Posted in: Comics, Marvel Comics | Tagged: cable, empyre, excalibur, recaps, wolverine, x-men, X-ual Healing - The Weekly X-Men Recap Column

Empyre: X-Men #4 Was Better Than an Event Tie-In Deserves to Be [XH]

Published Mon, 24 Aug 2020 13:30:52 -0500

by Jude Terror

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Welcome to X-ual Healing, North Korea's favorite weekly X-Men recap column. There are four X-Men comics that came out last week: Empyre: X-Men #4, Excalibur #11, Cable #3, and Wolverine #4. I'm gonna recap 'em. It's what I do.

But first, anyone pay attention to DC Fandome this weekend? No, me neither. It's kinda hard to fanboy out over a comic book company that just laid off a crapload of people last week. Well, hard for me. Most comic book fanboys… well, they've put up with way worse from publishers. Anyway, there's a Snyder Cut trailer, so at least The Snyderbronies got their due. There was a lot of cool wrestling too. Did you know I recap all the wrestling each week? Find my AEW Dynamite, NXT Takeover XXX, and WWE SummerSlam reports here. And I even got an EX-X-XCLUSIVE interview with Roman Reigns' old teeth (he got new veneers)! The wrestling stuff is starting to gain traction here, which is good. It means I won't be forced to go back to writing more about comics, which I have no desire to do. And that means that you, yes, you, dear readers of X-ual Healing, are the only ones that get to experience my comics-related wisdom! Aren't you lucky?

Alright, enough plugs. Let's get on with the recaps.

Sworn to sell comics for Marvel executives who feared and hated the fact that Fox owned their movie rights, The Uncanny X-Men suffered great indignities. Still, thanks to a corporate merger, a line-wide relaunch, and Jonathan Hickman's giant ego, the X-Men can finally get back to doing what they do best: being objectively the best franchise in all of comics.

EMPYRE X-MEN #4 (OF 4)
APR200877
(W) Jonathan Hickman (A) Jorge Molina
ALIENS! PLANT-MEN! MUTANTS! ZOMBIES! OLD WOMEN! DEMONS! EXPLOSIONS!
These issues have more than you ever dreamed to ask for. And then some.

Rated T+
In Shops: Aug 19, 2020
SRP: $4.99

Empyre: X-Men #4 Recap

The issue opens with a flashback to the scene from the first issue, where the Scarlet Witch brought back all the dead mutants on Genosha as brain-eating zombies. Then we see that afterward, she went to see Doctor Strange and ask him for help. He lectures her instead but agrees to help if she helps him stalk a girl he likes. He agrees so she explains how she raised the zombies. They go and gather the ingredients they need and then head to Genosha. Doctor Strange puts a barrier around the island to prevent any zombies from leaving it and then casts a spell that will make the zombies all die in 30 days.

It seems all of this happened 29 days ago, so what we've been reading in the last few issues with the X-Men and Cotati on the island is all taking place during the final day that the zombies will exist. Back in the present, the giant zombie Cotati monster rampages through the island. The X-Men are about to make a stand against it.

Meanwhile, on Krakoa, The Beast is working with one of the Hordeculture ladies to develop a way to kill the monster. We see Beast's inner monologue in which he decides to steal their intellectual property by examining the machines they use to hack the Krakoan gateways.

Beast invites Explodey Boy… the one resurrected by The Five, not the zombie version, to go to Genosha and meet with his zombie counterpart. Live explodey boy explains to dead explodey boy how Krakoan resurrection works and explains that the zombies aren't really alive, and the X-Men are going to have to get rid of them eventually. Dead Explodey Boy wants to know how his family is doing, and Live Explodey Boy says they're doing well. He also tells him that they had their first kiss, with Arachnidor, a mutant girl whose power is to smell like spiders who Dead Explodey Boy thinks is out of their league.

After their talk, Dead Explodey Boy is feeling pretty good. He borrows a jetpack from Live Explodey Boy and flies into the mouth of the giant Cotati monster and explodes. It kills it, and the monster's death kills all the other Cotati. There's just one problem though – Magik is still all Darkchilded out, and she says now she's the ruler of Genosha and everyone there, zombies and X-Men, are her slaves. Nightcrawler, specifically, will be her sex slave.

But then the time on the Scarlet Witch's spell runs out. All the zombies die. Magik returns to normal. Hordeculture makes their escape. The X-Men go home. In the final scene, the Scarlet Witch is crying while reading books in a library, perhaps still trying to find a way to undo Decimation, having apparently not learned anything.

This series was a lot more fun than it had any right to be. Yes, it was a shameless cash crab as any super-mega-crossover event tie-in is. But the creators involved used it to tell a fun four-issue story that put just about everything back where it was at the start (the big difference being that Beast now understands Hordeculture's tech). As far as these things go, this one was far from the worst, is what I'm saying.