SPOILER ALERT! This article discusses key plot points from House of X #2. If you have not yet read the issue and wish to remain unspoiled, stop reading now. If you have read the issue, or don’t care about spoilers, then read on!
House of X #2, the third issue in writer Jonathan Hickman‘s sprawling new X-Men epic, is in stores today. As with the preceding issues of House of X and Powers of X, the latest issue’s story is supplemented with text and infographics by Hickman and graphic designer Tom Muller (EW has a great piece with Hickman on why he uses those pages as a way to control the reading experience). House of X #2 spaces these pages differently than its predecessors, with only two text pages early on and then six pages of graphics grouped at the end, with those pages actually forming one full graphic. Unfortunately, Hickman has revealed a pretty major typo in the latter graphic.
LAST CHANCE!
SPOILERS AHEAD!
House of X #2 reveals that Moira MacTaggert, longtime human ally of Charles Xavier and the X-Men, has herself been secretly a mutant all along, with her mutant power being the ability to reincarnate. The issue outlines her multiple reincarnations, and the last six pages of House of X #2 present a timeline of the key events in almost all of Moira’s reincarnations.
Moira’s tenth life is the current Marvel Universe timeline, and includes both a minor typo and a major one. At Year 25, the name of Moira’s husband, Joseph MacTaggert, is misspelled; that’s the minor one. On Twitter, though, Hickman revealed another, less obvious typo, unless you’re well-versed in X-Men history:
https://twitter.com/JHickman/status/1159176513599746051?s=20
“I reversed the content of these two dates in the back,” Hickman wrote, referring to Years 49 and 50 on Moira’s tenth life. Year 49 marks the “Genocide at Genosha,” while Year 50 reads “Moira fakes death (Shi’ar golem).” The corrected timeline, then, should place Moira’s faked death ahead of the Genoshan genocide.
The correction of this typo brings the timeline into agreement with what actually happened in previous X-Men books. In 2001’s X-Men #108, Moira died after injuries sustained in an attack on Muir Island by Mystique and Sabretooth. Less than six months later, Cassandra Nova destroyed Genosha—and killed nearly all of its 16 million inhabitants—in an early issue of Grant Morrison‘s and Frank Quitely‘s New X-Men run. The “(Shi’ar golem)” note on Hickman’s timeline appears to be a retcon to account for Moira’s earlier death.
There are still plenty of mysteries to be found in this timeline graphic—How did Moira’s fifth and ninth lives end? What happened at all in her sixth life?—but at least one potential mystery has been cleared up as a simple error.
House of X #2 is available digitally and in stores now.
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