Hunting Ground

“Hunting Ground” / “The Sword of Damocles” / “The Skeleton Key”
X-Force #1-3
Written by Benjamin Percy
Art by Joshua Cassara
Color art by Dean White and Guru-eFX

The first issue of Benjamin Percy and Joshua Cassara’s new X-Force series arrived in the context of a mostly quite jovial Dawn of X relaunch in the wake of House of X/Powers of X and spoiled the triumphant mood by ending with a nightmare scenario that threatened to undo everything: Human commandos arrive on Krakoa and murder several mutants, including Charles Xavier, whose Cerebro resurrection machine was destroyed in the process. It felt bad. It felt like “oh no, not this again.” But within two more issues, Percy and Cassara have proven themselves to not be doing anything cheap or dull, and the grim actions of the debut issue serve as the inciting incident for a series in which a set of X-Men do whatever they can to avoid anything like that happening again. It’s X-Force reimagined as a mutant CIA, and thankfully it seems that Percy isn’t interested in making that out to be an entirely good or respectable thing.

Of all the writers working in the context of Jonathan Hickman’s new X-Men status quo, Percy seems to be the one who best understands and matches his tone, and is the most invested in developing the consequences of the mutants creating a nation-state. Percy, who literally wrote a book about how to thrill audiences, is very good at pacing the action of his story and delivering bold, memorable images at a regular clip. Cassara’s art is well-suited to the hyper-violence and creepy imagery of Percy’s story, and is particularly good at framing pivotal moments and reveals. Every page has a very thoughtful rhythm, and Percy’s use of text pages steers away from Hickman’s use of charts to embrace his strength as a novelist with pages with plot beats that work better with the quiet interiority of prose than they would as illustrated pages.

Quentin Quire is featured prominently in the second and third issues, and Percy’s version of the character is based fully in Grant Morrison’s original characterization of him as an arrogant young man who is a bit too eager to tell you about how much he loathes humanity and feels that Charles Xavier is too soft in his morality. This is great news if you’re like me and despise Jason Aaron’s cartoonish and defanged approach to the character, but it should be noted that Percy has not entirely abandoned some surface aspects of that version of the character and his relationship with Wolverine. But it’s a relief to see that the most important thematic elements of Quire are back in play without necessarily turning back the clock on more recent character development.

The third issue, in which Xavier is inevitably brought back to life by The Five and Jean Grey using a back-up Cerebro helmet, goes deep into the philosophical – and narrative – question of what happens when all mutants are effectively immortal now. Jean Grey, who was no stranger to death and resurrection before all this, gives a soliloquy about her feelings on the matter and concludes that without the threat of death, people become less selfish and more focused on the collective good. I like this framing a lot – it becomes less about bravery, and more about an aspirational value of cooperation and selflessness.

Riot At Xavier's

“Riot at Xavier’s”
New X-Men #135-138 (2002)
Written by Grant Morrison
Pencils by Frank Quitely
Inks by Tim Townshend and Avalon Studios

“Riot at Xavier’s” is the climax of the second year of Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men, and is effectively the end of the middle part of a trilogy of year-long arcs. It’s also the final story illustrated by Frank Quitely, a definitive X-Men artist despite only having drawn 10 issues in total. It’s a rare X-Men story in which the Xavier School is both the setting and the subject, and the sole threat is a group of students openly criticizing the X-Men and their teachings. The story is a critique of the very concept of the X-Men and the Xavier School in the context of one of New X-Men’s central premises – humanity is slowly dying off and mutants will eventually inherit the world. Does Charles Xavier’s dream of humans and mutants living in peaceful cohabitation matter much if the humans going to be extinct in a generation or two? And doesn’t this just mean that Magneto was always right, and that mutants are indeed superior and should play the dominant role in society? 

The primary antagonist of “Riot at Xavier’s” is Quentin Quire, a precocious teen who is radicalized following the murder of mutant fashion designer Jumbo Carnation and whose “just playing devil’s advocate…” provocations in class spread through the school partly through his nascent psychic influence. “Riot At Xavier’s” was originally published in 2002, but looking at the story in 2019, it’s immediately apparent that Quire is a very recognizable contemporary archetype – he’s cut from the same cloth as men’s rights activists, gamergaters, Twitter trolls, and assorted alt-right goons. He’s an aggrieved, arrogant, sexually frustrated young white guy who is convinced he’s more intelligent than anyone else and loves to get a rise out of authority figures and those he considers easily offended. He has a haircut that looks like something Richard Spencer would hand to his barber and go “this, please.” Quire and his Omega Gang dress up in outfits based on an image from anti-mutant propaganda, declaring themselves to be exactly the thing the humans feared. They get hooked on the mutant power-enhancing drug Kick, kill a bunch of random humans, and revolt on the school’s Open Day to the public. 

Despite the fact that the school has been part of the X-Men mythos since the beginning, there are very few stories in which students of the school are the antagonists, and this is the only major storyline with this type of plot. Morrison’s version of the school is much larger than anything that came before it – in the 1980s and 1990s, the Xavier School and Massachusetts Academy never had more than a handful of students, whereas there’s at least 60 kids enrolled in this era. 

The school is now large enough to have its own social castes. Quire starts off as a classic nerd but throws in with the aggro troublemakers, the blonde Stepford Cuckoos quintuplets are essentially a bunch of psychic Mean Girls, and Xorn teaches the “special class,” a group of weirdos and outcasts in a school for weirdos and outcasts. The special class are the counterpoint to the Omega Gang. They’re the mutants who can’t hide what they are, and are just vulnerable, impressionable, and confused kids looking for guidance. (Within a few storylines, we’ll find out that they’re getting guidance from the worst possible person.) The Omega Gang come at their radical poses and performative rebellion from a position of relative privilege – aside from the grotesque gelatinous idiot Glob Herman, they can all pass as human. The real freaks just want to be regular kids. 

“Riot at Xavier’s” stands as one of my favorite X-Men stories, or perhaps even my single favorite if pressed. But like a lot of the best elements of Morrison’s New X-Men run, it can be bittersweet to revisit because of how subsequent writers have used his characters and ideas. Quentin Quire appears to die at the end of the story but is eventually revived by Greg Pak in Phoenix: Endsong and is used extensively as a lead character in Jason Aaron’s Wolverine and the X-Men, another school-centric series. Aaron’s version of Quire is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of everything about “Riot at Xavier’s.” Aaron ignores every toxic and fascistic element of Quire’s character, and writes him as a vain and preening faux-rebel – just a silly punk kid who acts out but means well. This toothless version of Quire has become the most common version of the character, to the point that it might surprise new readers to find out he was originally conceived as an antagonist. 

I can’t imagine what “Riot at Xavier’s” must have looked like from Aaron’s point of view. While Morrison’s vision of Quire is sympathetic – the emotional roots of his anger and alienation are well established, his investment in advancing the rhetoric of the Xavier School beyond the simplicity of Xavier’s dream is earnest, he admits that the riot was done partly just to impress the Cuckoos – he’s still a murderous sociopath. This character, who would be awfully useful as originally conceived for contemporary stories, is completely defanged now. From the perspective of the political culture of 2019, in which the Quentin Quires of social media have demonstrably made the world a worse place, Aaron’s glib dismissal of Quire’s actions in “Riot” as just wacky teen hijinks strikes me as emblematic of Obama-era naive faith that young right wing creeps were more of a nuisance than a sign of much worse things to come.