Remembering Krakoa: How the last 5 years of X-Men comics changed a life, and a website

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It was the last week of July, 2019. House of X #1 had come out and I wasn’t convinced. I loved the artwork. I was interested in what Jonathan Hickman was setting up. My growing group of comics-obsessed friends were already proclaiming it a hit. But I was still spending that week being the most cautious X-Men fan I possibly could. If I let my hopes get too high after just one issue, I knew I was bound to be disappointed. I knew that if I jumped on board too eagerly with this new launch, there was a very good chance it would break my comics-loving heart. I was still getting over the last disappointment. 

It had been roughly four years since the end of the Brian Michael Bendis era (a three-year run that I absolutely adored), and they had not been good years. We had been treated to a bizarre set of stories that had tried to make a huge publishing push for the Inhumans and expected us to accept Cyclops was mutant Hitler because he tried to stop a traveling killer fart. There were occasional sparks of creativity and imagination, especially in the time-stalling Age of X-Man event that wrapped a week before HOX #1. Overall though, the franchise felt stagnant and immobile. I was ready for something new, while being very aware that the next new thing could be just as bad as what had come before. 

Then the rest of HOXPOX came out. Hickman came prepared with the retcon of all retcons in Moira X. Pepe Larraz, R.B. Silva and Marte Gracia delivered staggering artwork that represented enormous leaps in their artistic skills. There was a Krakoan island, Krakoan medicine, Krakoan gates, Krakoan tumors(!), and a Krakoan alphabet (for which no one at Marvel gave anyone in the X-Office a typeable font, so when I made one and distributed it on social media, multiple writers started using it in their scripts). There were “data pages,” and villains were going to live side by side with our heroes. There was a new evil organization called Orchis hellbent on mutant destruction, and – was that Mars (or Galm)?! I distinctly recall my Battle of the Atom co-host Zack Jenkins gleefully waiting for my real-time reaction to one of the biggest reveals, and when I read the introduction to The Five, the serotonin hit was huge. We marveled at the roster – Tempus was there, Hope was the actual mutant messiah, and I almost fell out of my chair when I found out that GOLDBALLS had been laying EGGS?! Just like that, death, a silly obstacle in the history of long-form serial comics storytelling, was wiped from the board. J-HiX was serving up an incredible remix, plucking all of these disparate elements from X-history and composing them into a new, rich tapestry. And I was IN. 

I wasn’t the only one. My relatively new friends Chris Eddleman and Robert Secundus were furiously writing page-by-page analysis of every issue as they came out, an exhaustive enterprise they playfully named HOX POX TOX. Suddenly, Zack’s XavierFiles website wasn’t just a place for him to share his thoughts on X-Men, or to post pages of my Bish and Jubez webcomic. The site was hosting big ideas and collaborating with a larger community. And over the course of 2020, the XavierFiles crew began to grow significantly as like-minded fans and writers bonded over this new, exciting era of X-Men. Suddenly we were collaborating with new friends from WMQ Comics, WWAC, Real Gentlemen of Leisure and more, all fueled by passionate speculation about this new era of X-Men that rekindled our genuine love of comics. 

Hickman’s world of X-Men was growing, too. The initial line of books known as Dawn of X had been announced. While Senior Editor Jordan D. White would oversee the operation, J-HiX would be the “Head of X,” ensuring that the books aligned with the world envisioned by HOXPOX. As books were added to the roster, a writing team emerged that wasn’t just made up of older white men who’ve historically dominated mainstream comics. This new creative team employed an online “X Slack” that left no one working in isolation, an approach to structure and planning that seemed more akin to a TV show’s writers room. Tini Howard, Gerry Duggan, Benjamin Percy, Bryan Edward Hill, Ed Brisson and, later, Age of X-Man alumni Leah Williams and Vita Ayala began building out the world of Krakoa, and with each new issue, readers were introduced to spectacular geography, new insights into the politics of this new nation-state, and bold new takes on characters and concepts that would drive the story forward. Alongside the writing team, a talented crew of artists including Leinil Francis Yu, Joshua Cassara, Marcus To, Rod Reis and Matteo Lolli contributed to the visual design of the space and all its peculiarities, picking up on what Larraz and Silva had started.

The growing XavierFiles community, now linked through our own Slack, wanted to follow up the success of Rob and Chris’ HOX POX TOX with coverage of the new books. So, following in the model of their initial coverage, new collaborators from across comics Twitter, including Christi Eddleman and Violet Gullapalli, Charlie Davis and Nola Pfau, Allison Senecal and Zach Rabiroff, Andrea Ayres and Tony Thornley, and Ari Bard and Kenneth Laster, paired off in conversational teams, each writer bringing their unique talents to their reviews. The hype was very real, and as new galaxy-brain concepts like the Crucible, or what Nightcrawler’s mutant religion would be, or what was going on with the Children of the Vault dropped, our hive mind was buzzing with excitement over the possibilities of all of it. This doesn’t mean we were unilaterally positive about everything; go back to those reviews and you’ll find plenty of fair criticism. But the fact that X-Men was thought provoking for the first time in what felt like forever linked us all together in a unique way. 

The initial excitement about Krakoa peaked in many ways at the end of February 2020 at C2E2 in Chicago. Zack and I had been doing our Battle of the Atom podcast for almost three years at that point and had yet to meet each other in person. Now we were both headed to Chicago to share an AirBnB with the Eddlemans, Charlie Davis and Thomas Cummins, which we affectionately called the “X-Loft.” I was an NYCC die-hard; but this was my first time in Chicago or at C2E2. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to continue building this online community in person. That weekend we came face to face with almost the entire X-Office – save for J-HiX, who we were told had been sequestered in his hotel room to catch up on late scripts. Zack and I split up and interviewed Reis, Howard, Brisson, Percy, Duggan, Ayala and Williams all in a single day. My blank cover copy of House of X #1 became filled with signatures. It was a thrilling day of talking to the folks who were responsible for making the books that had been thrilling us for more than a year. To top it all off, a panel with the X-Office was promising “years” worth of Krakoan stories, including a new linewide crossover called X of Swords. We were on cloud nine. Was that Eye Boy with an Eye-Sword?! 

And then? Well, you know what happened next. 

The global COVID-19 pandemic swept into all of our lives, and we went from a weekend of face-to-face interviews and in-person hangouts to barely leaving our houses for months. Amid all this uncertainty and tragedy, 2020 became an oddly fruitful time creatively for the XavierFiles team. There were enough of us now that the site started covering more than just X-Men comics. There were more editorials and thoughts about the industry as a whole. XavierFiles was turning into ComicsXF, we just didn’t know we’d be calling it that. 

Another byproduct of being stuck at home? Weekly Zoom calls with the entire XF team. Sometimes these were just chill hangs to relieve the boredom. Other times there was a table read of “The Demon Bear Saga” complete with some unexpectedly great voice acting. There was also a PowerPoint night where I talked about ’80s Rock Lord action figures, and bar-style trivia nights where Will Nevin did his best to stump us all. Zack and I did multiple live episodes of Battle of the Atom, I hosted live X-Men Trivia Nights online, I . . . grew a mustache? Let’s just say we did our best to have fun in what was admittedly a dark time. 

As we carried on and grew, Marvel and the X-Office did, too. After some publishing delays, the Krakoa era continued with new books like Giant-Size X-Men, Wolverine, Hellions, Cable and X-Factor. The linewide crossover X of Swords expanded to an epic 22 issues up from its original 15, delivering a spectacular collision between Otherworld and a new status quo for Apocalypse and his recently revealed family. The X-Office was continuing to deliver the world building we’d come to expect, and even if every issue wasn’t an outright classic, it felt like we were truly living through a renaissance of X-stuff. We were still asking questions like “What’s that key for?” or “What is Doug talking to in the basement of the X-Mansion?” Questions that had the possibility to pop up in stories in a few months, or maybe even in a few decades. The future was limitless. 

With all the new creative energy and expanded community formed throughout the past year, we decided it was time to create a new identity. XavierFiles wasn’t just Zack anymore, and the website’s branding needed to reflect that. We put our heads together and threw out an incredible number of bad ideas (I seem to recall fixating on filing cabinets for some reason?) until we finally agreed on the simple and succinct name of ComicsXF or CXF for short. Our in-house graphic designer Jason Large got to work on logos, a new look for the site, and even new recurring features that would set us apart from other comic book coverage sites. But the core “TOX” format would remain: Two or more intelligent readers having a conversation about the books and industry at large, in as entertaining a way as possible. ComicsXF officially launched on Jan. 1, 2021, to widespread critical acclaim! Well, maybe not widespread. But people were reading and that made us happy. 

We weren’t the only ones changing. The initial “chapter” of the Krakoan Era had ended, and we had entered the Reign of X. The X-Office continued to grow, welcoming Al Ewing and Valerio Schiti on SWORD, Ayala started a classic run on New Mutants, Si Spurrier and Bob Quinn took on Nightcrawler with Way of X, and long-rumored books like Tini Howard’s X-Corp finally saw the light of day. There was even going to be a new volume of X-Men set in . . . New York? (Wait, what was going on here, I thought these were island stories?) We saw our first books since Fallen Angels get nixed, including Williams’ X-Factor, whose rushed ending did not sit well with fans. We were also invited to our first Hellfire Gala to partake in the first ever X-Men Vote. Did I mention the X-Men terraformed MARS?! Things were changing, sometimes successfully, other times less so, but the biggest news hit in August: Hickman was leaving. 

Ask any one of my CXF colleagues and they will tell you I am still bitter about this [Editor’s Note: It’s true]. I continue to feel a little like the kid whose dad went out for cigarettes and never came back. Which is a silly thing to think about a guy who’s only eight years older than me, but whatever. I was told constantly that this was the way comics worked, and that we’d never see him on X-Men again. I refused to believe it. He had a multi-act story worked out! We were only in Act II! (It would turn out that actually we were still in Act I, a decision made by the rest of the X-Office to push back the next part of Hickman’s plan. Despite the Head of X nomenclature, the X-Office was a group of collaborating pros, and the creative decision making was collective, not just that of a sole auteur) I was convinced that after he left following Inferno he would be back. Or that we’d see him come back annually to write a mini to push the story along. Eventually he’d return to tell the end of his epic. But in the meantime, I had to come to terms with this jarring news, so I did the only thing I could do – I optimistically threw my support behind the rest of the more than capable Krakoan creators. I wasn’t going to turn my back on this world I loved just two and a half years into the project. I couldn’t. And with the strength of some of the stories still being told, I didn’t want to.  

What filled the heady void of Hickman’s absence shaped the remaining years of Krakoa, and what ultimately became its end. We were treated to Ben Percy leading Wolverine and Moira on full-throttle action movie adventures in X Lives and X Deaths of Wolverine, while Duggan continued on with the front-facing superhero stories, and Spurrier continued doing his thing with Nightcrawler and Legion. It was Kieron Gillen and Ewing who stepped into the “big concepts” role with Immortal X-Men and X-Men Red. Gillen’s influence on the line was unmistakable, especially once he helmed the enormous company-wide crossover AXE: Judgment Day in 2022, incorporating the Avengers and Eternals into the world of Krakoa as well as anyone could. Under Gillen and Ewing, the line became less concerned with Orchis and the existential threats outlined in HOXPOX, and more focused on a newly revealed quartet of Misters Sinister plaguing corners of the X-Universe. By the time-hopping and ambitious Sins of Sinister, it was clear who was driving the narrative. 

It was also clear that Hickman wasn’t the only member of the original X-Slack who wasn’t sticking around. Howard, who served as a major architect of Krakoa, Otherworld and Arakko in the first two years, was seeing her post-Excalibur books canceled. Excalibur was turned into Knights of X and then Betsy Braddock: Captain Britain. For whatever reason, these books weren’t clicking with audiences and suddenly Krakoa was down another founding member. Likewise, Ayala’s New Mutants wrapped with issue #33, and nothing new popped up for them in the X-Office. And while Williams had one last iconic turn with X-Terminators, it would be the last time we’d see her on Krakoa as well. With Howard, Ayala and Williams’ departures, a writer’s room that started with a modicum of diversity had gone back to the age-old default of all (mostly straight) white men.

ComicsXF was seeing changes, too. The pandemic days of work-at-home were behind us, and for many of us that meant less time to write and create for the site. The roster of creators at CXF contracted and grew in equal measure as we said goodbye to incredible talents who were more than busy elsewhere and engaged with new, brilliant writers who found kinship in our particular flavor of fun. Life got in the way, but also (Jurassic Park reference incoming) found a way. The biggest shift would come in mid-2023 when, after admitting that the site was becoming too much with his day-to-day life, Zachary Jenkins turned over editor-in-chief responsibilities to our more than capable friend and WMQ Comics collaborator Dan Grote through ritualistic trial by combat. But I’m getting ahead of the timeline here. 

If anyone was unclear where Krakoa was headed, Duggan elicited gasps from a crowded room at New York Comic Con in October 2022 when he announced what would be the final chapter of the Krakoan era, The Fall of X, by saying, “The X-Men have been winning for a long time. How long did you think the villains were going to leave them alone?” X-fans scratched their heads. Had the X-Men been winning? It did seem like the ultimate battle with Orchis, with Moira, with the Sinisters was all going to come to an exciting head. And with any Fall comes a Rise – right? This couldn’t be the actual end of Krakoa – could it? 

Spoiler alert: It was. But despite a demanding schedule, the era tried to go out with a bang. The X-line added nine miniseries to their five core books and moved Duggan’s Iron Man under the X-banner. The Fall of X would eventually add an additional five miniseries to that number, and that’s even before counting the era-concluding Fall of the House of X and Rise of the Powers of X. 

Within this flood of books, it became clear in the summer of 2023 we were facing the (an) end. In July, a teaser was floated for something called “The New X-Men” using the Age of Apocalypse font. (This title would later turn out to be a planned post-Fall of X title that eventually morphed into Weapon X-Men). But just weeks later, the bigger announcement dropped: Executive Editor Tom Brevoort changed his profile icon to the red X and signaled he was taking over the X-Office in the coming year. A new direction was on the horizon for the X-books. 

Deciphering the many-layered and chaotic story beats presented across the multiple intertwined titles that wrapped the Fall of X wasn’t always easy. Where Krakoan stories had largely worked independently but in the same world before, it was impossible to really grasp the narrative unless you were reading the bulk of the books. Fall of the House of X, Rise of the Powers of X and X-Men Forever blended into a singular but ultimately confusing continuity. But at least in the final issues of Rise and X-Men Vol. 6, it felt like Gillen, Ewing and Duggan had landed the plane. Now it was time to look back – to memorialize, to mourn, and maybe even move forward. 

So much happened over the course of these five years on and around Krakoa. In my own life, I saw my daughter go from an elementary schooler to a teenager ready for high school in what felt like the blink of an eye. I started a great new job. I got amicably divorced. And I lost and mourned loved ones who passed, all while living through an inconceivable Trump presidency and a global pandemic. All these memories, good and bad, are intertwined with the creative and social community that grew out of my relationships through ComicsXF and Battle of the Atom, and many a conversation about what was happening on this wacky island with trees that made root beer. Of course my biggest new relationship was the one I forged with my new partner, my one and only, Dr. Anna Peppard. Long before we started dating, I saw this gorgeous smartie in many a Zoom hangout, which turned into guesting on each others’ podcasts and even collaborating on writing. Now we’re planning the next stage of our lives together. 

I don’t know if it’s weird or not to look back on an eventful period of time in one’s life and associate it with superhero comics. But I have a feeling, whether there’s a second age of Krakoa or even a third, that I’m going to look back on this time with a great deal of nostalgia. These stories, their creators and the community we built alongside them sustained me through some very difficult times and helped me emerge stronger on the other side. As I watched Krakoa float up into the twinkling distance of the White Hot Room, and saw the toys put back in their box for a new creative team to strut their stuff, I had a feeling of gratitude and hope that no matter what the future of these characters might be, I’ll always look back fondly on this era of comics that challenged me, made me think – and ultimately changed my life forever. 

Adam Reck

Adam Reck is the cartoonist behind Bish & Jubez as well as the co-host of Battle Of The Atom.