Jonathan Hickman

The fractured alternate-future nations of America are being pushed to war by the House Of Mao - the mother of Death's child confronting the Chosen while Death searches for their lost son. Between the politics of millenarian cultists in power and hi-tech warfare and the three horsemen of the apocalypse setting out to kill Babylon and Death and his witch-friends in a bloody confrontation on the spiritual border of magic and reality, this smooth, stylish apocalyptic western moves slyly through show more epic moments on its way to the end of the world. Hickman and Dragotta are a powerful team and this mad sci-fi fantasy end times saga is a real favourite. show less

Jonathon Hickman continues his weird tale of global finance barons in thrall to the god Mammon, and the grisly murders committed in the course of their internecine rivalry.

In this instalment, Detective Dumas seeks the help of an academic to help his inquiries. The two go inside the Fed building and encounter a deep, dark secret. Meanwhile Ria Rothschild and her familiar are proceeding to enact a bloody retribution for the murder of her brother.

The artwork is still suitably creepy and Hickman show more manages to keep his story on the right side of ridiculous. I did find his chronology confusing at times; the narrative is not quite sequential, and the reader should pay attention to the date/time stamps on the top of the page. I also started to get uncomfortable with his use of the Rothschild name, and how he characterises them. I think it's the only real name in the finance industry that he appropriates, and he gives the impression that he's aligning with some of the anti-Semitic stuff that was hurled at the Rothschilds in the past. It's not necessary and the story would not have suffered at all if he'd invented another name for those characters.

I'm not expecting another instalment for a year or so, but I will be looking out for it. It will be interesting to see if I can pick up this convoluted tale after a long break. show less

Can't believe it actually took me this long to notice that the only character in this book that isn't a white male is the dog, but at least she gets a chapter to herself recounting her adventures in space. She's a bit of a pioneer, because the mad bad science is on an outward trajectory, to other worlds and other realities, even as it consolidates power on Earth, losing Star City to an alien infestation that has taken over Russia. There's a lot of pondering the relative morality or lack show more thereof in this, mostly for the purposes of noting how that there isn't any. Hard to like, let alone love, Manhattan Projects is still a dark, nasty comedy of science in the hands of sociopaths. show less

Jonathan Hickman's total relaunch of the X-Men mythos in 2019, otherwise known as the Krakoan Age which was to last in publishing terms through to 2024, is imaginatively masterful, so dense in its myth-making that it will eventually require a second reading.

It starts the new cycle as a massive reference text in which a 'present' (the creation of Krakoa) offsets a 'long future' or 'futures'. Hickman managed to draw relatively recent futurist speculation about the post-human into his core show more story of evolutionary competition between humans and mutants.

What was once a narrative about repression and cruelty that owed a great deal historically to a coming-to-terms with the crimes of national socialism has switched into a narrative of evolutionary struggle where one might be nervous of transformed national socialist tropes re-emerging.

In the older narratives mutants were persecuted victims but in the new they are a power in their own right engaged in a more equal struggle for dominance, initially intending to be moral but becoming less so out of necessity as humanity struggles to retain its species-dominant position.

The struggle is just a precursor to new states of being where post-humanity is not humanity at all and this post-humanity is destined for immersion in new forms of being that mean the end of all struggle. To cease to struggle is the end of evolution for both sides.

Where we end up can be seen as awe-inspiring or terrifying but Hickman creates an extremely clever multiversal model that offers more than one outcome, allowing the mythos to expand in one or many competing and conflicting directions, some in the novels and others to come.

Is Krakoa a form of futurist Israel? It is interesting to set it alongside the futurist and isolationist Wakanda. Is Krakoa caught up in struggle as victim or as perpetrator after the initial genocide of its type, with the genocided now enabled to become resurrected in a striking and distinctive eschatology?

There are many cultural tropes from our history but also from science being worked here into a creative whole. One is tempted to use the word 'genius' about Hickman. It is the sort of work that requires just a few paragraphs (as here) or a complete exegesis.

One might say that, in a wholly capitalist context (Marvel Publishing), Hinkman's market is responsive enough that he has been enabled to create a mythos that is transitional between a jaded Judaeo-Christianity and an inchoate transhumanism which definitely has religious leanings.

The two connected graphic novels are rhetorical ethical statements as obscure as those of the New Testament except that we know that it is all invention and not spiritual reality (if that even exists). The moral ambiguities of the tale are never resolved but force the reader into troubling thoughts.

Yes, it is just a set of comic books with all the posing and nonsense of a superhero universe but then most tales of gods and monsters are nonsense and made up of posturing, out of which our anxieties are expressed and our doubts and choices can be reflected.

It is good that it is just a capitalist exercise in nonsense because it reminds us of the status of all such exercises in high meaning - that they do not exist without some real world context - but Marvel has enabled Hinkman to do what Alan Moore was sometimes allowed to do, to expand thought. show less