An A.X.E to the Head Prompts Introspection in Marauders #6

The Marauders are back from space and ready to do their part to save the Earth in the editorially-mandated crossover event called “Judgment Day”, but first it’s time for…. a peek inside each one’s dreams in Marauders #6, written by Steve Orlando, drawn by Andrea Broccardo, colors by Matt Milla, letters by VC’s Ariana Maher.

Stephanie: Well, this one’s different. Ian, is this the quiet issue you’ve been waiting for? How many of the characters’ backstories did you have to look up? 

Ian Gregory: Shockingly few, Stephanie! I’ll have you know that the first issue of X-Men I ever picked up with was Uncanny X-Men #282 at a used book sale, which I read and re-read a couple dozen times. For me, seeing the long-forgotten Malcolm and Randall was like a visit from some old friends. That said, I was definitely not up to date (ha!) on Tempo.

Stephanie: Now that you’ve got your Mutant Liberation Front history clear and your Alpha Flight backstory sorted, shall we dive in?

Rush to Judgment

Stephanie: As a fan of “quiet issues,” moments to breathe, and brief spotlights on obscure-ish characters, I couldn’t be happier with Marauders #6 stop-everything look at team members’ interior lives. No, wait, I could. We see every cast member this issue but we don’t get to see them all in the same way…

Ian: This is a major change of pace from the first five issues of Marauders, in what I think is a good way. We had five issues of high octane space opera action, filled with fairly complex space politics and history. It’s nice to zoom in on the actual cast, even if it does come after a full arc.

Stephanie: We open with recaps, foreshadowing and maybe some misdirection. Dude named Scratch uses his “state of murderous rage” and his biohacking skills to make gooey monsters designed “to kill everyone.” Lockheed’s watching, unseen, and will surely report back. He does that a lot. Did Scratch feel more like a Batman baddie to you?

Ian: He definitely has Victor Zsasz / Professor Pyg energy. I think this is like the third or fourth page of Lockheed spying on Brimstone Love we’ve had this series? At some point, the guy’s gotta report back, right? There’s a bit of foreshadowing with him being stalked by a genetically modified animal. I suspect that Orlando is finally ready to launch this story. Don’t forget, we technically got our first preview of this in the Marauders Annual, way back in January.

Stephanie: Then there’s Broccardo’s recap page. In sum, we’re in the midst of an editorially-mandate crossover event called “A.X.E“, Avengers vs. X-Men vs. Eternals, and the supposed heroes have teamed up to construct a synthetic Celestial-a.k.a.-god named the Progenitor, who plans to judge the Earth ASAP by judging lots of individuals and deciding whether they’re worthy, whatever that means. In AXE: Judgment Day #3, which took place before Marauders #6 (a caption says so) we learned that Steve Rogers was not worthy, which gives you a sense of the Progenitor’s bar. It is high. Be very afraid.

Ian: I like that Orlando is just sort of ducking the usual expectations of a crossover issue. Sure, the events depicted here were set in motion by the crossover, but we’re not coming in, say, half-way through a fight. Marauders #6 isn’t part 7 of 13 in a sequence. If writers are going to be forced to promo crossovers in their main series books, then at least we can avoid being tricked into reading the crossover itself. It’s all very neat, how he uses the crossover to springboard into something much more interesting, and something we’ve been clamoring for: more character moments.

Stephanie: Exactly. Well put. –Did I miss a panel or did our Red Queen Captain Kate get resurrected off-page? I mean, I’m fine with that, except that based on my favorite previous issues of Marauders, Kate should get to kiss a girl at least one (1) time each time she comes back from the dead. Maybe that happened off-page too. (climbs down off hobby horse)

Ian: I’m convinced Marvel wants us to forget that ever happened.

Stephanie: Anyway, she’s back (yay!) and the Marauders have a mission on Earth again (also yay?) but she’s required to hang out with the two most obnoxious cast members we’ve got, Fabian Cortez and Cassandra Nova, guarding a Krakoan gate. 

You know when the teacher divides the kids up for group work at school and you get put in a group with two kids who certainly hate you, one of whom has poor personal hygiene, but you have to bite your lip and work with them because you care about your grade and your project even if they don’t? That’s Kate’s life right now.

Ian: Ah, Fabian. I find it amusing that he’s become Krakoa’s dedicated punching bag. Eventually, I suspect the joke will wear thin, but the fact that he was replaced by Khora in SWORD and, as Kate puts it, a pear in Marauders is pretty great. He’s a great counterpart to Cassandra Nova: the same amount of ego, with none of the cunning and immense power to back it up. I’m convinced Kate is simply here because she’s responsible enough to be the babysitter.

Stephanie: Wouldn’t be the first time (see Marvel Team-Up #135). Aurora has good advice for Kate. In, for some reason, a monospace typewriter font. Do they have old-fashioned typewriters on Krakoa? I hope so. I guess so. Aurora advises Kate to get the rest of her team some dream-based therapy before they return to action, via… Birdy?!?

Ian: Birdy!!

Stephanie: Ian, how much do you think about that 1990s plot where Sabretooth needed a mutant named Birdy to give him “the Glow” and keep him calm? Because I haven’t thought about it for a while. And yet here we are. Hi, Birdy! I like her neckerchief. She’s a “combat psychologist” who will help our mutants during “a ten-minute nap.” I’m all for that.

Ian: I know for a fact I read her first appearance, but I went back and double checked. Sure enough, she’s there in X-Men (vol. 2) #6, for like, a grand total of one page. That’s the plot that ran concurrently with some weird Mojo stuff, and also involved the Upstarts. I like that she’s retained her original outfit. It’s still very 90s, but I think it works pretty well – and the neckerchief-epaulet combo is pretty sweet. That’s a Jim Lee for you, alright.

You Be the Judge

Stephanie: There’s kind of a tradition where issues like this give each mutant a page or three for an individual psychodrama, right? Famously the Leonard Sampson psychotherapy issue of Peter David’s X-Factor, #87 (1993)? Ian, how do you think these pages stack up against those?

Ian: Boy, I’m having to dig up all my 90s X-Men readthrough memories here today. Far be it from me to be overly complimentary to PAD, but that X-Factor issue is very strong, except for a few crucial missteps. I think the fundamental difference between that story and this one, is that this story is focused on showing us how our characters have overcome various insecurities and tragedies, and the X-Factor story is really about laying out every character’s problems and fears. One feels like set-up for a longer series, and the other more like a reflection on line-wide themes.

Stephanie: I like what Steve Orlando is doing here: each dream shows a character’s vision of their own judgment, in a place of their choosing, by characters of their own choice. That means we get various backgrounds for Andrea Broccardo to draw, and various reintroductions to characters who have been around for… various lengths of time. Ian, do you have a favorite?

Ian: It’s definitely the Tempo pages. For one thing, I like that we get some art of her with her mask off, for once. For another, as far as I can tell, that time travel story with Tempo and Sumo never actually happened on the pages of a comic, which I suppose makes it a retcon. But it’s a great retcon, because it gives Sumo an identity beyond being a throwaway pro wrestling reference. I’m sure I don’t even need to get into the many levels of idiocy behind a mutant named Sumo whose power is having “multiple layers of elastic, fatty tissue” (as per the Marvel wiki).

Stephanie: Hey you know who else has multiple layers of elastic fatty tissue? Me! And you! And every other human being! Sigh.

Bishop hasn’t thought about his comrades from the future in a while. Or not on page. He might well feel awful because he’s “neglected” them. Survivor guilt! And, on Krakoa, since his lost comrades were mutants – albeit from a future – maybe he can do something with that guilt. I can see Randall and Malcolm resurrected alongside Bishop for a tough-guy private investigator kind of book. Maybe Ben Percy would want to write it.

Ian: Careful, Stephanie. You’re getting awfully close to describing District X. I think the idea of “resurrection guilt” is definitely worth examining in detail. Lots of mutants have come back, sure, but there are countless more who are still in the queue. What about all the dead Genoshan mutants (and, hey, Cassandra Nova is right there)? Krakoans must have some pretty complicated feelings about who gets to come back, and when. Some people keep getting skipped straight to the front of the line because they’re more powerful or politically important. How does your average, non-X-Men mutant feel about this?

Stephanie: Now that would be a terrific X-Men Unlimited issue. Meanwhile there’s Aurora! Ian, do you recognize a lot of these Aurora alters from Alpha Flight? I’d love to see more of this character’s inner life, more than we got in X-Factor recently. Headlok’s an Alpha Flight villain from 1990s. Nemesio Pietri comes from District X! I kind of love callbacks like these, especially since it’s 2022 and we can look them all up. And no, I did not recognize either one of these guys until I Googled them.

Ian: I regret to inform our readers that I have been derelict in my duty by having never read Alpha Flight. I like that all these versions of Aurora basically reveal her past as a character that writers have had no idea what to do with – and so they keep reinventing her. This is definitely a callback intense issue, but I really like it. As you say, with the internet, there’s no penalty for making a deep-cut like this, especially in little throwaway lines or pages. 

I like the brief mention Aurora gives to her being mind-controlled by Headlok. Just like with “resurrection guilt,” surely these characters, who have been mind-controlled half a dozen times each, have some baggage associated with that? It was even a major focus in the PAD therapy issue we discussed earlier. People make a lot of hay out of the X-Men being a super-powered allegory for social issues, but I’m interested in the X-Men as a super-powered allegory for trauma; sure, we can’t literally be mind-controlled like Aurora was, but a lot of readers can relate to having to process a similar loss of agency.

Stephanie: There’s a moral and psychological through-line to these face-your-fears dream-anecdotes: in each one some figure representing the Progenitor’s judgment confronts our team members (Bishop, Aurora, Somnus, Tempo, Kwannon, Daken) and demands reasons that they deserve to live. The right answer is that no one should have to prove that we deserve to live, based on what we’ve done in the past. We’re here. The right questions are: what now? What next? What do we do with the powers we have? 

Or, as Tempo puts it, “Justify my life? What a load. I’ve got a right to live. And so does Jun.” Jun being that sumo-themed Mutant Liberation Front era guy. And now, like Malcom and Randall, he’s apparently queued up for resurrection.

Ian: That’s certainly the ethos of the entire Krakoan era. No heroes, no villains, just the future. Progenitor is essentially testing each character to see if they are capable of evolving; none of the Marauders justify their existence by pointing to what they’ve done already, but instead by focusing on what they can do going forward. They have nothing to prove, but everything to achieve. 

Judge Not

Stephanie: Ian, I’m not sure I understand the emotional beats behind Kwannon’s dream. Can you take that one?

Ian: I barely understand Kwannon at all, to be honest, and I even read Fallen Angels. I suppose this was just her responding to a threat to her own child with a promise of bloody revenge. I’m not sure where the consensus is on her, but Psylocke’s story hasn’t worked that well for me in the Krakoa era.

Stephanie: Somnus’s own dream, on the other hand, hit hard. Zoomers IRL want to know why so many older queer people didn’t come out. We were scared. They told us lies. We thought we could live our whole lives without being our full selves. We were, most of us, wrong. These story beats work.

Ian: I think I’ve been waiting for some more depth to Somnus, and I’m glad Marauders #6 delivered. In the first five issues, he’s mostly been a relaxed, happy-go-lucky kind of guy. He’s got a sense of humor, and some interesting powers, but hasn’t shown much else. It’s good to see that he’s got a lot going on, and a real motivation for why he acts that way. He’s living the life he’s always wanted, unashamed and undaunted. Behind the Tempo scene, this was my favorite of the issue because I felt like Somnus really needed the space to gain some complexity.

Stephanie: My favorite art, and my least favorite story beat, comes with Daken, who decides to rename himself Fang, and says no one can judge him except for himself. There’s already a DC hero called Fang, and a Shi’ar Imperial Guard member called Fang, and also what the heck: does Daken like to bite people? But hey, he’s surrounded by Japanese snow monkeys in a Japanese national park, and he stabs himself in the eye! There will be blood. There is blood. There was blood. Snikt!

Ian: I told you last issue, no one knows how to write a Wolverine without them getting stabbed and stabbing back harder. Is it possible that this whole Daken-renaming is a reaction to the (false) assertion that gets run around online that Daken is a slur against Japanese people? It’s possible that Marvel has simply decided to side-step that entire controversy, though I will reiterate, it is not a controversy at all.  

Stephanie: And if you’re waiting for a peek inside Kate Pryde’s own stressed-out psyche in Marauders #6, or for that matter in this series, you’re just going to have to keep waiting. She’s got a job to do, waiting at the gate like St. Alphonsus Rodriguez of Majorca. And Cassandra Nova’s got a load of snark to interfere with her doing it.

Ian: I got a real laugh out of Birdy saying she wished she had a chance to dig into Cassandra’s brain, and Cassandra saying “How unprecedented. A canary that begs for the coal mine.” I’ve grown to like her deeply ominous presence in this book. Congrats, Orlando, you’ve managed the second-ever usage of Cassandra Nova that I like.

Stephanie: And as if our team didn’t have enough to do, an ORCHIS ally and 1990s Spider-Man villain called Judas Traveller turns out to be on his way. Ian, do you have feelings about his sweet stache?

Ian: Usually, when a long-forgotten character appears in a modern book, I’m either excited (that they’re finally back) or filled with dread (that they’re back again). Judas Traveller gave me the rare third reaction: incredulous laughter. I forgot he showed up in the amazing Giant-Sized X-Men: Thunderbird, so this really startled me. I mean, sure, why not? Let’s let the dude rock.

Stephanie: I’m happy with the pacing, and the break that we get from big braided plots internal to this title, even if they’re both a consequence of the A.X.E event. What do you think we should expect next time? Now there is a whole queue of semi-obscure mutants scheduled for resurrection based on these dream sequences. Who do you think we’ll see come back first?

Ian: I swear to god, we have to do the Brimstone Love arc next. It’s been about half a year of vague mentions of what he’s getting up to over there, so please, just let it happen. I’m not even that excited for it, but I feel like we need to get it over with. As for the resurrections, it’s hard to say. I suspect that they will all show up at once as a sort of “here comes the cavalry” moment for the Marauders.

Stephanie: Lest we forget: Cerebra (the 2099 one, not the AI) came back last issue but she’s not going to stay with this team: she says she’s only here to make contact with the First Mutants left over from the last plotline. Do we care? Will we care?

Ian: Brimstone Love was originally a 2099 villain, right? In this way, Cerebra’s appearance in this book is very fortuitous, maybe. I haven’t read X-Men 2099, so I’ve got no idea if they actually have history. But hey, maybe she’ll be around to help defeat him and kickstart the next arc with the Threshold mutants before disappearing again into obscurity. As for if I care about those mutants, then, well, that depends entirely on if they get the cool designs from the flashbacks in Marauders 4.

Pirate’s Booty

• Love the one-page, begrudging event summary. Just filled with loathing.
• Broccardo is on art again this week, doing what we liked from last week: drawing people’s faces! Lots of people’s faces.
• It’s past time for a guide to Krakoan fonts. 

Stephanie Burt

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

Ian Gregory is a writer and co-host of giant robots podcast Mech Ado About Nothing.