The creative team continues to care about layouts and panels and uses of color and rhythm and repetition. Unfortunately, the remaining issues, their arrangements and storytelling decisions, all kind of blur together. The story continues, traversing two books that suggest to some the structure of a double helix. This is likely a way to demonstrate that the important bit here was not her success but that her perspective has changed. Having been sufficiently “radicalized” (as a panel helpfully tells us), Moira’s story resumes on more sturdier footing, with a return of expected angles and layouts, even through her continued failings and additional deaths. The pages that follow are mostly arranged at oblique / Dutch angles, to reflect Moira’s own disjointed search for a better future for mutantkind.
Radical perspectives (oblique / Dutch angles House of X #2) The grid’s appearance here reads more like a wink to readers familiar with the history of superhero comics than a somber acknowledgment of this book’s ambitions (and it does return later in the series, but more as a way for the storytellers to alternate perspectives in Krakoa’s leadership roundtable discussions). When the story pivots to Moira’s interrogation by Mystique and Destiny, we see two pages of the nine-panel grid made famous by Alan Moore’s use of it in Watchmen and then infamous by later, inferior invocations of the form, deployed as a signifier of weighty introspection or whatever (now that I think about it, I don’t know many Marvel books that have deployed the nine-panel grid). The panel compositions start to vary when The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants show up, disrupting Moira’s third life and her attempt to play by the rules while changing the world for the better. “The Uncanny Life of Moira X” ( House of X #2) begins with three pages laid out very similarly: we see four “widescreen” horizontal panels of similar sizes.
#Serial coda 2 serial
This work seems particularly challenging in our present moment due to a range of factors: the high price points for single issues, preferences for collected editions and binge-ready batches of longer-form storytelling, disruptions to the temporal rhythms of buying and reading monthly comics.Īt the start of my House of X / Powers of X write-ups, I talked about the ways that these contexts for serial narratives in superhero comics seemed to be informing Hickman’s take on the X-Men. There’s an art to collaborating on a monthly mainstream comic: writers, artists, designers, and editors are all variously attending to the work on a particular issue, while also keeping a careful eye on what came before and what’s up ahead. I am still thinking a lot about the current state of the superhero serial narrative.
#Serial coda 2 series
Writing a “recap” style series was pretty exhausting, and in retrospect I think the only recap writing series that has stood the test of time anyway is Tom Scharpling’s commentary on the 2011 season of Celebrity Apprentice, so I have no regrets walking away from an unpaid gig that ultimately failed to bring me joy.
The last time I fired up this blog, I was closing in on the conclusion of a series of weekly write-ups on Jonathan Hickman’s X-Men relaunch.
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