ON THE X-MANHUNT: To attack and dethrone a goddess in X-Men #13

The X-Manhunt pits X-man against X-man in X-Men #13, written by Jed MacKay, drawn by Netho Diaz, inked by Sean Parsons, colored by Fer Sifuentes-Sujo and lettered by Clayton Cowles.

Tony Thornley: You know I didn’t expect a soft sequel to this volume’s psychic rescue story so soon, and in the middle of a crossover. But here we are.

Matt Lazorwitz: Dan Grote and I were talking about this series, and we realized it feels like a book that’s playing a long game, which we don’t get a lot of in modern comics. Plotlines come and go, and so it makes sense we’re seeing something like that come back now, although I didn’t expect it.

Goddess Against Avatar

Tony: Continuing from last week’s Storm, Cyclops’ team is in direct conflict with Ororo in the Thundercloud, her flying saucer. Ororo is possessed by a cosmic being, and pretty much the entire team is otherwise out of commission. And deep in the ship, Xavier has possessed Beast. It’s very much a rule-of-cool thing.

Where the rule of cool works, though? Storm has forced all but one member of the X-Men out of the fight. And who is that one member?

Cain Marko, the unstoppable Juggernaut.

That’s a hell of a setup, and shows the pace this issue moves at.

Matt: I don’t know when Juggernaut became one of my favorite characters in an X-book, but it happened somewhere. He’s a delight to read, especially here. He’s usually the comic relief, and he has some very fun moments here, but we also get the moment where he stands up to Storm and talks about the abuse he took from his father. It reminds us there’s more to him than just a guy who runs into stuff and cracks wise.

Unrelated to X-Men, I am really surprised that nowhere has anyone ever had Cain Marko and Bruce Banner have a conversation where they reckon with their abusive pasts. Especially since they took it and dealt with it in such different ways: Marko perpetuating the cycle of violence by being a tough guy, and Banner sublimating it into the Hulk.

Tony: I love the face turn that Juggernaut has had in the past 20 years. It’s built and refined one of the oldest X-Men characters into someone more interesting the more he appears. From exactly what you’re talking about with his abuse (and I would love a Banner/Cain sitdown in that manner) to his sense of humor, and even how he’s willing to become a Wolverine-style big brother figure, it’s all turned Cain into one of the more interesting and entertaining characters in the franchise.

Were you able to read last week’s Amazing Spider-Man #68.Death from Christos Gage and Mark Buckingham? It paired really well with this issue, basically as a Juggernaut solo story.

Matt: Oh, I have not! I’ll have to check that one out.

The other A+ Juggernaut moment was when Illyana reminds him that he can resummon and repair his armor since it’s bonded to his soul. Not only did I really enjoy the interplay between the two characters, but I had either forgotten or wasn’t aware of that aspect of Juggernaut’s powers, and revealing it could have been exposition, but that interplay made it feel like a character moment, which is the best kind of exposition.

Tony: Yeah, it really is. I really had never thought about how much fun a Storm-versus-Juggernaut fight could be, but this was a blast, through and through, especially as the team starts to recover and bounce back into the fight.

Another thing I love is Magik. Illyana bouncing in and out of different parts of the fight, grabbing Magneto’s helmet, all of that was just great. This is how a teleporter should be used, and they don’t do it enough with Yana.

Warning: Psychic Throwdown 

Tony: Charles Xavier and Quentin Quire in a psychic boxing match is a moment I didn’t know I wanted. The way Diaz draws it not only makes it exciting but visually switches up the issue significantly. It’s in this gorgeous ink-wash style that I want to see more of.

I dig how it’s written, it’s drawn even better, and really I think my only problem is that it’s not a little weirder.

Matt: The ink wash is absolutely stunning. Loved that.

[Editor’s note: Diaz says the psychic fight scene wasn’t ink wash but colored directly over pencils. Thanks, Netho!]

I’m OK with this being a little less weird than you might expect. Xavier takes the lead here, and Charles is so rigid and set in his ways that I think if he is even slightly in control of himself, his mindscape is going to be “real” and grounded. If we had spent more time with Quentin on the offensive, and more with him in control, then yes, I would have expected it to be more wild.

Tony: There was another thing that bothered me here — treating Charles as an omega. Charles Xavier is not an omega-level mutant. It’s been pretty firmly established at this point that Quentin and Jean are both superior telepaths to Charles as far as powers go, and Emma is better as far as skill.

I think this is just a change in language, because Charles’ skill could more than compensate for Quire’s raw power.

One thing MacKay has done really well is using the toys in his toy box, and this fight is a good example of that. While Quentin and Charles fight, Illyana steps back to the team’s base in Merle, Alaska, steals Magneto’s helmet and — back to San Francisco — plops it on Beast’s head. It’s always clever when writers use the helmet like that, and I really dig the humor it’s done with (“YOINK!”).

Matt: I laughed out loud at that moment with the helmet.

MacKay is also good at knowing which tools to hold back. The earlier part of that scene, where Magneto explains why Xorn didn’t go to San Francisco, makes a lot of sense, and generally explains why Xorn isn’t a combat character despite his power level. 

I agree that Xavier’s skill is superior to Quentin’s, but I think Quentin showed he is evolving in how he took down Xavier. Hanging on to that bit of Cassandra Nova’s trap from the end of the psychic rescue issue for just such an occasion is clever and proves that, as much as Quentin wants to come off as this fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants anarchist, he has the potential for real tactics. 

Tony: I don’t think any character has benefited more from the past five years than Quire. The guy just continues to grow and get more and more interesting. While he’ll probably never end up an A-list X-man, he’s steadily climbed to the level of someone like Dani Moonstar or Karma.

And that’s a long way of saying, thanks to all of that, I can absolutely believe him beating Xavier in this way. Pure head to head, no, but using a psychic trap? Absolutely.

Complications

Tony: These two fights lead to the same place. The X-Men regain their footing and bounce back against the possessed Storm and Xavier. This is where the issue gets messy, in my opinion.

First, the larger team puts a stop to the entity possessing Storm. And they do it by threatening to kill Maggott, who I forgot was even here.

And then after Quire springs the Cassandra Nova trap, Beast drops Magneto’s helmet on Chuck and knocks him out.

Matt: I liked the Quentin and Beast bit. That worked for me.

The Storm resolution is definitely not my favorite. As I am not reading Storm, I was a bit lost in all of this, and was not sure if there was really a cosmic being in her head or if that was something to do with Xavier’s psychic bleed, which is something that seems to come and go as the crossover needs it.

That’s the problem with this event. We’re moving from book to book, and it doesn’t feel very cohesive. Uncanny X-Men felt very disconnected from NYX, which felt very disconnected from everything else. If Xavier is really causing psychic trauma everywhere he goes, I want some show-not-tell on all of that. If San Francisco is going crazy, we should see some X-Men trying to do crowd control, or we have a West Coast Avengers book now; can’t we get a “collateral damage” issue where the WCAs are dealing with that? It would make it all feel more like a story and not a series of random encounters.

Tony: Yeah exactly. This is getting billed as a big deal, but it’s so scattered and small scale that it’s next to impossible to care. I would love to see what Charles’ psychic bleed is doing to civilians. And Ororo’s possession is just so poorly handled in general that I can’t help but wince at it. As confusing as it is here, it’s worse in her own series. 

Matt: I had really been hoping we would get something I liked more than “Raid on Graymalkin,” but we’re seeing the same problems we saw there writ even larger. The X-books have a feeling of lacking a direction, and awkward crossovers just demonstrate that. This book is at its best when it is the most character focused, and the best books of this era to me (Exceptional X-Men, NYX) are the ones that are character focused. This could have been that, focusing on each title’s cast dealing with their feelings about Xavier in the post-Krakoa world, but instead it is so much sound and fury, signifying very little, even in an issue that was generally enjoyable.

X-traneous Thoughts

• In the same way that the Scarlet Witch series keeps getting broken up by miniseries teaming her up with characters, after the initial arc of the Magik ongoing is done, could it be put on hiatus for a Magik & Juggernaut mini? I love that dynamic.
• This was like … two-thirds of a good issue.

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Tony Thornley

Tony Thornley is a geek dad, blogger, Spider-Man and Superman aficionado, X-Men guru, autism daddy, amateur novelist and all around awesome guy. He’s also very humble. Follow him @brawl2099.bsky.social.

Matthew Lazorwitz

Matt Lazorwitz read his first comic at the age of 5. It was Who's Who in the DC Universe #2, featuring characters whose names begin with B, which explains so much about his Batman obsession. He writes about comics he loves, and co-hosts the podcasts BatChat with Matt & Will and The ComicsXF Interview Podcast.