Marauders #3: Devil in a Cool Hat

How does Steve Orlando fit so much intensity into twenty-five pages of image and text? This story is a ride, in the best possible sense. It’s also a collection of some of my own personal nightmares: rapid aging, someone eating someone else’s brain while they are conscious, someone else getting skinned alive, and all committed by people who are acting on the side of the angels. Seriously, I’m glad that I read this story in the middle of the day. It’s basically Saw-meets-Cronenberg-meets-‘But I’m A Cheerleader’. It’s wonderful, is what I’m saying.

Cassandra Nova was the central focus of this issue, and I’m all for that. Give me more Scary Auntie, please, Mr. Orlando. Other characters have their moments to shine, especially Xandra, but this is Nova’s court (everyone else is merely playing on it) and nobody is allowed to forget it. 

Beneath all of the (possibly deserved) cruelty, there’s a story about freeing and honoring the memories of all of our LGBTQ elders who suffered, were jailed, died and had their histories literally and figuratively buried by the straight majority. We have to fight, to free them, if we modern queer-babies want to live good lives in the precarious Krakoa of modern human rights laws. This is a narrative that many straight people will possibly miss, but if you are looking at it through my set of bisexual non-binary lenses, it’s undeniable. And very, very welcome. 

I’ve seen a great many complaints about Eleonora Carlini’s art online. Frankly, I don’t understand the problem that people seem to have with it (except, perhaps, that Aurora appears to have only one expression— super horny for Daken) but I think that this issue will be more well received, since her line work is considerably less cluttered — though thankfully no less skillfully stylized. 

This story is an allegory of the struggles of queer people who want to uncover their histories, wrapped up in a sci-fi/body horror package. I cannot recommend it strongly enough.