- Joined
- Jul 22, 2020
it's interesting and certainly defendable. I just wish Hickman was allowed to do what he wanted. Some of the other X-Books at least had some fun, but I didn't like it when it got too egregious with the agenda-pushing.I'll always defend the Krakoa era, in so far as I find the core story and books very interesting, the most interesting the X-Men have been in a long, long time (aside from small flare ups of quality like Remender's Uncanny X-Force).
The thing is that Hickman, Gillen, Ewing, and Percy wrote their books under Hickman's idea of a morally compromised paradise and the increasingly corrupt games of power the leaders and key actors were playing; Spurrier and LaValle explored characters trying to navigate the moral loopholes and unintended consequences of the new nation, culture, and status quo; but Duggan, Ayala, Howard, Orlando, and everyone else were writing it all at face value, like "it's a paradise and it's awesome and we want to play with it for as long as we can".
And their plans to keep playing with it derailed Hickman's planned structure; editorial chose to keep it rolling (I mean, it's selling, why stop), and Hickman whipped up a compressed version of what he had planned, and bailed, leaving the rest of the story hanging loose and kinda directionless. Gillen has done well sort of guiding the main story since, but still.
I'll repeat myself a bit, but the core books (X-Men, Immortal, SWORD/Red, X-Force, the Legion ones) and in general the events have ranged from decent to great, while the peripheral books (New Mutants, Marauders, all of Howard's Betsy Cap Britain books, etc) have ranged from just decent to fucking shit, and leave the whole thing tasting pretty bad.
Glad the whole X-Men "polycule" thing of Jean/Scott/Logan has never been really mentioned, almost like it's non-existant. Shame that the Onslaught plot thread kinda fizzled out for some reason. I was looking forward to Nightcrawler waxing and figuring out how to bring religion to Krakoa.
Moira's entire schtick is kinda ??? to me.