The thrilling, unpredictable X-Men event X Of Swords sticks the landing with Destruction
Image: Image: Marvel Comics Aux Features Comics Panel
(This review reveals major plot points of X Of Swords.)
When Marvel announced X Of Swords, the first crossover event of the X-Men’s Krakoa era, it looked a lot like Soul Caliber with mutants. And it looked very cool: The X-Men have swords, and there are a bunch of new characters with swords, too! One of them is a giant alligator with four arms! But what the X-Office puts together is much less straightforward than a fighting competition, instead highlighting how well this group of writers and artists collaborate to fearlessly push this franchise in new directions. The broad strokes of the story are familiar—the forces of darkness threaten to overtake Earth, a group of champions assembles to fight them—but the execution constantly upends expectations. This helps the event grow momentum over the course of its 22 issues, leaving readers guessing as to how these moving parts are going to come together for the heroes’ inevitable victory.
And what a sweet victory it is. Writers Jonathan Hickman and Tini Howard unite all these threads for a triumphant grand finale in X Of Swords: Destruction #1 (Marvel), with artist Pepe Larraz and colorist Marte Gracia delivering some of the finest artwork in X-Men history. There are multiple panels here that could be blown up to poster size, and the gigantic scope of the action in this issue reads as a love letter to X-Men fans. The group shots are packed with detail that asks readers to pause and see how many characters they can identify, but none of that detail comes at the expense of dynamic action. One particularly gorgeous page is built around the Annihilation helm, placing sequential panels within the design of the object to emphasize its importance in driving the narrative.
The X-Men franchise spent the ’80s rapidly growing in popularity by constantly giving readers more with new characters and spin-off series like New Mutants, X-Factor, and Excalibur, and X Of Swords taps into that energy. The first year of the Krakoa era situated readers in an environment where everything old is new again, reviving figures from the past and uniting all the disparate factions of mutantdom. Now it’s time for more, and X Of Swords gives that to readers by introducing fresh faces and effectively developing their personalities. Apocalypse has been a breakout character of this new mutant age, and after being positioned as the toughest mutant in history, Apocalypse spends most of X Of Swords face-to-face with his greatest weakness: his long-lost family. Even Apocalypse is a slave to love, and the epic romance between him and his wife, Genesis, is the heart of this event.
X Of Swords isn’t perfect. The mythologizing of Arakko gets repetitive, especially when one of the issues (X-Men #14) reuses artwork from a previous chapter, pairing it with a new script showing a different perspective of the same events. There are going to be plenty of readers annoyed at the fight fake-outs, and you can’t blame them when that’s what the promotional materials promised. Saturnyne, the manipulative, omnipotent gamemaster of X Of Swords, isn’t an especially compelling villain, but Hickman and Howard ground her a bit through her obsession with Brian Braddock, the former Captain Britain. Even with all this power, she’s still pining for a guy she can’t have, and this final issue successfully uses Apocalypse and Genesis’ relationship to heighten Saturnyne’s tragic loneliness.
As a crossover, X Of Swords succeeded in letting individual series hold on to their unique voices while still telling a cohesive story. Not every chapter is essential for the main plot, but diversions like the Hellions two-parter still feel important because they use the event to plant major seeds for the future. There’s already a lot happening for mutants right now, and X Of Swords ends by establishing an entire new frontier to explore. The Krakoa experiment isn’t losing any steam, and the confidence and excitement of this crossover suggests that the best is still to come as seeds take root and the X-Men’s world continues to grow.
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A fun little bit of Marvel deep cut in X of Swords is the lore surrounding Kid Cable’s sword: The Light of GaladorGalador is actually the homeworld of ROM Spaceknight, a character that was part of a toy tie-in that was fully integrated into the Marvel Universe. But strangely enough Marvel doesn’t own ROM so they can’t mention the character by name anymore but all his backstory and his solo series is still canon.
Linkara did a retrospective on ROM a few years back to those who are interested in learning more:
The original Bill Mantlo run on ROM was pretty awesome. It was surprisingly horror-centric for a comic book made to sell dolls (not like cool comics, which are made to sell movies). ROM’s enemies are the Dire Wraiths, who in this incarnation are like Skulls but they use black magic, and one of their signature tactics is to kill everyone in a house, leave them hanging upside down in the basement to drain out their blood for spells, and then take on their identities.
Just to add to the mess. Marvel created the Dire Wraiths, but Parker Brothers mentioned them on the ROM packaging and in the commercial. So now it’s up in the air who exactly owns them. They still regularly appear in Marvel Comics but Hasbro – who bought out Parker Brothers – has introduced their own Dire Wraiths in their IDW comic universe. Marvel even had to file an opposition because Hasbro tried to trademark the name Dire Wraith. Which must have been awkward because Marvel is one of Hasbro’s bestselling toy lines.
I believe at one point the Dire Wraiths were identified as the Deviants of the Skrull race.
Did each of those characters just get Botox? They’re only slightly more emotive than the robots.
You’re like an anti-advertisement for this book
Stupid crossovers. I enjoyed HoxPox and the first Hickman trade, but I feel like this is going to be incomprehension without following a bunch of titles and spending a fortune.
If you can wait and have access through your local library, Hoopla should get these all for free within a year. The first wave of trades of this era hit in the last two months.
(This review reveals major plot points of X Of Swords.)Does it, though? Major ones, I mean. I read this review and left refreshed by the fact that it had piqued my interest in this story without giving me too many details that might otherwise cause me to not pursue reading it.
“delivering some of the finest artwork in X-Men history”LOL
Art Adams, Barry Windsor-Smith, King Kirby, Dave Cockrum, Jim Lee, Neal Adams, Frank Quietly, Marc Silvestri, Joe Madureira, Bill Sienkiewicz, John Byrne, Alan Davis, & Ed Piskor might have a word for you
Don’t forget my man, Rick Leonardi!
Leonardi, Paul Smith, Walt Simonson, John Romita JR, the list goes on & onDon’t get me wrong, Pepe Larraz is great, but come on
explain to me how praising pepe larraz’s art means all those other artists are suddenly bad when that’s obviously not what oliver was saying
It is simply not “some of the finest artwork in X-Men history,” when every artist i listed, and more have done finer work.
Larraz is great, but the bar is high
Do you not understand what the word “some” means?
“some” is one of the vaguest words in the English language
And yet you took this much offense to it!
Did I? Thanks for letting me know!
… I mean, the artwork was legit great though and it’s one of the first comic issues in a long while to leave me AGOG. I think it’s valid to say this without meaning any disrespect or disregard to the history of the books, but if you wanna be mad I guess you can!
Whoa, thank you for your permission. It means a lot to me
I think the art style is interesting but I’m not a huge fan. It’s like…trading card art?
Truly my only quibble is that ambient coloring fucks the line work.
But that just the way these comics get colored nowadays, and at least Marte Gracia is working in vibrant, bright colors, not just brown and grey sludge
It’s…flat, maybe?I grew up during the ‘80s and ‘90s, comic art is very different these days. You’re not wrong about the colors at least being a refreshing change of pace.
For me, Byrne is still the king for his ability to imbue his characters with a grounded humanity and emotion. He made ridiculous, outlandish characters and plots feel Earth-level, in the best way possible.
The panels I see here are ugly, yeah.
Easily my favorite crossover since Secret Wars – can’t wait to see what kinda nuttiness Howard’s going to continue to bring to Marvel over the next few years. And calling the art spectacular is an understatement… still thinking about some of those panels a week down the line.
It’s really night and day between this event and that Death Metal event over at DC.This isn’t a Marvel vs DC thing, just that in comparison this event while still dense with plenty of characters felt dynamic and emotional with real payoff for most of the characters.And on the other side with an event featuring DC’s big three, it feels like we’ve been standing in place for over a year just telling random “what of this hero was evil stories” unrelated to the main plot whose climax seems to be about two giant evil gods punching each other with planets. (Which sounds like it might be interesting, but really drags when you lack any emotional connection to the characters)
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned much (and I wonder why…) is that this issue effectively put paid to the “that’s not Xavier/Xavier is the bad guy/they’re all being mind controlled” thing that keeps getting bandied about by people who aren’t onboard with the new direction and are looking for some reason to undercut it.Just as they deliver an info-dump about why the term “X-Men” is being phased out (due to its diplomatic implications) Scott and Jean both go “f-that” and gather everyone they can to go on a massive rescue mission. Not only is that a VERY X-Men thing to do, but Charles and Eric are both shown smiling and approving of this act of blatant/ heroic rule-breaking. The council has to do/say one thing… but the people are a different matter.So it’s not that they’re evil/skrulls/doppelgangers or whatever – it’s that they have larger, more complex concerns – running a nation being one of them – mixed with the terrible knowledge that if they don’t get the entire Mutant species to come together as one, including the ones who’ve done terrible things/are terrible people, that the inevitable result is their extinction.But they’re still themselves enough to understand that outlawing the term “X-Men” on the world stage doesn’t mean their people aren’t still going to use it and see it as something to live up to. “You can’t kill an idea” and all that.
“dynamic and complex”… those are things you have to explain. Because when you don’t, people can tell you’re repeating them to yourself in your head as you read, like a pep talk.
What an absurd, over-the-top review. How much did Marvel pay to pimp this shitty 22-part “epic”? What drivel – the review and the “X-event.”
This event was kind of weirdly structured, which makes sense given that they re-organized it and nearly doubled the issue count once the pandemic hit. I could’ve done less with the sword hunting in order to have gotten a little more context and explanation of the Otherworld and its characters (beyond the prose pages), which I’m still kind of struggling to make sense of after having only really read the current Excalibur series. That’s one area of the X-Universe I’m not at all familiar with, and although there’ve been some storylines with that setting and those characters in the years since, there hadn’t been a regular Excalibur book in almost 15 years. There were plentiful hits and misses with this event for sure, but I do have to say I’m a little let down by it in the end. The geographic context of Amenth, Arrako, and Otherworld left me confused, Otherworld politics left me confused and the use of magic seemed arbitrary at times, and they didn’t really deliver much on the big shakeup of resurrection protocols.
Yeah, I only read the main x-men title and I’m a little confused about this event. I’ll be into anything by Hickman and Larraz but I still feel like I’m missing a piece of the puzzle somewhere. I wish there was some kind of reading list that wasn’t just: “read everything.”
There are a few things that are subjectively skippable if you’re willing to miss those earlier sword-gathering moments I mentioned, but the only book that was almost totally isolated from the main story around the sword bearers was Hellions. The issue of X-Factor that comes right after the Creation one-shot was surprisingly just as important (and just as long) as all three of the X of Swords one-shots, and then after the sword gathering and the Stasis one-shot, all the issues are heavily serialized between books with the exception of Hellions.If you want the bare minimum of the big story beats, you could maybe get away with just reading X-Men , X-Factor, and the three one-shots (and maybe Excalibur, which set the event up but was surprisingly not as critical overall as I thought it’d be).
I last checked in when they hired Apocalypse to help run their fantasy island and this family of books seemed to have returned from wandering in the wilderness. After years of no particular direction at all, call them the Bendis years whether or not he was writing… they’d definitively traded Claremont’s “start three new storylines every year, finish none of them” for Hickman’s “start three new Wikipedia articles every year, forget about them”. Sort of a spaying/neutering to play nice with the new, diminished audience, where arguing over “canon” and “lore” for the Wikipedia article is the telos of a comic book.Good to know they’re staying the course. I mean, objectively bad, but, well, yeah. Yeah.
That’s one take on it. Mine is that it was boring and pointless.
TBH, I did not have hopes for this when I first heard about it. I’m glad that I gave it a chance because it was much more than Soul Calibur with mutants. I loved how Saturnyne came up with some batshit rules (Summoner won despite getting killed because it was a literal fight to the death?!) and even more batshit matches (Illyanna arm-wrestles Pogg Ur-Pogg! Storm in a runway walk off! Drinking contests!).
I’m just upset that there was no games of Twister, no Karaoke Sing-off, no swimsuit competition, and no baking contests.
Loved X Men when I was a kid. Honestly can not believe they are still going.
Today? Violence and costumes are not so much my thing, but I guess, mighty ok, I can see the attraction there. there are other comic book series that are equally as cool if not way better.
They have just given up on the titles for these books. Tarot cards, and then we put an “X” in there? And then a colon. And then “Destruction”. Yikes.
I didn’t care for this crossover, but I’m not a fan of the X-Men’s exclusionary imperialist era. X of Swords should not be allowed to have more than ten installments yet it clocked in at twenty-two. I probably would’ve appreciated Saturnyne’s whimsy if it didn’t clash with the event’s portentousness.
Just what Krakoa needed: More background mutants! Meanwhile Apocalypse
gets to be reunited with his family in the terribly named Amenth. So
Apocalypse nearly gets Earth invaded by demon hordes because of his
selfishness & still essentially gets what he wanted anyway?