By Isaac Kelley — In X-Force #17, Quentin Quire gets a makeover. Specifically, he gets a new jumpsuit with pink omega-shaped highlights. I’m not a huge fan of the new duds, but I agree with Phoebe Cuckoo — he needed an update. He’s woefully behind the times when it comes to mutant fashion.

As the superhero has become the single largest dominant cultural force in our society — and is no longer considered to be children’s faire — it is clear that in some quarters, certain traditional aspects of the superhero are seen as embarrassments, needed to be downplayed. Perhaps no aspect is considered quite as silly as that of the superhero costume.

While Iron Man the movie changed the landscape forever, the modern era of superhero movies began in 2000 with the first X-Men film. Twenty years later, it now seems like a very odd movie. While at the time it was remarkable how closely it stuck to the comic book source material, in the modern context it is more a movie that is clearly on some level ashamed of being about superheroes. That meant that in the film, the colorful costumes of the comics were replaced with plain black leather jumpsuits. The next year, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely started with those same non-costume costumes and evolve them to create the New X-Men aesthetic.

Quentin Quire came from those pages, and his standard look, a jacket over a T-shirt with smartass text, is one form of that book’s vision of superheroes adolescently denying that they were superheroes. Quire’s whole bit is that he rolls his eyes at the conventions of superhero comics. Naturally, his uniform would be as far away from a “real” superhero costume as possible.

Times and trends have changed, however, and under Pax Krakoa, the superhero costume as a fashion object has flourished. In the pages of these books, the superhero costume is not an embarrassing vestigial element of a genre’s roots in storytelling for children. Instead, it is a proud way of displaying one’s mutantdom. Every community contains a fashion culture, and garish costumes are the fashion of the Mutant. Most of the mutants in the X-Books are not what one would traditionally consider a superhero, but they all wear colorful bodystockings, all the time, while working or playing.

Some characters basically wear one uniform always, while others cycle through a closet of costumes, typically a range of “classic” old costumes. Magneto, for example, keeps a selection of differently colored helmets on pegs. Some characters' costumes seem to only change when the artist changes, but it still adds to the overall effect.

Mutant fashion has been given a face in the form of Jumbo Carnation, a character killed off in his first appearance, only to be brought back with the Resurrection Protocols to become the foremost Mutant fashion designer in the world. He now makes regular appearances in Marauders and X-Force, primarily designing clothing for Emma Frost and her friends. It is he that gave Quire his new costume.

Quire had to get a costume. His T-Shirts were an argument that superhero costumes were stupid, but Krakoan society has now refuted that argument. To continue to fight against the notion of costumes would mean that he was fighting against mutant culture itself, which isn’t exactly right for the character, rebellious as he may be. It’s just a shame the new costume isn’t better.

Dispatches From Elsewhere on Krakoa

Wolverine: Holy shit, the art from Wolverine #9 and #10 has been inexplicably amazing. Drawn by my favorite Kubert, Adam (sorry Joe!), it isn’t surprising that these look great, but these past two issues are next level. They’re presented in a sixteen panel grid structure. Of course, not every page has sixteen panels, but you can feel the grid on every page, and the choices about how many sixteenths of the page every panel is allocated does so much storytelling work. Y’all have all read Dark Knight Returns, right? You know how effective that is. (If somehow you haven’t read Dark Knight Returns, give it a try. It’s pretty darn good.)

These issues of Wolverine go even further with the grid format. Some pages have full page or double page imagery, but then there are 1/16-page panels overtop of the spreads. What is more, in some cases those larger images are still divided by gutters, so that the big image becomes a combination of smaller images. It’s a wonder. It seems crazy that Kubert is applying these techniques to a perfectly fine but unremarkable story about Wolverine and Maverick having an adventure in Madripor. My hat is off to Kubert and colorist Frank Martin for the imagery, and I have no idea how much credit to give Kubert and how much credit to give writer Benjamin Percy for the fantastic composition. What an unexpected delight!

Cable: I know just last month I did a deep-dive explainer on Psylocke, but, by and large, truly one of the great feats of this era of X-Books is that the books are mostly accessible to the new reader. The books are enriched by decades of history, but they don’t require a reader to know that larger history. Or at least, so it seems to me, a reader who has been on-and-off-again with the X-Men now for decades. Maybe a truly fresh reader would be lost. It’s possible. At any rate, I have very little idea of what is going on in Cable #8.

Cable used to be an old grumpy soldier guy but is now a young exuberant soldier guy. Reading the current series has never required much knowledge past that. But this issue, which features Cable searching for Stryfe, — the evil clone of the old version of him from the future — had too many prior relationships and too many clones for me to make heads or tails of it. I visited the wikis and got more or less caught up (the short version is “blah, blah, who cares?”), but this issue just didn’t work as a piece of storytelling for a Cable neophyte. That’s more or less okay. There’s nothing wrong or unusual about an X-Book being impossibly dense with prior soap opera baggage, but it does stand out here in the current landscape as an oddity.

S.W.O.R.D.: S.W.O.R.D. from the beginning has looked slightly different from the other X-Titles. All the books in the line have a very specific style used for their text pages, including the recap page and the credits page. S.W.O.R.D. does the same, but while the other books have had text pages almost exclusively in black and white, S.W.O.R.D. has tactically employed color. Specifically, the different divisions of the S.W.O.R.D. organization are color coded and the color coding is used to communicate and reinforce information in the book. It is a simple trick that not only can be useful to the reader, but it also subtly tells the reader that this book is an evolution, moving past what has come before. This third issue takes that sense of evolution further, by having a page that is half-comic book art, half-text page, creating further disruption of the established rules. (Page count-wise, it is a story page.) S.W.O.R.D. is a mutant among mutants.

Color on the info pages is one way that S.W.O.R.D. is setting itself apart. — Color on the info pages is one way that **S.W.O.R.D.** is setting itself apart.

General: All the print editions of this month’s X-Books featured an advertisement for vinyl records on the back page…except for the three titles rated “Parental Advisory,” (That’s X-Force, Wolverine, and (If not, give it a try. It’s pretty darn good.) for those of you keeping track at home.) Those three books each had a cartoon advertisement for brightly colored candy. I have no larger point, but that amused me.

Read past installments of Pax Krakoa.

Isaac Kelley should really be working on his novel, but he can't stop thinking about the X-Men so he wrote this instead.