A wise man once said, “Everything dies. It’s inevitable, and I accept it.” That man was Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic of the Fantastic Four), and the dialogue was written by Jonathan Hickman during his time writing New Avengers all the way back in 2013. It served as a bit of a thesis statement for what Hickman was going to be tackling over the next few years while writing Avengers, New Avengers, and Infinity before closing things out with Secret Wars. Try as you might to keep things going forever, everything has to end eventually. Such is the case with Hickman’s run on the X-Men line of comics which began in July of 2019 with House of X and Powers of X and ended with Inferno #4 released on January 5, 2022.
Hickman’s time with the X-Men can be traced back to a tweet from the official Marvel Twitter account on March 20, 2019. That above tweet is how Marvel announced to the world that Jonathan Hickman was returning to the company to write comics for the first time since Secret Wars concluded in early-2016. They also ran full page ads of that exact image in comic books that were published that week. You’ll notice that nowhere in that tweet are the X-Men (or any property for that matter) mentioned. They don’t even mention Jonathan Hickman’s first name! That should give you an idea of the superstar status that Hickman has enjoyed in this industry. He made a name for himself writing Fantastic Four starting in 2009. He earned a hardcore following by bringing hard science-fiction concepts with global (and sometimes multiversal) consequences to mainstream superhero comics combined with long form storytelling that saw him seeding plot points that oftentimes wouldn’t pay off for years down the road.
It was this reputation that caused such a fervor among Marvel fans upon just seeing his name and a date with no other information. It was quickly revealed that he was going to be writing two series involving the X-Men called House of X and Powers of X. House of X would be drawn by Pepe Larraz, and Powers of X would be drawn by R.B. Silva. Marte Gracia would serve as the colorist on both series. All existing X-Men comics would be canceled with only these two six-issue limited series remaining to serve as the launchpad for the new status quo for Marvel’s mutants. These two series would be interwoven (with a reading order in the back of each issue and the most important issues highlighted in red) telling one large story with House of X dealing with the present day and Powers of X dealing with multiple time periods. Also, the “X” in Powers of X is the Roman numeral for “10,” so it’s actually pronounced “Powers of Ten.”
I’m going to try to summarize these two series as succinctly and clearly as possible. Keep in mind that the two are interwoven, so a lot of the plot is not presented linearly to the reader. In the present day, Professor Charles Xavier has telepathically announced to the world that he and Magneto have founded a nation-state for mutantkind on the sentient mutant island of Krakoa where all mutants are granted citizenship and amnesty for all previous transgressions. That means that even longtime villains like Apocalypse, Mr. Sinister, Sebastian Shaw, etc. are welcome. Krakoa also has developed multiple flowers that have specific properties including making portals that allow mutants to travel long distances in an instant and creating drugs with tremendous benefits for humans that can be used as a bargaining chip to grant Krakoa sovereignty recognized by the international community.
Conversely, we learn that the founding of a mutant nation-state has triggered a latent anti-mutant organization called Orchis to become active. Orchis is made up of some of the top minds and most insidious covert operatives from every major organization in Marvel continuity united by a belief that human supremacy over mutants must be maintained at all costs. They are aided by Karima Shapandar, the Omega Sentinel, a former ally of the X-Men who is a human/robot hybrid. They are operating on a repurposed Dyson sphere orbiting the Sun near Mercury’s orbit that is powering a Mother Mold Sentinel that can build Master Mold Sentinels that serve as mobile factories that build traditional Sentinels. It’s basically a Russian nesting doll of genocide.
Meanwhile, in Powers of X we are shown four different time periods that presented as integral to mutant history. The first time period is ten years in the past (within continuity, not publication history) when Charles Xavier first gets the idea to set the course for his dream of human-mutant coexistence. It’s also when he first meets Moira MacTaggert, a longtime human ally of the X-Men. The next time period is present day in which the events of House of X are unfolding. The third time period takes place around one hundred years in the future where a brutal Man-Machine Ascendancy has waged a successful campaign of genocide against mutants that has reduced the population of mutants in the Sol System to eight individual mutants. The rulers of this global regime are Nimrod (a sentient and self-replicating Sentinel composed of nanites that is virtually indestructible) and the Omega Sentinel in its final Omega state (see below chart for explanation).
The fourth and final time period takes place one thousand years in the future where human and machine have evolved and merged into a post-human race. In this future, humanity no longer exists as we know it, and the few remaining mutants are essentially kept in a zoo. This post-human race aims to ascend to the level of godhood by being absorbed and integrated into the techno-organic race of aliens (and ‘90s X-Men villains) known as the Phalanx.
So how is all of this connected, and how does it impact our protagonists in the present day trying to establish a nation-state? Here is where Hickman’s biggest retcon is unveiled. In House of X #2, we learn that Moira isn’t a human after all. She’s a mutant. That’s a pretty big bombshell of a retcon for a character who had been around since 1975. The even bigger bombshell is that her mutant power is reincarnation. This isn’t reincarnation in the sense that she simply comes back to life after dying. For Moira, each time she dies the entire universe ceases to exist. All of reality vanishes in the blink of an eye, and then suddenly she awakens inside the womb as a fetus with all of her memories and lived experiences from her previous lives intact. The great revelation from this fantastic power is that no matter what she does in each of her lives, mutants always lose. The combination of humanity and artificial intelligence always proves too much for mutants to overcome. Her first life ended before she ever knew she was a mutant. Her second life ended when she was killed in a plane crash on her way to try to meet with Charles Xavier to learn about mutation. In her third life she successfully meets Xavier, finds him to be an arrogant prick, and sets about trying to find a “cure” for mutants instead. She actually succeeds, but she is hunted down and murdered by the Brotherhood of Mutants led by Destiny and Mystique. Destiny reveals that her precognitive abilities allow her to see when Moira gets the idea to develop her cure. Because of this, she assures Moira that she will hunt her down and killer in each life where she chooses this path. She also reveals through her powers that she sees a maximum of ten or eleven lives for Moira before she has a reincarnation where she dies prior to her mutant abilities becoming activated, so she better choose wisely with the lives she has remaining. She then has Moira burned alive. In Moira’s fourth life, she actually ends up falling in love with Xavier and leads a life that closely mirrors the one that comic book readers are familiar with before Sentinels come and exterminate her along with the rest of mutantkind. In her fifth life, she once again meets with Xavier but pushes him in a more radical direction that results in the founding of a mutant utopia completely separate from humanity. Humanity sends Sentinels to successfully exterminate them all anyway. Moira’s sixth life is actually the one we see as the story taking place one thousand years in the future. She is one of the mutants in the mutant zoo being maintained by the post-humans along with Wolverine. She learns that post-humans intend to become techno-organic gods known as Dominions that exist outside of space-time. If they succeed, they will be able to withstand the death of the universe when Moira dies. Blessed (or cursed) with this knowledge, she has Wolverine kill her so she can reincarnate and try to stop this from happening. In her seventh life, she attempts to completely wipe out the bloodline of the Trask family before they can invent Sentinels. She succeeds, but Sentinels arise anyway and kill her. It turns out artificial intelligence will always come to be no matter what, and it will always result in the eventual creation of Sentinels. In her eighth life, Moira decides to ally herself with Magneto instead of Xavier and launch a preemptive strike on humanity. They are ultimately defeated by the X-Men and Avengers, and she dies in prison. In her ninth life, she decides to ally herself with Apocalypse and his Horsemen. They successfully establish a global mutant regime before the appearance of Nimrod and the rise of the Mutant-Machine Ascendancy that subjugates and exterminates most of mutantkind. We eventually learn that the time period we have seen one hundred years in the future is actually this life. Apocalypse and the few remaining mutants go on a suicide mission. One group creates a distraction that is met by Omega Sentinel that ultimately ends with a localized singularity created that kills both the mutants and Sentinels. The other group obtains a file that shows how and when Nimrod comes online. Apocalypse fights and is killed by Nimrod, but the information is successfully delivered to Moira who is then killed to wipe out this timeline. That brings us to her tenth life which just so happens to be our present reality. In this life, Moira decides to change up her strategy and tell both Xavier and Magneto about her mutant abilities, and she shows them all the things she has experienced in her previous lives. The new plan to try and prevent the eventual extermination of mutants is to have all mutants working together. That means bringing longtime enemies like Apocalypse and Sinister into the fold. If this is to be mutantkind’s last stand, then they’ll have to do so united.
Got all that? The last major revelation to come from these two intertwined series is that our present day mutants have successfully conquered death. Yes, you read that correctly. What has happened is Xavier has developed portable Cerebro helmets that store and create backups of the minds of every living mutant in the world. Xavier and Magneto then have Sinister catalog the DNA of every mutant. They then assemble a group of five mutants whose complimentary powers create large egg sacks where they can artificially create new bodies for deceased mutants that Xavier is then able to put a saved backup of their consciousness into and essentially resurrect them as they were shortly before dying. Now mutants no longer have to fear death, and they have a fighting chance at staving off their extermination.
Despite all of these radical changes, the one pillar that remained a constant (arguably the strongest it has ever been) during these two series was the same one that X-Men comics were founded upon: the relationship between Charles Xavier and Magneto. From the very first issue of House of X to the final pages of Powers of X, the one thing that not only survived from the earliest days of the X-Men line but continued to thrive was the importance placed on these two men. I’ll dig deeper into this in later posts, but Hickman clearly places a high premium on the relationship that has been forged over nearly sixty years of comic book publishing. They are the two characters who have devoted the most time and energy to the struggle for mutant rights over the years, and now they are more unified and resolute than they have ever been. It perfectly encapsulates this new era.
That is now the new status quo. Hickman has turned everything we know about how superhero comics work on its head. It’s a radical change, but it is one that has resonated with fans and creators alike. The two series sold extremely well, and it returned the X-Men brand to its status as the flagship property for Marvel it had been in the 1980s and 1990s. But what do you do next after such radical changes? We’ll take a look at the next chapter in Hickman’s run next week with the “Dawn of X.”