Ahoy, Marauders! It’s a new number one. A new ship (it’s a spaceship). A not-really-new mission (rescue endangered mutants). A new creative team (except that we saw the writer already in the Annual). A new team, except Red Queen Captain Kate Pryde and muscular source of continuity/ time-traveling ex-cop Lucas Bishop. A new mystery (it’s a really old box with weird writing). And a new… no, that can’t be who we think it is. Did Kate really invite her? For Pete’s sake, whyyy? Marauders #1, writing by Steve Orlando, art by Eleonora Carlini, colors by Matt Milla, letters by VC’s Ariana Maher.
Ian Gregory: The new Marauders are finally here. It’s been three months since Duggan’s run came to an end and since Orlando first previewed the team with the Marauders Annual. We’ve got Eleonora Carlini on art and Matt Milla on colors. This is, ostensibly, a new start for our favorite pirate mutants. Are you excited for this new era?
Stephanie Burt: I’m excited to read any new story starring my alter ego Captain Kate Pryde, the Red Queen of the Hellfire “We Haven’t Thought About That Part of Her Life In a While But She Looks Good” Club. So yes, I am excited. But I come in not knowing what to expect.
Ian: Well, let’s get into it. I think there’s really one place this has to start.
Stephanie: Fever Pitch, the so-obscure-they-joke-about-how-obscure-he-is mutant our Marauders save in the opening sequence amid a blaze of orange and yellow megaflame? That guy?
Cassandra No-Way
Ian: This lady, huh?
Stephanie: This lady. Not somebody Kate, or I, or anyone else on Krakoa, ever wanted to see again.
Ian: Has there ever been a good Cassandra Nova story since “E for Extinction?” In fact, was “E for Extinction” even that good, or just memorable? I feel like the tide has started to turn on Morrison’s New X-Men, and while I still like it, it’s definitely a run with some major holes. Subsequent attempts at making Cassandra Nova into a recurring villain (in Whedon’s Astonishing, or Tom Taylor’s Red) have been wildly underwhelming. I think what made Nova so striking was that her evil plan succeeded, effortlessly, and she continued winning for a dozen issues after that. In later appearances, it feels kind of cheap that her master plans are always overcomplicated and easily foiled within six issues. In any case, I am worried that Cassandra Nova will do as she always does: take up a ton of attention and space, and then end up feeling like a major anticlimax.
Stephanie: I will defend other parts of the Morrison run to the ends of the Earth but I never liked “E for Extinction,” a story that fridged sixteen million mutants primarily to show that Things Are Different Now. Part of the point of Cassandra Nova for Morrison was her irredeemability: a villain tough to beat and also incapable of gaining the readers’ or the characters’ sympathy. LIke the Red Skull, except pale pink. They’ve even got similar cheekbones.
Ian: Even with the guidance of a two billion-year-old puzzle box, what could possibly possess Kate to put Nova on this team? For one thing, she’s still super evil and not even attempting to hide it. She’s also having way too much fun being evil and taunting everyone. This just feels like Kate inviting disaster for pretty much no reward. Strange puzzle boxes handing out maps is no basis for a system of team-building.
Stephanie: Agreed. The first thing we see Cassandra doing is vivisecting Krakoa, for fork’s sake. She’s even got the standard-issue serial killer sleeve of surgical tools. I can see a thoroughly ends-justify-means mutant like Emma, or even Sage, inviting Cassandra Nova onto a team in order to solve a big puzzle, but Kate? Who just got talked up over in Immortal X-Men for being unusually ethical (and not for the first time)? I don’t see it. I can try to No-Prize it (whatever’s in that box must be pretty important, the box has designs of its own, the Allies teamed up with Stalin) but my heart refuses to go there.
Ian: Worse, I can’t actually tell what the justification is here. It’s one thing to team up with Cassandra Nova in the face of “the greatest threat mutantkind has ever faced” but here Kate just seems to do it… just because. She already has a telepath on the team!
Stephanie: Points to Carlini and Milla, on the other hand, for innovative panel construction– even when the story itself leaves me cold, I like seeing how it gets told. Extra double points for just how startlingly unpleasant Cassandra Nova appears. Unlike Apocalypse (who was always meant to do a face turn), unlike Mister Sinister (a low-rent, fun-to-watch, science-based Dracula), Cassandra Nova’s always supposed to look like what she is: a source of measureless cruelty who probably should not exist.
Then she tells Jean Grey that she, Cassandra, intends to commit more atrocities. Using that word. And Jean flies away and figures that’s Kate Pryde’s problem now?
Ian: I know. You’d think that would warrant some sort of response other than “let’s let Nova go into space where she’s in the perfect position to cause a diplomatic incident.” They’re practically rewarding her for being evil.
New Team, New Problems
Ian: It kind of bothers me that, to introduce the new team, Orlando just gives us a data page of Bishop’s opinions on them. Otherwise, we get a total of four pages that don’t revolve around Cassandra Nova or the Shi’ar. This is a pretty motley crew, with Aurora and Daken from X-Factor, Psylocke from Hellions, Tempo from the 1990s, and Bishop and Kate from, well, Marauders. That’s a lot of characters with interesting motivations and histories, but I feel like this issue does the bare minimum on establishing the team and immediately tries to move on.
Stephanie: We already got Aurora and Daken from the annual, and before that from X-Factor, so as somebody who ate up every issue of Leah Williams’ run over there I’m OK with just dropping those two in sans intro. Tempo, however, needs a reintroduction. She doesn’t get one.
OTOH it’s an extra-long issue already, and the pages Orlando and Carlini save by assuming we already know about Tempo get used elegantly for a big space battle later on. If you like space battles. I like space battles. Within limits.
Ian: Maybe this is just my personal preference, but do you feel like Marauders just has no real concept? Space stuff is the remit of SWORD/Red, and this feels like a major stretch on the “mutant rescue” premise. I feel like Orlando has given us no time to settle into the new team, understand their dynamic, and see how they operate. Instead, straight to space, with Cassandra Nova and the Shi’ar, two groups that historically suck up all the air in the stories. I enjoyed the original Marauders because it was doing so much with Kate and Emma, character-wise. This issue hasn’t reassured me that we’ll focus back on the characters.
Stephanie: This issue has assured me that we will not focus very much on the characters, at least initially, because the stakes are too high and the cast is too big. It’s cosmic space nonsense all the way down. I don’t know Orlando’s DC stories yet: is he known for subtle character work over there?
Ian: Of his DC work, I’ve only really read Martian Manhunter and Midnighter, both of which were pretty character-focused. I guess he co-wrote Milk Wars, which is a big plot-heavy crossover event, but there’s really no comic like Milk Wars.
Stephanie: On the other hand– and I’m running out of other hands; I’m not exactly Spiral over here– we’re clearly in the same story being told over in Secret X-Men, and I’m pretty sure that our Marauders are going to find themselves up against the space team led by Berto and Sam, without, at first, realizing that they’re fighting each other. That’s always a fun trope. Misunderstanding-based space conflict, anyone?
Ian: I hate misunderstanding-based conflict (space or otherwise) with a passion. I think I would be pleasantly surprised if this is just standard “the Shi’ar are awful” instead of being all one giant miscommunication.
Marauders… in Space!
Ian: We get a little entry scene of the Marauders doing their duty on Earth, but then we’re right back off to space to save “the first generation of mutants” from the Shi’ar. Stephanie, do you ever get the sense the Marauders are actively looking for excuses to not do the thing their team was designed to do?
Stephanie: I get the sense– not that I have any office gossip– that Steve Orlando wanted to tell a high-stakes story in space and this was the book Marvel offered. That said, Kate. Likes. Space. She’s always liked going to space. She likes the outfits and the aliens and the cool science stuff and the chance to play out the SF she read as a kid (she and Sam Guthrie read some of the same SF).
There’s a moment in the Sam Humphries Star-Lord/ Guardian books where she tells Peter Quill she’s only in space for him, and it’s a real “this writer doesn’t get it” moment, because she was mostly into Quill for the space. (Can you imagine them dating on Earth?) Kate’s early life and skill set prepared her for space pilot captain nonsense in a way that nothing prepared her for the high seas, and I’m not surprised she’s into that. Even if she feels compelled to bring that grinning genocidaire on board because she’s good at Ancient Wordle, or something.
Ian: The Marauders seemed to have stepped into an ancient Shi’ar conspiracy here. For one thing, I can’t help but feel like we’re headed towards some kind of major misunderstanding; maybe you shouldn’t have twelve-year-old Xandra running your empire, Shi’ar, or having a secret conspiracy of supersuperguardians that even the emperor doesn’t know about. It bothers me that pretty much everyone is working off wildly untrustworthy information: the Marauders are going on intel provided by Cassandra Nova, and Xandra from Delphos the Red.
Stephanie: Hereditary empires sooner or later collapse because the people at the top become unreliable or get bad information from untrustworthy subordinates! (Maybe democracies collapse for the same reason.) I found the basic incompetence and confused power structure at the Shi’ar HQ alarmingly plausible, given the way real-world wars sometimes start.
That said, we’ve got a storytelling problem, in that every player in this narrative (and in Secret X-Men, which will surely link up with it) chases something or somebody whose true name and nature remain unknown, either to the players themselves or to the readers. The Marauders are after the Last of the First Mutants; the secret team of super-super-guardians want to keep the First Mutants secret, or maybe defend them; the not-so-secret protectors of the Shi’Ar empire who still work for Xandra want to defend it against a threat involving Deathbird, maybe… Now that there are data pages in X-books, maybe we should get a scorecard.
Ian: Never let it be said that I demand perfect information in all my stories. But, why is the phrase “First Mutants” so powerful? Why does that justify everyone dropping everything and heading off to space? I’d like someone to unpack how that phrase – accompanied with basically zero proof – justifies all this action. At the very least, someone should say “What, wasn’t Apocalypse / Namor / whoever it is this week the first mutant?” It feels like a very flimsy start to an adventure.
You Da Boost (No, You Da Boost)
Ian: I’m somewhat mixed on Carlini’s art – especially her faces, which often strike me as too cartoonish. However, the scenes in space, and the mutant/spaceship dogfight, were outstanding. The warp field effect is great, I love the “psychic claws” that assault the Marauders, and the dynamism of Bishop and Psylocke floating in space firing off energy beams at a fast-moving ship. Just a really solid sequence.
Stephanie: Well, not literally solid: we’re in the vacuum of space. Will you take “intermittently awesome”? Carlini’s the right artist for a space opera book, and she’s no cartoonier than the art we got throughout X-Factor. But yeah, her faces and conversations aren’t great. On the other hand… imperial space battle nonsense! And let’s not forget Matt Milla. Fever Pitch colors at the start, vivisected Krakoan organs in the middle, prismatic imperial space battle near the end, and all those reds. Why isn’t this the book called X-Men: Red?
Ian: Speaking of which, Erik the Red. This guy, huh?
Stephanie: Oh no. He’s not really one guy, is he? We really do need a scorecard. And that’s not even counting Erik the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
Hey, may I offer you some boost fruits? I know that our Northern Hemisphere-bred characters call them plums, but they are green and oval and obviously feijoas, which are the best fruit and definitely convey space energy.
Ian: Erik the Red is such a mess of a character that I honestly had to do some digging to remember his deal. First, he was Cyclops in disguise, then he was a Shi’ar operator, and then he turned up in Deadly Genesis dealing with Gabriel Summers. He died at some point in the 90s, and Magneto also impersonated him. What a mess!
Stephanie: I’m trying so hard to keep up my enthusiasm for this book and I can just barely manage it. Pro: exciting action scenes, neat panel construction, art that serves the space-opera, high-stakes story; Kate Pryde in space; feijoas; future tie-in with Secret X-Men, a very promising book. Questionable: Cassandra Nova as a team member who’s obviously out to betray everybody and probably shouldn’t be on this or any team; too many characters with too little backstory; too many mysteries, secret identities and macguffins too close together, or at least that’s how it seems now. I will absolutely stick with this book, but I’m not sure I trust this writer with the Krakoan ethos quite yet.
Ian: I’m with you. I just want a little more focus, and a little more attention to the characters. I feel like Orlando speed-ran the first half of this book to get everyone into space as soon as possible, and I wouldn’t mind a more measured pace.
X-Traneous Thoughts
- I just figured out that Tempo’s headpiece is meant to be the gears of a clock. (I didn’t know that either. -S.)
- Poor Fabian Cortez, replaced by a plum. (Serves him right. -S.)
- Brimstone Love, the Earth-based villain Daken keeps fighting and fighting in his dreams, has the same big red bull horns as Erik the Red. Coincidence? Same costume closet?
- Hey, did we both forget to talk about Somnus?
Ian Gregory is a writer and co-host of giant robots podcast Mech Ado About Nothing.
Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. Her podcast about superhero role playing games is Team-Up Moves, with Fiona Hopkins; her latest book of poems is We Are Mermaids. Her nose still hurts from that thing with the gate.
