I can’t remember a tie-in with more anticipation than X-Men Red #5 (the number of anticipated tie-ins issues being admittedly small). Only one actual issue of Judgment Day has come out and, before the event started, the hype for this issue was fairly high (it began with a throwaway line in Kieron Gillen’s April 13 newsletter). I saw some tweets from people who had read advanced copies a bit ago (however long ago they may have first gotten advanced copies) and the reaction to the issue from what little I saw online was fairly strong. It tells the story of Uranos’s attack on Arakko that was alluded to in Judgment Day #1. Or, mostly, it tells the story of the first 20 minutes of his hour on Arakko, spending the first 19 pages on that time period before skipping to the end and giving a different version of Uranos’s final seconds before he was returned to the Exclusion as shown in Judgment Day #1. It is a slaughter of the Arakki as Uranos personally kills members of the Great Ring with seeming ease along with other powerful mutants. It showed explicitly what was suggested in Judgment Day #1 in how completely and utterly Uranos dominated the Arakki forces. And it did so with fantastic narration by Al Ewing that added scope and poetry to the slaughter, and Stefano Caselli’s fantastic line art that gave every act of violence a brutal reality.
And yet, I felt mostly disappointment when reading it.
Hype and expectations are motherfuckers.
One of the things that I praised highly in Judgment Day #1 was keeping Uranos’s attack on Arakko off-panel. We get a flash of it beginning, catching the Great Ring off guard, and, then, nothing until it’s the Eternal standing atop a field of bones, crushing Cable’s skull to dust, and disappearing back into the Exclusion. All we know is that he had an hour and used it to completely slaughter a large amount of Arakki, destroy their gates to Krakoa, and leave the mutant forces in a severely depleted position. And he did it alone.
How can actually seeing that happen live up to the hype?
For me, it couldn’t. It just couldn’t. Despite the seeming ease with which Uranos and his weaponry walked through the Arakki, it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t as easy as it seemed like it should be in my head. After all, the hype for Uranos began with the promotion for Eternals: The Heretic, the one-shot that had Thanos meets his great uncle (and affectionately refers to him as grandfather) where Gillen built him quite a bit – and the one-shot itself was more build up as his history was told. A former Eternal Prime who wanted to take the principle of “correct excess deviation” to a genocidal conclusion, he fought a civil war against his fellow Eternals and has been in the Exclusion ever since. He was hyped, almost, as what Thanos aspires to be. To finally see him in action was... well, how could it live up to the hype?
What I kept returning to was The Infinity Gauntlet #4, the issue where Thanos fights and kills all of the heroes gathered to try and stop him. It is one of the best event issues ever done, so shocking in the way that page after page is Thanos killing your favourite heroes. It’s a complete massacre of the heroes as he kills Thor, Spider-Man, Hulk, Wolverine, Captain America... Thanos kills them all and does so easily with the power of the Infinity Gauntlet. It was made all the more shocking because there was no indication of how any of it would be undone.
Here, Uranos does something similar, albeit with only a fraction of the marquee characters and within a context that contains the resurrection protocols and the Five. It would have taken almost the wholesale genocide of every living being on Arakko to meet my (quite possibly unreasonable) expectations with regards to seeing his attack as it happened.
Oddly, while I was let down as a Judgment Day/Eternals reader, where Ewing and Caselli succeeded for me was as an X-Men Red reader. This issue did a strong job of telling a story that’s rooted within the narrative of that title, focusing on its cast and giving the big moments to them. Magneto’s death, for example, gets a stunning sequence, while whatever happens to Legion (from Legion of X) takes place off panel (more alluded to hype that, now, Si Spurrier needs to live up to when he shows that particular exchange... that apparently lasts only 28 seconds according to the narration here). I’m trying to imagine coming into this issue as someone who only reads X-Men Red with no real background in Eternals or the first issue of Judgment Day, and this issue would have been shocking, I imagine. A single Eternal comes to Arakko, a world populated by a people that solve problems in an arena through trials of combat, where you’re only as good as your last fight, and he kills everyone in front of him with ease. I can only imagine what it would be like to read this issue under those circumstances.
Given some distance, I have no doubt that this issue will stand out not only as a high water mark in this event, but as an event tie-in issue in general. It delivers everything it set out to do and its only failings are ones beyond its control. And I didn’t even talk about that final page, which, in the moment, almost erased whatever disappointment I was feeling.
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That said, I did read Immortal X-Men #5, written by Judgment Day writer Kieron Gillen and drawn by Michele Bandini, first this week. There is an order to these things.
Like X-Men Red #5, Immortal X-Men #5 expands upon a fight sequence from Judgment Day #1: the Uni-Mind’s telepathic attack on Krakoa. Each issue of Immortal X-Men is told from the point of view of a different member of the Quiet Council, Krakoa’s ruling body. So far, we’ve gotten issues from the perspective of Mr. Sinister, Hope Summers, Destiny, and Emma Frost; this issue is Exodus. The structure is a clever weaving of his long history and the Eternals’ attack as their telepathic strike involves using memories to distract the mutant telepaths. It’s a conceit that allows Gillen to catch everyone up on Exodus’s story without it seeming completely unrelated to what’s going on. A knight who fought in the Crusades, Exodus’s worldview is shaped by his particular brand of mutant Catholicism that has centred upon Hope as the messiah.
“Who are the heroes here?”
Get used to me returning to that question until the event shunts it aside in favour of another. As this issue is told from Exodus’s perspective, obviously he is the hero. He makes the case for how he came to view Hope as the messiah and mutants as God’s chosen people, along with his role as the rock upon which that church is built. He is unwavering in his conviction and views himself completely within the right in a way that only someone acting on blind faith can. He believes in God and Hope and, as he acts in their service, he is Good.
Any war against mutants, then, is a holy war for Exodus, just as a war to “correct excess deviation” is, by definition, a holy war for the Eternals. They are acting upon their guiding principles given to them by their gods, the Celestials. Of all of the mutants to focus on first, Exodus is a smart choice, placing this conflict in a very specific yet accurate light. Possibly an uncomfortable one for some – which only makes it a bolder choice in an event like this.
I’m coming to Judgment Day with Avengers vs. X-Men sitting in the back of my head. Ten years on from that event, which is where Hope embraced the Phoenix and gave the mutant race another chance. That would have been a pivotal moment for Exodus, although one that isn’t specifically shown here. The final moment of Exodus’s history that we’re told is the birth of Hope, which was enough to convince him that she was the messiah. I wonder why Gillen didn’t include the events of AvX #12 except in a very brief allusion that would also include Hope’s role in the Five. As a being of faith, it’s almost like Hope following through on the promise he saw in her is secondary; of course she did, because he had faith that she would. The important part for Exodus is the faith she inspires with all actions (miracles) secondary because, if he needed concrete proof of her being the messiah, it wouldn’t be faith anymore.
And there’s also the matter of Judgment Day #1’s narrator, the coming new god/Celestial that Ajak and Makkari are creating... a third side to this holy war...
Immortal X-Men #5 may have taken the back seat to X-Men Red #5 this week in general hype and expectations for understandable reasons. I found it a strong thematic overture for what may be coming in the event. More abstract and specific to a single character, I think it hides its importance behind a religious zealot that’s easy to dismiss. But, this event looks to be filled with religious zealots. In X-Men Red #5, we saw what one religious zealot could do if given the chance.
Next week: Judgment Day #2
