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With X-Men Red, Marvel is following the tradition of early Science Fiction in treading actual space exploration efforts in story form.
With X-Men Red, Marvel is following the tradition of early science fiction in treading actual space exploration efforts in story form. As Jules Verne over a century ago predated the moon landing in his fiction, Marvel is timely in having a series about the colonization and challenges of exploring Mars. With NASA and private space industry aggressively working towards landing humans on Mars with the intent to stay, this series might be the most important story of the next decade. X-Men Red has a huge potential to truly explore what it means for humans to become multi-planetary.
Last year’s Planet-size X-Men (by Gerry Duggan, Pepe Larraz, Marte Gracia, VC’s Clayton Cowles, and Tom Muller) saw the nation of Krakoa host the Hellfire Gala announce the new X-Men and the complete terraforming and claiming of the fourth planet of our solar system. Immediately, in homage to Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010 novel, Krakoa issued this declaration: “Arakko is the first mutant world. Attempt no landing except at Port Prometheus. Arakko is the capital of this solar system. Hold fast for a message from the regent of Sol.”
Continuing the story of the mutants on Mars, X-Men Red, a new series in the Destiny of X slate of titles, is written by Immortal Hulk writer Al Ewing with artwork by Stefano Caselli. The entire series will focus on the mutants on Mars and their various challenges. Mars has attracted the attention of significant players including Storm, Abigail Brand, Vulcan, Cable, Magneto, and Sunspot. Writer Al Ewing said: “Mutantkind terraformed Mars, bringing a dead world back to life and changing the Marvel Universe forever. Mars is now Planet Arakko, home to an ancient mutant society that spent thousands of years facing war, imprisonment and pain – and home to Storm, who won a place of power on their ruling council.” Marvel.com promises the story to focus on the conflict within mutantdom on the fate of the planet Arakko.
Marvel’s promotional pieces asks “who can tame Arakko?” This question hints at the very turbulent nature of Mars and its current inhospitable nature to life. While the planet potentially could have supported life in the distant past, its current environment is hostile to life. Shifting the environment to livable conditions has been the subject of countless terraforming novels, the most popular one is the Mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson. What Robinson anticipates will take humanity centuries, the Krakoan mutants did overnight. Planet-size X-Men opening pages showed the detailed speculative terraforming efforts by the mutants. An effort of biblical proportions, the terraforming of Mars took several different mutants from Magneto to Storm to Vulcan and more—the project was truly a society-wide effort, alluding to the real-world efforts it will take to make Mars truly habitable for us.
Mars has always had a prominent place in fiction. Named after the Roman god of war, the most widely-known work was H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds where the fictional inhabitants of the red planet invaded Earth. This was followed by Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series, and other works from everyone to C.S. Lewis and Robert Heinlein.
Humans have explored Mars actively since the 1960s. The last several years have seen a major advance in humanity’s efforts to land on the red planet and to stay. There are robotic probes scheduled to land on the planet joining the already growing robotic population exploring Mars now. While NASA’s Artemis project focuses on a human return to the Moon, the promise is to use that to jumpstart human exploration of the red planet. Artemis intends to land the first woman on the Moon in 2024. Commercial projects are burgeoning as well: Elon Musk’s SpaceX has developed the Starship which plans to take humans to Mars, first in orbit and then to land. A more radical proposal, titled “Mars to Stay,” aims to send humans to Mars with no return flight options.
With human exploration of the red planet on the horizon, Marvel’s fictional considerations could explore several of the significant philosophical and societal challenges that we could actually face. As the X-Men have shown already, habiting a planet is no small feat—while they did in a biblical time-span (or faster), the effort was remarkably vast requiring the greatest powers working in conjunction. That reality is before us now: Mars will not be settled by a single nation. It will take the collective efforts of a wide representation of Earth itself.
Marvel is exploring real-world and soon-to-be real-world space exploration in comic form. X-Men Red can show us how it can be done, albeit in a fictional way. Ultimately, X-Men Red might be one of the most important comics to come out in regards to the near-future of humans in space.
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