X-Men #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN vol 6 #1
“Fearless, Chapter One: In Threes”
by Gerry Duggan, Pepe Larraz & Marte Gracia
COVER / PAGES 1-2. The new X-Men team in battle in New York. That’s the main cover, obviously. There are tons of variants.
PAGES 3-5. The back story of Feilong.
This is the first appearance of Kelvin Heng, a self-made scientific genius who was on the verge of beginning his own project to terraform Mars when the Krakoans marched in and took the place over in Planet-Size X-Men #1. Though we didn’t see Feilong himself in that issue, we did see the probe sent by the company that shares his name. The word “feilong” refers to a flying dragon and isn’t particularly unusual as a name for a Chinese company. We establish here that Feilong went to the trouble of altering his own body so that he could live on Mars – an effort now entirely redundant following the Krakoan terraforming.
Nikola Tesla. We’re told that Feilong is a descendent of Nikola Tesla via his mother, described as “a Nobel Prize winner from Serbia”. Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) was indeed ethnically Serbian (though he was born in modern-day Croatia), but he emigrated to the United States in 1884 and had no children – indeed, no known relationships. However, Tesla’s name should be ringing alarm bells in a Hickman-adjacent comic, since he was a major character in Hickman’s much-delayed S.H.I.E.L.D.. In that series, he has super powers and goes by the name “Night Machine”. And he does have an adoptive son, Leonid.
In the real world, that are no Serbian Nobel Prize winners. (There have been two from Yugoslavia, but they were both Bosnian.)
PAGE 6. Recap and credits. The small print now reads “Heroes of Krakoa”.
PAGES 7-9. Cyclops meets Ben Urich.
The Treehouse is, of course, new. It keeps the Krakoan theme of everything being plant-based, with a giant tree as a skyscraper. Notably, though, the heroes of Krakoa have chosen to set up their headquarters in New York rather than on Krakoa itself. Krakoa already had a presence in New York – we’ve seen the embassy in Children of the Atom. Cyclops seems to be distancing himself a little bit from the mutant nationalism of Krakoa, expressly disavowing any good-for-a-human angle when speaking to Ben Urich. He was making similar we-are-all-alike comments in the previous issue, none of which is entirely on message for the Krakoan era. That said, he’s still put a massive Krakoan tree in the middle of New York.
Ben Urich is a Daredevil supporting character who’s been around since the late 1970s and basically serves as the epitome of quality journalism in the Marvel Universe.
Seneca Gardens. As spelled out more directly later in the issue, the Treehouse’s park is named in reference to Seneca Village, a settlement founded by free African-Americans in the 19th century, only to get demolished to make way for Central Park. (In fairness to the planners of Central Park, it wasn’t their first choice – they tried twice to acquire Jones’s Wood on the upper east side, and lost in the courts each time. But that still leaves the question of why the result was different with Seneca Village…)
Jumbo Carnation. Jumbo Carnation died in New X-Men vol 1 #134. As Urich says, that story involved some confusion about whether he had died of a drug overdose or a hate crime – it eventually turned out to be an overdose. Krakoa’s resurrection facilities are still not meant to be public knowledge, and apparently the many thousands of mutants living there have been quite good at keeping their mouths shut. So Jumbo Carnation’s return has thus far gone unexplained.
It’s a little odd that Cyclops doesn’t have a pre-planned response to this question, since it’s a very obvious one for someone to ask. Presumably the X-Men have been relying on the general public to just shrug and assume that another superhuman has inexplicably returned from the dead, as they tend to do.
PAGES 10-12. Scott and Jean.
The zoning board of Manhattan. Evidently the Treehouse is being presented to the New York authorities as a fait accompli. Well, the X-Men got away with it when they plonked the Mansion in Central Park a few years back in X-Men: Gold. In fact, despite what Cyclops says here, they did have to deal with the city authorities in that storyline.
Generally, the X-Men are setting up home here and presenting themselves as a traditional superhero team, inviting phone calls from the general (human) public.
John Proudstar is the original Thunderbird, who died in X-Men vol 1 #95.
PAGE 13. Data page about the origin of the treehouse. Note that again, despite their tag as the heroes of Krakoa, the X-Men are expressly positioned as defending the whole world. This is, at the very least, an outreach project.
The Audobon Society is basically the US equivalent of the RSPB.
PAGES 13-25. Fighting time.
A thing crashes in New York for the X-Men to fight. Nice traditional superheroics. The attacker is a machine, always a bit of a warning sign in Hickman-era cosmology. It’s identified later on as “the Mind Reaver”.
Sunfire has a new costume, a little unusual for the Krakoan era, where most people choose to cycle through their greatest hits as a wardrobe.
The jointly-piloted robot, aside from evoking a whole bunch of anime, is another example of mutants combining their powers to be greater than the sum of their parts -a recurring theme in the Krakoan era.
Mainly, though, this is a chance to get a good extended action sequence into the extra-length debut issue and let everyone show off their powers – and, perhaps most important, to send a clear message that this is now a more conventional superhero book in which an actual team behave as such.
PAGE 26. The X-Men debrief.
It’s a thing from outer space and, as Wolverine points out, its focus on “mammalian” brains is a bit odd – why would alien invaders be concerned about specifically one category of animal?
PAGES 27-29. Gameworld.
It’s a space casino, and owner Cordyceps Jones is running a game to encourage people to take out the earthlings before they get any further. Presumably it’s the terraforming of Mars in Planet-Size X-Men #1 that’s prompted this response (“Let’s take out the Earthlings before they ruin a planet we all care about.”)
Jones’ only previous appearance was in 2017’s Rocket #4, where he was depicted as a spore that possessed host bodies. Since we last saw him, he’s apparently taken over and entirely consumed this poor schmuck. A cordyceps is a type of (mostly parasitic) fungus.
Among the crowd of gamblers – and singled out on page 29 panel 5 – is the High Evolutionary, the cosmic scientist type. Not exactly a villain so much as a scientist of questionable perspective, the High Evolutionary is at least a very serious type of character, who wouldn’t normally have any interest in hanging around in a place like this. So he’s presumably here to keep an eye on something.
PAGE 30. Data page. A column written by Ben Urich in the Daily Bugle.
Ben’s comments about Krakoa claiming Mars for themselves rather than for all humanity echo comments that were made in Planet-Size X-Men itself. Cyclops seems to be conspicuously reaching out to try and bridge that gap.
The United Kingdom broke off its trade agreement with Krakoa in Excalibur #21. I’m not quite clear what Ben means when he says that fewer countries recognise Krakoa than before the Gala – recognition normally means just recognising that a country exists, and I don’t recall any scenes in the Gala tie-ins which indicated that anyone was now taking the view that Krakoa wasn’t a country at all.
New Attilan was the Inhumans’ capital city during the period in 2014 or so when Marvel were trying to replace mutants with Inhumans for reasons of licensing synergy. As Ben says, it hovered over New York and generally looked intimidating.
The Sentry did indeed have a huge Watchtower in New York, and was erased from everyone’s memories for a time. The original gimmick of the Sentry was to imply that he was a Silver Age Superman-type character who had always been there and just never got mentioned before – the eventual reveal being that he had been, and it got wiped from all our memories.
PAGES 31-34. The Oblivion Institute
The “Oblivion Institute” and “Dr Stasis” are new. They seem to be trying to hybridise humans with animals, which means this is another post-humanity project of the sort that the Hickman-era X-Men get very nervous about. Like Feilong, the narrator here considers that his years of labour have been overshadowed by the mutants.
His pinboard shows him working on an investigation into how the mutants are resurrecting their dead. Of the two photos in the final panel, one shows Jumbo Carnation. I’m not entirely clear who the other one is meant to be.
PAGE 35. Data page. “Space lawyer” Murd Blurdock invites clients to claim compensation for distress caused by the terraforming of Mars. This is a callback to the similar poster that appeared in New Mutants vol 4 #1, with the same art (which comes from Rocket #2). It almost certainly won’t matter, but Murd is a parody of Daredevil – he’s secretly the one guy who can see, in a race who rely on echo-location, and he fights crime as Seeing Being, the Sentient Without Self-Preservation.
PAGE 36. Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: KANSAS.
Paul> Sunfire has a new costume, a little unusual for the Krakoan era, where most people choose to cycle through their greatest hits as a wardrobe.
Well, you say that, but Polaris also has a new costume for this issue; and Cyclops, Wolverine-23 & Synch are in new-for-the-Krakoan-era (if no longer “new”) costumes. Rogue & Jean are the only ones on the team actually wearing pre-Krakoa costumes.
[The tendency to cycle costumes is overstated anyway. Most characters are still wearing one costume most of the time, with the occasional exception.]
Sort of feels like that was made up after the fact because they had no good answer to the question of why Jean had gone back to wearing a cocktail dress as a costume.
Cyclops’ comment about honouring Thunderbird made me wonder why the character hasn’t been resurrected yet. Presumably it’s because no one has an idea for using him, but he seems like a weird omission given that other X-Men appear to have gone to the front of the line.
I liked this pretty well.
A decent set up issue, with fantastic art.
Lots of plot stuff introduced.
They should really make all first issues oversized it allows so much more room to hook a reader.
One thing I didn’t like was how X-23 was written. Very much a generic surly Wolverine. Is she supposed to be mad because her sister was murdered?
I wish we would have gotten a clearer look at Sunfire’s costume.
“Dual black holes convey the opulent planetoid, and time passes slower here as a result. Need a vacation? You could spend a month here over your weekend.”
Am I dumb, or does that not make sense?
Paul, I take it that the previous issue that you mention would be Planet Size X-Men #1?
Fellow Ben-
I guess they’re saying he can’t be resurrected because he died before Cerebro was upgraded and never properly came back to life in all the years since.
I’m not sure that actually tracks for a number of reasons but hey.
Oh, and here is hoping that they let go of this Laura-being-called-“Wolverine” sillyness sooner rather than later. It is quite annoying to me.
I’m much more upset they traded Honey Badger for Scout.
Uncanny X-Ben-There’s the idea that time slows down as you approach a black hole.
What jumps out at me is the “twin black holes” line.
In Hickman’s mythology, we know that a singularity lies at the heart of a black hole.
Hmm…
>Of the two photos in the final panel, one shows Jumbo Carnation. I’m not entirely clear who the other one is meant to be.
I thought it was Shinobi Shaw. It looked like him, and given his role as a prominent member of the Hellfire Corporation it’s likely that humans have learned he’s alive again.
Oh! And, there’s this really great short story by Poul Anderson called “Kyrie” which deals with that theme: about a black hole and time; which will leave you on the verge of depression when you finish it.
Great story.
Is there a good reason for anyone on Marvel Earth to care that some guy was trying to build something on Mars? I feel like you can maybe get away with suggesting this is a Big Deal as long as the X-books don’t sidle up to the rest of the Marvel Universe, but you’ve got the Avengers and Fantastic Four wandering in here like old pals. Just within that Quinjet and Fantasticar you’ve got multiple people who’ve lived in space and built interdimensional vehicles.
Thunderbird briefly came back to life during Necrosha, and seemed to have all his memories at the time – IIRC he was the one who told Warpath and X-Force how to stop Selene. But unless I’m mistaken, Xavier was depowered at the time due to HOM, so maybe there’s a plausible in-universe explanation for why Cerebro wouldn’t have picked up his mind/profile/whatever. That or being one of Selene’s zombies.
Yes I do believe that’s Shinobi. I don’t know why he specifically would be singled out though.
——–
Yeah I understand that concept about time slowing down around a black holes.
But if time slowed down it should make your time there seem shorter, not longer right? IE a minute inside the time distortion would be an hour in the outside universe?
Or have I finally become untethered?
The farther from the black hole you, the faster time moves.
So, if you go from Earth to that world, a weekend on Earth could worth a month on that planetoid.
It seems you have spent a month on vacation, but when you arrive back on Earth, it will only have taken up a weekend of Earth-time.
So, you got more vacation time.
The chronology of who can be resurrected is pretty incoherent at this point. Amahl Farouk died well before Xavier formed the X-Men and he’s back. So is Changeling, who died in the 60s. But there’s also Necrosha as a cure-all for the backups. Probably best to not think about it.
Uncanny X-Ben-But, yes, while you are on that plenetoid, it will seem that time moves faster for you than it would have on Earth.
It’s just playing with relativity.
Like, imagine living a month’s worth of time within the span of a weekend’s time.
I wonder if Duggan just misused the word ancestor and meant relative when describing Feilong’s relationship to Nikola Tesla. He had no children himself, but he had multiple siblings.
I thought it was ‘old’ Attilan that floated over NYC, for a really short time. New Attilan was sat next to the statue of liberty.
This was good. Perhaps it’s being back in NY, but it felt like if Gold had been done right. The Hickman themes are there but slightly adjacent, and the point still seems to be to let the X-Men score some wins for a change, and demonstrate the cool and useful things Mutants can contribute besides another paramilitary strike force.
The Treehouse is a fantastic idea. The grounds are inviting, yet there’s still a bio-futuristic enigmatic aspect to the design, since the only way to enter the treehouse above is via the gates.
The Voltron moment was kinda cheesy but if they want to do some fun kaiju battle why not let the powers combine trope manifest alongside the Hickman mutant circuit stuff.
Also, really narration heavy issue for contemporary comics, no? I’m here for it though.
Oh also Feilong, great use of Mars, letting some resentment fuel a revenge quest. Nice to have a villain with clear motivations.
Shinobi Shaw would make sense on the last page, since Duggan reintroduced him in Marauders but hasn’t really done anything with him since.
I originally read the space casino as a sort of wacky homage to Jason Aaron’s stories. I think there was a similar concept in his early issues. But as Chris V points out, Hickman stories have advanced civilizations hidden inside black holes, so maybe there’s more going on there.
I hadn’t realized that there was a time limit on who could be resurrected — that does make it odd that Changeling has been in crowd scenes. Probably an error.
I enjoyed this issue, but I do find myself looking forward to some big-picture plot development in Inferno.
Ben Johnston-It wasn’t until Xavier got the Shi’ar logic crystal that he was able to record a person’s soul.
There’s a scene in House of X which shows when Xavier went to Forge to get Cerebro updated, so that it could record the souls.
That placed the time-point when the resurrection was possible.
I forget the exact point in the time-line, but it was after Thunderbird died.
Before that point, Xavier could not record souls with Cerebro. So, anyone who died permanently before that point, Xavier cannot restore their soul; they cannot be resurrected.
It seems to me that there’s a fix for any mutants who supposedly don’t have backups already in place.
Krakoa has access to time travel/time travellers, right? Just send someone with a Cerebro back to the appropriate times, zoink a download, come back to the present and wham.
It would take Cable 5 minutes, tops. And since all you’re doing is downloading a mental backup, you’re not even altering the timeline.
The problem then becomes that the X-Men went back on time to back up Changeling, Petra and Sway but are leaving John Proudstar dead and paying tribute to a man they could just bring back to life. Which is, at a minimum, a dick move to his brother.
Just to nitpick, but there were three Nobel winners from Yugoslavia: Mother Theresa was from what’s now North Macedonia.
Besides Destiny and Thunderbolt, which other mutants are known to be unresurrected?
Blindfold was also not resurrected for the same reasons as Destiny (precognitive), and it’s been brought up in Way of X as one of the reasons why her boyfriend Legion is suspicious of the whole Krakoa project.
I believe Emma Frost has deliberately blocked or stalled the resurrection of her sister Cordelia as well, as she made mention of it in Marauders.
Oh, and of course Madelyne Pryor has also been denied resurrection after dying in Hellions, as she is a clone of Jean Grey.
Emma blocking Cordelia feels like a mixup by Duggan – Adrienne is the Frost sibling that Emma actually hates (and murdered!), where Cordelia was broadly sympathetic.
There are other mutants who haven’t cropped up but it’s not a plot point, they’re just minor, e.g, the Acolytes who died over the years. Honestly surprised that Percy hasn’t put Crimson Commando, Stonewall and Super Sabre in the background of a Green Lagoon scene yet, though.
“ (In fairness to the planners of Central Park, it wasn’t their first choice – they tried twice to acquire Jones’s Wood on the upper east side, and lost in the courts each time. But that still leaves the question of why the result was different with Seneca Village…)”
Really weird anecdote. Why are we giving “fairness” to them for using eminent domain on formerly enslaved, private landowners? Sounds about white.
X-Ben is exactly right, isn’t he? “To a distant observer, clocks near a black hole would appear to tick more slowly than those further away from the black hole.” (Wikipedia) If your clock is going more slowly, then a day near the black hole would be (say) a month away from the black hole. If it wouldn’t kill you, it would be a way to fast forward yourself through time, not pack a long vacation into a weekend back on Earth.
It’s a joke about relativity.
Yes, as I said, to the person on the planetoid, it would seem that time was moving faster. That’s technically true.
However, take one Earth-hour: on the planetoid, it would be the equivalent of…I mean, I’m not doing the math or anything…but let’s say the equivalent of five hours.
You stay on the planet over an Earth weekend, translate that in to the equivalency time it would be on the planetoid…Hence, you got a month of vacation time.
More vacation time for your buck, but only relatively speaking.
As I said, it’s like saying that you get to live a month’s worth of time within the span of a weekend’s time.
It’s a joke. I thought it was funny.
It’s like a come-on ad.
@matchommars Your point may not be wrong, but god is “sounds about white” cringey as hell. Maybe leave that to the Twitter-sphere
Yes thank you!
You don’t get magical extra time, time just passes differently.
A slowed down hour for you is still just an hour for you.
It’s only relative to the outside time frame that it’s different.
It sure doesn’t read like a joke to me.
Nor does it make sense it the context of the issue.
Why would anyone want that for anything other than one way time travel?
By the time the people on the black hole casino made their next move to attack the X-Men it would be the year 2176.
It makes zero sense.
Isn’t the ad to attract tourists to the casino?
Casinos usually try to attract customers and often use come-ons to appeal to them.
I thought Duggan was trying to be clever, and it was a time that I actually found it funny.
It’s a joke only nerds could enjoy, I guess.
This was fun. I didn’t expect this to be so typically superheroic, but that is a nice change of pace. I liked the use of Ben Urich and the Columbo-like ‘just one more thing mr Summers’.
I wonder if anybody will being up the fact that the X-Men are now elected ‘and also Scott and Jean are there, it’ s their clubhouse’.
Also I now want a scene set at the Summer House with Wolverine staying behind with a beer while Jean and Scott leave to go to work.
Anyway. The x-bot was dumb, but sure, why not? And it all looked great.
Actually, Uncanny X-Ben, I have come around to your way of thinking.
I don’t think I considered returning home from the casino.
You’d spend your weekend at the casino, but return home to Earth a month later. That’s probably not conducive if you have a job.
I guess I was thinking too much about other time dilation in science fiction, that travelling faster than the speed of light slows down the aging process.
So, it seemed like you would be getting more benefit for your time there as compared to Earth-time, but that’s not what Duggan really wrote.
Yeah scifi has a funny relationship with science.
Traveling near the speed of light does slow down your aging, because the faster you go the slower time passes.
It’s the same thing. You don’t actually gain anything besides one directional time travel into the future. It’s just basically complicated suspended animation. But you can watch a movie or something while it happens.
Reality isn’t any fun.
“Besides Destiny and Thunderbird, which other mutants are known to be unresurrected?”
What about what’s his name? Rusty Nail. No, wait… Tom Collins. No, wait… Rusty Collins.
I keep wondering whether we will see Johnny “Ricochet” Gallo during this run.
I don’t think that he has died, though. He just hasn’t been shown reacting to the current status quo of Krakoa and the X-Men.
Uncanny X-Ben-The fun is in the fiction stories you can write that deal with the topic.
I mean, if you want to outlive everyone on Earth, moving at the speed of light would accomplish your goal.
You could come back eighty years down the road and see if everyone killed themselves yet.
The casino could appeal to vanity, in some way.
You could stay on the casino for a couple years and return to Earth and be younger than all your friends.
You get to at least gamble while you mess with your friends.
*a couple weeks on the casino, I meant to write!
“@matchommars Your point may not be wrong, but god is “sounds about white” cringey as hell. Maybe leave that to the Twitter-sphere”
His point was dumb too. Paul’s point still acknowledged the racism involved in the event.
Anyhow, I did like this issue. It fills a gap in the line by providing standard superheroics and it’s well-done. Pepe Larraz and RB Silva really are the stars of the Krakoan Era, and happily, the editors seem to know it.
The whole “Let’s be superheroes for good mutant PR” rationale to just do your normal routine also feels less like a mere excuse than it did under Whedon and Gillen (to pick two writers that come to mind).
I’m onboard.
Re: Thunderbird
As has been mentioned, there are plenty of mutants who’ve been resurrected despite having died before cerebro started recording. Necrosha and Chaos War are responsible for that- they both featured dead mutants being resurrected briefly, and cerebro apparently recorded them then.
So it is confusing that the X-men would publicly pay tribute to Thunderbird’s death in this way, because it implies that he isn’t even in the queue. As for Changeling, I do believe he was drawn into that crowd scene accidentally. But I’d love to see him on Krakoa.
Regarding Proudstar, etc.: It’s an oft-made observation that fiction has to make more sense than real life. But just for myself, I assume obvious contradictions that don’t really matter to the story (like why Proudstar hasn’t been revived, as opposed to the whole plot of “The Draco”) could be sensibly explained were we privy to the minor details that so often explain unbelievable events in our world, such as anecdotes used by conservative news stations to get their viewers’ dander up.
There’s some extenuating circumstance that makes Proudstar, etc a problem. Maybe even just corrupted data. Onward.
“There’s some extenuating circumstance that makes Proudstar, etc a problem. Maybe even just corrupted data. Onward.”
Proudstar was one of the first dead X-Men (not counting Changeling) and the subject of massive amounts of handwringing over the years and a primary motivation for Warpath. In this case, it does matter to many long-time readers the why and how, because he ostensibly would have been one of the first in queue. Whenever dead X-Men are resurrected — Necrosha, Chaos War, etc. — he’s always one of the first to show. Whenever there are mutant ghosts in someone’s subconscious, he’s always there. The character matters, which is why very long-time readers are so pressed for an answer.
“Really weird anecdote. Why are we giving “fairness” to them for using eminent domain on formerly enslaved, private landowners? Sounds about white”
The phrase “in fairness” is oft not meant to extend fairness to a person. It can be a bit cheeky — to damn someone by articulating the criticism first, articulating their reasoning and then excuse, and then knocking it down. Lord knows, I’ve been reading Paul’s columns since Usenet was popping and it’s a turn of phrase I picked up and overused from him.
It is more of a sentence-structure thing than a genuine attempt to give the people who demolished Seneca park any grace.
Seneca Village, rather.