Marvel’s ‘Powers of X’ Ends With Surprising Revelation – Hollywood Reporter

Death was conquered, via an elaborate cloning technique, and everything looked as if things were finally turning around for Charles Xaviers friends and foes.

And then Powers of X explicitly states that things will always turn out badly for mutants.

Its much worse than that. We always lose, Moira MacTaggart tells Xavier midway through the series, and she should know; by this point in the narrative, she has lived and died nine different times, trying alternative ways to maintain the survival of the mutant race without success. (As the final issue of Powers of X reveals, Moira has lived for a thousand years in one timeline and it still ended with the mutantkind being outstripped by a humanity augmented by its own invention.

Mutants are an evolutionary response to an environment. You are naturally occurring. The next step in human evolution, a character from 1,000 years in the future explains in the issue. But what happens when humanity stops being beholden to its environment? When man controls the building blocks of biology and technology Evolution is no match for genetic engineering. What good was one mutant adapting to its environment when we could make ten super men?

Turning the franchises long-running theme on its head, the core conflict of the X-Men property isnt homo superior (mutant) versus homo sapien (man), but homo superior versus homo novissima (post-human, or genetically engineered human) a battle that, its suggested, mutantkind will lose no matter what.

Armed with this knowledge, Moira has manipulated events throughout the franchise and certain people to try and equip mutantkind as best she can in the upcoming conflict, leading to a united Xavier and Magneto announcing that she has honed them into perfect tools for an imperfect age that would change things moving forward.

The new era of X-Men comics, therefore, is one in which the majority of characters believe that theyre living in a golden age of mutantkind, but theyre actually part of the latest in a series of conflicts for survival that they are, perhaps, destined to lose. How this thread will continue through the multiple Dawn of X spinoff titles remains to be seen, but with Powers of X author Jonathan Hickman writing the ongoing X-Men series launching in the wake of this reveal, one thing is for certain: This isnt an idea that is going to go away anytime soon.

Powers of X No. 6 is available now in comic book stores and digitally.

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Marvel's 'Powers of X' Ends With Surprising Revelation - Hollywood Reporter