#hellfire gala 2023

[wakandas]

threnody, scarlet witch, psylocke

for hellfire gala 2023

[webshootersandwingdings]

Jen Bartel designed Carol’s look for this year’s Hellfire Gala

[hessobbingincabo]

X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023 #1

X-Men #27 (vol. 6, 2023)

Wolverine #38 (vol. 7, 2023)

Jean Grey #1 (vol. 2, 2023)

X-Men #25 (vol. 6, 2023)

David Nakayama Hellfire Gala (2023) Magazine Variant Covers

(open images for higher quality)

+bonus under the cut

Silk #1 (vol. 5, 2023)

[torterracotta]

When I heard Gerry Duggan get asked on Cerebro, white boy to white boy, about the unfortunate optics of announcing and then immediately murdering the least white team of X-Men in years, I knew we'd be in for some shit. Man, did he deliver - after some evasive waffling about how ORCHIS is meant to be fascist, and how the story's point is to put the collective back of mutantkind even more against the wall than it was any of the last six times something like this has happened.

And, honestly? That's fair! This year's Hellfire Gala is ultimately the first part of a larger story, and history shows it's not going to last forever — hell, does anyone remember what the status quo was immediately before HoXPoX? At least this time most of the characters have implicitly just been sucked into Mother Righteous's magical Poké Ball, rather than outright killed; if anything, that's an improvement. I was fully content to just think "hey, not for me," and get back to ignoring everything beyond Immortal and Sabertooth, secure in the knowledge that certain topics are bound to be handled poorly when almost everyone in the room is white, when Duggan said three words that stopped me in my tracks:

"Keep the faith."

See, that struck me, because for a lot of us, this entire era of comics has been about nothing but faith. I've been reading X-Men, and engaging with fans since I was eight, and I've never seen the kind of collective buy-in from other marginalized readers that I have with Krakoa. X-Twitter (or, I suppose, X-X) has been Blacker, queerer, more disabled, less homogeneous than the fandom has ever been, all of us buying in to the implicit promise that this time things would be different. Sure, the line was headed by a presumably straight white guy, but there were other voices in the room for a change, and it really felt like they were going to be listened to. We thought we'd moved past clunky metaphor, past queerbaitimg and awkward racial gaffes. Storm and Kwannon were getting to do stuff, Arakko was full of amazing characters of color, Cyclops and Wolverine were probably fucking, we were hooked, and we turned out.

It's hard to overemphasize just how wild this was to see in real time. X-Men has always been allegory, sure, but it's traditionally allegory by and for the majority. For years, the readers who might really feel that resonance, those of us who have been hated and feared for the unforgivable crime of being who we are, we were afterthoughts, tolerated at best. We got scraps, "representation" from creators who seemed to be offended by the implication that we would ever want something other than being fetishized tokens. We were, as Hickman so succinctly put it, told that we were less when we knew we were more. And then, out of nowhere, Krakoa made us inescapable.

The two biggest X-Men podcasts, X-Plain the X-Men and Cerebro, are hosted by queer people. X of Words has been rocking the Black, queer experience like no one's business, Mutant Watch has been a joy to listen to and to be on. Not just podcasts, either, in everything from criticism to fanart to cosplay, voices have been elevated that were previously silent. I mean, hell, I've gotten paid to talk about comics, that shit never would have happened four years ago.

All of that was based on faith.

Faith that we were being celebrated, for once, instead of just used. Faith that for whatever growing pains there might be, things were going to be better.

And let's not fuck around here, there were growing pains. In the first year alone we dealt with everything from blatant whitewashing, to queerbaiting — any Sunspot fan can go into detail there, assuming you can get one of us to stop crying for long enough. While that was going on, we watched Bryan Edward Hill (the only non-white writer in that initial wave) put out a book that was, let's face it, at worst aggressively mid, only to be excoriated by certain portions of the fandom, and dropped by the office, while significantly worse books managed to hold fast — er, hold on. Not to say that Fallen Angels was without sin, mind you, the book was packed with enough orientalism to make Chris Claremont blush. But, at the same time, Wolverine's first year ended with him doing what he does best: trying so hard to be Japanese that I had to check to make sure he wasn't Marvel's editor in chief.

Through all of that, we kept the faith.

Things didn't really get much better, of course. Arakko was a fascinating concept, and felt like it damn near doubled Marvel's characters of color. And yeah, the ending of X-Factor was one of the most poorly handled racist messes I've seen this side of… well, any given day on Twitter. Sure, the whitewashing has never stopped, to the point where everything from X-Corp to this week's Hellfire Gala has had to be hastily edited between previews and release. Maybe we keep dealing with stuff like butchered AAVE, even more queerbaiting, Kate Pryde's funeral, the genocide of almost all of those Arraki characters, and whatever the hell was going on with Lost in Way of X. Maybe there's a very real argument to be made that there's something insidious about three straight years of voting to determine if characters like Monet (who, by the by, has been retooled from "basically Superman" to "Black woman with anger powers") deserve the honor of being written by a white man who's stayed writing with his foot in his mouth. I mean, hey! All my white friends in the scene say he's nice, just like Williams, or Howard, or any number of other crusty crackers who are still proud of tripping over the bar Claremont left on the floor in the 80's!

And dammit, we kept the faith!

Even before the issue dropped, the Fall of X has had a lot of us wary. After all, all of the promotion leading up to it has been white guys saying the minority allegory has had it too good for too long, which, whatever, press copy. We all know they've gotta sell books — they, in this case, being the almost exclusively white, almost exclusively male creative teams attached to all of the books in the line. Sure, as Duggan said, the 616 has a fascism problem, but it’s hard not to see this as a deliberate step back from the almost double digit number of non-white creators these past few years — almost as if Marvel has realized they can make space for a fourth ongoing by their favorite white boy if they just throw out a Voices special every couple of months as a containment zone for the darkies. And, hey, considering how good ol’ C.B. got his foot in the door, I can’t even fake surprise. At this point, it’s a minor miracle any time a person of color is tapped for anything that’s expected to last beyond one issue.

In this issue, as a reward for keeping the faith, we got to see something astounding, something that'd bring a tear to the eye of even the most cynical reader — a team that was only half white. My god. And sure, their brutal murder in favor of a team with Kate "Hard-Arrr" Pryde and the Kingpin(????) was only a pit-stop between the resurrection of the suddenly ashy Ms. Marvel and Lourdes Chantel being killed off for the sake of a white woman's angst yet afuckinggain, but ain't that the dream that Malcolm Ten or whoever died for?

The Krakoan era, ultimately, has been the same as every other. Empty promises by white men who show us time and again that there was never any point in expecting anything better. Any meaning we've found, everything of worth, has been what we've made for ourselves.

We've spent years keeping the faith, Gerry, while you and yours have continued to let us down. What the hell do we have to show for it?

[matthew-novak]

PROFESSOR X by LUCAS WERNECK

ULTIMATE INVASION #2 HELLFIRE GALA VARIANT COVER

[thejinxmaster]

The new Hellfire Gala 2023 Variant covers >>>

[stepfordcuckoos]

Luciano Vecchio's design sheet for the Stepford Cuckoss' look for this year's Hellfire Gala

[viaov]

Jamie McKelvie, Rasputin IV, Hellfire Gala

[heckcareoxytwit]

What Rogue was doing on that fateful day of Hellfire Gala

As the Avengers were distracted by the distress calls and hearing the news of the terrorism attack, Rogue goes out of Krakoaland with the Avengers to help them out. Meanwhile, Captain America was on the way to the Capitol Building when he was ambushed and attacked by the Orchis Soldiers. Before Captain America could drown, he was saved by Rogue who pulls him out of the water with magnetism as borrowed from Polaris. It is likely that Rogue had absorbed Polaris' magnetic powers off-panel. Iron Man comes in to check on Captain America at the bridge. Even though Captain America had lost his motorcycle, nearly choked and drowned; it doesn't stop them from carrying on their Avenger duty by going to Washington DC to stop the terrorist attack carried by Orchis.

Back to Krakoaland, the Hellfire Gala party had been ruined with the attacks by Orchis. Several mutants dead, most of the mutants are scattered and Charles Xavier is at mercy by the insane Moira-Bot. Before she could finish him off with a blade, Rogue comes in and destroys Moira-Bot (temporarily) and gets Xavier out of Krakoaland. It turned out that Rogue and the Avengers had to leave the gala as they were called up because the Orchis had distracted the Avengers by performing the false-flag operations outside Krakoaland like attacking Captain America and bombing other places. Xavier, being a broken mutant man, cries that he "killed" them (mutants) and declares that Krakoa should be avenged.

X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023 (1st, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th pics)

Free Comic Book Day 2023: Avengers/X-Men #1 (3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th pics)

Invincible Iron Man v5 #8, 2023 (7th pic)

[smashpages]

Black Panther #2 (Marvel, July 2023) Hellfire Gala Variant Cover by Mateus Manhanini

[smallbutplucky]

Magneto was sadly unable to attend the 2023 Gala due to an unfortunate case of death, but apparently that was for the best. Either way, if I ever had the honor of dressing this man for the Gala, this would be my submission.

My theme was “War in a time of Peace”. Inspired by Ares and Magneto's own gladiatoresque armor. His outfit is loose and drapes in a regal fashion like a person in leisure and yet he still wears protective armor. While he wears white of Peace, the red of War lies underneath.

Magneto knew that while Krakoa flourished the wolves were prowled at the door. He would be ready.

[wakandas]

a dreamy trio. Unveil, Sunspot, Dani Moonstar

for hellfire gala 2023

twitter / insta / ko-fi

[webshootersandwingdings]

CAPTAIN MARVEL: DARK TEMPEST #1

HELLFIRE GALA VARIANT by Jen Bartel

[hessobbingincabo]

Captain America #750 (2023) by C.F. Villa

Thor Annual #1 (vol. 6, 2023) by David Marquez

Incredible Hulk #2 (vol. 4, 2023) by Bryan Hitch

Captain Marvel: Dark Tempest #1 (vol. 1, 2023) by Jen Bartel

Black Panther #2 (vol. 9, 2023) by Mateus Manahani

Doctor Strange #5 (vol. 6, 2023) by Dustin Nguyen

Avengers #3 (vol. 9, 2023) by David Baldeón

Moon Knight #25 (vol. 9, 2023) by W. Scott Forbes

Amazing Spider-Man #30 (vol. 6, 2023) by Betsy Cola

Guardians of the Galaxy #4 (vol. 7, 2023) by Lee Garbett

Ghost Rider #16 (vol. 10, 2023) by Gerald Parel

Miles Morales: Spider-Man #8 (vol. 2, 2023) by Bernard Chang

Amazing Spider-Man #29 (vol. 6, 2023) by David Nakayama

Hallow's Eve #5 (vol. 1, 2023) by Bengal

Venom #22 (vol. 5, 2023) by Joshua Cassara

Daredevil #13 (vol. 7, 2023) by Javier Garrón

Avengers Hellfire Gala (2023) Cover Gallery

(open images for higher quality)

+bonus under the cut

Stunning Captain Marvel piece by Angel Solorzano

[smuglysasha]

Well I just read Hellfire Gala 2023, and all I have to say is go fuck yourself Marvel with your edgy genocidal bullshit you artless hacks. Do you think your story becomes more serious and real by killing characters in showers of viscera? Of course you just had to do this to the x men AGAIN. Seriously, whoever decided on this creatively needs to go fuck themselves.

[matthew-novak]

WAKE UP PEOPLE NEW CHARLES DRIP JUST DROPPED.

You’re honor he’s slaying!!!!

Hellfire Gala 2023 variant cover.