Exceptional X-Men #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #4
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artist: Carmen Caranero
Colour artist: Nolan Woodard
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort
THE MAIN CAST:
Bronze goes to Westinghouse College Prep, which is a real school. It’s not the same school as Senn College, where Melée was playing on the soccer team in issue #1. She wavers about whether to audition for the school musical (The Loveliest Sunday, which isn’t a real show), because on the one hand, she has a crush on a boy who’s going to be in it, but on the other hand, she’s afraid of turning into her metal form during the audition. Since it’s clear in this story that her powers are not generally known in the school, she evidently doesn’t have a general problem with controlling her powers; she must be worried about a stress reaction. Emma and Bobby both advise her to go ahead, and Emma encourages her to use the situation as a way of keeping her focus.
She’s distracted during training at the start of the issue, and panics. But in her first actual fight, she defeats a monster on her own, and she’s justifiably proud of this success. Still, she decide that she’s not cut out for a lead role, or maybe just that she ought to be devoting her spare time to training.
She feels that her family and popular culture keep expecting her to be “strong” when she only wants to be “gentle” and “peaceful”. We saw in issue #1 that she lives with her grandmother; she mentions here that her mother “had to go away”, but doesn’t elaborate.
Melée and Axo show up to be supportive but don’t otherwise have much to do here. Their names are the wrong way round on the recap page.
Kate is actively avoiding Bobby, just as she’s tried to avoid all contact with the X-Men during the “From the Ashes” era. Kate correctly regards his behaviour as pushy and weird, and tells him to go away. She incorrectly assumes that he’s an impostor until she realises that he’s been sent by Rogue. When arguing with Bobby, Kate says that she killed people during “Fall of X”, loudly enough for the kids to hear. Generally, the idea seems to be that her rejection of the X-Men is tied to trying to reject the persona that she took on during the later Duggan issues. Axo seems surprised; Bronze seems appalled; Melée’s reaction is harder to read. Emma mainly seems worried about the kids’ reaction.
Emma Frost is still using psychic ilusions to train the kids, in the absence of any proper equipment. When asked by Bronze why she doesn’t just read Bobby’s mind to find out why he’s acting strangely, she basically replies that she won’t do that as a concession to the X-Men’s values. This objection apparently doesn’t extend to looking through Kate’s eyes or mind-controlling the kids in the earlier issues, but who ever said Marvel’s psychic ethics were consistent? It’s also possible that Emma is just lying and knows perfectly well what Bobby is there for – she strongly implies to Bobby that at the very least she’s worked it out – and that she simply wans to reassure Bronze.
Iceman is hanging around to help out with training – for some reason, he now wears normal clothes over his ice body, rather than just returning to human form outright. He’s quite supportive as a teacher, but mostly dreadful at concealing the fact that he has an ulterior motive to be there; even Trista can figure that out. Mind you, Priti seems to take his offer to cook for her and Kate at face value. (Bobby seems to come up with this idea because he’s meant to be hanging around with Kate and she’s avoiding him by no-showing training sessions.)
Much of the story is spent hinting that Iceman is there for sinister reasons, but in fact he’s been sent by Rogue to check whether Kate is okay, given her refusal to speak to any of the X-Men. But Bobby has no particularly good reason to be in town, forcing him to mumble platitudes about finding “grounding” in an attempt to mirror what he’s learned from Emma about Kate’s attitude. He says that he’s thinking of setting up an accountancy firm, but since his whole agenda here is to draw Kate back into the X-Men, he’s probably lying. But maybe not, because he is a qualified accountant.
He thinks that the three kids have potential, but isn’t sure how attached Kate is to them, possibly because she’s been ducking their training sessions in order to avoid him. He (correctly) thinks she’s unhappy and seems to think that drawing her back into the X-Men’s orbit would be for the best.
THE SUPPORTING CAST:
Reggie is a boy at school that Trista has a crush on. Mr Hampton is the English teacher running the auditions. Both find out that Trista is a mutant and are understandably impressed by her beating up a monster singlehandedly; they’re also happy to respect her wish to keep her powers secret. They join this book’s growing list of civilian supporting characters whose personalities aren’t developed much beyond “nice”, but to be fair, they serve more to anchor the main characters in the real world than to drive stories themselves.
Priti cheerfully agrees to Bobby cooking for her and Kate, without telling Kate in advance. Nina, the girl that Kate dated in issue #2, is invited along by Priti.
Rogue has a brief cameo, and is responsible for sending Iceman here. Kate still won’t talk to her.
VILLAINS:
Well, there’s a random monster which attacks the audition so that Bronze has something to fight. Since the story has no interest on taking up pages explaining where it comes from, it’s simply footnoted as one of the many extradimensional monsters that briefly appeared around the world in X-Force #5. Presumably, by the time Trista catches up with the rest of the cast, the whole incident is over, since nobody expresses any particular surprise that Trista has run into a demon thingy.
REFERENCES:
Page 5 panel 5: Trista breaks the fourth wall and speaks direct to camera, as we’ve seen Kate do occasionally in earlier issues.
Page 11 panel 5: “We grew up together. Dated for a while. But turns out I’m gay!” Bobby and Kate were indeed a couple immediately before Iceman was revealed to be gay in Brian Bendis’ All-New X-Men. The claim that they “grew up together” is simply wrong: Bobby had left the X-Men long before Kitty joined, and they weren’t members of the team at the same time until way into the 2000s. But Nina at least is an outsider, so it’s probably a case of Bobby giving vague and misleading answers rather than a continuity error.
Page 13 panel 4: “Beneatha’s monologue from A Raisin in the Sun.” A Raisin in the Sun (1959) by Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) was the first play by a black woman to be produced on Broadway.
Page 22 panel 2: This seems to be intended as a montage of Kate killing Orchis characters during the “Fall of X” period, though the art shows her in her Marauders costume rather than her Shadowkat outfit. In the top right are the two swords that she retrieved from the Mansion on taking on that identity.
Page 22 panel 3: “Rogue and Remy and Logan said they tried to reach you.” Footnoted to Uncanny X-Men #1, although if we’re being technical, what actually happened in that issue was that Rogue told the others that she’d phoned Kate, and we got a one-panel flashback to Kate telling Rogue to get lost.
“Much of the story is spent hinting that Iceman is there for sinister reasons”
I see what you did there, Paul 🙂
This issue seems to confirm that Trista looks human when she’s in her human form. But then why did the bouncer refuse to let her into the club in issue 1? How did Kitty know that she was a mutant before she used her powers in issue 1?
Kitty’s definitely acting hypervigilant- she threatened Bobby with lethal force just because she assumed she was a threat. She really needs to do something about that.
This is a nice series, though I still worry that Eve Ewing doesn’t have the best grip on the characters, as they feel slightly off, voice wise (at least where extant ones like Kitty, Bobby, and Emma) are concerned. This isn’t the first moment of sloppy continuity awareness we’ve seen with regards to Kitty and Emma’s histories, and it’s getting harder to wave them away when Ewing is so specifically bringing the details into the story in the first place.
But I will say it’s really nice to see civilians who don’t immediately run screaming for the Sentinels when they see a mutant, and it’s a relief to have friendly human allies/friends/supporting cast again after so long with the X-Books being their own self-contained microcosm. Say what you will about Claremont, but he had some good human supporting characters.
I’m not sure why the bouncer in issue 1 was giving Trista a hard time. Maybe he was just being a petty asshole and didn’t like her appearance. I thought maybe he was being racist because she’s Black, but he’s kind of ambiguously brown himself. She’s not even the most outrageously or weirdest dressed in the line.
(Speaking as someone who’s spent a lot of time taking tickets at venues, maybe her ticket didn’t work, it was invalid/voided/bought off a third party who scammed her… in which case he’s just a petty asshole with no sense of sympathy or customer service. Which tracks since he’s also a mutantphobe with a gun willing to try and murder a teenage girl.)
It’s definitely a mystery. Or sloppy storytelling–he rejected her because the narrative needed him to reject her, no explanation needed.
I’m not sure how I feel about the kids’ reaction to learning that Kitty killed people.Kitty’s killing the Orchis goons, while not truly self-defense, were arguably a wartime exigency. OTOH, if they heard Kitty threaten to kill Bobby, they might be scared of her.
But what do the kids know about Emma? Emma’s murders were much less defensible than Kitty’s killings. She killed thre of her goons because they failed to capture the X-Men even though the Club captured the X-Men a couple minutes later. And what’s more relevant to the kids, Emma abused both Firestar and Warpath, who were her students, like the kids. Emma even tried to kidnap the kids last issue. But the kids seem to have no problem with Emma.
And why did Bobby encase Kitty in ice at the end of last issue?Was it just his way of saying hello?
I think the cast sound more real and relateable
@ Michael: I don’t know how much the kids know about Emma’s past. The scene of her killing Hellfire Club goons back in the Dark Phoenix Saga hasn’t been brought up in a while in-universe, just like how no one talks about Butter Rum anymore.
Another good issue; I think Ewing does a good job using Kate’s recent actions to further the story, and I like how she writes the students. Carnero’s art looks good as well. I hope Iceman sticks around, he works as a dorky teacher.
This one is growing on me. Now that Emma and Bobby are in the picture, it’s not just Kitty herding, well, cats (sorry).
I agree that Bobby’s characterization felt off, though I haven’t really had a good grip on what his character is about since he got forcibly outed in the Bendis era. I expected a shapeshifter or mind control or some other twist more than Rogue spying, but I actually kinda like this angle in part because it gets a little dirt on Rogue, who’s been sainted by Simone to contrast Cyclops.
I do thank it’s reasonable for the kids to be so taken aback by the revelation of Kate killing. While Emma has been introduced to them as a good teacher but a bad role model, Kate tried to portray herself as a teacher who wouldn’t turn them into soldiers. They didn’t just live through an extinction event. And they don’t understand that Kate was the only one who had access to a secret weapon that, if she didn’t kill to protect it, could have meant the deaths of millions.
I expect the next few issues to be about Kate forgiving herself for doing what had to be done, by asking the kids to forgive her. And that’s a story I don’t think we’ve seen in a while – Ide had to make a similar choice to kill, just to save her own life, in Schism, and half the X-Men blew a fuse over it. But maybe this time, they’ll be able to put it in perspective better.
John, I will note that with Shadowkat went all kill happy she deliberately executed surrendering enemies. That goes a bit beyond what Ide did .