X-Men/Fantastic Four vol2 #1 (2020)
by Chip Zdarsky & Terry Dodson
Was there ever any doubt that Doctor Doom would show up in a series like this?
We are currently in the “Krakoa era” of the X-Men. It derives its name from the fact that the X-Men are residing in the newly created country of Krakoa, which is actually a living island.
This is not the first time that the X-Men gave automatic citizenship to any mutant that wants to live in their newly formed nation (we’ve had Genosha and Utopia), but if you thought that the X-Men of other eras isolated themselves from the rest of the world… that was nothing compared to Krakoa.
Admittedly I haven’t read a ton of X-Men stories from this period, but if I understand correctly being a mutant was basically the only criteria… they even let freaking APOCALYPSE join the council leading the place!!!
While there are plenty of cool and interesting ideas (it’s a fairly competent mix of fantasy, science fiction and political thriller tropes)… something never sit right with me with this era of the X-Men, and I’m kind of a casual fan of their franchise to begin with.
All this just to cover my back because I really, REALLY don’t feel qualified to pass judgment on the Krakoa era.
But of interest to THIS review is that the X-Men themselves question how to handle Franklin Richards, considering he’s not just an incredibly powerful mutant… he’s probably the most powerful mutant who doesn’t live in Krakoa.
So Magneto and Professor X… yes that’s him in that goofy helmet… basically decide they’re going to recruit Franklin for Krakoa.
This attitude is to be expected from Magneto, even if he’s supposedly in one of his heroic phases… but I really, really, REALLY don’t like Professor X in this.
The fact that he looks completely ridiculous certainly doesn’t help.
He’s counting on the personal connection that Kitty Pryde shared with Frankling during Fantastic Four vs X-Men to make the argument to leave his family sound more appealing.
Sounds legit.
As a reminder, in this period Franklin is slightly older than he should be (because he spent a couple of years outside of the universe), has hit puberty and is in a rebellious phase to the point of dying his hair black.
So he’s not in the best mood for having lost his powers.
There’s also a lot of resentment towards Reed, who hasn’t found a way to fully restore Franklin’s powers.
Although I appreciate that he’s not being entirely unfair here…
Not to mention that the Thing now fully trusts Reed. Compare and contrast with the original Fantastic Four / X-Men miniseries, where he was REALLY easy to convince otherwise.
The X-Men show up at the FF base (which is in Yancy Street in this period) for the sales pitch.
Great idea to show up, unannounced, closing ranks around the Fantastic Four. It REALLY sells the idea that you’re only here for Franklin’s sake.
Did I mention that I really, REALLY don’t like Professor X in this?
When you’re in the same room as MAGNETO and YOU are giving the mutant supremacy speech, that’s not a good sign!!!
Am I being too harsh on Chuck? I feel like his argument basically boils down to “we are the ones with the most power and so we are the ones to dictate the rules”… isn’t that supposed to be MAGNETO’s ideology???
I am asking with all sincerity to any X-Men fan who likes the Krakoan era: can you disagree with Susan’s position here and still consider the X-Men the good guys?
Also Magneto is being a COLOSSAL hypocrite here: the concern now is Franklin’s security?
REALLY? You seriously want to compare the safety of the Fantastic Four headquarters against the X-Men headquarters!?
I’m a self-admitted casual X-Men fan but I believe the score is something like…
Deaths caused by the destruction of Fantastic Four headquarters: 0
Deaths caused by the destruction of X-Men headquarters: dozens
Deaths caused by the destruction of a mutant nation: millions
That’s what I was saying, Thing!
Up to this point Kitty is the only X-Man with an understandable point of view because she’s the only one who actually bothers to ASK FRANKLIN WHAT HE WANTS.
Too bad that she did this by sneaking Franklin out of the house and bring him to one of the teleportation portals that allow access to Krakoa.
This turns into, of course, a big dumb family battle.
Notice that Reed and Susan are not against the idea of Franklin eventually moving to Krakoa. They are more concerned by the sudden interest of Xavier to bring him there immediately, and frankly THEY SHOULD BE.
So up to this point I’ve been VERY critical of the X-Men and defensive of Reed… but he then does one of the dumbest things he could’ve done in this situation.
The Thing continues to be the most relatable character in this story.
Followed by Susan, because of course.
Franklin then decides that if he’s not going to use the portal to get to Krakoa, he can get there with the boat that the X-Men are currently using on a mission.
Too bad that the boat is intercepted by Valeria’s godfather.
X-Men/Fantastic Four vol2 #2 (2020)
by Chip Zdarsky & Terry Dodson
Of course when you involve the X-Men, you run the risk of involving dozens of them.
After the disappearance of the kids, the FF suspect the X-Men are involved for obvious reasons.
Cyclops isn’t any better than Xavier, considering he very blatantly doesn’t care about Valeria AT ALL just because she’s a mutant.
Please explain to me why Cyclops shouldn’t come off as INCREDIBLY racist here.
One of the reasons why I didn’t spend too much time listing my problems with Krakoa?
Susan is basically doing the job for me.
Meanwhile, Doctor Doom is serving dinner.
The reason why the X-Men were on a boat is that they were trying to rescue some mutants…
…who were never lost in the first place. Because it turns out that Doctor Doom ALSO has an island for mutants.
Obviously Doom has ulterior motives… HE’S DOCTOR DOOM, of course he does… but to me he comes off as way more reasonable than the X-Men here.
The X-Men have been throwing around their newfound power lately, and Doom relocated the Latveria mutants to this island to avoid an all-out war between Krakoa and Latveria.
Which isn’t exactly a good thing… you just KNOW the Latverian mutants weren’t asked… but considering the alternatives?
By the way, there is a page with a useful graphic that informs us there are about 200,000 mutants living in Krakoa and 10,000 living elsewhere (there is no number for “omega-level mutants” but from the graphic there’s less than 50).
This is a big problem I have with most of the X-Men series of the 21st century (as this really kicked off only from 2000 onwards)… there are WAY TOO MANY MUTANTS for me to accept that Earth wouldn’t be unrecognizable by having so many superpowers around.
Also, to prove the Thing’s point from earlier? MOST of these Krakoan citizens will die by the end of the era.
All superhero teams spend more time planning how to fight other superheroes rather than worrying about missing children and teammates, right? No? Just the X-Men?
To be fair, they DO need to defend themselves this time… but mostly because they brought this to themselves.
Those 200,000 are STILL not enough to stop an incredibly angry mother.
Meanwhile Doom is giving a tour of his island…
…and being a magnificently manipulative bastard.
You can tell Franklin has matured because while he’s willing to listen to what Doom has to offer, he doesn’t buy in the slightest that he’s doing it for selfless reasons.
Remember when Kitty was the only reasonable X-Man in this book? Good times.
I should remind you that Doctor Doom has previously tried to sacrifice Franklin to the Devil and, IN A COMPLETELY SEPARATE OCCASION, has exiled him to Hell.
And yet he’s STILL the most reasonable authority figure Franklin can currently rely on.
Yeah, Doom has been plenty reasonable so far.
Pay no attention to how he’s building himself an army of Doom Sentinels.
Doom significance: 0/10
Ultimately doesn’t have a lot of consequences besides making the X-Men distrust Doom, but what else is new?
Silver Age-ness: 0/10
Not really.
Will it stand the test of time?
If you like the Krakoan era: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If you dislike the Krakoan era or know nothing about it: 8/10
That’s really the elephant in the island. While I appreciate the era has several things in its favor on a technical level, I have a reeeeally hard time not to root against the X-Men for most of it.
And I get the feeling that Chip Zdarsky is WAY more on the side of the Fantastic Four in this; Reed does some questionable things, but compared to the X-Men he’s kind of a saint.
Because if I haven’t made the point abundantly clear, I think the X-Men are just HORRIBLE here… is everyone now buying the whole “Magneto was right” crap? How are these heroes!?!?
It’s so blatant that I think poking holes into the Krakoa situation was one of the major goals of the miniseries, and as such I’m not detracting any points.
I should also point out that the artwork is just gorgeous: I’ve always had a soft spot for Dodson, but he’s just incredible in this.
Crazy tech
Doom managing to hide his island to the X-Men doesn’t sound like a lot, but considering the kind of truly bonkers resources the X-Men have at their disposal in this era… yeah that’s QUITE impressive.
I’m going to choose to believe that 195,000 of the mutants on Krakoa are people born with an extra toe, a weird new eye color or the ability to digest starch better than normal, things like that….
I have to think that tens of thousands of the mutants have very minor or very stupid powers, which is why the earth is still mostly recognizable. Mutants like Fartacus or Toenail Tina or Pizza Perfecto or The Splat. Guys who wouldn’t have made the Legion Subs in the Giffen era. After all, there’s no requirement that the mutation be useful.
Charles Stross touched on this in “The Annihilation Score,” where a government agency is analyzing the appearance of superpowers among the population. The briefing goes something like,
“The power distribution follows a bell curve, with a sharp cutoff at one sigma on the left – we simply can’t detect such minor powers as a little girl whose dog always comes when she calls. Even the more powerful sometimes escape notice- we wouldn’t have detected that trawler captain who summoned fish if he hadn’t exceeded catch quotas. On the right side, the three-sigma and higher powers generally make themselves obvious, like the ‘Crazy Cat Lady’ in Leeds.”
I had high hopes for the Krakoa era at the start, mainly because I thought they would give some sort of compartimentalization that would make significantly different stories possible as mutantkind got isolated from everyday Earth.
As it turns out, that era made a point of glossing over all the interesting social and political implications of a supremacist, isolationist mutant nation in order to bring us a lot of sympathy for the villains.
That frustratred me to no end. And then the bad half of that era began, trailing with a full year of pointless, pretentious, unreadable “Fall of Krakoa” stories that served no narrative or construtive purpose. Unless, I suppose, you get a rush out of seeing Storm play Great Non-White Saviour for over a year.
At no point except arguably this series and a few later connected developments we get any significant exploration of the dilemmas of people who happen to be mutants but also have, you know, lives of their own among humans. We are shown at a later point that Northstar’s husband (a human, not a mutant) lives in Krakoa, and apparently that is it.
No, that does not make Xavier, Cyclops and Magneto appear any more reasonable here either.
Word has it that Hickman’s pitch was originally for the Eternals as opposed to the X-Men. And it makes a lot of sense indeed. This whole period works far, far better if we can convince ourselves that mutants never once had human families or ever thought of themselves as humans.
But it does not, nor does it ever make any serious effort at exploring the cultural needs and dilemmas. Or even the simpler and less avoidable matter of political citizenships. Even dedicated X-Fans often joked that apparently during the Krakoa Era mutants were not big on having jobs, occupations, or clearly established families. They all seem to be uniformly content on living from the magical formations of the living island, surrounded by other mutants and hardly any human, and telling themselves that they are a sovereign nation, a mover and shaker while under one of their lowest ethical levels ever.
I’m a strong antinationalist and an hesitant X-reader to begin with, so this was not my favorite period of the X-books despite considerable initial hopes.
Ah Krakoa, only it could make, “They’ve been kidnapped by Dr Doom” feel like a relief. Innmany ways it was the inevitable end result of the X-Men’s smug insufferabke self righteous entitled eternal victim/superiority complex, they went from seeeking tolerance and representation to outright racist authoritariansm yet refuse to acknowledge it. Sound familiar?
Doom v. Wakanda & Doom v. Krakoa. Stop making me route for Doom damn it.
“And then, out of the blue… Doctor Doom Attacks! Thank God!”
As in Flash #108 – https://comicsarcheology.com/index.php/2026/05/21/legion-intermission-jenni-part-1/
“I should also point out that the artwork is just gorgeous: I’ve always had a soft spot for Dodson, but he’s just incredible in this.”
The hands & feet are horrible
Krakoa was originally meant to be part 1 of a much longer story arc by Hickman, with most of the flaws inherent in the concept readily apparent from the start, and was slated to fall apart much more quickly, but other writers wanted to continue working with the new status quo for a while, so he wished them luck and left. I’m not particularly enamoured with Hickman so I’m not convinced the rest of the planned story arc would actually have been better than what we ended up with, though as it stands we’ll never know since he’s committed to never publicly revealing it.
The Krakoa arc did, at least, inspire Kieron Gillen to write The Power Fantasy, which is a much more interesting work tackling the sociopolitical implications of living in a world where there are superhumans whose individual powers put them on par with entire nation-states, and what happens if they decide to assert themselves on the global stage.
So as a bit of a Krakoan Era fan (in that I loved it as a new space to play with Mutants in, which given where things have gone since (into the most bland and boring Era of x-men maybe ever), was a big breath of fresh air), I’ve always hated the stuff they do with Franklin. I feel like this book in particular is written by someone who hates the whole idea, which is fair, but makes for a very strawman-ish read. And the stuff they do later with the big retcon is just awful. Just one of the most childish “I don’t wanna share my toys with you.” decisions ever. I’m very glad that the North run has seemingly re-retconned that.
Honestly?
Was I a kid just starting reading Marvel today, I’d find the X-comics one of the most racist, evil things in the MU. Ew!
“I should remind you that Doctor Doom has previously tried to sacrifice Franklin to the Devil and, IN A COMPLETELY SEPARATE OCCASION, has exiled him to Hell.”
Good point, well made.
I get that modern writers can’t have read every comic, & that Marvel won’t want the continuity of older stories to get in the way of their current stories.
But either one of these occasions seems too traumatic to be forgotten in any interaction between Doom & Franklin.
Even with Doom’s subsequent closeness to Valeria, there should be nothing that would make Franklin trust Doom. Not sure how this particular story develops, but a teenage Franklin with control of his powers should be Doom’s worst enemy.
I’m not so sure he remembers the first time, Franklin was like four and wasn’t fully aware of the whole situation.
The second time though, during the Waid arc, he WAS massively traumatized.
The only in-universe justification I can see that he blocked those memories just like *SPOILER YOU DEFINITELY SAW COMING* he blocked his own powers
Now I think about it, FF Annual #20 where Doom tries to sell Franklin’s soul to Mephisto is itself a sequel to FF #277, where Franklin temporarily destroys Mephisto.
And if I remember right, Franklin also goes down to Mephisto’s hell with the rest of the FF in the first issue of “Mephisto vs…”.
So including the Waid storyline, that makes it at least 4 times where Franklin has been sent to a ‘hell’. That is a lot of times for a small child.
(Not really relevant to that, but Franklin was also kidnapped and later possessed by Nicholas Scratch, a warlock wielding the “Satan staff”. I’d never realised before how many mystical/hell stories Franklin had been involved in.)
It could be argued that some of those Mephisto ‘hells’ are illusions, and that the characters aren’t actually really in hell, which might account for why the Waid storyline left him much more traumatised.
In FF #277, Franklin is asleep most of the issue, and once he wakes up, he quickly destroys Mephisto. It’s said that he’ll only remember it as a dream.
But the FF Annual shows Franklin remembering destroying Mephisto before, and he is confident he can do it again. So he’s at least somewhat conscious of what was going on, and this time he’s awake, & again battles with Mephisto.
And at the end, Franklin is angry at Doom for betraying him, and Reed has to talk Franklin out of sending Doom back to the hell they just came from.
Since Doom then sent Franklin to an even scarier hell in the Waid arc, Franklin really shouldn’t trust Doom at all, and if he has his powers, he should probably be thinking about sending Doom somewhere unpleasant in return.
You’re right though, I’m sure the Marvel explanation would be that Franklin was too young and had blocked out all these memories.
“Word has it that Hickman’s pitch was originally for the Eternals as opposed to the X-Men. And it makes a lot of sense indeed.”
Hmm. I heard it was the pitch was for Legion originally. Which, given the reboots, makes a little bit of sense with Moira and the timelines. But since I’ve found Hickman’s stuff in both Avengers and Fantastic Four to not be my taste, I was just as glad to see his attention here on X-men, as they’re my least favorite property of the bunch.