Wednesday, November 16, 2022

Judgment Day Reading Order

As with past reading orders, my methodology is that the main event series is the ultimate guide for the reading order. Next come any tie-is written by the writer of the event, followed by the rest using my best judgment. In a few sections, the specific reading order does not matter as tertiary tie-ins often can be shuffled around with little to no impact. In those cases, the order that I have here is simple personal preference/instinct. This is just my personal guide and it may change over rereads. Comments are added to clarify choices with as few plot details mentioned specifically, so, if you haven’t read the event, you won’t have anything spoiled if you wish to use this guide for your first time reading it.

I have added a new feature to this reading order in the formatting. Bold means main event series, underlined means tie-in written by Kieron Gillen, and italics means tie-in that I think fairly important/essential. This gives you four levels of reading the entire event: just the main series, just the Gillen stuff, just the stuff I think is good/important/essential, and the entire event including all of the tie-ins. That italics group is entirely my own taste/judgment and you may not agree.

While not completely essential, before we even get into Judgment Day, I truly would advise reading Eternals and the first three issues of Immortal X-Men. Eternals #1-12 along with the specials, in particular, inform Judgment Day. The event basically began as the third storyarc of that title after all. The Immortal X-Men issues are less essential, but they’re quite good. Mostly, you should read all of these comics before reading the event because they are good comics.

* Free Comic Book Day 2022: Avengers/X-Men #1, X-Men: Hellfire Gala #1, and Immortal X-Men #4. These all set up different elements of Judgment Day. The FCBD stuff that really ‘matters’ is mostly repeated in Eve of Judgment, while the two X-Men comics are nice background on what’s going on with the mutants right before the event starts.

* AXE: Eve of Judgment #1. The proper prologue to the event that gets listed on the official checklist.

* Judgment Day #1

* Immortal X-Men #5 and X-Men Red #5: Both issues expand upon scenes in Judgment Day #1, but Gillen wrote Immortal X-Men, so it comes first.

* Judgment Day #2

* Death to the Mutants #1 and X-Men #13: Expansions on Judgment Day #2 and Gillen gets priority. But, I genuinely think X-Men #13 works better after reading Death to the Mutants.

* Judgment Day #3

* Death to the Mutants #2 and Immortal X-Men #6: I find that Death to the Mutants #2 is a little more related to/expands upon the events of Judgment Day #3 and would suggest reading it prior to Immortal X-Men #6.

* X-Men #14, X-Force #30, Wolverine #24, X-Force #31, Wolverine #25, X-Force #32-33, Avengers #60, Amazing Spider-Man #10, Fantastic Four #47-48, AXE: Iron Fist #1, and Captain Marvel #42: For this bunch of judgment-related tie-ins, the order does not matter really, except in the case of the X-Force and Wolverine issues. You can shift that chunk of six issues wherever you like in this group, but I would recommend keeping them in the order that I have here. X-Men #14 is a borderline important issue as the final three pages are referenced later on in the event, but the rest of the issue is completely unrelated. However, I wouldn’t call the reference essential or something that isn’t explained enough later on to warrant putting that issue in italics.

* X-Men Red #6: This issue leads directly into Judgment Day #4 and is best read right before it.

* Judgment Day #4

* X-Men Red #7, Legion of X #6 and Marauders #6: X-Men Red #7 is a nice expansion on the Storm/Magneto scene from Judgment Day #4 and, then, largely unrelated to the event anymore. Despite Legion of X #6 expanding upon a moment in X-Men Red #5 (which expanded upon a moment in Judgment Day #1), it ultimately takes place after Judgment Day #4, covering a lot of ground. The Marauders issue was released fairly early in the event, but takes place around the effort to reopen the Arakko gate, so it seems best placed here.

* Judgment Day #5

* Immortal X-Men #7, Death to the Mutants #3, and AXE: Starfox #1: The ‘outside the Progenitor’ tie-ins between the final two issues. This order is based on Gillen’s advice for reading them. Who am I to disagree? (Especially when I don’t.)

* AXE: Avengers #1, AXE: X-Men #1, and AXE: Eternals #1: The ‘inside the Progenitor’ tie-ins between the final two issues. These three issues are more directly related to the resolution of the event in the final issue and seem better suited to read right before it.

* Judgment Day #6

* Judgment Day Omega #1: The epilogue to the event and Eternals.

Hopefully, this is a help to anyone looking to make sense of how to read the event and its various tie-ins.

Sunday, November 13, 2022

Them Guys Ain’t Dumb 15 (Judgment Day Omega #1)

“Who are the heroes here?”

In the end, it might just be a small group of Eternals. The Lemurian Eternals who, at the end of the first storyarc of the Kieron Gillen/Esad Ribic run, split themselves off from the rest of Eternals society, so disgusted at the knowledge that their eternal life comes at the price of one human life every time The Machine (Earth) resurrects them. That divide has been increased since Sersi revealed this secret to the world and was killed for it – the first Eternal truly killed, never to be brought back; paired with the transformation of Ajak into Ajak Celestia, a new attempt at a god for the Eternals, it has allowed a new path for these Eternals. No longer just outcasts, they are now heretics.

Judgment Day Omega moves in two directions at once. On the one hand, it returns to the status quo of Zuras as Prime Eternal and Eternals society falling into its old routines of quiet background overview of Earth. There are minor changes in their relationships with humans, mutants, and Deviants, but, in general, the concept of Eternal has returned to what it was in Eternals #1. There is lip service towards change, but... how much can a society that has never changed truly change itself? On the other hand, there is the splinter group that fall under the guidance of Ajak Celestia. A new Eternals religion that offer a different interpretation of the Four Principles and seeks to make amends for the Eternals’ crimes against humanity one good deed at a time. Eternal lifetimes dedicated to service. But, for a society that has always had its factions, is one more a true change? Are these acts of servitude different from before? Ikaris posing as a human is how we first met him, after all... has there been change or is this just a variation on a very old, very Eternal theme? Are they heroes? Have they always been?

Less an epilogue to Judgment Day than an epilogue to Gillen’s Eternals run as whole, Judgment Day Omega #1 focuses on the core cast of Eternals and setting them in place within their ‘new’ status quo after the event. This is basically Eternals #17 after Eve of Judgment #1 and Death to the Mutants #1-3 were issues 13-16, and the Starfox issue was this group’s one-shot special. Separating Judgment Day from Eternals is a tough bit of business given that the event rose out of Gillen’s plans for the next story in that run. But, that’s the way it is with these events (or the goods ones, I find): they rise up out of existing titles and, then, flow right into what comes next. Except, unlike a lot of events, there isn’t really a what comes next here as Eternals is done. Gillen is full time X-Men at Marvel (as far as we know) and there has been no announcement for a new Eternals series by a new creative team. Usually, these Omega epilogue issues are part wrap-up, part teaser for the next comic you need to buy – or, honestly, the three or four different comics you need to buy. Here, there may be a “Next” page at the back that points readers in the direction of Avengers Assemble Alpha #1, Immortal X-Men #9, and X-Men Red #9, but none of those comics get a lead-in in the Omega issue proper. It would be overly dramatic to declare this issue a dead end as there is no such thing in corporate superhero comics.

But.

This is an end. And that is incredibly unusual for an event.

There is a specific structure to events, especially for Marvel. It’s a structure perfected in the period of Brian Michael Bendis writing the Avengers titles: status quo leads into event leads into new status quo leads into event leads into new status quo and so on forever and ever amen. You read the monthly comics and they got you hyped for the event, so you read the event, and it ended with a dramatic change that affected the month comics, so you read them, and they got you hyped for the next event. As such, events could wind up feeling very unsatisfying by the time you reached the end as, instead of an end to the story you were reading, you were greeted by a sales pitch for what you needed to read next. And this has largely been the structure of their events ever since. Even events tied specifically to one monthly book like War of the Realms still ended in a way that said “And now you should read the end of Jason Aaron’s time on Thor along with the new Loki and Valkyrie series!”

What I was left with when I finished this issue is a desire to skip ahead a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand years. This issue is the beginning of “Acts of the Apostles” after Judgment Day’s gospels. A new religion has begun, a splinter of society has broken away, and the heretics are tolerated until they get in the way. An interesting concept, yes – but the real meat is further down the road when the novelty becomes entrenched and we can see if this is cult or religion. Part of me is upset that Gillen isn’t sticking around to develop that; part of me knows that it probably wouldn’t get the chance to develop enough. This is still a superhero comic after all. It may have begun as something a little different when Jack Kirby wrote and drew the first issue, but even he couldn’t keep it from becoming more and more like everything else on the shelf – and, then, after he left it behind, he couldn’t stop it from literally becoming part of the rest of the Marvel story. So, we get an ending.

Again, I’ll state: there is no next for the Eternals that we have been told of. There is no sales pitch in this issue. It is simply the end of the story with elements in place for someone to pick up later. Or not. Who knows. It’s not that they don’t want our money as is the usual driving point of these events and the purpose of the cycle I mentioned above, it’s that there are no Eternals stories to buy next.

Finally, an event that ends with nothing for money instead of the other way around.

(Next: my Judgment Day reading order post, unless Immortal X-Men #8 warrants a post as another epilogue to the event, one that actually encourages the reader to keep buying more comics. If so, I will do that first and, then, sometime after, the reading order post will go up. And, then, be on the look out for the continuation of these posts in January 2023 in a new series on the Sins of Sinister story. That will begin after Immortal X-Men #10 comes out where I will write about it and issue nine together as the prologue issues. Thanks for reading these, hope to see you again for what comes next.)

Tuesday, November 01, 2022

Them Guys Ain’t Dumb 14 (Judgment Day #6)

It’s hard sometimes to remember where Jack Kirby’s Eternals ended and where the Marvel Universe Eternals began. Less than a year after Kirby’s series ended, Roy Thomas brought the characters into Marvel’s continuity via a Thor annual. From that point on, Thomas and a variety of writers integrated the Eternals, Deviants, and Celestials into the very core of Marvel’s history. Most people who are aware of those characters probably have never read Kirby’s original comics, especially now thanks to the Eternals movie (which owes shockingly little to Kirby’s comics). I’ve thought about the distinction between Kirby and what came after quite a bit since Kieran Gillen and Esad Ribic began their Eternals run, one that added and clarified and refined quite a bit about the Eternals, alluding back to Kirby’s original vision seldomly, but still seeking to somehow honour it while bringing to fore what makes his creations distinct from every other superhero.

In Kirby’s Eternals series, the idea of the Eternals and Deviants as enemies is shunted to the side fairly quickly. When the series begins, there is animosity in the cold war state that the two sides share, and that is put aside as the Celestials return to the Earth as the Fourth Host. Under Arishem’s watchful eye, the people of Earth have 50 years before judgment will be rendered on their survival. Immediately, Eternals, Deviants, and humans begin to shift their focus as a core group representing each race works to bring them all together in harmony, theorising that that is the only way that they can possibly survive judgment. Before Eternals became something akin to ‘just another superhero book’ seemingly under editorial pressure, there’s a few issues where the hard work of cultural exchange and understanding is underway. A shared threat and a vague hope that peaceful harmony is all that will save them has three races take the first steps towards putting aside generational conflicts. A god that unifies rather than divides. Man, Kirby was a little nuts sometimes, am I right...?

Judgment Day is basically the same idea with a few twists: the addition of mutants as a fourth race despite an effort to conflate them with Deviants; the Celestial in question is created by Earthlings; the judgment is only a day; and we get to see the judgment and get a possible understanding of the criteria. In some ways, it’s possible to read Judgment Day as Kirby’s Eternals on fast forward – and with more death, destruction, and hitting.

That is to say that, before we get into things, I enjoyed Judgment Day quite a bit. In the broad strokes, it is very much an Eternals story with the X-Men and Avengers grafted on. But, like the greatest event writer of all time, Jim Starlin, the additions to the core plot are so well done that you don’t notice/mind that they are extraneous. You can quite clearly see how this began as an Eternals story and was expanded into an event and I would argue that that is partly what makes it great. Many events feel like stories that come out of nowhere and are forced upon the characters; this one grew out of a series to such an extent that it enveloped the others.

And I have a feeling that I will have a chance to touch on that particular idea in greater depth when the Omega issue comes out...

*

There’s a point about halfway through Judgment Day issue six where it felt like things had gone too far. Like so much had been done to stop the Progenitor from destroying the planet that it seemed like a foregone conclusion. Now, the Earth was not destroyed. In fact, everything was restored to before the judgment began and the Progenitor died, having never been created, in a sense. The entire issue hinges on that moment where the end seemed certain and, then, the day was saved. Since reading the issue, I’ve quietly been pondering that moment and if it actually works for me. That delicate balance of pushing things to the brink and, then, pulling them back... did Gillen pull it off?

In a structural way, yes. Three people speak to convince the Progenitor to stop killing the planet and restore things: Ajak, Jean Grey, and Tony Stark, in that order, which is the reverse order of the three one-shots that bridged the gap between issues five and six. That it was these three characters addressing the Progenitor feels organic given their central role in the one-shots leading to this issue – after all, why did Gillen choose to highlight those characters rather than, say, Wolverine or Sersi or Sinister?

More than that, each of them pose a question to the Progenitor that comes directly from their judgments in those issues. After the Celestial says that everyone deserves to die, Ajak agrees and asks “...but do you deserve to kill us?” while Jean Grey acknowledges that she destroyed a planet as the Phoenix: “Once you’ve done this, it’s done, and you have to live with it. Can you?” After the Progenitor begins to waver, Tony addresses its concern that it may be too late by telling to do what he does: “I get out of my depth? I try to make amends? What can you do? Do that!”

Three questions borne from the Progenitor’s judgment of these three people that turn everything around:

Is the Progenitor qualified to make this judgment?

If so, will the Progenitor be able to stand by that judgment after the sentence is complete?

If not, what can it do to stop?

Each question leads to the next and, in a sense, leads the Progenitor to sacrificing itself to put everything back. When I first read it, it seemed too elegant and smooth in how the scene moved from Ajak to Jean to Tony with the Progenitor seemingly swept up in the current. It’s like once Ajak asked her question, the Celestial’s will to act was undone with the other two moving it into a specific position. Intellectually, it made sense and is quite well done; emotionally, it left me cold and unsatisfied. But, that was then. Walking through it now, the elegance is still there, while the emotional core hits harder.

“Who are the heroes here?”

This is the scene that answers that question. (Or Immortal X-Men #7.) That was the question posed back in Judgment Day #1. It was the main question of the series. It was never about the justification of existence (even though it was). This is a superhero event comic. It was always about superheroes. Heroes aren’t the folks who always do the right thing necessarily. Here, the heroes are those that fall short of their moral codes and make mistakes, and keep going, trying to make amends, make things better. Ajak admits the god she created is an unworthy, flawed one; Jean admits that she killed a planet, will never be able to make amends, but will never stop trying; Tony knows that he fucks up again and again, but each new problem is a chance to come up with another solution; and the Progenitor realises that it is a flawed god, maybe not a god at all, unable to carry out its judgment, and, instead, gives its life to undo its mistake. It sacrifices itself to save the world.

Ajak fails the Progenitor – and it accepts that judgment. Based on the criteria we have seen until this point, the acceptance of that judgment is its specific point of failure. Up until that point, the Progenitor remained true to its moral code. It judged the people of Earth and found them unworthy of further existence. All efforts to stop its judgment failed or were about to fail. That feeling of inevitability that I spoke of was the Progenitor passing its own test. The words of Ajak, Jean, and Tony prompt it to second-guess itself and begin to waver. At that point, the Progenitor fails and becomes unworthy of living further. It narrates about not being a god and Gillen, wisely, refrains from stating something best left unsaid in the comic:

The Progenitor fails godhood by choosing to be a hero.

Despite its moral failings, it tries to save as many people possible and gives its life to do so. It does this despite the immense fear and shame it feels. It does this despite every natural instinct telling it that it should kill the planet and be done with all of this.

“Who are the heroes here?”

I’d argue that the Progenitor is one by the end.

*

At some point in this event, I kept thinking about “All Good Things...” the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. A double-length episode, it features three timelines where Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s conscious mind seems to jump between his bodies in each of these time periods: just before the first episode of the show, the current time in the series’s run, and a potential future. Near the end of the episode, the efforts of Picard to save humanity from a spatial anomaly that moves backwards through time, growing bigger the further into the past you go, seem to fail. Throughout the episode, he’s been helped/hindered/taunted by Q, a godlike being that Picard first encountered in the first episode of the series when he and members of his crew were put on trial for the crimes of humanity. At the end of that episode, it seemed like they had proven humanity’s worth despite Q returning throughout the series to torment/toy with them, Picard especially. When it seems like the efforts to stop the anomaly that will prevent life from Earth from beginning have failed, Picard finds himself in Q’s court, head in his hands, and Q talks to him. It becomes apparent that Picard managed to save humanity and says that he hopes that this is the last time he’s in this court, to which Q responds, “You just don’t get it, do you, Jean-Luc? The trial never ends.”

“The trial never ends.”

Those words just kept coming back to me when it became obvious that the judgment was still going on despite the Progenitor saying that it was finished and the planet will die. They were practically ringing in my ears as I read the final pages of this issue as the Progenitor narrated over Ajak Celestia greeting the dawn and holding her thumb in a position of judgment. Despite the event acting as the whole of Kirby’s Eternals in a condensed form, once again, the judgment of a god hangs over the planet. Be it Arishem, the Dreaming Celestial, the Progenitor, or, now, Ajak Celestia, the trial never ends.

It’s both a fitting way to end the event – and an honest one. Despite everything, little changes. Sersi is dead, Ajak is a god now, the Eternals are the new mutants in the hated and feared sense, the mutants have won a bit of goodwill but so have Orchis... there is progression, but, largely, much is the same now as it was when Judgment Day began. And that’s fine. It’s fine. Even the promo blurb for the Omega epilogue issue seems to get the joke: “After events, we make promises. ‘Nothing will ever be the same again.’ For the Eternals, it’s a lie. It’s always the same and always will be.” That could have been a larger statement about superhero universes. The details change; the larger concepts remain frozen in place. And, as I just said, that’s fine. That’s a feature not a bug.

The idea that an event has to change everything and leave every character in a brand new place is a misguided one. My favourite event, The Infinity Gauntlet, did the exact same thing that Judgment Day does. Almost everything is put back into place and the core characters that the writer is interested in are left in different places. That event killed half of the universe and, by the end, the only things that had really changed were Thanos was a farmer and Adam Warlock had the Infinity Gauntlet. This event killed most of the planet and, by the end, the only things that have really changed are Sersi is dead and Ajak is a god.

The important things are that it felt like it could change everything and that it was a good read.

That’s the way you do it.