‘No more mutants’, with these three words mutant kind was no longer going to replace humanity at the top of the food chain, how could it with the spell working so well that there would be no more mutant babies. They became an endangered species, but unlike the sea otter this population could tear down cities. This new status quo was unbelievably appealing with the question, what would happen now? on the lips of every fan of Marvels merry mutants. However this concepts true potential seems to have been squandered with concepts being put in place, the sentinels guarding the mansion for example, which where either never explored or retconned into oblivion, does everyone remember Iceman being de-powered at the end of House of M, but as soon as the character was picked up in the actual X-books he in fact did have his powers he just blocked them out. We can all blame bad writing for these incidents, however I believe it is more like the writers don’t seem to understand the scale of the actions they take. As X-Men is a superhero book they concern themselves with the constraints of the genre itself, they don’t break the mold. They throw out these massive concepts but don’t necessarily follow them through. Which seems a little ridiculous as they have three titles devoted to the X-Men proper (not to mention the list of other books with an X) and they still have most of them doing the same thing. This leads me onto what is happening at this very moment within the X-verse, the X-Men’s exodus to Utopia, the newly christened island nation of mutant kind.

“Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.” One of the most common and well known quotes from Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. The scene is set in a cave, with three witches adding their sinister ingredients to a boiling brew chanting around a cauldron. Since the time when man could first put ink to paper, pagan traditions have been a popular reference in literary art work. Even today in the modern era, pagan allusions can still be seen. From the bluntly obvious Harry Potter novels by J.K. Rowling to more the more subtle references in our favorite comics, Pagan innuendos are everywhere.