X-Men: The Hellfire Gala #1
With all that happened recently, Krakoa still throws the Hellfire Gala in X-Men: The Hellfire Gala #1, by writer Gerry Duggan, artists Kris Anka, Russell Dauterman, Matteo Lolli, and CF Villa, colorists Rain Beredo, Frank Martin, Matt Milla, and Matthew Wilson, and letterer Cory Petit. This comic is a slog, badly written and horribly paced, but at least the art is good.
There is way too much to summarize, and very little of it is interesting enough to summarize. Basically, the Hellfire Gala happens, there’s a new X-Men team, Orchis makes some moves, and it all ends with a stinger for Judgment Day.
Last year’s Hellfire Gala had some fireworks, and this one wants to feel like it does as well, but as usual when Duggan writes an X-Men story, it’s mostly terrible. On the one hand, Duggan writes Emma Frost well, the vote pages are cool, and the next X-Men team is great, but this book is a slog. There’s no sense of pacing at all. Conversations go on for too long with very little interesting happening. There’s no sense that the humans actually care about the immortality of mutants beyond a few mentions. There could have been some real tension in this comic, but there’s not. Emma tells people stuff the readers already know about the wrongdoings of Krakoa under Xavier and Magneto, and that’s really it.
Duggan again shows how little he knows about X-Men history in a scene with Emma and Tony, who are talking like they don’t know each other, even though their sexual relationship was established in an obscure comic called Civil War. Moira shows up in control of Mary Jane, but all she does is talk to Proteus, messing with him. Orchis does something, but it’s not in this book, so it doesn’t matter. Feilong shows up at the Gala, a known enemy of Krakoa, and no one does anything about it. There’s some celebrity baiting that doesn’t really land. There’s a terrible joke about C.B. Cebulski’s time as Akira Yoshida that tries to be in on the joke of Cebulski pretending to be Japanese but comes off as a way to make light of something terrible. This comic is a complete waste for most of its sixty-page run, full of Duggan’s laughably bad dialogue and awful sense of humor.
The artists all do a good job with what they’re given. Other than Dauterman, though, their styles are all basically alike, and they’re not really given anything interesting to draw other than the endless dialogue scenes.
X-Men: The Hellfire Gala #1 is a slog of a comic. Duggan keeps making his play for being the worst X-Men writer ever, but Marvel won’t do anything about it because X-Men sells. The art is good, but that doesn’t matter because nothing worth drawing really happens. Too many pages, not enough story worth telling. There’s a part where Emma says, “Jonathan, I missed you,” that’s a bait and switch joke, but a comic like this makes everyone miss Jonathan Hickman.
