X-Men pirates. Does that sound like fun to you? Look no further than “Marauders.”
Due to a quirk of her intangibility powers, Katherine Pryde (once nicknamed Kitty, now Kate) can’t use the Krakoa portal network. Emma Frost has turned the Hellfire Club into the Hellfire Trading Company, Krakoa’s largest corporation that distributes life-saving drugs across the globe (all part of a plan to buy mutants’ way into the human world order). So, the two team up: Emma gives Kate a ship and crew (Storm, Bishop, Iceman, and Pyro) to sail the globe, rescue mutants from countries that don’t recognize Krakoa, and bring them home. This shipping company, Emma proclaims, will be a force of liberation, not the slave trade.
The book, written by Gerry Duggan, employs a couple different artists (first and foremost Matteo Lolli). The covers, though, are always gorgeously drawn by Russell Dauterman. The pages inside are pretty good too. Emma and Kate have a lovely dynamic: once enemies, now mentor/mentee. They are unquestionably the stars of “Marauders” and the book focuses much on their power struggles with Sebastian Shaw, the Hellfire Company’s Black King — so much so that it gradually slips away from its initial pirate premise. “Marauders” could do with a bit more one-off stories about Captain Pryde and her Marauders having adventures on the high seas.
The initial run, though, is one of the highlights of “Dawn of X” (it basically wraps up with issue #16, where Kate and Emma — wise to Shaw’s machinations — blackmail and beat the s**t out of him). What I can’t recommend is the relaunched “Marauders” by Steve Orlando, which does away with corporate politics for stories about prehistoric mutants.
The X-Men comics launched some bold and radical new storylines during the Krakoa era, in which mutants established their own nation. Read More