Krakoa waves goodbye, and all that’s left are Ashes in X-Men #35/Uncanny #700

All good things must come to an end, and as good of a thing as the Krakoan era has been for mutantkind, its time has come at last. The tragedy and triumph of FALL OF THE HOUSE OF X, the madness and mystery of RISE OF THE POWERS OF X, they have all come to their end and led to this moment that will change the future of mutantkind for years to come. X-Men #35, aka Uncanny X-Men #700, is written by Gerry Duggan, Al Ewing, Kieron Gillen, Chris Claremont, Gail Simone and Jed MacKay; drawn by Joshua Cassara, Phil Noto, Lucas Werneck, Leinil Francis Yu, Walt Simonson, Mark Brooks, John Romita Jr., Scott Hanna, Jerome Opeña, Luciano Vecchio, Stefano Caselli, Sara Pichelli, Salvador Larroca and Javier Garron; colored by Romulo Fajardo Jr., Phil Noto, David Curiel, Laura Martin, Sonia Oback, Marcio Menyz, Matt Hollingsworth, Matthew Wilson, Guru-eFX and Morry Hollowell; and lettered by Clayton Cowles.

Jake Murray: So ended the first Krakoan age. After five years of dawns, reigns, rises and falls, it’s over. There are a few songs we could use as the tenor to this action-packed, emotional jam review that could be appropriate. Do we go with the wistful lament of Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road”? Perhaps the raw and fatalistic “In the End” by Linkin Park? 

Given the emotional goodbyes between friends old and new, the maps and charts that promised years’ worth of adventures ahead, and what the mutants built in this story, it’s perhaps most fitting that we frame this review through the lens of “The End” by The Doors (with a hint of irony):

This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend
The end of our elaborate plans
The end of everything that stands

Now to the story itself. How is everyone feeling after reading this issue?

Scott Redmond: Underwhelmed. That might be the best single word to throw out there as to my overall feelings. In a way, having said my “goodbyes” of sorts to Krakoa and to the world of X multiple times (through writing) over the months probably helped. As I looked at this issue, while underwhelmed and disappointed, I skipped right to acceptance. 

Anna Peppard: I think it’s inevitable that those of us who’ve been deeply engaged with the Krakoa era, to the point of spending many hours of our lives dissecting its emotional beats and dangling plot threads and even doing dark things like maintaining a Twitter account to talk about it, have done some anticipatory grieving. Given all that baggage, it’s hard to decide how to feel about this issue. But it tried, or at least tried to try, and as a battle-weary veteran of reviewing Fall of the House of X, I appreciated the semblance of effort. 

Adam Reck: While there are parts of this that I enjoyed, I do think that this issue confirmed for me that for as much as I don’t want to say goodbye to one of my favorite eras of comics, it was time. 

Tony Thornley: I have complicated thoughts I’ll get into in a minute. It’s better than I had expected it to be, but overall, I’d say it was fine. Not great, not bad. But fine.

Rasmus Skov Lykke: Yeah, I’m very much with Adam and Tony here. I’ve greatly enjoyed the Krakoan era of the X-Men, but the way the line has been for the past year or so (with two exceptions in Immortal X-Men and X-Men Red), it was time for it to end.

Mark Turetsky: For me, it was somewhat bittersweet. I’m glad about certain things getting covered, confused about some of the decisions made.

Kafka on the Shore

Jake: At the very heart of this issue is Kafka, the young mutant we saw quieting down the panicked mutants in the White Hot Room at the end of X-Men Forever #4 to form the Krakoan council in exile. He returns to the pacific Krakoan shores all grown up, and it’s soon revealed that 15 years have passed for his Krakoa in a matter of weeks on Earth. 

During that time they have built the functioning society Charles Xavier had always dreamt of, a mutant circuit that, unencumbered by external threats, can remain unbroken and sustain itself in perpetuity. Ruling through genuine consensus, by listening rather than instructing, they have returned to obey the wishes of some of their populace to return home, while others elect to stay in the White Hot Room. 

What did everyone make of the decision to frame such a pivotal issue through the eyes of a relatively unknown character, and what were your thoughts generally about the farewell to Krakoa?

Adam: This felt like the most genuine and satisfying part of the issue for me. It tied together multiple areas of the story to give a fitting and emotional end. I could have done without every character saying “Oh!” on every page, but I honestly have no real complaints here.  

Tony: Yeah, agreed. Also, it kind of gave closure to the eclectic casting of Krakoa books in a fun way. Everyone was important, everyone mattered, and by making a character with no more than, what, six to 10 appearances the mouthpiece of New Krakoa, it brought the whole thing full circle. The X-Men were more than Cyclops, Jean, Wolverine, Nightcrawler and Kate Pryde in the end. They were all of Krakoa.

Anna: This is the part of the issue where I was most grateful for the effort being made. We’ve had a rather extreme tonal bifurcation in the Fall books, with Rise of the Powers of X doing most of the sci-fi heavy lifting while Fall of the House of X too often devolved into a punching match where any ideological stakes were lost amid the challenge of trying to figure out what surface of which country or planet or spaceship the characters were standing on at any given moment. So it was satisfying to return to the radical, sci-fi infused promise of Krakoa in this final issue of the era, and ground that promise in identifiable human emotions.

That said, I couldn’t quite separate my frustration with the deeply flawed characters who couldn’t let Krakoa be the socialist, environmentalist paradise it might have been from the flawed worldbuilding that contributed to the necessity of dismantling it. That flawed worldbuilding has lots of causes; while there are some specific choices made by some specific writers that I’ll probably never forgive (Yes I’m still mad about the unresolved issue of reproductive rights on Krakoa), it was also caused by stuff beyond the control of creatives, like pandemic-related publishing delays and the inevitable limits of change within comics starring IP owned by Disney. Still, I’ll always regret the might-have-beens, and this glimpse at a technically concurrent but functionally alternate future for Krakoa had me feeling the weight of those regrets. 

Rasmus: Yeah, I also had problems separating what was actually going on on the page with what my inner cynic knew was simply putting the toys away, so that the next era of X-Men comics could tell a different story, without having to worry about all those pesky innovations and massive status quo shake-ups the Krakoa era brought with it.

As I was reading it, I very much got the feeling of Marvel having its cake and eating it, too. They did do all those innovations, and technically they still count, because the White Hot Room Krakoa is still there, and everything is great there. But at the same time, none of that really matters to the characters back in this dimension. You know, the characters we normally follow, that headline series. Those are mostly back to how they were pre-Krakoa.

Mark: For me, it resolved a lot of my reticence about the White Hot Room situation. Is it fundamentally different that we get this coda for those characters in the long run? Not really. It’s not like having them be on Earth would change much in the comics moving forward. We get a few 20-page superhero comics every month; we’re not going to see many mutants beyond the ones on the cover. But altering the story such that they’re not trapped in a de facto prison that they didn’t choose for themselves and that rather they’re living in an actual utopia that they could choose to leave, that’s something of a win for the era. Not to mention they finished the work of Krakoa, of resurrecting the millions of dead Genoshans and returning some of them to Earth. Exactly how many, who knows? As always, the number of mutants depends on what the writers need in any given issue. But again, even though we’re mourning the end of the era, it ends on a victory.

Tony: Amen to that, even if I don’t love that four truly great characters will remain “trapped” there, unless they decide to end that utopia. Tempus and Goldballs deserve better (OK, I said four great characters, but I’m fine never seeing Elixir or Proteus again). I did enjoy that Hope isn’t “gone.” She’s just transcended. She’s still there in the White Hot Room, she’s still felt. She’s just not standing there next to them.

Scott: I’m of mixed minds on the whole state of affairs here. Like others, I’m glad that Krakoa gets to continue somewhere, and the initial exile situation did turn into an actual paradise through Kafka and the others. I do wish that Kafka had a bit more of a presence in the books, even minor, to hinge such a big part on a character that I believe only showed up in Gillen books of the last half-yearish or so. 

It’s quite another “get mutants off the board” cheat, but one that at least didn’t end in genocide. In fact, it finally finished the work to overturn one of those past genocides. At the same time, while I get the whole issue with status-quo driven IP comics, seeing things like resurrection and circuits and all the other beats from Krakoa partitioned away is silly. It takes away things that could be useful to storytelling and mothballs them just because it doesn’t fit with trying to turn the clock back to the version of the X-Men that incoming editor Tom Brevoort wants, akin to their ’90s sales highs. 

Overall it works, and at least Krakoa is still out there. Even if comics are not likely ever going to be in a place where it can continuously exist on the page.

Apocalyptic Heel Turns

Jake: As with any status quo shift, we get some quite drastic reversions to type in this issue. Most of these feature in the “From The Ashes” transition story toward the end of the issue, some of which hit with the whiplash of a roller coaster breaking down. 

Most prominent within the main body of the issue is Apocalypse. Upon being presented with Krakoa in exile’s precocious vision of a future unburdened by the limitations of human thought, mutantkind’s staunchest elder statesman takes umbridge with the accusation that previous attempts at mutant utopia had not been “radical enough.” He then proceeds to fight the X-Men for ages before Jean stops him, making him see the “millions of mutant minds” and their genuine gratitude for those who paved the way. What was going on here?

Adam: For the issue to present |A| as a petty psychotic villain again for what felt like half the page count just so they could tee up a miniseries that will not factor into the next era of X-Men filled with jam-issue-style splash pages by guest artists was a lot to process, and I’m not mincing words when I say I hated it. The entire scene felt gratuitous, unnecessary and filled with out of character moments like Nightcrawler taking |A|’s eyes just so Wolverine could make a Deadpool-style joke about cojones.

Tony: You say out of character, I say awesome. But you’re probably right.

Anna: I probably enjoy Logan and Kurt making junk jokes more than the next guy, but it’s telling that I didn’t feel much of anything about the fuzzy blue mutant I’ve been very officially unofficially PR managing for many years ‘porting a dude’s eyes out of his head. Yes, teleporting objects and body parts off people and sharks into people is technically something Nightcrawler can do, which has been more shocking and impressive in other comics. But why this, why here, why now? A corny truism about |A| being too blind to see wouldn’t have made it better, but there really didn’t seem to be any gesture toward any deeper meaning behind this specific character doing this specific thing to this other specific character in this specific moment. It just felt like an expedient way to end a pointless battle, which was disappointing given the supposed stakes of the moment. 

Tony: And to that point, the dudes who WOULD have done that — Wolverine and Deadpool — were right there, with Wade hanging on to Poccy’s back like Ty Murray on the back of the world’s biggest, meanest bull.

Mark: For my part, I’m not sure I disliked |A| going nuts that they’ve formed the wrong kind of mutant utopia. Look, this is the guy that, as a rite of passage, came up with the idea that he gets to beat any depowered mutants to death before they can reclaim their powers through resurrection. And that was in the good times!

Tony: Good grief, the crucible was screwed up in all the best ways.

Scott: Clearly Marvel didn’t want the whole “Blue Dad” internet thing to carry over. While it partially makes sense for |A| to take offense — even in his “best times” he was fueled by ego — it just feels so out of nowhere and dragged on for way too long. We could have spent actual time exploring Krakoa as it exists now. Find out just why these big-time X-Men are all choosing to stick around in bigot land, other than dollar-signs-in-the-eyeball sales reasons. Instead it’s just one massive fight scene that looks just as silly as the ones that capped off the era against Nimrod and Omega Sentinel. 

Basically the scene really hit home (alongside the actual transition ending) that Krakoa and the new ways are done, and we’re back to business as usual. 

Tony: I have to say I loved the single-page splashes in the fight, though. Simonson to Brooks to Romita was just very fun. As long as the fight dragged out, I kind of wish that instead of a few of those pages, we got a few more of those splashes. A great little callback to X-Men history. If you can’t get legends like that for more than a page, might as well make them THOSE pages.

Rasmus: Yeah, at first I thought that was what the fight was going to be, and despite it feeling a little forced, I was actually excited for it. But then it just dragged on instead, sadly. Even if the art was nice.

Tony: But after those splashes, Noto continues to show how much of an all-star he is with Storm shutting down the villains starting to gather and consider joining Apocalypse. It made the transition to Jerome Opena in the Wolverine-Deadpool-Nightcrawler sequence incredibly jarring, though.

Aunts at a picnic

Adam: Elsewhere, the issue is padded out with extras including throwing Papa Chris a bone and letting him play in the sandbox. His Mystique/Destiny story with Larroca felt very bizarre after the tone of last week’s Wedding Special. I’m glad Larroca actually drew this short instead of the egregious trace job we just saw in the recent Obi-Wan TV adaptation, but it still falls flat and doesn’t seem in line with where we are with this family unit. 

Anna: The Claremont/Larroca story was another moment where I wanted to appreciate the effort. Except that Kurt holding a sword to Mystique’s throat strikes me as more out of character than him popping out |A|’s eyes. I’ve read a lot of Nightcrawler comics. One might even say I’ve read all of them. And I’m not convinced the dude who’s barely even raised his voice to any of his evil mothers over the past several decades, even after they sent him to hell and committed mass murder and sold him to Orchis and told him they yeeted him over a waterfall as a baby, would do this. But that’s the nature of late-career Claremont comics. Sometimes, he still brings the feels. Other times, it’s baffling to see him misunderstand his own characters so badly. 

Tony: Yeah, this whole short felt like Claremont severely misunderstanding all of the characters involved, while also finally writing what he always wanted to do with Mystique and Destiny. It was nice to see Larroca’s art looking incrementally better than the current, heavily traced norm, though.

Scott: This was the one part of the story that I’m pretty sure my eyes glazed over and I just skimmed through it. Much respect to Claremont for all that he’s done for the characters and comics, but the man’s continued trend of writing what he wants with characters and things that have happened after him be damned tires me out. 

Rasmus: I actually disagree slightly. Yes, my eyes also glazed over with that story. Yes, Claremont has a tendency to misunderstand his own characters as they’ve evolved after him. Yes, this particular story was pretty dull.

But at the same time, Claremont is the most prolific X-Men writer ever. He had to be part of the 700th issue. And he could’ve done the usual thing of just doing a greatest hits story, something slightly to the side of continuity. But instead he did a story that actually was born directly of recent events within the comics, which was a nice touch. Even if the story itself was pretty bland and didn’t really resolve much of anything.

Adam: As for the “From the Ashes” previews, I saw absolutely nothing that piqued my interest. I was hoping for something interesting, but “Cyclops has a secret base in the snow” and “Kitty Pryde: Barista” are both things we’ve seen before in X-Men and don’t feel particularly inspired. I finished the issue ready to close the door on Krakoa but not psyched to jump into whatever Breevort & co. are about to serve up. 

Anna: I enjoyed Mystique getting her revenge on Mother Righteous. I didn’t enjoy Kate Pryde tending bar while wistfully referring to Piotr Rasputin as her ex. While I understand this is technically true, that relationship feels like several lifetimes ago given everything both Kate and Piotr went through during the Krakoa era. The idea that Piotr, of all people, would suddenly be on Kate’s mind is bizarre, to say the least. Remember when Kate kissed a girl and liked it? Sure hope someone’s allowed to remember that, someday.

Tony: But they called her Kate! Not Kitty! An ounce of progress in the middle of a gallon of regression, sure, but it was something.

Rasmus: All that being said, I did enjoy the Man of Steel to “My ex” “Men” joke. A nice bit of writing and lettering there.

Scott: I was already pretty certain this new era was not going to be for me, and that “From The Ashes” preview section worked hard to cement that feeling. Cyclops has plans! Rogue and Remy have left the X-Men but are feeling pulled back! Logan has gone feral! Kitty has tried to go “normal” before being pulled back in! Beards are gone again! Just so much been-there-done-that energy, by design.

Also, why did the X-Men scatter to the winds? They watched Krakoa go and beat their enemies … but all said “OK, peace!” all so the new era can do the requisite build-teams-back-up thing. This is not the smooth one-for-one end to beginning that Brevoort keeps claiming was coming. It’s whatever really, that doesn’t matter in the long run. With all that lead time he boasted about, there were actual ways to create an actual path from the two that came with some sort of spark to excite. Then again, that would require the new editor to not have a seeming big-time hate for the previous era.

Rasmus: I don’t think Brevoort hates the Krakoa era. I simply don’t think he understands why it became popular in the first place. It was by doing something new. And sure, the back-to-basics approach is new compared to the Krakoa era, but it is not by itself new. It is simply more of the same, more of things we’ve seen a thousand times before. It looks like a bunch of middling X-Men books we’ve all read a dozen times before at least.

I will say that one nice thing about the “From the Ashes” era, there seems to be a bigger focus on the everyday world. Everyone we see, besides Cyclops and Beast — and don’t get me started on Beast’s reversion from war criminal to cuddly fuzzball again — are out in the world, not tied up in superheroics. That’s a nice change of pace from almost every other comic put out by Marvel these days.

Whose Dream Is It Anyway? 

Jake: “Charles, Charles, Charles … how did we get here?”

Professor X has had an eventful time of it lately, and this issue is no exception. Opening where X-Men #34 left off, Wolverine is out for revenge against his former mentor, although he’s abruptly booted out of the scene like an uninvited wedding guest by Magneto. It would appear that magnetic poles have reversed again, although this time it’s mutantkind’s two chief philosophers who have reversed positions.

Ready to accept his lot as “Inmate X,” martyr and pariah, Charles is stunned when his eternal philosophical counterpart proclaims himself protector of mutant and human alike. Charles is reduced to nothing but lamentations at this point, capped off by a half-hearted proclamation of “Xavier was right.”

How do we feel about this scene, folks?

Tony: I think the opening is absolutely hilarious from two POVs. The first being Wolverine plows his way through whoever the hell this military org is (Did we get it confirmed on page? I mean, it’s not SHIELD, it’s not Orchis). It’s a great action sequence. Then Magneto just skeleton wedgies him and throws him across the state.

The second being the behind-the-scenes of it. It felt very much like “Shit, we ended with that badass Cassara page in #34, we gotta resolve that.” And resolve it they did.

Scott: Such a scene between these two men, coming to the sides that they have after Krakoa, feels like it should be a profound moment. They are two of the heaviest of weights in the line since basically the beginning (give or take). Yet it just feels so whatever in many ways. Even beyond the corniness that Xavier displays. At least Magneto got a whole after-death mini to develop and show why he is at the point he is now. Xavier has just been an utter all-over-the-place mess for most of the last year, leaving most motivations unclear. Oh wait, sorry, that’s just Charles Xavier. My bad. 

Rasmus: Yeah, I honestly have no idea why Xavier did most of the things he’s done since Sins of Sinister, to be honest. Which makes this whole scene between him and Magneto ring hollow and honestly a tad confusing, especially the whole “Xavier was right” bit, since it was never clear what he was right about.

Anna: I liked how the writing lampshaded the corniness of that line by having Mags identify it as corny: “Oh Charles. Is that truly all you have left?” Making the line immediately pathetic – yet another symptom of Charles’ self-destructive ego – made it much better.

Jake: Charles Xavier is pure box office. 

Calling all the way back to the first Hellfire Gala, to that moment he whispered in Reed Richards’ ear, he’s only gone and popped a psychic loophole in, hasn’t he? As it turns out, he’s still able to manipulate events from his Fox X-Men-looking prison, which he almost certainly only ever uses for good. In this case, he rescues a young woman openly supporting mutants with a “Krakoa was for lovers” T-shirt from a human bigot who literally has the word ‘MANKIND’ tattooed on his forehead. 

While the means of illustrating it were not subtle, was this reveal an effective and satisfying answer to one of the long lingering questions of this era?

Adam: I’m of two minds on this. The execution of the first Xavier epilogue was done very well. I love the idea of the trapdoor into Reed’s mind allowing Xavier to play vigilante from inside his geodesic dome. What makes absolutely zero sense to me is why there needed to be a second Xavier epilogue where they moved him back to the mansion. It was redundant and took away from the elegance of that first ending. 

Mark: It’s as if one creative team handed off the ball to their incoming teammates, and those teammates just spiked it to the ground. It implies a weird lack of communication for an issue that’s so deeply concerned with putting all the pieces into their new spots as elegantly as possible.

Anna: I’m of two minds about whether otherwise naked astral projections should have junk. Except that I’m lying. I think they definitely should. Are you even really being profound if you’re not pontificating with the profligate privilege of Dr. Manhattan?

Scott: If there is anyone that would make sure they are showing off astral junk, it would 100% be Charles Xavier. 

The two-Xavier problem really suffers from not only the miscommunication, but the idea that less is more. Doing the same beat but different is almost always going to fall flat, unless you have a damned good reason for doing so. Especially when we’re talking about it being done in the same space. Clearly this whole era was going to end this way with Xavier going off the deep end; Magneto warned as much before his death. So one would think it would mean the two sides could have used that supposed huge lead time to make this flow better. Then again, the whole last year of Krakoa was this very issue spread across a whole line.

Tony: After getting the epilogue of Charles getting his loophole in the psychic safeguards to just temporarily lobotomize any bigot — a sequence I really liked — to Charles going full Padme Amidala at the end? I was fine with the “From the Ashes” epilogue until that moment.

I mean, I think that Doctor Ellis is exactly what we were promised with Alia Gregor and Dr. Devo. It would be nice to see her develop into that kind of antagonist that we were kind of promised but never got.

Scott: While I can see the potential, my first instinct was to let out a massive sigh both here and the first time we saw her in the Free Comic Book Day issue. Another angry, yelling, probably hates mutants human antagonist just feels like whatever. Not that I want them fighting other mutants right away (even though we know that is coming since Brevoort has said as much, and hates that mutants were mostly all getting along), but something different than another bureaucratic human. 

Speaking of FCBD, so weird how out of order the “From The Ashes” reveals and debuts are happening. 

Rasmus: An entire year to plan, and yet the FCBD story happens before the teases in this issue. If that isn’t emblematic of the entire end of the Krakoan era, I don’t know what is.

I hope Tony is right and Doctor Ellis will fulfil the role we were promised at the outset of the Krakoan era. She feels more like an Orchis leftover. Someone who was out for lunch, as the organization was disbanded and simply didn’t get the message, so she just carried on. It doesn’t feel like anything new, nothing exciting at all. The exact same enemy that the mutants have literally just defeated, a representation of mankind that hates and fears mutants.

It’s as if the Brevoort team have all the standard ingredients but refuse to think of new recipes, while the outgoing Krakoan team had new ingredients but were forced to follow boring, old recipes. All it did was leave us with a story that was overcooked and burned, and what comes from the ashes seems to be undercooked.

Tony: Just some final thoughts here. This issue is so emblematic of Krakoa post-Inferno, basically the last 18ish months boiled down to its essence. Some good, some bad, a lot of it is just fine, and the art is largely just house style. There’s a ton of unrealized potential here, and ultimately, we’re never going to see it realized.

And you know what? That’s fine. Adam said a few minutes ago that it’s clearly time for Krakoa to end, and he’s right. While I would have loved for that ending to be something more like a hybrid between Krakoa and a reversion to the status quo, this was going to happen sooner or later.

In the end, I’m going to miss this era, just as much as I sometimes miss the Grant Morrison era. It has some of the highest highs the X-Men have ever seen, and legit, it had some lows, but none of Krakoa’s lows will be the dregs.

I kind of can’t wait to see it go, but also I’ll miss Krakoa. It was one of the greatest eras of my X-Men fandom, and legitimately helped me make some of the best friends I have. For that alone, it’ll be worth it.

X-Traneous thoughts

• How does the White Hot Room have a Krakoa? 
• Doom has a Krakoa seed. That will never come back and bite anyone in the ass.
• >|A|< can teleport now, I guess? 
• Worried about Mother Righteous making it out of the era? Don’t worry, Mystique has you covered. 
• Just like the cartoon, the comics remembered Bishop existed for a moment!
• Where do I get my Krakoa Was for Lovers T-shirt? 
• At least someone is acknowledging that Krakoa was all about the fuckfests. [MT]
• But did they have access to contraception or practice safe sex? [AP]
• While I always enjoy a callback to “radiant and with open arms,” that’s Kurt and Logan’s thing.
• Seeing Flora twice in this issue was a nice full-circle moment with House of X #1.
• It’s somewhat telling that the Chris Claremont portion and the “From the Ashes” portion of this issue go back to using an all-caps font, eschewing all of the formal trappings of the Krakoa era.

Buy X-Men #35 here. (Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate, ComicsXF may earn from qualifying purchases.)