High Stakes In Lowtown! It's Marauders #18!

The chess game between the Marauders and Homines Verendi gets more and more complex as lines are drawn in Marauders #18 by Gerry Duggan, Stefano Caselli, Matteo Lolli, Edgar Delgado and Cory Petit.

Christina Eddleman: Now that the Marauders are back to marauding, I’m ready for boats! Lot’s of boats! Boats. All. Day. Okay I suppose I can settle for an island with a boat in the background. And not just any island, Madripoor, the island in Southeast Asia where things went south for Kate. My apologies for this terrible joke. I promise I will continue to be equally as funny.

Vishal Gullapalli: I’m gonna be honest, every time Madripoor appeared in comics I had to stifle the urge to quit reading. But Marauders has done a great job making something about the fictional nation interesting! I’m much more excited to get back to our regularly scheduled mutant pirates doing what they do best, but it looks like we’ll have to settle for… political drama? Okay, I’m hooked.

Krakoa in Madripoor

VG: We start with Magneto and Xavier walking through Madripoor together, something that I feel is pretty notable – we don’t often see the two of them in an issue not written by Hickman and even rarer do we see them outside of Krakoa. But they’re here, and they’re attending the grand opening of a new hospital that serves as a publicity stunt for Krakoa to gain a foothold in the hearts and minds of Madripoor.

This is something I feel like we haven’t gotten enough of, both in Marauders and in the rest of the line – legitimate political drama between Krakoa and the rest of the world. Not the spats we see in books like King in Black, but official actions from mutant leadership as well as foreign heads of state. I’m really glad we got it here. But what makes this hospital notable, beyond its existence, is its name. I legitimately laughed out loud when I saw it – Christi, how’d you react to the Moira MacTaggert Memorial Hospital?

CE: I definitely had a good chuckle followed by a moment of reflection on just what Emma knows about Moira. We haven’t had much Moira content since House Of X & Powers Of X, and Magneto and Charles are, as far as we know, the only ones that know she’s still alive. It was hard to tell if this hospital being named in her memory is pure dramatic irony, or an implication that Emma knows more than she’s let on. Why else might she have been so delighted by the looks on Magneto and Charles’ faces?

Nonetheless, it’s a nice reminder of Moira’s significance to Krakoa, and Proteus’s tears were perfect. It’s during this unveiling we also notice a hiccup in the art, perhaps due to the fact this issue has both Lolli and Caselli as artists. Kate is first seen in her red resurrection dress and is next seen in her standard red coat and epaulettes. It’s a touching moment with a few distractions.

VG: I was trying to come up with some reason why this works, something about Kate phasing or taking her jacket off or something, but it only works if the clothing was in the reverse order. I do want to point out that Lolli and Caselli both do a decent job maintaining the visual style of the issue, but I’m personally not the biggest fan of either – especially when Delgado’s coloring them. It just feels stylistically muted, a bit too close to “standard” for my liking. But I’m still enjoying the writing well enough.

Krakoa buying up properties all over Madripoor’s lowtown as a way to push Verendi out of their singular grasp over the region is a really enjoyable beat. I’ve been playing a ton of Yakuza recently and this is literally exactly what you have to do in the game to throw a bunch of billionaires out, so I am absolutely headcanoning that Kate played a ton of Yakuza 0 and proposed this idea to the Council. [Ed. note: I’m choosing to believe that former G4 writer Gerry Duggan is real into it.]

CE: From outright attacks to attempting to poison Krakoan medicine, Verendi has been such a thorn in Krakoa’s side. So not only is it nice to see billionaire’s plans to evict the poor ruined, the added humanitarian effort of free healthcare just seals this a sound win for Krakoa. I normally would not be fond of nations interfering with other nations, but this does seem good.

VG: If anyone deserves to have their plans meddled with, it’s definitely these terrible children.

Verendi’s Revenge

CE: Pyro, Bobby, and Bishop walk into a bar and make the most subtle transaction known to man. In a move that is either intentionally meant to antagonize Verendi further or is simply a display of sheer stupidity, they ask for the owner and present him with a bag of cash to purchase the bar. Somehow I don’t imagine this is what Emma had in mind for the Hellfire Trading Company. I don’t know much about Madriporian business practices, but shouldn’t they have signed something first?

VG: There’s nowhere more cartoonishly capitalistic than Madripoor, and I feel like the only thing the three of them missed out on was bringing the money in a big sack with a giant green dollar bill painted on it. Bishop does mention that this seems to be a strategy of spreading their own money around the island to make it harder for Verendi to try to take them down, but that clearly didn’t work as well as anyone intended.

It’s also really funny to see Pyro be the sole member of the three worried about the dangers of owning a business in Madripoor. He’s the real genius of the group. But, as seems to be habit with them, the Reavers have to just ruin everything. I’m honestly really fascinated by this iteration of the Reavers, but Verendi’s plan with them is a lot more nuanced than just “blow up the mutants.” In what might have been the most predictable move possible, this attack on Krakoa’s new bar was all just a ruse to make the mutants look bad. Who could have seen that coming?

CE: Verendi may be headed by children, but they seem to have more cunning than our three stooges show in this issue. It’s an entertaining fight, with fire and ice from Pyro and Bobby and a morbidly comedic “don’t shoot” from Bishop as he absorbs the energy from one of the Reavers blasts and sends it back at them, but it definitely doesn’t end in a win for Krakoa. Mutants brawling in the streets of Madripoor is exactly what Verendi needs to get the UN and Donald Pierce involved.

VG: I honestly forgot about Donald Pierce’s involvement with everything until I recognized him at the UN! Krakoa’s got a lot of enemies. I do wonder if it’s possible for the UN to enforce a ban on one specific ship from entering a harbor – that’s weirdly specific. But whether the real UN functions like that, this comic book UN has just added another hassle to the already frustrated Hellfire Trading Company.

Do we know if there are any gates in Madripoor? Because Kate aside (her problem with gates is still unresolved) I feel like that would bypass most of their problems. I’m going to be honest, though, I’m getting just a bit tired of this. I mentioned that previous issues felt like a return to form for the book, but this feels like a return to the same conflict we’ve had for a while. I’m ready for the situation with Verendi and Madripoor to resolve, if not completely than at least in a way similar to Shaw’s status.

CE: There is a Krakoan Gate in Madripoor, as we saw in issue seven, so banning The Marauder from Madripoor bay does seem irrelevant. This conflict with Verendi was introduced twelve issues ago, and they have not been a constant presence in the title. Whether that’s been an intentional narrative choice or the result of structuring around events is unclear. While I thought that Emma and Pyro’s threatening message in issue nine was a cap on that arc, it was clear when Verendi received an invitation to The Hellfire Gala that they were definitely not gone. The conflict isn’t one that thrills me, but the introduction of this new version of the Reavers is intriguing.

Just Desserts

VG: Yeah, I legitimately love the concept behind these Reavers. Bishop said “Kill no man doesn’t mean fuck no man up”, and it was a great moment, but now we’re seeing the result of leaving a trail of living people behind. We definitely both celebrated Bobby getting really brutal to those soldiers when he found out Kate died, but it turns out that might have not been the best course of action. People hold grudges, and these new Reavers all have massive grudges both against specific mutants and against Krakoa as a whole. I appreciate Bobby’s lack of remorse, given these guys don’t really deserve any apologies, but it’s something I’m going to be chewing on for a while.

CE: Not only have the Marauders and other X-Teams have created a crop of humans who could easily be radicalized and augmented with cyborg tech. This touches on a debate that I’ve had with friends and family about whether the burden of ingratiating and educating others falls at the feet of marginalized groups. The answer to this debate normally seems to come to no, marginalized individuals cannot solely carry this burden. But does this burden fall to mutants that have created a prosperous nation?

Was this not the purpose of Krakoan drugs, the hospital in Madripoor, the upcoming Hellfire Gala? When are these mutants beholden to the need to represent Krakoa and when are they allowed to be individuals? It’s a complex question that doesn’t have a good answer. Another complex moral quandary in this issue is Masque. How did Masque’s role in the Moira MacTaggert Memorial Hospital strike you, Vishal?

VG: I find it fascinating – Masque has, for so long, been a completely irredeemable person to me. He’s not just an outcast like the rest of the Morlocks, he actively does what’s in his power to hurt other people. But as Hellions laid out really well with “The Empath Problem”, it’s worth asking whether Masque is at fault for his own moral failings or if he could have been saved by a support structure when his power first manifested.

I love the idea of Masque using his powers to help people, but I do hope this gets explored a bit more. Because his character history makes me very wary of any “good” acts he does. I do think that everyone deserves their own personal redemption, but they don’t necessarily deserve the faith of people who know who they were before they repented.

CE: It’s definitely significant that Calisto is the one to escort Masque. Their history together is hardly pretty. I do find it heartwarming that Masque seems incredibly surprised to be asked and trusted to transform an infant’s cleft palate by someone he’s repeatedly wronged in the past. Krakoa is committed to the idea of fresh starts for all mutants, and it’s hopeful to see that it may work out in this case. While this offer for redemption extends to even the worst of all mutants, it ends with mutants. Masque’s chance to be good is juxtaposed with the Reavers in this issue. Will the Reavers make the Marauders and Krakoa rethink their approach to human foes? Should it be rethought?

VG: This is definitely the territory I’d like to see Marauders delve further into – some real moral dilemmas about how Krakoa should exist in the context of the world around it. But also, I’m excited for more swashbuckling adventures. I’m glad that Gerry Duggan’s able to deliver both.

CE: I have truly appreciated that Marauders has been able to deliver stories that are enjoyable at a surface level and worthy of deeper thought. I’m excited to see how it shapes mutant policy going forward.