Mutants, on Saturday Night We Party in Brooklyn

Edited by Sam Thielman

IF YOU CAME HERE FOR JOURNALISM, I have to disappoint you. I'm between multiple deadlines that land over the next six days, all on top of book-writing duties. I tried forcing some things about the Nuseirat massacre/hostage rescue over the weekend, but nothing I write could compare to the work of Palestinian journalists in Gaza like Shrouq Aila. Keep an eye out this week for my next piece for Zeteo—result of the first of these deadlines—which is about the potential U.S.-Saudi defense deal, and which I'll publish for paying FOREVER WARS subscribers the day after Zeteo runs it.

Instead, today I'm going to plug a forthcoming appearance of mine—and the one I'm most excited for since the Jim Lee & Friends panel at 2022's New York Comic Con. You should come to this one. It's going to be incredible. It's only going to seem like we're sitting shiva.

Like the illustration above says, this Saturday, June 15, at 6 p.m., Anyone Comics and the Brooklyn Pride Comic Book Fair are assembling a requiem for what's known as the Krakoa Era in X-Men comics. This just-completed five years of comics will be studied for years by creators, cherished by fans for the rest of their lives, and forever debated. (Just read editor Jordan D. White's exit interview with AIPT for a sense of Krakoa's importance.) Krakoa restored my favorite comics franchise to glory. Krakoa helped me get through the pandemic. Krakoa also made me desperate to write comics, and that resulted in WALLER VS. WILDSTORM. If that was all Krakoa did, dayenu. But Krakoa was so much more.

And I don't want to really say more here, because I'm going to be putting my all into dissecting What Krakoa Meant on Saturday at the Armory—sorry, at the Owens Center—in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, located on 1561 Bedford Avenue. To do it justice, eulogizing Krakoa has got to be at least up to par with my performances on the Magneto, Beast, Professor X, Callisto and Fenris episodes of Cerebro. It must, so it will.

I am not the draw on Saturday night. The draws are my co-panelists, two people who made Krakoa what it was: X-editor Anita Okoye, and Vita Ayala, the visionary behind an instant-classic New Mutants run. ‘Nuff said! I suppose I'm going to be the audience proxy character, since I represent everyone who read the work of Anita, Vita and all their varied colleagues and collaborators and recognized greatness. I intend to play that role to the fullest. 

If you're someone familiar with Krakoa, I didn't need to sell you once you saw Vita's name. If you're not familiar, but maybe you recently watched X-Men '97, come out on Saturday too. You'll come away with your next favorite thing to read. And as far as I know, this event is free and open to the public. Say hi—you will never see me in public in a better mood! 

MY FRIEND AND BANDMATE MIKE DUNCAN absolutely destroyed Edward "Decline And Fall of The Roman Empire" Gibbon with facts and logic. One thing I recently learned about Gibbon that Mike couldn't be expected to mention: Gibbon is why Western historical memory now considers the Eastern Roman Empire an un-Roman curiosity called the "Byzantine Empire" To make that sentence more like something Glenn Danzig would sing, Gibbon is the reason that Byzantium's said.

Gibbon, writing in the 18th century, couldn't have very well explained the Decline and Fall of something that lasted until the 15th century. Well, he could have—1453 is when a state that thought of itself as Roman decisively ended, and there's a lot of decline along the way. But in keeping with tendencies Mike expertly describes, Constantinople and its Empire was just too Eastern, so Gibbon anachronistically treated it as something other than Roman. This shoddy, arbitrary decision has had tremendous cultural consequences for the modern Western imagination. Gibbon, the first modern Western historian, excised from Western civilization an empire whose borders at their greatest extended as far as Armenia, Mesopotamia and North Africa. Imagine how different history would look if Westerners saw such people as sharing a lineage with them. 

WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, the superhero spy thriller I co-wrote with my friend Evan Narcisse and which the masterful Jesús Merino illustrated, is available for purchase in a hardcover edition! If you don't have single issues of WVW and you want a four-issue set signed by me, they're going fast at Bulletproof Comics! 

No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.