I’ve followed the original mini, this was the last part.
A follow through is deserved. So what happened to the grand, ambitious X-Men run by Jonathan Hickman?
It ended in a trainwreck.
It’s Hickman himself to explain, earlier this year:
When I pitched the X-Men story I wanted to do, I pitched a very big, very broad, three-act, three-event narrative, the first of which was House of X.
[…] as a three-year planI was also pretty clear with all the writers that came into the office what the initial, three-act plan was so no one would be surprised when it was time for the line to pivot.
during the pandemic, when the time came for me to start pointing things toward writing the second-act event, I asked everyone if they were ready for me to do that, and to a man, everyone wanted to stay in the first act.
the reality was that I knew I would be leaving the line early.
So after Inferno, I’ll be leaving to go work on my ‘Next Big Marvel Thing™’
I pruned the rhetorical noise.
The truth of it is that the ambitious project went nowhere. The original 12-issue mini presented a grand plan, followed by its first expansive arc titled Dawn of X, followed this year by Reign of X, and moving now into Destiny of X, I think now lead by Kieron Gillen. (if you, despite everything, still want to read this, I suggest the release order)
The project already went off the rails during the first year, so it’s not surprising that it ended with a trainwreck. Dawn of X didn’t even seem a sequel to the original story, it was all over the place and lacked the cohesion you would expect, and that was promised… Since House of X was just a setup for things to come. That didn’t come.
Rather than this expansive story in three acts we only got a clumsy 20%. We’ll never know the truth about why Hickman left it so incomplete. If we trust his words then it’s probably a mix of him wanting to support other writers while at the same time feeling like the story wasn’t anymore under his control. So he shrugged and left. He’s being paid anyway, and will continue to receive undeserved critical acclaim.
But it was also rather predictable. Marvel’s comics in general are in a really bad shape that more or less resembles to the collapse of the late 90s. There are many reasons for this and I’m not going to examine them here.
I’m disappointed because regardless of the quality of the stories from this point onward, and despite my original lack of trust on Hickman, I still wanted to see where it was going, and I still wanted him to have full control of it to the end. As I wrote before, I appreciate the ambition, and whether or not I like the story, I still want it to be fully realized as the author intended. Only when it’s done and wrapped up I can comment it for its merits and failures.
But this just went nowhere, and not only it is bad because we’ll never know how it was meant to be, despite following and trusting it for so many pages, but it also diminishes what is already there, because the whole thing collapses.
Please do not make grand plans if you don’t have what it takes to complete them. In the case of Hickman: please do not write grand things if you don’t give a shit. Are you trying to imitate J. J. Abrams?
