Who’s that man with the horns of a ram and your most personal data in the palm of his twitchy hand? It’s Sheldon Xenos, gene-editing superfan, and he’s got a frightening plan in Exceptional X-Men #7, written by Eve Ewing (whom we stan), drawn by Carmen Carnero (who follows her plan), colored by Nolan Woodard (grab your Ray-Bans) and lettered by Travis Lanham.
What do you do when your safe space, your friend group, your refuge in a threatening world, goes away? That’s the question almost every mutant had to face with the end of Krakoa. And it’s the question you’ll ask yourself, sooner or later, if you are (like me) emotionally attached to ongoing serial tales about company-owned characters, since serials of that kind always go on too long, or stop short, or change direction, or undermine their initial aims. No matter how much you like a particular status quo in, let’s say, X-comics, you know that it won’t be around forever — the end of an era, a change in ownership, a hostile editor, or an untimely retirement — will sooner or later do away with your favorite plot, subplot, setting, premise, or characters.
That’s why the fall of Krakoa — as messy and badly executed as it became — still stands for something important, if we take these cape comics, this “From the Ashes” era, as comments on why we read stories, comments on themselves. They’re also comments on the failure of, well, everything to provide us with real-life safe spaces, psychically and physically. Sometimes — when Exceptional X-Men tells stories about Kitty Pryde — this particular comic proposes solutions: get on your feet, put your oxygen mask on first, don’t try to found another nation, teach self-defense, embrace education. They’re very good stories. I hope Kitty thinks so too.
Sometimes, though, Exceptional X-Men just stays inside the sad. That’s what we get in the first few pages of Exceptional X-Men #7, each one a complete, page-wide composition, surveying Emma Frost as she surveys herself in her mirror, sorting through photographs of her former beaux, and settling on “the one that got away,” the lost love of her life: not any guy or lady but Krakoa, a nation where mutants could be ourselves. Sorry, themselves. The mutant metaphor works that way sometimes. “Time and again we construct these safe havens,” she muses, remembering and envisioning Krakoan beaches and fireworks, peaceful festivals and children seated together. “And it keeps blowing up in our faces.”
Never Grow Up
Stay with the sadness as long as you like, this comic says. You have a right to mourn. For pages and pages. Six one-panel pages, most of them in the opening Emma-remembers sequence, along with three pages where a couple small panels sit over a big one that fills the page: expressive, and beautiful, and faster to draw than five million nine panel grids, especially if a script comes in a bit short.
Today I learned that before “Here Comes Tomorrow” became the name for the last arc in the Morrison run, it was the title for a Monkees song in which Davy Jones wishes that he could “stand in someone else’s shoes” and step out of his own. You might feel that way, today: Emma sure does. But she’s still got work to do. And she does it, training the new kids (I almost wrote the new mutants), alongside Kitty, in the Exceptional version of a Danger Room sequence: supervised simulated combat in a dance studio, with close-up angles on the combatants, and no wacky tech anywhere.
Even here, when they’re co-teachers in a mini-school, the fabulous Ms. Frost can’t quite treat the dun-haired Chicagoan as her equal. But the kids treat their teachers as equals, and that’s what matters to Kitty, as when the two women give Melee contradictory advice: “Your White Queenliness, no offense, but I defer to Kitty on phasing stuff.” As she should.
This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
These new mutants (lowercase) are, well, new. So young and new that they don’t know their own history, except for what Emma and Kitty have made sure to tell them, and what they might discover on the Internet. They all know Krakoa, but Bronze, who’s not a history buff, has never heard of Charles Xavier. In-universe, it’s a lovely way to acknowledge, and dodge, the Hunt for Xavier that has eaten up slices of all other X-books lately. It also feels real. Most of my students have never heard of ACT UP. Emma tells Melee that the loss of Krakoa hurts teen mutants too: “They took away your home. Even if you never went there.”
I’d read — honestly I’d prefer to read — 26 pages of nothing but this kind of drama: anguished conversations, training sequences, emotional adjustments, teenage angst, adult grief, and careful allegories for real-world politics, with all the fighting offstage. Marvel would barely let Chris Claremont and Paul Smith do that kind of comic in the mid-1980s, and I can’t imagine it coming from Ewing and Carnero — or from anybody — today, though the exceptional Exceptional line gets as close as it can. But there’s also a B-plot that will lead to violence: Axo’s internship at (wait for it) Verate, the company that collects everybody’s genomic information in order to let you improve your life, address your problems, and (of course) cure mutation.
Not knowing enough mutant history, Axo’s condemned to repeat it: he’s got a internship with Sheldon Xenos, the glad-handing horn-headed CEO at Verate, He’s taken the gig for idealistic and for personal reasons, since he’s big and green and can’t remotely pass. He’s also got (why has no X-story explored this idea before?) a mutant power that makes people open up to him, psionic empathy that he’s still learning to control. He took the gig because he’s wondering how his life would feel without that power. Would anyone, as a great singer once asked, love me for me?
Alas, Verate’s the kind of gig you can’t quit. Sheldon leads Axo into a room full of shadows and telescreens, and starts to villain-splain his master plan, and… what recurring X-villain really, really wants to collect everybody’s genomic information, and also loves pseudonyms and disguise? If you’re the kind of X-fan who reads this site on the regular, you’ll probably guess Sheldon’s other name. I regret that I failed to guess that name before Sheldon told us himself. It’s quite the cliffhanger. I sense a rescue in store.
Points of Pryde
- Carnero and Woodard absolutely outdo themselves on Emma’s fashion choices and accessories in that opening sequence. Also of note: a rare picture of Scott Summers smiling.
- Emma remembers (again in that opening sequence) not just Krakoa but the now-underrated Utopia era, and the destruction of Genosha, depicted in the colors of dirt and sandstone. Did Krakoa contain memorials to those projects? Will someone build a Krakoa memorial, now?
- Kitty’s hair looks more elaborate than ever: I don’t think she’s worn it that way before. Could her new (non-mutant) gf be doing her hair?
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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.
