Marauders by Gerry Duggan and co. was a highlight of the last wave of X-Books, primarily because the team sat in a very peculiar place amongst those teams. Ostensibly a team of heroes, the Marauders crew were never focused on downright superheroics (as the X-Men were), or crime-fighting (as X-Factor were); they weren’t knights in shining armor (Excalibur), nor were they villains-making-nice (Hellions).
Instead, the Marauders occupied the moral gray area of the Krakoan groups, acting as literal pirates with hearts of metaphoric gold. They were the Robin Hood team, dabbling in explicit corporate and international incident crimes. Smugglers, saviors. Rescue rangers.
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While their fellow residents on Krakoa—Magneto and Charles excluded—were all looking to put a positive face forward (even if that failed), the Marauders couldn’t have cared less. They cut to saving mutantdom in the tried-and-true ways of capitalism and crime. They were the Krakoan pragmatists.
This all made for a compelling, somehow grounded book equal parts intriguing and fantastic. It struck a certain note, in uncertain times, of fighting back against unjust causes, sometimes using the very tools of the oppressor. Save the refugees and extort the corrupt officials that displaced them.
In its final volume, the series does a lot to express that criminal heroism. In one horrifying twist, the Stepford Cuckoos help the murderous Wilhelmina Kensington achieve vengeance for the sexual trauma that contributed to her instability. This isn’t a superhero moment, per se, but it a striking sort of horrible justice of the type that the internationally renowned teams wouldn’t be able to enact.
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The volume also does a lot of looking forward. It establishes a new direction for the Hellfire Trading Company, offers potential new crew for the Marauders, and it even broaches the subject of intergalactic trading. All this within six issues, before the creative team hands off the reins to a reboot under Steve Orlando and Eleorora Carlini.
All this means that it doesn’t exactly provide a tight conclusion, wrapping up all dangling threads—it does the opposite. Long-lost members of the classic Hellfire Club, Lourdes Chantel and Harry Leland, return and are given prominent roles in both Krakoa’s financial and international standing, creating whole new story possibilities; Emma steps down from the Trading Company and sets the Cuckoos in her place. There aren’t a whole lot of resolutions.
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This volume gives us some of the most dynamic one-off adventures of the series, cementing the legitimately incredible ways the team can come together—all right before breaking the team apart. Jettisoned from a spacecraft, our team manages to survive in the vacuum of space by uncanny team-work, and it’s a thrilling illustration of how disparate parts can make an incredible whole.
More than anything, the book continues to key in to delivering amazing Emma Frost and Katherine Pryde moments, something that I’ve made no secret is my major reason for showing up in the first place. These two characters, playing off one another or alone, speak to a certain altruistic brutality driving the series, with Pryde taking up the surprising role of “the muscle” and Emma effortlessly maintaining her role as “the brain”.
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This by no means limits the payoff for other characters; in this volume we see Iceman begin to fully embrace his Omega-level powers, while Tempo (who seems to be a part of the coming team) gets a moment to do something beyond aging Shaw’s whiskey. Even Pyro’s newfound career as a writer gets its nods, both with a juicy excerpt from a romance novel and with his role in creating a credible excuse for Leland’s absence (that absence, of course, being the time when he was very, very dead).
With all the hard work of establishing themes, characteristics, and tone taken care of in the preceding volumes, volume four puts forward a sort of greatest-hit singles for each—swashbuckling, brutal justice, manipulation—and every track is an all-out banger.
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