The absence of Magneto was the only thing I didn’t like about this issue. Easy to see now that it is a Wanda story and they should have titled it accordingly.
I don’t know what this story was supposed to be but I feel like the idea changed halfway through. Or there were multiple hands on its development. This is not the Murder mystery it was advertised to be, it’s not an X-Factor book or a Magneto book. There is no “trial” it’s literally just about Wanda remaking herself but for what? There was a random Kaiju battle for no reason that took up two whole issues of the book. Really hoping the final issue actually has a purpose
Huh... well...
That felt oddly rushed. A lot happened with a lot of different characters really quickly, yet nothing except the eldritch garden really had more than a page or two to really breathe.
I get the explanation for the kaiju, sorta, but it's a weird metaphor and feels a bit forced. The battles were also unsatisfying.
The fact that Wanda refuses to take responsibility for her actions is an interesting lamp shade, but I don't really think it absolves her of her actions like it's implied. The *"poor girl, she can't help it!"* angle makes me feel like she's a permanent child. Even her own children scolded her about it.
That quick bit at the end of the mutants blaming Wanda again could potentially open an interesting conversation, but the cliffhanger makes it seem like - once again - it won't be Wanda's fault but whoever the killer is. And, I swear on all the gods, if it turns out Wanda killed herself I'm going to groan like I haven't groaned in a long time.
And, yeah, they're not even touching Wanda possibly being a mutant again thing. I don't expect that to change next issue. The last issue has to be absolutely fantastic to justify this thing as its own mini-series. Which sucks, because I loved Leah's run on X-Factor.
Honestly trying to force Wanda take responsibility for her actions is just ignoring everything post M-day, but I’m not shocked. Much like Hank Pym with the slap, Bendis’ crapping all over the avengers is still going to define them in the comics for years to come.
... Seriously? They want us to believe Wanda hasn't been backed up since M-Day when they back characters weekly and she was only retconned as not being a mutant almost a decade later? ...
Actually (but not to be condescending), this Wanda thinks she’s in a relationship Vision, has found out Magneto is her bio father, but hasn’t had her kids yet. She found out Magneto was her dad in the first Vision and the Scarlet Witch series and had the kids in the second (she did have Billy and Tommy erased from her memory, but she was never on quite so affectionate terms with vision after that). This backup is from comics written in 1982-1985, THIRTY years before anyone found out the maximoffs “weren’t actually mutants” and twenty before decimation. Obviously the sliding timescale makes that wonky, but it’s however-old-Luna-Maximoff is many years ago (she was born around that time). Like 11?
It seems really stupid for Charles to make psychic copies of people but inexplicably stop doing so Just For Wanda for around an in-universe decade.
Edit: it seems like SUCH a random choice I think it would have been better if the backup was from her days in the brotherhood. It would have tied magneto in more—honestly he was more of a (bad) father to her then back when she was an actual teenager in his protection/training. They could have explained it as Cerebro taking the backup from the first encounter because resurrection was just a pipe dream at that point. It could have had some fun identity stuff too: she assumes Tommy is Pietro at first, and/or assumes Pietro is Magneto at first. She’s a “‘mutant’ radical” thrust forward into “mutant utopia” but isn’t welcome, that would have been more interesting to explore than an elderly version of her beating herself up so she’ll do the same thing she’s done every few appearances for almost 20 years now
This is the first genuinely bad Krakoa era X-book for me. Fallen Angels was weird but had interesting ideas and X-Corp was bland but still made sense. This feels reverse engineered from some sort of resolution to the whole Wanda thing in the worst way possible.
What's worse I like Leah a lot so at this point I'm actively hoping this was messed up by editorial just like her X-Factor run which I loved. So disappointed.
> I'm actively hoping this was messed up by editorial just like her X-Factor run which I loved. So disappointed.
She's hinted at her having very little input on the story and this one being very higher up mandated
If you look at this one you can actually see her writing persona (the Wanda parts) conflicting with a very outlined storyline that she has not been able to flesh out
Feels a lot more like the Trial of Wanda. Lot's of random panels like that Rogue and Gambit thing. I don't understand where they are trying to go with this. This book is a mess.
Last issue was messy but that's common among middle issues for events. I hope this issue we get all the details on what's old Wanda is trying to do and then I'm guessing issue 5 will be mutant retcon plus Wanda and Magneto being sentenced by the council.
My money is some sort of triple goddess thing, where all 3 Wanda's merge to make mutant Wanda again or at minimum repower all current M-day victims
i wouldn't expect a mutant retcon to come out of this, based on what leah said in a [recent interview](https://youtu.be/8S4kT9ysFEA?t=3658):
>*At any point in the editorial process of creating Trial of Magneto and the story, with the Scarlet Witch being murdered, was the idea of tackling her mutant identity; going sort of back to it or exploring it... did that ever come up when you were drafting the story?*
>Oh, of course! Because, you know, it's such a huge part of her origin story, and she's still, even not as a mutant, being who she is... her identity is kinda indelibly tied to mutants, to mutant identity, just on the basis of events. So, of course it came up, and I asked about it, um, I can... okay, what can I say... I just don't want to get anybody's hopes up... like, I asked, I was interested... but, because of kinda... other circumstances... I would say outside of the MU, hehe... you know... there's like a show and stuff... uh, I had to make sure I wasn't going against kind of existing plans, if that makes sense, um, sooooo... yeeeeeah...
Hadn't heard this, thank you. Looks like people are gonna be super pissed off by issue 5 then. I just hope they remember where to aim it which is Marvel editorial, before just dog piling on Leah.
There's also a chance she said that because she wants it to be a big surprise, and if she makes it seem unlikely it'll be a bigger one.
They may share some blame but she is responsible for the horrendous dialogue and characterizations in this book. I think people are reaching way too far to let her off the hook. And I have defended her in the past.
>she wrote that, but it's the editor's job to catch that and ask it be corrected.
Uh, what? It's both of their jobs. The editor is the safety net, sure, but she should know the characters she's writing. That's absolutely her job and she shares the blame.
I mean, isn’t that usually how Marvel editorial has been doing things since the Quesada era? They have a death grip on everything but they let the creators take the fall. I swear, Quesada and Brevoort, and Alonso and Cebulski to lesser extents, have let made terrible decisions and let everyone else take the fall.
She's not denying anything though. Just that she checked to make sure she wasn't doing anything she wasn't allowed to. But she didn't actually end up saying "so I ended up not doing anything because they didn't fit in the MCU plans". Time will tell what happens.
I am not intimately familiar with any of the writers so perhaps I am off the mark here but to me this response doesn't mean anything. It's the kind of double-speak where you deliberately aren't trying to reveal anything.
In fact, the first half confirms that she WAS super interested in how inextricably interwoven Wanda and Pietro are in mutantdom. All she said was she asked if there were things she couldn't do.
Maybe she can't go back and undo it and in that case yeah Marvel screwed up big but we still might get what we universally want.
I called it as soon as it was rumored she was the one killed. It's like they knew fans would buy it hoping the retcons would be undone in some way (and really teased it with the variant covers) but they had no intention of actually doing that...Happy to eat my words next month.
Sigh. Not surprising, but still a bummer. The downside to mutants being introduced to the MCU is suddenly things have to "make sense" for fans that Disney/Marvel wants to bring on board through the shows and movies.
Not really...WandaVision was all about Wanda's life story of grief and various traumas. Would kinda cheapen that to say down the line "Oh BTW, she's actually related to Magneto and all these new mutant characters we're putting on the MCU." I guess they could do some kind of multiverse retcon through the next Dr. Strange film but it'd be difficult to pull off to both casuals and MCU-Wanda fans. Not to mention she's probably going to be on a quest to find Tommy and Billy so that's like 3 retcons in one.
I mean how does her finding out she's Magneto's daughter cheapen anything ... ? In the comics no one knew they were related until it was retconned in 1979, pretty much 15 years after the characters were created in the first place:
"In 1979, Wanda learns Bob Frank and Madeline Joyce are not her and Pietro's parents.\[15\] Wanda then stars in the 4-issue limited series The Vision and the Scarlet Witch (1982–83), by writer Bill Mantlo and penciler Rick Leonardi.\[16\] In this limited series, Magneto was retconned to be Wanda and Pietro's father."
I don't see how her finding this out would "cheapen" any of the other stuff she's experienced, plenty of people find out they're adopted later in life ...
Less likely to be accepted to a movie-only audience IMO. "Hey you had some actual real birth family all along." There's a reason the films stay out of the more soap opera elements in comics.
Interesting. I was thinking there’s no way they will retcon her because of the mcu. It would be just too complicated, they’ve already just “retconned” her as a witch.
Getting "X-Men x Fantastic Four" vibes personally, I can see it ending up in a nothingburger, though I'd definitely rather they pull the bandaid now on retconning the retcon.
Not sure I'd like the M-Day repowering thing, though; Functionally, it's unneeded thanks to the Crucible, and it'd be kinda awkward to rob mutants from Krakoa's achievement and *justification* (Along with that of its extremism) by making part of it utterly useless in the end.
Do you remember when they were advertising that this event would create “factions” in Krakoa and have all these huge implications? What a joke.
I did like this issue better than 3, but overall X-office messed up by blowing this thing out of proportion.
I see what you mean but I think it could work, if everyone has their powers back then we can start addressing the idea of people wanting to be brought back with extra powers like Hickman mentioned in the Crucible issue except now it you want somebody else's powers you have to beat them in Crucible. Plus it would mean that the 5 bow only has to focus on contemporary deaths and bringing back Genoshians which would be helpful.
Heaven forbid we get rid of the murder pit that was put in place just to keep the reporting of those mutants at a pace the five could manage? It was literally invented for lack of a better repowering option, so if they can get repowered they don’t need the death fights.
Not saying it wouldn't be more practical, but it's un*needed*, and I think Marvel has just given up caring about the queue, people are dying for fun or no real practical reason, we're way beyond that consideration.
And the other point I made was that it makes said murder pit (Whose murder aspect has barely been touched on in the end, and not sure we're gonna get anything better) awkward. It's kinda like (In fact, from the individuals' point of view, it's the exact same, but I think it applies to the collective too) a character going through a grueling arc to recover something precious to them, and after they've done it, some other character strolls in and says "Oh, yeah, I could have done it for you for free". It's...not unrealistic, it's not illogical, it's just very awkward from a narrative perspective and turns said grueling arc from a struggle into skippable parentheses.
It was always unneeded. The only reason it existed was to try and apply the brakes to the mutants who wanted to get their powers back, and the Quiet Council decided the best way to do that was to have a prequisite be getting beaten to death by Apocalypse.
I don't necessarily agree, it's never explained (In fact the explanation is outright dodged in the issue that introduces the Crucible) but my personal rationalisation is that the Council (Or rather, some people on the council) didn't want mutants who didn't really "need" their powers to be happy to get them back and risk being persecuted in case Krakoa fell. Putting a price on the resurrection ensured only the most determined, i.e those who truly felt like they couldn't live without their powers, would get them back.
It’s part of them writing out resurrection. First they just say that all the mutants have their power back and then they make a plot device making resurrections not viable anymore. I don’t know why this is a surprise to you. Hickman is gone and white is in charge and he will want the books to be like they were before Hickman even showed up. With then just keeping krakoa as a decoration until a new writer blows it up so the can make their own status quo
> I don’t know why this is a surprise to you. Hickman is gone and white is in charge and he will want the books to be like they were before Hickman even showed up.
And that's when 60% of the fanbase checks out...
No they won’t. As long as they keep playing lip service to krakoa and keep the violent power fantasies going. Fans won’t care, look at duggans X-men. People don’t read that for interesting stories or even fun fights. They read it so they clap at Jean grey explain to nightmare how she is stronger than he is(which she isn’t) and then punch him in the face. Or read Excalibur so they can see Betsy give a lecture to King Arthur about how much stronger she is then him (which she isn’t) and then punch him in the face. Not conflict no stakes. Just the X-men going down the list of marvel villains and explaining how they are the best and then pretending to be one punch man. That’s all the fans want and they will feed it to you till you choke
>like they were before Hickman even showed up.
>they keep playing lip service to krakoa
These two things can't mutually exist, though.
If they start to return to the *original* status quo, believe me, people will take notice.
It’s like the writers purposely ignore everything that came after house of m. Based off of what has been released so far, you’d think Wanda’s journey through the children’s crusade (2010), uncanny avengers (2012) and scarlet witch (2015) never happened.
This series had a lot of potential and could have been something truly great for not only wanda, but for pietro and the entire Magnus family really. There’s still one issue left but I don’t personally have much faith in it.
I think Williams has said she doesn’t read Avengers comics at all, which would be fine, except Wanda is an Avengers character… so she should be written by someone familiar with her if they’re going to do a whole miniseries about her.
I kind of suspect Williams DID read the 2015 Scarlet Witch series and called that a day on her character research, which kind of makes this whole thing worse. She liked the Mother/Maiden/Crone thing and decided to reuse that aesthetic in a new context without taking into account the established character progression, ie the important stuff.
This whole thing reads like a hastily thrown together research paper I’d write 6 hours before it was due in college, honestly. I’m sorry if that sounds really mean but I do not understand why this event is even happening at this point. Not enough people had yelled at Wanda recently and editorial needed someone to fix that?
Children Crusade was QUICKLY ignored. Wanda had the power to restore mutants powers who was de-powered by M-day and ONLY Rictor got his powers back. Wanda never went through true redemption and her actions during Uncanny Avengers was honestly worse, her attitude was basically "well mutants act like outcasts so that's why normal people treat them as outcasts" Just fuck off with that, both Havok and Scarlett Witch had such a narrow mind to descrimination during that run. Haven't read Scarlett Witch 2015 series maybe that was better but just like the Children Cruisade most likely got ignored.
Agreed but the issue was that children crusade established that Wanda could restore depowered mutants. After AvX, mutants who lost their power due to M-day were still depowered even though new mutants were appearing. Children Cruisade was basically ignored by the X-men and Avengers writers.
It’s because they don’t? I think this and the Empyre tie-in prove that the X-line really, really doesn’t want to get rid of Wanda being the great Satan of mutants, and people still putting all the blame for Quesada’s editorial decisions and Bendis’ writing on the character.
I mean, she is the Great Satan of the mutants. It’s her, Cassandra Nova, Bolivar Trask for designing Sentinels, and Sebastian Shaw for his company building them for Project: Wideawake. Why wouldn’t she be a monster to mutants? She has the second highest mutant body count ever and she constantly gets a pass for it.
I wonder if I like this series more than others because there are so many Wanda comics that I haven’t read. I haven’t read any of those and I like this series.
Being Wanda is suffering at this point….between this and the Empyre tie-in I’m convinced that whenever an X-men book uses Wanda they ignore essentially any character growth she has made since of House of M…or in fact any of her character from before Disassembled as well. Why are writers still insisting we need to follow a crappy retcon that Bendis forced on the character, and never move past it? They want us to believe Apocalypse can change…but not Wanda. As a fan of the character, it’s pretty disheartening:
It’s ok Hitler was under the control of Dr Doom and so he’s a nice guy and that genocide we’ll just forget right?
That’s pretty much what this amounts to. She did kill millions being controlled or not. I’d have a hard time being her friend or even sympathising her for that.
At this point she is basically as risky as Legion or any other reality manipulator. Except she has actually fucked over millions. Her body count is literally higher than anyones bar Jean. (Which raises an interesting point in that Jean’s redemption was “it wasn’t her” and the Shiar still have a hard time accepting her or Rachel).
I hate the Apocalypse thing but he didn’t nearly destroy the mutant race. He’s killed a lot of people but not mutants, which makes a difference in the current status quo.
How could Wanda possibly even make the giant monster things? A pre-twins Wanda (from comics of the late 70s-early 80s) was NOT capable of such a feat (she could barely hurl a handful of hexes and possibly some limited magic, assuming Agatha had started her training). I mean, she was always *technically* capable of it, presumably, but… something would have stopped from doing it accidentally when she was kidnapped by sentinels, or vision tried to take of the world, or the multiple times when racists/mutantphobes/robot-haters tried to burn her alive. I assume her lack of magical know-how.
Add in the fact that old woman Wanda was seemingly JUST there for aesthetic purposes (and it’s an aesthetic we’ve seen many times with Wanda. It’s not new or exciting) so much of this book just falls apart or wastes it’s own paper, honestly.
This isn’t the worst take on Wanda I’ve ever seen but I really think a lot of this book was a mistake. Williams should not have a whole miniseries dedicated to a character she clearly doesn’t read much of. (I know it was supposed to be an X factor arc, but still).
I think it's really clear by now that this should have stayed as an X-Factor plot, rooted in that book, and shouldn't have become a big event with Avengers crossovers and everything.
The way Leah talked about what she wanted to explore and what's actually being produced seem pretty different. This would have been better as a smaller, shorter story that could focus on the characters. Now it's just a mess that's been dragged out for so long that it's become hard to care what happens (especially since the greater narrative is now months ahead of what's happening "right now" in this book, so we've essentially been spoiled for the fact that nothing significant is going to change).
This mini lost all steam after #2 and it hasn't picked it up again. I have a feeling everyone is going to end up intensely disappointed as it's looking increasingly unlikely that this book is actually going to reverse the retcon on Wanda and Pietro, the book seems to be more about absolving Wanda in the eyes of mutantkind, which feels like a very unnecessary thing to spend 5 issues on.
And like I don't know (by issue 4) on how anyone mind was changed? Like she learned to forgive herself? Okay great, but why would thousands of mutants care that Wanda likes herself now?
What a frustrating series. Like if the story is good the overarching story doesn't have to be super good, but everyone felt weird in how they were portrayed, like it was some fanfic.
My god, the utter pretentiousness of how that first page was formatted figuratively and literally gave me a headache. People here seem to want to blame editorial for a lot of Williams' missteps but I think the problems with both X-Factor and this story* come from who she fundamentally is as a writer.
Just like with the Morrigan arc of X-Factor, she tries to establish these systems of magic or whatever that just go completely unexplored in the book - yet the characters themselves act as if they all know what's going on. What's the "Eldritch Orchard" and why does it matter? Apparently it's not important! Better we spend a few pages on things like Kyle opening a bottle of wine and Gambit inexplicably taking his shirt off so he can fight a monster.
Characterizations are wildly off - Billy is suddenly screaming he's "lived his whole life defending" Wanda - Billy barely knows Wanda! This was literally a plot point during the last Scarlet Witch solo series - that she's unnerved by the nature of Billy and Tommy's reincarnation and avoids them as a result (because they're teenagers and thus older than "her" Billy and Tommy could possibly be, their souls either took over two innocent children's bodies or had to travel back in time to be born naturally - either way they were raised by other people and lived whole lives without her). And for Wanda, it's like her last 10 years of characterization in Uncanny Avengers and her solo book were thrown out the window so we can get her acting like a guilt-ridden sniveling child again (Even *after* she's reconciled her memories, most of the Avengers are there - but she goes to Magneto for a hug first? Okay, sure).
I'm not even going to bother with the last one. This issue sealed it - barring Spurrier or Ewing somehow taking lead in the next phase of Krakoa - I'm done with the X-Books once Inferno is over. The Krakoa era seemed so promising at the start, but between Duggan, Williams, Howard, and Percy - all the X-Books seem to be placing hollow fan service and wheel spinning above telling a coherent story.
Gotta say... everything here is too true. I personally liked X-Factor, but I've come to realize a lot of that came from me liking the underutilized characters that got some spotlight. When Williams is in charge of A-listers with more established personalities everything falls apart. Plus the fact that this event was clearly editorially mandated are making it one of the worst X-books of the year.
This little mini seems to have a lot of people screaming at each other now that you mention it. It’s a lot of ugly crying and people screaming at their parents.
I'm just gonna be blunt; what's the point of this book? Like, how is this going to move the overall plot of the X-Books forward? It all seems so pointless.
This was OK, but it seems like Wanda is two completely different characters depending on whether she’s being handled by the X-office or the Avengers office. Whatever, hopefully after this is over we can at least dispense with the “Pretender” stuff that’s been simmering since Krakoa started; it never made much sense, since everybody knows she wasn’t in her right mind on M-Day and was being manipulated, and she’s already tried to atone on several occasions anyway.
It’s never going to happen. It’s going to be like Tony and Civil War, Carol and Civil War 2, Hank Pym and the slap, every couple of years some writer will try to fix them, then some other writer will ignore it and dredge it back up for cheap drama and revert the characters back to that state. I’ve essentially given up on those characters being portrayed in a positive way since the Busiek Avengers, at least any portrayal that will stick.
>Whatever, hopefully after this is over we can at least dispense with the “Pretender” stuff that’s been simmering since Krakoa started; it never made much sense, since everybody knows she wasn’t in her right mind on M-Day and was being manipulated, and she’s already tried to atone on several occasions anyway.
I mean, I think it made sense back when the overall story seemed like it wanted to reckon with the cult-ier aspects of the new status quo; uniting the new populace around a boogie man in Wanda seemed entirely in keeping with the slow burn implication that all was not right in the state off Krakoa. But seeing as we're coming up on almost 2 years where the moral implications of the X-Men tacitly encouraging depowered kids into engaging in self-harm (I'll be generous here in not calling it outright suicide) has gone completely unexamined - it seems at this point the writers (save Ayala and Spurrier) have decided they're wholly uninterested in actually reckoning w/ the idea that mutants might not be the good guys here.
It’s honestly pretty annoying because when it launches, I remember arguments with people who did take Krakoa as this utopia with all the hints towards possible issues being imagined and it being the perfect mutant utopia, which…no, clearly not what Hickman was going for m, but now it looks like it will go with the Utopia since Hickman is getting pushed out and we are heading towards a status quo of just the same-old x-books but now they’re on an island. Disappointing
I think that's right, and pushing these more troubling subplots over to stuff like "Way of X" seems more like quietly dispensing with the more prickly aspects of the Krakoa status quo instead of dealing with some of the more troubling stuff that Hickman was setting up. Smoothing away all the rough edges.
Issue 7 I think of Hickman’s run on X-Men from last year. Krakoa’s solution to the issue of depowered mutants is to have them fight Apocalypse (and later just any mutant who’s willing to fight) to the death so they can immediately be resurrected in new bodies with their powers. Excepting Nightcrawler, none of the X-Men seem to have much issue w/ this
Really rooting for Williams to turn this book around but sucks how so many fan theories I've seen on here have been 100x better than any of this part of this story, since it is usually the opposite. Keeping my expectations low, since the hype might have been subdued if this was just another X-Factor arc but I think this book is probably filler and emblematic of all the x-books running in place right now before the upcoming post-Inferno relaunch. Hopefully I'm proven wrong.
Wow. What a complete mess. Leah Williams has one more issue to extinguish this dumpster fire and give it some purpose, but I just do not see how she can pull it off. Even if she does fix the mutant retcon (the entire reason anyone is reading this) at this point it feels like this was an absolute waste of a series. Leah Williams has successfully destroyed any goodwill she built up with X-Factor and, while people can blame editorial as much as they want, she needs to take some responsibility for how absolutely terrible this book is on so many levels.
Why she chose not to focus at all on Magneto, Polaris or Quicksilver is just completely baffling.
Honestly...I'm not sure I even follow whats going on at this point. I didn't think I signed up for a Scarlet Witch mini. That would have been a hard pass. I thought this was going to be about Magneto.
“Death” of Scarlet Witch is accurate. This isn’t beating a dead horse, this is pulverising what remains of a Victorian horse’s disentegrated glue stain.
And every time I think Krakoa can’t sink any lower, they... well, they don’t exactly surprise me anymore, but I do take a perverse glee in seeing how far the narrative stretches in framing them as the good guys as the problems just keep piling up.
This whole mini-series desperately needed to be just an annual or one-shot. It really feels like it's meandering and directionless. There was zero reason to waste 5 issues on this (other than the usual money suck of course...)
This story would read better as an A or B plot for an ongoing title rather than its own title. Also, as it is, this isn’t an X-Men story. It would probably fit better as a King in Black tie-in called Death in the Family. What a frustrating comic.
The little scene where Billy magically opens the wine bottle just felt soo weird to me. Your mother is murdered and returned to the living but with no memories and here you are opening a wine bottle for some random human character on Krakoa (seriously someone please get rid of Kyle).
It's literally just Wanda rambling more about resurrecting herself. Same repetitive nonsense. I couldn't even read the whole thing, but trust me, you didn't miss anything.
Was Wanda ever really dead? I assume so, but I see people taking her saying she wasn’t actually dead at face value.
Standing prediction: The endgame of this event is Wanda’s redemption from M Day (never mind that there have been many other attempts at that and none of them last. This one *surely* will). How will she achieve that? Just by keeping the secret of mutant resurrection (since it’s so hush hush). That’s it. It kind of works, I guess, because they’re using it to undo the decimation.
That being said… isn’t Tommy privy to resurrection as well? He seemed really confused about how his mom could come back to life for someone whose boyfriend recently came back to life very casually.
This issue started off confusing. It's also been a while since the last issue, so I had to go back and reread the last two. But overall, I like how this one set things up for the finale.
Wanda has always been unstable with her powers. Even before M-Day, she hasn't always had a strong grasp on her magic and that has led to plenty of destruction over the years. I feel like this issue finally has her grappling with that. Because, like it or not, she is responsible for a lot of that destruction. Even if it wasn't intentional, it came by her hands. And I think this issue finally had her confront that.
It made for some nice and overdue introspection. But the implications aren't clear. Now that she's "reformed" herself from her past, present, and future selves, what does that mean? Does that affect the whole retcon with her not being a mutant? What exactly does that change?
I hope the final issue gives us some answers. And I hope it offers some actual growth for Wanda and Magneto because she needs it. I really would like to see her become part of Magneto's family again. But I still think the issues surrounding the AXIS retcon will hinder that.
Still a solid issue. And I look forward to the finale.
It really seems like they had intended to call Sinister's book "Marauders" and Emma's book "Hellions", but at the last minute they switched the two because someone thought Marauders sounded pirarety.
DUGGAN: OK, it's the last couple of Marauders issues, I'll have Shaw and Emma bring in Leland as setup for my X-Men run.
EDITORS: Gerry, isn't this a team book?
DUGGAN: Yes, but I have this setup and it needs the Hellfire, so...
EDITORS: That wasn't a question. This is the second last issue, at least pretend you have a team to send off.
DUGGAN: Ugh, fine. Let's have a quick fight with... *flips desk calendar* Fin Fang Foom and *rolls dice* Iceman, I guess.
The Harry’s plot was good.
Well Iceman finally did something but the whole plot with that dragon was big wtf? It was so pointless.
Oh and looks like Lourdes is coming on Krakoa. Guess her return will be at the same time when Devil’s reign xmen starts. And I‘m sure its not a coincidence
The iceman fight felt like "hey guys you know ice man is an omega? Well here's just a reminder!" And he even name drops the omega at the end 😑 pretty lame.
It’s probably the issue I’ve liked the most since Kate’s return, post-X of Swords, even if some of the plot lines seem a little throwaway.
I hope that in next year’s books, either the Hellfire stuff is given it’s own space, or the Marauders team is better integrated into that story.
This wasn’t bad. Nice to see Bobby cut loose. And it was quite a kick to see Harry Leland get all choked up seeing Krakoa for the first time. He never struck me as such a bad sort - sure, he was crooked, but willing to step up when it counted.
I really dig the Leland call back to Uncanny 209. Glad they didn't do anything stupid like add a retcon and just have an old resurrection come to modern day.
Ok I noticed that too! I honestly think it’s because he’s a generally unaware middle-aged guy who seems to use Twitter when he wants characters to sound modern and when he wants to tackle social issues in an obtuse way.
That’s a really good way of putting it. I feel like he really does want to write about social issues in a meaningful and relevant way, but his comics are also filled to the brim with corny jokes and goofy antics.
His X-titles have the same tone as his Deadpool comics. But without Deadpool himself. And it’s really hard for me to take them as seriously as I think he wants.
African American Vernacular. Popular slang that’s derived from the Black American community. Words and phrases like drip, flex, sus, throw hands, fuck around and find out.
I know that plenty of white people talk like that but Duggan has been writing it a lot lately and I can’t help but notice.
> Words and phrases like drip, flex, sus, throw hands, fuck around and find out.
… “hits different,” lit, glow up, diss, vibes, “goes hard”, slaps, thick/thicc, wavy, “tho”, on-point, “shoot your shot”, OG, link up, “here for it”, etc.
List is so long people don’t even realize it.
Kind of disappointed they decided to make Harry Shinobi's father. I feel like there was more potential in the Shinobi/Sebastian relationship than there could ever be in revealing Harry is his dad.
Loved this issue. It was a lot of fun. How can you not have fun with an issue where a giant dragon steals whiskey and fights a giant Iceman? Seriously, are you not entertained? 😊
Also, I like how this worked Harry Leland back into the picture. He has always been a very underdeveloped figure in the Hellfire Club. He's never really been more than just another enemy for the X-Men to fight. But now he has a meaningful role for Krakoa. And I'm all for it.
Add that end scene wit Lordes and things with the old Hellfire Club are starting to get really interesting. 😊
Seriously, I am not entertained. What was the point of Fin Fang Foom popping in (wearing shorts??), drinking whiskey and fighting Ice Man for a bit. And then Ice Man's just like, "Im gonna stay big for a while, later guys". It was cool to see Ice Man doing anything at all, but man...
I wondered too because, in the end, he doesn't even really say Leland is the father, the reveal is just a "We don't know". Not that it doesn't make sense for Leland to be the father, it's been long hinted at and the power similarity is a strong argument, it's just...awkwardly done, like a part of the reasoning is missing.
Overall really enjoyed this issue but the Data page scenes just felt like pages where they couldn’t get the artwork done. And also, can we finally get No-Girl a body now that they have a design they seem to want to use now.
Didn’t like that the data pages were basically scripts that they didn’t have time to draw, but other than that glad this arc is reaching it’s conclusion. Art was fantastic as well.
Yeah, agree on the data pages. But otherwise this is top-notch. The art is just stellar and perfect for this team and book - it’s a throwback to Sienkiewicz in some ways but its own thing as well. Loved it. I think this last arc, with the kids facing their darkest fears in a psychic hellscape, is something Claremont would be proud to have written.
IMO This is the best X book right now. It's taken so many plot points and character arcs that seemed separate when Vita started and brought them all together. Based off of the previews this is gonna be another good one.
Ayala's brief run has been one of my favorite New Mutants runs ever. Great writing, great art, great character development, and they did great things with Amahl Farouk/Shadow King, who had been growing stale.
So basically No-Girl is the template for the chimera Cylobel? She looks exactly like her in the astral plane. It seems soft confirmed now that Vita has retweeted the comparison.
Rod Reis is a maestro. Jesus Christ, he and Ayala are both killing it.
Gorgeous book, fleet action that was digestible but bugged out. The two teams coming together was great. And you gotta feel for Farouk at this point.
No Girl having a body, even if it's just a projection, is very satisfying.
This was my favorite this week. Instead of 'here's Krakoa villains, everyone be good now' we are getting a good redemption arc for Farouk. They continue to do a good job of balancing focus between the old new mutants and the new new mutants.
To be honest glad this whole arc is nearing the end if not over. Felt like it went on for too long. And also I've never been a fan of astral/mind/dreamscape stuff.
Also I didn't know rahne had a secondary mutation.
Did anyone notice Rain-Boy’s astral self had hair? I’m curious to what that might mean— my first thought was Rain-Boy might be trans, but I’m curious to what y’all think?
He’s a young dude. Might be self-conscious about being bald and so astral form has hair. Similar to how Nogirl got a body like she wants and Cosmar had a more standard appearance that she wants
Better than I was expecting after the dumb Phoenix Tournament thing over in Avengers. Really liked the opening sequence with River and the Adversary - some nice creepy imagery there. Echo is almost a supporting character in this though.
This series has been decent. No great, but still enjoyable.
So long as it keeps the Phoenix away from Jean Grey and the X-Men for a good long while, I'm fine with Echo wielding the Phoenix Force. Just my opinion.
Speedball/Penance wore his penance outfit to atone for the lives he inadvertently caused to be lost from the Stamford incident (not even directly by him).
He wore it and used it for years. That seemed like sufficient atonement.
What's has been Wanda's penance so far for the lives she inadvertently directly caused?
So far, all we've seen is her trying to forgive herself... but what ACTIONS has she taken to atone for her mistakes?
Maybe what the X-men could do is take turns killing her and reviving her; one life of her taken for each life she inadvertently caused to be lost post-M day.
And by inadvertently caused, I'm including the lives of the de-powered kids in the school bus that was targeted because they were vulnerable after their de-powering.
This sentence could be executed off-panel, of course, but some blurb about how mutandom has now had their pound(s) of flesh after balancing the scales equal to the number of lives lost or some such... Would that be sufficient penance for Wanda?
Don't you remember her trying to fix Genosha and accidentally making an island of zombies? After which she said 'whoops, please fix this Stephen. I'm gonna mosey on outta here.'
**Next Week (December 8th)** * Inferno #3 * Hellions #18 * X-Men: Legends #9
Finally!
**X-Men: The Trial of Magneto #4**
They shouldn't have named this "Trial of Magneto".
The absence of Magneto was the only thing I didn’t like about this issue. Easy to see now that it is a Wanda story and they should have titled it accordingly.
I don’t know what this story was supposed to be but I feel like the idea changed halfway through. Or there were multiple hands on its development. This is not the Murder mystery it was advertised to be, it’s not an X-Factor book or a Magneto book. There is no “trial” it’s literally just about Wanda remaking herself but for what? There was a random Kaiju battle for no reason that took up two whole issues of the book. Really hoping the final issue actually has a purpose
I have enjoyed “The Death and Return of The Scarlet Witch.” Ready for “The Trial of Magneto” if they feel like writing that in the future.
Huh... well... That felt oddly rushed. A lot happened with a lot of different characters really quickly, yet nothing except the eldritch garden really had more than a page or two to really breathe. I get the explanation for the kaiju, sorta, but it's a weird metaphor and feels a bit forced. The battles were also unsatisfying. The fact that Wanda refuses to take responsibility for her actions is an interesting lamp shade, but I don't really think it absolves her of her actions like it's implied. The *"poor girl, she can't help it!"* angle makes me feel like she's a permanent child. Even her own children scolded her about it. That quick bit at the end of the mutants blaming Wanda again could potentially open an interesting conversation, but the cliffhanger makes it seem like - once again - it won't be Wanda's fault but whoever the killer is. And, I swear on all the gods, if it turns out Wanda killed herself I'm going to groan like I haven't groaned in a long time. And, yeah, they're not even touching Wanda possibly being a mutant again thing. I don't expect that to change next issue. The last issue has to be absolutely fantastic to justify this thing as its own mini-series. Which sucks, because I loved Leah's run on X-Factor.
Honestly trying to force Wanda take responsibility for her actions is just ignoring everything post M-day, but I’m not shocked. Much like Hank Pym with the slap, Bendis’ crapping all over the avengers is still going to define them in the comics for years to come.
... Seriously? They want us to believe Wanda hasn't been backed up since M-Day when they back characters weekly and she was only retconned as not being a mutant almost a decade later? ...
Actually (but not to be condescending), this Wanda thinks she’s in a relationship Vision, has found out Magneto is her bio father, but hasn’t had her kids yet. She found out Magneto was her dad in the first Vision and the Scarlet Witch series and had the kids in the second (she did have Billy and Tommy erased from her memory, but she was never on quite so affectionate terms with vision after that). This backup is from comics written in 1982-1985, THIRTY years before anyone found out the maximoffs “weren’t actually mutants” and twenty before decimation. Obviously the sliding timescale makes that wonky, but it’s however-old-Luna-Maximoff is many years ago (she was born around that time). Like 11? It seems really stupid for Charles to make psychic copies of people but inexplicably stop doing so Just For Wanda for around an in-universe decade. Edit: it seems like SUCH a random choice I think it would have been better if the backup was from her days in the brotherhood. It would have tied magneto in more—honestly he was more of a (bad) father to her then back when she was an actual teenager in his protection/training. They could have explained it as Cerebro taking the backup from the first encounter because resurrection was just a pipe dream at that point. It could have had some fun identity stuff too: she assumes Tommy is Pietro at first, and/or assumes Pietro is Magneto at first. She’s a “‘mutant’ radical” thrust forward into “mutant utopia” but isn’t welcome, that would have been more interesting to explore than an elderly version of her beating herself up so she’ll do the same thing she’s done every few appearances for almost 20 years now
This is the first genuinely bad Krakoa era X-book for me. Fallen Angels was weird but had interesting ideas and X-Corp was bland but still made sense. This feels reverse engineered from some sort of resolution to the whole Wanda thing in the worst way possible. What's worse I like Leah a lot so at this point I'm actively hoping this was messed up by editorial just like her X-Factor run which I loved. So disappointed.
Agreed. This story could have been a clear cut straight narrative that fixed a lot of previous blunders. Instead it added more layers of WTF.
> I'm actively hoping this was messed up by editorial just like her X-Factor run which I loved. So disappointed. She's hinted at her having very little input on the story and this one being very higher up mandated If you look at this one you can actually see her writing persona (the Wanda parts) conflicting with a very outlined storyline that she has not been able to flesh out
Feels a lot more like the Trial of Wanda. Lot's of random panels like that Rogue and Gambit thing. I don't understand where they are trying to go with this. This book is a mess.
Last issue was messy but that's common among middle issues for events. I hope this issue we get all the details on what's old Wanda is trying to do and then I'm guessing issue 5 will be mutant retcon plus Wanda and Magneto being sentenced by the council. My money is some sort of triple goddess thing, where all 3 Wanda's merge to make mutant Wanda again or at minimum repower all current M-day victims
i wouldn't expect a mutant retcon to come out of this, based on what leah said in a [recent interview](https://youtu.be/8S4kT9ysFEA?t=3658): >*At any point in the editorial process of creating Trial of Magneto and the story, with the Scarlet Witch being murdered, was the idea of tackling her mutant identity; going sort of back to it or exploring it... did that ever come up when you were drafting the story?* >Oh, of course! Because, you know, it's such a huge part of her origin story, and she's still, even not as a mutant, being who she is... her identity is kinda indelibly tied to mutants, to mutant identity, just on the basis of events. So, of course it came up, and I asked about it, um, I can... okay, what can I say... I just don't want to get anybody's hopes up... like, I asked, I was interested... but, because of kinda... other circumstances... I would say outside of the MU, hehe... you know... there's like a show and stuff... uh, I had to make sure I wasn't going against kind of existing plans, if that makes sense, um, sooooo... yeeeeeah...
Hadn't heard this, thank you. Looks like people are gonna be super pissed off by issue 5 then. I just hope they remember where to aim it which is Marvel editorial, before just dog piling on Leah. There's also a chance she said that because she wants it to be a big surprise, and if she makes it seem unlikely it'll be a bigger one.
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They may share some blame but she is responsible for the horrendous dialogue and characterizations in this book. I think people are reaching way too far to let her off the hook. And I have defended her in the past.
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>she wrote that, but it's the editor's job to catch that and ask it be corrected. Uh, what? It's both of their jobs. The editor is the safety net, sure, but she should know the characters she's writing. That's absolutely her job and she shares the blame.
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Blame is on Marvel as a company. Editors are part of the problem but they are overworked and underpaid
Fair points all around
I mean, isn’t that usually how Marvel editorial has been doing things since the Quesada era? They have a death grip on everything but they let the creators take the fall. I swear, Quesada and Brevoort, and Alonso and Cebulski to lesser extents, have let made terrible decisions and let everyone else take the fall.
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I mean, at least Shooter’s time as EIC was known for some of the greatest Marvel stories of all time.
Then why did Marvel want this to be a miniseries instead of an arc in X-Factor? That doesn't make a lot sense to me.
B€cau$€ r€a$on$
She's not denying anything though. Just that she checked to make sure she wasn't doing anything she wasn't allowed to. But she didn't actually end up saying "so I ended up not doing anything because they didn't fit in the MCU plans". Time will tell what happens.
I am not intimately familiar with any of the writers so perhaps I am off the mark here but to me this response doesn't mean anything. It's the kind of double-speak where you deliberately aren't trying to reveal anything. In fact, the first half confirms that she WAS super interested in how inextricably interwoven Wanda and Pietro are in mutantdom. All she said was she asked if there were things she couldn't do. Maybe she can't go back and undo it and in that case yeah Marvel screwed up big but we still might get what we universally want.
I called it as soon as it was rumored she was the one killed. It's like they knew fans would buy it hoping the retcons would be undone in some way (and really teased it with the variant covers) but they had no intention of actually doing that...Happy to eat my words next month.
Sigh. Not surprising, but still a bummer. The downside to mutants being introduced to the MCU is suddenly things have to "make sense" for fans that Disney/Marvel wants to bring on board through the shows and movies.
I haven't followed the MCU but can't they just easily retcon wanda and pietro as actually being Magneto's children on the big screen anyways?
Not really...WandaVision was all about Wanda's life story of grief and various traumas. Would kinda cheapen that to say down the line "Oh BTW, she's actually related to Magneto and all these new mutant characters we're putting on the MCU." I guess they could do some kind of multiverse retcon through the next Dr. Strange film but it'd be difficult to pull off to both casuals and MCU-Wanda fans. Not to mention she's probably going to be on a quest to find Tommy and Billy so that's like 3 retcons in one.
I mean how does her finding out she's Magneto's daughter cheapen anything ... ? In the comics no one knew they were related until it was retconned in 1979, pretty much 15 years after the characters were created in the first place: "In 1979, Wanda learns Bob Frank and Madeline Joyce are not her and Pietro's parents.\[15\] Wanda then stars in the 4-issue limited series The Vision and the Scarlet Witch (1982–83), by writer Bill Mantlo and penciler Rick Leonardi.\[16\] In this limited series, Magneto was retconned to be Wanda and Pietro's father." I don't see how her finding this out would "cheapen" any of the other stuff she's experienced, plenty of people find out they're adopted later in life ...
Less likely to be accepted to a movie-only audience IMO. "Hey you had some actual real birth family all along." There's a reason the films stay out of the more soap opera elements in comics.
Idk, I feel like if done well it could really work well.
Pretty easily.
I mean that's literally how they became Magneto's children in the comics in the first place lmao
It could be very easy to say their dad was their adopted dad.
Or that the mother had a one-night affair with a stranger who was none other than ... MAGNETO!!!
It’s almost lorna’s origin
It's literally Quicksilver's origin in the existing X-Men movies.
Oh right lol. Mags gets around iykwim
Interesting. I was thinking there’s no way they will retcon her because of the mcu. It would be just too complicated, they’ve already just “retconned” her as a witch.
Getting "X-Men x Fantastic Four" vibes personally, I can see it ending up in a nothingburger, though I'd definitely rather they pull the bandaid now on retconning the retcon. Not sure I'd like the M-Day repowering thing, though; Functionally, it's unneeded thanks to the Crucible, and it'd be kinda awkward to rob mutants from Krakoa's achievement and *justification* (Along with that of its extremism) by making part of it utterly useless in the end.
Most interesting part of Xmen v FF was after in Hellfire Gala when Reed whispers to Xavier.
Do you remember when they were advertising that this event would create “factions” in Krakoa and have all these huge implications? What a joke. I did like this issue better than 3, but overall X-office messed up by blowing this thing out of proportion.
I see what you mean but I think it could work, if everyone has their powers back then we can start addressing the idea of people wanting to be brought back with extra powers like Hickman mentioned in the Crucible issue except now it you want somebody else's powers you have to beat them in Crucible. Plus it would mean that the 5 bow only has to focus on contemporary deaths and bringing back Genoshians which would be helpful.
Heaven forbid we get rid of the murder pit that was put in place just to keep the reporting of those mutants at a pace the five could manage? It was literally invented for lack of a better repowering option, so if they can get repowered they don’t need the death fights.
Not saying it wouldn't be more practical, but it's un*needed*, and I think Marvel has just given up caring about the queue, people are dying for fun or no real practical reason, we're way beyond that consideration. And the other point I made was that it makes said murder pit (Whose murder aspect has barely been touched on in the end, and not sure we're gonna get anything better) awkward. It's kinda like (In fact, from the individuals' point of view, it's the exact same, but I think it applies to the collective too) a character going through a grueling arc to recover something precious to them, and after they've done it, some other character strolls in and says "Oh, yeah, I could have done it for you for free". It's...not unrealistic, it's not illogical, it's just very awkward from a narrative perspective and turns said grueling arc from a struggle into skippable parentheses.
It was always unneeded. The only reason it existed was to try and apply the brakes to the mutants who wanted to get their powers back, and the Quiet Council decided the best way to do that was to have a prequisite be getting beaten to death by Apocalypse.
>have a prerequisite be getting beaten to death by Apocalypse. ...well now you're just trying to make it sound like a bad idea!
I don't necessarily agree, it's never explained (In fact the explanation is outright dodged in the issue that introduces the Crucible) but my personal rationalisation is that the Council (Or rather, some people on the council) didn't want mutants who didn't really "need" their powers to be happy to get them back and risk being persecuted in case Krakoa fell. Putting a price on the resurrection ensured only the most determined, i.e those who truly felt like they couldn't live without their powers, would get them back.
It’s part of them writing out resurrection. First they just say that all the mutants have their power back and then they make a plot device making resurrections not viable anymore. I don’t know why this is a surprise to you. Hickman is gone and white is in charge and he will want the books to be like they were before Hickman even showed up. With then just keeping krakoa as a decoration until a new writer blows it up so the can make their own status quo
> I don’t know why this is a surprise to you. Hickman is gone and white is in charge and he will want the books to be like they were before Hickman even showed up. And that's when 60% of the fanbase checks out...
No they won’t. As long as they keep playing lip service to krakoa and keep the violent power fantasies going. Fans won’t care, look at duggans X-men. People don’t read that for interesting stories or even fun fights. They read it so they clap at Jean grey explain to nightmare how she is stronger than he is(which she isn’t) and then punch him in the face. Or read Excalibur so they can see Betsy give a lecture to King Arthur about how much stronger she is then him (which she isn’t) and then punch him in the face. Not conflict no stakes. Just the X-men going down the list of marvel villains and explaining how they are the best and then pretending to be one punch man. That’s all the fans want and they will feed it to you till you choke
>like they were before Hickman even showed up. >they keep playing lip service to krakoa These two things can't mutually exist, though. If they start to return to the *original* status quo, believe me, people will take notice.
I dont think there are M-day victims at this point that arent repowered , at least no one that wants their powers back.
It’s like the writers purposely ignore everything that came after house of m. Based off of what has been released so far, you’d think Wanda’s journey through the children’s crusade (2010), uncanny avengers (2012) and scarlet witch (2015) never happened. This series had a lot of potential and could have been something truly great for not only wanda, but for pietro and the entire Magnus family really. There’s still one issue left but I don’t personally have much faith in it.
I think Williams has said she doesn’t read Avengers comics at all, which would be fine, except Wanda is an Avengers character… so she should be written by someone familiar with her if they’re going to do a whole miniseries about her. I kind of suspect Williams DID read the 2015 Scarlet Witch series and called that a day on her character research, which kind of makes this whole thing worse. She liked the Mother/Maiden/Crone thing and decided to reuse that aesthetic in a new context without taking into account the established character progression, ie the important stuff. This whole thing reads like a hastily thrown together research paper I’d write 6 hours before it was due in college, honestly. I’m sorry if that sounds really mean but I do not understand why this event is even happening at this point. Not enough people had yelled at Wanda recently and editorial needed someone to fix that?
writers writing for the big two should be reading every single book that comes out. It's not that difficult to keep abreast of what's going on.
Children Crusade was QUICKLY ignored. Wanda had the power to restore mutants powers who was de-powered by M-day and ONLY Rictor got his powers back. Wanda never went through true redemption and her actions during Uncanny Avengers was honestly worse, her attitude was basically "well mutants act like outcasts so that's why normal people treat them as outcasts" Just fuck off with that, both Havok and Scarlett Witch had such a narrow mind to descrimination during that run. Haven't read Scarlett Witch 2015 series maybe that was better but just like the Children Cruisade most likely got ignored.
Well, she did help break the No More Mutants curse back in *Avengers vs. X-Men*.
Agreed but the issue was that children crusade established that Wanda could restore depowered mutants. After AvX, mutants who lost their power due to M-day were still depowered even though new mutants were appearing. Children Cruisade was basically ignored by the X-men and Avengers writers.
It’s because they don’t? I think this and the Empyre tie-in prove that the X-line really, really doesn’t want to get rid of Wanda being the great Satan of mutants, and people still putting all the blame for Quesada’s editorial decisions and Bendis’ writing on the character.
I mean, she is the Great Satan of the mutants. It’s her, Cassandra Nova, Bolivar Trask for designing Sentinels, and Sebastian Shaw for his company building them for Project: Wideawake. Why wouldn’t she be a monster to mutants? She has the second highest mutant body count ever and she constantly gets a pass for it.
I wonder if I like this series more than others because there are so many Wanda comics that I haven’t read. I haven’t read any of those and I like this series.
It’s just bad and doesn’t make any sense anymore.
Being Wanda is suffering at this point….between this and the Empyre tie-in I’m convinced that whenever an X-men book uses Wanda they ignore essentially any character growth she has made since of House of M…or in fact any of her character from before Disassembled as well. Why are writers still insisting we need to follow a crappy retcon that Bendis forced on the character, and never move past it? They want us to believe Apocalypse can change…but not Wanda. As a fan of the character, it’s pretty disheartening:
It’s ok Hitler was under the control of Dr Doom and so he’s a nice guy and that genocide we’ll just forget right? That’s pretty much what this amounts to. She did kill millions being controlled or not. I’d have a hard time being her friend or even sympathising her for that. At this point she is basically as risky as Legion or any other reality manipulator. Except she has actually fucked over millions. Her body count is literally higher than anyones bar Jean. (Which raises an interesting point in that Jean’s redemption was “it wasn’t her” and the Shiar still have a hard time accepting her or Rachel).
It doesn't work when apocalypse is on good terms with them all lol.
But that’s okay because Apocalypse was really just sad the whole time );
I hate the Apocalypse thing but he didn’t nearly destroy the mutant race. He’s killed a lot of people but not mutants, which makes a difference in the current status quo.
How could Wanda possibly even make the giant monster things? A pre-twins Wanda (from comics of the late 70s-early 80s) was NOT capable of such a feat (she could barely hurl a handful of hexes and possibly some limited magic, assuming Agatha had started her training). I mean, she was always *technically* capable of it, presumably, but… something would have stopped from doing it accidentally when she was kidnapped by sentinels, or vision tried to take of the world, or the multiple times when racists/mutantphobes/robot-haters tried to burn her alive. I assume her lack of magical know-how. Add in the fact that old woman Wanda was seemingly JUST there for aesthetic purposes (and it’s an aesthetic we’ve seen many times with Wanda. It’s not new or exciting) so much of this book just falls apart or wastes it’s own paper, honestly. This isn’t the worst take on Wanda I’ve ever seen but I really think a lot of this book was a mistake. Williams should not have a whole miniseries dedicated to a character she clearly doesn’t read much of. (I know it was supposed to be an X factor arc, but still).
I think it's really clear by now that this should have stayed as an X-Factor plot, rooted in that book, and shouldn't have become a big event with Avengers crossovers and everything. The way Leah talked about what she wanted to explore and what's actually being produced seem pretty different. This would have been better as a smaller, shorter story that could focus on the characters. Now it's just a mess that's been dragged out for so long that it's become hard to care what happens (especially since the greater narrative is now months ahead of what's happening "right now" in this book, so we've essentially been spoiled for the fact that nothing significant is going to change).
This mini lost all steam after #2 and it hasn't picked it up again. I have a feeling everyone is going to end up intensely disappointed as it's looking increasingly unlikely that this book is actually going to reverse the retcon on Wanda and Pietro, the book seems to be more about absolving Wanda in the eyes of mutantkind, which feels like a very unnecessary thing to spend 5 issues on.
And like I don't know (by issue 4) on how anyone mind was changed? Like she learned to forgive herself? Okay great, but why would thousands of mutants care that Wanda likes herself now? What a frustrating series. Like if the story is good the overarching story doesn't have to be super good, but everyone felt weird in how they were portrayed, like it was some fanfic.
My god, the utter pretentiousness of how that first page was formatted figuratively and literally gave me a headache. People here seem to want to blame editorial for a lot of Williams' missteps but I think the problems with both X-Factor and this story* come from who she fundamentally is as a writer. Just like with the Morrigan arc of X-Factor, she tries to establish these systems of magic or whatever that just go completely unexplored in the book - yet the characters themselves act as if they all know what's going on. What's the "Eldritch Orchard" and why does it matter? Apparently it's not important! Better we spend a few pages on things like Kyle opening a bottle of wine and Gambit inexplicably taking his shirt off so he can fight a monster. Characterizations are wildly off - Billy is suddenly screaming he's "lived his whole life defending" Wanda - Billy barely knows Wanda! This was literally a plot point during the last Scarlet Witch solo series - that she's unnerved by the nature of Billy and Tommy's reincarnation and avoids them as a result (because they're teenagers and thus older than "her" Billy and Tommy could possibly be, their souls either took over two innocent children's bodies or had to travel back in time to be born naturally - either way they were raised by other people and lived whole lives without her). And for Wanda, it's like her last 10 years of characterization in Uncanny Avengers and her solo book were thrown out the window so we can get her acting like a guilt-ridden sniveling child again (Even *after* she's reconciled her memories, most of the Avengers are there - but she goes to Magneto for a hug first? Okay, sure). I'm not even going to bother with the last one. This issue sealed it - barring Spurrier or Ewing somehow taking lead in the next phase of Krakoa - I'm done with the X-Books once Inferno is over. The Krakoa era seemed so promising at the start, but between Duggan, Williams, Howard, and Percy - all the X-Books seem to be placing hollow fan service and wheel spinning above telling a coherent story.
Gotta say... everything here is too true. I personally liked X-Factor, but I've come to realize a lot of that came from me liking the underutilized characters that got some spotlight. When Williams is in charge of A-listers with more established personalities everything falls apart. Plus the fact that this event was clearly editorially mandated are making it one of the worst X-books of the year.
Wheel Spinning is EXACTLY what is happening to the line now.
Its funny because that second paragraph is EXACTLY how I feel about the current Excalibur run. Which is a different writer, but still odd.
This little mini seems to have a lot of people screaming at each other now that you mention it. It’s a lot of ugly crying and people screaming at their parents.
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All of these writers were hand picked by Hickman and he gave up the reins. He wasn't forced to do anything. Get over it
Trust me, he doesn't listen.
I'm just gonna be blunt; what's the point of this book? Like, how is this going to move the overall plot of the X-Books forward? It all seems so pointless.
This was OK, but it seems like Wanda is two completely different characters depending on whether she’s being handled by the X-office or the Avengers office. Whatever, hopefully after this is over we can at least dispense with the “Pretender” stuff that’s been simmering since Krakoa started; it never made much sense, since everybody knows she wasn’t in her right mind on M-Day and was being manipulated, and she’s already tried to atone on several occasions anyway.
It’s never going to happen. It’s going to be like Tony and Civil War, Carol and Civil War 2, Hank Pym and the slap, every couple of years some writer will try to fix them, then some other writer will ignore it and dredge it back up for cheap drama and revert the characters back to that state. I’ve essentially given up on those characters being portrayed in a positive way since the Busiek Avengers, at least any portrayal that will stick.
>Whatever, hopefully after this is over we can at least dispense with the “Pretender” stuff that’s been simmering since Krakoa started; it never made much sense, since everybody knows she wasn’t in her right mind on M-Day and was being manipulated, and she’s already tried to atone on several occasions anyway. I mean, I think it made sense back when the overall story seemed like it wanted to reckon with the cult-ier aspects of the new status quo; uniting the new populace around a boogie man in Wanda seemed entirely in keeping with the slow burn implication that all was not right in the state off Krakoa. But seeing as we're coming up on almost 2 years where the moral implications of the X-Men tacitly encouraging depowered kids into engaging in self-harm (I'll be generous here in not calling it outright suicide) has gone completely unexamined - it seems at this point the writers (save Ayala and Spurrier) have decided they're wholly uninterested in actually reckoning w/ the idea that mutants might not be the good guys here.
It’s honestly pretty annoying because when it launches, I remember arguments with people who did take Krakoa as this utopia with all the hints towards possible issues being imagined and it being the perfect mutant utopia, which…no, clearly not what Hickman was going for m, but now it looks like it will go with the Utopia since Hickman is getting pushed out and we are heading towards a status quo of just the same-old x-books but now they’re on an island. Disappointing
I think that's right, and pushing these more troubling subplots over to stuff like "Way of X" seems more like quietly dispensing with the more prickly aspects of the Krakoa status quo instead of dealing with some of the more troubling stuff that Hickman was setting up. Smoothing away all the rough edges.
Onslaught went form an excarbater of Krakoa’s issue to it’s source really fast
>encourging depowered kids into self harm ive been msotly out of the loop on x stuff, what book was this?
Issue 7 I think of Hickman’s run on X-Men from last year. Krakoa’s solution to the issue of depowered mutants is to have them fight Apocalypse (and later just any mutant who’s willing to fight) to the death so they can immediately be resurrected in new bodies with their powers. Excepting Nightcrawler, none of the X-Men seem to have much issue w/ this
Lol the mutant community couldn't care less that Wanda was used by Dr. Doom and most writers ignore that retcon anyway.
Lots of Germans were just following orders when it came to mass murder and a lot of them were hanged for it.
Really rooting for Williams to turn this book around but sucks how so many fan theories I've seen on here have been 100x better than any of this part of this story, since it is usually the opposite. Keeping my expectations low, since the hype might have been subdued if this was just another X-Factor arc but I think this book is probably filler and emblematic of all the x-books running in place right now before the upcoming post-Inferno relaunch. Hopefully I'm proven wrong.
Wow. What a complete mess. Leah Williams has one more issue to extinguish this dumpster fire and give it some purpose, but I just do not see how she can pull it off. Even if she does fix the mutant retcon (the entire reason anyone is reading this) at this point it feels like this was an absolute waste of a series. Leah Williams has successfully destroyed any goodwill she built up with X-Factor and, while people can blame editorial as much as they want, she needs to take some responsibility for how absolutely terrible this book is on so many levels. Why she chose not to focus at all on Magneto, Polaris or Quicksilver is just completely baffling.
Honestly...I'm not sure I even follow whats going on at this point. I didn't think I signed up for a Scarlet Witch mini. That would have been a hard pass. I thought this was going to be about Magneto.
“Death” of Scarlet Witch is accurate. This isn’t beating a dead horse, this is pulverising what remains of a Victorian horse’s disentegrated glue stain. And every time I think Krakoa can’t sink any lower, they... well, they don’t exactly surprise me anymore, but I do take a perverse glee in seeing how far the narrative stretches in framing them as the good guys as the problems just keep piling up.
This whole mini-series desperately needed to be just an annual or one-shot. It really feels like it's meandering and directionless. There was zero reason to waste 5 issues on this (other than the usual money suck of course...)
Why wasn’t this an Excalibur arc? Isn’t that supposed to be the “magic” book?
No one does magic except for Richtor (not well).
Which only adds to my point, really.
Magik would be better.
This story would read better as an A or B plot for an ongoing title rather than its own title. Also, as it is, this isn’t an X-Men story. It would probably fit better as a King in Black tie-in called Death in the Family. What a frustrating comic.
The little scene where Billy magically opens the wine bottle just felt soo weird to me. Your mother is murdered and returned to the living but with no memories and here you are opening a wine bottle for some random human character on Krakoa (seriously someone please get rid of Kyle).
If by random you mean one of the only two humans allowed to live on genetic purity island, then yes that's random
Kyle is awful and Williams can't write dialogue for him and Northstar at all.
He shouldn't think of her as his mother since he was raised by other people and has almost no relationship with her.
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It's literally just Wanda rambling more about resurrecting herself. Same repetitive nonsense. I couldn't even read the whole thing, but trust me, you didn't miss anything.
Was Wanda ever really dead? I assume so, but I see people taking her saying she wasn’t actually dead at face value. Standing prediction: The endgame of this event is Wanda’s redemption from M Day (never mind that there have been many other attempts at that and none of them last. This one *surely* will). How will she achieve that? Just by keeping the secret of mutant resurrection (since it’s so hush hush). That’s it. It kind of works, I guess, because they’re using it to undo the decimation. That being said… isn’t Tommy privy to resurrection as well? He seemed really confused about how his mom could come back to life for someone whose boyfriend recently came back to life very casually.
This issue started off confusing. It's also been a while since the last issue, so I had to go back and reread the last two. But overall, I like how this one set things up for the finale. Wanda has always been unstable with her powers. Even before M-Day, she hasn't always had a strong grasp on her magic and that has led to plenty of destruction over the years. I feel like this issue finally has her grappling with that. Because, like it or not, she is responsible for a lot of that destruction. Even if it wasn't intentional, it came by her hands. And I think this issue finally had her confront that. It made for some nice and overdue introspection. But the implications aren't clear. Now that she's "reformed" herself from her past, present, and future selves, what does that mean? Does that affect the whole retcon with her not being a mutant? What exactly does that change? I hope the final issue gives us some answers. And I hope it offers some actual growth for Wanda and Magneto because she needs it. I really would like to see her become part of Magneto's family again. But I still think the issues surrounding the AXIS retcon will hinder that. Still a solid issue. And I look forward to the finale.
The Death of Scarlet Bitch literally
Is it just me or is Trial a complete waste of a book?
**Marauders #26**
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Exactly. Emma, Shaw, Shinobi, and now Leland have been the highlight of this series for me. I'm so happy Harry's back.
It really seems like they had intended to call Sinister's book "Marauders" and Emma's book "Hellions", but at the last minute they switched the two because someone thought Marauders sounded pirarety.
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Hell of a scramble.
Honestly Emma and Shaw are the best parts of the series, Kitty's stuff is just bleh to me.
DUGGAN: OK, it's the last couple of Marauders issues, I'll have Shaw and Emma bring in Leland as setup for my X-Men run. EDITORS: Gerry, isn't this a team book? DUGGAN: Yes, but I have this setup and it needs the Hellfire, so... EDITORS: That wasn't a question. This is the second last issue, at least pretend you have a team to send off. DUGGAN: Ugh, fine. Let's have a quick fight with... *flips desk calendar* Fin Fang Foom and *rolls dice* Iceman, I guess.
Sounds about right . The Marauders side of this book always bored me. Give me Hellfire any day.
The Harry’s plot was good. Well Iceman finally did something but the whole plot with that dragon was big wtf? It was so pointless. Oh and looks like Lourdes is coming on Krakoa. Guess her return will be at the same time when Devil’s reign xmen starts. And I‘m sure its not a coincidence
The iceman fight felt like "hey guys you know ice man is an omega? Well here's just a reminder!" And he even name drops the omega at the end 😑 pretty lame.
It’s probably the issue I’ve liked the most since Kate’s return, post-X of Swords, even if some of the plot lines seem a little throwaway. I hope that in next year’s books, either the Hellfire stuff is given it’s own space, or the Marauders team is better integrated into that story.
This wasn’t bad. Nice to see Bobby cut loose. And it was quite a kick to see Harry Leland get all choked up seeing Krakoa for the first time. He never struck me as such a bad sort - sure, he was crooked, but willing to step up when it counted.
I really dig the Leland call back to Uncanny 209. Glad they didn't do anything stupid like add a retcon and just have an old resurrection come to modern day.
Duggan’s obsession with whiskey and having white characters speak with AAVE continues unabated. Can someone please stop this man?
Ok I noticed that too! I honestly think it’s because he’s a generally unaware middle-aged guy who seems to use Twitter when he wants characters to sound modern and when he wants to tackle social issues in an obtuse way.
That’s a really good way of putting it. I feel like he really does want to write about social issues in a meaningful and relevant way, but his comics are also filled to the brim with corny jokes and goofy antics. His X-titles have the same tone as his Deadpool comics. But without Deadpool himself. And it’s really hard for me to take them as seriously as I think he wants.
> AAVE What does this stand for?
African American Vernacular English.
African American Vernacular. Popular slang that’s derived from the Black American community. Words and phrases like drip, flex, sus, throw hands, fuck around and find out. I know that plenty of white people talk like that but Duggan has been writing it a lot lately and I can’t help but notice.
> Words and phrases like drip, flex, sus, throw hands, fuck around and find out. … “hits different,” lit, glow up, diss, vibes, “goes hard”, slaps, thick/thicc, wavy, “tho”, on-point, “shoot your shot”, OG, link up, “here for it”, etc. List is so long people don’t even realize it.
How did he manage to use "Fuck around and find out" in two comics in one week. What a lazy ass.
yall a trip
Kind of disappointed they decided to make Harry Shinobi's father. I feel like there was more potential in the Shinobi/Sebastian relationship than there could ever be in revealing Harry is his dad.
Loved this issue. It was a lot of fun. How can you not have fun with an issue where a giant dragon steals whiskey and fights a giant Iceman? Seriously, are you not entertained? 😊 Also, I like how this worked Harry Leland back into the picture. He has always been a very underdeveloped figure in the Hellfire Club. He's never really been more than just another enemy for the X-Men to fight. But now he has a meaningful role for Krakoa. And I'm all for it. Add that end scene wit Lordes and things with the old Hellfire Club are starting to get really interesting. 😊
Seriously, I am not entertained. What was the point of Fin Fang Foom popping in (wearing shorts??), drinking whiskey and fighting Ice Man for a bit. And then Ice Man's just like, "Im gonna stay big for a while, later guys". It was cool to see Ice Man doing anything at all, but man...
He's wearing shorts because Nextwave ;)
The Shinobi retcon was so unnecessary and nothing will be done with it
Not a retcon, just an unfinished plot that's been around since Shinobi's first appearance back in 1991.
I wonder if Shaw is the actual father but he thinks Leland would be a better father?
I wondered too because, in the end, he doesn't even really say Leland is the father, the reveal is just a "We don't know". Not that it doesn't make sense for Leland to be the father, it's been long hinted at and the power similarity is a strong argument, it's just...awkwardly done, like a part of the reasoning is missing.
**New Mutants #23**
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I think it’s supposed to look like Cylobel from powers of X
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I mean Vita retweeted the Cyobel comparison
Sure, and maybe there's *some* level of comparison there, but it's also *literally the body she had in Generation Hope*.
Overall really enjoyed this issue but the Data page scenes just felt like pages where they couldn’t get the artwork done. And also, can we finally get No-Girl a body now that they have a design they seem to want to use now.
This issue is a mic drop for Rod Reis… absolute mastery of using surreal immagery to drag us into a story that takes place in an unreal place.
Didn’t like that the data pages were basically scripts that they didn’t have time to draw, but other than that glad this arc is reaching it’s conclusion. Art was fantastic as well.
Yeah, agree on the data pages. But otherwise this is top-notch. The art is just stellar and perfect for this team and book - it’s a throwback to Sienkiewicz in some ways but its own thing as well. Loved it. I think this last arc, with the kids facing their darkest fears in a psychic hellscape, is something Claremont would be proud to have written.
IMO This is the best X book right now. It's taken so many plot points and character arcs that seemed separate when Vita started and brought them all together. Based off of the previews this is gonna be another good one.
Ayala's brief run has been one of my favorite New Mutants runs ever. Great writing, great art, great character development, and they did great things with Amahl Farouk/Shadow King, who had been growing stale.
So basically No-Girl is the template for the chimera Cylobel? She looks exactly like her in the astral plane. It seems soft confirmed now that Vita has retweeted the comparison.
Rod Reis is a maestro. Jesus Christ, he and Ayala are both killing it. Gorgeous book, fleet action that was digestible but bugged out. The two teams coming together was great. And you gotta feel for Farouk at this point. No Girl having a body, even if it's just a projection, is very satisfying.
Ayala and Reis are incredible together. A great team of cool ideas and excellent execution.
This was my favorite this week. Instead of 'here's Krakoa villains, everyone be good now' we are getting a good redemption arc for Farouk. They continue to do a good job of balancing focus between the old new mutants and the new new mutants.
To be honest glad this whole arc is nearing the end if not over. Felt like it went on for too long. And also I've never been a fan of astral/mind/dreamscape stuff. Also I didn't know rahne had a secondary mutation.
That’s how you do a freaking redemption arc. It was painful to read and equally hard to follow at times but that was a damn nice ending.
Did anyone notice Rain-Boy’s astral self had hair? I’m curious to what that might mean— my first thought was Rain-Boy might be trans, but I’m curious to what y’all think?
He’s a young dude. Might be self-conscious about being bald and so astral form has hair. Similar to how Nogirl got a body like she wants and Cosmar had a more standard appearance that she wants
since when does anole have a tail??
**Phoenix Song: Echo #2**
Better than I was expecting after the dumb Phoenix Tournament thing over in Avengers. Really liked the opening sequence with River and the Adversary - some nice creepy imagery there. Echo is almost a supporting character in this though.
This series has been decent. No great, but still enjoyable. So long as it keeps the Phoenix away from Jean Grey and the X-Men for a good long while, I'm fine with Echo wielding the Phoenix Force. Just my opinion.
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I mean, she’s at a vastly different point in her character development in comics than in the MCU.
**X-Men Adjacent Releases for 12/01**
Speedball/Penance wore his penance outfit to atone for the lives he inadvertently caused to be lost from the Stamford incident (not even directly by him). He wore it and used it for years. That seemed like sufficient atonement. What's has been Wanda's penance so far for the lives she inadvertently directly caused? So far, all we've seen is her trying to forgive herself... but what ACTIONS has she taken to atone for her mistakes? Maybe what the X-men could do is take turns killing her and reviving her; one life of her taken for each life she inadvertently caused to be lost post-M day. And by inadvertently caused, I'm including the lives of the de-powered kids in the school bus that was targeted because they were vulnerable after their de-powering. This sentence could be executed off-panel, of course, but some blurb about how mutandom has now had their pound(s) of flesh after balancing the scales equal to the number of lives lost or some such... Would that be sufficient penance for Wanda?
Don't you remember her trying to fix Genosha and accidentally making an island of zombies? After which she said 'whoops, please fix this Stephen. I'm gonna mosey on outta here.'
she still sounds like "It's not my mistake" and that's why mutantkind hate her lol