Inferno #4 Review/Spoilers

[Wallcloud]

Moira's unwillingness to learn from her mistakes will probably cost mutantkind more than, well, a lot of things. Because she doesn't learn, she bandages over past errors in hopes that they'll heal in time.

Now she's single-handedly fucked over not only mutantkind but also humankind, as the machines are more than likely going to usurp them.

[Wallcloud]

If I remember correctly, the anti- mutant vaccine only worked on mutants AFTER the X Gene manifested.

Moira wants to come up with a cure that works BEFORE the X Gene activates.

[Rift]

Holdup... why Moira sound like a Hickman stand-in?

Moira leaves unceremoniously, depressed and unable to fulfill her vision because other people got in her way. Damn.

[Vishop]

That was it?

More than that. It was highly anticlimatic.

[jwatson]

If i'm honest even his little throw away scenes now have new meaning to me. Like in xmen drawn by booth i remember thinking why does storm costume look so loose, now it makes sense to him she was pregnant at that time or was suppose to be. So it's like each moment he had for her the overall story was to get her to a point to be a baby momma and it just makes the whole run not seem as deep as i played it up to be at certain points. like for me his run was saved by others and him ending it early.

[Saithor]

Yeah I mentioned that they all got promotions/ new roles. What I don't understand is how he got put in the category of "can't be trusted".

Morals are a major liability for glorious Krakoa /s

“Scott, why can’t you be more like Hank? He’s putting in some good work.”

[Kingdom X]

On the other side, if we had, the Krakoa era would end, and we'd be back to mutants being hunted and hated while having barely any power...

I agree the Krakoa era should be extended, I just wish they'd done more to keep Hickman.

Call me naive, but I’ve always kind of been of the opinion that Hickman could have reached a definitive conclusion without blowing up Krakoa and taking mutants back to square one. Like there are so many ways to change the current status quo with mutants still having a nation and not being in that damn mansion. Same way Secret Wars didn’t actually reboot the Marvel universe.

[yellow cyclone]

^ Guessing it's a dropped storyline? Maybe for the better? They might've had him be mind-controlled and fridging a random female character like Colossus did.



On the other side, if we had, the Krakoa era would end, and we'd be back to mutants being hunted and hated while having barely any power...

I agree the Krakoa era should be extended, I just wish they'd done more to keep Hickman.

i think you could've had the krakoan era "extend" after hickman's story, since you have moira with a reset power. now we'll never know

[Stormultt Divine]

On the other side, if we had, the Krakoa era would end, and we'd be back to mutants being hunted and hated while having barely any power...

Right and ain't nobody got time for that.
The mutants going back to being the MODEL MINORITY? Yea..no lol.

And how I loved the past panel.

[Kingdom X]

Moira leaves unceremoniously, depressed and unable to fulfill her vision because other people got in her way. Damn.

I think we just cracked the code my friend.

[sunofdarkchild]

Based on what we got, I'm going to agree it was for the best. Krakoa as an idea has so much potential that I'd hate to see thrown away because of stories like Moira or Orchis. The books that really take advantage of the new playground are the most compelling the franchise has had in a long time, and after over 30 years of the franchise resetting back to the status quo every couple of years it's nice to finally have a new status quo that doesn't suck and isn't undone by a reset button. We're not back to the mansion and school for the 100th time or just repeating another mutants are almost extinct story, though now Moira threatens to become one.

[BobbysWorld]

ok but now she is human. she is moira again. So instead of living this life with those she built connections with she is so hellbent on taking choice away from others that she is off to her next plan. It just doesn't make any sense. If we let everything ride to this moment, what is moira problem now? She can be that human ally now that mutants have a place to go but instead she wants to make it like mutantdom never exists at all. What does that accomplish now? Who is she fighting for now? Hell, what is she fighting for now?

Then let's say she succeeds and stops mutantdom so who is there to help humans in this pivotal time that actually causes the robots to lose. It only makes sense if moira wants the robots to win.

My fave part of the issue was the emotion hickman allowed the robots to have though. I actually did think Omega sentinel made a good point about creating something for one purpose but then destroying it when it develops it's own independent desires but the machines still wrong. Unless of course on some meta level the implication is we should all be rebelling against creation/. Theres just a lot here my mind is processing.

Also, its incredibly relevant that Moira's plan to make mutants human inherently suffers from Moira's hubris of thinking she knows more than she does just because she's lived through so much....because one thing she clearly DOESN'T know....is the reveal that the machines hate humans just as much as they do mutants, and thus curing mutants was never going to actually save them on that basis.

However I will say that while the machine characters' emotions and point makes sense from a narrative standpoint, its one of the problems I've had with Hickman's overall approach to Krakoa in general. A lot of the time when I talk about the supremacist vibes I've felt he seeded in, that's not necessarily the right way to say what I'm describing. Its more accurate to say that just as big a problem for me is the way Hickman's so fixated on building parallels that he falls into the trap of creating false equivalencies where they REALLY don't fit.

One such example is here where he deliberately paralleled Omega Sentinel's "how long did you think we would be content to just sit here and take it" about machines' reactions to sentiments towards AI....with Cyclops' line to the Fantastic Four in HoX about how long did you think mutants would just take it.

That's.....a huge problem for me, because the situations are just NOT parallel, no matter how Hickman tries to frame it as such. What Cyclops said about mutants founding Krakoa even while most of their actions in doing so seemed extreme from the FF's point of view....that spilled DIRECTLY out of readers having spent the last two decades watching mutants be hunted to the edge of extinction, facing attempted legislation aimed at sterilizing them, driven from one refuge to another.....whether people agreed with the actions mutant characters took when forming Krakoa or not, there's no denying that the reaction of mutants to all these years of stories about persecution was EARNED....by those years of stories about persecution.

The same simply can not be said to be true of the machine sentiments here. What Omega Sentinel said spilled out of literally ONE miniseries' worth of revelations that in ONE possible FUTURE timeline.....mutants won and wiped out AIs, most of which are just completely hypothetical beings to us, the readers, given the only ones we have ANY emotional investment in are just....Nimrod and Omega Sentinel. The persecution driving Omega Sentinel's fervor is basically abstract and hypothetical, deliberately created by the narrative to turn the story into one of a war between equal aggressors where both sides are equally at fault and equally invested in a desperate drive for survival....whereas the persecution driving Cyclops' words to the FF in HoX and the creation of Krakoa, was a long established concept within the franchise that the entire seed of the Krakoan era arose organically out of.

And these things are just....not interchangeable. But Hickman's narrative tries to treat them as interchangeable in order to turn this into a story of two sides that are equally justified......but without the narrative ever actually doing anything to EARN that justification. Because even when focusing on the specific timeline that led to Omega Sentinel coming back in time, and even diving deep into the events of that timeline and how they inform Omega Sentinel's motivations and actions here and now......the reality is, at most we have a few pages of a vague abstract mutant future oppressing machines in a future timeline.....but ON THE PAGE, there's at most a bare handful of mutants who are actively attempting to engineer the downfall of machines even in order to assure mutant survival. Like, the Quiet Council, the Child of the Sun, the Trickster Titan, the X-Force members repeatedly trying to take out Nimrod....at MOST, these are literally ALL the mutants we're ever actually SHOWN acting as aggressors to the machines and thus earning their hatred......whereas the average Krakoan, the hundreds of thousands living on Krakoa now, and who are actively threatened by Orchis' actions and those of Nimrod and Omega Sentinel.....all of these mutants are completely innocent and blameless in any actual aggression against AIs, because they don't even know there's even any kind of conflict between their two peoples! And that matters! You can't treat one race's actions in their own defense and security in the face of active, on the page threats, as being the narrative equivalent of another race's actions in their own defense and security in the face of abstract future threats and at most the threat posed by a mere handful of individuals acting of their own volition in the here and now. This is a false equivalency. These two things are just not remotely the same thing, but Hickman's entire premise of the conflict between mutants and machines, as of Inferno's plot twist about the AI motivations, relies on treating it as the same thing and reframing the threeway conflict between races as one of mutual aggression.....despite decades of the aggression driving persecution of mutants within the X-franchise being explicitly, and DELIBERATELY....NOT justifiable.

And that.....is a huge, gaping flaw in the heart of Hickman's approach to the entire Krakoan era, and its why as much as I like the storytelling possibilities created BY his admittedly creative and clever changes to the X-franchise paradigms in a lot of other ways.....I'm not actually sad to see him go without resolving this particular era of stories in the way he personally intended at the outset of it.

[king81992]

The Krakoan isalnd and that safe space it created can still be around for mutants once ORCHIS is taken care of IMO.

It would just be the same as Genosha. An island haven for mutants.

But I also don't think getting rid of ORCHIS will ever make sense because its basically all of the hateful human entities coming together.

Unless they all start going against eachother.

ORCHIS is being set up for a civil war, I can't imagine some of their members being okay with machines replacing humanity.

[king of hybrids]

I’m probably way out of my lane, but considering how this era is rather straining the metaphor as it is; the main villain being an Indian woman vs the 3/4 white Quiet Council is a bit… off

[sunofdarkchild]

If I remember correctly, the anti- mutant vaccine only worked on mutants AFTER the X Gene manifested.

Moira wants to come up with a cure that works BEFORE the X Gene activates.

The last anti-mutant vaccine was specifically given to children before their powers could theoretically activate on the off-chance they were a mutant. Dark Beast then corrupted the vaccine into a form that would harm and eventually kill the mutant children.