The Uncanny Life of Moira X
“The Uncanny Life of Moira X”
House of X #2 (2019)
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Pepe Larraz
Color art by Marte Gracia
“The Uncanny Life of Moira X” is one of the most radical X-Men comics ever in terms of the magnitude of the retcon being introduced and its implications for all future X-Men comics, but it’s also a bold narrative move so early in Jonathan Hickman’s tenure as the lead writer of the franchise. After two issues of setting up several major plots across four time periods, he’s stepping back from all that to focus on the origin story of Moira MacTaggert, a supporting character who was killed off nearly 20 years ago. Moira – a brilliant scientist and former lover of both Charles Xavier and Banshee – was always understood to be a human ally of the X-Men. In this issue we learn the truth: She’s a mutant with the power of reincarnation, and the Moira that we have known all along – and the Moira who appeared in Powers of X #1 last week – is the tenth Moira. It’s not an X, it’s a 10.
The issue tells the story of Moira’s many lives, and how living through different timelines gradually radicalized her and set her up for her proposition to Charles Xavier in her tenth life, which she has been led to believe could be her last. Much of the story deals with Moira’s learning curve in figuring out what to do with her extraordinary circumstances – she spends much of her second life coming to grips with the odd experience of reliving your life from the start, and what happens when she deliberately changes events.
Hickman addresses a lot of interesting details of Moira’s experience here – what it’s like to be a fully aware adult in the womb, and what it’s like to meet the love of your life again only to know too much about them going in and have that prevent the possibility of repeating the romance. Other details are left to the reader’s imagination, such as what it must be like to live adult lives and then be forced to relive childhood and puberty over and over again before getting on to the agendas of adulthood. Moira’s lives are outlined in a flowchart in the back of the comic, and she’s lived around 500 years. Imagine the sort of patience she must have developed along the way.
The most brilliant sequence in the issue shows what happens at the end of Moira’s third life, in which she succumbs to self-loathing of her mutant nature and uses her scientific brilliance to devise a “cure” for the X-gene. Her lab is attacked by Mystique’s Brotherhood, and all of her colleagues are murdered. Destiny, an old blind woman who can see the future, confronts Moira about what she has done.
Pepe Larraz’s interpretation of John Byrne’s character design highlights an essential creepiness to Destiny’s eye-less golden mask, which is even more unsettling in its contrast with Moira’s highly emotive face as she faces her captor’s righteous dismissal of her work and promise to murder her in any new life she has should she go down this path again. Hickman’s Destiny is cold and ruthless, but speaks nothing but truth. Destiny only wants to ensure that Moira uses her gifts to help her people in her lives to come, and sees to it by having Pyro burn her alive – “And slowly, so she doesn’t forget how dying like this feels.” This is the most nuanced and horrifying depiction of a terrorist act to ever appear in an X-Men comic.
Moira’s story is largely about the responsibilities of members of oppressed groups who have the option to pass. Moira can opt out of living as an out mutant, and can also choose to work against her people. But she is in a unique position of power in terms of helping her people, and after her experience with Destiny she becomes increasingly radicalized and focused on working for the greater good of mutants. We see her go through different approaches and iterations on mutant philosophies – lives spent with Xavier, a life with Magneto, a life at the side of Apocalypse – and all of them fail in the goal of protecting mutants from the the machines. We leave her in a pivotal moment that sets up the beginning of this story – the establishment of the House of X, and a world in which she and Charles Xavier “break all the rules.”
Notes and observations:
• Moira’s seventh life spent hunting down and killing all of the Trasks, the family responsible for the creation of the mutant-hunting Sentinel robots, explicates an emerging theme that was suggested in Powers of X: The machines are an inevitability and evolve in parallel with the mutants. The struggle in this run is not so much between human and mutant but rather mutants and machines: the natural inheritors of the planet and the creations of man. The machines carry out the social orders enforced by their creators – programming passed down from a ruling class.
• Moira’s sixth life is not accounted for in either the story or the flowchart of her lives in the back of the issue, which is clearly a big deal. I suspect this will be addressed in one of the next few issues, and it will be the life in which Moira discovers the truth about the nature of Krakoa.
• This issue opens up the possibility of a continuity reboot, and that we’re already in the new timeline, with the first hints being that the two Stepford Cuckoos who had died in the Grant Morrison run are both alive in House of X #1. Many of the characters who were killed off in Matthew Rosenberg’s Uncanny X-Men run, which just ended a few weeks ago, are already slated to be regulars in forthcoming X-comics. It would seem that Rosenberg actually did what he said he was doing in that arc – tell the “last X-Men story” – and in a pre and post-Crisis sense of things, it looks like he actually did. It seems very likely that we’re in Moira X world now, and that up until recently we’ve been in another Moira’s timeline.