House of X/Power of X Hot Take

X-Marks the spot with this series! (Ugh. I know. Sorry about that)

Last week, the last issue of Jonathan Hickman's X-men two mini-series came to an end. His return to Marvel was billed as a big event that would change the landscape of the X-men forever (until the next big thing).

I can say definitively that he has done just that. If you read comics, I get that Hickman is not everyone's cup of tea. He tends to write grand, long spanning, complicated stories. Separately, the pieces do not make sense, but they come together as a whole at the end. There is a brilliance in the way that he writes because he is well aware of what he is doing and you just have to wait till the end.

I say all that to say that each issue of his book went from confusing to masterful. Now that it is all done, I can say it is definitely masterful. He has definitely reshaped the X-Men. Their mission is now different. I truly enjoyed this series and there were genuine, mouth wide open surprise moments from me.

The most amazing thing about this series is that Hickman took characters from deep into the X-Men lore and made them relevant. I think the biggest star of these books is Moira McTaggert. To say anything else would spoil things, so I will leave it there. She has been kind of retconned into being probably the most important mutant ever. I know that sounds like the hottest of hot takes, but once you read this series, you will know what I mean.

Some of the forgotten characters from Brian Michael Bendis's run on the X-Men appear and they are have also been thrust into an area of importance. We get characters such as the Phalanx, Doug Ramsey, Forge, Nimrod and others. He pulled in as many X-characters as he could and breathed life into them.

I'm speaking around all the big things that happened in this series because I really don't want to spoil it for people. Okay. Maybe one thing. The mutants now have a sovereign nation built on island called Krakoa. If you know anything about the X-Men, the name Krakoa should be setting of your nerd sense. There are grand ideas here that are going to play out for a little while and I am over the moon. After the last couple of years of trying to do something interesting with the X-Men, I think we finally got it.

To go along with the writing, we get wonderful art from Pepe Larraz (quickly becoming one of my favorite artists) and R.B. Silva (I had written him off a while ago about not being so good on X-Men: Gold. I was wrong).

These books were pure Hickman. The issues are full of graphic design pages and charts. We jump back and forth between the present and the future.

Nevermind anything that came before this, the X-Men are back and I am genuinely excited about what happens next.