Dumbstruck by all his dismal failures, Magneto asks why they showed him this. Moira telepathically reveals to the longtime X-villain, as revealed in last week’s House of X, that she is a mutant who reincarnates in a time loop and has lived all the myriad ways Xavier and Magneto’s dueling dreams for mutantkind have failed.

The issue opens in X⁰, with Professor X and Moira MacTaggert meeting an embittered Magneto on an “Island M” in the Bermuda Triangle. Instead, Powers of X #2 affirms that there was a reason for everything that’s happened to the X-Men over the years, and building on top of the past, that there’s a new future coming for mutantkind. Silva, co-inker Adriano Di Benedetto, colorist Marte Gracia, letterer Clayton Cowles, and designer Tom Muller (who’s behind the many text pages and cyphers in the Krakoan mutant language) aren’t so caught up in blazing a new frontier that they leave the reader behind. And while two of those timelines - X⁰, set before Charles Xavier founded the X-Men, and X¹, the present day - expand on stories unfolding in House of X, the other two - X², set 100 years in the future during a war between highly advanced mutants and the Man-Machine Supremacy, an alliance of humans and evolved Sentinels, and X³, set 1,000 years after that, where humans are (kinda) extinct - are largely playing out in their own spaces.īut Hickman, artist and inker R.B. Our recommendation therefore remains: rather than buy a giant robot destined to be destroyed in a fireball at the hands of an American cape-wearing do-gooder, buy a Japanese giant robot with a track record of fighting enormous monsters.Of the two books fueling Jonathan Hickman’s giant X-Men relaunch, Powers of X is tripper than House of X, given that it’s juggling four separate plots in four separate timelines. In addition, the publisher pedigree of these robots is American by a strict interpretation only: Takara Tomy is a very long-standing Tokyo-based toy company which was one of the original partners in the creation of the franchise. These are giant robots, but are sentient alien giant robots: hardly an off-the-shelf product produced in a standard fictional military military lab being sold as surplus for you to theorectically buy online using PayPal. Better known as an animated cartoon, the “Transformers” properties started their media existence as a comic book published by Marvel Comics in 1984. Perhaps the best known giant robots are “Transformers”, a collaboration between American toy company Hasbro and Japanese toy company Takara Tomy. Perhaps the best known giant robot in Japanese manga is Mazinger Z, first appearing in “Weekly Shonen Jump” in 1972. Testujin 28-go, featured below, first appeared in 1956. Giant robots in Japan tend to fight for good instead of evil, and as such have a longer shelf-life. Below are a giant Joker robot recently appearing in the pages of “Detective Comics” #44 (2015) (and which did not last long), a giant robot created by Superman’s foe The Toyman (“Superman/Batman” #5, 2013), and a giant robot fighting the Justice League from 2011.ĭC Comics also have a propensity to deploy giant Nazi robots as enemies to their super heroes (“Batman: Confidential” #36, 2009 and the “Uberbot” from “Justice League International” #48, 1991): The other major US comic book publisher, DC Comics, also ordinarily deploys giant robots as adversaries for superheroes. The fictional management of the Sentinel program would surely be frustrated by the robots’ poor win-loss ratio and the very low death toll.Īnother Marvel Comics’ character property, a giant roboto called Ultimo, depicted below, faces a similarly poor record, usually in battling the superhero Iron Man. This giant robot is described as evolving in the future into a smaller, more lethal version, called “Nimrod”:Īs an adversary to superheroes, such robots are usually fodder for destruction. Here is the schematic for a Sentinel, a mutant hunting robot most often seen in Marvel Comic’s “Uncanny X-men” titles: In US comic books, most robots tend to be opponents to altruistic superheroes. (For the purposes of this discussion, we exclude “mecha” and other forms of exoskeletons, like “Iron Man”, “Gundam”, and “Neon Genesis Evangelion”). Comic books both in the US and Japan have long considered militarised robots, although ordinarily on a gargantuan scale for visual effect. North Dakota in the United States has legislation which specifically allows flying drones used for policing to be equipped with Tasers, pepper spray and rubber bullets.

Marvel sentinel schematics