Captain Kate Pryde has taken her new team to space! Bishop, Psylocke, and the rest– among them, incredibly, the genocidal ex-supervillain Cassandra Nova– have set out for the stars in order to find the First Mutants and solve the mystery of an ancient box. Whatever they seek, the Shi’ar don’t want them to find it– and they’re willing to take our kids down. Marauders 2, writing by Steve Orlando, art by Eleanora Carlini, colors by Matt Milla, letters by VC’s Ariana Maher and Clayton Cowles.
Stephanie Burt: So, Ian, what’s your favorite Kin Crimson album? I used to like “In the Court of the Crimson Kin,” but now I think maybe it’s “Red.” Love that whole-tone scale. Oh, whoops, sorry. We’re in a space opera situation with a lot of combat and some warlike dudes and a light show and a nebula in the background like on the cover of “Islands,” except for there’s an angry outsized red guy like on their first album? You can look it up. Or don’t. Ian, what do you think about our heroes’ violent travails?
Ian Gregory: I’m a certifiable youth so my only experience with Kin(g) Crimson is the hit manga series JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. In this issue of Marauders, it appears only ten minutes have passed since we left our heroes last issue, if that. This is certainly a fighting book, with lots of fighting, but I do think we get some interesting Shi’ar nuggets along the way.
In Space, There’s No One to Hear Your Psychic Scream
Stephanie: So our Marauders have launched themselves into space in order to find and save the First Mutants, whoever they are and wherever they’ve been hiding for the last few millennia. There’s a box that contains a secret about them of some sort. Other space types do not want the Marauders to find the First Mutants, and they want the box. Before we learn anything about the box or space or our bipedal heroes, though, there’s a tease where Lockheed discovers a body in Newark. A mutant body, either squishy or decomposing, and kinda purple. Could be a job for X-Factor, if they still had a comic book of their own. Aurora and Daken would be up for it.
Ian: That opening page feels like Orlando reminding us that yes, Brimstone Love is eventually going to show up in this comic. But that’s all we get, as we’re right back to space. I suppose it’s possible that the Brimstone Love plot will somehow come around to be relevant to this First Mutants business, but I think it’s more likely Orlando is just trying to keep some gears turning back on Earth for when the Marauders return.
Stephanie: After that mysterious opening, we find our heroes fighting a secret Shi’ar fraternity designed to protect Secret Knowledge about those gosh-darned First Mutants. It’s knowledge so secret that the fraternity– King Crimson, sorry, the Crimson Kin– won’t tell the Majestrix. They never do. So of course the brand-new and still-girlish Majestrix, Xandra [Ed. note: She’s Xavier’s daughter who came out of a different kind of egg than all the X-Men currently do] doesn’t know. Maybe a third of this issue gives us Xandra deciding what to do about her new knowledge, hemming and hawing on the Shi’ar throneworld, and Shi’ar bigwigs giving advice. “Mutants are our allies,” Xandra objects, and the red dude replies: “What the Marauders seek is not for them.”
Ian: I think the scenes with Xandra were my favorite in this issue. She’s not had that complete indoctrination that the members of the Imperial Guard received, and so she’s naturally more suspicious of the Crimson Kin showing up and taking command. Xandra also has a more personal connection with mutants, seeing as how her egg was hatched (literally!) under the guidance of Rogue and Gambit. Unlike the Marauders, who appear to be operating under the vaguest possible motives and clues, Xandra actually has a pretty concrete and interesting character arc at play here. She’s waging a war with her duties as an empress and her personal morals and friendships.Other than that, well, there’s a lot of punching.
Stephanie: When I reread for our writeup I realized that Xandra felt like the protagonist. She’s also the only character whose decisions depend on her personality, or on her backstory. That’s…. disappointing. I liked X-Men Gold more, or hated it less, than almost all my friends, because even if you didn’t like the writer’s decisions, at least he was trying to work with particular characters: you couldn’t just substitute out Kate Pryde for Sam Guthrie or Domino and tell the same story. Same with the Duggan on Marauders. Here, though, so far, you kind of can.
Anyway the Marauders, who happen to be Kate, Bishop, Psylocke, Daken, Aurora, Tempo, Somnus and Cassandra, fight Eric the Red and his space allies, who can project something called Hard Skin: hard light versions of whoever they’re fighting. So there’s a hard light Somnus who fights Somnus, and a hard light Daken who fights Daken. They’re all red and glowy and have X’s over one eye, and at least some of our friends’ normal battle tactics (like hyper-aging your opponent’s body, which Tempo likes to do) don’t work on these hard-light fabrications, although other tactics, like Bishop’s energy absorption, work just fine. He’s the quicker energy picker-upper.
Hey, Ian, did you know that “Red” was Kurt Cobain’s favorite Crimson Kin– sorry, King Crimson– album?
Ian: Stephanie, are you some sort of King Crimson superfan? I wasn’t expecting all these fun facts. I do actually like the way this fight plays out – we finally get an interesting demonstration of the tactical advantage having a telepath affords your team. This is, for the most part, an experienced team of mutants, and the telepathy shows us how they exchange tactics, protect each other, and coordinate attacks (I particularly like how they all take a different role in setting up life support when they’re blown out of the ship).
I often find fights in superhero comics to be pretty boring, but I like this kind of narration, showing us how each character is thinking about and approaching the encounter. It’s pretty clever, and I like that we see the disadvantage of this strategy at the end, when Somnus pulls everyone into his dreamscape, leaving their real bodies unawares of the Shi’ar dreadnaught that’s just arrived.
You Won’t Believe This List of Ten Shames!
Stephanie: I was afraid this sort of thing would happen last issue and now I’m afraid it has happened: Eleanora Carlini’s art pops and zips, but it’s way too cartoony for a space opera book like this one. The alien menaces don’t seem awesome, or sublime, or even science fictional, so much as they seem goofy. It’s like our mutants are fighting the Super-Friends. Or maybe Starfire’s family on Teen Titans Go!
Carlini would be good on a more humorous book, or a more conventional superhero book– the people move fluidly and they’re fun to watch!– but I think she’s the wrong artist for this kind of epic intergalactic action’n’intrigue. That said, layout and panel design impressed me. Did you notice how all the battle pages have diagonal or stretched-out, non-rectangular panels, and all the panels without combat (like the debates on the throneworld) show up in sedate rectangular panels, their sides parallel to the page? (Maybe the problem is mostly the inks?)
Ian: Good catch on the layouts. They make the fight feel frenetic and out of control as characters slide from one side of the page to the other. I have mixed feelings on Carlini’s art – sometimes, I really like some of their faces, particularly Nova’s permanent and unsettling grin or Xandra’s upset expression at the end, but other times they feel out of place. You’re also right that it doesn’t really match the tone of what’s being discussed. It feels like Carlini is illustrating a particularly awesome scene straight out of a Starjammer game, but this is a book at least partially about hyper-imperialism. There’s a strong disconnect there between space-fantasy action and watching our heroes get killed in the name of covering up war crimes.
Stephanie: Ian, are there double entendres all over this book, or am I just secretly fifteen? Or both? I mean. The Crimson Kin, led by Eric the Red, have developed something called a Hard Skin which responds to the imagination of the wearer by getting hard. It’s a powerful force in combat. But in case that’s not enough (according to the data page) Emperiax the Red has “hypothesized a Wet Skin, a backup to the Hard Skin.” But now he has to search for raw materials in order to manufacture the Wet Skin. Is it silicone-based, or water-based? Is there any way to cover this material in a family-friendly way?
Ian: By that logic, I have some questions about the other shames. Could someone explain to me the meaning of “Goblin Extraction,” the “Shapeless Ridge,” or the “Gelding of Birj?”
Stephanie: Of course! The gelding of Birj produced the Shapeless Ridge, which is why the participants later needed Goblin Extractions. Don’t worry, they’re fine. But it gets, uh, worse. Members of the Crimson Kin are apparently DM’ing with each other: “Noble Eric will not fight alone. I have called to Noble Pr!z. We depart to defend the shames….The Kin were wise to add the Hodinn to our line, Betel. You do us proud. We stand on the razor’s edge.”
Would that be the Noble Pr!z in medicine? or the Noble Pr!z in literature? I assume it’s not the Noble Peace Pr!z. Maybe we’ll never know, since (Delphos adds) “The Tenth Shame is unspoken to all but one,” while “The Theft of the Hard Skin and the Birth of the Wet Skin remain obscured.” Dudes are upset because someone kept them from getting hard, and kept their shame unspoken?
Ian: I did find these data pages to be pretty interesting. First, we know that the creation of the Wet Skin requires materials whose gathering is “aggressive and cruel,” and that the Hard Skin requires harvesting the genes of an alien race. The Ten Shames of the Shi’ar appear to be a list of horrific things their empire has done – more horrific, even, than the regular horrifying stuff that’s part of their public history. They have an entire secret society dedicated to keeping these Ten Shames from coming to light, and they seem to believe themselves to have authority superseding the emperor. Based on the way they’re talking in these documents, I wouldn’t be surprised that if Xandra had an attack of conscience that they would remove her.
Stephanie: I semi-hope that’s where they’re going, since we’d get a story with moral stakes and political resonance. But also a semi-hope that’s not where they’re going, because a few of my favorite X-Men are trapped in this space book and I would like to read a story about some of them. Doesn’t even have to be about Kate Pryde. OK, I lied. Maybe it does. Anyway, space!
Ian: I like this take on the Shi’ar Empire – they’re an ancient space empire built on blood and colonialism. Just because Xandra’s in charge and is generally friendly to the X-Men doesn’t mean that there aren’t hard-line conservative elements working in the shadows. I also like that, while the Shi’ar are “ashamed” of the Ten Shames, they are not so ashamed to do anything about them, and in the case of the Hard and Wet Skins are still actively manufacturing and using them. These aren’t shames – they’re politically inconvenient things to admit, but still far too useful for the Shi’ar to stop using. It’s a grim and realistic kind of motivation for the Shi’ar, and it makes them all the more hateable.
Dreams of Kingo
Stephanie: I jest, because I don’t want to take this story too seriously: I’m saving my seriousness for the seriously literary titles in the line, like Sabretooth, which you should all be reading, and New Mutants, which at some point Marvel will once again be publishing.
In the meantime, though, I’m certainly not giving up on our spacefarers, who have become travelers in inner space too. After the spaceship-to-spaceship combat goes all space-pear-shaped, our heroes get stuck in a zero-g vacuum with seven minutes of O2 in each of their helmets. Cue Somnus, who brings them all into his dream-space, where time slows down and they can hang out and chat and make plans. It’s also, delightfully, a space that duplicates Somnus’s favorite video game, with a gray-and-white game character called Khan Kingo leading us through the remake of Seeker 3000. Ian, are you thinking Metroid? I’m thinking Metroid. But I’m hardly a gamer. I love that Somnus is one.
Ian: Is it some sort of strange coincidence that “Khan Kingo” looks like Kingo the Eternal? He’s even got the two swords strapped to his back. [Ed note: Ian, my friend, Kingo is just Toshiro Mifune but immortal. He was an actor in the game ala Yvonne Strahovski in Mass Effect 2. Actually I think this is a movie but I digress.]
Somnus really got very little to do last issue, so I’m glad we’re seeing his powers in use, as well as his combat inexperience. He panics when ejected into space, where the other Marauders treat it like old hat. He’s confident that they’ll be safe in his dream, but we see very quickly that that’s not the case. It’s nice to have an inexperienced character to contrast the hyper-competence of the rest of this squad, including Cassandra Nova who’s off soloing a Crimson Kin and their space dragon.
Stephanie: You mean Kingo Crimson the Eternal, right? I mean, they’re still touring! (I loved them so, so much when I was 16. Start with the songs “Book of Saturdays,” and maybe “The Night Watch,” and “Red,” and “Frame by Frame.” Catchy!)
I’ve been going after it a bit, but I am still enjoying this space opera mess of a fight book. We cut away from the battle and get back to Xandra, the young Imperatrix, summoning her resolve and giving orders: “Take me to the Roc.” I know that’s a battleship but I keep thinking she’s expecting to see Dwayne Johnson. Xandra could become a terrific character– one who asks (to quote George Orwell) “what you would do if you were actually in charge.”
That’s what Marauders has been about in the past. But Kate made her decisions last issue: she and her team (a large one) are just trying to fight and survive. Except for Cassandra Nova, who, in a very big panel near the end, fights Eric and a space dragon over a planet of lava fields. Cassandra’s enjoying it. She’s scowling– no, smiling– because she gets to inflict a homicidal level of pain. Ian, remind me again why Cassandra’s here, and why Kate’s decided to trust her?
Ian: No clue, Stephanie. But at least she’s having fun?
I’m definitely enjoying this more than the last issue. With a little more clarity on the Ten Shames, I think Orlando has the start of a very interesting story. Like you said, the moral center of this story is Xandra, and I hope the story revolves around that axis. I want to see her grow up and make hard decisions, and confront the nature of the Shi’ar Empire. For a fighting book, the fights are pretty good, and Orlando’s characterizations continue to be on point. I’m excited to see where this goes!
X-Traneous Thoughts
- Matt Milla’s work makes me want to know more about digital coloring and how colorists’ work has changed. Just go through and count the shades of red.
- Kate’s still wearing her Captain Red Queen Pirate uniform. And wielding a sabre. Has she had any conversations with Corsair about space piracy? Has she been watching Our Flag Means Death?
- Xandra’s musings about her strategic dilemmas (“an armada gathered against our allies… all on the word of advisors I’ve never heard of”) remind me very much of what elected officials say about the so-called Deep State. And sometimes the Deep State is bad, and sometimes the elected officials are awful and the Deep State is on the side of the angels, and sometimes they’re both bad.
- We didn’t talk about it, but it looks like the Crimson Kin are trying to get rid of Deathbird off-screen. They’re welcome to try, but if the last forty years of X-Men comics haven’t managed, I doubt they’ll be much more successful
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.
Ian Gregory is a writer and co-host of giant robots podcast Mech Ado About Nothing.
