Loved this. Hopefully future issues are a little less dialogue heavy and do away with Amazing Baby. Also would love to see Jamie Madrox incorporated somehow.
I thought it was kind of weird and disjointed. I wanted to like it because Daken is finally involved in something, but it was pretty meh. Northstar really didn't contribute anything and is being made leader for no real reason. I don't remember him peppering his speech with so much gratuitous french before. Everyone else was just sort of there. They're trying to make that dog into a thing, and its not working. Its kind of grim if you know what the war wolves are. I love Daken, but doesn't having a telepath who can pull info out of minds make his pheromone-interrogation kind of redundant? In fact a lot of their skills make each others' redundant if I think about it.
It felt like they were building up a decent mystery, and the image of all the cars in the water was striking. But then they just left? And figured out the whole thing was because of some faceless random mutant racists? I thought they were going to saw the bridge was haunted and people were getting dragged off the side by Pennywise or something. But nope, another racist.
That confrontation with the 5 made everyone look bad. Northstar was demanding and petty, and the 5 were hypocrites because we know how often they've 'line jumped' from all the deaths in other books. And if they have thing massive backlog of missing persons, they've done a real **** job of keeping people safe.
I felt the issue was very wordy and kind of hard to follow
Had a pretty big Polaris focus which I liked though. The thing with her dad almost pressuring her to want to be the leader or having "expectations" in that way was kind of neat. But honestly I didn't like how she asked him to describe her in a sentence, he can't, and she's like "exactly". That... was 4th wall stuff to me and Leah Williams giving her own PoV on Lorna. But Lorna *does* have a lot of past definition to work with she ISN'T a blank slate and should not be treated as such. The fact Polaris has a history with Krakoa involving tossing it into outer space (along with Storm and Havok) was good to bring up. Her creating the team building meh it's fine. Overall my main thing with Lorna is, the book needs to justify why she's there, what does she offer the team and what does the team offer her. Rachel has TK so if it's just about controlling metal she has no purpose.
Felt kind of bad for Eyeboy whose prior development in the most recent Generation X (and also continued a bit in the Age of XMan book he was in) is being reverted and ignored some, and he's just a "lovable loser" of the group, or a comic relief. Of course that is probably how most fans view him anyhow but still... he actually DOES have very useful mutant abilities. And his thing with Nature Girl...
Northstar still has his arrogance and elitism SOME but toned down for sure. I can still tell he's from Quebec but that's also kinda toned back.
Daken to me seems almost unrecognizable not just how he's drawn but how he behaves. At least some characters note Daken is basically a villain for 90% of his existence but him suddenly being just a nice mellow dude...? It's a bit much to take. Need more transition here.
Prodigy didn't get a lot of attention I don't think
Rachel... don't know if I love how she's dressed well I guess they didn't really get their new costumes yet they were all in casual wear which is fine for a first issue when they were all out doing random stuff. I did like how her casualwear still had like "spikes" design on it. She and Polaris are obviously the powerhouses here and will presumably do the vast bulk of the work, although I can definitely see how the others could assist.
I had some headcanons going in to this book about how the team chemistry might work out, so far totally don't think it'll go the way I was thinking but we'll find out
Overall yeah just a confusing first issue, they're detectives searching for how mutants die, and the book will involve "The Five" and touch on more details related to the new Resurrection Protocols and all of that. It could get fairly philosophical or involve moral conflict for sure, and I still hold out hope their detective work may ultimately lead them into finding out "secrets" that are less than wholesome regarding Krakoa/Moira. That would give this book a real point, right now it seems more of a setup for sort of "wacky hijinks... when a group of strangers all are forced to come together, who knows what zany fun might emerge?". Which is OK but not really great for me, hoping for more substance
Last edited by AbnormallyNormal; 08-03-2020 at 03:52 AM.
Forget the old ways - Krakoa is god.
OBEY
This is a weird detail that irks me, but Krakoa still doesn't feel like a real place that people actually live on. The maps have actually worked against this, because Krakoa is actually a tiny island, so having these shots of big open fields and gigantic structures for tiny groups of people just serves to emphasize that the island makes no sense.
I'm not familiar with Aurora and what her powers are. Why didn't she just get out of the car when it wrecked? She drowned, not died on impact.
And that data page at the end told us nothing. Oh look, they're government is still mostly a secret. That told us so little information that it was a waste of space. Reminds me of when I was super into the SCP Foundation, and you'd see pages where something was supposed to be creepy because literally everything was blacked out and ||DATA EXPUNGED||
I feel the same way. Is Krakoa really that large and we're not aware, or is it that it grows with the needs of a story or writer?
I presume that something else was in play in why she didn't escape. Likely to be addressed when she is revived and a plot point down the line.I'm not familiar with Aurora and what her powers are. Why didn't she just get out of the car when it wrecked? She drowned, not died on impact.
I believe Leah said that she will be revealing parts of those redacted bits as her arcs move along and they touch upon them.And that data page at the end told us nothing. Oh look, they're government is still mostly a secret. That told us so little information that it was a waste of space. Reminds me of when I was super into the SCP Foundation, and you'd see pages where something was supposed to be creepy because literally everything was blacked out and ||DATA EXPUNGED||
Aurora's secondary mutation is invulnerability to vehicular accidents
This is an area where size is relative and scale can be very deceptive. In HoX, Krakoa is given a land area of 316 square miles (tiny print on the map), which is roughly comparable to Molokai in the Hawaiian Islands (5th largest in the chain with 260 square miles). What they've shown of Krakoa would fit pretty comfortably there and population/building probably wouldn't be an issue, currently at least. However Oahu, the most populated of the Hawaiian islands has almost twice the land area of Krakoa and a total population of about a million people. If they ever get to the point of restoring the dead from Genosha in significant numbers, 16 million would probably start straining things.
this is between 263 square miles for the pacific Krakoa and 53 for the Atlantic Krakoa*
Last edited by Kisinith; 08-03-2020 at 01:27 PM.