Journey now, 100 years to the future where mutants are... (checks notes) fighting a desperate bid for survival!
Seems right.
Originally Published July 2019
(This post was originally featured on the Uncanny X-Cerpts Patreon and may be subject to formatting issues)
We begin with a brief rundown of the whole scope of the timeline of X, from year 1 (The Dream) to year 10 (The World) to year 100 (the War) to year 1000 (Ascension.)
Okay, so we've got that to look forward to.
Back in year 1, we see Xavier hanging out on a bench. The circus is in town and he's content to watch the reverie from afar. He's joined by a mysterious woman in a jaunty cap. She's not really "into" the circus thing, having received this weirdly specific tarot reading:
No, this woman -- whomever she is -- is looking specifically for Charles Xavier. When he says he looks so content because last night he had a wonderful dream, she offers the following in response:
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| She said the thing!!! |
Charles, understandably spooked by this woman who seems to have intimate knowledge of his life, asks who she is. She invites him to read her mind and finds that they go back quite a ways indeed.
Back, er, forward in Year 10 -- more or less the present day -- Mystique arrives on Krakoa, having returned from her mission of stealing a USB Stick from Damage Control, as seen in House of X #1. However, she declares to Magneto and Charles, she has some demands. Charles retorts that he has additional demands of his own, pointing out they they are building a better world...
Flash forward to the X-Year 100, in the Northern Territory -- specifically the Nexus. What that means or where that is, I could not tell you, but anyway.
A pair of designated baddies (identifiable as such because gosh darn it they're so very designed that way, as a nasty-looking spindly robot and a militaristic humanoid female in purple) comb over the aftermath of some kind of battle where their mutant foe lays dying. Its memories are wiped upon termination, preventing them from learning more about his mission, but they catch another mutant crawling away from the scene, a "black brain telepath" born in "the Khennil" named Cylobel. She offers little in the way of intel...
Never a good thing.
Now, contrary to Cylobel's earlier statements, she actually does have friends, as you can see watching from behind some nearby rubble (a delightfully low tech way to hide from seemingly all-seeing robots.) These are Rasputin and Cardinal. Rasputin reaches out telepathically to promise they'll find some way to rescue Cy, who insists they not, but Rasputin is set -- she was born without a name until Cylobel gave her one, and "all of this" (whatever it was) was for nothing if Cy doesn't make it back.
Cardinal, however, feels discretion is the better part of valor and wants to get going, but Rasputin points out that Cardinal was literally bred to be a coward, so his opinion doesn't count and he can go on his own. He merely sets about his business planting the black seed of Krakoa to grow a portal, and notes that he'll wait as long as he can ( and also that he'll pray for her, as he does all living things) as she jumps into the fray.
Rasputin holds her own against the Sentinel forces, but somehow they manage to snag Cylobel in an amber bubble. That's one thing that never changes in 100 years, is X-Men being trapped in bubbles and tubes of all sorts.
We pause now for some DATA, as we learn about the Mutant Breeding Program and the Sinister line.
At some point, the mutants realized that since their lives were constantly based around running, hiding, being destroyed and relocating, their refugee lifestyle left them very time for conventional babymaking. And so they began a program of artificial propagation of the species, commissioning the creation of breeding pits on Mars.
Now, you maybe the thinking, if they have the time and resources to set up an entire genetic engineering laboratory on Mars undisturbed, why not simply live on Mars and make babies the normal way? And the answer, from head mutant geneticist "Mister Sinister," is shut up.
By the way, this all happened following a period of "lost years" during which all the established mutant leadership -- you know, your Xaviers, Cyclopes, Storms, Magnetos, Jeans, Logans, Kates, Frosts and so forth -- were all either dead or disappeared. We are told that there is some rumbling that maybe this mass-misplacement of mutant management was not a sheer coincidence, and to look up "BETRAYAL."
Betrayal? Next to the name Sinister? I'll believe it when I see it.
Anyway, so, modelling the program on the Hound system the human used (by which they bred mutants to hunt and persecute other mutants). The first generation were soldiers fighting the good fight for Krakoa, who were cloned from a single-source X-gene. The second and third were "Chimeras" from a variety of X-gene sources, and had a pretty successful run. In the third generation, we did get about a 10% outcome of peacenik "Cardinals" who all go by the same name and refuse to fight, but other than that, it was a winning team.
The fourth generation was a bit of a debacle, being borne of a corrupted hivemind that led to the fall of Krakoa and Mars, the destruction of 40% of the mutant population, and eventually mass suicide. You win some, you lose some.
In the long run, Sinister defected to the Man-Machine side, and was publicly executed, which seems like a weird way to treat someone who's just joined your team.
Back at Nimrod's tower, the hunters present Big 'Rod with their capture, Cylobel. Identifying her as a former Hound.
Nimrod, displaying some of that famed robot sincerity, offers a heartfelt apology, saying there never should have been Hounds, what a black mark on the administration, and maybe we can all move forward.
Knowing they can't interrogate her (because of the black brain of it all) they put her in "the bath" -- a new process intended to distill living beings (mostly, perhaps solely, mutants) into data, to be used to make more Nimrods. Over time -- no way of knowing if it'll be a week or a year or two years or five years or eleventy-one years -- they'll have the raw information she's hiding from them.
While Cylobel enjoys a rinse and spin, we are treated to a data page about the Khennils, such as the SalCen one where she was born, basically running down the failures of the hound program, including the final generation of Black-Brains who were bred for betrayal and subterfuge, and shockingly enough, betrayed their masters and joined the X-team.
Eventually all the Khennils were destroyed, along with all the information about them.
Except, I guess, this data page.
Back at the X-Men's secret base, Rasputin and Cardinal arrive and are greeted by the X-People of the future:
That's right, it's Logan, Green Magneto (Mag-greeno?) Floating Xorn and Old Man Krakoa, keeping the mutant dream alive.
Cardinal confirms that yes, they've got "it," and so Logan bids them to follow, because the "Old Man" is waiting. And whoever it is, they've got to be super old for Logan to be calling them old, because, you know.
Oh, you don't know?
Well, Logan is so old his social security number is 3.
Logan's so old that he knew Burger King when he was still just a Prince.
Logan's so old he was an anti-vaxxer during in the 1918 influenza pandemic.
Logan's so old his momma was dug up and put on display at the British Museum.
Logan is so old his favourite show is Blue Bloods.
Logan's so old he really prefers if you call, rather than text.
You get the gist. He's not young.
But before we can meet this even-older-old guy, we get some DATA about surviving mutant population here in the year X*10*10. Seems there's less than 10,000 mutants left, mostly in the Benevolence colony in Shi'ar Space, some on the throneworld of Chandilar (could the mutants be any more endangered?) and 8 or so living on "Asteroid K" in the Solar system. There is some whispering that current Shi'ar Majestrix Xandra is hoping to use mutants as a foothold to annexing the Sol system, which.. good luck with that, but anyway.
By the way, that 8 number, I'm not sure if that includes Cylobel and Percival (the agent who died) so it would now be 6, or if there's two more mutants we've yet to meet, including the Old Man.
On that note, we dip forward to X-year 1000, which you may recall as the Ascension. The Librarian at the archive of Nimrod laments that they are losing data integrity.
Much like my SNES cartridges that won't play anymore, the mutants housed digitally in the museum's databases is slowly corrupting and will soon pass into nothingness.
This current incarnation of Nimrod offers an apology -- he simply wasn't meant to house the consciousness of an entire race for a millennium, and the Librarian lets him off the hook. That wasn't his job. His job was to collect data for a tactical advantage in the Human-Mutant War, and he performed that very admirable.
But, you know, it turns out that war was totally pointless and ended in some kind of surprise twist.
We don't know what that means, but we do know that The Humans have been reduced to sexy naked forest-dwellers living on a preserve, like so much endangered species.
And on that note, we'll be back soon with House of X #2!
Further Thoughts:
Powers of X #1 is definitely a more dynamic read than House #1, even as it engages in prolonged Sci-Fi/Fantasy-style worldbuilding about the destiny of the human-mutant war. It takes its own chances in setting up that plane of the story by offering us an X-Men story with some people resembling X-Men, but nobody we know, with circumstances that need to be explained. And are told a lot, but are ultimately teased that there is much more to learn, so stick around.
Comics in this era have the luxury of a relatively captive audience. If you've bought one comic, you are likely to buy the next several, so taking this pace -- in which we, the reader, are dropped into a sea of information and given time to dog-paddle our way to shore -- is not a faulty strategy, and besides, most people are probably reading it all at once, later, anyway.
As world-building, it's pretty effective. I liked the issue even if I don't happen to share J. Hickman's interest in post-humanism, and I'm a little put off by the long term "Well, none of what you're about to read was really worth it anyway" dust-in-the-wind shaggy dog reveal at the end, but there's time to recover from that. It does make good fodder for an ambitious cross-generational sci-fi epic, which is part of the appeal.
As Douglas Wolk put it in his engaging tome All The Marvels, this is largely just a recapitulation of the ole "Days of Future Past" bad destiny for mutantkind, but it's also an experiment in form and process that seeks to push comics further, which is definitely worth sticking around for, as we are getting a bigger, wider story, told differently, from what we've had before.
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| It's gotta be the shoes |
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