Uncanny X-Men #6 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #6
“The Change in Ourselves”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Javier Garrón
Colourist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
THE X-MEN:
Wolverine still hasn’t regained his eyesight, even though some time has obviously passed since the last issue (as Marcus has had time to get the Outliers into school). This is unusual for Wolverine but nobody comments on it, so it may just be an editorial decision to drag Wolverine’s healing powers back into more sensible territory than it’s been pitched at in recent years.
He explains that he’s depressed because he recently acquired a bottle of tequila for outliving the last of a bunch of army friends. We saw Logan collect this bottle from a dying friend near the start of issue #1, but the criteria for him “winning” it weren’t explained. Rogue‘s conclusion is that Wolverine has PTSD which has never been properly treated, which seems reasonable enough – many stories over the years have suggested that Wolverine’s healing factor attempts to deal with psychiatric injury but only in rather unhelpful ways, such as suppressing painful memories. Wolverine isn’t convinced, ahd points out that she isn’t a therapist.
Gambit proves surprisingly effective at persuading Calico to accept that she’s a mutant – he ascribes it to her needing a new parent figure. Parenthood is a major theme of this series so far, and the basic premise of Sarah Gaunt’s character.
Jubilee is missing her adopted son Shogo, who stayed in Otherworld as a dragon in Knights of X #5. She and Calico get abducted by the Graymalkin crew to set up the “Raid on Graymalkin” crossover, for reasons which aren’t made clear at this stage (assuming that they extend beyond “because mutants”).
Nightcrawler tells Jubilee that he sometimes thinks about having kids, but thinks he’s a better babysitter.
SUPPORTING CAST:
Calico. An opening flashback to “six years ago” shows her mother infantilising her; at that point she’s keen to go to a normal school, but gets shut down at once. This is consistent with her account of her origin in issue #3, though that showed her slightly older, and put more emphasis on her isolation than on her not being allowed to grow up. She said in issue #3 that she had “No films, no TV, no music”, but her room here has a TV with a video game console of some sort attached ot it. Maybe it got removed as she got older.
In the present day, she vigorously refuses to go to school – with both her and Ember’s eyes gleaming. Again, a possible reading is that Ember is driving this and resists the prospect of being separated from her. This is the first time that she’s been at all uncooperative. She even has Ember boot Wolverine in the face when he tries to talk sense into her. According to him, the horse is insanely powerful – if we’re to take him literally when he says that he can’t remember the last time he was hit that hard, then Ember is more powerful than Sarah Gaunt, who he fought in issue #2-3. And Sarah was strong enough to break Rogue’s wrist.
Calico does calm down when spoken to sternly and in a trad-parent manner. She tends to fend off claims that she might be a mutant by citing her (clearly deranged) mother, but changes tack surprisingly quickly when Gambit gives her a pep talk. Everyone seems inclined to take this as a good thing and an act of self-acceptance, but it’s so abrupt that you have to wonder.
She’s only reluctantly separated from her beloved horse in order to go to school, and the Graymalkin soldiers have little difficulty in defeating her when Ember isn’t around. I still think it’s an open question whether she really is a mutant, or whether the horse is the one with the power.
Jitter tries to make friends with the kids on the school bus, and is upset by their rejection. Ransom and Deathdream both deal with the bullies on her behalf (and without her involvement). Ransom claims that he was an Olympic boxing hopeful. He also reprimands Deathdream for not supporting Jitter and not caring about anyone but himself – however, last issue we were told that Jitter and Deathdream were particuarly close, so it’s possible that Ransom is just misreading Deathdream’s surface persona.
Marcus St Juniors insists on any children staying at Haven going to school, which seems fair enough since his own daughter Chelsea St Juniors goes there already. She gives Calico her stuffed toy in orer to comfort her in Ember’s absence. Principal Owens is evidently on good terms with Marcus and willing to bend the rules to admit the Outliers early (though they still need school uniforms). He tells them to “keep a low profile, for everyone’s safety”, which suggests that he knows they’re mutants; it seems to be intended as genuine practical advice.
VILLAINS:
Jubilee and Calico are both abducted by soldiers from the Graymalkin Prison; the gunman who first tries to arrest Jubilee is head of security Captain Ezra. Dr Corina Ellis gets a brief cameo at the end of the issue.
Ezra is accompanied by the Blob, Siryn and an unnamed character who looks to be Wild Child. All are wearing gray uniforms (though Siryn still has her costume wings) and seem to be wearing control collars. We saw Blob and Siryn as prisoners in the Free Comic Book Day one-shot, and Dr Ellis invited Siryn to become one of her trustees in issue #2. Apparently she wasn’t giving Siryn a choice. As for Wild Child, this is his first significant appearance since the Krakoan-era Hellions book was cancelled.
Tommy is the school bully who gets a name.
Calico’s mother, presumably Mrs Simon-Pinette, is a controlling weirdo. She not only fires an assistant groundskeeper for telling her daughter about the outside world, but falsely accuses him of sexual offences. It’s not clear whether the staff were told not to speak to Becca, but the fact that she felt the need to invent a false reason suggests not.
OTHER REFERENCES:
Page 7: “Harvey X and Sarah Gaunt both tried to warn us. One of the kids here at Haven might be the Endling, the last mutant on Earth, the one who watches as every mutant dies.” In issue #1, Harvey X said: “They’re coming. You have to help them. One of them is the Endling.” He didn’t specify what an Endling was. Sarah didn’t warn them so much as just try to kill the Outliers.
Page 12: “Everyone has chores.” This was indeed given as the first rule of Haven in issue #3. (The other two were “Everyone cooks” and “Everyone cleans.”)
Page 13: “Marigny Bywater.” These are actually two different districts of New Orleans, though they do neighbour each other.
Page 13: “Besson’s Dark.” Previously mentioned in issue #1, where Gambit described it as one of his favourite beers and “only available from a tiny grocery chain in town”, which would apparently be the Guidry’s Grocery chain seen here. Nightcrawler either doesn’t realise that it’s a local craft beer, or has remarkably jingoistic views on the quality of German beer for someone who’s been living abroad this long.
““Harvey X and Sarah Gaunt both tried to warn us. One of the kids here at Haven might be the Endling, the last mutant on Earth, the one who watches as every mutant dies.” In issue #1, Harvey X said: “They’re coming. You have to help them. One of them is the Endling.” He didn’t specify what an Endling was. Sarah didn’t warn them so much as just try to kill the Outliers.”
It was SADURANG. not Sarah Gaunt, who tried to warn them about the Endling in issue 1. It’s not exactly reassuring that Simone can’t seem to remember what she wrote five issues ago.
“Ezra is accompanied by the Blob, Siryn and an unnamed character who looks to be Wild Child. ”
There was considerable debate on the internet over whether that was supposed to be Toad or Wild Child.
This was a lot – setting up the crossover, four new characters still barely developed beyond tropes, and for some reason we get the ‘revelation’ that Wolverine might have some PTSD? Doesn’t he have multiple solo books for that? The Nightcrawler moment was a nice inversion of expectations but I don’t know if I buy Calico suddenly accepting she’s a mutant after a short conversation with Gambit.
The principal is doing the Midnight M in one panel, so he may be a mutant himself.
I’m still trying with this book, and there’s a lot to like (the scene with Nightcrawler and Jubilee, Gambit trying his hand at mentoring). But the stuff with the kids is just dull. I get that everyone wants to create new characters in the hope they’ll stick, but all the new mutants introduced post-Krakoa are just so dull.
I think the Krakoa era showed that there was a lot of interesting things you could do by integrating the “evil mutants” and telling new stories with new configurations of existing characters, instead of just introducing endless generations of mostly-forgettable kids. But now, we’re seeing new mutant school in all three flagships, and I don’t expect to see any of these characters again outside of a background scene once we move to what’s next.
So Calico is from Clintwood, VA. That’s a real life place, a town of about 1400 down there in the very tip of southwest Virginia, not far from the Kentucky border. It’s an interesting location just for being so specifically small town and I wonder if there’s any significance to the choice, or just Gail being capricious. After all, all evidence is that Calico is extremely sheltered and privileged, her mother extremely controlling and clearly a bit… unconventional with her views on both parenting and mutants. What if there really is something to the talk of goblins and witches, the hyperfocus on horses, and Calico’s bond with Ember?
Just saying, she wouldn’t be the first mutant with ties to the mythological, folkloric, or supernatural…
^Silver John? Shonokins?
What if the horse has been trying to tell everyone its a mutant since the beginning, but it can’t do the midnight M with hooves?
Actually there’s a lot of mutants who’d have trouble with it. Nightcrawler for example. Why’d they pick a sign for mutants that relies on having ordinary human anstomy?
The “Zagg’s Chips” mentioned on p10 are a thinly-veiled version of the actual New Orleans based “Zapp’s” brand. I discovered a few months ago that Amazon sells their “New Orleans Voodoo” flavor, which is odd, but has grown on me. These chips can also be seen in some episodes of Leverage: Redemption.
I think that Calico *is* a mutant, but is a specialized power-granter. I bet she’s going to escape by giving the stuffed dinosaur powers 🙂
@John: No one expected we’d see Quentin Quire again after Riot at Xavier’s either, or that out of everyone in Generation Hope it would be Idie who ended up getting the most exposure. Introducing new mutants is always a gamble, but you never know who audiences will latch onto.
“So Calico is from Clintwood, VA.”
It is curious that the flashback is set there since in previous issues Becca had said she was a Simon-Pinette of the Loudon County Simon-Pinettes. There is a Loudon County in Virginia, but it’s nowhere near Clintwood, which is in Dickinson County.
@Diana: Probably more a question of which character future writers will latch onto, but they are of course part of the audience too.
Sitting here in a befuddled half-awake state trying to work out what Chris V is talking about. Silver John is of course a great Manly Wade Wellman hero. (Fresh in my mind because I was looking at the list of Last Dangerous Visions stories and one was a chapbook from the fancy The Complete John the Balladeer book set I got a while back.)
And Shonokins are… well, after googling, a monster a different Manly Wade Wellman hero faced? Oh, but also in one of the Silver John novels that I haven’t read, “After Dark”.
But I still don’t understand the connection with anything else here?
@Sol: Maybe they’ll fight the Ugly Bird next issue.
Morrison’s “new mutant” characters seem to have a lot of sticking power: Quentin, the Cuckoos, Glob, Beak, Angel are all currently appearing in the X-books.
I assume that has something to do with the popularity of Morrison’s run. But maybe it’s also because Morrison gave the characters things to do besides a) get trained in the Danger Room and b) get sucked into fights with supervillains. They had unique perspectives in the story and weren’t just defined by their powers.
@Sol: At a guess, maybe it’s the general “supernatural characters from Appalachia” thing?
@Thom H- Beak and Angel arguably don’t qualify, since they’re only appearing in the Infinity Comics. You’re right about Quentin, the Cuckoos and Glob, though. (Of course, it took a LOT of work by later writers to make Quentin and Glob even vaguely sympathetic/heroic. )
Every (good) new mutants book gives the new kids unique perspectives and story arcs.
Morrison’s special class had the added benefit of co-starring in the main x-book instead of a b- or c-title like most new mutants.
I do think it mostly has to do with who the new writers latched onto when they were fans. I like the Academy X kids. They got nothing after Messiah Complex ended their book. For almost 20 years. X-23 nonwithstanding, since she was dropped into that book instead of coming out of it.
And now, suddenly, NYX is basically an Academy X reunion book, Surge was part of X-Force (and I still expect her to be back in energy form at some point), even the rather bland Wind Dancer is doing something.
Sol-As Omar and Drew guessed, Clintwood, VA is in Appalachia, and The Other Michael mentioned goblins and witches. So, it brought to mind the Manly Wade Wellman John the Balladeer stories. Just a joke.
I’m pretty sure Glob Herman’s sticking power was in fact his unique and memorable appearance, more than anything else, until — was it Jason Aaron who really had a thing for him? — anyway, until writers decided he’d be interesting as part of an ensemble. If you can’t have a unique personality (i.e. Quentin as the resident uppity rebel/asshole) then have the sort of distinctive look writers wanna use or artists wanna draw (like Glob or Pixie or Anole or Rockslide).
Beak was popular because writers liked to pair distinctive appearance with useless powers with ‘well, he has a personality’. Angel… well, she really got demoted to ‘Beak’s baby momma/wife/occasional partner in adventure when not stuck at home with the hatchlings’ after Morrison was done.
As noted, be bland (Wind Dancer) and you have to hope a writer sees something in the character…
@The Other Michael- I’m not sure I’d really say Beak is popular. Yes he was used in Exiles for a couple of years, and as the-Blackwing-that-wasn’t-Silvermane’s-son in that awful New Warriors series and he appeared in that 6-issue Vengeance series but aside from that he really hasn’t been used that much. He really hasn’t had that many appearances since the Vengeance series ended.
Glob Herman is even weirder. He had only THREE appearances between Riot at Xavier’s and Aaron’s Wolverine and the X-Men series. Yes. Aaron used him as part of the ensemble of students but he betrayed the X-Men AGAIN to the Hellfire Brats and nearly killed Quentin. He didn’t start to become heroic until after Arron was gone.
[…] X-MEN #6. (Annotations here.) This is a transition issue between the “Red Wave” arc and the “Raid on […]
“I’m not sure I’d really say Beak is popular. Yes he was used in Exiles for a couple of years, and as the-Blackwing-that-wasn’t-Silvermane’s-son in that awful New Warriors series and he appeared in that 6-issue Vengeance series but aside from that he really hasn’t been used that much. He really hasn’t had that many appearances since the Vengeance series ended.”
As far as young mutants go, that IS popular, at least for a while. He certainly got more use than most of them. Heck, he survived New Warriors which is more than I can say for some of them. Though I agree he’s mostly been demoted to “guy with family” and cameo appearances, but he’s still had a higher profile than many of the Academy X or Jean Grey School kids.
@The Other Michael- Beak is certainly not as popular as any of the Claremont New Mutants kids or the later young mutants who worked with them in X-Force (Rictor, Boom-Boom, Warpath, Shatterstar, Siryn.) As for Generation X, he’s certainly not as popular as M, Husk or Chamber. It’s true that he avoided being killed off for decades like Skin or Synch but Synch has recently seen a resurgence. As for the later students, he’s not as popular as the Cuckoos. Quentin, Glob Herman, Idie, Hellion, Anole, Rockslide, Prodigy, Pixie, or Elixir.
I’d say some of the popularity of Morrison’s characters is due to the influence of that run. I don’t think bit players like Redneck or Tattoo made it into the New Warriors based on their distinctive personalities.
If there’s a formula for making it as a new mutant character, it’s 1) have a distinctive visual, and 2) have a creator like you.
It harder to get new mutant’s through when so much space needs to be given to fan favorites. which dates back from Claremont not being able to retire Scott when Nathan was born. The number of Characters at the top of the resurrection queue is so long you really need a good reason to use a gen hope, Jean grey, Bendis or new x-men character. Even the New Mutants end up slide lined in to their own team book.
If you look at 21st century X-men in the new books, they area all ones that have been given feature rolls already.
X-men Quintin was the key antagonist of both Wolverine and the X-men and x-force. Temper was part of the OG X-men road trip team and was the focal point of Schism and was just in Sabretooth.
X-force we need to see if surge will return otherwise it was new x-men as cannon fodder
X-factor – the newest is Cecilia Reyes
Dazzler has wind dancer and Shark girl as background character’s.
Uncanny and Extraordinary no 21st century x-men. Gambit is the newest character in either book at the start of the run.
NYX the young book is lead by a Charecter that was not even created as a mutant and has had over 100 issues as a solo or team leaded in the champions. 2nd lead is x23 who benefits from being a Wolverine and has had her own solo. The Cuckoo have been in constant use especially under Bendis. Anole had one big arc in Lameires run so this is one of his 1st big spotlights. Prodidgy had time in new Avengers and x-force.
Even in the last Era the Main 21st century characters were mainly the same people X23, Quintin the Cuckoos, Dust, Blindfold and Eye boy.
Imagine if change were allowed and the old guard would occasionally die and be replaced by the newer guards. Death is part of life, so is growth. Yet comics seem to only care about stunting, in all its meanings. Scott and Storm and Logan had their day, this endless recycling serves nobody, least of all the characters.
Most mainstream comics don’t work that way.
Superman, Batman and the others are not going away any time soon.
It’s the audience who should be recycled in order for it to work.
“Morrison’s special class had the added benefit of co-starring in the main x-book instead of a b- or c-title like most new mutants.”
This is such a good point. I wonder how much “has interacted with the actual X-Men” factors into other decisions mentioned here. Meaning: how much do characters like Quentin and the Cuckoos stick in creators’ minds because they were front and center in main title arcs like “Riot at Xavier’s”?
@JCG: That’s not entirely true – DC had legacy heroes like Wally West and Kyle Rayner inheriting the mantles of their predecessors. Dick Grayson’s become Batman on more than one occasion. It just didn’t stick because they made the mistake of hiring regressives like Geoff Johns, whose only shtick besides having characters stabbed from behind is turning the clock back.
Marvel went for a different approach, the “have/eat cake” strategy where Jane Foster can be Thor, but Odinson’s still running around, and both Sam Wilson and Steve Rogers can be Captain America, etc. That, of course, is an inherently flawed strategy because as long as the predecessor remains active, that’ll be the one the audience reads as “real”. (See: Peter Parker being called Spider-Man, and Miles Morales being called… Miles Morales.)
Wait a second – I don’t think that’s entirely fair to Geoff Johns. He also really liked to have characters get their arms pulled off. Otherwise, I agree. I miss Kyle.
@Diana- I remember when Marvel had a policy of having only one name per character because otherwise people might get confused. Although it resulted in problems like Richard Ryder being called Kid Nova when he got his powers back because Frankie Raye was already called Nova, which allegedly led to Frankie being killed off.
How many Captains America are there now? To be honest I haven’t read the mini that introduced the Captain America Network. I think only Aaron Fischer still appears anywhere (and he’s relegated to the Unlimited exclusive), but presumably the… four? others are still active? As are Steve and Sam.
At this point US Agent might feel like he’s the butt of their joke.
@Alastair: I think that’s part of the issue, but I think there’s a structural flaw with the X-Men’s premise that makes it worse. They’re supposed to be based out of a school for mutants, but sooner or later the kids will have to grow up some, if only because they can’t have decades worth of stories behind them and still be teenagers. That just leads to another generation of students who take their place, which starts the cycle over again.
And the problem may have gone into overdrive over the past 20 years. The Morrison era had the Special Class and the Omega Gang, then we got the New Mutants and the Hellions, the Young X-Men, the Five Lights, the X-Men: Red kids, the Uncanny X-Men vol. 3 kids, the Children of the Atom, and now the Exceptional X-Men kids. That’s a lot of characters to push and while I can understand that creators might want to throw ideas out there and see what sticks, it makes it almost impossible for characters to stick around if they’re just going to be cycled out for the next batch of kids.
@Kryzsiek- the issue I have with the multiple Captain Americas is that the Skull has a habit of doing nasty things to Captain Americas who aren’t Steve. He beat Roscoe to death and murdered US Agent’s parents in front of him in order to drive him insane. It makes no difference with Sam and James because they’ve already thwarted the Skull’s schemes 649 times. But did anyone tell the other Captain Americas what they’re getting themselves into?
@Taibak-Yeah. the problem wasn’t too bad before Generation X and X-Force got cancelled in 2001. Generation X was the mutants-in-training- and X-Force featured the New Mutants kids plus Warpath. Boom-Boom, etc.. But after they were both cancelled, Morrison decided that it would be a good idea to make the Mansion an actual school again, as opposed to the Massachussetts Academy. So instead of finding places for the Generation X and X-Force characters, some of whom spent years in limbo, Morrison introduced a new class of students. But even worse, he established there were over a hundred students attending the school instead of a small group as with the New Mutants or Generation X. That meant that any writer could introduce a new student whenever they felt like it and say they were always there.
Honestly, all of the students introduced between the start of Morrison’s run and the founding of Krakoa seem to me to be part of one large class. We had Quentin and Glob, who were introduced in Morrison’s run in the same class with idle, who was one of the Five Lights in Wolverine and the X-Men. We had Glob, who was introduced in Morrison’s run, and Shark-Girl, who was introduced in Wolverine and the X-Men in the same class in Spider-Man and the X-Men.
Yeah, there were age differences between them withing the group / book (Academy X didn’t use specific ages IIRC, but specifically said which kids were younger, who was the youngest among them and so on), but in later books they were all thrown in together.
Quentin and Idie were dating despite Idie being, supposedly, the youngest of the Lights (I think Fraction gave her age when she was introduced, and it was… thirteen? fourteen?). But, well, he spent some time on the astral plane, probably not aging (?), and there was the sliding scale, and we’re really not supposed to think about these things anymore… nobody wants another Angel and Husk kerfuffle…
I don’t think about all the kids from those 20 years of comics as one group/class. For me it goes something like this:
Morrison / Academy X / Young X-Men – one class/age group (Dust was in all of them)
Five Lights / Wolverine and the X-Men / Bendis kids (we have to ignore the obvious age gaps between the Lights themselves; also, Hijack was clearly an adult, but nobody cares about Hijack, you probably forgot there was a Hijack)
after that the only ‘new mutants’ book coming out was the All-New X-Men / X-Men Blue starring the time displaced O5 (and later X-23, Idie and Evan Sabahnur), practically all the way up to Krakoa
So the penultimate batch would be all those Krakoan kids we’ll presumably never see again (Gimmick/Feint being maybe the sole exception). But here the sliding timescale caught up with all the previous batches, with characters from Academy X training together with brand new kids in Vita Ayala’a New Mutants, for example.
And now we have the first post-Krakoan crop of Uncanny Endlings and the Kate & Emma show trio.
It’s interesting to me that, in an environment notorious for creators not putting forth new character concepts, the X-books have the opposite problem: way too many new, non-derivative characters. So many that you can kill a handful and still have too many. Is there something about this corner of the Marvel universe that overrides creators’ concerns about control of new characters?
Maybe because new mutants tend to be fairly generic, meant-to-operate-on-a-team types? A bunch of quickly designed power sets with a couple of teenage personality traits attached, one of whom will hopefully catch on? It reminds me of Alpha Flight: create outlines of characters, set them loose in the story, fill them in later as necessary.
Even if that’s true, Gail Simone’s new mutants actually seem fairly distinctive in terms of design. Maybe she’s really not concerned about receiving compensation if/when one of them takes off. Maybe she doesn’t believe any of them will. Or maybe it’s all part of the expectation when you’re writing an X-book.
@Thom H.: I tend to agree with the folks that have connected the multiple waves of new characters to the cyclical idea that “school for mutants” is a core part of the concept. Established characters are hard to turn back into students, so new mutant youth need to be created.
@Krzysiek: It’s not so much a question of whether or not they were one group, it’s the sheer volume of characters that’s the issue.
@Thom H.: I really think it comes back to the idea that the X-Men are meant to be training young mutants in how to use their powers. As long as they have a school, they need students. Those students will need to be replaced every so often because it doesn’t make sense to call them “The New Mutants” after ten years of stories.
And even if there’s no school, you still have characters taking young mutants under their usually metaphorical wing because that’s just what the X-Men do.
Which just takes us back to M-Day. The whole point of that was because Quesada wanted to limit the number of mutants being created because it had become too easy to create generic characters and label them as mutants. I think he was right about that, but the execution was, well, horrible.
Interesting. Time dilation must be different for a lot of these “new mutant” characters then. Kitty/Kate’s been aging about as slowly as she can (maybe 10 years of age in 45 years of real time) while new young mutants are aging out of school in what? A decade? Two?
It’s such a weird confluence of comic book specific problems:
— We need new young mutants for the X-concept to be complete.
— Only a handful are going to join the main team because we don’t want the old X-characters to retire.
— Time dilation is speeding up(?) so the young mutants can’t stay students for very long.
— B-tier “young mutant” books get cancelled more frequently than the main books.
I suppose it’s not much different than the Robin problem DC has, but instead of a single new character it’s a whole generation of new characters for each iteration.