Hellions #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
HELLIONS #4
“Love Bleeds”
by Zeb Wells, Stephen Segovia & David Curiel
COVER / PAGE 1. Havok lashes out, with the Hellions lying defeated around him. Not exactly a scene which takes place during the issue. It seems to be a homage to the cover of Uncanny X-Men vol 1 #270 (the first part of the X-Tinction Agenda crossover), in which Havok was a brainwashed Genoshan magistrate.
PAGE 2. Once again, an epigraph from Nightcrawler. He seems to be addressing somebody (most likely the Quiet Council) and making an argument for the need to come to terms with past trauma.
PAGES 3-4. Madelyne talks to Havok about demons.
Madelyne seems to be claiming that the boundary between Earth and Hell is literally eroded in Sinister’s old base. I’m not sure that really makes sense; Madelyne was living in Australia when she started to get corrupted by demons and turned into the Goblin Queen. She did confront Sinister in the orphanage in Uncanny X-Men vol 1 #241, and it’s something of a turning point where she goes from being a corrupted Madelyne into an outright villain.
PAGES 5-6. Recap and credits. As pointed out in the comments last time, the former Scalphunter is now credited simply as “Greycrow”.
PAGES 7-11. Wild Child and Psylocke rescue Nanny and Greycrow from the zombie Marauders.
The idea seems to be that Wild Child is obsessed with finding an alpha figure to follow, and has now settled on Psylocke. While this is going to be rather annoying for Psylocke, it does seem to make him a lot calmer and more manageable.
Of the Legacy Marauders, Arclight seems to be set up as the most sympathetic, or at least the one with the strongest friendship with Greycrow – that might become significant later, if and when the Legacy Marauders return.
Greycrow, meanwhile, tells us that his responsibility is to get the Marauders clones (“my people”) out and bring them home, which makes it sounds as if he’s going to rescue them. As we’ll see later, he actually intends to kill them, although in the Krakoa era that can be seen as clearing the decks to allow them to return in a more coherent form. This is presumably what he means when he tells Arclight that Madelyne did “nothing that can’t be fixed”, right before killing her. Psylocke essentially confirms later on that she knew what he was going to do but wasn’t going to stand in the way of him fulfilling his nature.
PAGE 12. The other Hellions find the waste processing centre.
Nanny is genuinely appalled by what she finds there, which is perfectly in character – Nanny has always been trying to help people, just filtered through a very distorted grip on reality.
PAGES 13-20. Greycrow shoots Madelyne, and Havok goes crazy and destroys the building.
“Your wounded mind… It wasn’t me…” Havok was acting out of character, and clearly under outside influence, in issue #1. Apparently that wasn’t Madelyne after all, despite the fact that possessed Havok spoke in the same way as the Legacy Marauders.
Greycrow shoots Madelyne, but it’s not 100% clear whether that’s because he’s treating her as a villain or as another distorted clone in need of a reset.
Madelyne. As she dies, she repeats the point that she was stressing in the last issue: her main concern is to be remembered as a character in her own right, not merely as some sort of continuity spin-off from Jean Grey. Havok is obviously very emotional about this, but as we’ll see, the Krakoan authorities don’t honour Madelyne’s wish.
PAGE 21. Data page – a report from an unnamed writer, presumably the same one as in previous issues. As I said last time, Nightcrawler seems a likely contender, if only because he must keep getting mentioned in the epigraphs for some reason. On the other hand, the tone seems a bit distant for him.
Emma Frost. We’re told that she’s been providing input to the Hellions’ progress and scanning Havok in particular. Emma voices concern about having messed up an attempt to fix Alex “last time”. That presumably refers to X-Men: Blue #28, where she restored Havok’s normal personality after he was turned evil during the best-forgotten Axis crossover. Havok said in that issue that he could still feel his “inverted” personality inside him.
The Legacy Marauders are to be returned – eventually with “as few of Mr Sinister’s genetic modifications as feasible”. Bearing in mind that the X-Men rely on Mr Sinister for the genetic material to carry out resurrections, that might be easier said than done. Greycrow is understandably not keen to have anything more to do with the revived Marauders.
Madelyne Pryor. This is the big question – do they resurrect Madelyne? She clearly isn’t human, but is she to be classed as a mutant in her own right (as she so desperately wanted) or just a clone of Jean?
PAGE 22. Greycrow and Psylocke talk.
Considering how little he wants to do with the Marauders, it’s odd that Greycrow is still wearing his Scalphunter costume. (Incidentally, Wild Child is wearing the costume of his Age of Apocalypse counterpart.)
PAGES 23-25. Cyclops tells Havok that Madelyne won’t be revived.
The Quiet Council decide that Madelyne isn’t a mutant in her own right, but just a stray clone of Jean. This is true in a technical sense but doesn’t really accord with how any of us see the character. Obviously, it’s tied in with the resurrection protocols which are designed to stop multiple versions of the same character running around, something that would be bound to spark awkward questions about the soul which are best not thought about too closely.
It’s difficult to square this decision with the fact that two of the Stepford Cuckoos were resurrected at the start of the Krakoan era. The Cuckoos are clones of Emma Frost – what’s the difference? Is there some desire on the Quiet Council’s part to rationalise away Madelyne as Not Quite Real, which doesn’t apply to the Cuckoos?
Mister Sinister says he “made eternal life possible for all Krakoans”. That’s overstating it, since he couldn’t do it without the Five and Professor X, but we’ve seen that he seems to be the source of all the DNA samples, which is presumably what’s being referred to here.
Nanny has decided she’s going to kill Sinister, so outraged is she by what she saw in his lab. She’s so grossly outpowered by him that this seems absolutely suicidal, but we’ll see where it goes. More fundamentally, how do you kill anyone on Krakoa? Sinister is on the Quiet Council – even if he dies, he’ll be back very quickly.
PAGES 26-27. Reading order and credits. As always this month, the trailer text reads NEXT: X OF SWORDS.
Clearly, the implication is that Madelyne is considered problematic by the Quiet Council in a way that the Cuckoos, X-23, Scout, and so on aren’t, and they consider it in their best interest to sideline her return for as long as possible.
This might even tie into the greater issue of the resurrection protocols, priority queue, and so forth. When certain characters can be killed and get shuffled back to the head of the line (Quentin, for example) with alarming regularity, it suggests a definite caste system. And when they’re willing to bring back obscure characters like Tommy the Morlock or Explodey Boy, and yet they have no intention to bring back Destiny, sooner or later someone’s going to go snooping and ask -why- Explodey Boy gets more priority than Destiny.
And then you know shit will hit the fan.
Meanwhile, the casual wink and acknowledgment that they -expected- Empath to get killed…
How did Jean vote on the Council about Madelyne? Or, if there wasn’t a vote, did she speak for or against? Or did she recuse herself, given the potential conflict of interest? (Of course, half the Council are either friends of Jean or straight-up antagonistic toward Madelyne in the first placr
And shouldn’t this set a precedent going forward? Cyclops more or less promised the Vault group that they’d clone them if they came out dead, but that included X-23. Is she now screwed? (Notwithstanding that even if they somehow make it out alive, hale and hearty given they were picked for potential lifespan, they should have lived long enough insude vs before to be unrecognisable as characters.)
> This might even tie into the greater issue of the resurrection protocols, priority queue, and so forth. When certain characters can be killed and get shuffled back to the head of the line (Quentin, for example) with alarming regularity, it suggests a definite caste system.
They have basically said that if you get killed “in service of Krakoa”, you go to the head of the queue. Although Apocalypse wasn’t, but straight-up abused the fact that the Quiet Council automatically go to the front of the line.
As to why they refused to resurrect Madelyne, five potential rationales spring to mind. First, Krakoa is super keen to pretend that their new fancy The Five resurrection is definitely not cloning, and cloning is not cool. We even sent the Hellions to destroy a clone factory! Second, she died while trying to invade Krakoa, so she’s an imminent security risk to the nation instead of generically evil. Third, she’s not just a physical clone of Jean, but also had shared memories, which Jean absorbed back during Inferno, so they’re partially the same mind – and soul? – which doesn’t apply to the Cuckoos or Gabby. Fourth, Jean’s on the Quiet Council and would presumably be firmly against Madelyne coming back. Of the Council members who met her at all – Jean, Sinister, Storm, Kurt, Xavier, Kate, Magneto? – only Storm knew her well. She’d have lost a vote. And fifth, her resurrecting and being on Krakoa would inevitably cause tensions within the Summers House, which contains their Captain Commander and a Quiet Council member. Maintaining peace of mind for the ruling elites outweighs mutant rights.
I read the anonymous data pages as being Beast. Plugged into Krakoan security, prone to writing reports, increasingly amoral, refers to core X-Men by their first names, and though not in this issue, the parenthetical snarky aside from last issue doesn’t sound like Kurt at all. Or, in this issue, “elucidate” isn’t a Kurt choice of word. Beast or Sage seem likely.
Also, in a week with gobs of portentous setup for X of Swords, the upcoming storyline I am most interested in is Nanny vs. Minister Sinister. What a fantastically insane idea.
Seems doubtful if this will ever actually be addressed on-page, but I can’t help thinking that Sinister’s Marauders had better be placed lower on the queue than every single one of the Morlocks they killed.
I don’t know though. Is it a cunning hint, or merely a utilitarian plot tool? Is there a deliberate caste system to subtly hint at a dystopia, or is there a trend where popular and plot-significant characters are kept in circulation because they sell comics, followed by visually interesting background characters and characters the writer likes. Remember the 198, where somehow the thousandth of a percent of mutants who kept their powers were almost exclusively X-Men?
It’s the problem with the whole line really, a problem pointed out by others before. It’s impossible to know what’s significant and what’s just background noise.
Si- I agree with your point about the line, but from my reading of things I think the caste system stuff is very intentional.
Whether or not it’s supposed to be a big plot point that will ever be brought up is another thing.
There is a myriad ways of challenging the rationale for the ressurrection protocols.
I would expect Krakoa to acknowledge X-23 as a different character from Wolverine. In all fairness, and quite despite herself, she always was.
Meanwhile, the Cuckoos literally style themselves “Five-In-One”. I thought that they were also clones of Emma, but apparently not. I wonder if we ever learned if they have a biological father, and who he would be if so.
A more ambitious writer than Hickman could use these dangling questions to create a daring storyline that provides clear, courageous answers. I fear that Hickman is not such a writer -and if he were, Marvel would simply ignore the answers as it mostly did with Grant Morrison’s.
Has it been mentioned what happens if Cable dies? There’s a few factors at play there I imagine.
1) would they re-infect him with the whatsit-whatsit virus that gave him is robot parts?
2) would they use the young him’s brain or the old him’s brain?
3) he travelled time a lot. Does Cerebro download a fresh file every time he comes back or are the times he’s out of the present just get lost? Can it even figure out the chronology if Cable jumped back or forward a couple of years?
4) what if old Cable wanted to do that ridiculous ceremony where they fight Apocalypse with a sword? And he’d want to, fighting Apocalypse is his whole thing. He would almost certainly win, too. Then what?
X-23 doesn’t present a problem here, because she isn’t a true clone of Wolverine. Her back story always involved her being created from a damaged Wolverine sample with her creator Sarah Kinney plugging the gaps using her own DNA. As Tom Taylor’s run points out, that means she’s not a clone of Wolverine, she’s his genetic daughter.
Scout is another matter. She’s a clone of X-23.
Another interesting point is that, since the Quiet Council had to take a decision on whether to resurrect Madelyne, it must follow that they *could* have resurrected her, and a back-up of her mind must exist within Cerebro, separate from Jean’s.
Can I just chime in that I never liked the revelation that the Cuckoos were clones of Emma? Can’t they just be characters who looked up to her and styled themselves on her? It feels regressive that ‘every character is linked!’, but hey, comics.
Would have been more amusing for the Cuckoo’s mother to be a harassed frumpy woman who can’t deal with her super smart hive mind quintuplets.
Oh, and the Madelyne stuff had a lot of pathos. I like how the conflict about her has been set up – some clones are more equal than others! It’s all in the parameters of the new rules of HOX, which I want to see being toyed with. Sets up some good character conflict.
@Evilgus – completely agree, and you could still keep the current situation where the Cuckoos call Emma “mum” and live with her, as a variation on the Emma/teacher role.
Didn’t Madelyne spend a significant portion of time as a psychic ghost, from just before the Twelve storyline into Matt Fraction’s run where she created the Sisterhood? Why would the x-men think she’s actually gone? Cloning and imprisoning her like Sabretooth would likely be the safe solution to her popping up suddenly and threatening everyone.
Not to mention, couldn’t The Five just “fix” her? They did modify Domino and Shinobi’s memories after all. Also, didn’t they make some adjustments to Synch before he went into the vault as well?
@NS – The Five just make husks that replicate the dead mutants appearances and powers. It’s Xavier’s “nudge” that imbues the husk with the person’s memories and personality.
The only person that really knows what’s in Domino’s head is Xavier. Shinobi’s memories were affected by him not knowing what happened between his last back-up and his murder.
Xavier could definitely “fix” Madelyne. But what does that give you? The woman that Cyclops loved, Cable’s real mother… both roles now taken by Jean.
Her previous ghost-status does seem like it would have been a convenient in-story justification for not putting her into resurrection protocols. Or as Paul said above – just point out that they couldn’t back her up for Inferno-related reasons.
I’m really interested that the writers actually suggested that resurrection was a possibility for her.
@NS: How could an attempt at “fixing” a ressurrected Madelyne’s mind be justified from an ethical perspective?
At the very best, that would be as wrong as brainwashing her.
And as Luke points out above, the end result would be if anything even less adjusted to life than the original. Neither Madelyne herself nor anyone else would really want her walking around being quite that redundant to Jean. Odds are that she would simply regain her hatred of Jean and feel mentally violated on top of that.
Worst of all, she would be entirely right.
I’m now wishing we saw the Quiet Council debate Madelyne’s resurrection. That would be a chewy scene!
Greycrow and Arclight were a full on couple at some point, no?
@Luis Dantas: I would guess it’s to continue their mission of giving of every mutant amnesty and a home on Krakoa. She wants to be accepted and included and the only way they can trust her is to “fix” her. It could be viewed as the x-men making up for sort of abandoning her in the first place by accepting her as a real person and giving her a home.
Ethically, what makes her different than the other villains they’ve given amnesty to? If the Shadow King can live on the island with full amnesty, why not Madelyne?
@Luke: They could just give her a new life without memories and feelings of abandonment. Make it so that she sees Jean as a sister and just starts over. She doesn’t seem to want to be with Scott, but to hurt the x-men and him as well. Xavier could just take away that hurt and madness as it were.
Ultimately besides the headache she could cause with her memories intact, they may not think of her as a person because she’s spent most of her life fighting them because of anger and madness at being a clone (and the abandonment that arose from that revelation). She’s not developed enough of an external life to fully claim personhood in the council’s view I assume which is valid to an extent. Ironically, her repeated demand to be recognized (and anger at not being so) over the years may have associated her too much with being a clone in the minds of the x-men.
We don’t know if the Shadow King is on the island or not.
We saw Amahl Farouk, but we don’t even know how much of a threat Farouk is, versus how much he was controlled by the Shadow King.
I mean, the Shadow King is supposed to be a being of pure hatred, so if it is on the island, sure….
There’s certainly complexity with Madelyne. She was given a background separate from Jean by Sinister.
It was fictional. Yet, Xavier must have recorded those engrams from Madelyne with Cerebro.
So, her memories are fake, but they seemed real to her.
So, where is the line? What is right or wrong?
Isn’t that really narrow ground to base personhood? Most people would agree that the ability to prove self-awareness is a good starting point to decide personhood.
Madelyne showed the ability when she claims she is an individual, in and of herself, rather than just an aspect of Jean.
She freakin’ fell in love with her own son from an alternate reality!
If that isn’t living a life, I don’t know what is.
Basically, I think the Quiet Council makes up stuff, ex nihilo, and then there’s no one to challenge it.
Krakoa does seem to be a totalitarian society.
So, whatever they say goes, and there doesn’t need to be great precedent.
Isn’t Madelyne (arguably) more of a Mister Sinister creation than most other people?
Avengers Annual #10 (1981) had a cameo by a child named Maddy Prior at a hospital scene. Seven years later, Uncanny X-Men #238 has some ambiguous scenes that strongly hint that she is in some sense Mister Sinister’s creation and linked to the younger Maddy.
It is all kind of vague, but much of the heel turn from Madelyne since that time (just before Inferno) revolves around her insecurity over her own identity. It is very easy indeed to present evidence going back to that time that she is in some sense not entirely her own person.
The Avengers Annual story is a ret-con.
Originally Claremont threw that baby in as a nod to his friend named Maddy Pryor.
Then, later, apparently stuck for a name, he reused the name Madelyne Pryor for Scott’s love interest.
It’s very weird because it does very much play in to the clone revelation.
It looked like she was only born a few years ago and was now an adult.
So, I think Claremont vaguely hinted at it when he was forced to reveal Pryor as a clone. I don’t think he was very happy about it.
Granted, it is all very vague and can be legitimaly disregarded… but then again, I don’t think that Claremont wrote the hints of the link between the two Maddy Priors out of editorial pressure.
Nor is it particularly clear how much of an existence Madelyne ever had beyond or before Mister Sinister interceded and independently of Jean Grey. I don’t think that Marvel itself ever quite decided the matter.
Madelyne even turned out in a San Francisco hospital in Uncanny X-Men #206 (1986) without explanation, seemed to turn out dead in New York in X-Factor #13 (1987), then in X-Men #215 (the very next month by cover date) it turns out that she is still in the SF hospital and had fought the Marauders before ending up there. She is rescued from a new attack by the Marauders in Uncanny #222 and ends up joining the team, after turning out to be fairly good at holding her own against Mister Sinister’s killers.
Those events were never really much clarified, and if anything they hint that she is indeed Sinister’s creation and may even be any of several identical clones, as is often implied about the Marauders of the same time period.
I have to assume that Claremont (and Louise Simonson and Marvel Editorial) attempted to leave their options open for as long as possible while they attempted to reach some form of consensus and kept an eye at reader reactions.
From my perspective, they sort of gave up, went through the Inferno event, and used it to have a little drama and fights and put a lid over Madelyne and the doubts around her origin and nature for a long time.
Come to think of it, is this Madelyne that died in this issue even the same that had once married Scott? Can we even know? She has supposedly been dead for years, and has been recreated essentially out of thin air perhaps twice since Inferno, hasn’t she?
I can almost see Sinister speaking to the Quiet Council as a member, saying that he has no idea of whether this Madelyne is the genuine article.
Beyond that, it is not very clear either whether Sinister would even be told of any reason for the avoidance of ressurrecting people who are already alive… or that he would have any reason to believe the explanation if given one. He presumably provides the genetic information that the Five use to ressurrect mutants, but he had been cloning his own Marauders without the Five for a long time. There must be some advantage of going through the Five, but there may well be drawbacks as well. It may well be that literally no one knows what would happen if the Five or Sinister himself attempted to ressurrect Madelyne.
I keep enjoying this series. Although every issue so far contained something that read to me as off in some way – in this issue, the casual death of Madelyne being rather anticlimactic – but those ‘off’ things turn out to work in favor of the story. Clearly the casual way she’s dealt with is intended to underscore the – arguably even worse – way she gets dealt with posthumously by the Quiet Council. And how all that affects Alex. And though ‘female character dies to motivate the male hero’ is a textbook definition of fridging, it’s pretty clear this isn’t the end of that story – and I, for one, am very on board with… well, with whatever Wells is doing.
I just hope the megacrossover won’t derail things too much.
“And fifth, her resurrecting and being on Krakoa would inevitably cause tensions within the Summers House, which contains their Captain Commander and a Quiet Council member. Maintaining peace of mind for the ruling elites outweighs mutant rights.”
This, very much so. Folks have laid out the Council’s possible arguments quite thoroughly, and ultimately it feels like all of these different forces factor in.
But it is very difficult to ignore that while other characters organise their lives according to their teams and/or ages, the House of Summers stands on its own terms. It speaks to an underlying degree of familial purism which is never quite recognised as such. Sinister’s reasoning seems to hold true: the Summers bloodline matters too much to be normalised amidst other mutants.
We know Scott as the de facto leader of the X-Men in numerous instances, and as their current commander. His biological family gathers around him – even though his relationship to Gabriel is tenuous at best.
Along with them, the non-monogamous constellation: Jean, Emma, Logan. Marriage doesn’t signify much of anything, and monogamy is voluntary rather than compulsory. Although I was genuinely charmed by this set-up, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to believe it stands as more than a conceptual point.
And it’s a weird one. Mutant society functions on its own terms, and according to its own precepts. In fact, mutant identity seemingly ought to take priority over any other facet of a character’s life or persona. Then why familial togetherness? Is this about a model of love, or about a model of power? Why do human surnames matter, when society is being re-founded in opposition to human wordlyness? In fact, given no one ever dies, can the idea of the family (of sexual and social reproduction) hold at all?
On the moon, no less. The bloody moon.
When Alex and Scott talk, Alex is appealing to his brother’s sensibility and empathy. Scott communicates The Council’s decision, while refusing to explain the decision, or name his own. The decision presents as an inevitability, which cannot be subject to scrutiny, because The Council’s authority doesn’t to accountable to anyone, or anything.
Cyclops hasn’t felt like an actual person for quite a while, now. When I read that scene, I was struck by that sense of Cyclops as a devout believer, in the absolute even, who experiences little to no conflict in his experience of Krakoa. Independently of Madelyne’s physical or psychic structure, she can’t exist for him, because she would muddle the beautiful construct he inhabits. If she is to be resurrected, then the past can come to mean to much yet again. And the fantasy breaks.
…
Well, that was a bit much. TL;DR: “SCOTT SUMMERS IS A JERK”; “FREE MADDIE”.
Note the contrast that in Hellions #1, Magneto warns that if Alex had killed a human, he would’ve been sent to the Pit. Cyclops immediately snaps back that if the Council tried, he’d oppose them. Whereas in this issue, with the resurrection of Madelyne, his ex-wife and other of his child, he blankly defers and won’t even criticize their decision. Nor do we get to see the Council debate the issue on panel. Maddy was right: she was a real person, but the only one that ever really cared about her was Alex. To everyone else, like Greycrow, she’s just an aberrant clone that needs to be unceremoniously put down.
@Allan M, how do you know that Madelyne was a real person?
“Know” was probably overstating it, but I do think she qualifies. Yes, she is a clone of Jean and her pre-adult memories were implants from Sinister, a combination of Jean’s and made-up stuff like the plane crash that only she survived. But after that, she has unique experiences and her own personality, driven in large part by her feeling overlooked and forgotten – it’s a character point all the way back to Claremont even before she knows Jean is back. She has her own career as a commercial pilot. She has a son with Cyclops and a short-lived married life in Alaska. When they hit Australia, she’s the X-Men’s tech person, which Jean has never been. She has unique relationships with a different tenor than Jean’s were, owing to her being a civilian (until she wasn’t). And obviously her alliance with demons and becoming the Goblin Queen and all that follows is unique to her. That’s a lot of lived experience by this point, especially given that she was dead for awhile.
In my view, clones become “real people” when they have enough of a unique identity, personality and lived experience that clearly differentiates them from the original. Maddy qualifies under that, as does Gabby, X-Man and the Cuckoos.
Oh, and the kicker is that we know definitively that she had a soul, since she sacrifices herself at the end of Fall of Mutants, expressly on the basis that Forge tells the team that they need nine souls, and she’s the ninth. The spells works – the narration and then Roma confirm this – proving that Maddy had a soul.
I think, from any normal ethical perspective, a clone is a real person, full stop, from the moment of their creation. Identical twins are clones, after all, and they haven’t really had significantly separate experiences immediately after birth. Nevertheless, no-one approaches a pair of identical twin babies going, “Oh good, we’ve got a spare.”
Comics has its own definition of a real person though. Sometimes conventions overrule making sense!