3 Confusing Things About the X-Men’s Krakoa Era That I Still Don’t Understand

The X-Men have retaken their place as Marvel’s most popular team, with the current “From the Ashes” era bringing them to the top of the sales charts again. However, none of that would have been possible without the Krakoa Era. Kicking off with 2019’s House of X/Powers of X, an immediate contender for the best X-Men story of all time from the moment it released, it lasted for five years, ending with X-Men #35/Uncanny X-Men #700. The Krakoa Era breathed new life into the X-Men after years of marginalization, taking the concept to new places. The Krakoa Era gave the X-Men power in the world, as part of their mutant nation of Krakoa, and it allowed creators to do things with X-Men books that had never been done before. However, things weren’t always perfect with the Krakoa Era, especially in its later years.

The behind the scenes story of the Krakoa Era is honestly as interesting as anything in its pages. The Krakoa Era’s fall was inevitable, but looking back over it, there were some decisions that I still don’t understand, ones that had a detrimental effect on the X-Men comics.

1) The Entire Vibe of the Krakoa Era Changed, and Not in a Good Way

There was something unnerving about the Krakao Era from the beginning. The first issue of House of X began close to the end, after a team of X-Men sacrificed themselves to destroy Orchis’s Mother Mold. Readers had no idea what they were seeing at the time, and right away, there was a vibe to the whole thing, a certain creepiness. It felt a little but like a horror story, with imagery that no one understood — mutants coming out of cocoons, reaching toward a creepily smiling Xavier wearing a Cerebro helmet. That feeling only intensified over the course of House of X/Powers of X and it sent tongues wagging across the Internet. Characters were making decisions they had never made before, and it often felt like a cult. By the time that the main books began towards the end of 2019, things just seemed off in most of the books. Krakoa seemed like a great thing for mutants, but there was something rotten underneath it. There was even a fan theory that Xavier was mentally manipulating everyone, especially after the mechanics of Krakoa resurrection was revealed. Hickman seemed to want to show the danger of ethnostates, and Krakoa fit that idea like a glove.

However, that feeling went away as time went on. It was still there in books like X-Men, X-Force, and Wolverine, where the sins of nation-building were explored, but most of the rest of the books seemed to embrace an idea that Krakoa was the best thing to happen to mutants. It became a party, a tropical island orgy for characters that had been mired in misery.

A lot of this was the fact that this was the first time in years that the X-Men had felt vital and important. Marvel did a lot of damage to the team over the ’10s, because of their lack of film rights to the X-Men, and fans were thrilled to see their favorite characters finally get to enjoy themselves a bit. This extended to the creators, and soon the entire line changed completely. Suddenly, Krakoa was a good idea for mutants. This hurt the Krakoa Era immensely and it’s still mystifying why they made the change. Giving the fans what they want can be a good thing, but Marvel went too far with the Krakoa Era in terms of fan service.

2) What was the Point of S.W.O.R.D.?

S.W.O.R.D. was meant to be the sci-fi X-Men book, taking a disparate team of mutants — Abigail Brand, Cable, Manifold, Fabian Cortez, Frenzy, Risque, Wiz-Kid, Peeper, Armor, Random, Lila Chaney, Blink, Vanisher, Amelia Voight, and Gateway — and bringing them together as Krakoa’s space force. Written by Al Ewing, fans were excited by the book from the moment it dropped; Ewing had proven how great he was with sci-fi Marvel in books like The Ultimates. The cast was amazing, a bunch of C and D-list mutants led by Abigail Brand and Cable. However, cracks started to show almost immediately; S.W.O.R.D. became the crossover book. Issues #2 – #4 were King in Black crossover issues. Issue #5 went back to telling the story of the team, then issue #6 was the aftermath of the first “Hellfire Gala” story. Issue #7 was a tie-in to “The Last Annihilation”, and then the book’s last four issues were its end, partly setting up X-Men Red.

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Look, I get that S.W.O.R.D. was meant to build into X-Men Red, but why do it the way they did it? S.W.O.R.D. has always felt like something of a missed opportunity. Readers were very excited about the book and creative team when it started, but it became the crossover book. It never really had its own identity, because it only had six issues to build a story, one that really didn’t even deal with what readers thought it was supposed to be. It wasn’t a bad book, but it was a massive disappointment in a lot of ways. Readers were sold an interesting bill of goods, but instead of getting that, they got a book that felt like a placeholder for X-Men Red. And look, that’s not a bad thing to be; X-Men Red is widely considered one of the best Krakoa Era books. However, S.W.O.R.D. deserved to be more than a crossover book and a six issue miniseries rolled into one.

3. Marvel Cutting Six Months Out of the End of the Krakoa Era

Comics take a lot of time to make. Writers, editors, and artists work for months to plan out the book they create before they’re even start working on the issues. The Krakoa Era was meticulously planned, with its four distinct eras — “Dawn of X”, “Reign of X”, “Destiny of X”, and “Fall of X” — each dealing with different aspects of the story, the creators working together to make it all make sense. Readers were sold on the idea of the camaraderie of the X-Men writers and artists — they talked about X-Slack, using the Slack app to talk to each other about what was going on with the X-Men books.

Collaboration was always the key to the Krakoa Era, and it made a huge difference in the books. Planning was the key to the Krakoa Era, and the plans often changed. The first major changes came when Hickman, in his position as Head of X, decided to change his own outline for the story to tailor it to the work of the other X-Men creators, who had taken the story in new directions. However, some of the changes to the plan had nothing to do with the creators and everything to do with Marvel.

“Fall of X” was planned out months in advance, meant to take the disparate thread of “Destiny of X” and weave them into a breathtaking tapestry for the Krakoa Era’s ending. However, sales had started to slide — the top-selling books like X-Men, Immortal X-Men, X-Men Red, and Wolverine were topping out in the 20s instead of higher — and Marvel wanted to hit the reboot button early, in order for the short term sales bump of new number ones. Creators had planned out “Fall of X” to take a year and a half. They had their books plotted out for that amount of time… and then Marvel cut six months off “Fall of X”.

This was something of a disaster for the Krakoa Era. The issues had already started to be produced; suddenly, new issues had to have six extra months of stories crammed into them. The pacing of “Fall of X” was thrown away completely, and weaker books, like Gerry Duggan’s X-Men, suffered. It also didn’t help that Duggan was tapped to be the writer of Fall of the House of X; he had already shown that he couldn’t figure out a way to make the story he was writing in X-Men, which led to Fall, work with less time. Fans immediately noticed the change in quality to the books, the wonky pacing making certain books, like X-Men and Fall of the House of X nowhere near as good as what came before.

Complaints in X-Men fan spaces were everywhere and the ending of the Krakoa Era is considered as one of the worst moments in X-Men history. As good as X-Men Forever, The Resurrection of Magneto, and Rise of the Powers of X were — and even they certainly suffered from being rushed — fans just didn’t enjoy the ending. Marvel’s greed destroyed the legacy of the Krakoa Era. The ending’s problems can be laid at the feet of whoever at Marvel decided that Tom Brevoort taking over the X-Men office and rebooting was more important than a quality story (honestly, it was probably Brevoort himself, who has long been one of Marvel’s most important editors).

What parts of the Krakoa Era mystified you? Sound off in the comments below.