Krakoa

Jonathan Hickman gives every mutant on Earth one nation, one seat at one table, and a machine that brings them back from the dead. Sixty years of persecution metaphor becomes a state with borders, laws and a drug trade. It runs five years, ends on schedule, and is the most complete reinvention the X-Men have ever had.

Why you are reading this era

Read this era because Marvel let a line-wide premise change everything and then held it for five years. Mutants are not a hunted minority in a mansion. They are a sovereign island with a United Nations seat, an economy built on three miracle drugs, and a resurrection protocol that makes death an administrative delay. Every relationship in the franchise gets renegotiated under those terms, and most of the books are smart enough to do the work.

You also get the cleanest structural experiment in modern superhero comics. House of X and Powers of X are twelve issues told as one braided graph across four time frames, with data pages carrying as much plot as the art. Denser than anything since Claremont, and unlike Claremont it was planned to a finish line.

The threads. Moira MacTaggert’s real power rewrites the history you read in Eras 4 through 11, and pays off in Inferno #1-4 and Rise of the Powers of X #1-5. Orchis, a data page in House of X #1, kills the nation in 2023. Arakko, named in X of Swords, becomes a populated planet in X-Men: Red. Destiny’s resurrection in Inferno #1 converts forty years of Claremont subtext into stated fact. Off the mutant side the same window holds Chip Zdarsky’s Daredevil and A.X.E.: Judgment Day, the rare crossover that is about something.

The reading list

Track A: Mutant

The line ran six to twelve books at once for five years, which is why readers bounce off it. Below is the spine plus what is worth your time.

The House of X and Powers of X reading order

Twelve issues, two titles, one story, shipped weekly in a deliberate order that is not strict alternation. Read them in this sequence:

Note the two swaps. Powers of X #3 comes before House of X #3, and House of X #4 before Powers of X #4. Guides printing strict A-B-A-B alternation are wrong, and so is the common variant that puts Powers of X #4 before House of X #4. The order above is the 2019 shipping order and the collected edition order. Verified against both.

House of X is the present: Xavier founds Krakoa, three drugs buy diplomatic recognition, a strike team dies attacking a Mother Mold. Powers of X runs four time frames labeled X0 to X3, meaning year one, ten, one hundred and one thousand. X2 is a future where mutants lose to Nimrod. X3 is one where the Phalanx harvests everything. Xavier is not building a nation. He is running a strategy against a machine future he has already watched happen.

Do not skim the data pages. Krakoa’s laws, the drug formulas, the resurrection procedure and the first mention of Orchis all arrive as text.

The resurrection protocols in House of X #5 are the other load-bearing invention. Five mutants grow a body, Xavier restores a backup mind through Cerebro, and the dead walk out of an egg the same week. Death becomes logistics.

Dawn of X, the line after the reset

Twelve titles launched between 2019 and 2021 under the Dawn of X and Reign of X banners, and they are not equal. Read Hickman’s X-Men #1-21 first: not a team book but concept pieces about mutant life, plus the Orchis build. Then Duggan’s Marauders #1-27, the best pure fun in the line. Then Percy’s X-Force #1-50, where Krakoa’s ugliness lives: Beast running a torture program, an intelligence service accountable to nobody. Then Zeb Wells’s Hellions #1-18, funny about disposable people and cruel in exactly the right way. Then Leah Williams’s X-Factor #1-10, which takes the era’s sharpest premise, that someone must prove you died before you can come back. The rest are Optional. Add S.W.O.R.D. #1-11 first, because Ewing uses it to wire Krakoa into Track B.

X of Swords, the first crossover

Twenty-two parts across ten titles, late 2020. Saturnyne of Otherworld calls a tournament: ten swordbearers from Krakoa against ten from Arakko, the sundered other half of the living island. X-Men #12 is a prelude, not a chapter.

Required, and it earns the full twenty-two. The middle third is a quest-object shopping list and drags. The last third is a tournament Saturnyne rigs so the contests are almost never sword fights, which is the joke and the point. Arakko joins Krakoa, which hands Ewing X-Men: Red two years later.

Inferno and the Hickman exit

Inferno #1-4, 2021. Required, read directly after X-Men #21. The title is misdirection and has nothing to do with the 1988 crossover in Era 7.

Hickman planned three acts and got one and a half. The line sold too well for Marvel to run his second-act pivot on his timetable, so he handed the toys to the other writers and compressed what was left into four issues. Mystique resurrects Destiny, the one precognitive who can see Moira coming. Nimrod comes online. The Council’s founding lie gets said out loud. Unfinished: the Orchis war, Moira resolved on his terms, and the Phalanx and Dominion material from Powers of X X3. Gillen took most of it, which is why the ending reads as intended rather than substituted.

The Gillen and Ewing years

From 2022 two books carry the line. Immortal X-Men #1-18 by Kieron Gillen is the best comic of the era: each issue narrated by one Quiet Council member, a rotating first-person study of twelve people running a country while lying to each other. The politics are real and the votes matter. X-Men: Red #1-18 by Al Ewing is the other half. Arakko is a terraformed Mars carrying billions of hardened survivors, written as a civilization rather than a plot device, and Storm gets her best writing since Claremont. Read both in parallel.

The Hellfire Gala is the annual clock. The 2021 Gala ends in Planet-Size X-Men #1, where Krakoa terraforms Mars in an afternoon. The 2022 Gala is one issue with a team election. The 2023 Gala is Orchis killing the party. Track Orchis from the start: a data page in House of X #1, a human-supremacist consortium built from the leftovers of Hydra, S.H.I.E.L.D. and A.I.M., with Nimrod as its goal. Nimrod activates in Inferno #3, and after that the ending is only a question of when.

Sins of Sinister, 2023, eleven parts: Immortal X-Men #9-10 as prelude, Sins of Sinister #1, then Immoral X-Men #1-3, Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants #1-3 and Nightcrawlers #1-3 in parallel across ten, one hundred and one thousand years, then Sins of Sinister: Dominion #1. Optional, and the good kind. The timeline is erased at the end, but Gillen uses the thousand years to define what a Dominion is, and that definition is the machinery of Rise of the Powers of X.

Fall of X and the end of the nation

Fall of X begins in Hellfire Gala #1, 2023. Orchis takes the gates, kills much of the population and scatters the rest. Krakoa is finished from that issue on. The phase is loose and heavily tied in. Follow X-Men #25-29, Immortal X-Men #14-18, X-Men: Red #10-18 and X-Force #43-49. Skip the satellites.

The ending is two five-issue series read together, January to May 2024. Fall of the House of X #1-5 is the war on Earth. Rise of the Powers of X #1-5 is Moira, Sinister, the Phalanx and the Dominion. Alternate them, starting with Fall of the House of X #1. Alongside, read X-Men #30-35 and Resurrection of Magneto #1-4. X-Men #35 is the last issue and carries the epilogue. Then X-Men: Forever #1-5. It lands. Marvel gave the era a scheduled finish rather than a cancellation, and the two writers who best understood Hickman’s setup closed it.

Track B: Avengers and cosmic

Jason Aaron ran Avengers for the whole period and it is the weakest major book in the chapter. The first arc is good. Then it inflates for four years, adds a prehistoric team, a multiversal team and a tower on the Moon, and ends with the same roster in the same place. Read #1-11 and stop.

A.X.E.: Judgment Day #1-6 is the exception to the rule that crossovers are skippable. Druig turns the Eternals’ machine on humanity, a woken Progenitor Celestial begins grading every person on Earth, and Gillen writes it as a moral argument rather than a fight. It uses the Krakoan resurrection protocols as plot machinery and resolves his Eternals #1-12. Read it.

Immortal Hulk #1-50 finishes in 2021 and is covered in Era 11.

Track C: Street level

Zdarsky’s Daredevil #1-36 is the best sustained street-level run since Bendis. Matt Murdock kills a man during a robbery and the book spends three years refusing to let him off. Elektra takes the costume, Fisk runs for mayor, and the legal, Catholic and criminal threads braid properly. Read Devil's Reign #1-6 as the final act, not as an event.

Track D: Spider-Man

Zeb Wells’s Amazing Spider-Man is the flagship Spider-Man book of the era and you can miss all of it. It opens with Peter disgraced, withholds the reason for over two years, then explains it in a way that undoes its own stakes.

Cross-book checkpoints

The tracks barely touch. Read Track A straight through and drop the other items in where this table says.

Characters introduced

Retcon notes

The biggest retcon in the book, and the only one done well, because it is disciplined. It changes nothing at the level of events. Every issue of Claremont, Morrison and Whedon happened exactly as printed. Only the frame changes: someone had already run the experiment nine times and was steering. A retcon that adds a layer without contradicting the text is a gift. One that says the text was wrong is vandalism.

Adaptation notes

Checkpoint