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Feb 4

New Mutants #6 annotations

Posted on Tuesday, February 4, 2020 by Paul in HoXPoX

As always, this post contains spoilers, and the page numbers go by the digital edition.

COVER / PAGE 1: Armor, Maxime, Manon, Glob Herman and Boom-Boom sit awkwardly on the steps of Beak’s burning farmhouse.

PAGES 2-3: Recap and credits. This is “Not as Hoped” by Ed Brisson, Flaviano and Carlos Lopez.

PAGES 4-17. Everyone fights the drug dealers. The kids nearly escape, but Túmulo kills Beak’s parents, then kills himself, claiming that his government will blame the mutants.

Yes, 13 pages, but it’s basically an extended action sequence, which mostly speaks for itself. Of note along the way…

Boom-Boom. She’s clearly drunk, and seems irritated that Armor isn’t more grateful for her assistance. But we’re also reminded that beneath it all, Boom-Boom is still pretty competent, even if Armor seems to see her as a bit of a liability. She can take down the drug dealers without her powers, and she was the only person on Krakoa who figured out that Armor’s crew needed help.

Maxime and Manon. Their ethical standards and common sense both remain very doubtful – we’ll come back to that in a bit. However, when Glob Herman calls them on their dubious decisions, they don’t come across as sociopathic – they promptly justify their actions as well-intentioned self-defence, simply using the most obvious route. That said, nor do they respond to any of the points about their moral decisions – it’s a purely practical point from Glob (lack of subtlety and the risk of attracting more guards) that makes them concede the point. Note that while nobody points it out here, Maxime and Manon have (indirectly) killed two of the drug gang, which breaks the laws of Krakoa. They also try to kill more, by getting the gang to turn on one another.

Glob Herman. Glob comes across pretty well here, for a character who’s often portrayed as sad-sack comic relief. He’s the one who steps up to talk sense into Maxime and Manon; his idea of how to use their powers is objectively better; and he actually subdues an armed gang member in straight hand to hand combat. Brisson often writes Glob as a character who rises to the occasion when the situation is too pressing for him to become self-conscious, and this seems to be in that vein.

Angel. Angel gives a speech at the end making the point that if she surrenders to Túmulo then Beak will die from his gunshot wound, so that somebody is going to die whatever happens. Of course, most mutants in the Hickman era are pretty relaxed about the threat of death, due to the resurrection protocols. Either Angel isn’t aware of them, or she’s so far out of the loop that they don’t come to mind in the heat of the moment – and either way, nobody else flags it to her.

Túmulo, in contrast, is surprisingly willing to shoot himself, though he does seem to hesitate. It’s clear enough why he thinks this will encourage an anti-mutant stance from his government; it’s less obvious why he thinks that is worth dying for himself.

PAGE 18. A data page on the Bohem Cartel. It’s basically a very large drug cartel, and we’re given assorted names for people involved. “Bohem” is apparently the name of the town or city where they have their base of operations; I don’t think we’ve seen it mentioned before. It’s Spanish for “Bohemian”.

None of the other henchmen are established characters, as far as I know. So far as the nicknames are concerned, the guy on top is “the King”, and the two main lieutenants are “the Red” and “the Yellow”. The three guys shown under the Red are also colours: the Purple, the Orange and the Green. But the three listed under Yellow are not: aside from Túmulo, the others are the Sarcophagus and the Death.

PAGES 19-20. Angel and her family race to the hospital in Túmulo’s truck, while the Krakoans are left behind to reflect on how badly things went.

Only Glob seems really upset about it. Maxime and Manon look blank, Armor is taking stock of the situation, and Boom-Boom is checking her phone (though admittedly, she’s trying to figure out how they can get back to civilisation, which is a reasonable thing to do).

PAGE 21. A data page with an article from something called “DOX”, apparently an anti-mutant website, reporting on the mutant-related shooting in Nebraska. The implication seems to be that Dox is a website which exposes mutants trying to live in the normal world, through tip-offs from readers. Their account of events appears to be based on leaks from the local police. The author either doesn’t know who the victims were, or doesn’t want to spoil his angle by explaining that drug dealers were involved – it’s ambiguous.

PAGES 22-25. On Krakoa, Armor and Glob find that Maxime and Manon have altered the memories of Beak and all his families, so that they believe that Beak’s parents actually died years ago.

Again, the angle seems to be that Maxime and Manon kind of mean well, but are alarmingly lacking in basic moral instincts – a disturbing thing in a telepath. They claim that they were trying to make themselves useful because they know nobody else trusts them (understandably, given the circumstances of their debut in Extermination and their all-purpose creepiness). Armor and Glob decide that reversing this would only make matters even worse, but it’s pretty clear that we’ll be getting back to this.

Note that we’ve seen some suggestions that everyone on Krakoa is being psychically affected to some extent anyway, making them prone to get on board with the whole Krakoan culture. Beak, Angel and co all seem surprisingly cheerful now that they’re on Krakoa, but Maxime and Manon’s interference makes it difficult to tell whether there’s anything else going on there.

PAGES 26-27. The Krakoan text in the trailer reads: NEXT: BIRD OF PREY.

Bring on the comments

  1. Si says:

    If Boom Boom must be always drunk then so be it, but if this all leads to yet another story about a superhero coming to terms with their alcoholism and struggling against it, I won’t be happy.

  2. Michael says:

    DOX… doxxing… Dawn of X… So clever.

  3. Col_Fury says:

    Marvel needs to publish Day Drinking With Tabby “Boom Boom” Smith. I’d buy it.

  4. CJ says:

    Is Boom-Boom still basically her Nextwave incarnation? Darkly comic, capable but coming off as “not all right in the head?”

  5. Yup. Reckless, drunk and sarcastic. I want to see her go after the drug dealers and draw the attention of SHIELD – bringing Skids back in (who is, as far as we know, still an agent). And how come Pyro is back and not Rusty?

  6. Chris V says:

    SHIELD no longer exists. It was disbanded after the events of Secret Empire.
    SHIELD had been discredited before that, but having it infiltrated and taken over by Hydra so publicly was the final blow.

  7. Si says:

    I don’t know what SHIELD is doing actually. I read the latest (6 month old) Captain America on Unlimited, and Nick Fury was in it, in a SHIELD uniform, and acting like nothing had changed. This was in a comic drawing directly from the Secret Empire event.

    SHIELD of course follows a cycle and has for decades. Corruption is exposed, a helicarrier crashes, the agency collapses, it reforms in a new and corruption-proof way, GOTO 10.

  8. Col_Fury says:

    Yeah, Boom Boom and Machine Man have both kept their Nextwave reinventions. Monica Rambeau had a story in Cap & the Mighty Avengers about her dealing with her time in Nextwave and has since “moved past it.”

    Nothing to do with anything, but I’ve had it in my head for years that whenever Tabby says her codename, she shakes her chest left to right while saying “Boom Boom,” timing it out, of course (Boom (left), Boom (right)).

    …man, Maltdown was such a terrible name for her. 🙂

    Anyway, I’d love a Rusty and Skids reunion. Someone needs to make that happen!

  9. SanityOrMadness says:

    Col_Fury> Nothing to do with anything, but I’ve had it in my head for years that whenever Tabby says her codename, she shakes her chest left to right while saying “Boom Boom,” timing it out, of course (Boom (left), Boom (right)).

    Funny thing, of course, is that Tabitha was reverse-Power Girl’d. She started out with “Boom Boom” being a literal boob joke, and by the time she became Meltdown she was nearly flat-chested. (These days, she just tends to be whatever the artist’s default for adult females is.)

  10. Chris V says:

    Si-I’ve been reading Captain America too.
    Nick Fury Jr. is currently working for the US government.
    I’m not sure if he’s part of the FBI or a special agent.
    He’s not working with SHIELD though.

    SHIELD no longer officially exists. It receives no funding anymore.
    A recurring plot that pops up on occasion in different books is the issue of old SHIELD tech falling in to the hands of corrupt forces (foreign governments and private individuals).
    Since, what do you do with all that highly advanced tech now that SHIELD has been disbanded?

    Also, a number of agents who worked for SHIELD have joined the Orchis organization, per Hickman.

    I’m sure that SHIELD will probably be reformed at some point, after readers have forgotten the way SHIELD was portrayed for a number of years at the end.
    It’ll probably require a big cross-over mini-series though, because this is Marvel.

  11. Mark Coale says:

    And probably a return by Classic Nick Fury at some point, prob once Sam Jackson is finished with the MCU movies.

  12. SanityOrMadness says:

    @Chris V

    Well, last time SHIELD reformed*, I’m not even sure there was a story where it happened, or whether it just…started appearing again.

    *SHIELD was replaced by HAMMER after Secret Invasion – losing most of the better-known “good guy” agents in the process so it could more clearly be The Bad Guys – and HAMMER in turn was deauthorised after Siege. After that, Steve Rogers notionally had a similar sort of role to Nick Fury’s “classic” role, but without a SHIELD. And then there was a SHIELD again, headed by Maria Hill, amd I’m not sure when that occurred.

  13. Si says:

    Like SHIELD resetting, AIM are bad guys again, leaping straight from cleaned up organisation working for the US government to faceless mooks for heroes to punch, with no explanation (that I know of). Al Ewing is one of the best world builders out there, but he gets no respect.

  14. YLu says:

    Ewing himself explained AIM’s reversion in Avengers: No Surrender. At the end of that series, Toni Ho re-brands it as ARMOR, figuring that if villains want to re-claim the AIM name so bad she’d let them have it.

  15. SanityOrMadness says:

    @YLu

    Wait, wasn’t there already an ARMOR – the body dealing with interdimensional stuff from various Fred van Lente stories?

  16. YLu says:

    Yeah, that sounded a bit wrong even as I was typing it. Google tells me I got my acronym organizations mixed up. Toni’s group is RESCUE.

  17. Moo says:

    There should be a group called ACRONYM.

  18. Taibak says:

    I still like OWCA.

    The Organization Without a Cool Acronym.

  19. Ah, reread the Tales of Suspense story, which is Sally’s last appearance, AFAIK, and she’s a former SHIELD agent. not an active one.

    She’s woefully used, though, Black Widow creates a fake car crash/explosion and Hawkeye and Winter Soldier think Sally’s been killed. Her super-power is a damned forcefield, she’s one of the people most likely to survive a car explosion!

  20. Krzysiek Ceran says:

    Sure, but do Hawkeye and Bucky know that? Have they ever met Skids before?

  21. Moo says:

    “Her super-power is a damned forcefield, she’s one of the people most likely to survive a car explosion!”

    Only if she actually has the forcefield up at the time the car explodes, and she likely wouldn’t while driving a car. Her forcefield is frictionless. Her feet would slide across the pedals and she wouldn’t be able to firmly grip a steering wheel.

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