In a stunning turn of events, the Progenitor has abdicated from the position of God to spend the rest of his days as an omniscient corpse. The position of God has been turned over to noted religious extremist Ajak. Truly, an inspiring moment as we get our first female God.
A.X.E.: Judgment Day #6 was written by Kieron Gillen, drawn by Valerio Schiti with Ivan Fiorelli, colored by Marte Gracia and lettered by Clayton Cowles.
Sean Dillon: GOD IS DEAD. GOD REMAINS DEAD. AND WE HAVE KILLED HIM. HOW SHALL WE COMFORT OURSELVES, THE MURDERERS OF ALL MURDERERS? WHAT WAS HOLIEST AND MIGHTIEST OF ALL THAT THE WORLD HAS YET OWNED HAS BLED TO DEATH UNDER OUR KNIVES: WHO WILL WIPE THIS BLOOD OFF US? WHAT WATER IS THERE FOR US TO CLEAN OURSELVES? WHAT FESTIVALS OF ATONEMENT, WHAT SACRED GAMES SHALL WE HAVE TO INVENT? IS NOT THE GREATNESS OF THIS DEED TOO GREAT FOR US? MUST WE OURSELVES NOT BECOME GODS SIMPLY TO APPEAR WORTHY OF IT?
Austin Gorton: Is … is this where I buy one of those cute pink robot balloons? I’m just looking for one of those balloons of the cute pink robot that helped save humanity.
Sean, we have reached the end (well, nearly) of Judgment Day. Before we dive into the details, on a high level, how are you feeling about this as an event, now that we’ve seen the majority of it?
Sean: Recently, Steve Morris of Shelfdust did a poll of comics critics as to the best event comics of all time. Were this to have ended prior to that list being released, I have no doubt it would’ve made my top five. It’s an absolute joy of a series, and I’ve had fun covering each chapter of it!
Austin: Big cosmic thumbs up from me as well. I can pick some nits (I think Druig largely disappearing from the narrative after kicking things off seems like a mistake, and some of the scheduling issues — which of course won’t matter in the grand scheme of things — made for a disjointed reading experience), but for the most part, this was a surprisingly cohesive event that was also largely entertaining. While Kieron Gillen wasn’t the only creator involved, it is definitely a case of everyone else working to execute his vision of the story, and it speaks to what a difference it can make when an event is driven by a creative vision and not just “marketing says we need another crossover now.”
Shall we dive into the details of the climax?
God’s Gonna Cut You Down
Sean: To start with, everything’s on fire. And once again, we return to people. The people who died being terrible, those who tried to be better, and the people who were simply there and did nothing special. But, as Gillen has been hammering over and over again, that’s the point. Everyone’s important. Be you an insignificant bigot, a superhero or a courier. You matter. You are all agents in this wonderful world of ours. You are complicit in its grandeur and monstrosity. If you can’t accept that, then we’re all fucked.
Austin: As the world burns, the Avengers, X-Men and Eternals work to save what they can of humanity (for now) by bringing everyone left alive into the Eternals’ massive cities, turning them into, as Starfox calls them, life rafts. There’s a charming exchange here between Starfox and Nightcrawler that will, in hindsight, prove somewhat ironic, as Nightcrawler notes how nice it must be for Starfox to have all the people they’re saving cheer for him. Starfox also notes that love is infinite, which is one of Gillen’s themes as well, and he calls Nightcrawler his hero. I know Starfox is, unfortunately, a problematic character, but Gillen has deployed him well, and I kind of want to just hug him here.
Sean: All the while, God basically looks at everything with a mix of mild pleasure and contempt. He’s still interested in humans, despite them basically failing miserably. The absurdity of life — of wanting to get your bike from the hell sphere — is charming. But it’s not enough. It’s never going to be enough. So, rather than go for the clever solution, God opts to just break reality itself. And, well, boom.
Thankfully, there are people here to save the day!
Austin: There’s something legitimately terrifying in the way the Progenitor keeps overcoming the obstacles thrown at it by the heroes. With the AI machine that runs the world rebooted by Phastos, Progenitor decides to just cut out the middle man entirely and begins cutting his way through the planet to the Reality Loom. That this is couched as action prompted by the part of Progenitor that comes from Tony Stark is all the more troubling. At this point, the only hope is the team battling to destroy Progenitor from within.
Sean: That goes poorly as the Eternals, free from their control, make choices. Mainly, Ajak decides to save God. God uses this, and the X-Men’s decision to kill God, as justification to kill everyone. Because no one is willing to change. They will merely enact the illusion of change. But the Eternals are eternal and will never be anything other than eternal.
Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)
Austin: Yet something has changed. As the inside-Progenitor strike team reaches its core, the Eternals realize their God has changed something: By temporarily deactivating their protocols and resealing their mental firewalls, they can no longer be controlled by the telepaths of the X-Men. But they are also free to finally act on their own, free of their adherence to the Celestials’ rules. Inside the core of Progenitor, the strike team sees that the Eternals’ god has taken a new form. Ajak argues that while killing it will stop the immediate destruction (and allow mutants to gain ascendancy, as all their dead can be resurrected) everyone else who has died already will stay dead. Tony agrees, and so the decision is made to attempt to reason with God.
Sean: Meanwhile, the X-Men have bribed one of their baddies — Orchis — into helping save the day. This does not go well for anyone other than the bastards, as God decides to just keep doing what he’s been doing. And might I say, this is a truly spectacular design for inner God. Just look at his eye. Look at it. It’s so wrong. It shouldn’t be there. Why is it there? Help me!
Austin: It’s a (creepily) great evocation of his whole “Progenitor appears as someone you know but with a bulbous red eye” device used in the earlier judgey tie-in issues, but I have no idea *why* this space god has this one weird eye in all its forms. The Orchis attack is an example of the way Gillen repeatedly upends event storytelling tropes: It’s the classic “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” beat, yet in the end, Progenitor (who *really* seems impossible to please) decides it’s just another piece of evidence against the continuation of the world. If Orcis had a choice to NOT help the mutants, they wouldn’t, and thus, their alliance means nothing. Similarly, Ajak’s decision to not kill her god only makes that god’s case for it: Even when removed of their shackles, they continue to follow their existing “programming.” So Sersi says “eff it. You want change, I’ll give you change.”
Sean: It’s an easy confession, all things considered. The very heart of her story from the very beginning. The angel who knows the price of angels. Who kept it even from her fellow angels. And, once she told the world the truth … they killed her. Because it’s extremely fucked to just keep that a secret. Let alone to do that at all.
There’s a degree to which nothing has changed. That humans are still the monsters who will make everything worse. Who will kill what they understand perfectly and yet not at all. But there is change. One cannot go back on this. One can only move forward. Which brings us to the ultimate question of God’s judgment:
Does God deserve to judge Man?
Austin: That’s the question Ajak poses to Progenitor: Sure, humanity has failed judgment, but is Progenitor deserving of being the one to carry out the sentence? Jean prods things along, pointing out that if it did so, it would have to live with that action in the same way Jean does, something for which it failed her. And then Tony Stark, finishing out the A.X.E. trifecta, argues that the part of Progenitor that is him would do everything it could to make amends after screwing up, no matter the cost. God … agrees.
Sean: And so, God does the only sensible thing one can do given his system of ethics. God dies.
God Only Knows
Sean: In the aftermath of God’s untimely suicide, things both change and stay the same. The people judged by God are brought back. Ajak is the new God (which I’m sure will end well), and Orchis is beloved by humanity.
All in all, not the worst outcome for an event comic.
Austin: It is, of course, all in the execution. There’s a built-in expectation that everything is going to return to normal by the end of an event, barring a few minor tweaks (just like we all knew at some point in the story, the source of the Eternals’ immortality was going to be revealed to the world at large).
The question then becomes HOW do all the toys get put back into the box, and this largely works. A distinction is made between the damage caused by Progenitor and that caused by other actors (chiefly Uranos) that allows for a general reset but not the complete erasure of all consequences. Sersi is still dead (Humanity, not Progenitor, judged her and found her worthy of death). Zuras is Prime Eternal and signs a treaty of non-aggression, basically, with the mutants, more or less hand-waving away Druig’s perspective on mutants as the result of excess deviation (This is the one bit of cleanup that didn’t sit as well to me, as it seems almost too easy an answer to the inciting incident of the conflict). Orchis is cheered by humanity for being seen as coming to their rescue. And the X-Men pull off a PR coup of their own, opening up the resurrection process to selected humans in need (another turn of the plot that was expected but is still satisfying to see).
Sean: A step backward is as much a step as one forward. What Gillen and co. ultimately do with the cyclical nature of event books is make it about the smaller things. It’s not about whether God is disappointed in us or whether Spider-Man will be judged favorably. Look at the scenes with the ordinary — non-super — people. Not with regard to their capacity for change, but rather the fact that people who would normally be relegated to cannon fodder are given center stage. It’s a story about people who never meet, who live their lives well and do their best in the absurd. It’s about Captain America going out for coffee and a young woman reconnecting with her mom and a dead middle-aged man. It’s all of these and so much more.
Jury Box
- Mister Sinister’s ongoing complaint that he was never judged makes for a fun comedic throughline for the issue.
- What’s the over-under on how long before someone brings back Sersi?
- “Every day is Judgment Day” is a hell of an ending line.
- It’s been an absolute blast doing every single main issue of this series. Every issue was a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to owning the trade and reading it again in its entirety.
- To round things out, Kieron … What can we know about Thunderman?
Austin Gorton also reviews older issues of X-Men at the Real Gentlemen of Leisure website, co-hosts the A Very Special episode podcast, and likes Star Wars. He lives outside Minneapolis, where sometimes, it is not cold. Follow him on Twitter @AustinGorton
