PHOENIX #10
Writer: Stephanie Phillips
Artist: Alessandro Miracolo
Colour artist: David Curiel
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Annalise Bissa

PHOENIX

She sees parallels between Adani’s back story and the way her own life changed when her powers traumatically emerged on the death of her best friend Annie Richardson. This origin comes from the Phoenix story in Bizarre Adventures #27, and involves Jean withdrawing from the world until Professor X comes along to help her out. In this issue, Jean presents it as a turning point that caused her to lose her childhood – not merely because of the immediate period that followed, but by setting her on a path to meet Professor X, join the X-Men and ultimately become Phoenix. (Some stories maintain that she was always destined to become Phoenix, but that’s arguably a chicken-and-egg matter, given the Phoenix’s confusing relationship to linear cause and effect.)

The Dark Gods assume that Phoenix has the power to destroy Adani, but won’t use it because her sense of empathy holds her back. This is correct as far as it goes, but Jean stops Adani anyway by showing empathy to her and persuading her to reject her power and become an innocent child again. The clear implication is that Jean would rather have remained normal and not become Phoenix (or even an X-Man) too.

(more…)

UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #13
“The Dark Artery, part 1: Machinations of Dread”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: David Marquez
Colour artist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

THE X-MEN

Gambit. Sadurang claims that the Left Eye of Agamotto will corrupt him over time, eventually leading him to kill his family and friends. We don’t know whether that’s true or not, but it’s at least consistent with what we’ve seen so far – Rogue was claiming as early as issue #2 that the Eye was “affecting him somehow”.

In narration, he says that he had a “hard time growing up” as a visible mutant due to his eyes. He says that the nurse cried at his birth when she saw him; I’m not sure that’s been said before, but Gambit #1 (1999) does say that the Thieves Guild “cursed the babe as an abomination” because of his eyes. He’s privately hurt by people’s reactions to his eyes, but feels that if he hadn’t been a mutant he would have been a nobody – maybe a low-level criminal enforcer.

Rogue. Appears in two panels. She is cold.

(more…)

HELLVERINE #5
“The Mephisto Conspiracy”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Raffaele Ienco
Colour artist: Bryan Valenza
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Mark Basso

HELLVERINE

This one won’t take long.

After being drowned by Mephisto’s water demon last issue, Akihiro is transported to Hell. Since Akihiro never actually made a deal with the devil, Mephisto separates him from Bagra-Ghul and tortures him, before trying to get him to sign up.

However, Akihiro has been studying the Book of Lamentation that Dr Strange gave him in issue #3, and we saw in issue #4 that he could work magic by using his claws to carve symbols into his own chest. Once separated from Bagra-Ghul, he’s able to claw a symbol into the demon’s chest – a “possession cipher”, apparently – that lets him reclaim the demon under his control. So Bagra-Ghul is now under Akihiro’s control and Mephisto’s plan to use him as a conduit has been thwarted, at least for now.

(more…)

PSYLOCKE vol 2 #6
“House of Ghosts”
Writer: Alyssa Wong
Artists: Vincenzo Caratù & Moisés Hidalgo
Colour artist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Darren Shan

PSYLOCKE

The last issue ended with her seeing a monstrous ghostly image of herself and Betsy merged, which she chose to ignore. As this issue starts, she’s still experiencing these hallucinations, but she’s chosen not to tell the other X-Men. Since nobody’s noticed her being distracted up to now, it’s probably not long after issue #5.

Her rationale for not telling the other X-Men is partly that she assumed it was an after-effect of the Taxonomist’s hallucinogenics from the previous issue, which would wear off in time. Her narration says that “With the tensions between Rogue’s X-Men and ours, the last thing we need is any sign of instability.” Her paranoia about letting the team down makes sense; the bit about the two X-Men teams feuding is probably there mainly as foreshadowing for later in the issue. Given what we saw about the relations between the teams in “X-Manhunt”, this probably has to go very shortly after “Raid on Graymalkin”.

(more…)

X-MEN vol 7 #14
“Search and Rescue”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Ryan Stegman
Inkers: Ryan Stegman & JP Mayer
Colourist: Marte Gracia
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

THE X-MEN

Cyclops. As in issue #1, he’s keen to have good relations with the town, and seems to trust Chief Robbins anyway – he offers the X-Men’s help to her before she’s explained what the issue is. He asks her to call him Scott.

Kid Omega. He doesn’t seem terribly worked up about Piper going missing, though he takes the task of searching for her seriously enough. He’s more concerned about Idie’s reaction and tries to make supportive noises about how it’ll all be fine, though he acknowledges that he isn’t good at this. Then he gets shot out of the sky and presumably spends the rest of the issue unconscious.

(more…)

LAURA KINNEY: WOLVERINE #4
“Brother in Arms, part 1”
Writer: Erica Schultz
Artist: Giada Belviso
Colour artist: Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso

This one won’t take us long.

WOLVERINE

Bucky claims to be enlisting her help because he needs an “old-school tracker” to locate Henrick Schneider. She doesn’t believe this is the whole story but doesn’t seem to press him on it. She seems to be happy enough to go along for the sake of the road trip and the chance to go after a Nazi mad scientist. Bucky specifically sells to her the fact that Schneider tortured mutants.

Naturally enough, she sees Bucky as “not so different from me”, as they’re both would-be heroes trying to escape a past when they were used as weapons. This was also the theme with Elektra, the guest star in the previous arc.

She’s surprised to find that the unnamed mutant they rescue in Red Oak wanted to keep it secret that he was a mutant, and has to remind herself that not all mutants are “ready to be out” (to be fair, there weren’t many closeted mutants on Krakoa, nor is she meeting many in NYX).

(more…)

UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #12
“Some Kinda Way”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Gavin Guidry
Colour artist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

THE X-MEN

Gambit. This is a self-contained spotlight issue for him.

The flashbacks to his childhood take place, according to him, at a time when he “wasn’t quite wild yet, not quite feral”. He’s been adopted by Jean-Luc LeBeau at this point, but hasn’t yet been fully accepted into the Thieves Guild. If we’re going by the account of his early life in Gambit #1 (1999), this almost certainly means that he’s ten. According to that story, Remy was always seen as significant in New Orleans Guilds circles because of his strange eyes, and Jean-Luc had been keeping an eye on him throughout his life, but wasn’t able to take him in earlier due to guild politics. In the years running up to this, he’s been a member of a street gang called Fagan’s Mob, learned to fight and pick pockets, and already befriended Bella Donna Boudreaux. Everything here is basically consistent with that.

Remy’s powers are apparently starting to manifest at this point. He’s promised to stay out of trouble but winds up getting into a fight with some other Assassins Guild family members, which the Vig gets him out of, leaving him in debt. (See below.) These events also lead to him meeting Marcus St Juniors for the first time, while in hiding from the Assassins Guild. It turns out that the whole thing was engineered by the Vig, and this story is basically Gambit standing up to him when he tries to get back into Gambit’s life.

(more…)

X-MANHUNT OMEGA
“X-Manhunt Finale: Dreams End”
Writers: Murewa Ayodele & Gail Simone
Artists: Gleb Melnikov, Federica Mancin & Edni Balám
Colour artist: Brian Reber
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort

This double-sized one-shot is the final part of the “X-Manhunt” crossover. For annotation purposes, I’m going to treat it as an X-Men special.

X-MEN

Cyclops. When trying to reconcile with Rogue in a flashback set after “Raid on Graymalkin”, he makes an optimistic case for the post-Krakoan diaspora as offering a range of different mutant dreams; he seems to be rationalising Krakoa as a dream that went wrong because it was one-size-fits-all.

Nonetheless, he insists that Professor X has to be kept in prison. His official argument is that Xavier is worth sacrificing to preserve deals with the US government (which, to be fair, was Professor X’s stated reason for handing himself in to the authorities in the first place), but he seems to believe that Professor X deserves to be there for the atrocities he committed in House of X, and he resents the trauma that Professor X has inflicted on him over the years. He doesn’t know that the crew of the Agnew were simulacra, something which seems to surprise Professor X (who, on one reading of the original scene, was trying to heavily hint to Scott that all was not as it seemed).  Professor X suggests that Cyclops is caught between hating him and not wanting him to leave.

(more…)

MAGIK vol 3 #3
“Pacts”
Writer: Ashley Allen
Artist: Germán Peralta
Colour artist: Arthur Hesli
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Darren Shan

MAGIK

While in Liminal’s domain, she can’t teleport and can only use simple magic. This seems to still be enough for her to put up a fight against him, but he gets back in control quickly enough that he may just be stringing her along. Liminal claims her magic is impaired in his domain because it’s so closely linked with him (and that he’d be in the same position in Limbo, which is equally closely tied to her) – but he also suggests that her bigger issue is a refusal to access Darkchild’s power.

She hates being trapped in Liminal’s domain, evidently because it reminds her of her origin story – something that Liminal goes out of his way to play up with “constructs” of characters from the first Magik miniseries. Belasco seems to particularly disturb her.

(more…)

PSYLOCKE vol 2 #5
“Hostile Hospitality”
Writer: Alyssa Wong
Artists: Vincenzo Carratù with Moisés Hidalgo
Colour artist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Darren Shan

PSYLOCKE

She takes particular exception to being treated as an object to be preserved, which brings to mind her upbringing with the Hand. She thinks that the Hand regarded her not merely as a weapon but as “something to be discarded when it’s outlived its use” – the accompanying flashback in fact shows childhood friend Mitsuki being murdered in order to motivate Kwannon, but evidently she sees no real difference between the two. At least in the flashback, she feels guilty for failing to protect her best friend.

She declares that she’s spent too long hiding from her past and trying to “bury” what happened to her in order to build a new future. There’s at least a suggestion that this is why she’s chosen to take on Betsy’s Psylocke name and role instead of focussing on her own identity. The other moral that she draws from the story is that the Taxonomist’s traumatic past is not an excuse for his current behaviour, with obvious parallels to herself.

(more…)