X-Men #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers are going by the digital edition.
X-MEN: This is the fifth volume of just-plain-X-Men, although confusingly the legacy numbering continues from the last run of Uncanny X-Men.
COVER (PAGE 1): The residents of the Summers House (plus the visiting Corsair) in the Blue Area of the Moon. More of that inside.
PAGES 2-3: A flashback to Charles Xavier giving Scott Summers a pair of ruby quartz glasses to control his optic beams. It’s a metaphor for Xavier giving Scott the confidence to embrace what makes him superhuman, of course – plus, there’s a parallel being drawn with the leader of Orchis, Killian Devo, but we’ll come to that. Scott’s visor can be seen sitting on a stand in the corner of the room.
Scott seems unsure that the glasses will work, but it was established way back in the 1960s “Origins of the X-Men” back-ups that Scott got his ruby quartz glasses at the orphanage, long before he met Xavier. (The original explanation was that he was given them to control headaches; a 1980s retcon brought Mr Sinister into the picture,) So if this is meant to be the first time Scott uses ruby quartz, it’s a retcon. Maybe he’s just unsure about trusting a new pair.
PAGE 4: Laid out like one of the House of X / Powers of X data pages, but it’s a typical Marvel recap page with headshots of the cast.
PAGE 5: Credits, still in the HoXPoX style. The Krakoan text above the X (simply reads “X-Men”, and the word above the credits is “one”.
The issue title is “Pax Krakoa”, playing on “Pax Americana” (the notion that American dominance brought comparative world peace in the latter 20th century). Basically, it’s positioning Krakoa as a superpower.
The small print in the bottom right reads “Mutants of the world unite”, referring to the famous line from the Communist Manifesto (“Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains”). That fits both with the mutant liberation theme, and with the theme of individuals becoming part of a larger whole. Not subtly, but it does.
PAGES 6-17: Cyclops, Storm, Magneto and Polaris attack “the last Orchis stronghold on Earth”, bring it down, and liberate the people who Orchis were holding in stasis tubes – all of whom are mutants except for one…
Orchis. Orchis were the main villains in House of X, where they were trying to build Sentinels in space in what they apparently considered an act of self-defence against humans. HoX played up the parallels with the X-Men and the vicious cycle of escalation rather more, and made them come across as somewhat more sympathetic and understandable. This bunch, in contrast, are demented extremists. Base leader Dr Mars rejects the idea of wiping the database to stop it falling into X-Men hands, and opts instead for a suicide scheme of turning everyone into an ape. We don’t actually see what happens to the apes (Magneto deals with them off panel), but presumably that precious database falls into the X-Men’s hands.
“The last Orchis stronghold on Earth.” The term “stronghold” is significant as part of Hickman’s cosmology of cosmic societies from Powers of X, though that’s not something Storm herself would recognise in using the term.
Cyclops and Storm. Storm’s a bit zealous at the start of this scene, isn’t she? Granted that these guys are Sentinel builders, she keeps talking about Orchis as “conquered people”. She also berates Orchis for keeping people in stasis – “How little they must think of themselves to treat others this way” – despite having voted to do something broadly similar to Sabretooth in House of X #6.
Cyclops gives a somewhat more measured inspirational speech about how the X-Men are winning because mutants are the future and no amount of Orchis science and technology is going to stop that. In the context of the wider Hickman project, this is dramatic irony – Powers of X tells us that in fact, a technology-driven posthumanity always wins in the end.
The stasis tubes. Most of them hold mutants, though they all seem to be new characters. The two gold and silver figures are specifically drawn to our attention in the next scene, so they’re probably important – otherwise they seem to be randoms. We’re not told why Orchis were holding them, but presumably some sort of experimentation was in mind.
The unnamed non-mutant. This is Serafina, a character from Mike Carey’s run. She was one of the Children of the Vault (as Storm seems to realise) – a community who had been locked inside a sealed vault where time was accelerated relative to the outside world, so that 6,000 years passed for their society while 30 years passed outside. This is why Polaris detects “massive atemporal development”. Although the Children were said to be a separate species on account of their genetic drift, their actual superpowers were attributed to advanced technology. In other words, they’re posthumans, just like Powers of X warned about. Serafina, in particular, had technology interfacing powers, making her the most posthuman of all.
Serafina claims here that she emerged from the Vault “before [she] was fully cooked”, because “wild gods [were] loose in the world”. The Children’s actual motivations in the Carey stories weren’t always entirely clear, but broadly they seemed to believe that they were the rightful inheritors of the world. Note that Magneto – who knows what happened in Powers of X – suggests that the wild gods are mutants, and wants to chase after her until Cyclops overrules him.
Serafina did not have the photo-negative look when we last saw her. That’s new, and it’s a plot point. Nor does the story give any clue of what Orchis wanted with her, bearing in mind that she’s not a mutant – though maybe they just couldn’t tell the difference.
PAGES 18-22. The X-Men bring the liberated mutants back to Krakoa and Dr Cecilia Reyes checks over them.
Cecilia Reyes. A mutant doctor who’s been a member of the cast on and off since 1997. Basically the go-to X-Men medic these days, if the injuries aren’t exotic enough to call for a full-blown scientist character. Reyes is basically a non-combatant; her power is a force field.
Magneto. The children of Krakoa idolise him, and he rather enjoys the adulation. This doesn’t seem entirely healthy – and note that he gets much more attention than the other X-Men, perhaps because he’s willing to play along.
Polaris and Cyclops. Scott invites Lorna to join the Summers family reunion, pointing out that Alex will be there; the significance here is that Lorna and Alex were a couple for years. Scott talks about the birth of his son. That’s Cable, of whom more later. It’s the second somewhat-inspirational speech Scott has given in this issue, and Lorna politely questions how much of it is for show.
PAGES 23-26. Killian Devo arrives on the Orchis Forge to take charge of the operation. Generally, this scene takes us much further back to the parallels between the X-Men and Orchis which we saw in House of X. Devo talks about the Orchis Forge as a refuge (in similar terms to Krakoa) and uses the same “Look at what they have done” line, in reference to the Orchis dead, that House of X used about mutants.
Killian Devo. This is the first time we’ve seen him, but in the data pages of House of X #1, he was named as Orchis’s director. He’s said to be 63, and before he was in Orchis, he was affiliated with STRIKE (a UK organisation from Captain Britain which was broadly aligned with SHIELD). He clearly sees Orchis as the good guys, cheerfully rattling off all the reputable organisations where his staff worked in the past, and grudgingly conceding that there are also ex-HAMMER and -Hydra staffers (whom he considers a “lesser evil”). He personally designed the Orchis refit of the station, but hadn’t arrived by the time the X-Men attacked – he does seem to feel some personal responsibility for the deaths that ensued. Karima indicates that, despite the X-Men’s attack, the Orchis Forge is still conducting some sort of “experiment” (our attention is drawn here to the former location of the Mother Mold), for which Devo is necessary.
Devo also appears to be somewhat posthuman – he has cyborg arms and has some sort of visor fitted to his head. He tells us later that this allows him to see despite natural blindness. Visually, there are parallels both with Xavier and Cyclops, in terms of the permanent eye-covering.
PAGES 27-31. At the Summer House, the Summers family entertain the visiting Starjammers. Aside from the actual content, one thing to notice here (and throughout) is the shift of scale from House of X. That book was concerned with the huge social changes brought about by Krakoa; X-Men shifts focus down to the level of smaller groups.
The Summer House. A home for the Summers family next to the Blue Area of the Moon. We’ve seen it before in House of X #3, when the X-Men set off for their attack on the Orchis Forge. It was mentioned in Powers of X #5 as the location of one of Xavier’s back-up “cradles”.
Interestingly, Cyclops has chosen not to have his home on Krakoa itself, though the Summer House is a Krakoan habitat with a link to the main island. We’re told later that the Summer House is on the Blue Area of the Moon; its main significance for the X-Men context is that this is where Jean Grey “died” as Dark Phoenix. Which seems like an odd place to set up home.
The Summers family. Traditionally portrayed as one of the most important mutant bloodlines. We’ll come back to the history of individual characters if it turns out to matter in future issues, but the permanent residents are:
- Cyclops himself, obviously.
- Wolverine, who is not a member of the Summers family. I’ll come back to that.
- Jean Grey / Marvel Girl, Cyclops’s wife and fellow founding X-Man. (Or ex-wife, depending on whether you think their marriage ended on her death – we don’t establish here how they regard their current relationship.)
- Alex Summers / Havok, Cyclops’ brother, and an X-Man on and off since the late sixties.
- Gabriel Summers / Vulcan, the third Summers brother who was born in outer space and never knew his relatives until X-Men: Deadly Genesis came along. After Ed Brubaker’s run, Vulcan was shunted off to Marvel’s cosmic titles and the X-books pretty much forgot about him until now. He spent some time as the Emperor of the Shi’ar, and as near as I can tell, he was last seen in War of Kings #6, where he vanished in battle with Black Bolt. (Black Bolt long since returned from the same apparent death, so there’s no particular reason why Vulcan wouldn’t have survived too.) He’s behaving like a grandiose Silver Age villain in this story, but it seems to be partly tongue in cheek. There’s obviously a back story to be filled in here.
- Nathan Summers / Cable, the son of Scott Summers and Madelyne Pryor (who later turned out to be a clone of Jean Grey). Nathan grew up in a far future dominated by Apocalypse, where he was raised by a time travelling Scott and Jean as seen in the miniseries Adventures of Cyclops & Phoenix. Cable was the quintessential early nineties guns and ammo character, but this is a divergent version of Cable who first appeared in the recent Extermination miniseries, and had his back story fleshed out in the recent X-Force. In very broad strokes, when the teenage X-Men from the Silver Age spent an extended period in the present day (in All-New X-Men and X-Men Blue), this eventually caused disruption to the timeline that led to Cable travelling back in time decades early to sort it all out and to get rid of the older, original Cable who ought to have dealt with it but failed to do so. So this is a younger Cable but, sharing the back story of the original through to his late teens – as such, he still recognises Scott and Jean as his parents.
- Rachel Summers / Prestige, the daughter of Scott and Jean from the alternate future timeline of Days of Future Past, who travelled back in time to become a permanent resident here. She’s been a member of the X-Men and Excalibur on and off since the 80s. She was a Hound in the DOFP timeline, which she likes to remember with the spikes on her costumes (mentioned here); the tattoos on her face are connected with that as well. The codename Prestige comes from X-Men Gold.
Hickman largely avoided characters with time-travel back stories, like Cable and Prestige, in House of X. Cable, in particular, comes from a timeline in which events don’t seem to pan out as seen in Powers of X – Apocalypse rises to dominance instead.
The visitors are the Starjammers, space pirates and general adventuring swashbucklers:
- Christopher Summers / Corsair, the father of Scott, Alex and Gabriel, abducted by aliens when Scott and Alex were children. He’s a regular human.
- Raza, the cyborg
- Ch’od, the big strong reptile guy.
- Hepzibah, the skunk-woman, who is Corsair’s partner.
For present purposes you really don’t need to know anything about the last three beyond the fact that they’re Corsair’s regular entourage.
PAGES 32-33. Data pages on the Summer House, largely with a floor plan, though also confirming that Vulcan has been a bit of a troublemaker. There’s a story coming with him, clearly. The Summer House has two empty bedrooms, though it’s not clear who they’re being reserved for, if anyone. Recall that Mr Sinister’s gossip column in Powers of X #4 suggested that there might be still more Summers brothers.
That column also implied that Wolverine was having an affair with someone “married with a kid”, with the full knowledge of her husband, who was “up to much the same, and more.” This now seems to be Jean, the kid being Cable, and the husband being Cyclops. Look closely at the floor plan: not only is Jean’s bedroom between Cyclops and Wolverine (something that isn’t obvious from the numbering of the legend), but those three bedrooms have connecting doors which are missing from all the other rooms. As for Cyclops’ own affairs, the obvious candidate would be a resumed relationship with Emma Frost.
PAGES 34-35. Corsair is worried about the X-Men’s ambitious new direction, and Cyclops reassures him. Pretty self explanatory.
PAGES 36-38. Back on the Orchis Forge, Devo speaks to Alina Gregor about the death of her husband. The parallels with Krakoa continue – Alina reveals that she has a way of bringing her husband back. This seems to involve a ruby quartz crystal in some way (which would suggest a connection with Sinister), and implies that Alina believes she can restore him from back-up just like the mutants are doing. If that’s right, then it would cast doubt on whether the X-Men really do need those five combined (though Moira seemed to think so in her journal).
PAGES 39-40. The Krakoan text on the trailer page reads “NEXT: ARAKKO.” That was the name of the other island which was supposedly split off from Krakoa in ancient times.
Once again: thank you for these excellent annotations. All the HoX/Pox annotations have been incredibly good.
Am I alone in feeling that #1 was quite muted and restrained for a first issue? I finished it feeling oddly… unsatisfied.
Another friendly plug for our podcast with Paul, recorded before X-Men 1 came out but after Hox/Pox concluded. Hickman chat, misc comics chat and some rasslin talk.
http://tinyurl.com/winter81
@Paul
Pages 36-38’s paragraph is cut off.
Hickman is being very spare with doubting characters. Both Polaris and Corsair raise some minor concerns with Cyclops, which is more than we saw in all of HoXPoX.
I’m surprised there are time-travelers here after being non-existent in HoXPoX. I guess if they avoid talking with Moira, it’s not a problem.
That clearly looks like Serafina from the Vault, but did she ever have teleportation powers before? Some kind of “I was never here” powers?
Storm’s intensity at the beginning really took me by surprise.
The humor of grandiloquent Vulcan totally worked on me.
The second-last paragraph cuts off abruptly (“If that’s right, then it would cast doubt on whe”)
The ‘Pages 36-38’ section seems to be cut short.
It’s been lovely discussing HoXPoX each week in the comments to these annotations – Paul, do you think you’ll continue to post them for this title and/or other Dawn of X books?
Re: Time travelers-
I’m not sure why their talking with Moira would be a problem.
None of them expect their future time-line to happen on Earth-616 now.
Cable felt he accomplished his goal of stopping Apocalypse, and probably seeing Apocalypse joining with Krakoa makes him think that the threat is really over.
The same is true of Bishop. He stopped the “X-traitour”, or something, during Onslaught.
Bishop also realizes that his future will never exist on Earth-616 either, and that his world is a divergent time-line.
Rachel realizes that she now comes from an alternate future.
The Days of Future Past world is no longer the true future of Earth-616.
Paul> Gabriel Summers / Vulcan, the third Summers brother who…spent some time as the Emperor of the Shi’ar, and as near as I can tell, he was last seen in War of Kings #6, where he vanished in battle with Black Bolt. (Black Bolt long since returned from the same apparent death, so there’s no particular reason why Vulcan wouldn’t have survived too.)
Well, he was practically a walking skeleton by the end of that fight, although he kept protesting that he could keep going ’cause he was Omega-Level. It was all a bit Monty Python (i.e., the Black Knight skit), so there’s more for him to come back from than Black Bolt. And not only is he fully intact here, he’s missing the scars he had already accumulated before that fight.
Of course, if he was restored from backup, that would raise further questions – surely he went out of range of Cerebro when he headed off to the Sh’iar galaxy, so is he from an old (pre-Emperor Vulcan timeframe) backup? What’s the last thing he’s meant to remember?
To me, a much better issue than all of HoXPox put together.
Really hate this Jean shit though.
She was so interesting and assertive in X-Men Red.
Now she’s playing mommy in a miniskirt and dick swapping her brother-husbands.
Bleh.
I’ve fixed the missing sentence, thanks.
Vulcan *could* have been restored from back-up, true, but he spent almost no time on Earth so it’s hard to see how they’d have a recent copy of his mind. Of course, maybe that’s the story.
I didn’t read Extermination, so I don’t know why Old Cable failed at whatever he was supposed to do, and why Young Cable was able to do it better.
Nevertheless, if Cable now has the opportunity to be reborn at any age, why would he opt for the less familiar Young Cable form? Does he still have the transmode virus? Why does he still have a scar over his eye?
Jesus christ, the logic of this premise interferes with nearly every character.
> …Alina believes she can restore him from back-up just like the mutants are doing. If that’s right, then it would cast doubt on whether the X-Men really do need those five combined (though Moira seemed to think so in her journal).
Really, in a world with cloners like Sinister & the Jackal, who can spit out adult clones at will, why would anyone believe that was the only way to do it? Death itself popped along to confirm that the Jackal’s last batch of clones were really the real people really resurrected, even!
If there’s a significance to “The Five”, it’s that they can get to that point purely on mutant powers. (Which is then, of course, undermined by Cerebro being a required sixth part)
> Nevertheless, if Cable now has the opportunity to be reborn at any age, why would he opt for the less familiar Young Cable form? Does he still have the transmode virus? Why does he still have a scar over his eye?
It’s an divergent Cable. He does NOT have “old Cable”‘s memories.
SanityOrMadness-Agreed. I think it’s the technology that is the problem.
Except Cerebro….
The X-Men should, obviously, know that Sinister can just create clones.
He uses technology to create his clones though.
This way subverts the technology.
Except Cerebro….
There seems to be a divide between Orchis and Krakoa on the use of technology.
Except Cerebro….
@ Ben
“Really hate this Jean shit though.
She was so interesting and assertive in X-Men Red.
Now she’s playing mommy in a miniskirt and dick swapping her brother-husbands.”
I do too, and also miss the confident, savvy, knowledgeable Jean of X-Men: Red a lot, which I thought was a tremendous improvement (to the character’s status quo, as well as to the X-Line during that time).
But I don’t think “dick swapping her brother-husbands” is in any way incompatible with a character being constructed as “insteresting” and “assertive”. I think it’s best to wait and see with the non-monogamy/polyamory/open relationship angle. And not to lapse to such moralistic readings of it.
I assumed the reason time-travelers were left out of HoXPoX was due to the nature of the Powers of X series. When the timelines are so vastly different, characters like Cable and Rachel wouldn’t exist at all (if the Scott and Jean never meet or Sinister never tampers with Jean’s DNA to clone her). So if they were present it would be a dead giveaway that these events were taking place in Moira’s tenth life. Their exclusion from the story just made things simpler I guess.
@Mark Coale I listened to the podcast yesterday and quite enjoyed it… at least until you guys starting talking about wrestling. It might as well have been in Portuguese from the point on.
@Chris V
Well, the point still remains – if we assume that what’s presented in Hoxpox is true, then for Rachel/Bishop/Cable/etc’s futures to *ever have existed*, then Moira must have either been depowered or still be alive in their “presents”. Otherwise their futures could never have come to pass. (And both Bishop & Cable, in one of Messiah CompleX’s many pieces of bad plotting, asserted their futures were still possible as of that point and M-Day/Hope existed in their worlds’ histories)
@Brent
Moira… IV, I think…’s life included a shot of AvX. Which was tied to Hope after she spent a couple of decades in a future (…which couldn’t exist…), along with Bishop & Cable existing.
Thanks. You just reminded me that I forgot to put in the timestamps for the topic changes.
@Chris V
The Moira retcon has put constraints on distant futures for the X-Men. You can classify those futures as 1) Moira is somehow still alive (like Life 9 or Life 6), 2) Moira never existed, 3) Moira died before she turned 13, or 4) Moira was depowered as an adult.
Anyone whom she interacts with has their future causally connected to hers. So for example, if she tells Cable how to kill Apocalypse in the distant future, in her next life she could choose to not do that. So now _even futures that have pasts where she never existed become part of her current life._
This probably won’t come up in Hickman’s run, but they can cause a timey-wimey headache.
The lives of Moira aren’t “timelines,” though, in that they don’t exist in a multiverse that time travelers or dimension hoppers can access.
@job
Remember you said that when Rasputin & Red Omega show up in the present day
There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it line in one of the HoX/PoX text pages about how clones who are speed-grown to a certain age via normal methods (so through traditional tech rather than the Five) aren’t actually completely identical to the original people because the accelerated growth process introduces slight changes to their DNA. So the idea here is that the Five’s process creates -true- duplicates in a way others don’t, I guess?
I guess no one has brought up the whole possible threesome(Wolverine-Jean-Cyclops) after seeing the floorplan of the Summers House. I guess we’re moving to that after the White Queen-Cyclops-Jean triangle debacle.
@Sanityormadness
I think that appearance of AvX was life 4 or 5.
Whichever one where everything played out like we were familiar with. So in that life, Cable and Bishop could have both existed IF the timelines were that close. But I suppose if Moira died earlier than that (which I’m fairly certain she did) the future itself wouldn’t exist, so there’d be no where for them to come from. So, either way the appearance of time-travelers complicates things.
I think Rasputin and other characters from the year 100 storyline, if they do show up in the current storyline, would do so because they were absorbed into that blackhole which was suggested to not be effected by Moira’s life cycles.
@Shawn Lion
I think several people chimed in on the Wolverine-Jean-Cyclops thing on the previous HoXPoX review post, before Paul surprised us with annotations for this issue as well.
My basic take on it is: I’m not a fan. I’m kind of done caring about that particular love triangle and have been for quite sometime. I can’t believe with all these new ideas and bold changes to continuity the thing we’re talking about is the love life of these three. Despite whatever new is going on in their bedrooms, it feels like a desperate attempt to get people to start arguing for Cyclops or Wolverine again… that and to just stir up the internet in general. In that aspect, I think we can say it’s worked.
Because we know these characters, the idea that Scott and Logan could share Jean without any argument makes them seem even more like hive-minded-pod-people or either we missed something huge that would make a great story. If this were some new characters involved in this kind of relationship it would be easier to accept at face value. But their alpha-male jealousy disappearing overnight makes it seem even more like Hickman has no interest in it from a story perspective and really just has it there to raise eyebrows and stir the internet up… again, it’s working.
@SanityOrMadness
“Remember you said that when Rasputin & Red Omega show up in the present day”
Why? They could come from Moira 10’s future.
@Brent
“I think that appearance of AvX was life 4 or 5. Whichever one where everything played out like we were familiar with.”
I’m pretty sure we’re meant to accept that everything that occurred in the past 56 years of X-Men comics took place in Moira 10’s life.
While true,that aspect of the plot was definitely one of the many reasons that made Morrison’s time good. And just like Hickman has taken aspect of Morrison’s run about mutants being a culture and next evolutionary scale of man and flipped on its head, I’m willing to see how he manages to change this relationship as well.
Karima/Omega keeps popping this tiny antenna out of her ear – it happened in PoX #1 and now we’re seeing it again. Two different artists wouldn’t come up with that accidentally.
Is this just signaling that they’re definitely the same person or is it going to matter down the line?
…Or is it the opposite.
It’s not that life 9 Omega is Karima in the future.
It’s that life 10 Karima has been replaced by life 9 Omega after she arrived through the black hole.
@Job
Correct. But there one other life where things seem to be going like somewhat like the one we’re familar with… and then suddenly death by sentinels? The life that referenced “the lost decade.” I think it’s life 4. That’s what I meant to be referencing but it was a little unclear.
Please keep doing these annotations. They are wonders for going through this stuff.
That said, I got a kick out of the Wolverine room reveal. It took me a second to get the numbering down to where the rooms actually were, and then noticed they were connected. Ha! Well, Cyclops had years of running around with Emma Frost while Jean was all dead and whatnot, so I guess turnabout is fair play?
@Brent
“The life that referenced “the lost decade.” I think it’s life 4. That’s what I meant to be referencing but it was a little unclear.”
Oh, I think I remember what you’re referring to. Yeah, there was some explanations of previous lives that lined up with the, uh, “real one” and that may have also been meant to double as synopses of the “real one.” I don’t even know anymore.
@Job
“Nevertheless, if Cable now has the opportunity to be reborn at any age, why would he opt for the less familiar Young Cable form?”
Young Cable and Old Cable are both Future Cable, but Young Cable saw that Old Cable wasn’t “doing his job” protecting the timeline and leaving the time-displaced young O5 X-Men vulnerable to Ahab, who wants to kill them and screw up “the” future, so he came back in time and killed Old Cable who were both in the present day. Hey, don’t make that face at me!
So I don’t think Young Cable has been killed or resurrected yet.
@ Salomé H.
Honestly I think X-Men Red was a much better groundwork for this exact kind of “X-Men get their shit together” story without all the creepy cult shit.
Eh, maybe I’m old fashioned but I don’t see swinging Jean as being set up as assertive. With the other changes to her plus the very strong cult aspect of this story it reads to me so far as gross. Pretty much everything in this story does.
The whole phony Summers family on the moon is bonkers.
@Ben
“I don’t see swinging Jean as being set up as assertive. With the other changes to her plus the very strong cult aspect of this story it reads to me so far as gross. Pretty much everything in this story does.”
Because none of the characters (besides Xavier, Magneto, and Moira) have demonstrated any real agency. We don’t know how any of them actually feel about Krakoa and all the clone body shit, or living with evil mutants who’ve tried to kill and imprison them over and over. We’re just at some vague point long past where they’ve accepted all this.
I dunno…
Just knowing what’s been revealed so far, swinging Jean might be the most assertive Jean we’ve seen in years (aside from X-Men: Red, which I thought was fantastic).
I mean, in X-Men: Red Jean was taking assertive control of her personal politics. In theory, in Dawn of X Jean is taking assertive control of her sexuality.
Unless, of course, it’s revealed in X-Men v5 #4 that Logan just likes to watch. Or something. Even then… 😉
@Col_Fury
“In theory, in Dawn of X Jean is taking assertive control of her sexuality.”
But how is this relevant to anything about her? Prior to HoXPoX, she hadn’t been reunited with Cyclops, and the last time they’d been together, he’d left her for Emma. We don’t know anything about her or their relationship other than she wants to fuck two guys.
Couple of points:
– While I agree that there’s many instances of ‘there’s a story here’ in regards to the various interactions of people, I’m not sure anybody will tell these stories. Hickman said (in the interview with Adventures in Poor Taste, I think?) that he’s more interested in the present then in providing background for that present. Though he did say we’ll see some of those reunions in flashback, so who knows.
Regarding the mutants embracement of Krakoa and ‘cult-like demeanor’ – at this point I don’t think there’s a story there and I don’t think that’s a plot point. It could easily become one with a retcon by a later writer (I totally see Krakoa becoming ‘the gas leak year’ for the X-Men sometime in the future), but at this point I think that’s just Hickman’s handling of these characters and nothing more. It often rubs me the wrong way (Storm’s egregious, Summers family acts incredibly weird), but I no longer think it’s on purpose.
– Unless some heavy retconning takes place, I think it’s impossible for Vulcan to have been restored from ‘Emperor Vulcan’ era. Or even Deadly Genesis era. The data pages say that so far only Xavier has the ability to copy minds with Cerebro. Xavier was depowered in Deadly Genesis. He received his powers back in the finale of The Rise and Fall of the Shi’ar Empire, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t have Cerebro in space – and even if he did, there was virtually no time for him to do that between regaining his powers and being sent back to Earth with half of the team.
There is the option of him being able to copy Vulcan’s mind from Earth while Vulcan was ruling in space, but that’s… ridiculously overpowered. Though anything is possible in comics.
(And also, as noted before, it is possible that this is original Vulcan who somehow survived his encounter with Black Bolt.)
Still, the much more likely option is that this is Vulcan restored form a pre-Krakoa mission state. Which would make for an interesting meeting with Darwin, if somebody ever remembers he’s been alive all this time. Also I wonder if we’ll see Sway and Petra.
…wait, having written all that I now remember that Cerebro can copy minds only thanks to Forge upgrading it as such and that meeting looked like it was supposed to take place around X-Men #1 (1991). But that can’t be right – Destiny died before that, but Xavier sounds in PoX#6 like he has the ability to resurrect her only chooses not to because of Moira.
I guess we need to keep an eye out for additional resurrected mutants to pinpoint a more exact date. I think Synch has been the one who was dead for the longest time we’ve seen so far? And he died in 2000.
Though as I’ve mentioned above if Vulcan has been restored from before being sent to Krakoa that would be a restoration from 1975 as it was a retcon to Giant Size X-Men #1.
It would be easier to guess Vulcan’s supposed age in this issue if Yu could draw teenagers. But Young Cable is supposed to be one and he looks like a twenty-something bodybuilder here, so that’s no use.
Some of the interesting things with these books involve taking the normal sources of conflict in X-Men comics out of the picture. Magneto and Xavier are getting along, Apocalypse and many of the other baddies now work alongside the X-Men, character deaths and resurrections can happen without much drama, etc.
The Scott-Jean-Logan set up seems like another perumtation of that. It’s taken the typical love-triangle stories out of play by making it a non-issue, explained away by a floorplan of all things.
I suspect that eventually this will all unravel as we find out that everyone ‘getting what they want’ makes things more complicated than keeping everyone suspended in their typical conflicts, but I think there are more dramatic possibilities in seeing how Logan and Scott negotiate their domestic relationship than in rehashing them both pining for Jean for the billionth time.
Magneto has been an ally of the X-Men for 15 years now. Ever since he shacked up with Xavier on the ruined Genosha in the weirdly named Excalibur (vol. 3 I believe?). He’s an opponent in House of M, but everyone’s out of their mind there, he helps resuscitate Xavier after Messiah Complex, then he pretends to be a Silver Age villain in Fraction’s Uncanny to help High Evolutionary access the Dreaming Celestial and in turn give Magneto his powers back, after which he drops the pretense and joins Cyclops on Utopia. He left the team years later, halfway through the Bendis run, when he got his solo ongoing, but he still remained an ally. Only at the tailend of X-Men Blue did he ‘abandon the dream’ and started a new Brotherhood, only for that to get swept away in the Uncanny/Age of X-Man revamp.
Long story short – Xavier getting along with Magneto is by no means a new development.
On another matter entirely – I enjoyed the dishwashing scene. That was the most grounded thing about Krakoa so far.
Speaking of Darwin, doesn’t he have death god powers now?
He did the last time we saw him. So did Siryn, though that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. Or she learned to switcha back from the Morrigan persona.
By the way Hickman said something weird – he mentions that the resurrected mutants can be tweaked and he have M as an example gthat she couldn’t switch to her Penance form but nów she can.
Buuut… That was never her power – it was Emplate’s, right? And also – she does that before being resurrected. So either she died between Generation X vol 2 and Hoxpox or Hickman is Confused by his own script.
…or I’m misremembering the answer he gave.
Krzysiek Ceran
That’s actually a really good point.
The last time Magneto was played as an out-and-out villain was the Morrison run (which they obviously retconned) and before that, Eve of Destruction (Shudder. What a shit storyline).
It’s funny, I was looking back at some mid-late 2000s issues just yesterday and there’s so many storylines and subplots which seemed to suggest they were going somewhere with the whole reversing M-Day thing (Endangered species/Magneto’s subplot through Brubaker’s run/X-men Legacy) none of which really went anywhere and obviously the build-up seemed to be that Second Coming was going to be the culmination and end of the M-Day storyline. Except it wasn’t and then the books just kind of floundered along.
@Aro: I was thinking the same thing. By allying nearly every mutant on Earth, Hickman has effectively neutered mutant in-fighting. Which means that the conflict with humans and their machines can be foregrounded.
Of course, the are plenty of hints that the mutant alliance is going to fall apart, but that seems to be secondary to the Man/Mutant/Machine war for the moment.
And I, for one, am glad because there’s nothing more boring to me than Scott and Logan fighting over…anything, really. Or debating the merits of Magneto’s dream v. Xavier’s, etc. It’s refreshing to have well-defined villains from outside mutantkind.
Thanks again for continuing the annotations Paul. I never would have picked up that the Vault was a reference to the Mike Carey run (which I never read).
I’ve seen a few comments here praising that run, after not hearing much about it previously. I guess it’s time to check it out on Unlimited. Unless anyone wants to talk me out of it?
If you want to be kind to Hickman, you could say that the Summers home is not located on Krakoa so that a human (Corsair) could visit… but if that is the case, it probably should have been made explicit.
After reading this, I’m worried about the monthlong wait for the next lone Hickman issue. I think a real advantage of HOXPOX was the weekly release schedule by a consistent creative team. A couple people mentioned to me how it made it feel more like a TV show and I tend to agree. It will be very difficult for the other titles to maintain that momentum.
It’s weird to explain the concept of “Pax Americana” for the benefit of people who might not have heard it and not mention Pax Romana and Pax Britannica.
“Killian Devo. This is the first time we’ve seen him, but in the data pages of House of X #1, he was named as Orchis’s director.”
He was also seen in a single panel in HoX/PoX. He’s one of the people seen listening as Xavier telepathically announces Krakoa to the world.
“This seems to involve a ruby quartz crystal in some way (which would suggest a connection with Sinister), and implies that Alina believes she can restore him from back-up just like the mutants are doing.”
I see a pink-ish crystal, my mind also goes to Nimrod. Between this and the line about how Evil Husband guy was a great “hunter,” I think this is hinting that we’re about to see the birth of Nimrod.
Adam-It’s been stated that Krakoa will allow humans on the island, so long as they have a mutant sponsor and get acceptance.
Considering Scott’s prestige and the fact that Corsair is Scott’s father and not a bigot, I’m sure that Corsair could get permission to visit Krakoa.
Also, I would definitely recommend reading the Mike Carey run. It was probably the best X-Men comic between the Morrison and Hickman eras, for mine.
It just doesn’t present any new direction or real path forward for the X-books.
It’s a book that is for long-time fans of the X-Men, with heavy use of continuity. Especially as the run progresses and the book becomes X-Men: Legacy.
The one drawback is some of the Chris Bachalo artwork.
I’m a fan of Bachalo, but at that stage in his career, his artwork was very messy.
It was a far cry from his Generation X, Shade, or Death (Vertigo Comics) days.
SanityOrMadness-That’s a good point about divergent future time-lines, that branched off of the Earth-616 time-line.
Their alternate realities would have had to happen exactly like Earth-616 until the divergence point, when their future becomes an alternate future.
Especially in the case of Cable, who we know was traveling back from the then-future of Earth-616 to the then-present of Earth-616 to stop Apocalypse.
The only thing we could conclude is that Moira didn’t have mutant powers in those other realities.
Which is a stretch, because we now know that she did have mutant powers on Earth-616.
Bishop or Cable might have thought that their futures were still possible, but they also didn’t know about Moira, so you can just discard that.
Job: Prior to HoXPoX, she hadn’t been reunited with Cyclops, and the last time they’d been together, he’d left her for Emma.
Scott and Jean reunited at the end of Rosenberg’s run. They reconciled before that in Phoenix Resurrection #5.