2023's Hellfire Gala Shows Marvel Still Only Has One Idea For X-Men Stories
Krakoa was supposed to represent a bold new era, but The Hellfire Club (2023) #1 reminded readers of Marvel's singular idea for the team.
X-Men: The Hellfire Gala (2023) #1 shocked readers to their core. Marvel has been teasing Fall Of X for months now and had announced that this book was going to be major, but even that feels like an understatement. The Orchis Initiative's brutal attack against the X-Men broke the back of Krakoa and everything the mutant nation had built since it was established, scattering the X-Men to the winds, killing heavy hitters by the score, and leaving mutants in the worst place they've ever been.
Well, since the last time that Marvel put the X-Men in the worst place ever. For almost 20 years now, Marvel's default method of X-Men storytelling has been to wreck mutantkind. Fans had hoped that this was the end of that sort of storytelling, but Marvel decided that wasn't in the cards. Creating drama is one thing, but this goes in a much darker direction.
What Happened In X-Men: The Hellfire Gala (2023) #1
The issue began by reminding readers of the drama surrounding Ms. Marvel's death, an event that this story mirrors in certain distasteful ways, and only went on from there. After introducing the newest X-Men team, one that starred many fan-favorite characters and was the least white X-Men roster in a long time, Nimrod attacked. Every member of the new team died immediately before Iceman and Jean Grey were both stabbed with poisoned knives. From there, the slaughter continued until Professor X was forced to surrender and order Krakoans through gates controlled by Orchis. No one really knows where they were sent, although Mother Righteous got involved, taking the Atlantic branch of Krakoa and placing it in her magic lantern.
Emma Frost led a group of survivors to the old Hellfire Club headquarters in New York City with the help of Kingpin. Jean Grey was able to convince Doctor Stasis that Firestar was a mole on the X-Men before she died. Captain Krakoa's attack, teased in FCBD's Uncanny Avengers #1, took place, resulting in Cyclops being gravely injured. Wolverine was caught by Orchis soldiers on his own but ripped through them, Kate Pryde fell through a Krakoan gate, something that was heretofore impossible, and landed at the Krakoan embassy in Israel, and Rogue saved Xavier from Moira MacTaggert and left him on the now empty Krakoa. The island nation's power is completely broken. Fall Of X may not be Krakoa's end, but things are worse for the X-Men than they've been in a long time.
A Familiar State Of Affairs
The Krakoa Era was supposedly a new beginning for the X-Men. Since 2004's House Of M, Marvel has marginalized the X-Men in a variety of ways. At first, it was having Scarlet Witch depower the vast majority of mutants, pruning away the massive X-Men side of the Marvel Universe. This coincided with a fall in prestige, as the X-Men were increasingly relegated to their own corner, and A-list creators went elsewhere. For example, the X-Men had no place in Civil War's main book and were also noticeably absent from Secret Invasion. Every time there was a major event in the Marvel Universe, the X-Men got a tie-in miniseries, but they never played a role in the end of the conflict unless it was Wolverine when he was an Avenger.
In the X-Men books, stories were increasingly dark. Mutant numbers had dwindled to a mere 198; they were surrounded on all sides by enemies. Stories focusing on the fate of mutantkind as it battled against tremendous odds became the standard, and it all got very boring and same-y after a while. Avengers Vs. X-Men seemed like it was going to change all of that, as it ended with the repowering of the mutant race, but instead, Marvel soon began their most overtly hurtful-to-the-X-Men push ever — the Inhumans.
Mutants and the Inhumans had barely interacted in the past. In fact, the one moment that stands out between the two didn't come until Son Of M, a story about Quicksilver stealing Terrigen Mist crystals to repower mutants but learning its terrible price. However, Marvel brass saw the Inhumans as a way to circumvent using mutants, whose film rights were in the hands of Twentieth Century Fox on media outside of comics. So, the publisher began pushing the Inhumans, both in the comics and on TV, even planning on the Inhumans getting their own MCU movie. In 2015, Marvel changed the game on the X-Men, revealing that the Terrigen Mists, now released into Earth's atmosphere, were deadly to mutants. They also built in a mystery box where Cyclops had died doing something everyone hated him for.
Marvel sent the X-Men into an apocalyptic situation, all while trying to make the mutants look like the bad guys. Marvel spent years doing this sort of storyline, breaking the X-Men at their most hopeful. Pre-House Of X/Powers Of X in 2019, Marvel did no less than three stories — X-Men Disassembled, Uncanny X-Men's short run with Wolverine and Cyclops fighting to destroy the last enemies of mutantkind, and Age Of X-Man — with apocalyptic, end-of-mutantkind implications. That's laughable in the worst possible way. Marvel has shown a history of using the same kind of X-Men story over and over again. While the circumstances are always a little different, the story has always defaulted to mutants being a hated group on the brink of extinction. Krakoa isn't close to perfect, but it represents something new for the X-Men. Marvel going back to a poison well for ideas isn't what fans wanted.
Marvel Fridged The Most Diverse Team In X-Men History
There's another sin in X-Men: The Hellfire Gala #1, one that definitely feels like something the company that killed Ms. Marvel in a Spider-Man story would do. It involves the new X-Men team. Since 2021, Hellfire Gala season meant getting a new team, and this issue gave readers that. The team — led by Synch and Talon with Juggernaut, Dazzler, Frenzy, Prodigy, Jubilee, and Cannonball — is the most diverse X-Men team ever, with several favorites of online fans. When first reading the issue, it feels like a win: a completely new team of X-Men with an interesting mix of the kind of B- and C-list characters that make the X-Men comics so great. And then readers turned the page, and Nimrod smashed right through them while making a joke. A lot of characters were killed in this issue - death is a normal part of the Krakoa Era — but there was something about this that was unsavory.
This was fridging. Historically, fridging refers to when writers, mostly male, kill off female characters with no agency in order to build a plot and aggrandize the male protagonist of the comic. A white writer killing the most diverse team of X-Men ever in order to build a plot while having the villain make a joke feels like another example of fridging. It also feels way worse and reminiscent of the death of Ms. Marvel, which this issue uses as well to build part of its plot. The Krakoa Era has tested the X-Men in a variety of ways, but its diversity was always supposed to be what set it apart from old X-Men stories. Suddenly, that feels hollow, as the book makes a joke out of giving fans a truly diverse X-Men team, something many have been asking for. It compounds this book's mistake.
Inevitability And Suitability
The X-Men and Krakoa were already fracturing, as post-A.X.E. Judgment Day X-Men books saw the characters falling further and further. Sins Of Sinister, Beast becoming a villain, the Quiet Council falling to infighting, and Arakko's unity splintering as Genesis returned all showed the X-Men as they spiraled down to their lowest point. The Krakoa Era was always going to be a finite story; at some point, readers would have to get a The Empire Strikes Back moment of the villains breaking the good guys, but no one expected it to be this brutal. Krakoa allowed X-Men fans to have something that they'd never had before — a giant sandbox full of their favorite characters being happy and doing cool superhero stuff. There was, of course, more to it than that, but the Krakoa Era was a salve for a fandom that had been slapped around a bit too much in the preceding years. Marvel literally tried everything it could to end the X-Men's relevance to the Marvel Universe four years ago; X-Men fans may be paranoid, but they aren't wrong.
Krakoa Era X-Men books have gone to a lot of dark places — Crucible, Professor X's many sins, the ethics of resurrection, the power of racism, and just the fact that Krakoa is an ethnostate. Readers are used to stories that aren't afraid of being critical or violent; what seems to bother them is things returning to the way they were. Krakoa was always going to have a calamity, but it shouldn't have completely destroyed them. It shouldn't have brutalized the X-Men so thoroughly. There are ways to do this same story but without using the deaths of queer folk, people of color, and women to sell the drama that has a white man give all the power to a racist who wants to exterminate his people as a concept. It's an ugly sight for a lot of fans who were hoping that these sorts of things would stop happening.
The X-Men Don't Need To Be On The Brink Of Death To Sell Drama
A huge reason the X-Men got popular in the 1980s is that it not only gave readers amazing action that ran the gamut of superhero stories but it also gave them soap operas. Uncanny X-Men was full of character drama, but the team wasn't constantly on the brink of ruin to make it happen. That was just the way their lives were. However, dystopian futures and alternate realities started popping up like mushrooms in a cow field. Stories like Days Of Future Past and The Age Of Apocalypse were praised by fans and critics alike. People bought X-Men books that were pitch black, and Marvel came to the conclusion that the X-Men thrived when things were at their worst.
The X-Men are their own comic universe unto themselves. There are so many ways to go about creating drama other than destroying everything the X-Men have, with their enemies waxing fat and affluent over them. The X-Men don't have to be constantly torn down to create drama. Fall Of X was going to happen no matter what, but building the drama on the backs of characters from marginalized backgrounds in a move that can be construed as mocking the fans for wanting a truly diverse X-Men team and breaking everything to build it feels like Marvel deployed their one story — break the characters people love in ways with terrible optics — and called it a day. X-Men: The Hellfire Gala #1 isn't a bad comic, and Fall Of X isn't a bad idea, but this execution has fans questioning what exactly Marvel is thinking.