Marauders #10: Time Travel and Action Galore

For a team whose premise was based on rescuing mutants from around the world and bringing them to Krakoa, they sure haven’t done much rescuing. Instead, the comic continues to convolute what is already a convoluted history of the X-Men and mutantdom at large…to an end that further dilutes what a fantastic allegory it once was. Add time travel to that, and boy; you get a headache.

The art continues to amaze with vibrant colors, good action sequences, and the solid movement and flow of characters. The visuals are just the right amount of graphics without turning gory but still keeping to a specific tone befitting the story.

There was, left over from the previous issue, an attempt to add stakes by adding death and the fear of it and dooming our heroes. But no matter how you spin it, when you take away any permeance of death, even when time travel is involved to “raise the stakes,” it still fails to deliver an emotional weight.

However, the new characters introduced throughout this adventure are exciting and leave the reader wanting to delve deeper into their stories. At the same time, the action is constant in this issue, leaving little room to process the events and be with the characters.

Somnus continues to be an incredible new addition to the Marvel Universe, both in his powers and as a character. But it is a decent read if readers are only in it for the action and do not care significantly about the more significant implications of this adventure.

Marauders are, in many ways, an excellent example of the Krakoan era storytelling, where character backgrounds, histories, and emotions are not as relevant as the following story. Things do get resolved, and questions are answered.

But something was missing in this issue. Perhaps the next issue will give us what has been missing.