It’s time to drop anchor in home port and let the crew disembark: Emma Frost quits, Kate investigates her disability, there’s one more fight on one more ship, and Marauders as we know it comes to an end. Marauders #27, written by Gerry Duggan, art by Matteo Lolli except where it’s by Phil Noto, colors by Rain Beredo except where they’re by Phil Noto too and boy is that distracting, letters by Cory Petit.
Ian Gregory: Marauders is over, long live Marauders. After nearly five issues of knowing this series is coming to an end, we have at last reached the final issue of the Duggan era, knowing that Steve Orlando’s Marauders is just around the corner (in literally two weeks).
Stephanie Burt: I’m usually the one who tries to get excited about everything, defend every odd plot decision, and No-Prize away the inconsistencies, but this issue honestly reviews itself: in Emma Frost’s words, “I was trying to do too much, and not doing any of it as well as I could.” It’s half talking heads over stiff narration (albeit effectively drawn by Noto) and half Kate and Bobby and Bishop flailing around in search of their next character beats, and looking like wax figurines half the time (Lolli has done, and I hope will do, much better elsewhere). At least the shipboard combat scenes look cool.
Ian: In a way, the split art duties fit the patchwork nature of this issue pretty well – in a semi-ironic synergistic sense. But maybe having Noto being part of that split is a mistake. I love Noto’s art, but his style is so distinctive that it’s painfully obvious when the art changes.
Stephanie: The full-page spread with Kate in full Red Queen regalia, posing in front of a gate she can’t use? Lovely. Kind of perfect. After that the Lolli art goes sour for me: Kate’s and Forge’s faces look shiny and slippery and wrong. I see why Kate’s so hung up on becoming someone who can use the gates– she’s the only mutant who can’t!– but I don’t understand the tone of her exchange with Forge: he makes a kind of Yakov Smirnov chiastic semi-joke (“In America, Kate, you disrupt technology; on Krakoa, technology disrupt you!”) and she reacts as if he’s accused her of betraying her best friend.
Lourdes and Bishops
Ian: It’s been teased since even before the Hellfire Gala, but Lourdes finally makes her return public in this issue. The only thing missing? Lourdes actually introducing herself to the island. Where this issue picks up, Lourdes is just settling in on the island, riding horses with Emma. This felt like an odd choice – why not show Lourdes’ actual arrival and the reactions to her? – but Duggan has largely seeded the reactions to Lourdes’ survival throughout the past several months of Marauders. There aren’t many people left to be surprised she’s alive.
Stephanie: Or to care? I loved this book when it was about survival on the high seas, and about how it feels to be resurrected, and about learning to enjoy a kind of power you didn’t even know you had: i.e. when it was a book about Kate and Emma. I liked it when it was Star Wars. I’m having trouble caring about who holds a majority stake in the family business, no matter how big the business happens to be, and this book requires me to care. It also requires me to shift focus every few pages, and no wonder: in his last issue Duggan has to get Lourdes into the Hellfire Trading Company, get Emma out of it, get Pyro and Christian and Bobby Drake off the Marauder (the ship) and presumably off Marauders (the book), wrap up his ill-conceived subplot involving Wilhelmina Kensington’s recovery from abuse, and put Kate back in the spotlight. No wonder he can’t entirely pull it off. But wow, we’ve got a lot of talking heads, and the dialogue doesn’t make them come alive enough. Nor does Emma’s boxed narration. (Lest I come away sounding like a Duggan hater, I would like to let the audience know that I love current adjectiveless, which plays far more to Duggan’s strengths!)
Ian: There’s some Council-related maneuvering here (presumably, ahead of Immortal X-Men), and Shaw is ousted as Black King in favor of Lourdes. I can’t say I’m so excited for this change given how little we know about Lourdes – Shaw may be an evil bastard, but he’s entertaining to watch. I did appreciate that his seemingly meaningless abdication came with the goal of putting Shinobi in a stronger position. Whether Shinobi actually becomes relevant or just gets sidelined for another twenty issues remains to be seen.
Probably the most interesting part of the end result with all the Council changes is that Emma appears to be gearing up for a more direct rivalry with Sinister. Shaw and Shinobi moving in the background to destabilize and discredit Emma and Lourdes could be an interesting angle on things, but one that seems almost outside the remit of Marauders itself.
Stephanie: Shaw does warn Lourdes against Shinobi, even while promising Shinobi his support. But, again, who cares? It’s a few evil deceivers who might double-cross one another while going up against a nearly blank slate: Lourdes has a history but I’m not sure she has a personality yet (prove me wrong, Mr. Orlando!). Emma vs. Mr. Sinister, on the other hand, I would absolutely pay to watch. Will pay to watch.
I also support the Cuckoos taking a larger role: they’re one of the Morrison innovations that just keeps on fitting into modern X-books without derailing them. Which is not something I’d say about Cassandra Nova.
Crypto Is a Mutant Scam
Ian: It’s unfortunate that Pyro is leaving the book, because he gets more to do in this issue than he has in ages. I love his obsessive need to provide backstory to his and Bishop’s scam, not that Verendi think for even a second they’re being bluffed. Then he even gets a neat moment to stop himself from getting shot in the head.
Stephanie: 100%. Of course they remember Pyro’s a romance novelist. Of course Christian Frost needs a new name. And of course Duggan can’t help going for the joke about how Bishop won’t let anybody confuse him with Blade. Did Pyro get his face tattoo removed because Krakoan resurrection removes tattoos? I hope no one offs Ink. (Or uses him, for that matter.)
Ian: This fight sequence works much better for me than last week’s. Fin Fang Foom coming out of nowhere, taking some hits, then vanishing was so removed from the plot of the issue it felt like total whiplash. This fight, where the Marauders successfully scam Verendi out of eight billion in crypto (eight billion in what, exactly?), at least makes sense with the general mission of the Marauders, and even if it doesn’t come into play in the long-term, it’s a nice picture of the kind of activities the Marauders get up to on the regular.
Stephanie: It’s the only part of the book that really worked. Fast, fun, silly but politically pointed, and just cartoonish enough. I love the outfits Lolli and Beredo give Pyro and Bishop. They look like movie arms dealers, and that’s the point. (Or like Miami Vice villains, for those of us elderly enough to remember Miami Vice.)
Ian: I’m young enough that Miami Vice came back around for my generation as a kind of nostalgia for the unremembered 80s (thanks James Murphy). This section is lighthearted, fun, and I even liked the little cutaway to Iceman fighting some frost trolls. Like you said above: this is the kind of material that best suits this cast.
Seeking Further Opportunities
Ian: Duggan kindly cleans up the roster ahead of Orlando’s new team. Pyro quits for a book tour, Emma to focus more on the Council, and Bobby and Christian are going on vacation. Wilhelmina (remember her?) gets a brief moment in Madripoor before she too gets shuffled off the board by Callisto and Masque. That these resignations take place during a full-on battle against Reavers high in the sky is a nice touch – even the Marauders aren’t phased by the kind of fights they go through.
Stephanie: I see what you did there.
Ian: While the other issues since the announcement of the Marauders change-over have felt very perfunctory, this one does manage to introduce some interesting ideas and momentum to the series. It’s odd to wrap up the Wilhelmina story now, and not when it was relevant after the Gala, but at the time I was practically begging to see less of her, so maybe I’m getting what I wanted. Similarly, the ending of the issue (with Kate showing up to talk to Mr. Fantastic) may have been more at-place shortly following the actual X-Men/Fantastic Four series where Charles actually wipes his memory (at the end of that series, he eliminates Reed’s ability to make his mutant gene detector/cloaker). I appreciate that Duggan let it sit for a long time, but I definitely needed a reminder of when exactly Reed got his memory messed with (I assumed it was during the Gala).
Stephanie: Kate sneaks into the Baxter Building, rather than ringing the doorbell, because she doesn’t want the Krakoan establishment to know she came (surely Reed would simply let her in), and she’s bringing Krakoan flora so that Reed can learn how Krakoan flora work so that Reed can figure out why Krakoan flora– i.e. the Gateways– reject her. Right? And in exchange, Kate can help Reed re-acquire whatever information Charles erased.
This kind of secret dealing seems honestly out of character for Kate– maybe she’s learned from Emma. But the dialogue feels a bit out of character too: “I was born a ghost and trained by a ninja.” You were trained by Ogun, a mind-control villain, Logan isn’t a ninja, and the last time you thought about ghosts around Reed was when you almost took your own life, in Fantastic Four vs. X-Men #3. Everyone’s pretty blasé about it now. I wish they weren’t. It’s a comic that means a lot to me.
Ian: I’ve noticed a general trend towards blowing off the effects of Ogun on Kate lately. There have been a couple references to her being “ninja trained” or “a ninja” which feels like a serious misrepresentation of what happened in that comic.
Stephanie: Cassandra Nova’s up next, and the only continuing characters will apparently be Kate and Bishop (not to be confused with Kate Bishop). Ian, do you have any sense of what Orlando-era Marauders readers should expect?
Ian: Orlando has said that he wants to refocus the series on part of the Marauder’s original charter that was rarely explored: mutant rescue. We’ll see what that means in practice, but I’m hoping that we get a more goals-oriented Marauders, who are more concerned with doing their actual job than hanging about organizing Galas and doing politics.
X-Traneous Thoughts
- The orchid placed on the X-Desk (in the data page) definitely either feels like a callout to ORCHIS, or some kind of Krakoan flower. [Ed. Note: This is what you get for not reading Wolverine]
- Masque reshapes Wilhelmina’s face but we don’t see the end result of that reshaping (we just hear that she’ll remain comely), which means that any unusually young femme character we meet from now on could be Wilhelmina in disguise.
- Whenever we see Emma on horseback the Internet cries out “Justice for Butter Rum!”
- Has anyone seen Franklin Richards lately?
- Hold Fast
Ian Gregory is a writer and co-host of giant robots podcast Mech Ado About Nothing.
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.
