This was a bittersweet goodby to five years of storytelling, and a bright, beautiful hello to the wonders that are soon to come. Read Full Review

Overall, X-Men #35 is a bittersweet and thought-provoking conclusion that sets the stage for a new chapter in X-Men history. Pick it up if you've been following the X-Men line and want to experience the emotional send-off to the Krakoan era. If you're new to X-Men comics, it might be a good idea to start with some earlier issues to understand the context. Read Full Review

With an oversized finale, the Krakoan era is put to rest. Stacked with an all-star line-up of creators, the writing lines up final goodbyes and new beginnings. Images of intense fighting to somber realization of a fallen dream will have fans attention. One dream is over, what will rise from its ashes? Read Full Review

Written and drawn by an all-star cast of writers and artists who have shaped the Krakoan Age, this is one milestone no X-Fan will want to miss! Read Full Review

All of the artists deliver visually thrilling moments throughout the issue, but the stand out moments are definitely during the Apocalypse fight. A great looking issue that visually celebrates these characters well. Read Full Review

Overall, the comic book was hugely important to a long-standing series that has been going on since 2021. X-Men #35 ends on a new path for the mutants that readers adore. It's a nice ending point that even newer readers can read before the new series starts. Read Full Review

Is this how Hickman dreamed Krakoa would end? Most assuredly not. But as the ending we got, it's not half bad. It's time to move on to the next era. Pick this up if you can find it. Read Full Review

There are moments of great catharsis, characterization, and promise, but there are plenty of blunders and overly complex reversals even within the relatively short span of 86 pages. Read Full Review

X-Men #35 will likely make fans of the era both happy and sad. There are some cheery moments and it reveals that Krakoa lives on and we might again see the island's return in the future. It closes one door, leaves more opens, and begins whole new paths to take. Read Full Review

With how things went with Fall of the House of X and Rise of the Powers of X, X-Men #35 did its best to provide the Krakoa Era its final chapter. This final chapter was at its best tapping into how sad it is to say goodbye to the Krakoa Era. Though there are many moments that felt like the creative team was stretching the story rather than fully honoring what this era meant for the X-Men. Hopefully the foundation set for the future of the franchise is followed up well by the new era. Read Full Review

The notion of "putting the toys back in the box" has consequences positive and negative, but this issue mostly manages to walk the tightrope, wrapping things up with some important moments, and finally giving Chris Claremont's idea about Nightcrawler's real parents a chance.But man, is it spendy. Read Full Review

Again, underrated here. A perfect ending.

I can't remember the last finale/send-off that I liked as much as this one. I give this a 10 not to mean it was flawless in every way, but to say that after reading it I'm left with nothing but good feels and no critiques. I loved every part of it, especially the Apocalypse fight and the Darkholme-Adler family picnic.

Some of my favorite individual moments were Nightcrawler tele-plucking Apocalypse's eyeballs out, Magneto yeeting Wolverine away to prevent him from ending the Xavier problem once and for all, Irene getting concerned when Nightcrawler was dueling Mystique only to realize she had been had, all the "to me, my X-Men" team teasers (Kate had the best one), and Xavier checking in on everyone before...self-inducing coma? I thought he had committed suicide at first until the last page he was on. Great stuff. I'm very much looking forward to all the coming books, they all look like top notch creative teams and rosters. more

I think this issue revolves around one very large question: was Krakoan worth it?

And while I have plenty of gripes about the way Fall of X was handled from an editorial standpoint, I'm left with the same conclusion that Ewing, Gillen, and Duggan come to: Yes, Krakoa was a resounding success. I can't remember the last time X-Men comics in particular felt this interesting and fresh. There was a level of excitement around the line that I don't believe has existed since the early '00s at best. The vast majority of books that came out in the Krakoan era presented new ideas, fresh concepts, and bold character interactions that challenged me as a reader.

This issue in particular is fascinating because it somehow manages to perform magic in the following ways:

- It wraps up Krakoa in a satisfying way while leaving the door open for it's return. The idea that mutants have evolved to meet the needs of their environment rather than as some sort of survival of the fittest is truly brilliant as it takes evolution to it's logical conclusion. The resurrection of ALL of the Genoshan mutants truly felt like a perfect bookend, undoing the original sin from Morrison's highly influential run.

- "The Quiet Counsel listens. That's why we're quiet" - from Kafka was chef's kiss good.

- It manages to set up a return to a normal status quo (ie mutants as outsiders in a world that distrusts and hates them) without it feeling forced. The mutants who fought for Krakoa just aren't necessary anymore for the nation to thrive in the White Hot Room in times of peace and prosperity. I honestly can't believe how well they threaded the needle here. It makes perfect sense that those who have only known war, bigotry and trauma would be unable to let it go. Apocalypse's role this issue perfectly exemplifies this.

- The conversation between Xavier and Charles was damn near perfect. No notes. I also loved how we're both starting and ending Krakoa with Charles in a helmet. While I'm not sure they nailed all the little details of Xavier's downfall, the broad strokes worked and it sets up McKay and Simone and the rest with a good jumping off point.

Overall I'm going to miss Krakoa dearly. It was easily the biggest, boldest swing either Big 2 publisher has taken in a decade and we're all the better as readers for it. Congrats and thanks to all the creative teams (and Jonathan Hickman especially) for taking us on this wild ride. more

The ‘Fall of X’ arc should have just been Apocalypse going on a revenge tour because mutants fell to Orchis& then Kafka returning to teach them the meaning of Krakoa. You could have still had major plots like the WHR & done away with the absurdity of Enigma & Dominion which forced writers to explain confusing concepts more than tell stories.

All in all, X-Men #35 was probably as perfect an ending to Krakoa as possible at this point, given how poorly things were executed towards the end. The issue had way too many epilogues & tried to set too much up for the next era, but the Apocalypse stuff was perfect.

I loved the Krakoan Age so I wasn't excited about it coming to an end, but I found the ending pretty satisfying. Throughout Fall of the House of X and Rise of the Powers of X I was confused why the X-Men couldn't just return to Krakoa after it all, but here they give us the answer. I like that they were able to wrap up this status quo while still giving a feeling that it mattered and was worth something, rather than just dropping a nuke on Krakoa and putting the X-Men back to the brink of extinction. The art here is very good, with the exception of Claremont's backup story, but it still gets annoying changing artists every few pages. I am happy with the Krakoa saga and the way it ended, so I'll definitely pick up a Fall of X omnibus if it's ever announced. more

This issue has a lot of things going on. The promise of Krakoa fulfilled. The inevitable collapse. The beginning of something new. I went into this issue not knowing what to expect, and what I got, by my estimation, was a pretty thoughtful, mostly quiet issue, at least in comparison to what came before. Big things happen, sure, but the bombast of the FoHoX/RoPoX finales are much bigger. What I find most interesting about this issue is the use of Apocalypse. I'm pretty sure it's been accepted by most readers that Apocalypse serves as an embodiment of trauma. The generational trauma and violence that consumes the marginalized, that they have to overcome. So I find it so interesting how they use him here. When faced with the other side, when faced with a world as it should be, a world without hate and fear, Apocalypse turns violent. He cannot accept it. He won't accept it. He is trauma, and he won't be shed. It's such an incredibly powerful metaphor, I think, that genuinely gets to the heart of what X-Men is, and especially was during the Krakoan Era. In that way, I feel like this is an incredible way to send off Krakoa.

The rest of the issue is not quite so excellent. The Clairemont story is well-deserved. We finally get to see him chime in on what was initially his idea. And it mostly works. I feel like a better artist would've been welcome, but I don't have a large issue with it. The preview of what's to come has me both excited and nervous. Something that was so great about this era was how interconnected the mutants felt, and to separate them all again is... A choice. I'm not quite sold on all the pitches here, but I'm willing to give them a chance of course. I've read every single issue of the Krakoan Era, I'm not jumping off here. The creative teams look mostly great. I'm sure it'll be fun.

Also, briefly: Duggan's run on the X-Men had its ups and downs. It at times felt disconnected and all over the place, but I felt like it ultimately had more good than bad. Even the more lackluster issues were a fun read, at the very least. more

And thus ends an era. The issue itself is a solid conclusion, with the idea of what happened to the mutants stuck in the White Hot Room being a particularly lovely idea — I adore the concept of the Krakoan dream ascending to Heaven, leaving its flawed architects behind to exist forever in an unreachable eternity. But it suffers in places from the rift in talent between its writers, with (presumably) Ewing giving a lovely scene between a reborn Magneto and Xavier and (unmistakably) Duggan giving us one last moment of out-of-character ultraviolence with Nightcrawler casually ripping out an enemy's eyes.

The Krakoan era was an odd beast, reinvigorating the X-Men at a time when I would have sworn they were a dead concept continuing on for no reason except that they were lucrative IP, but designed to merely be phase one of a never-completed Hickman megaplot.

The concept always had a sloppiness that reiterated its originally limited intentions, a sort of Potemkin village where only the protagonists were ever real. Krakoa was an island with no media, no art, no sports, no culture, few living spaces and no place to go except the one tiki bar with the one bartender, a place where nobody seemed to mind that the architect of one of the worst genocides in mutant history was on the ruling council or that the ruling council was self-appointed. (While much of that is because it wasn't meant to last so long, an innate aversion to democracy has always marked Hickman's constructions.) For all its immense utopian promises Krakoa was never more than a storehouse for NPCs who seemed to do little with their lives but stand around waiting to be added to the cast of the 27th monthly X-title. One could fairly accuse Krakoa of being little more than the high-concept equivalent of the smoke that endlessly drifts around a Liefeld character's feet.

But Krakoa was also a framework that forced writers to tell new and exciting stories at a time when the X-Men had been lost in the metaphorical wilderness through years of storytelling that was either sloppy (Bendis, Fraction), lazy and uninspired (Guggenheim, Lemire), or Whedon. Krakoa forced writers out of the comfort zones that they'd been trapped in with brilliant new ideas like the resurrection protocols, which broke the X-Men free from the drab cycle of routine deaths and returns and forced writers to find new ways to make the threat of death meaningful. Krakoa opened the door to new stories and new ways of looking at the X-Men in a way that nothing else had even come close to since Morrison. And while the era had its duds, there were some truly great comics that came out in the last five years: HoXPox, Way of X, Hellions, Sabretooth, X-Men: Red, Immortal X-Men — and of course the greatest of them all, X-Terminators.

And now we're headed into the backlash era. Just as Austen and Whedon followed Morrison, the conservative "back to basics" retrenchment must come after all experimental phases in superhero comics because corporate IP management means superheroes can never grow and change more than temporarily these days. I'm excited about the creative teams (I mean, Gail Simone writing X-Men!!!) and ready to love the new era and certainly ready to move on from the quagmire of Fall of X. But whatever critiques I had of it, I'm truly sad to see Krakoa go. more

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The Gay-Mazing Psycamorean - Jun 5, 2024

X-Terminators was truly the best, and everyone refused to see it.

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A mostly satisfying end to a flawed but interesting run.

It's a decent send off and tribute to Krakoa. Nothing extraordinary, nothing bad.

This issue is a totally nonsensical, complete disgrace of storytelling and an insult not just for X-Men fans, but for the trees that were pointlessly cut down to produce this garbage that pretends to be a comic book.
Thus, a fitting ending to the Krakoan era.

I'm just so glad it's over that I'm not going to criticize the fact that these writers are so dumb they simply can't come up with better ideas to end the story than "the whole island literally just disappears", "it moved to another dimension or something, please don't ask".

That's actually OK, this way I can pretend that the last 4 or 5 years just never happened. I can pretend that the X-Men are not evil, and that they are actually themselves instead of clones, I can pretend they never did the horrible things they did.

Still, Magneto is good and Xavier is evil now, that's weird.

Well, Xavier is a white privileged dude who lives in a mansion, of course he was bad all along, it's just that we were too bigoted to see it.

Being cancelled is no fun, so I won't share my thoughts of the politics in here and the leftist utopia propaganda speech presented by the fairy, diverse, and not very masculine krakoan mutant of the other dimension.

Let's talk about the extras, first, the Chris Claremont short Nightcrawler story:
I would have never thought I would deeply dislike anything written by Chris Claremont, yet here we are. Are we sure Claremont did that?
It feels so weird and off-putting.
There's a reason why Jim Shooter (allegedly) rejected THAT original idea for Nightcrawler's origin, that short story is why.
The worst part is that there's a moment where Nightcrawler says he was tempted to commit murder, which is completely out of character, even worse is that it was his mother Mystique he wanted to kill. I mean, DAMN!

The prologue of From The Ashes was... not bad and... somewhat refreshing? I guess? At least it was nice to look at and it was well put together (unlike anything from the X-office in the past 3 years), it's also pleasant to see that the status quo is somewhat back to normal even though Xavier being a captive villain and Magneto being a hero doesn't make sense and the fact that Jean Grey is now a goddess because she has completely merged with the Phoenix force undermines the great importance of the Dark Phoenix Saga and her first real death, now it was all for nothing.

I guess it doesn't matter if you destroy decades of history of a character if you get in return an empowered female icon so OP that doesn't have any challenges, isn't that right, Carol Danvers?
But how is she still married to Scott? How can they still be a couple if she is out there in the cosmos reigniting suns or whatever? When was the last time they got married? When Jean hooked up with Wolverine during Krakoa, was she Scott's wife? Sorry, I digress.

Another thing that doesn't make sense is that Cyclops' team is supposed to be people he trusts, right?
He trusts Hank, of course, but does he trust Magneto? Or good ol' Juggie? What about obnoxious Kid Omega? Is he the only one who cares about Oya?
I'm sure he trusts my man Colossus, but he is not in the team, her sometimes crazy sister is, does Cyclops trust her? Maybe...
I understand why anyone would like asian Psylocke in the team, but Betty's character (eternally butchered to fit into the lesbian icon category) is not under that body, Kwannon is, and nobody knows anything about her really, other than she is a ninja (and one of the hottest girls in comics), would Cyke trust her?

X-Men needs good character dynamics, if the characters mix well the book will work, but I don't think they will, I'd like McKay to prove me wrong, but I don't think he will.

Inconsistent stuff across the board, but if we get just a couple of good on-going series in a sea of awful mini-series waiting to be announced, it would be a WIN. Problem is, that is unlikely.

Asking for 1 good title is a lot for the big two right now (there aren't good titles), asking for 2 is a dream. No hope. Still, I want them to surprise me.

I'm telling you, if "From The Ashes" doesn't bring any good series at all, I give up on new comics, I can't take it anymore, it's not healthy. more

I assume the grade for this book is so high because most people who actually like X-Men have long since left the book. I suppose someone has to post an alternate view for those in the future wanting to get a read of what this book is like. Avoid this like the plague. This is a disaster.

This book sums up the failure of the Kraoka era. Please note for this review I am not an America and I assume it is this cultural difference which puts a different lens on it for me. I do not take pleasure is segregation or hating my neighbour. This book is almost a love song in some ways to the idea that segregation is right and that things are always better if you just eliminate people who dont have the same views as you. It endorses everything about the fear that sweeps the world (in 2024). It is hard to work together with others. Real life is hard and its hard to do the right thing most of the time. X-men 35 finishes off this era with the bad guys winning, the good guys joining them in a pro-segregation way and the destruction of Xavier's dream. The fact that Magneto gives that speech to Xavier in the dream. You literally have the mutant supremacist giving the good guy speech.

This all felt dirty. It ends and era and starts a new era deeply tainted. Mutants are monsters with many of them seemingly ok with just separating themselves (this Krakoa in a bubble BS). Xavier getting a guy to kill himself at the end is just madness. Like way to establish him as a total monster. Way to ruin his dream. This entire era was a disaster and a terrible 'take' on the X-Men. So If you have loved the old x-men. This isnt it. This era feels like a celebration of hate.

I honestly shouldnt even be rating this book as I dont want (I have hated this series the last while) to but seeing all these 9 and 10/10s baffles me so future readers deserve a bit more of a balanced take.

Phil's art is mostly good. more

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Maximus - Jun 11, 2024

Great! A real X-Men fan out here. Talking about the politics in the current comics landscape has got me cancelled in the past so I tried not to lean too much into that in my review, but you are right, it's disturbing AS HELL. And yeah, the only character assassinations worse than Charles Xavier's are Frank Castle's and Nick Fury's. However, we disagree in something, half of the art is awful.

Toonstrack - Jun 13, 2024

Mutants are complicated and always have been. Thats rule #1 to knowing the x men. And it seems you've forgotten that rule.

ResearchReader - Jun 14, 2024

"Always have been." Seems like you have forgotten the first decade of X-Men where Stan just created them because it was an easy explanation and Magneto was clearly the bad guy. At least that is what the Omni's and Essentials of X-Men I have on my shelves tell me. X-men did get more complex plots with Chris, but while complex and nuanced issues arose, they were at worst morally grey. The X-Men in todays world are just functionally fools, segregationists, OP and often evil.Do you not realize this?

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