Closing The Books In X-Corp #5

The facade falls away, and corporate jargon turns literal, as J.P. Kol’s hostile takeover turns into an all out brawl for the future of X-Corp. The Fenris Twins have their eyes on X-Corp’s proprietary IBG technology, forcing Angel and Penance to drop all their masks to keep their flying island of a company afloat. Written by Tini Howard, drawn by Alberto Foche, colored by Sunny Gho, lettered by Clayton Cowles.

Armaan Babu: I’m feeling a little déjà vu. The first issue of this series ended with a hurried mess of an action scene, where it was hard to tell exactly what was happening, and where the stakes seemed kind of low for the world that it’s set in. With the final issue of this series, we get more of the same.

I wanted to like this book, I really did, but I’m glad it’s ending here. Corey, your thoughts?

Corey Smith: If I’m entirely honest, Armaan, part of me wishes it could have gotten another few issues, because it really needs some time to come into its own. 

Minutes from the 6:30 IGB Takeover

Armaan: Last issue ended with the firing of Madrox Prime; specifically, the firing of a bullet through his head. I was left with a lot of questions – none of which seem to matter, because the truth behind someone being fired is that you will be replaced immediately by someone just like you who can do your job just as well. It could be clever, but I’m a little miffed – the book set up Madrox as one of the few people on Krakoa whose death means something anymore, given the importance of the memories in his head that are lost if he dies before a back-up. None of that seems to matter this issue, but perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.

What we get here is chaos – and it would make for a fun-filled finale if it wasn’t such a mess to follow. Panels feel cramped, is the best way I can put it. While Kol’s agents hulk themselves out, Monet and Angel seem to have a moment of shared self-acceptance as they transform into their more violent selves, then immediately proceed to make some truly baffling choices in a fight with Fenris.

I know narrative is supposed to trump fight logic, but sometimes it’s hard to overlook. The Fenris twins have one key weakness – keep them apart and they don’t really have much they can do. That…doesn’t really seem like too hard a task, and we’re given no reason why Angel and Monet keep failing at this, over and over and over again.

Corey: If any mutants are perfectly poised for a game of codependent keep-away, it’s gotta be Archangel and Penance. Both of them can fly, and Monet has enhanced strength and speed. Both of them have, at this point, spent most of their lives as superheroes, and are fully aware of how Fenris’s powers work. It should be a simple matter for these two experts to come up with the brilliant tactical maneuver of “I’ll go this way, you go that way,” even discounting the possibility that Monet’s alleged super intelligence and intuition would lead her to simply yeet a Nazi off the floating island. And yet, despite all of these experiences and advantages, Warren ends up dropping Andrea right over where Monet and Andreas are fighting, and Monet decides to simply jump out of the way and let them activate their powers. 

It says a lot that I’m genuinely not sure if this is simply a case of unclear art, a script that relies on everyone making the worst possible choices, or, as is becoming increasingly more likely, both. But, then again, that’s just the story of the book isn’t it? Howard and Foche aren’t a good fit, at least not in this book, which has led to every issue having action sequences that leave me completely bewildered. I honestly don’t know what the hell is happening on the first panel of the second page, for instance — from context, it looks like Monet has swooped down towards Andreas, only to wrap her legs around his chest, give him an uppercut to the chin, and knock him to the ground? And for as much as she was talking about ripping him apart two panels earlier, let’s not forget that Penance’s fingers are claws — she would logically have to morph her hands back to normal to make a fist, and from what I can tell from the art, that’s exactly what she did! In fact, let me break down this opening sequence, and see if we can make some sense of it:

• Monet and Warren fly down to meet the twins, with some exposition about how they need to be separated from each other to be depowered.
• Monet fully kicks Andrea in the chest, and the art is unclear as to whether or not this separates the twins. She jokes about being allowed to kill them.
• She and Warren then stand back to back, in midair, while she dramatically switches into her Penance form, and they banter about absolutely being allowed to kill Fenris.
• She then proceeds to do a weird flying leglock from below Andreas, which is apparently what actually splits the twins apart, and turns her claws back to normal in order to punch him in the face.
• Warren snags Andrea in midair, explicitly says he’s not going to drop her anywhere near her brother, only to be kicked in the face and drop her an unclear distance from the ground, while she calls for her brother. 
• At this point, Monet and Andreas are on the ground, she’s… backhanding him with her talons out? And tells him to call Andrea, “bring her right to me.”
• DESPITE THIS, Monet seems to be caught entirely by surprise when Andrea does exactly what she textually wanted, and ends up backflipping away, leading to the twins getting their powers back, with a panicked “Warren, they’re gonna touch—!”
• Boom.

…Yeah. I’d be more forgiving if it wasn’t like this in every single issue, but Armaan, I’ve gotta ask, because I’m hoping you have an answer: what the fuck? 

Armaan: I like that you’re not afraid to ask the hard questions, Corey, and that’s a great one. I’ll give Foche and Gho this – it is a very pretty boom, made all the more gorgeous in comparison to the messy art that happens leading up to it.

X-Corp clearly wanted to end on a bang. Unfortunately, it’s neither had the time nor the ability to make us care about anything happening here, and between the extremely low stages of vaguely defined research being stolen, and the incomprehensibly cluttered action, this all feels like…someone rushing through an explanation of a dream they had last night. I’m just about aware of the issue’s Big Moments, but everything in between doesn’t really work and it doesn’t make sense as a whole.

I think the best thing I can say is that I like the story that I think the comic was trying to tell. Sometimes you have to embrace your darker sides to defeat truly evil people. Or possibly something about not losing yourself in your work. Or…that Nazis and underhanded capitalist humans are bad.

I mean, these are all great lessons that I’m reasonably sure one can take away from the book.

Everyone of our star cast gets a hurried moment to shine in this finale – Trinary saves Sara St. John, Selene goes head to head with Kol, Penance and Angel battle with Fenris, and the un-Primed Madroxes save the day with some pretty handy usages of his powers.

Is there anything in that mix there that particularly stood out to you, Corey?

Corey: The Madrox thing was morbidly funny, though I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it before? Trinary and St. John’s combat rolls were absolutely hilarious as well. A genuine personal highlight was the panel where Selene seemed to be colored to look like Monet, which will give me fuel for plenty of shitposts about Nova Roma. But aside from that? The thing that stood out the most was how relieved I was when the issue finally ended. 

Like you said, there are plenty of lessons or themes you could try to take away from this issue, or even the series as a whole, but I think this finale proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the series stood for nothing. Every time it started to take any sort of stance, it immediately undid it so quickly that I have to wonder if the whole thing is a farce. For as much as every issue likes to point out that mutants are better at everything up to and including capitalism, for example, what we see doesn’t back that up at all. I can’t help but point out, yet again, that the series opened with the launch of a flying island a matter of days before the Hellfire Trading Company launched a fucking planet, and announced mutantkind to be the dominant species in the solar system. Forget front page news, it’s hard to imagine X-Corp getting more than a paragraph. Flying island? Planet. Free internet, years after Stark did it? Planet. Surviving and broadcasting an attempt at an attack, while letting the basically-powerless-unless-they’re-touching Nazi twins escape? PLANET. There isn’t a single metric where X-Corp, the book or the company, manages to escape the shadow cast by its peers.

Company Trajectory

Armaan: Is this a darkest before dawn situation? Maybe, but in any case this issue’s epilogue places our characters in some interesting places. While the comic itself might be ending, X-Corp as a company is still part of the Krakoan canon, and I’m interested to see what writers may or may not pick up.

Firstly, we have Madrox Prime, who can curiously be resurrected even though multiple dupes of him exist – Krakoa’s biggest exception to the “no clones” policy, I think. That’s a continuity mess just waiting to happen, but when has that ever not been true of Jamie? The important thing is that he’s being taken off the board – pun fully intended, as he steps down from X-Corp to spend more time with his family, a valuable lesson learned off-panel in wherever X-souls reside while waiting for resurrection.

More interestingly, Trinary gets his spot on the board, which she really should have from the beginning. And, to our delight, she finally gets named! World, meet Shilpa Khatri. The naming thing has been something we’ve been keeping an eye on ever since Ritesh Babu pointed out her lack of one. Of course, her lack of a name was just a glaring example of a much deeper issue, but with her on a seat of power, given the absolutely vital power she has now amplified by seemingly unlimited broadband…I can’t say I’m happy about how she was written, but I am pleased with where she’s ended up, and hope to high heavens she gets the spotlight she deserves in the future. 

Corey: Here’s hoping! While throwing her name into a data page that happens to be the very last page of the series feels more like a “now shut up” than anything else, it is, at the very least, progress, and with any luck a sign of things to come. 

Like I said last issue, I’ve found myself surprisingly enjoying the interactions between Selene and Mastermind, and their positions on the board will hopefully lead to more of that in the future. Honestly, while Monet and Warren are functionally exactly where they were when the series started, all of the supporting cast ended up in fun new roles, with opportunities to get more spotlight as the Krakoan age continues. I think that one of the unwritten rules of being an X-Men fan is that a lot of it is spent waiting for your favorite D-listers to get enough focus or momentum to get a really good story, and if nothing else, X-Corp did a pretty good job of spreading its focus throughout the cast, and I have little doubt that it will pay off, one day. 

On the villain side of things, I can’t say I’m particularly invested in seeing St. John or Kol again, to say nothing of the Fenris twins. While “Nazis are bad” is an obvious truth, hearing it from characters who have knowingly partnered with Nazis in the past (yes, Ms. Gallio, I’m talking about you) is hard to take seriously. As far as the humans go, I’m still not entirely over their overnight switch from Professional Business People to trained assassins killing Madroxes by the roomful. Hopefully X-Corp’s next big business rivals will be Cameron Hodge’s cryptocurrency investment startup, or something along those lines — someone with a little more pizazz. 

Looking at the Bottom Line

Corey: Now that the series is over, I’d like to take the time to take a look at the work as a whole. Obviously neither one of us has been thrilled with how it turned out from issue to issue, but I don’t think it would be fair to say that it was entirely without merit! If X-Corp makes a return in some form next year, is there anything from this run that you hope carries over?

Armaan: Well, I gotta say, we may have gotten a messy comic, but a lot of the choices here have a lot of potential. I am fascinated with the Multiple Man questions this series brought up, and I hope another writer explores the weirder aspects of his powers. I want someone to tell me just what it means that the mutants control the Internet now – or, at least, have the power to. And I think that our current X-Corp board could, in the right hands, be about as ridiculously fun to read as the cast of Hellions, which is a high bar. 

Howard, I think, has always had good ideas, and nothing brings that home for me as much as this issue’s recap page did.

I was reading through the recap page as reference for our intro up there, I found myself somewhat intrigued by the story I was reading there. Underhanded business deals, CXOs battling it out in the danger room, evil Nazis infiltrating a flying fortress – and I had to remind myself the way it all played out in the actual comics.

I talked earlier about how this comic felt like someone recounting a dream badly. Here’s the thing: I think I would have liked that dream. Somewhere out there is a platonic ideal of this comic, and I really, really want to be reading that. I have been harder on this book than I think I have been on any other comic I’ve ever reviewed, and I think a part of the reason why is that I keep getting glimpses of how great it could be. It’s one thing to not like a comic. X-Corp disappointed me.

Corey: I completely agree. X-Corp is genuinely the most excited I’ve been for an X-Men book in years, and I had a lot of faith in Howard’s ability to deliver, so the end result hit me harder than I expected. While this particular run didn’t land for me (I’m pretty sure every one of our reviews has had me saying something along the lines of “but now that the set up is out of the way, I’m sure it’ll be better next issue”), I don’t think I’d be upset at all to see Howard take another shot at the concept. There’s still a lot of potential here, and plenty of areas where something great should have happened, and I think that if it had another shot, away from the shadow of the Gala, and maybe trying to be a little less self-satisfied, it’d manage to live up to its tagline. “Simply superior” is a hell of a boast, and I’d love to see it backed up. 

Howard mentioned shortly after the first issue came out that part of her goal was to tell a story that was more about Warren than Archangel, and while I don’t think that was necessarily delivered on, it came closer than any book I can remember, so I’d definitely like to see that trend keep going. That said, I’d definitely like to see some more exploration as to exactly what’s going on with Monet — the changes to her powerset have had me scratching my head since HoXPoX, to say nothing of the Penance Twins(!) running around in the background. I had really been hoping this series would provide some answers, but I’ve definitely come out of it with more questions than answers! Seeds for future stories, perhaps?

Armaan: We can only hope. Whatever else you may have to say about Krakoa, it’s certainly fertile ground for a number of stories. We’ve seen a LOT being planted every since this era began, though some may never come to fruition at all. Perhaps it’s time someone calls in the Hordeculture grannies.

X-Corp has a great mix of things, and though the series has been put down, for now, we’re both clearly looking forward to the things being introduced here being picked up again. That’s not such a bad thing to come out of a series’ end.

Mutant Memos

• The “Buckyball” and Winter Soldier joke was hilarious. The Madrox Data pages are the best, and there ought to be a coffee table booklet filled with just those and art for a Where’s Waldo style hunt for Jamie Prime.
• Considering the millions of Genoshan mutants in the resurrection queue, Fenris gambling on not being pushed all the way to the back if they die is a pretty big risk on their part. Though it seems unlikely any of us would complain if they never came back.
• Monet choosing to stay alive out of spite is A Mood.
• Krakoan reads: INFERNO

Armaan Babu

Corey Smith

Corey Smith is probably tired right now. He's definitely trying not to think about everything he has to write! When he's not staring at a blank word document, odds are he's tweeting, playing Pokémon, or wondering how he ended up with such a smart-ass kid.