Brimstone Love is back and so are character faces in Marauders #11!

Our team has come back from the distant past, bringing three plucky survivors from the long-ago, now-defunct mutant society Threshold. Will Captain Kate Pryde start a time loop with their help? Also, remember that jerk Brimstone Love? He’s back too, in Marauders #11, written by Steve Orlando, art by Eleanora Carlini, colors by Matt Milla, letters by VC’s Travis Lanham.

Ian Gregory: Stephanie, we’re eleven issues in now to this second volume of Marauders. I can’t help but think back to the first volume, where in Marauders #11 we had Kate’s funeral and resurrection, and in Marauders #12 we got the “Kill Shaw” tattoos and Kate’s first (and, to date, last) gay kiss. In a way, I feel like somehow less has happened, even considering all the time travel and space travel and other forms of travel.

Stephanie Burt: We’ve seen a lot less character development for the mutants we already know, because Gerry Duggan’s Marauders spent all its page count changing existing heroes and villains in existing settings: Orlando and Carlini have been putting new pieces on the board, or introducing new game boards. Now all the pieces are back on Earth, in the present day, for the first time in forever. It’s past time we see the play.

Close to You

Ian: We’re kicking Marauders #11 off with a nice Kurt moment. Remember how Kate and him were on a team together for, like, multiple decades? He’s probably one of the characters she has the most history with by simple volume of issues. I have to admit that I haven’t kept up with the Way of X and Legion of X stuff that features Kurt elsewhere in the line, but I liked his appearance here.

Stephanie: I like what he says and does. If you haven’t been following those titles you may find his literal appearance jarring: he’s got a pair of long, pointy horns! And now he’s in Nightcrawlers. And he helps Kate think aloud.

“Why don’t I feel like we won?” she asks him, and that is honestly my feeling about the arc that concluded last month: there’s something unsatisfying about bringing back a couple of mutants from the distant, distant past while leaving the question unresolved of how that past came about. It’s a difficult question even to No-Prize. What were those mutants doing back there anyway?

Ian: This Kurt scene is only a few pages, but I think it’s an important bit of context for the rather jumbled issue that follows. We know that Kate is working on something for those who are dead, something other than resurrection. We know that she’s not strictly following the rules. I think this is a really important section for getting into Kate’s head, because in the past I’ve felt like she’s made decisions very hastily and without much chance to just talk to the other characters. Seeing her work through things here is really great.

Stephanie: She’s working things through with an older mutant she trusts: they’re close. They look close. She’s also acting like a captain, a leader, someone who’s got the experience and the grit to deliberate and then act. I love that we see the deliberation.

Ian: I’ve been fairly harsh about artist Eleanora Carlini’s faces, but I actually really liked them in Marauders #11. When the focus is on character moments, she’s really great at drawing out expressiveness. I think Kate gets some really good faces at the start with Kurt, and at the very end on Genosha. I think Matt Milla’s colors are really on point in Marauders #11, which might be part of it: the vibrancy of each scene, the strong color differentiation between settings, and the spoooooky effect on Wicked’s power.

Stephanie: Agreed. Carlini’s style is super-cartoony, and her figure drawing later on gets sketchy and approximate and looks rushed, but she’s finally creating faces and expressions I recognize as belonging with our Kate. She’s also got Kate growing out her hair and giving it one heck of a curl, which I like, even though the style reminds me, now and then, of (wait for it) Starfire.

Reach Out for Me

Ian: Kate then starts to put together her special team of mutants, for reasons that will be explained later (not by me, I mean literally her plan has yet to be explained). This starts with a trip to Santo Marco to handle a reactor meltdown caused by a kidnapped mutant — who was forced to serve as their power supply. This is a grim end for Feedback, late of the Alpha Flight program (though I believe he never made it above Beta Flight).

Stephanie: When you read (that is, when I read, for our new podcast) books and essays about how to be a better gamemaster (GM) for a tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG), one piece of recurring advice is: never introduce new characters when you can bring back people you’ve seen before. Big Two writers may accept, or dismiss, or abuse that advice, making readers dive deep into largely forgotten runs. Till now Steve Orlando has mostly blown it off. But things have changed: Feedback is just the first of the obscure callbacks we’ll see. I’m OK with it.

Ian: I like seeing all the various mutants involved in humanitarian efforts. It’s a good reminder that the Marauders are, technically, supposed to still be operating on Earth by bringing aid to trapped and hunted mutants (and humans, who deserve mutant treatment and resources). It’s nice to get a reminder that the Marauders have a function beyond high-falutin’ sci-fi action.

Stephanie: Amen. I want to read a book about pirate (technically privateer) Captain Kate Pryde, her swashbuckling crew, their moral dilemmas, and her attempts to kiss girls, and for the first time in the Orlando run I’ve got three out of four. Also, despite the weight of those dilemmas, Kate looks like she’s having fun. She’s got her pirate jacket back, too.

Ian: Kate assembles her team at Genosha. Besides the usual crew — Bishop, Tempo, and Psylocke (rocking a sweet pink jacket) — we also get Theia from the Threshold Mutants, Polaris, and Wicked.

Wicked?? Last seen in the Merry X-Men Holiday Special?? I had to look her up, Stephanie.

Stephanie: I had to look her up, too. She conjures up the spirits of the dead. And she’s a late Claremont job. You know how Claremont, before and after his stroke, wrote an absolutely superb run of New Excalibur, centered on Nocturne and Sage? Wicked comes from the other other Excalibur, the Xavier team assembled on Genosha, which ran for fourteen issues leading into House of M.

Ian: Lastly, Cerebra doesn’t make the rendezvous, giving us a hook into our next issue. But from what I can gather, Kate’s plan seems to involve cramming all the spirits of the dead humans and mutants of Genosha into a time capsule and shooting it backwards in time to become Threshold. Remember how I whined and whined that it simply made no sense for mutants and humans to exist that far back in pre-history? Evidently, Orlando anticipated all my complaints, because here we go learning that Threshold wasn’t naturally occurring but rather a fun little time experiment by the X-Men.

Stephanie: That’s our Kate: conducting experiments, trusting the science, still grieving her dad, a perpetual student, like it or not: “School’s never really over for any of us,” she tells Theia. “But the teachers change.”

She even tries on her old and very familiar black and yellow “training” uniform to “get me in the right headspace.” which feels like gilding the lily. I’m still not sure how “cramming the spirits” would work, but OK: it’s a magic-meets-science time loop that Kate’s attempting to undertake, and as with all closed loops, if it already happened, then we know it’s going to happen, and the question becomes: how?

The World Is a Circle

Ian: There’s a pretty big B-story this week, which involves Akio (sigh…Fang…) finally getting around to tracking down Brimstone Love. You know, the guy who shows up on the last page of every other issue to foreshadow his inevitable appearance. Anyway, Akio finds Scratch and, boy, really just rips his face right off with a baseball bat. If you’re like me, you’ve probably forgotten that Scratch is like, a character who has shown up in this series before. I’m glad that we’re finally returning to this plotline, even if it is all buildup for a future issue.

Stephanie: Scratch has a congregation of potentially violent mutant-haters devoted to the idea that no one should stick together or help anybody else out, so of course when Fang starts winning this notably bloody fight, Scratch’s congregants scatter. Seems like a stupid way to run a movement, discouraging cooperation in favor of no-holds-barred competition every time, although people have also tried these ideas in real life.

Ian: There’s a fight scene in Marauders #11 that’s pretty well done, but brief. It doesn’t quite feel perfunctory in the way we’ve noticed before (I’m thinking back to the Fin Fang Foom fight in volume one, which was so sudden and meaningless it’s stuck in my head ever since), but it’s also not exactly vital. After a round of enhanced interrogation, Akio gets the location for Brimstone Love.

Are you happy to see this all coming together – perhaps in time to combine with the “Cerebra is missing” beat from the A story? Or is this all just too little too late? I’ll admit whatever enthusiasm I scraped together for Brimstone Love has pretty much faded.

Stephanie: I’m interested in the art, which looks speedy and sketchy and non-realistic even for Carlini: some of the figure drawing approaches Ralph Steadman levels of stretched-out unreality (and, as in Steadman, there’s spattered blood over the page). Not much happening here in terms of character, though, unless you count the alphabetical characters that make up the sound effect SMANSHCH. A smashed mensch? A man’s sandwich? An unkind abbreviation for centrist senator Joe Manchin?

Ian: Finally, Akio arrives at Brimstone Love’s penthouse in Madripoor. Madripoor again, huh? I’ve not really liked the way Marauders has handled Madripoor in the past, and I would honestly kind of like it if they would just leave that poor place alone for a while. Anyway, Akio brings along a friend – Mister Dee, from, uh, Son of M? I had to look this guy up too, and boy does he not seem like a very nice person. Do you have any strong feelings about Johnny Dee?

Stephanie: None, so can we talk about Wicked? And about Kate’s return (in her red captain’s outfit again) to Genosha, the site where her father died? Wicked’s arrival comes with all kinds of green swirly backgrounds, which look cool, and Wicked herself comes with a neat contrast between her spooky ooky Goth appearance (complete with a wrinkly chin, like Thanos) and her friendly, disarming demeanor. “Don’t be scared– it’s just necroplasm.” You tell them.

Ian: Overall, Marauders #11 definitely felt like a major setup issue. I don’t mind that, because I felt like we got a couple of real character moments, but it can feel a little frustrating when an entire issue goes by without a real payoff. As has often been the case with Orlando’s issues, I feel like I’m making half-informed guesses about where the plot is going, and only understanding things in retrospect.

Stephanie: I loved the half of Marauders #11 where Kate assembles her team and puts her plan together, with Theia and Tempo and then Wicked and Polaris arriving to help. I also dig the data pages: Kurt annotating the Three Principles of Krakoa, Kate writing down her time-loopy ideas on a big, thick, durable napkin. “Genosha to Threshold? Death to Life?…. ME? Come on, who else is going to walk on water and spill this cup?” Fang punching people, or hitting them with a baseball bat (that’s drawn like a shillelagh), will always bore me, but at least it goes by fast. Overall I’m on board for this new arc, a lot. I have high hopes.

Our Flag Means Notes

Is the three-headed sentinel on Genosha a statue? I (Ian) remember it flying off in Astonishing X-Men and I’m not sure if it ever came back.
Lockheed’s been spying on the Scratch/Love crowd and reporting back to Fang. How do they communicate?
Just gonna say again how good it feels to see Kate Pryde devise and execute a plan with her team, and to see her face while she does it. It’s been a minute, hasn’t it?
Twice we hear that Polaris needs caffeine. Does that mean Illyana, with her famously high-stakes coffee habit?

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.