Marauders #10 Tests the Team's Time Travel Travails!

Billions of years in the past, a culture of proto-mutants and proto-humans faces extinction-level threats from the Unbreathing (an anaerobic civilization), from Arkea (wannabe world-dominating microorganisms), from Sublime (wannabe world-dominating microorganisms created by Grant Morrison), and from Stryfe (that guy). Can our chrono-journeying mutants save everyone? Or anyone? Time to find out in Marauders #10, written by Steve Orlando, drawn by Eleanora Carlini, colors by Matt Milla, letters by VC’s Travis Lanham.

Ian Gregory: It’s been a little over four months since we started this whole Threshold business, and it looks like we’re finally clear of all this time travel in Marauders #10. I have a lot of mixed feelings about the way this arc wrapped up, and I’m hoping that we’ll be able to reach some closure here — at least, more closure than this issue left me with.

Stephanie Burt: It’s about time. It feels like it’s been aeons. [Checks audience response.] Nothing? Well, as long as we’re still on the clock. I’m gonna get really harsh about the first half of this issue, but I do play nice later on.

Resist Psychic Death

Ian: Remember last time, when I was super excited about Stryfe, and what his presence could mean in this book? I’m very sad to report that Stryfe actually does nothing in this issue and he immediately gets written out and accomplishes nothing. There’s no reason for Stryfe to be here, and there’s no payoff for last month’s reveal. This week, he gets in a little scrap with Kate, and then Amass just glomps him and that’s the end of things. Amass and Kate’s daring escape from the Unbreathing, meanwhile, is relegated to a data page. I am slightly reluctant to say that this doesn’t pay off, as Orlando does in fact resolve a couple plot threads we had previously pointed out as being forgotten or ignored, but Stryfe’s presence in this series amounts to basically a wet fart.

Stephanie: You’re not wrong. And it’s not just Stryfe who got lost. Look, artist Eleanora Carlini still excels at making cartoony high-powered fight scenes look exciting. But at this point in the arc we have way too many antagonists. We’re on something like the fourth or fifth “I thought Z was dead, but they had a narrow escape!” And the stakes (as I think you yourself said earlier) have become so high they’re meaningless. When heroes and villains fight for the life of a character, or a neighborhood, or a planet of broccoli people, we know they might die, or at least get hurt, a lot. But we’re seeing a fight in the distant past about the future of all life on Earth. Duh, we’re here. The good guys won. But how?

Ian: After her daring escape, Kate arrives to help the Marauders in their attack on the spawning pools, where Bishop is going to do something to destroy Sublime and Arkea and save the future of Threshold. Between this and the last scene, I felt like we were missing some major visual clarity.

Stephanie: I would have felt that way except that I didn’t care. We’ve met so many characters in the last few issues who were pretty much a cool design and a power set, and we’re supposed to get emotionally involved in exclamations like “Hold on, Theia– I can block your fatigue today, but it’ll hit twice as hard tomorrow!” Which requires us to remember how Theia’s powers interact with Psylocke’s powers, assuming that is Psylocke speaking, which I think so, though it’s hard to tell because all the X-Men from our time are wearing identical pressure suits except for the names down the side.

When Tini Howard wanted to introduce a whole new place with new characters she did it in a twenty-one part event. This story has four parts and frankly it just feels mega-rushed, in terms of who the characters are and why they do the things they do.

Ian: Yes! The suits! They look cool, but as far as pure storytelling goes, they’re one of the most baffling design decisions I’ve seen in a long time. Maybe, to soothe the pain of having so many darn characters in this arc, it was an intentional decision to make all the Marauders completely interchangeable (this is a joke. I am joking).

Carlini is using her diagonal-layouts that she likes to break out for action sequences, and while it does give the scene some dynamism, the fight lasts for twelve pages. I wanted to be grounded a little more in the scene, and she keeps pulling in for close-ups that mostly leave me disoriented. It doesn’t help that the objectives and motives in this fight are a little vague to begin with: I was never sold on the mechanism by which Bishop will defeat the microorganisms, and Sublime and Arkea’s sudden turn to fighting each other doesn’t help much, either.

Stephanie: I miss Stryfe. Also, advice for future writers, not that they need to take advice from me: please try to avoid having multiple antagonists in a fight scene all of whom can discorporate, separate themselves into multiple bodies, or infect hosts? One splatter-based bad guy at a time next time, please?

Rebel Girl

Ian: The real turning point of this scene is Cassandra Nova plunging into the spawning pool and inviting Arkea and Sublime to join her. This is a heel turn so transparent that you know it’s fake, but all the Marauders seem to buy it. Thus joined to Sublime and Arkea, Nova then psychically eradicates all their associated parasites. As she points out, she’s instantly killed a few trillion beings. Oh, ain’t she a stinker?

Stephanie: Well, she does love a genocide. And I love Matt Milla’s colors here and throughout the battle scenes that dominate the first half of this issue. It’s like a fireworks show you can see again and again.

Ian: I love Nova’s unhinged grin as she emerges from the spawning pool, but I was especially gratified by what happened next. Since this series launched we’ve been complaining that it makes no sense for the Marauders to allow Nova on their team, trust her, and let her participate in important missions for Krakoa. I’m pleased to see that Kate and co. weren’t trusting Nova, and Orlando was instead content to let us think that until this twist.

Stephanie: Orlando strung us along just as Kate, with Emma’s help, strung her teammates along. She even strung herself along, since she put her plan into a locked psychic box. That full page of Cassandra zapping everyone– KRZZZAK!– it’s very Comic Book, in a good way as well as a bad way. Then we get the reveal that Grove and her people will hold Cassandra in the past, with their Chokestick, so Nova can’t return to the present. I think it requires Kate and Emma to have known about the Chokestick and the psychic-proof jail before they went to the past and met Grove, but I guess Krakoa could have told Kate what to do, since the whole arc amounts to a time loop.

Ian: I’m really glad that Orlando hasn’t forgotten that Kate has a very personal reason to hate Nova, and that she hasn’t completely set that aside for “the good of Krakoa,” a concept she has never identified with too strongly. I’m really happy for this beat, because I feel like it sets some of the team’s characterization back on track (and also gets rid of one of our too-many cast members).

Stephanie: Yeah, the last half of this issue feels like the first time in forever (yes, I’m quoting Frozen) that Kate gets to be Kate: impulsive but able to strategize, trying to save everyone and gut-punched by the knowledge that she can’t, devoted to her teammates because they’re her teammates (not just because they’re mutants), still attached to her former life in the non-mutant world. Speaking of Frozen I still don’t buy the love-at-first-sight that blooms between Tempo and Theia. I want as many lesbians in my mutant comic books as I can get, but still. Do they finish each other’s sandwiches? (That said, see below.)

Ian: This issue also addresses my complaints that Kate was steamrolling the group, and going ahead with an ill-advised plan without listening to their complaints. It’s slightly annoying, however, to discover that all sorts of plotting and character interaction between our protagonists has taken place entirely off-screen. This is a fun, clever plot that makes good use of Somnus, who I think has struggled to be useful outside of niche situations. I don’t really like that it’s all back-loaded and explained after the fact. At least give it the decency of a lengthy, stylistic flashback! In fact, the Nova betrayal itself lasts about a page and half, which is really no space at all.

Rah! Rah! Replica

Ian: In the end, the Marauders embrace fatalism as they decide that maybe Threshold was destined to fall, and they head home, leaving Stryfe and Nova to their extinction event fate. I’m sure that this choice won’t come back to bite them later.

Stephanie: Indeed. It is a time loop, though, so we can at least believe that the present is safe. Of course we don’t know whether Kate or Psylocke or anyone else tracked a few cells of Arkaea back to our day in the soles of their boots…

Ian: I ultimately like Kate’s explanation for why Nova couldn’t be trusted, despite Jean’s psychic conditioning: ultimately, even if she believed she was acting for the benefit of mutants, Nova had no interest in consensus. She would act unilaterally and escalate threats as it pleased her, and ultimately fashion herself into a mutant dictator. Also, yeah, she just sucks. Even if Chuck and Erik declared amnesty for all mutant villains, it only feels natural that there are some people that others couldn’t tolerate. Kate would be that person to ignore that amnesty and follow her heart, and I think that works well here.

Stephanie: Kate’s correct. Cassandra Nova did a genocide, on purpose, and she’d totally do another, and the psychic mites that turned her into something other than a genocidaire were the worst part of Tom Taylor’s X-Men Red. There’s evil you have to work with, in ugly alliances, because without it you can’t do good (Mister Sinister) and evil that holds in itself the seeds of good (the blue guy formerly known as Apocalypse), and there is, very rarely, evil you have to obliterate. Frankly, I still dislike the opening arc of the Morrison run, because I’d rather not have my X-comics contain direct analogs for the Cambodian killing fields or the Rwandan genocide. But that ship has long sailed. I am looking forward to Cassandra Nova-free X-comics for a little while at least.

Ian: I do like that Orlando manages to get Tempo and Theia into something resembling an on-screen relationship, even if they are broken up by the cruel fate of time travel. Taking the long-distance gays trope to new levels, there, but in the end everything works out. The Threshold mutants are resurrected, Tempo gets her girlfriend, and everyone is happy (except Cassandra Nova). Do you ever think all the other people waiting for their loved ones to be resurrected are annoyed that the Marauders keep skipping the queue?

Stephanie: It’s Tempo, so who knows how long she’s had to wait for her lover, in subjective time? Theia’s been dead for two zillion years, in Earth time. Kate’s chat (hand on shoulder) with Tempo at the Green Lagoon about how time stops when you fall in love, and how fast that love story moved? It’s the best part of the issue, maybe my favorite part of the entire Orlando/Carlini run so far. Kate knows what it’s like to lose your girlfriend to a time paradox, and Orlando has to know that we know. But still, you’re right about the queue. Rahne Sinclair to the white courtesy telephone, please.

Our Flag Means Notes:

The tagline for next issue reads “Requiem for Genosha,” signaling that the Morrison parade isn’t over yet.
Hey, remember Brimstone Love? He’s still out there!
Grove is Okkara. Cool. (Has Krakoa told Doug?)

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.