Scott's Take: A.X.E.: Judgment Day by Kieron Gillen

A.X.E.: Judgment Day by Kieron Gillen is a massive event crossover title featuring The Eternals, The Avengers, and The X-Men. It is helpful if you have been keeping up with the X-Men and Eternals titles since there are references to both. Also, to understand the full story, one really needs to have read some of the tie ins. In this crossover, The Eternals have a new leader who has decided to go to war. He has decided to give his people an enemy to unite them under his rule. His target is The X-Men and he intends to kill them all. Simply put, he intends to commit genocide and wipeout every last mutant not only on Earth, but on Mars as well. Of course, The Avengers are going to try to stop the Eternals from committing genocide but they are also trying to protect the regular people everywhere going about their lives.

So, on one team, you have The Eternals, superlong living immortals, who don’t have much free will, since they are more programed than people. There are 101 of them. Most are pretty powerful, but the gap between their level of powers, is pretty small. They all can pretty much do the same things and have the same limits though there are some exceptions.

The X-Men number somewhere in the millions and exist on Earth and Mars. Most mutants on Earth have pretty useless powers while some are very powerful and then some are incredibly powerful. So, The X-men have the numbers, but most of their members are pretty much human just with a little extra that’s not very useful in this kind of situation.  That means the fight is pretty even. Though, the ones that live on Mars are survivors of a thousand-year war so they are superior to most of The X-Men on Earth and have far stronger powers than those mutants on Earth.

Featuring great art and plenty of action, this is a fun read even for someone like me who is not a fan of The Eternals.  There is a twist halfway through that throws a monkey wrench into the plot that one cannot go into too much detail without spoiling the read, therefore, I will not try to explain that. I can explain that he fights between the teams are pretty epic. You have Professor X leading a group of telepaths fighting off an Eternal strike force in the Astral plane and trying to stop them from melting everyone’s brains. At the same time, The X-men on the island are facing off against a strike force of Eternals while a separate group of X-Men are battling skyscraper size Eternals called “The Hex” in the waters around their island home.  There is plenty of blood and gore. There are many deaths, but since resurrection is a big part of the abilities on each side, the deaths are usually not permeant even when you see people burned alive. They will be back.  For example, one dude is reduced to nothing more than a skull and yet, a few pages later, is back and is pretty much fine.

Some characters get the spotlight more than others, but in a title featuring more than 30 characters that is expected. One thing that did surprise me and I guess it should not when literary characters and works are being sanitized so as to not offend was the fact that one character is brought back from the past so that they can use him in movies. Marvel changes his character and does some revisionist history to the canon as he is problematic on his own and very much so in today’s culture and political environment. It’s hard to feel bad for the character and reconcile who he is supposed to be now after who he was in previous reads.

Overall, I highly enjoyed this event title, but some of the story is missing since some of the tie ins are very critical to the tale and are not included here. Like the War on Mars is told in the tie ins, so you just get a brief check in here with such and such is dead. Well, how did they die? Go read the tie ins.

 

My reading copy came from the Skyline Branch of the Dallas Public Library System.

 

Scott A. Tipple ©2023