X-Men: Golgotha

X-Men (2004) (Collected Editions) #2

by Peter Milligan, Salvador Larroca (Artist)

The X-Men travel to Antarctica to respond to an S.O.S. from a colony of mutants... and what they find is far more shocking than they expected Will the X-Men share the colony's gruesome fate? Collects X-Men #166-170.

Genres: Comics, X Men, Graphic Novels, Marvel, Comic Book, Graphic Novels Comics, Superheroes

120 pages, Paperback

First published August 10, 2005

About the author

Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name

Peter Milligan is a British writer, best known for his work on X-Force / X-Statix, the X-Men, & the Vertigo series Human Target. He is also a scriptwriter.

He has been writing comics for some time and he has somewhat of a reputation for writing material that is highly outlandish, bizarre and/or absurd.

His highest profile projects to date include a run on X-Men, and his X-Force revamp that relaunched as X-Statix.

Many of Milligan's best works have been from DC Vertigo. These include: The Extremist (4 issues with artist Ted McKeever) The Minx (8 issues with artist Sean Phillips) Face (Prestige one-shot with artist Duncan Fegredo) The Eaters (Prestige one-shot with artist Dean Ormston) Vertigo Pop London (4 issues with artist Philip Bond) Enigma (8 issues with artist Duncan Fegredo) and Girl (3 issues with artist Duncan Fegredo).

Series:
* Human Target
* Greek Street
* X-Force / X-Statix

Reviews

[Chad · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is just as bad as the Chuck Austen run. I thought Milligan would be a little better. He's got all of the X-Men acting out of character to drive the story. It's about some alien virus that drives some mutants insane and others into zombies. None of it made much sense and it felt like someone who knew nothing about the X-Men was writing the X-Men, which is probably the case.

I did like Larroca's art and found it interesting how he drew Iceman as partially see through as if he was solid but clear ice.

[Alex E · Rating 2 out of 5]

The team investigates a distress call only to find an ancient evil that brings out the worst in people around it. They decide to bring it back to the mansion to study it, and all hell breaks loose as everyone's secret gripes come spilling out, causing drama between the team. Once the creature is caught and dealt with, the team is left with the lingering tension due to the revelations.

I'm normally a fan of Peter Milligan, but this was just... not good. To be honest, I thought it was still Chuck Austen, as it has that same vibe to it. It's a vibe where the story is taking precedent over the characters because the characters act so unlike they usually act. In order for the plot to move forward, they have to have things happen like Emma Frost saying to bring the Golgotha creature back to the mansion, or Bobby sacrificing the integrity of the team by constantly being and trying to care for Polaris. I think I see what Milligan was going for here, a much more character driven drama, but the delivery is so ham-fisted that it just rang false.

I was hoping to see something better after Austen left the title, but so far, it feels like more of the same unfortunately.

[Andrew · Rating 1 out of 5]

Now having read X-Force/X-Statix by Milligan, I was intrigued to see what he would do with the more mainstream batch of X-Characters. I now know the answer. He would suck. This is nearly as bad as Chuck Austen. It is actually worse than 3rd phase Claremont who he's competing with on Uncanny at this time. So what happened between X-Statix and this?

Well, obviously these two series are very different. X-Statix was free reign for him to do what he wanted. New characters, all eminently slayable. And perhaps he has a better hand at the satire game than trying to play straight up with classic (and overdone) characters.

At least when this is over, I will get Mike Carey and (¡)Chris Bachalo(!).

[TR Naus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Havok takes his X-Men squad to investigate a distress call from a mutant colony attempting to set up their own Utopia in Antarctica, but they quickly discover that the colonists both killed themselves and each other with a horrific scene of dead bodies and wandering mutants in zombie-like states. Tensions are already high between Polaris, Iceman, Rogue, Gambit, Emma Frost, and Wolverine, but their personal relationships are further strained as every one of them starts facing their own personal demons, fears, and insecurities. Only one cryptic word written in blood offers any clue -- Golgotha.

Peter Milligan takes the lead with this more psychological approach to the impact of small nudges and suggestions to the egos of a team that needs to work together. Things unsaid or repressed come to the fore. Gambit and Rogue confront the implications of not being able to touch (and why they stay together because of that inability). Havok and Iceman passive-aggressively vie for Polaris's attention in the most inappropriate times, while Polaris is still dealing with witnessing the Genosha genocide. Wolverine is reminded that he is an old man amongst the younger generation, and Emma Frost struggles with her body image. They attempt to avoid and even directly confront their own doubts and the source of the telepathic assault.

Golgotha does not tread new ground regarding the issues each character is facing, but I do like the more subtle method used to express those deeply rooted insecurities. The run unravels at the end when the X-Men need to travel into space to deal with an incoming threat that just happened to arrive at this moment in time. They ask NASA for help (really?), and a single NASA general responds in perhaps one of the most unrealistic ways. There are too many confusing story points for me that I couldn't quite follow (such as the sudden global threat and how it ties to the growing resentment that launches the LA mutant riot/murders), but I still love Salvador Larroca's art.

[Trevor · Rating 2 out of 5]

The X-Men travel to Antarctica to investigate a distress call from a mutant colony there. The mutants are all either dead or violently insane and the word Golgotha ("The Place of the Skull," a.k.a. Calvary, the hill on which Jesus was crucified) is written on one of the walls. The X-Men discover a massive dead alien creature nearby, which they identify as Golgotha. They also hear reports of similar violence in L.A. and in Israel, at one of the possible sites of Calvary.

Traveling to Calvary, they find another creature buried under the hill and they bring them both back to the Xavier Institute. The creatures are revealed to be shells left behind from a single creature as it melted, which is now very small and hidden among them. The creature starts to drive the X-Men insane until they manage to kill it.

The X-Men then learn that many more of these creatures are flying to earth, so they go to space and destroy them.

This story felt like a rough draft or a cut down version of a larger story. It was hard to follow and some elements, such as the religious motif were not at all fleshed out. Is Milligan implying that Jesus's crucifixion was caused by this creature? Maybe but he never actually says that or explains why it's called "Golgotha."

Some of the horror elements were effective but generally those needed to be fleshed out more too.

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

SUMMER OF X-MEN CAPSULE REVIEW #4

So one of the things I sort of forgot about/kept super close to my heart is that back when it was coming out, Peter Milligan's X-Men was sort of my #1 jam. I mean, don't get me wrong --Whedon's Astonishing was happening about that time and melting all eyeballs, including mine, but there was something about Milligan's work that felt virtually ignored by everyone but me, and that made it more special. It's almost hard to talk about what's good about it without discussing what's bad, which this article at The Comics Cube does brilliantly -- in short, Milligan's X-Men was too messy, too loaded with anxiety and ennui, too unformed to feel like X-Men. It felt ugly and strange.

Case in point -- in Golgotha, the inaugural storyline, the team spends most of their time in multiple lovers' quarrels while chasing down a protoplasmic government experiment that is driving them insane. The quarreling is embarrassing and petty-- a love triangle gone wrong that reads more like an overheard drunken fight than an engaging tale of heartache -- and the monster is destroyed without being fully understood, which is par for the course with Milligan, but not with X-Men.

Even when reading the whole volume rather than single issues, it feels like something is missing, and I think it takes reading (and appreciating) a lot of Milligan's work to understand the intentionality of the discomfort he creates. Of course he's given a straightforward superhero property and promptly turns it into messy pile of beautiful muck. Of course he does.

[William Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Peter Milligan brings his Vertigo stylings to Marvel and gives us a decent horror story. However, Larroca needs a new ink and color team because his pencils seem to be nonexistent beneath the washed out computer art. What begins as an intriguing horror story soon devolves into an extaterrestrial anticlimax. Milligan doesn't know how to write this incarnation of the team without adding Wolverine in the mix for no apparent reason.

Writing Grade: C
Art Grade: C

[Fugo Feedback · Rating 3 out of 5]

Creo que le puse tres estrellitas sólo porque tenía la esperanza de que fuera mejorando con el correr de los capítulos, pero la historia en sí no sé si se las merecía. Tampoco es que sea tan mala como las que le siguieron, pero con lo exigente que me estoy volviendo ahora (al menos a la hora de dar puntos), probablemente una relectura devaluara el puntaje de esta historia. De todos modos, no creo que pase pronto.

[Rhiannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

The X-Men go up against an insanity-inducing mushroom, and some awesome craziness ensues. I wasn't sure what a more mainstream title by Milligan would be like, but this was good - funny and a little meta, but not X-Statix levels of funny and meta.

[Tomás Sendarrubias García · Rating 4 out of 5]

Como ya he dicho por aquí, después de que acabara la etapa de Morrison en New X-Men, toda la franquicia mutante se reorganizó, preparándose de paso para lo que se les venía encima con Dinastía de M, y una de las colecciones que más cambió fue precisamente la New X-Men de Morrison, que perdió el "New" y quedó de nuevo simplemente como X-Men. El escritor Peter Milligan y el dibujante Salvador Larroca fueron los encargados de desarrollar las historias que se contarían en X-Men en lo que, desde mi punto de vista, es una de las etapas más extrañas que he leído sobre los mutantes, sin llegar al nivel bizarro de Morrison, pero no le anda muy a la zaga.

En X-Men, Milligan y Larroca cuentan con un equipo disfuncional formado por Kaos, Pícara, Gambito, Polaris y el Hombre de Hielo, en lo que es una extraña danza amorosa que se lleva la mayor parte de los argumentos de esta etapa. La tensión entre Pícara y Gambito por un lado, y el triángulo amoroso formado por Polaris, Kaos y el Hombre de Hielo se convierten en los vértices de toda la narrativa de Milligan, que también recurre en algunas ocasiones a Emma Frost como personaje recurrente, mejorando con ella bastante la dinámica de las historias.

Antes de Dinastía de M, Milligan y Larroca contaron tres historias principales. La primera (reunida en este volumen), enfrenta a la Patrulla-X a una especie de criatura fúngica llamada Golgotha, que aumenta los miedos y tensiones de aquellos que la rodean, y que además de provocar disturbios en Los Ángeles, Jerusalén y la propia Antártida, hace que los X-Men tengan que recluirse en cuarentena en la mansión, haciendo frente a sus propias tensiones (que con la alineación de Milligan desde luego que son muchas). Después la historia se centraría en Pícara y Gambito y en la tensión física existente entre ambos, causada por los poderes de Pícara que les impide tocarse, y la aparición de un nuevo personaje (que luego resultaría no ser tan nuevo), Foxx, cuya intención evidente es liarse con Gambito pasando por encima de Pícara, una historia de culebrón con un toque un tanto "sucio". Luego llegó el cruce con Pantera Negra en una aventura no demasiado elaborada que recupera a un viejo personaje de Marvel, el Fantasma Rojo, enemigo ruso de los Cuatro Fantásticos en los tiempos de la Guerra Fría... y después llegó la Dinastía de M, y tras ella, Diezmados. Aquí conocimos al Escuadrón Centinela O.N.E y a la Liga Sapiens, pero el peso de la historia seguía estando en como se enfrentaban algunos personajes a la pérdida de sus poderes y sus consecuencias.

En fin, unas historias que, sin ser demasiado llamativas a priori, son tan extrañas que resultan muy curiosas de leer, y merece la pena hacerlo.

[Nelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an odd one. The story arc started out as a horror mystery, but it quickly got messy and confusing (and I'm not just talking about the trippy scenes). The panel layouts were hard to follow, the pacing was poor, and the passing of time wasn't expressed clearly enough. This is in part because Milligan needs to set up the admittedly very ambitious plot in a rather short amount of time. Luckily, once that's out of the way, we finally get to the meat of the story when the X-Men are thrown into a violent, dark psychedelic trip of sorts and are forced to face their demons. I thought that aspect of the story was very interesting and well portrayed in the dialogue, but felt too unclear in the panel layouts and art. I feel like that was partly intended, but it backfired and obscured the actually very interesting premise of the story. I think Milligan's intention was to let the very angsty and dysfunctional team air out their fears and insecurities (as written and exaggerated) by the previous writer Chuck Austen. A sort of purge, if you will. Unfortunately, the story never lives up to its potential, but kudos to Milligan for trying to pull off such an ambitious hook. It's better than Chuck Austen's run, at least. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Lillian Francis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think the 3 stars might be over generous but I'm tired.
A strange blob is affecting people's minds. In fact there are 2, one in the middle east and one in the antarctic. So why are people in LA going crazy? This story was so confused. Also I don't get why it affected the X-men by throwing them into romantic turmoil.
Gambit and Rogue argue about the lack of touch. Rogue makes out with Wolverine. Bobby and Polaris are a thing (although they've already dated in the past and at her hen party Lorna implied her and Bobby had NEVER had sex) and Havok is jealous cos her wants her back despite having dumped her at the altar (tbf she was acting nuts) and having been in love with the human nurse not more than a few issues ago.
It's all such a mess. The art's not great either.

[B · Rating 2 out of 5]

This felt like a direct continuation of the Austen run. Everyone acts erratically and overt torment about romance takes center stage.

The plot is what you'd use in a play to make sure you didn't have to build a new set: everyone is trapped in the mansion with an emotion monster that makes you feel strong emotions.

That could have been interesting maybe, but,
here it feels like an excuse for Iceman and Polaris to shout at each other.

Also, the ending seemed to be missing a whole bunch of pages.

[C · Rating 1 out of 5]

Continuing the (not so) great x-read of 2017...

Not a whole lot of redeeming factors for this one, in my opinion. Poor characterization, a tired story, weird moments that seem to happen out of nowhere.

Not a high point in X-history, honestly. And I'm surprised that it is Milligan. It feels really phoned in...

[Roman Colombo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw the terrible reviews for this and was a bit worried going in, but this is a lot better than people give it credit for. It's a cool sci-fi psychological thriller. There were some odd parts that didn't work great, like the whole Golgotha name, but otherwise, it was fascinating, fun, and had pretty good art.

[Mickey · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like Milligan's X-Statix. It's a fun, if somewhat uneven, take on the X corner of the Marvel universe that is at the very least creative and energetic. His arrival to the 'normal' X books feels anything but that. It's a 'meh' monster/alien story, the kind that the X-Men already have about a million of.

[Rohail · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started off as an intriguing horror mystery that turns into an unorganized, rushed mess by the end. All wrapped up in a Hollywood style ending that just left me saying "What?" 3 stars for the first 4 issues plus a 1 star for the last.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish Milligan had gotten to the "trapped in the mansion and slowly going crazy" part of the story a lot faster because that's when it got really good. And while it all made sense in the end, it was hard to follow at first.

[James Speiker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Action is not as crisp as you'd expect. Humor is light.

[Rangga Sukmawijaya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Diawali dengan sinyal S.O.S dari Kutub Selatan, para X-Men kini harus berhadapan dengan sosok alien yang bisa mempengaruhi kewarasan mereka.

[Adam Stone · Rating 1 out of 5]

Updated During 2025 Readthrough:

Apart from his brief run on X-Force (not X-Statix, but his original issues before the name change), Milligan is one of my least favorite writers to work on X-books. He's one of those writers who has interesting ideas but never executes them well. He has no fluency with dialogue so everything reads like terrible 1970s sci-fi.

It was smart of him to have his first storyarc be about an alien threat/box/mutant (it's unclear exactly what the villain is in this story...I suspect Milligan didn't know what he was doing and retconned his idea from issue to issue), as it doesn't expose that he lacks the talent to understand these characters.

Everything's very surfacey. He plays off Austen's horrendous Lorna-is-crayyyyyyyzeeeee storyline while simultaneously trying to evoke some empathy by suggesting that her insanity was caused by Havoc, which was not the story that Austen was telling. And, again, the villain (whatever it is) making everyone crazy allows characters to shout their feelings and change their motivations page by page.

I hate reading Milligan's run more than Austen's because, as much as Austen also had dreadful dialogue and a tendency for misogyny, I do think he had a clear vision for what the series should be, and you could laugh about his soap-opera style, which was sometimes intentionally funny and sometimes so-bad-it's funny. Milligan, again, doesn't appear to have the foggiest idea what his message is, how to tell it, or how to make it come across with these characters.

Unless you're a die-hard Milligan completist, or you feel the need to punish yourself for doing something terrible, I don't think there's any reason to read this z-level schlock.

***

Original 2018 Review:

Another candidate for The Worst Ever X-Men story. The scripting is atrocious. It's just an embarrasingly poorly told story about...something. The dialog is haphazard, the plot is ludicrous, and while I'm not a huge Salvador Larocca fan, the art in this book deserves a story that makes an ounce of sense.

I recommend this to people who think Chuck Austen's run was The Worst (I'm not saying it's not) so that you can see that other writers also completely fail to understand how to write X-Men books.

[Timothy Villa · Rating 2 out of 5]

It gets a little better by the wnd making this a mediocre book rather than just bad. I didn't mind the art, it's the story that didn't work for me. This is not X-Statix Milligan at all. The interpersonal stuff and character work is off, the plot is weak and sometimes confusing, and the lockdown of the school is strange as the only X-Men we see are the team from this book. The whole thing felt off from page one.

[C. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Liquid Graphics color studios should win an Eisner, because they can make Larroca's pathetic pencils look okay. Seriously, I thought the X-Men had a new artist after they took over the coloring. Storywise, its pretty much the X-Men meets Cthulhu, which is pretty much as lame as it sounds. Plus Wolverine kisses Rogue, and that's just wrong.

[Shannon Appelcline · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s nice to see Milligan trying to follow in Morrison’s footsteps with a really science-fictiony story line. His decision to focus heavy on the interrelationships of his X-Men is also an interesting one. However, there’s just too much weird fighting against who knows what for this to be a great story.

[Derek Moreland · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely more of a 2 and a half, but I'm feeling generous because of that gorgeous Larocca art. And I feel bad for Milligan, he inherited a completely disfunctional team and a lot of overly hyperbolic drama from the book's previous writer. He really did the best he could with what he was given - the problem is he was given utter shit.

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent story, aliens are causing mutants to kill everybody in sight. The Xmen have to stop them while fighting their own personal demons. Bobby and Lorna's new relationship is put to the test. A decent read but will probably have big repercussions in the Xmen universe.

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

strange....

[Enrique Peral · Rating 1 out of 5]

Historias inanes y de relleno antes de empezar con 'House of M'.

[Guido · Rating 3 out of 5]

Primera saga de los X-Men de Milligan.
Me quedan personajes pendientes todavía.