People’s History of the Marvel Universe, Primary Special: Krakoan Economics

(This is wildly out-of-order, but if you follow me on Twitter or Tumblr, you’ll know that these ideas are running around in my brain, and the only way to get them to stop is to write them up.)

There have been many x-cellent analyses of House of X/Powers of X and Dawn of X from many different perspectives – from nationalism and nation-states to queer and disability theory and the politics of “safe spaces” – but one relatively unexplored dimension is economics and economic policy. As Spencer Ackerman points out, while Jonathan Hickman may be familiar to many Marvel fans as the writer of Fantastic Four and Avengers, he’s also the author of Black Monday Murders, which presented economic theory and high finance as black magick. (Wait, wrong Image series.)

Is Hickman et al’s interest in economic topics just style and symbolism, or is there content to Krakoan economics? Do we have a mutant economic policy to go along with our mutant language for a mutant culture and a mutant nation-state?