Comic Book Herald

A Comic Book Reading Order Guide For Beginners & Fans

David Bowen

About David Bowen

In his early days, young Davey was accepted *twice* to the Joe Kubert School of Cartooning. Alas, what might have been! Now a finicky freelancing wordsmith and (blessedly) former academic, Prof Bowen hopes to share his lifelong love of comics and sci-fi/fantasy through the lens of deep visual reading and hopefully something of his experience as an enthusiastic teacher of literacy across all media. You can find him confused about social media on Twitter at @VorkosiganCadet
(Honoring the inimitable--Lois McMaster Bujold!)

“Sins of Sinister” Part 10: Nightcrawlers #3—in Review!

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“The Sacred Heart”

Credits: Si Spurrier writes; Lorenzo Tammetta and Phillip Sevy draw; Rain Beredo colors; Clayton Cowles letters; cover by Leinil Francis Yu and Sunny Gho

I’m very pleased Si Spurrier’s Nightcrawlers mini ended up being the most event-essential in its final entry, and it’s the one that had the most detailed world-building—with its contributions on the mystic side of things baffling some readers who couldn’t see how any of it could ever fit into the main thrust of the narrative. Whoops!

Not only is this issue one of the most event-critical—we get some fun surprises along the way! Right away, fans will be mystified by what appears to be Galactus possessed by a Spirit of Vengeance. The last entry from Spurrier for this event goes down swinging, and it’s a sight more impressive than the other entries for Year 1000. That’s no small thing when the friendly competition is Kieron Gillen and Al Ewing.

SPOILERS AHOY

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“Sins of Sinister” Part 8: Immoral X-Men #3—in Review!

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“Our Nine-Hundred-Years-and-Counting Mission”

Credits: Kieron Gillen writes; Alessandro Vitti draws; Rain Beredo colors; Clayton Cowles letters; cover by Leinil Francis Yu and Jesus Aburtov

A millennium into the Sinister Era—or rather, 900 hundred years into the Exodus Dominion (speaking only in the religious sense)—and our plucky heroes, Mister Sinister and his devoted servant Rasputin IV, are winding dramatically toward the conclusion of their centuries-long star romp, whose grim relentlessness must surely echo in tone the source of this issue’s epigraph, literature’s most embittered picaresque, Voltaire’s Candide. The 1759 French novella is most pointedly a rebuttal of Leibniz’s belief that our world must surely be the best of all possible worlds; this is actually the opposite a “multiverse” theory, since Leibniz was saying only one world is, it is this one and since God made this one world, why, it must surely be the best there could possibly be—so, Candide’s cast parades through a sequence of real-world horrors, which they mostly happily rationalize as simply integral to God’s miraculous natural order. And if our reality is so great, what does that say about the lesser options that might have been? Here’s an answer:

Welcome to Sinister X-Men: Warhammer!

Imagine the most loathsome anti-life tendencies of religiosity multiplied throughout the galaxy via Prayerworlds, each a world engine of mindless devotion wrenched from tortured meatpuppet prayerbots to feed a giant Exodus—whose greatest enemy is the next closest Exodus on his own Prayerworld. Warhammer goodness, indeed. The Warhammer universe Emperor is somewhat akin to what we see here from Exodus, in that each day, a thousand souls are sacrificed to sustain his immortality and thus his endless war against heretics, and even mutants! There is no individuality left in this war-ravaged reality (A few years ago, Gillen himself wrote a Warhammer title for Marvel).

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Steve Orlando’s Marauders—Annotated, Part 3!

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Steve Orlando’s Marauders #10-12—Annotated!

Marauders #9-12

Credits: Steve Orlando writes; Eleonora Carlini draws; Matt Milla colors; Travis Lanham letters; covers by Peach Momoko (#9-10) and Kim Jacinto (#11-12).

This is the final of three annotated entries on the recently ended Marauders volume 2, a whirlwind of cosmic and timey-wimey adventure that perhaps tried to do too much in too little time and space (ironically enough!)—but should provide plenty of worthwhile fodder for further mutant adventures.

The first entry annotates issues #1-5; the second covers issues #6-9.

Here, we look at the wrap-up to the title’s main story, about the human/mutant Threshold society—which also, oddly enough, contains the seed of the origin of Krakoa itself! Unfortunately, without the rest of this gonzo deep-time history, it’s very unclear what the storytellers were trying to achieve with Threshold. Seriously, given the ease with which Mars was terraformed… why not just give them a whole new planet, which they can verify isn’t already home to indigenous life and won’t be open to damaging time paradoxes. Perhaps there was a plan here, but for the foreseeable future, we just won’t know.

That said, whatever your feelings about this title, no one can deny our storytellers here took big swings and wild risks to do something different. In an industry where nothing is ever guaranteed, they took bold moves to see how far they could get before the corporate guillotine fell. If the series wasn’t for you, hopefully, you didn’t sink much, if any, cost into it—and if you still like X comics years down the line, who knows, maybe someone will take some of the most interesting material laid out here and give it another go in a story that can run its course. Sometimes, it never happens, but if it feels relevant to the right creator, the raw story stuff from prior runs does get told, even if it’s piecemeal, by different creators over time. That is just the biz.

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Steve Orlando’s Marauders—Annotated, Part 2!

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Marauders #6-8

Credits: Steve Orlando writes; Eleonora Carlini (#7-8) and Andrea Broccardo (#6) draw; Matt Milla colors; Ariana Maher letters; covers by Kael Ngu (#6-7) and Peach Momoko (#8).

This is the second of three annotated entries on the recently ended Marauders volume 2, a whirlwind of cosmic and timey-wimey adventure that perhaps tried to do too much in too little time and space (ironically enough!)—but should provide plenty of worthwhile fodder for further mutant adventures.

The first entry annotates issues #1-5; the third covers issues #9-12.

While the last entry speculates on where the title’s deepest revelations, regarding the origins of Krakoa itself, might be headed beyond Marauders #12, this one 1) provides some backstory reference for each Marauder, per their character-revealing therapy sessions; 2) covers the obscure pulls Orlando utilizes for the B plot (which unfortunately likely won’t get picked on again for quite a while); and 3) lays out the basics of the title’s main story, about the human/mutant Threshold society 2 billion years ago.

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