Children of the Vault #3 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
CHILDREN OF THE VAULT #3
“War on Tomorrow”
Writer: Deniz Camp
Artist: Luca Maresca
Colourist: Carlos Lopez
Letterer: Cory Petit
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Sarah Brunstad
COVER / PAGE 1. Bishop and Cable (with their big guns) in the foreground, with the Children floating over their City in the background.
PAGES 2-6. Bishop and Cable attack the City.
Last issue, Bishop and Cable captured Martillo and Cable obtained “access codes, layouts, City defence protocols” and so forth from him. This is them acting on that plan. The basic idea is to fire a “micro-singularity” at the City, simply as a distraction to leave the Children open to Orchis. We’ll see in the next scene how Cable and Bishop got Orchis to attack.
Most of the Children are just defending themselves here, but Capitán is singled out as the one who really looks down on the mutants. The previous issue established that he was the leader of the losing “Traditionalist” faction that argued for just wiping out humanity and starting over with the Children; the whole idea of posing as superheroes and assimilating (some of) the humans is a comparatively liberal plan pushed by Serafina.
Astonishing Iceman #3 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
ASTONISHING ICEMAN #3
“Out Cold, part 3”
Writer: Steve Orlando
Artist: Vincenzo Carratù
Colour artist: Java Tartaglia
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1. Iceman in action alongside Aaron Fischer.
PAGES 2-4. Aaron Fischer defends the Y-Men from Mr Clean.
Mister Clean. We’ve had a couple of issues of build to Orchis sending Mr Clean after Iceman – as we’ll see later, this attack is a deliberate attempt to lure Iceman out of hiding. I covered Mr Clean’s background in the annotations for the previous issue.
Aaron Fischer. Aaron Fischer debuted in 2021’s United States of Captain America miniseries. He’s part of the Captains Network, basically an assortment of grass roots Captain America imitators intended to represent the diversity of American society, who wind up being endorsed by Steve Rogers. Fischer is one of the most prominent characters from the Captains Network, having shown up subsequently in Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty and had a solo storyline in Love Unlimited Infinity Comic #49-54. In that storyline, he gained superhuman powers from an experimental super-soldier serum created by the Alchemax corporation.
Daredevil Villains #5: The Matador
DAREDEVIL #5 (December 1964)
“The Mysterious Masked Matador”
Writer, editor: Stan Lee
Artist: Wally Wood
Letterer: Sam Rosen (uncredited)
Colourist: not credited
While the previous issue featured a goofy Silver Age villain who became increasingly grim in retrospect, there are no such concerns here. In Wally Wood’s first issue, we have the Matador, who is as Silver Age as it gets. He is an evil matador who commits crimes in the style of a matador while dressed as a matador. He is absolutely committed to the theme. He is wonderful. He really should be fighting Adam West, and isn’t that what you come to the Silver Age for?
Like any new villain, the Matador gets quite the build-up. He has been on a “one-man crime wave”. He is, we are assured, “the greatest threat to law and order in years”. Now, you may be wondering how exactly you commit crimes in the style of a matador. Does it just mean wearing a fancy costume and waggling a sword around? No, no it does not. In his first scene, the Matador robs an armoured truck by making it crash with his bullfighting skills. He stands in the middle of the road and confuses the driver by waving a cape around. And he is very pleased with himself. “What delicacy! What artistry! What magnificent daring!”
This issue isn’t just about the matador gimmickry, though. There’s an actual theme to this story. Eventually we get the Matador’s origin: he’s Spain’s most famous and controversial bullfighter, “Manuel Eloganto”. Ah, the sixties. Audiences turned on Manuel over his cruelty towards the bulls – we’re not told exactly what this involved, but since bullfighting already involves killing the bulls, I suppose any more detailed explanation would be a horrible tone clash. Manuel was so distracted by the booing that he got gored. Now that he’s better, he wants “revenge on all mankind”, and to do that, he’s going to manipulate the public into loving him. That’s not a means to an end, mind you. It’s the entire plot. He just wants to make the suckers love him.
The X-Axis – w/c 9 October 2023
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #108. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Lynne Yoshi, Fer Sifuentes-Sujo & Travis Lanham. A lot of this is infodump, but it picks up at the end when we get a bit of action followed by an unexpected swerve into something that has nothing at all to do with Sunfire’s quest for Redroot. (Which is – spoiler – that Moira shows up.) Even so, this arc is Just Kind Of There right now. For all we’ve seen so far, you could plug anyone into the hero role and it wouldn’t make much difference. There must be some reason why this is being done as a solo Sunfire story – he’s not a character who often gets to be a solo lead, maybe because he’s a bit too distant and annoying to work without someone a bit more friendly to bounce off. Which is kind of what Sheriff Whitechapel is asked to do in this issue. But in practice she just doles out exposition. That’s the issue right now, I think – I get why we’re doing “someone finally goes looking for Redroot”, but I don’t have any real sense of why we’re doing it with Sunfire.
X-MEN RED #16. (Annotations here.) We’re still in Genesis’ invasion of Arakko, but this issue brings us back to a couple of angles that interest me more. For one, there’s the plot thread of the Great Ring being offered access to Uranos as a Doomsday Weapon at the end of Judgment Day, and the dilemma of whether the situation is ever dire enough to resort to that – or indeed whether bringing him out is an excuse to avoid taking full responsibility for something that Storm could already do on her own. Then there’s the Horsemen, and specifically Death (since the other three are kind of interchangeable), who gets to play the traditionalist who’s at least sincere. It’s a bit of a stretch that Death is only just figuring out that his siblings see his core values as merely a means to an end – how long has he been fighting alongside them again? – but I like his reaction enough to let that slide. Yildiray Çinar makes him look good, and does a lovely opening scene with Craig Marshall and his adopted kids, too. I’m not that interested in Genesis herself, but I can get behind her as something for other more interesting characters to bounce off, and that’s where the focus is with this issue.
Wolverine #38 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
WOLVERINE vol 7 #38
“Last Mutant Standing, part 2”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Juan José Ryp
Colour artist: Frank D’Armata
Letterer: Cory Petit
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1: Wolverine and Captain America in action, surrounded by … well, obscured figures, because the identity of the villain is a reveal halfway through the issue. They’re wearing the hats of typical Legacy House agents, though.
As with the previous issue, we get some actual lettering on the cover, which seems to be a thing for this “series of team-ups” arc. (If “arc” is the right word – it’s really more a series of linked one-shots.)
PAGES 2-4. Logan approaches Steve Rogers in a bar.
Logan’s explanation for how he’s evading the Orchis patrols is simply that people don’t recognise him out of costume. Which… Wolverine’s pretty recognisable, isn’t he? It’s not too hard to find stories where members of the general public recognise the short guy with the unusual hair on sight. It happens in the recent Fallen Friend one-shot when he shows up to Kamala Khan’s memorial service. I know you have to turn a blind eye to this sort of thing for the book to function at all during “Fall of X”, but maybe just go with “he’s good at dodging the patrols”?
X-Men Red #16 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN RED vol 2 #16
“The Fall of Prometheus”
Writer: Al Ewing
Artist: Yildiray Çinar
Colour artist: Federico Blee
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. The Horsemen pose in front of Port Prometheus.
PAGES 2-4. Craig Marshall’s ship approaches Arakko.
Craig Marshall was last seen in issue #14, with the two kids Loolo and Kobb. In that issue, he was simply wondering about leaving his part of Arakko for Port Prometheus, where Peter Corbeau had offered him a posting. Evidently he either accepted that posting, or otherwise made contact with Corbeau once war broke out. The fact that Kobb hasn’t talked since A.X.E.: Judgment Day was mentioned by Craig in issue #11.
Peter Corbeau makes his first actual appearance in X-Men Red here; he’s a NASA scientist who had some minor appearances in early Claremont X-Men. I don’t think he’s been seen on panel in years. He’s still wearing his yachting cap, which is nice.
The X-Axis – w/c 2 October 2023
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #107. By Steve Foxe, Steve Orlando, Lynne Yoshii, Fer Sifuentes-Sujo & Travis Lanham. This is the sort of thing you get in middle chapters of Infinity Comics. Sunfire goes to a place, gets into a bit of trouble, and then someone we recognise shows up at the end. Nothing wrong with that – it’s getting the story from A to B, and it’s re-establishing the idea that Otherworld is a place where random monsters can show up for no good reason. With fairly short chapters on a weekly schedule, you’re going to get issues like this, but there’s not much I can say about them individually. It’s fine.
X-MEN #27. (Annotations here.) Hideous cover aside – and I genuinely do loathe it – this is a definite step up from the last couple of issues, because it isn’t so relentlessly bleak. Instead, it’s an issue of the X-Men going to have a nice chat with the Fantastic Four on a farm, drawn by Phil Noto. And Orchis are barely in it. Of course, this still amounts to saying that this is one of the better issues of the storyline because it’s a detour from the storyline, and in plot terms it’s maybe a bit thin, but it still feels like a welcome tone correction from the last couple of issues. Part of that is probably because it’s Phil Noto on art, which is going to lighten most things up, but it’s not the art that made the last two issues so oppressive. Hopefully we’re sticking with something closer to this – I wouldn’t say it really engages me, but at least it doesn’t feel like a chore.
X-Force #45 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-FORCE vol 6 #45
“A Slip of the Pen”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Robert Gill
Colour artist: GURU-eFX
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Design: Tom Muller and Jay Bowen
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1. A weird image of Colossus, Quentin Quire and Wolverine (Laura) as prisoners of Mikhail Rasputin with multiple perspectives and a kind of 3D effect. The solicitation for this issue read: “X-Force is held captive. But what powerful force can keep Wolverine, Colossus, Omega Red and Quentin Quire from their compatriots, and what will this mean for the future of mutantkind? And, as the Chronicler focusses his powers on a new subject, how will his control shift the balance of power in the Fall of X era?” That last sentence is certainly in this issue, but Wolverine, Omega Red and Quentin Quire only have brief cameos in this issue (a single panel of each of them, on page 23).
PAGES 2-4. Chronicler recaps the plot, and Colossus kidnaps Jun Wei.
The Chronicler opens by reflecting on how Colossus was perfectly placed to be the first person narrator of his story about Krakoa precisely because he’s a secondary character in the grand scheme of things; it accords with his sense of how this sort of story ought to work, and as we’ve seen, Chronicler’s reality-warping powers are constrained by what he can rationalise as a sensible story. Mind you, given how often Chronicler has taken to writing directly about his control of Colossus and the way in which Colossus is being manipulated, this book must be a very strange read.
Immortal X-Men #16 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
IMMORTAL X-MEN #16
“The Island of Doctor Xavier”
Writer: Kieron Gillen
Artist: Lucas Werneck
Colour artist: David Curiel
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. Apocalypse – or rather, the version of Apocalypse from the desert landscape – with the Phoenix Force in the background. I think it’s meant to be perching on his left arm (note the claws). His Pharaoh trappings reflect the role that he’s been cast in for this re-enactment of the Book of Exodus.
PAGE 2. Shaw and Selene monitor Krakoa.
Recap: The External Gate was created in Excalibur #12 from the (involuntary) sacrifice of most of Selene’s fellow Externals. Now that the mutants are out of the way, Selene wants to secure the Gate and bring back the Externals. Charles Xavier has been repelling all the landing parties by turning them back telepathically. Last issue, Selene and Sebastian Shaw tried sending a group of soldiers with psi-blockers. Professor X responded by tearing them apart, apparently with his growing telekinetic powers; that’s the red smear they see next to the External Gate. This is not what Shaw was trying to achieve, and while it’s unlikely he cares about the soldiers himself, it hasn’t advanced his goals of actually profiting from his notional ownership of Krakoa.
It’s worth saying here that we don’t actually see Professor X killing the soldiers last issue. We see the fight starting, and then the next panel takes place the following morning and shows their bodies scattered by the Gate. We’ll come back to that.
X-Men #27 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN vol 6 #27
“Road Trip”
Writer: Gerry Duggan
Artist: Phil Noto
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. A singularly unpleasant image of Cyclops as an Orchis prisoner with his eyes sewn shut, as seen in issue #25. This has very little to do with the content of the issue – Cyclops appears in it for one page, in which he’s asleep. The actual story mostly involves the X-Men going to ask the Fantastic Four for help. The solicitation for this issue, though, seems to suggest that this was meant to be a Cyclops story. (“When Cyclops joined this iteration of the X-Men, his pitch was simple – ‘I am the X-Men.’ If so, the enemies of the X-Men seem to have this fight all sewn up.”) That’s the second issue in a row where the cover and solicitation have born very little resemblance to the content.
PAGES 2-6. Shadowkat breaks into the Orchis facility at Randall’s Island.
Last issue, Emma Frost had asked Shadowkat to focus on finding Cyclops (something which Kate seemed to have been paying lip service to up to that point, in favour of her own priorities). They were going to leave together to look for him until Emma got derailed by her wedding subplot. Shadowkat headed off anyway, and apparently she has indeed turned her attention to it this time.
