X-Men #20
Bethany W Pope
Recap
Mystique has been promised her wife, but Xavier's bar for success keeps moving and the prize is drifting out of reach. Just what is Raven willing to do, to get what she wants?
Review
This issue primarily served as a means of driving up the stakes for Mystique and drawing the readers’ sympathies further into her corner. Much was promised, here, for future stories (most notably, the upcoming Hellfire Gala) but this story was very definitely designed to foster emotional resonance rather than furthering the plot — which isn’t to say that nothing majorly important happened here. Without getting into spoilers, there’s a reason that Nimrod features on the cover. It ain’t just window dressing.
Family is the central theme of this book — specifically the lengths a strong person will be willing to go to in an effort to undo the death of a loved one. On the one hand, we’ve got Mystique — a woman who is, frankly, terrible at loving people — who has been promised the return of the one person she has ever managed to really love well. Xavier and Magneto have promised her a great gift (something to which she should be automatically entitled, according to the laws of Krakoa) and the requirements for getting this gift (in point of fact, a *person*, not property, not a bargaining chip) keep shifting. Now they’ve sent her on an impossible mission, to complete a task, by herself, that an army failed at. They want her to fail, though they know the cost of it. She fails, of course, and buried in that failure are the seeds of their fall.
Even worse than her failure is the fact that they’re strike has sparked against another woman’s grief and lit the fuse of something world-ending. I can’t give away more without the aforementioned spoilers, but this is a big, long-promised shift in the series, and it will create external pressure which will match Mystique’s rage. Picture an internally pressurized can. Picture a nail. You get the idea.
In other words, old manipulative Chuckles, in his hubris, has forged a double rod for his own back.
I will say that this issue wasn’t particularly necessary. We could have seen this Orchis development in other books. We were already well acquainted with Raven’s raging grief. But the mirroring of the women (missing partners: subtextual children) their mirrored agony at the denied, long promised return of their loves, was beautiful and terrible to see. This story might not have been necessary, but it was brilliant. It certainly made me hug my spouse a little bit tighter tonight.
I will say this, also: Destiny’s diaries aren’t missing anymore. They’re in the hands of the person who deserves them least, and they have been turned over and well-thumbed.
Francesco Mobili’s art was potent, visceral, but it presented a clarity that was both wonderful and awful to endure. We see everything we want to, in these pages, and quite a few things that we’d rather look away from. There was one panel in particular, of a grieving woman (no. Not Raven) that practically tore my heart out. Mobili makes suffering beautiful. That’s a gift. He’s a talent to watch.
I’ve never been so impressed with this series.
Final Thoughts
This book is a beautiful, terrible gut-punch. It'll leave you grieving— in the best possible way.
X-Men #20: Between the Profit and the Loss
- Writing - 10/1010/10
- Storyline - 8.5/108.5/10
- Art - 9.5/109.5/10
- Color - 10/1010/10
- Cover Art - 9.5/109.5/10
I am in fact onboard for Hickman’s X world, and I want it to be good, but X-Men 20 was a really bad read.
Each of Hickman’s X Men title’s 1 or 2 issue stories clearly function as individual lines on an overall plot outline. X-Men 20, for example, can be seen as follows:
Mystique is sent to prevent Nimrod from coming online and fails
– Nimrod comes online
– Xavier and Magneto refuse to bring back Destiny
That’s all he wants to accomplish with this issue. While there are any number of different ways to tell that story, Hickman’s choices are baffling.
1. The issue opens with Mystique talking to Forge, requesting that he build her a powerful weapon. It should be simple enough to write that exchange in a way that is tolerable to read. But what we get is a conversation that is more awkward and needlessly cryptic than you could ever imagine. It could have been a straightforward conversation, it could have had good characterization for Mystique and Forge, it could have had fun back and forth between them, or it could have just provided good exposition.
Instead, it is these two overly serious weirdos trying to outdo each other with how awkwardly they can talk about simple things. It is a painful 4 pages. It’s also an unnecessary conversation, as it’s made clear that request has already been made by the Quiet Council.
2. This is probably the most important mission in X history so it is fortunate that they can send as big a team of their best and most destructive fighters as they want to. They have unlimited power and resources to get this extremely important mission accomplished, and they can resurrect any casualties from whatever team of mutants that they may send. Nimrod has been identified as the most likely threat to end the Mutant Race, after all.
Instead, Charles and Magneto just send… 1 mutant with a bomb.
Just the one. No back up, no team, not multiple mutants with multiple bombs just in case something goes wrong. They don’t even send one of the many mutants who has built-in destructive powers, like Havok or Cyclops or Orphan (whose mutant power is apparently cataclysmic) or even Iceman. Which brings us back to the stupid conversation with Mystique and Forge. Why do they need Forge to build a bomb when they have experienced mutants whose powers are already as destructive as bombs?
In fact, last time they attacked an Orchis station back in HoX/PoX, they succeeded with a team of powerful mutants that went in, split up, and destroyed the station. In that adventure, it was pretty clear that none of the mutants on that team (which included Mystique) could have pulled it off just on their own. Also, on that adventure, the whole X-team was killed. You’d think they might want to go get some payback, this team that has experience with successfully blowing up Orchis stations.
No. All Xavier and Mags do is send in Mystique, all alone, with a bomb, about five minutes (literally) too late.
3. Dr. Alla creates Nimrod in order to resurrect her husband. You’d think she might resurrect him not to look like a big white robot with a hot-pink robot face. But, I guess. Whatever. The point here was to add some emotional aspects to the creation of this big robot. Fine.
4. Mystique could easily just plant this bomb and get out of there unseen. In and out, easiest thing in the world. Instead, we find her standing around (with the bomb) in a group of Orchis agents who are all watching Nimrod be brought online, watching him sit up, talk to Dr. Alla, give her a hug…. Why? Why is Mystique spending ANY time in that room and not LITERALLY ANYWHERE ELSE ON THAT MASSIVE STATION?
This isn’t even the first time Hickman has written this situation. I wrote the following in another post about X-Men #17:
“When Jean identifies the hidden agent just using a different tactic than Oracle did, it only begs the question of why the hidden agent stayed around there at all, once their mission to abduct the queen was successful? Why remain behind at the scene of the crime to be scanned by telepaths at all?”
Check this out: Mystique is in any other part of the station. ANY OTHER PART. The kitchen. The bathroom. The toolshed. She sets off the bomb and escapes through a gate. She goes back to Krakoa and sips some tea.
Meanwhile, Dr. Alla and Nimrod are hugging and then poof, station blows up. All gone. The end.
Hickman created this reality, but he isn’t playing by his own reality’s rules. If Hickman was determined that she would fail, if that were his foregone conclusion, he really should have come up with a different reason than “She’s an idiot, and Charles and Mags are idiots”. He’s created a scenario where the X-Men have unlimited resources and powers. To have this mission be a failure, he had to come up with plausible obstacles that could thwart his Krakoans, and he didn’t do that. Instead, Hickman writes that Charles, Mags, and Mystique just ignore all the resources that he himself has already written them as having.
I understand that the point of the story was that Mystique would fail. Johnathan Hickman just never bothered to write a situation where that should actually have been what happened.
5. The story establishes that Nimrod can create duplicates of himself. Then, one of the Nimrods teleports away with the bomb in order to save the station. BUT that Nimrod was the only one with the husband’s consciousness. OK… why? Is Nimrod as big an idiot as Mystique is?
It could have been any duplicate that ported away with the bomb, but that wouldn’t pay off any pathos with Alla and her husband, even though it makes no sense at all. And let’s be honest. None of us care about Dr. Alla and her husband “Erasmus”. I think if your name is Erasmus, you might actually be destined to be changed into a weird robot. Apologies to any Erasmii who may be reading this.
6. Mystique returns to Krakoa and gets shamed by Xavier and Magneto for failing, just so they can confirm for her that they aren’t going to bring Destiny back. You’d think they’d have other priorities than being recriminatory and acting like d*cks, what with Nimrod being online now, and the Orchis station not even damaged.
7. The issue ends with a vague final page showing Moira reading Destiny’s Diaries. There are voice-over blurbs repeating what Destiny had once told Mystique. Is that just for our benefit, or is it also in the books Moira is reading, so that she knows it too? It would be easy to make that clear, so why not just make it clear?
Even worse to contemplate: Does this last page imply that Moira, Charles, and Mags already knew from the diaries that Mystique would fail, and Mystique was just sent in to fail anyway just so that they could keep putting off resurrecting Destiny? That would just be monumentally stupid.
Like I said, the only point and function of this issue is to establish:
Mystique is sent to prevent Nimrod from coming online and fails
– Nimrod comes online
– Xavier and Magneto refuse to bring back Destiny.
It’s like a creative writing assignment. “Here’s an outline, tell it in the form of a short story”. Hickman took those three bullet points from his broader outline, but then he told their story in such a distractingly dumb way.