Magneto Dresses For The Occasion While The Cotati Descend In X-Men #11

Krakoa is under attack from alien forces. This has happened multiple times in the last few issues, and frankly? The council is putting together plans to stop it from being such a nuisance. Till then, Magneto is gonna wreck it in Jonathan Hickman, Leinil Francis Yu, and Sunny Gho’s X-Men #11.

Chris Eddleman: Empyre, like sand in the hourglass, is quickly slipping away. The biweekly has turned weekly which means a chunk of tie-ins has been exploding out at us like a firehose. And X-Men, being the hottest thing going right now, not only has Empyre: X-Men but also tie-ins of the main title. Last issue we got a nice portrait of a mutant no one cared about last year, Vulcan, while this issue is another take on everyone’s favorite villain-turned hero-turned villain-turned hero-turned….errr….

Robert Secundus: I am shocked by how much I’m loving Empyre. Normally I’d dread an ongoing I love being dragged into some unrelated event, but after each issue of Empyre has ratched up in quality, after the brilliant Lords of Empyre tie-ins have made clearer what the story is doing thematically, and after the equally moving and hilarious Empyre: X-Men, I was tremendously excited to see what this issue had in store.

The Man, The Myth, The Magneto

CE: So before we hit the main crux of this issue, I think the first few pages need to be touched on a little bit. This is our Summoner friend back from Issue #2 hanging out with some of the Young X-Men, including internet darling Loa [Ed. note: Alani Ryan], and inviting them to play a game. However, the game barely gets underway. I think this game is somewhat important to X of Swords, Rob. I think this is a bit of forshadowing with the give and take aspect of this two-player experience. Is this duality supposed to represent the duality of Krakoa and Arakko? Who knows, but it’s obviously not nothing.

RS: I think we’re definitely sowing some sword-seeds here. It’s a bit frustrating that we know so little about the game– but, uh, it feels like Rockslide is going to die. And it feels like the game might be akin to the classic Game of Metaphors you see in folklore (or folklore-adjacent pop culture, most notably for comics people in Sandman #4).

CE: Yeah it definitely feels like we can’t just trade wood for sheep in this one. It’s really hard to get a read on Summoner. We do get the description that he’s a mutant, just kind of a different flavor, and as far as we know he isn’t like…malevolent. But also, further previews have put him on the side of Arakko, and possibly in an adversarial role. But then, this scene doesn’t get touched on anymore as Cotati ships rain from the sky. And that’s where we get our main character for this issue, the Master of Magnetism, Magneto. We’ve seen Magneto get slotted into not just a heroic role, but a folk heroic role. Thoughts on this? Like, it seems like any moment someone will whip out a banjo and start singing about him.

RS: I prefer Magneto as framed, for the reader, as straight up hero. I think the X-Men as a concept works best when the more radical characters are treated as heroic even while they remain radical, and so my favorite eras of X-Men tend to be those when Magneto is on the team and pushing the team towards his own ethos. I also love Magneto as a hero because, as this issue demonstrates, he is rad as hell. I’m less comfortable with Exodus’ role here, just as I was uncomfortable with his role when he taught the children about the Scarlet Witch. In both cases as a reader I agree with the content of his speeches– for me, Magneto is best thought of as a hero and Scarlet Witch (until further work is done developing the character) is best thought of as a antagonist, or, at the very least, an unwitting agent of antagonists (if you emphasize all the Doom Retcon Stuff over the original House of M story).

But I can’t get away from who Exodus is— a crusader, who has continued acting like a Medieval crusader throughout his long life, and who has warped the legends of those who admires previously for his own ends. I can’t pin any particular thing in the speech that would be problematic– but something about it being Exodus, the Crusader-who-did-Medieval-War-Crimes, being the one to shape the idea of Magneto in the children (and in an issue that talks so much about war training and the creation of armies!) makes me uncomfortable.

CE: I think Hickman is trying to maybe mold Exodus into the bard of the group but, he’s always seemed pretty out there so I completely agree with you. Luckily, this issue is almost solely in the hands of our folk hero, as Magneto is called to lead the charge against the Cotati, since the Captains are fighting on the moon (as you do). A few things I loved right off, Magneto taking some time to do his mindfulness in his sauna meditations, and also his CHOICE OF SEVERAL OUTFITS. Rob, do you think the red and purple were picked for a particular reason?

RS: I think at this point that White Clothes Magneto is for Diplomacy, and Purple and Red is War Magneto? I’m not sure, but I continue to love that the X-men can wear all of their outfits now, and I love that Magneto has decided that he’s going to use his outfits as a kind of mood ring.

CE: To make it about video games again, it’s like we’re in the endgame and we’ve unlocked every optional alternative costume. It’s wonderful. I think we get an awful lot of wonderful Magneto stuff here. He’s the same confident leader that we saw in X-Men #1, and I frankly love to see it. This is one of those “The X-Men frankly deserve to win” issues that are starting to become hallmarks of the Krakoan era. We get twenty tons of iron bullets, an old man telling the aliens to get off his lawn, and almost nobody dies (sorry Toad).

C-C-C-Combo

CE: The data pages in this issue, while designwise were pretty lackluster while they looked just like a text report, really got to hit home one of the themes of X-Men, especially in this new age. This was expressed in the synergy idea of combining several mutant combat powers to a devastating effect. This kind of had a two-fold purpose for me. One of which was just to be a super cool concept in a superhero comic but, I think this also hammered home the community aspect of Krakoa, just in a way where it could be used as like…punching?

RS: And it foreshadows the later development of Chimeras in Krakoa IX. It’s videogame teamup stuff, continuity teases, and thematic resonances. It’s meaning and lore and radness. In that way it’s a lot like what X of Swords appears to be, and how it uses the tarot not just as an excuse to give the X-Men a bunch of swords, and not just to tie into the imagery of HoXPoX, but to explore the thematic depths of the deck and the particular card. Now, I gotta ask Chris– what kind of theoretical Combo Moves have you come up with since reading?

CE: So I think we should do a Magneto throws Colossus who then throws two Wolverines, and then Storm whips them up in a tornado. It’s a Wolvernado. Elaborate yet ineffective.

RS: Mine is– so, Nightcrawler teleports around and finds every power-boosting mutant and psychic on the island, and then they assemble in a sort of psychic-satellite dish pointed at Iceman and Storm, and then Iceman looks at the bad guy and says ice to meet you and with his ultra-charged super psychic omega powers punches them with Earth’s ice-caps, and then drops them down where they’re supposed to be, but then everyone is like, uhoh, wouldn’t that cause a series of tidal waves that would destroy the coasts on the planets? But NOPE because as I already said Storm is also there and is also getting ultra-charged super psychic omega powers and she takes the global tidal waves and redirects them away from population centers and at the bad guy because the ice cap punch wasn’t even the ultimate move, this is the ultimate move, and Storm says “SEA YAH” as she hits the bad guy with all ocean. Not an ocean, all ocean. And then she puts ocean back.

CE: But anyway, this is the logical conclusion of Moira X’s thoughts on mutants, which is meta in some ways. Doing ridiculously huge things often seems very rulebreaking in comics. If Iceman is Omega Level and can just freeze the oceans, who could beat him? But narratively, they only break the rules when mutants work as community, where these sort of supermoves are possible. The Five already gets to do the ultimate supermove, a Megalixer if you will, so I think it’s logical to continue these fun combos. And in some ways this isn’t new, just a much larger scale. The X-Men have always won battles after fighting as a group, and usually lose (the big one I’m thinking of is the first Hellfire Club fight) when they’re picked off one by one. It’s a hammer over the head as a metaphor but it’s effective to me.

It’s All Stories, Innit?

CE: So this is not the first time we’ve seen Exodus sitting around the campfire. He’s kind of our narrator for this tale, which almost means that some of it might be exaggerated but, I’m just going to let that slide. Last we saw of this medieval mutant, he was explaining that Scarlet Witch was a horrible unforgivable person who caused them the most harm. Which is I guess, partially true? [Ed. note: Wanda-stans, he said it not me.] Exodus has always been a follower of the cult of personality of Magneto, and would definitely jump at the opportunity to puff him up in the eyes of the impressionable youths. Is this another contribution to Krakoan culture in the form of oral traditions, or is this just some Exodus brainwashing? Anyway, it’s a very cool way to frame the narrative. Hickman seems to enjoy doing these sort of parallel narratives, even if this one is a support for the other.

RS: For the reasons outlined above, I’m uncomfortable with Exodus playing this role, even if there’s nothing in particular in his speech here that I find specifically troubling. But I really do enjoy the frame narrative. I love how it adds an even greater tone of grandiosity to Magneto’s heroics. And I love how it subverts a problem of tie-in issues; oftentimes, we know from the outset that the issue can’t really matter supremely to the event, or else the plot of the issue would just be in the actual event comic. On the other hand, in order to win your dollar, an event tie-in will try to very much convince you otherwise. With the frame narrative here, there’s no tension– there’s no pretending that this is a vital part of Empyre’s story for which we should be on the edge of our seats. This is something that happened in the past, it was cool, but it’s done now, and Krakoa is safe, so we’re just going to sit back and enjoy some magnetic action. Normally eliminating all tension from a story is, you know, bad, but I think the complete lack of tension works to this story’s strengths.

CE: Yeah it’s not as though we were really concerned about Magneto from jump. We know death is not a super big concern and the way he carries himself in this issue is “completely unstoppable.” Plus, the framing device I think sets the tone to some extent. It reads like a heroic tall tale, complete with dropping 5 satellites on a bad guy. I really dug Yu here. I often complain about his work being static, but it felt more dynamic to me this time. Although the satellites seeming static just kind of added to the fun. I think Magneto as a hero to the kids is going to continue, and we shall see if it builds to subversion or just a fun trope.

RS: Those satellites. Chris, Hickman and Yu did slapstick. And it was actually good.

CE: It was really good! I thought this ish was a hoot and a half. A little amuse bouche of fun before we get into the main course of X of Swords next month.