#resurrection protocols

The Quiet Council forces him to alpha test a battle suit built by Forge intended to protect non-combatants. Using it to pose as CAPTAIN KRAKOA, Scott visits his own memorial at the X-Men's New York treehouse. Duggan really twists the knife here with this devastated child and a wonderfully sincere public memorial. Sure, the Quiet Council or X-Force might have put it on to sell the secret, but there are strangers there weeping over his passing.

Cyclops was this kid's favourite and now he's sad. I really didn't expect this to be honest and it made me emotional. Perhaps it's the soul cruising 'hated and feared'/Cyclops is mutant Hitler stuff the previous decades had been filled with, but I didn't imagine Cyke having fans like this. We've seen them before and he's been on the cover of Rolling Stone, but compared to his previous public death it's night and day. Cyke himself is having some complicated feelings, as you would imagine. What else can he say in a situation like this?

This is a bit more light-hearted. Scott and Synch are chilling in the tree watching Negasonic Teenage Warhead make out with one of her many girlfriends. I love that there's no further analysis of her value as a potential X-Man - Synch thinks that alone means she'll make a fine member one day. I agree and good for her.

Comic book deaths rarely feel like anything more than a setback, and the convoluted or unexplained ways people return tend to feel rote and predictable. I can't get excited about a solicit saying 'next issue an X-Man dies!' or similar because I know it's a temporary inconvenience to goose sales. In most cases creators already know when or how they're coming back. I didn't really see it as a get out of jail free card - more a paradigm shift that challenged writers to introduce more interesting stakes.

Taking that arbitrary, low stakes genre convention and pushing it to its logical endpoint struck me as a clever way to move past that tiresome sensationalism. Death doesn't have to be the only stakes, especially when mutants have more to lose than ever. A nation, vulnerable to external threats. A society built on quicksand. Bad faith actors living next door. Geopolitics! Any mutant can return without preamble to this brave new world, for good or ill. It wasn't a perfect safety net either - Otherworld, Arakko, dying publicly, the secrecy, requiring proof of death, the clone issue, etc all altered the paradigm with new stakes.

In short, HoxPoX stopped pretending that death was final or even meaningful and found new stakes to explore. I don't think Krakoa would have been as powerful without it, narratively and thematically. The fact that warriors were prioritised and precogs secretly banned set up dominos to explode in everyone's face. Mainly Chuck and Mags. The power they exercised over Mystique, for example, was so fucked up. That was always going to ignite and it didn't disappoint. They solved for death but they didn't solve for life - and that's the tricky part. As powerful as resurrection is, it's just as powerful a thing to have weaponised against you.

I do wish we got a book about The Five as characters, exploring their family unit, the pressure and position, the religious awe surrounding them. They're all pretty interesting people who barely knew each other beforehand (except Egg and Tempus.) They appeared in books here and there, but X-Factor and IXM (and HoxPoX to a degree) were their most substantial appearances. COVID happened at a terrible time for X-Men comics and messed up publication but I'm still happy with what we got.

As for how I feel about resurrection protocols being off the table (except for Chuck, apparently. Nevermind that it doesn't work that way) - it was inevitable and I think I've mostly just accepted it. From The Ashes is very back to basics and it wouldn't really fit, so I'm happy it's not being used RN. Definitely think R-LDS is a cynical and shallow idea taking shots at something wonderful for little gain.