Best Of The Decade: 2019 // Best Of The Year

Welcome back to You Don’t Read Comics Best of the Decade! Our daily retrospective of the best comics this decade had to offer in celebration for the new year. Please refer to our post highlighting the criteria used to determine each year’s entry. We hope you have enjoyed our picks for Best Comics of the Decade!

Hi, I’m David Harth and guess what? It’s time for me to write more about House Of X/Powers Of X. I know, I know, it’s been a while since I’ve done it. Still, I figured this little throwback to our days talking about the books would be a nice little intro to these “Two Books That Are One”— Jonathan Hickman’s words, not mine— by Jonathan Hickman, Pepe Larraz and R.B. Silva (Larraz handled pencils on HoX, Silva on PoX), and colorist Marte Gracia and why they are easily the best books of the year 2019, annos domini.

The X-Men were once the book that gave Marvel its massive sales dominance, but for a long time now, they’ve been second class citizens at the House Of Ideas. There are many theories about why this is and why suddenly, it’s time to throw all of the power of Marvel behind the Merry Mutants (I’m sure it has nothing to do with Marvel’s parent company, Disney, acquiring Fox and getting film and full merchandising rights back for the X-Men… Yeah, it’s definitely not that.), but for X-Men superfans like me it’s been a rough time. We had to deal with the Inhumans being pushed in the worst possible way, trying to use them to supplant mutants, but being so tone deaf as to replace a Civil Rights allegory with a group that are a slave owning monarchy. (Surely you’ve heard of the plight of the Alpha Primitives; if not, Maximus will tell you all about it.) Jeff Lemire was given an X-Men book and felt knee capped by editorial edicts that hurt the book, (but I still liked it a lot). Then we got ResurrecXion, and it was… fine. Still, we were a long way away from the glory days of Morrison and Whedon, or Aaron and Remender.

Then Jonathan Hickman came along.

Hickman is a guy who can work all kinds of magic; combining sci-fi concepts with superheroes in a perfect way that hearkens back to the Silver Age, with its more sci-fi influenced stories, but in a way that is thought provoking for modern readers, adding to the book he’s writing. He’s pulled out all the stops for House Of X/Powers Of X, bringing the mutants to the next level. One of the things most writers forget about the X-Men is that they are the next evolution of mankind, a new thing. The last writer to really hit that home was Grant Morrison on New X-Men, where he started to give mutants a new cultural identity. But this was pretty quickly abandoned for more status quo tales, and then a completely new status quo that nearly destroyed the mutant race, abandoning everything that Morrison set up. Hickman takes Morrison’s baton and expands on it, giving mutants an international power they’ve never had before and a new homeland that changes everything for the mutant race.

Then there is that one big moment in the second issue of House Of X (that I’m not sure I should talk about), that kind of changes everything for mutantkind. It’s the kind of retcon that can lead to so many things and it’s easily one of the most brilliant I’ve read in my many years of comic reading. Then there’s the Five. And Apocalypse. And Homo Novissima. And the Orchis Initiative. And creepy Xavier. The hits keep coming.
The art by Larraz and Silva is great (and Marte Gracia’s colors are one of the hidden weapons of the book), giving the books the images it needs to impress. Their art styles are just similar enough to give the books an artistic continuity while also being just different enough to give each book its own identity.

House Of X and Powers Of X are the best book of 2019 for so many reasons. Hickman has changed the game for Marvel’s Merry Mutants, bringing them back to the forefront of the comic industry in a way that just a few years would have seemed impossible. Honestly, that’s a big enough deal on its own. Marvel may be the perennial sales leader, but I can’t remember the last time they captured the buzz of the industry like they have with these two books. We can make snarky remarks about the timing of Marvel caring enough to actually fix what they’ve done to the X-Men over the last decade all we want, but Hickman has revitalized the X-Men and he did it in 12 weeks. He made the summer of 2019 one of the best times to be an X-fan in recent memory and gave us all memorable comics that will be talked about for years. Nothing else published this year comes close.

Honorable Mentions: Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, The Wrong Earth, Jughead Time Police