Resurrection of Magneto #2 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
RESURRECTION OF MAGNETO #2
“The Weight of the World”
Writer: Al Ewing
Artist: Luciano Vecchio
Colour artists: David Curiel & Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. Storm confronts Magneto at his memorial – a straightforward scene from the comic.
PAGES 2-4. Flashback: Magneto acquires a magic key.
This is a flashback to Giant-Size X-Men: Magneto #1, a one-shot from 2020. It’s the issue where Magneto buys an island from Namor the Sub-Mariner, in order that Emma can use it as the location of the first Hellfire Gala. In return, Magneto helps Namor to open a large metal doorway in the Molloy Deep, bearing the seal of the Old Kings of Atlantis (“Uhari, I think”). Inside, after fighting a kraken for a few pages, they encounter three apparent witches – the green one seen in this flashback, and two others who are just out of shot. The green witch challenges them to choose correctly between a “spiral” (a shell) and a stone in order to return to the surface. Namor chooses the shell and is immediately attacked by the thing which is on his face in the flashback. The witch then challenges Magneto to make the same choice; Magneto notices that there is a third plinth, apparently vacant, and chooses it. The witch then gets very angry but hands over the key seen here.
Wolverine #44 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
WOLVERINE vol 7 #44
“Sabretooth War, part 4”
Writers: Benjamin Percy & Victor LaValle
Penciller: Cory Smith
Inker: Oren Junior
Colour artist: Alex Sinclair
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1: Sabretooth stalks Wolverine in a graveyard full of the graves of people Wolverine loved, or at least felt responsible for. I say that because Quentin Quire makes the list, although arguably an awkward father/son relationship is intended between the two of them.
PAGE 2. The Greenhouse residents clear up after the Sabretooth Army’s attack.
The bonfire presumably contains the body parts of the people who were killed in issue #41. The lone Cuckoo next to the bonfire is Phoebe, Quentin’s ex-girlfriend, whom he brought back to the Greenhouse in X-Force #47. Other than Black Tom and Sage, the mutants inside the Greenhouse seem to be generics.
PAGES 3-5. Aurora sews up Wolverine.
She’s reattaching his hands and feet after he tore free of his bonds in issue #42. It was all rather silly. Aurora and Akihiro’s relationship was established when they were in the cast of X-Factor.
The X-Axis – w/c 19 February 2024
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #127. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy, Yen Nitro & Travis Lanham. They fight. The arc does seem to be getting more focussed on its core plot, but it’s no closer to making any of this seem interesting. Captain Britain, Rictor and Shatterstar versus Absalom and Nicodemus? Even by the standards of Unlimited exclusives, who cares? The story does try to punch up Absalom by dusting off his despair gimmick, but I remain genuinely puzzled about what the hook for this story is supposed to be. What is any of this about and why am I supposed to care? It’s coherent on the surface, but if I’m still asking that question by part 7, something’s gone very wrong.
X-FORCE #49. (Annotations here.) The resurrected Classic Beast enlists the help of his best friend Wonder Man to take on the Krakoa Beast – although since it’s not the early 1980s any more, Wonder Man is rather confused to see him. Meanwhile, the modern Beast’s plans get increasingly demented, and X-Force blunder around misreading the whole situation in their normal fashion. This isn’t remotely subtle, but it is quite good fun. And I do enjoy the retro Beast’s reaction to his dystopian future, which is to remain doggedly upbeat. Robert Gill’s art makes his sequences with Wonder Man rather likeable. Benjamin Percy doesn’t quite seem to grasp just how pacifist Wonder Man has been for the last decade, which is unfortunate, not least because it would actually play quite nicely into a path-not-taken angle. But overall, this is perfectly enjoyable.
RISE OF THE POWERS OF X #2. (Annotations here.) While Fall of the House of X has felt as if it’s spinning off the rails, Rise of the Powers of X is far more coherent. That might simply be because it has less to tie in to – it only really has to worry about Dead X-Men, and gesture vaguely in the direction of some sort of anti-Orchis uprising going on, and then it can get on with its time travel story. That story is admittedly convoluted, but that’s time travel for you. Gillen gets the idea across, and RB Silva makes it all suitably epic. The Cypher reveal is particularly well played, casting all his dialogue up to that point in a different light that makes more sense, even though it didn’t seem that off the first time round. I’m still not entirely sure whether this story is actually about anything in particular, beyond finding a way of drawing key themes of the Krakoan era to a climax – but it’s certainly achieving that, which is enough at this point.
Rise of the Powers of X #2 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
RISE OF THE POWERS OF X #2
“Out of Space”
Writer: Kieron Gillen
Artist: RB Silva
Colour artist: David Curiel
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. Rasputin IV in battle.
PAGE 2. Moira just before her powers emerged.
Not exactly a flashback, because this is narrated by Enigma, who is outside normal time. This is Moira MacTaggert in her tenth life, reliving childhood as she always has to, while waiting to be old enough to try her newest idea. Enigma is apparently going to offer her another option that she hasn’t thought of – possibly another way out of being stuck in a time loop. (Though note that Moira apparently never tries to end the loop by committing suicide before her powers emerge.) More of that later.
We don’t get a clear shot of Moira’s mother, but this is Lady Kinross. She has been seen on panel before – she can be seen from behind in some of Moira’s earlier lives in House of X #2 – but she’s never done anything significant.
PAGES 3-4. Enigma’s montage.
The panels shown here are:
- Page 3 panel 1: The MacTaggert family home, as seen in House of X #2.
- Page 3 panel 2: Jean Grey making contact with Phoenix at the climax of X-Men #100. Enigma reminds us again that Phoenix can defeat Dominions, something that was also mentioned last issue.
- Page 3 panel 3: This is apparently meant to be young Scott Summers being thrown to safety by his parents when the Shi’ar attack, as seen in flashback in Uncanny X-Men #156. However, he really ought to be clutching his younger brother Alex. Enigma says that Scott’s parents are “gone forever, in every meaningful way” because he doesn’t reunite with his father Corsair until well into adulthood, and Corsair never returns to Earth. The “new parents” are presumably Mr Sinister (who secretly ran the orphanage where Scott grew up) and Professor X; Enigma doesn’t seem terribly impressed by either of them.
- Page 3 panel 4: Cyclops awaits his trial in Fall of the House of X #1. Scott has been dreaming in that series that Jean will save him.
- Page 3 panel 5: This seems to be M/Penance fighting Sentinels, presumably part of the fightback against Orchis in Fall of the House of X, and having little to do with Enigma’s narration. Jean is “dying along with the Phoenix” thanks to Mother Righteous’ botched attempt to use the Phoenix to ascend to Dominionhood, as seen in the Jean Grey miniseries and recent issues of Immortal X-Men.
- Page 4 panel 1: The abortive timeline that we saw in the previous issue.
- Page 4 panel 2: Young Charles Xavier squabbles with his stepbrother Cain Marko. The man in the background ignoring the whole thing is Cain’s father, Kurt Marko.
- The remainder of the page sees Professor X escaping Enigma’s view by slipping into the No-Place where we saw him last issue.
X-Force #49 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, andpage numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FORCE vol 6 #49
“We Need to Talk About Beast”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Robert Gill
Colour artist: GURU-eFX
Letterer: Joe Caramanga
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1. Beast and Wonder Man burst forth, with X-Force in the background. It’s a homage to the cover of Giant-Size X-Men #1.
PAGES 2-4. The Beast raids the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station.
This is the Krakoa-era Beast. He’s wearing the suit of Krakoan armour that he stole from the Greenhouse last issue. According to page 10, the component he steals here is a “nuclear reactor”; we see him on page 11 welding it into his “black hole gun”. The US military has experimented with portable nuclear reactors, but not that portable. Still, this is the Marvel Universe.
Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station is a real place. According to its website, it’s “America’s premier weapons station family [sic], and winner of the 2021 Commander, Navy Region Southwest Installation Excellence Award for Small Installations.” Basically, it provides weapons storage and support to the US Pacific fleet.
PAGE 5. Recap and credits.
Daredevil Villains #16: The Boss
DAREDEVIL #29 (June 1967)
“Unmasked!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Penciller: Gene Colan
Inker: John Tartaglione
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: not credited
As Daredevil approached issue #30, Stan Lee was getting downright sluggish when it came to new ideas for villains. Last month was little green men. This month is “the heartless hood they call… the Boss!” The Boss is just a regular old crime boss, with no particular hook. Often characters like this represent Daredevil toying with the sort of stories that will eventually make the book work. Less so in this case.
The issue opens with Matt pondering a dilemma. He’s decided to ask Karen to marry him. No, you didn’t miss an issue. It’s all or nothing with Matt. The dilemma is: should he marry her as Matt, or as Mike? Yes, this sounds like an excellent foundation for a healthy marriage. As Colan draws him, Matt at home looks like a genial English professor, with a nice cardigan and a tweed jacket. For some reason he also has a signed photograph of Karen Page. Seems like an odd gift for Karen to give to a man she believes to be completely blind, but it keeps showing up in later issues.
Meanwhile, we check in on the Masked Marauder’s men. The Marauder died two issues ago, and his men have been waiting patiently for “over a month” for further orders. Finally, they decide that he’s really not coming back, and so they open his last instruction. It tells them to go after Nelson and Murdock, find out who Daredevil is, and then avenge the Marauder’s defeat. The Marauder certainly has a lot of faith in his men to carry out this vague instruction from a man who is, presumably, no longer paying their wages. But follow it they do, heading to the Nelson & Murdock offices in the Marauder’s customised truck that very night.
The X-Axis – w/c 12 February 2024
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #126. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Phillip Sevy & Yen Nitro. Captain Britain, Rictor and Shatterstar go to break mutants out of British government custody, but the Externals have got there first. This is at least a bit more focussed than previous issues – we’re not jumping all over the place any more, and at least we’re back to the supposed plot – but it’s still hard to figure out what the hook is meant to be. Most of the Externals were bush league characters at the best of time, and nothing here is really setting out a stall for why we should be interested to see them again – and thus far, whatever Selene has planned isn’t really that different from any other “Fall of X” story about Orchis persecution. The individual issue is better, but I still don’t get what this story is trying to do.
WOLVERINE #43. (Annotations here.) The first two issues of “Sabretooth War” were fairly dire, but this is rather more like it. The gratuitous violence is kept down to one big moment, and it’s much more effective that way, while Wolverine himself is barely in this issue. Instead, we get Sabretooth thinking back to the happy days when he and Logan were killing lots of people side by side, the remaining alt-Sabretooths wondering why the hell they’ve been following this clown, and the Exiles showing up to enter the plot. Geoff Shaw’s art also brings this much closer to feeling like a continuation of Sabretooth & The Exiles. Victor LaValle’s contribution wasn’t terribly evident in the last couple of issues but it’s rather more recognisable here. That’s a relief, because I had no interest in a 12-issue arc that read like the first couple of issue. This is far more promising.
Wolverine #43 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
WOLVERINE vol 7 #43
“Sabretooth War, part 3”
Writers: Victor LaValle & Benjamin Percy
Artist: Geoff Shaw
Colour artist: Alex Sinclair
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1. Sabretooth and Wolverine in their Team X days.
PAGES 2-3. Flashback: Team X on a mission in Nicaragua.
Specifically, Sabretooth, Wolverine and Maverick (the other Team X member who shows up regularly in this book). So far as we can tell at this stage, this is just Sabretooth nostalgically recalling a random mission – with somewhat meta comments about nostalgia, this being a strand of continuity that dates back to the 1990s. The main point is really that Sabretooth looks back on these days fondly, which ties to the idea later that he wants to bring Wolverine back to this sort of persona too. In the next scene, Sabretooth seems to suggest that his team of alt-Creeds is also an attempt to recapture his sense of belonging from these days.
Fall of the House of X #2 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
FALL OF THE HOUSE OF X #2
“Long Games End”
Writer: Gerry Duggan
Artist: Lucas Werneck
Colour artist: Bryan Valenza
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. Polaris in front of Knowhere.
PAGES 2-6. Polaris and the Brood storm the Bloom.
“Feilong has abandoned ship just to go kill one man – Tony Stark, who built some fancy new suit for himself right under his nose…” This is footnoted to Invincible Iron Man #15, which won’t be out for another two weeks. As of issue #14, Feilong was increasingly preoccupied with defeating Iron Man, and the AI contingent of Orchis were losing patience with him.
“Make it so, M.O.D.O.K.!” Dr Stasis is referencing Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the bridge layout is indeed rather similar.
Polaris and Knowhere. Issue #1 ended with Polaris travelling to Knowhere and enlisting Broo’s contingent of the Brood – who have been living there since X-Men #21 – to help. Apparently she wanted the whole head. Knowhere is the severed head of a dead Celestial, as M.O.D.O.K. alludes to.
Daredevil Villains #15: The Queega
Again, we’re skipping a couple of issues with returning villains – issues #26-27 feature the return of Stilt-Man and the final defeat of the Masked Marauder.
DAREDEVIL #28 (May 1967)
“Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor’s Planet!”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Penciller: Gene Colan
Inker: Dick Ayers
Letterer: Sam Rosen
Colourist: not credited
Yes, it’s a flying saucer issue. The aliens are really just little green men – well, they’re quite big green reptiles, I suppose, but you get the point. They aren’t even named in this issue. The name “Queega” comes from the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.
Matt accepts an invitation to give a talk at Carter College on the legal aspects of flying saucers. About a third of the book is taken up with the romantic triangle before we even get to the College, where Matt plans to wing his way through a talk on a subject he knows nothing about. As it turns out, he just gives a fairly sensible talk about how the law would treat aliens if they ever showed up. In fact, you could make a case for this being one of the more legally sound issues of Daredevil. (Readers interested in the sum total of UK case law on this topic are directed to paragraph 23(2) of this decision.)
The talk is interrupted by the sound of a gunshot. Exciting!
It turns out that the shot was fired by Professor Tom Brewster, a UFO obsessive who claims to have stumbled upon some aliens in the woods. Rather surprisingly, Brewster is promptly arrested for firing a gun in a public place.
Naturally, Daredevil suspects that Brewster is telling the truth. So he investigates, and stumbles upon a flying saucer. The aliens seem surprised that “another human has discovered our presence on this primitive planet”, despite having set up base two minutes’ walk from a university campus. The aliens are reptilian semi-humanoids with weird energy halos. Wouldn’t you just know it, their main weapon turns out to be a ray that blinds people. Of course, it has no effect on Daredevil whatsoever. Unfortunately, they also have a secondary weapon: a delayed-effect freeze ray, which does work on him.
