Marauders #1
Marauders #1 marks the first appearance of the Krakoan-era Marauders team — a deliberate reclamation of a name once synonymous with Mister Sinister's mutant assassins — and it fundamentally reframes Kitty Pryde, re-christened Kate, as a seafaring captain-turned-Red Queen rather than a schoolteacher or student. The issue introduces a genuinely novel genre for X-Men comics: a pirate-adventure book operating at the intersection of geopolitical intrigue and mutant liberation, with the Hellfire Trading Company as its morally ambiguous backer. It also plants the Krakoan Age's most quietly devastating character puzzle — that Kate Pryde, whose entire mutant identity is built on passing through solid matter, cannot pass through Krakoa's gates — giving her story arc an emotional weight that reverberates across the entire Dawn of X publishing line. Group editor Jordan D. White publicly called it 'probably the most important book of the Dawn of X so far as furthering the world and status quo of the X-Men,' a claim the issue earns by immediately dramatizing how hostile nation-states are exploiting mutants excluded from Krakoa's protections.
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Marauders was announced in July 2019 as one of six simultaneous launch titles in Marvel's Dawn of X initiative, the franchise-wide Krakoan-Age reset engineered by Jonathan Hickman's House of X and Powers of X. Writer Gerry Duggan — who had previously collaborated with artist Matteo Lolli on Deadpool — has noted that the conceptual DNA for the series reaches back to Uncanny X-Men #153, the classic 'Kitty's Fairy Tale' issue in which a young Kitty cast herself as a pirate; the Krakoan Age simply gave him the editorial circumstances to make that fantasy literal. The cover was produced by Russell Dauterman with colors by Matthew Wilson, while the interior story was penciled and inked by Lolli with colors by Federico Blee, letters by Cory Petit, and edited by Jordan D. White — the same editorial team overseeing the broader Dawn of X line under editor-in-chief C.B. Cebulski.
Trivia · 8 facts
- First appearance of the Krakoan-era Marauders as a team (Kate Pryde, Storm, Iceman, Pyro, and Lockheed), per the Marvel Database's featured-characters listing for the issue.
- Written by Gerry Duggan with interior art by Matteo Lolli (pencils and inks), colors by Federico Blee, letters by Cory Petit, and a cover by Russell Dauterman with colors by Matthew Wilson.
- One of six simultaneous launch titles for Marvel's Dawn of X event, announced in July 2019 and released on October 23, 2019.
- Establishes the central hook of Kate Pryde's Krakoan-era arc: her phasing powers — the defining feature of her mutant identity — inexplicably fail to work on Krakoa's organic gateway portals, forcing her to sail to the island by stolen boat.
- This is the issue in which Kitty Pryde formally asks her teammates to start calling her 'Kate,' a moment prompted by Emma Frost earlier in the same story; the name 'Kate' had previously been associated with her future self in the 1981 'Days of Future Past' timeline.
- Pyro (St. John Allerdyce) returns to the Marvel Universe here as one of the first mutants resurrected by the Krakoan resurrection process known as 'The Five'; he had previously died saving Senator Kelly.
- The Hidden Gem variant cover (a 1:100 retailer incentive) is a recolored reprint of a Rick Leonardi pin-up that originally appeared in Marvel Fanfare #12, making it a notable production artifact connecting the Krakoan Age to 1980s X-Men publishing history.
- The issue spawned more than a dozen variant covers at launch, including a 1:10 Tom Muller design variant, a 1:25 Philip Tan variant, a 1:50 Todd Nauck variant, an Aaron Kuder Young Guns variant, and a Mark Bagley 'Every Mutant Ever' variant, reflecting the breadth of Marvel's Dawn of X retail support program.