3K finally makes a move, and that move is “exactly what Revelation did in the Age of Revelation.” A massive X-Men/Fantastic Four crossover kicks off in DNX #1, written by Jed MacKay, drawn by Federico Vicentini, colored by David Curiel and lettered by Clayton Cowles.
Tony Thornley: Nine months later and it’s finally time to get my new mutant power or a really bad cold from the X-Virus. It’s like the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic all over again, minus the virus that killed my pancreas.
Dan Grote: Personally I could use that Tempo/Tempus localized-time power so I could get more work done. Or tentacle arms.
Adam Reck: I’m just here to gawk at White Beast, aka “Chairman.” Thanks for the invite.
Scott Redmond: Wait, I thought we were just getting Philly cheesesteaks. I didn’t realize possible powers were on the table. This changes everything!
Call it a hunch
Tony: It’s time. The big confrontation between Cyclops and the Chairman, in which their teams are the ones doing the actual fighting. And also, none of the other X-Men, even though theoretically they’re all available thanks to X-Men United, which actually could use the sales boost of a crossover/mini-event. Except for one, who’s not revealed here, but in a tie-in X-Men #37. And the Fantastic Four.
Crossover logistics are confusing, yo.
Dan: Part of what attracts me to this crossover is its neatness, though. The various current X-books are so individually embroiled in their own thing, and any time they’ve been brought together over the past two years (“Raid on Graymalkin,” “X-Manhunt,” “Age of Doug”), it’s been like watching a bunch of cats row in eight different directions. This book already sets up an intrahero philosophical conflict between Reed Richards and the X-Men’s Beast; why muddy that with Cyclops, Rogue and Emma Frost all side-eyeing each other about differences in leadership?
Tony: That’s very true, but it does expose the issues of the current line. This is an all-hands-on-deck situation. Chairman McCoy is about to make mutants look really, really bad, yo. It should be concerning everyone. And yeah, with the Avengers currently either broken up or in the middle of fighting a human nuke, it falls to the X-Men and the Fantastic Four.
But it’s weird to only have one squad of X-Men and the Fantastic Four dealing with a world-ender.
Dan: I meeeeeeeeean, they are getting help from at least one extra X-person. (Spoilers for X-Men #37)
But even so, there’s character overlap between DNX and Avengers: Armageddon, so for those pedants who read Marvel for the interconnectedness of the universe, it can be confusing trying to suss out what characters should be doing what when.
Adam: I have to concur that after the endless Age of Revelation, having a tight miniseries that just crosses over Jed MacKay’s X-Men with Ryan North’s Fantastic Four is smart marketing. But it also speaks to the absolute disconnected mess of the X-line that something this big is only happening in one X-book.
Scott: While I agree that this is an all-hands-on-deck situation if there ever was one, I also like how tightly confined this event is, because yeah, Marvel events as of late are plentiful and messy as all get out when it comes to who should be where, doing what, and when. I mean technically there is a Hela/Knull invasion at the same time that the Avengers: Armageddon stuff is happening at the same time this is happening.
Only having to read this mini and X-Men and Fantastic Four to fill in concurrently happening events feels like a breeze. Also, Cyclops deciding “F this, we’re going to take this guy down ourselves” feels pretty in line with how things have been lately.
Tony: And yeah, X-Men has been the line’s flagship book, and it’s been the one at least semi-connected to the wider universe better than the rest of the line. It’s so jarring though that we’re still experiencing this whiplash two years after this editorial office was formed. I hate that we have to basically keep saying “during Krakoa,” but it wasn’t even just “during Krakoa.” The line was better connected during “Age of X-Man,” and during ResurreXion, and the Terrigen crisis…
Dan: OK, you’re giving the IvX era WAY too much credit.
Tony: This is the most disconnected the X-Men line has felt since probably the Grant Morrison/Chuck Austen era. And those books at least had the advantage of having a generational run and one of the most epic trainwrecks in comics history running simultaneously.
Scott: Some of those eras running numerous books with the same premise but different casts, yet feeling more connected, sure is something. But hey, a new era of Marvel is supposedly on the way!
Fly Eagles Fly
Tony: So it all begins in Philly (Dan: Go Birds!) because Scott thinks the Chairman is predictable. Which it turns out he is, at least to his oldest friend. 3K will drop the virus on the City of Brotherly Love as soon as the Chairman is able to. I kind of like that this plot point isn’t just “plot convenience” (which it is), but plot convenience that happens because the bad guy is very predictable and he’s ignoring that his enemy is one of his oldest friends in the world.
That fits with megalomaniac Chairman Hank McCoy, whose greatest weakness is hubris.
Adam: We’ve known 3K’s goals since early in Jed’s run. Age of Doug just gave Chairman Beast a shortcut to get there in 2026 instead of X years in the future. And of course he thinks he’s smarter than Doug and can actually make this work. The rest of 3K don’t have the same faith, most of them assuming (rightly) that the Chairman wants them dead.
Tony: The constant declarations of “stop not trusting me, I’m not trying to kill you!” are one of the best things about this issue. The Chairman cannot convince his evil allies that “yes, he’s evil but not THAT evil.” While they, obviously, are.
I say hubris is the Chairman’s weakness. I think ego is going to be 3K’s weakness overall. Evil Hank chose his allies poorly.
Scott: I actually found this part quite funny, because normally the villains like to act like they are really in lockstep, only to break apart as things go wrong. Here they stand at the peak of things seemingly going their way, and they can’t help but show they are all scorpions and assume the others are scorpions as well. As they correctly should. The Chairman was far more effective as a villain when he was enmeshed into the “hero” society and was able to pull things off on the down low, by himself. He’s now getting hit by the realization of why villain alliances always fail.
Dan: We never did get 3K’s origin story. Like, Nova I get; she’s powerful as hell, but how does one settle on Astra and Wyre for their mutant revenge society?
Tony: It would be very funny if the reason the Chairman invited Astra was entirely “I want a Magneto.”
Scott: Chairman ordered a Magneto, but turned out it was the Temu version, and came with an additional Astra.
Save Magneto, Save the World
Tony: The other main plot is Blue Beast convincing Reed to save Magneto. And the debate is interesting enough — should Reed Richards save Max? And is Magneto still a threat or has he redeemed himself?
Also, we continue to learn more about the degenerative comic science disease.
Dan: I still don’t understand how Magneto’s R-LDS works. If it came from the future, how did it come back farther in time than the point at which Scott/Evil Hank were pulled to/returned from Age of Doug?
Adam: Well, first off, we know R-LDS is not real. Magneto’s disability has nothing to do with Krakoan resurrection. Where it gets weird is Blue Hank’s belief that the key to stopping his evil self lies in a secret code in whatever is hurting Magneto. It’s like assuming there’s a message in invisible ink on your paper placemat at Denny’s and pulling out a lighter.
Tony: The thing that throws me is that I’ve read every issue of this volume of X-Men (which yes, this is its own miniseries, but it’s also basically the first half of X-Men #37, while actual X-Men #37 is the second half) and I have no idea when it was established that the R-LDS is not just “something” from the AOR, but also a message from the future.
Dan: It definitely feels like a logic leap we’re all being made to just go with.
Scott: It really feels like they loved the idea of a Krakoa-related disease and figured they would fill in the blanks later. It’s definitely one of the weakest parts of MacKay’s overall run.
Adam: Weirder than Blue Hank’s convictions are Reed’s objections to bringing Magneto back to full power. Magneto hasn’t been a true-blue villain in ages, and Reed hasn’t sounded this anti-mutant since the first Marvel Civil War. The argument extends far too long and feels unnecessary when this mini needs to get the action started.
Scott: All of this. I found myself just wanting these moments to be over as there was little behind Reed’s objections. Comparisons to a gun/weapon were beyond silly when this is a room full of people who are in most cases far more powerful and potentially devastating than a gun/weapon. The line between hero and villain is thin as hell, and people from both sides dance over it all the time in the Marvel Universe.
Dan: Even the rest of the FF are like, “What are ya jawin’ for Stretcho, let’s go,” to the point that Sue had already dispatched Johnny and Ben to Philadelphia, and lemme tell ya, I do love a good Ben Grimm entrance. It lets me know when it’s clobbering time!
Tony: Also, North’s volume of Fantastic Four has firmly said Sue Storm is the leader of the Four. It was implied at the beginning and firmly and explicitly stated when the series relaunched into a “media tie-in” new volume last year. I like how MacKay picked that up and made it clear that Sue isn’t just the leader in name but in practice. Sending Ben and Johnny to Philly is great, and it leads to such a fantastic last page.
Also, it’s so much better than “comin’ in hot!” “And orange!”
Adam: Yeah, so a good deal of this book feels like table setting, which is needed for anyone not following the story from X-Men (Fantastic Four readers, I guess?), but the real action doesn’t get started until Quentin and Cassandra throw down in X-Men #37. Given we’ve only got five issues of DNX, I did expect a little less standing on rooftops and in labs.
Scott: This kind of feels like an overall issue with Marvel when it comes to events. They spend months, sometimes years, seeding events in the “main” book the characters appear in, only to then spend most of the first issue of the event on setup, after which they have four, really three, issues to get into the actual meat of the event action. Then they have to quickly wrap it up with a conclusion that feels way too fast. I’m not saying this one will fall into that same trap, but it’s far too common for the overall publishing line.
X-traneous thoughts
- Can we agree for any other time we talk about this event, it’s “Chairman” for evil Hank and “Beast” for good?
- There are many moments in X-history that show Magneto’s cruelty and capacity for atrocity. Vicentini picked the moment every middle-aged man remembers from when they were 13 — Magneto ripping the adamantium out of Wolverine in X-Men Vol. 2 #25 — because it looked cool.
- If Reed should have a qualm about helping the X-Men, shouldn’t it be that time Charles Xavier made him forget how he created a device to suppress the mutant gene in his son? Mr. F has more beef with Professor X than he ever did with Mags.
- I appreciate that this comic addressed Johnny Storm shaving his mustache. It was my first question when he appeared on panel.
- Our Hank says 3K has “a Joseph.” There’s something funny about the fact that there have been multiple Magneto clones, and they are all named Joseph, and they all have the same terrible mother.
- All of the Alaskan X-Men are in the field, except for Glob Herman, who is still recovering from being shot, and Xorn, who is his doctor.
- Kaare Andrews’ cover does not match the tone of this book even a little bit. Who are these rubber-faced, all-chin heroes, and why do they all look like they’re voiced by Patrick Warburton?
- I want to point out that Andrews’ weird cleft chin and prominent jaw-bone is now his default “superhero dude” look. Just go find his variants for December’s Avengers #1.
- Hey, where the hell did Doug go anyway?
Buy DNX #1 here. (Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate, ComicsXF may earn from qualifying purchases.)
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.
Dan Grote is the editor and publisher of ComicsXF, having won the site by ritual combat. By day, he’s a newspaper editor, and by night, he’s … also an editor. He co-hosts The ComicsXF Interview Podcast with Matt Lazorwitz. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, two kids and two miniature dachshunds, and his third, fictional son, Peter Paul Winston Wisdom. Follow him @danielpgrote.bsky.social.
Adam Reck is the cartoonist behind Bish & Jubez as well as the co-host of Battle Of The Atom. Follow him @adamreck.bsky.social.
Scott Redmond
Scott Redmond is a freelance writer and educator fueled by coffee, sarcasm, his love for comic books and more "geeky" things than you can shake a lightsaber at. Probably seen around social media and remembered as "Oh yeah, that guy." An avid gamer, reader, photographer, amateur cook and solid human being. Follow him @scottredmond.bsky.social.
