Next came Year One Thousand. I was glad to see something concrete unfolding from this timeline. As I’ve said before, this part of the story didn’t captivate me as much as everything happening in other points in time. We have this race which found a way to make it to the end and ascend through merging with the Phlanax, but we weren’t seeing too much of the importance of what this was serving in our understanding of the mutant’s future. Obviously their numbers dwindled down to a group that could be contained within a dome. So I guess this was their way of showing us where there was only so much that the mutants could get away with through their Krakoan experiment. However, we needed to see that there was something more to this than an emphasis on what survival looks like at the end of the road for everyone on the planet. The truth to what this life of Mora was trying to reveal to us took some time to absorb, but I found myself satisfied with the understanding it granted us by the end.
What Hickman succeeded in doing more than anything else was showing us what we were getting excited for. Powers of X and House of X are now done, so now what matters is what comes after. We got plenty of that to take from this finale between the things that Xavier and Magneto would do differently, and addressing the eggshells they are going to have to walk on in order to maintain what has now been built. We have already gotten hints that things aren’t going to be perfect, so there was no better time than now to have someone say it out loud that this isn’t it for their fight. Krakoa has been built, the mutant’s place has been earned, but this is all just the foundation for the world that they now have to live in.
As I said with House of X #6, it was appreciated up p the bitter end that we could experience the numerous pages of research notes which found their own way to add depth to this story. In the case of Powers of X #6 i enjoyed most diving into the journal of Moira. This said so much that would have taken much longer if images were needed to accompany her accounts of actions taken towards building this better world for the mutants. Some things we knew, much more was new information, but all of it was engaging to read from her perspective.
Till the very end there wasn’t a better art team they could have chosen for Powers of X than RB Silva, Pepe Larraz, Marte Gracia, and David Curiel. This team created the most visually pleasing experience we have had with the mutant world in a long time. Beautiful renders of their new home, the wonders of the mutants living a life where they are now in control, and the beauty of resources they have never been afforded like what they have now. There was not too much which stood out in this issue that we didn’t only see from different perspectives, but you loved everything your eyes absorbed for the same reason as each issue before. Part of me almost wishes these four could just draw all of the X-Men books, and that says more than enough for the impression that they were able to leave on just me. I hope there are plenty other readers out there who feel the same.