Pepe Larraz.
"I was smiling because I have recently had the most wonderful dream. Of a better world and my place in it." — Charles Xavier, Powers of X #6
"Just look at what we have made." — Magneto, House of X #6
"To this day, those who saw it cannot describe it. Only that it was beautiful … the most beautiful dream." — Narrator, X-Men (2021) #35
"Prisma Health day treatment programs can help adults and teens facing emotional or mental health difficulties that interfere with their daily functioning. Our programs include treatment for mood disorders, co-occurring disorders and substance use disorders.
In full- or half-day outpatient treatment, patients receive compassionate, intensive, and structured treatment—and still enjoy the freedom to manage their responsibilities and return home each day." — Midlands Outpatient Programs, Prisma Health
***
I know it was raining and early August, and so I know Columbia, South Carolina, was intolerably humid, hot, wet and cold all at once. My glasses probably fogged up as I got out of my car and walked across the parking lot to my outpatient intake evaluation appointment. I remember that on the drive across town and over the swollen Congaree River I’d been listening to an episode of Cerebro, an X-Men podcast that began during Marvel Comics’s “Dawn of X” initiative. I know that the episode was about En Sabah Nur (classic X-villain Apocalypse) and that its featured guest was Jonathan Hickman, Marvel’s premier writer/architect since the late 2000s, who is best known for the huge scale of his long-form storytelling.
This was 2023. I’d spent the summer going to weekly therapy for the first time in seven years; laying on the floor doing nothing for long stretches of time, and reading X-Men comics from two starting points — Giant-Size X-Men #1 (1975) by Len Wein and Dave Cockrum and House of X/Powers of X (2019) by Hickman, Pepe Larraz and R.B. Silva. Who knows how far along in those two runs I was by early August. I know I was far enough gone to be relieved at the prospect of intensive outpatient treatment.
My first notes for this essay asked, “What does the Krakoan Era mean to me?” Like, literally, at the top of a notebook page. This was followed by: “It’s tricky. I find myself saying things like ‘It’s more the idea of Krakoa than any one story or book.’” The answer to the follow up question (“What does the Krakoan Era mean to me (continued notes)?”) detailed the most difficult stretch of my life, and it was, in short, really personal and embarrassing. I actually wrote out, longhand, “I felt spoken to b/c Krakoa is for all mutants.” Ventriloquized by fictional Krakoan propaganda!
For what it’s worth, I’m perfectly comfortable discussing my mental health. What’s uncomfortable, at least for me, is how deeply I left claw marks in the Krakoan X-books and how much of those comics are still under my fingernails.1 At the same time, I’m sort of chronically aware that personal reading habits are political and should thus be influenced by the political. Before getting to close textual and societal reading, I’ll flesh out my own history, as the personal figures deeply into fandom. It should be just a quick rundown of the last few years. I think I’ve done a decent job rehearsing and calibrating it for maximal sympathy and minimal panic attacks. Here goes.
My wife of nearly five years called me in early May 2023 to say that we should separate. A few weeks earlier, I’d quit drinking because it was exacerbating my until-then worst episode of suicidal ideation and self-harm — hence my eventual visit to Prisma Health Midlands Outpatient Programs, whose profoundly kind intake counselor firmly suggested that I enroll in their outpatient program that featured — five days a week for an indefinite number of weeks — solo and group therapy, skills-based workshops, lunch, and wake-up calls/wellness checks every morning. Unfortunately I couldn’t afford to miss the beginning of school, plus the prospect of pushing the issue of cost with my separated wife is even literally right now making my hands shake.
A few months before I stopped drinking, I began to selectively stand up for myself after being berated by saying things like “I don’t think I should be treated that way in this situation.” This in turn helped me to see that many similar situations were also not the product of my basic lack of worth but were manufactured to control and scare me. An incomplete list of things friends said to me after the separation that made me cry includes: “You aren’t annoying,” “Being a little untidy doesn’t mean you’re a bad person,” “You deserve to be seen,” and “We’d love for you to still come to the baptism.”
When I tell myself to think of that summer, I think of lying in the middle of my bed at 7 p.m., pounding sparkling waters, and reading comics on my laptop. I can exactly picture it. I know just how I felt.
My thesis advisor — I was entering the third year of my MFA program at the time — had been reading '60s Spiderman comics. Having already heard that people were excited about Krakoa, I started House of X/Powers of X and was sucked down into the vortex. It got me out of bed in the morning, it filled up time that otherwise would have been spent staring at the baseboards while the carpet left its imprint on my face. I didn’t have any idea why or how these comics had such gravity; I wasn’t, somehow, at all paralyzingly self-reflexive about it either. Only recently did I connect my own emergence from fear back into myself with the mutants’ emergence from their resurrection eggs and with the hope of Krakoa.
This essay in many ways is an attempt to square my almost primal personal connection to Krakoa with corporate comics at large. What if this connection isn’t special but something easily induced as a way to sell me something and to simultaneously reinforce ideologies that support an increasingly oligarchic surveillance state? Does it matter that it feels like more than that?
***
I’d like to posit a few terms that describe much of contemporary media, that began in — and to some extent structure — American superhero comics, and that explain in part the entanglement of fans and the producers of dominant culture. In chronological order, they are the shared fictional universe, the requel, and (what I’m calling) the extended corporate universe.
It isn’t too difficult to find pre-21st century precursors of the shared fictional universe — Lovecraft and Tolkien come to mind. Tolkien’s books share the same fictional world; Lovecraft and subsequent writers share the same mythology. Ultimately, the authors still hold pride of place. With the enclosure of the intellectual commons, however, publishers were able to isolate their Intellectual Property from comics creators and readers. There would be some dissonance if Jane Eyre visited Russia and ran into Anna Karenina; though “believable,” the story wouldn’t be in the same universe, it wouldn’t have the same authorial force. Publisher-owned IP, however, provides a necessary layer of abstraction; Captain America and Namor the Sub-Mariner really do exist in the same universe — it’s legally enforceable. Paradoxically, the bounding of IP invites readers to fill in the gaps between stories,2 whose texts alone no longer constitute a whole fictional world. The shared fictional universe, then, is dislocated, separated from an auteur and set adrift in IP-space. In the creation of the text, readers are tasked with constructing the noumenal “real story” that a rotating set of writers and artists only partially illuminate, access, and provide access to. Maybe this is why comics spawned the originary fan culture. The question, of course, is whether readers are creatively playing within cultural and economic constraints, whether meaningful connection with these texts runs counter to its publishing and ideological structures, and whether it can.
The earliest use of “requel,” according (dubiously) to Wiktionary is: “Daniel Weissenberger (quoted in a column by Roger Ebert), ‘Wake up and smell a secret,’ Chicago Sun-Times, 7 December 2007.” That the “original” first use is a citation—and that the hyperlink refuses to take me away from Wiktionary — is funny and fitting. I first encountered this neologism in Scream 5, also known as Scream (2022), which is list-item 3 in a MovieWeb article titled “Just What is a Requel Anyway? 5 Movies that Define the Subgenre.”3 Skipping over the generous use of “subgenre,” it’s obvious that superheroes have been left out. This listicle focuses on film; and American superhero films, because they prioritize origin stories, might not technically qualify as remakes, sequels, or requels. American superhero comics, on the other hand, are foundationally and inextricably related to the requel. Look at the titling conventions of Halloween (2018) and Scream (2022), and then look at the six books titled Uncanny X-Men whose only distinguishers are volume number or first publication year. There are seven volumes of X-Men, and I’m not even sure that includes Grant Morrison’s New X-Men. Reading Wikipedia’s “X-Men Disambiguation” page is a headache.
Like the modern cinematic requel, each volume of Uncanny or any other recurring comics title takes place in the same chronology without depending on it. Readers understand that a new instantiation of a title both is and is not the old title. A shared fictional universe allows different comics to exist in the same theoretical space; the requel allows different takes on “the same” comics to persist in a shared theoretical timeline. The shared timeline requires a bit more fictional justification than the shared universe — while having Superman visit Gotham City is enough for readers to accept that he occupies the same space as Batman, it stretches credulity that Bob Kane’s Batman is the same as Frank Miller’s. For the disjunctive but continuous timeline to go down easier, comics writers glue together various internally-consistent requels by deploying retcons, a portmanteau of “retroactive continuity,” with maneuvers like “Captain America could fight in WWII and not look any older in present day because he was frozen in ice after the war” or “Jean Gray didn’t commit genocide it was a cosmic force that took on her likeness.” Corporate comics write and rewrite their past by means of these story-specific retcons. Corporate comics also cannot “break their toys,” because they have to account for the always-on-the-horizon requel and its retcons. We see this in Grant Morrison’s Batman #663 (1940), a bizarre prose-forward story that both reinvents the Joker and posits reinvention itself as the only foundation of the villain’s character. He is terrifying, in other words, for no other reason than that he exists in cyclical corporate comics. The realities of the comics publishing apparatus — and the imaginaries of the comics reading public — become not only fictionally influential but fictional themselves.
We see this on larger scales as well, and DC in particular puts its real publishing thumb on the line-wide fictional scale.4 For example, DC’s Silver Age comics are in many ways a set of loose Golden Age requels: Barry Allen replaces Jay Garrick as the Flash, and Hal Jordan replaces Alan Scott, redefining what constitutes a Green Lantern. In Wolfman/Perez’s Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985), DC’s need to tidy up a cluttered continuity — created in part by the Silver Age’s “new universe” that existed parallel to the Golden Age’s — gets incarnated into the story as the Monitor and the Anti-Monitor, who are safeguarding and erasing, respectively, the many universes of the multiverse. The end result is a single universe where Alan Scott is a “Green Lantern” in name but unaffiliated with Jordan’s space cops, and where Power Girl is Supergirl but not this earth’s Supergirl. DC would go on to “reset” its universe with increasing regularity, even branding these events using “crisis” and “infinite” in various combinations. Fans know, then, that “crises” and publication initiatives are superimpositions of each other, neither one really primary.
Lastly, the idea of the “extended corporate universe” as an evolution of the “shared universe” will be important. There is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, for example, and the Taylor Swift extended corporate universe. The beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake might constitute its own extended corporate universe. Major sports leagues, if bundled with their media and fan cultures, might be extended corporate universes. The point is that the term indicates a situation in which a corporation5 stretches an IP across the media and generic gamut. The most important catalyst in the extended corporate universe’s evolution is the preexistence of fandoms. Propagating into any medium and market that will have you requires a lot of capital, and fandoms’ demand is pretty inelastic — probably because the ancestral shared fictional universe is in large part (more than for individual texts) a fan creation. The important difference is that the extended corporate universe alienates its fandom from their creative role (hence the toxicity, gatekeeping, and entitlement that can mark these communities). Video, which is the primary medium for many of these extended corporate universes, directs its own viewing experience more stringently than a comic book. Additionally, production time and cost mean iterability, which is key to corporate comics, becomes almost impossible. Other media function differently to produce the same distancing: you can skip a live show to see the movie; you can listen to a song to piece together social media drama. And so extended corporate universes place menu over meal, sprawl over series, potential narrative arcs over singular story.6 For the most part, I think this is nefarious. Just read any of the weird articles drooling over Jeff Bezos’s Tolkien budget. Or watch Stephen A. Smith go apoplectic over the vagaries of NBA free agency negotiations. And yet, weirdly, the extended corporate universe opens space for really good stuff to be made. Is this space created by the same machinery that threatened the making of good stuff in the first place? Sure. Has there ever been a prelapsarian creative environment that isn’t both beset and enabled by oppressive systems of power? Nope. But, given the soulless mining of IP-space — given the idea and existence and litigious patrol of IP-space — I’m glad to have high-profile mainstream media like Andor and The Last of Us Parts I and II and Daniel Warren Johnson’s Transformers.
***
This brings me to Krakoa — specifically to Hickman/Larraz/Silva’s House of X/Powers of X (2019), the first Krakoan gateway, which, like Crisis on Infinite Earths and Secret Wars (2015), incarnates a new publishing direction with fictionality. And readers know this. The key difference, I think, is that House of X/Powers of X is generative. Krakoa isn’t the apocalyptic ending of beloved worlds; it dreams that things can be better. Here’s Professor Xavier again: “I was smiling because I have recently had the most wonderful dream. Of a better world and my place in it” (Powers of X #6). This hope has always been implicit both in fandom (though it can certainly sour) and in the X-world’s mutant community, and this makes the real thumb on the fictional scale far less alien.
First, it’ll be helpful to outline a bit of relevant X-Men history and Jonathan Hickman’s past projects. In 1975, Giant-Size X-Men relaunched and invigorated the then-canceled title, deemphasizing the school aspect of the X-Men and replacing the original Lee/Kirby team with a global cast of new characters. Together with Cyclops, who carried over from [Uncanny] X-Men #1 (1963), the new team consisted of Wolverine, Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus, Sunfire, Banshee, and Thunderbird. Professor Xavier tasks this team with the rescue of original X-Men Marvel Girl [Jean Grey], Iceman, Angel, and later additions Havok and Polaris — all of whom have been captured by a living mutant island, Krakoa.
In 2015, the whole Marvel line stopped dead in its tracks as the multiverse collapsed and Secret Wars (2015) began.7 The core story of Secret Wars is the culmination of Jonathan Hickman’s twin series, Avengers (2012) and New Avengers (2013), and features “main universe” superheroes navigating a doomed (pun intended) multiverse and its strange, patchwork remainder, Battleworld. If the multiverse is a fictional corollary (or justification) for superhero comics’s internally disjunctive continuity, then Hickman’s Battleworld — as opposed to Shooter/Zeck/Layton’s Battleworld in the first Secret Wars (1984) — is a fictional corollary for the Comics Crossover Event. These tie-ins, written and drawn by a host of writers and artists, turn Marvel’s past storylines and eras into multiversal fragments; the fictional geography of Battleworld, then, mirrors that of its stories’ publication and reception. Secret Wars (2015) was a heat death across the fictional and nonfictional dimensions of Marvel comics, condensing and consolidating and celebrating its previous universes and storylines — from this came a reset/reboot, Marvel’s “All-New, All-Different” initiative.
In 2019, the whole X-Men line stopped dead in its tracks shortly after the announcement that Jonathan Hickman, whose last work with the company had been Secret Wars (2015), was returning to corporate comics to write X-Men. From July to October, Hickman’s intertwined, two-in-one House of X and Powers of X came out weekly. A kind of obverse to Secret Wars (2015), House of X/Powers of X was both build-up and event — Big Bang rather than heat death, reboot/retcon/requel rather than reset.
To briefly sketch the plot: Charles Xavier, Moira MacTaggert, and Magneto have, it turns out, always been planning to build a sovereign mutant state. Moira, whose newly retconned mutant ability is reincarnation (which resets the universal timeline each time she dies), is desperate to avoid the extermination of mutants by AI-based post-humans that she has witnessed in each of her previous nine lives. During the course of those lives — which Powers of X dramatizes — Moira has developed a final, desperate plan — which House of X dramatizes — to consolidate mutantdom and prevent its death.
It’s a bizarre story in many respects. It privileges beginning over ending, collectivity over individuality, potential over actual.8 The end result, is a set of “rules” for this new space called Krakoa. Mutants can be resurrected. Mutants can travel between any two points as long as a gateway has been planted in each place. “Krakoa is for all mutants,” a political and publishing slogan, means amnesty for all mutants, good guys and bad guys all on the same side. Recognition of Krakoan sovereignty gives other nations access to miracle mutant drugs that extend life and cure disease. And a techno-fascist human organization, Orchis, has partnered with the machine intelligence Nimrod, whose emergence has precipitated the elimination of mutants in all of Moira’s timelines.
The “Krakoan Age” lasted from 2019 until 2024 and included an enormous array of titles, stories, genres, and creators. Like Secret Wars (2015) before it, Krakoa reappropriates and echoes key X-Men moments ("The Trial of Magneto," "Inferno," "Sins of Sinister," "Mutant Massacre," "Fall of the Mutants") and teams (Hellions, Marauders, and Krakoa-specific versions of many other titles). This creates (or at least reaffirms) a kind of X-Men canon. In doing so, the Krakoan Age defines and connects itself to classic X-Men while changing almost everything else. There was also a sense that the writer’s room, the “X-Office,” had achieved a kind of collaborative ideal in which every book in the line felt integral to the “main story,” as if the X-Office were itself a kind of Krakoa.
Or, at least, that was the promise. It got bumpier as it went on — Hickman left after “Reign of X,” Krakoa’s second phase, and during its final phase, “Fall of X,” one couldn’t shake the dread that the ground was fast approaching. Plot lines began to rush, the looming erasure of Krakoa (with all the fan-favorite mutants nevertheless surviving) seeming to dictate narrative beats rather than the other way around. I think the last few seasons of HBO’s Game of Thrones felt similar. The most important difference is that readers always knew this would happen to Krakoa. Corporate comics stories have a kind of sedimented status quo that enables indefinite publication and infinite variation at the expense of lasting change. To rework a common saying: Big Two comics subsume all critiques and opposition into themselves.
So, Krakoa means a lot of things. And the word “Krakoa” means a lot of things. It’s a mutant island, a mutant nation-state, the idea of mutant separatism, the threat of mutant supremacy, a new era in the history of the X-Men, a new era
in the history of the X-Men, a visual vocabulary, a “soft reboot,” and line-wide collaborative comics-writing. “Krakoa” spans a host of enmeshed contexts: fictional, inter- and intra-textual, personal, communal, and economic. And this definitional sprawl mirrors, at least by analogy, the complex implications and implicatedness of reading, writing, and being a fan of comics that flow from the bowels of perhaps the modern American corporation.
As we’ve discussed, there’s a permeability in corporate comics between the fictional and the real — that’s probably the case for all fiction to some extent. But, the creative role of fandoms as well as the always-ongoing stories make this prominent in superhero comics to the point that the real occasionally makes itself fictional to justify itself. Big event comics started this way, and it’s the reason Crisis on Infinite Earths, which directly dramatizes a real publishing mandate, works so much better than a mandatory tie-in to an otherwise unrelated event. When poorly disguised, the real world butts in and renders the fictional story entirely contingent, evacuated of vitality. At its best, however, this kind of move makes a story more real: fictional universes are being erased, for example, but so are the real books that perpetuated those universes.
Take “Krakoa is for All Mutants,” a slogan that is prominent in much of House of X/Powers of X’s paratextual material. We can understand it as a political slogan, both an invitation to mutants and a warning to those that would stop their emigration. We can also understand it as advertisement, a distillation of the book’s draw. To the extent that propaganda and advertising function the same in their respective domains, the idea that “Krakoa is for All Mutants” transfers nearly unchanged from the fictional to the paratextual. When I write in my notebook that “I felt spoken to [...] b/c Krakoa is for all mutants,” both Kurt Wagner and I can understand it, and in similar terms. “Krakoa” can describe many different levels of reality at once using the same words, and the meanings, though different, are all comprehensible in context. Occasionally, then, when reading, a moment cleaves and sounds those many conceptual layers all at once.
This helps to explain, I think, the sheer force of the Krakoan Age for me personally. I hadn’t read X-Men before that summer of 2023, so it wasn’t about existing fandom. My ex had certain unspoken prohibitions that I self-enforced — or, rather, I’d heard enough variations of “you’re a loser” that I began to avoid doing things that I thought a loser might do. My reading of those early Krakoan celebrations was itself a celebration: it wasn’t just that “Krakoa is for All Mutants” simultaneously said something across different layers of reality, but that it also said something in that one bewildered, self-destructive, wrecked life. Or that it allowed that wreckage to speak somehow, to imagine a life without being afraid, for example, that I was folding towels improperly or walking out to the car too slowly. And in those moments of multilayered simultaneity, I could look at my barren but untrammeled future and say, in Charles Xavier’s voice, “while I slept, the world changed.”
That’s mostly, though not exclusively, in the early parts of the Krakoan Age, which uses the requel structure to open an extended corporate universe within the constraints of X-Men continuity. I’d argue it’s a “good” version, in that it aligns with fictional and readerly hopes while supporting ambitious creativity that includes writers, artists, and readers. As Krakoa went on, though, neither mutants nor readers could shake their dread. Caught up in fireworks and celebrations, it feels giddy to read Magneto say “Just look at what we have made” (House of X #6) or to sit with the pages where Storm and a rapt crowd welcome back from death the martyrs of a suicide mission. But we know that utopias don’t last, that seamless creative cooperation is fleeting, that mutants will always be Feared and Hated, that Krakoa will be obliterated. The fictional and publishing realities line up on this front. Like, it wasn’t too hard to make it believable. And there was the strange sense that the fabric of the stories themselves was degrading, as if corporate comics couldn’t sustain this kind of utopia in the same way the human world couldn’t accommodate the nation of Krakoa. We didn’t, in my opinion, get an ending that matched the craft and gravitas of House of X/Powers of X — and, strangely, it felt understandable. Of course the real would intrude and reset the world (it always does in corporate comics), and of course the stories would have to cut corners to move from point A to point B.
That said, I do think the final moments of Krakoa were wonderful: key X-Men look on as Krakoa ascends to a higher plane, iridescent, carrying with it millions of resurrected mutants who had been lost to genocide. Those last panels spoke to the endeavor’s essential ideality and idealism, making the ascended Krakoa once again the stuff of hope. And, because we’re dealing with narrative and not actual life, Krakoa does still exist — not the initial exciting moment of discovery, sure, but also not a cliche “it exists in our hearts” either. Unlike real life, the Krakoa stories can end without going away. The narrator of X-Men #35 (2021) puts it this way: “To this day, those who saw it cannot describe it. Only that it was beautiful … the most beautiful dream.”
Because I had repressed so much during my marriage, that summer, when all the memories returned, I feared and hated myself quite a bit. I had been alone for so long without knowing it. When I read Krakoa now, I’m revisiting that summer self who finally said enough, who was never truly alone, who has not gone away. Sitting in Midlands Outpatient Programs telling my story to an intake coordinator, knowing I could never afford to actually participate in the program, feeling I desperately needed validation nonetheless — X-Men didn’t lead me to any of this. But it did model (and exist as actual evidence of) real agency in a hostile world; it modeled the kind of expansive requel that I began in a freezing side room across the Congaree River.
The post Krakoa is for all mutants: How the X-Men might have saved my mental health appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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