X-MEN: HELLFIRE GALA 2023: Pride Goeth Before the Fall of X (Spoiler-Free Review)

Be forewarned: X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023 is EXACTLY what readers have been hoping and fearing it would be.

Everything the X-Men and the Krakoan nation have been building towards since House of X is changed, just as promised. This triple-sized one-shot kicks off the aptly-titled “Fall of X” era, and if there were ever truth in advertising, it’s right there in the title. It’s worth appreciating just how expertly the entire X-office has navigated the Krakoa era since 2019, with very few missteps and a clear sense of where the overarching story was going. Line-wide, the X-Men group of comics has never been more clear-eyed in its execution and sense that everything was building toward something, and that everything was tied together. Even with the departure of Krakoa mastermind Jonathan Hickman last year, editor Jordan White and his stable of writers and artists have managed to keep their eye on the ball to produce a genuine, honest-to-goodness multilayered three-act play that has played out across hundreds of single issues, numerous titles, and rotating creative teams. And by God, somehow it’s worked. Now, the third act of the sprawling, epic Krakoan era kicks off with the force of a dozen atom bombs.

There’s a palpable sense of tension building throughout X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023 that writer Gerry Duggan expertly teases out until the it explodes at the perfectly-timed moment. The entire narrative is holding its breath, waiting, waiting, waiting to exhale… Everything is proceeding exactly as the X-Men want it to, until… boom. All hell breaks loose. Absolutely no one is safe. Everything the X-Men took for granted as secure is turned against them in the blink of an eye. The scope of the horror wrought by ORCHIS, Moira X, and more is hard to comprehend at first – readers may want to read this comic a second time through to truly ingest what they’ve just read. The words “hated and feared” haven’t been so brutally up front and personal since a Sentinel incinerated Professor X way back in “Days of Future Past.”

Once readers’ jaws are picked up off the floor from the shock and awe of what they’ve just witnessed wrought against their favorite characters, the real scope of what ORCHIS has in mind for Earth’s mutant population is revealed – and in terms of setting the plate for what “Fall” will look like, Duggan leaves it all up in the air in the best way possible. There’s no clear way to know what the next steps look like for the X-Men – an amazingly difficult task to pull off in this modern era of comics, but more admirable for the execution of craft at Duggan’s hands. Hats off to all concerned for this expertly-crafted piece of tense, taut yet character-driven storytelling.

Two things stand out that prevent Hellfire Gala 2023 from being a flawless comic, though. First and foremost – the shoehorning in of a fan-favorite character into the narrative distracts overall. There are lamentable beancounter/IP-maintenance driven decisions at play here; once more the whims of the MCU force themselves onto the Marvel Universe proper to the detriment of natural storytelling. It isn’t surprising, unfortunately, but the pacing of the opening scene slows the opening moments noticeably out of the gate. But once this scene is done, the storytelling flow recovers quite nicely.

Second, and perhaps more crucially, is the fact that there are a whopping nine pencillers for this book. While jam issues are fairly routine affairs in modern comics, some of the wildly different art styles clash and distract from the otherwise flawless narrative progress. Not a single one of these pencillers turns in bad work – Adam Kubert’s art might be the shakiest, all things taken equally – but the fact that having a single artist for the whole comic would have produced a more unified sense of storytelling is hard to ignore.

While hardly new reader friendly, X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023 is a mammoth of a comic that overcomes this by gobsmacking readers over the head with sheer storytelling ferocity. Anyone reading it would be extraordinarily hard-pressed to not be chomping at the bit to know what comes next. The Fall of X is here… woe unto Marvel’s merry mutants. But, it should also be considered – it’s always darkest before the dawn.