X-Men #12 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN vol 7 #12
“Work Release”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inkers: Sean Parsons & John Livesay
Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
THE X-MEN:
Cyclops. The alien mercenaries want him so that he can be used as a hostage to keep Phoenix under control – or at any rate, that’s what they understand that their unnamed employer wants. For once, he doesn’t really contribute a great deal to the X-Men’s victory, but he remains as calmly confident as ever while waiting for his team to sort it out. He offers to break Alpha Flight out of jail if they want, but seems to regard it as their choice whether to play along with Department H.
Juggernaut. He can be stopped with “inertia foam” – since he isn’t as powerful as he used to be, presumably he isn’t literally unstoppable any more. It’s also possible that the foam doesn’t completely stop him but slows his progress to such an extent that it comes to the same thing in the heat of battle.
Magik. She can be defeated with a ray that induces vertigo – presumably it’s her own choice to then call up a stepping disc and teleport to safety rather than try to fight, since it’s not obvious why vertigo would make her teleport. She seems remarkably unfazed by being a snowbound landscape in a costume with plenty of exposed skin – let’s be generous and say magic’s playing a role in her not freezing.
Temper. She believes that she could destroy the Acanti ship singlehandedly, but that would kill all her teammates aboard.
Kid Omega. Serves mainly to relay messages back and forth in story, but that’s arguably significant in itself – with no authority figure to kick against in this story, he simply focusses on the mission and gets on with it.
Psylocke. Everyone forgets about her (or she used her telepathy to shield herself) so she gets to destroy an Acanti heart singlehandedly.
SUPPORTING CAST:
Alpha Flight. Look, they don’t have their own book at the moment, and this issue seems to be setting up longer term storylines, so they’re supporting cast for now.
Aside from last issue’s cameo, we last saw Alpha Flight in “Fall of X”, where they were pretending to work for the Canadian government as a cover for helping mutants to escape Orchis, and wound up in jail. Despite the fall of Orchis, Alpha Flight haven’t been pardoned for trying to avert genocide – even though nobody’s suggested that people are still languishing in American jails from that period. So apparently we should take it that in the Marvel Universe, Canada is fascist-adjacent. I have my doubts about whether this is tenable in the current climate, but it’s worth pointing out that Jed MacKay is Canadian, and that the Canadian government’s Department H have been portrayed as Basically Evil by many writers down the years.
Department H has set up a project where the imprisoned Alpha Flight members are allowed to go on missions under the supervision of one of their agents. Most (but not all) of the team have agreed, and there are at least a few hints dropped that all is not quite as it seems here. We’re not told directly what sort of missions they’re serving on, but this one is perfectly above board. Plus, Vindicator talks about the Alphans being motivated by their desire to be heroes, Guardian talks about them saving lives, and Puck says they’re better off doing good than being in prison – so by all appearances their actual missions are genuine superhero work. No particular reason is given for why the whole team don’t make a break for it as soon as the mission is over, beyond the fact that Guardian doesn’t want to – are there actually any security measures in place, or does the program just rely on their goodwill?
Guardian. James Hudson has often been presented as a compromised figure – sometimes he’s hinted to have been involved in Weapon X – but for the purposes of this story he’s a straightforward national hero. He claims that he and Alpha Flight have more symbolic weight in this role than they would do as fugitives. He claims to be “shaming” the authorities, which implies that the public know that Alpha Flight are serving from prison. He also claims that “I’ll be free soon enough,” without explaining why.
He chafes somewhat at being given orders by Vindicator – more because she’s been foisted on the team and she’s taken Heather’s identity than because she’s asking for anything unreasonable. He’s reluctant to call her “Vindicator” (or keeps forgetting), but does use her codename in front of the X-Men, with a stumble.
Puck. Not much to be said. He’s here just to do his hero thing.
Snowbird. It’s specifically flagged up that Narya is a “living goddess of the north” (more accurately, a demigoddess) and doesn’t recognise human authority, and that this makes it odd that she’s willing to sit around in prison and co-operate with the programme. She promises a “reckoning” for Vindicator “speaking to a goddess” by giving her orders.
Marrina. She wasn’t in jail at the end of the last series, but escaped with the refugee mutants to Chandilar. We’re told that she actually turned herself in in order to be with her teammates because “Alpha Flight is all she has”, though this is Arsenault’s interpretation (as relayed to Department H). It doesn’t entirely make sense, because there are other Alphans out there that Marrina could still turn to, such as Northstar – and she’s spent plenty of time apart from them over the years.
Shaman. He went to jail with the rest of the team, but we’re told he declined to join the programme on ethical grounds. Arsenault says they “need further leverage on him”. Nonetheless, the general impression is that everyone actually in the team has made a free choice to be there, and could (like Shaman) have turned it down, at least for now.
Vindicator. The new Vindicator is Department H’s Agent Arsenault (she doesn’t get a first name). At least when addressing the Department H council in flashback, she says that Alpha Flight are both heroes and criminals, that having them in jail is “a waste of resources of both the superhuman and public-relations varieties”, and that the new project can take advantage of the Alphans’ desire to do good coupled with the state’s control over them as prisoners. It’s at least possible that Arsenault is playing to her audience here rather than giving her unvarnished opinions.
As Alpha Flight’s “handler and new leader”, Arsenault wears a black and white version of the Vindicator armour. It’s not clear whether this was her idea or the Department H council’s (the dialogue faintly implies the latter), and we’re not given a reason for the colour change.
She’s quite bossy and rubs the team up the wrong way, but this could just be her trying to impose her authority on a group that she knows hate her, particularly when Guardian is right there as a competing authority figure. The actual content of her orders seems reasonable, and she seems entirely competent in action. Guardian proposes a plan that involves himself, Vindicator and Temper combining their powers, with the X-Men’s lives at stake if it goes wrong, with no apparent qualms as to whether she can pull it off – so apparently he does trust her on that level.
Once the aliens are defeated, she poses alongside the other X-Men and Alpha Flight members as if she were a hero like any other.
Corsair. He doesn’t contribute much in this story. He takes the captured mercenaries off the X-Men’s hands by arranging to hand them over to the Kree/Skrull Empire authorities (which would be Hulkling right now, so relatively sensible).
The Beast. He contacts Cyclops at the end of the issue to let him know that Professor X has escaped, setting up next month’s crossover.
VILLAINS:
Xanto Starblood. The alien mercenaries are mostly unnamed generics, and their leader Captain Karkos is new, but Xanto Starblood is an existing character who showed up in two storylines in Jason Aaron’s Wolverine and the X-Men run (and never appeared again, until now). As he says here, he’s an expert in “extreme zoology”, which in this case means that he knows how to hijack an Acanti as a ship in the style of the Brood, and knows how to tailor countermeasures to the X-Men’s powers. He was apparently some sort of celebrity author in the wider galaxy and quite what he’s doing joining this sort of mercenary expedition isn’t clear.
The only two characters that he’s met before are Kid Omega and Temper, but both of them spend the story on the Marauder, so they never meet him. Xanto says that he was hoping to “get my hands on” both of them, but it doesn’t seem to be that high a priority for him: the contract was just to get Cyclops, and he’s perfectly happy to ignore his personal agenda and head for space once Cyclops is captured. At best, any interest in Quentin and Idie seems to be a mild preference.
FOOTNOTES:
Page 5 panel 2: Guardian died in Alpha Flight vol 1 #12 (1984). And again in Alpha Flight vol 1 #100 (1991). And again in New Avengers vol 1 #16 (2006). He’s quite fragile.
Page 7 panel 4: Heather Hudson, the original Vindicator, has been in a coma since last year’s Alpha Flight miniseries.
Page 8 panel 4: By “a Nova”, the alien presumably means a member of the Nova Corps, not a star.
Page 10 panel 3: Temper and Kid Omega were Xanto Starblood’s students at the Hellfire Academy in Wolverine and the X-Men during 2012-2013.
Page 11 panel 4: George Street is the entertainment district of St John’s, Newfoundland.
Page 25 panel 2: Alpha Flight “stood up for us” by helping mutants to escape Orchis in last year’s Alpha Flight miniseries.
> Page 7 panel 4: Heather Hudson, the original Vindicator, has been in a coma since last year’s Alpha Flight miniseries.
Guardian was the original Vindicator; it was his second codename after Weapon Alpha.
I think what’s keeping Alpha Flight from running are that Shaman and presumably the comatose Heather are in the custody of Department H when they go on missions.
Re: Juggernaut and the goo- Amazing Spider-Man 68.Deaths this week is all about the current state of Juggernaut’s powers. The story make clear that Juggernaut’s still the avatar of Cyttorak. Scott says to Cain “If you never get started, you can at least be slowed down”. That implies that the classic rules about Juggernaut’s powers still apply. If that’s the case, the goo shouldn’t have stopped him- he was clearly already moving when the aliens used the goo on him.
On the other hand, in that issue, Cain says, “When I do good things, I get weaker”. And Cain points out that Cytorrak has lowered his powers before. But at the end of the story, Cytorrak doesn’t withdraw his powers from Cain.
Isn’t Illyanna using the same costume that she used when Scott and her were using Department H or Weapon X installations as their base? Sure, those installations probably had some form of heating and the typical temperatures may have been somewhat higher than in this issue, but it still appears that she is not too bothered by snow cold.
I would be happy with a new Alpha Flight series picking up from this status quo. It’s not their worst iteration by far, and they’ve long dealt with hostile government oversight (Department H often being corrupt or awful.)
There’s still a bunch of unanswered questions regarding the whereabouts of certain members, how/why Marrina became avian (though her Plodex genes make her uniquely suited for this sort of change), what sort of game Arsenault might be playing…
I’d give them a 10 issue series, that’s about right for them. 🙂
Juggernaut seems to be in a status of “empowered by Cytorrak but not his official avatar.” But given that Justin the Kid Juggernaut, the supposed new avatar, is even MORE of a hero, it’s hard to see Cytorrak going “yeah, this is fine.” I guess he’s just sort of in a *shrug* mood at the moment when it comes to his mortal representatives.
(Cain got a really good spotlight in the Spider-Man issue which made it even more expressly clear why he’s a hero now. He was tired of being a perpetual loser despite being the Juggernaut, and he likes having friends and family who accept and back him up. Given his long, slow turn towards heroics, it makes sense on a personal level. And I really like it. His main motivations towards being bad were family-related so getting over those and deciding that Friendship is Magic works.)
Almost all of my memories are only from the Byrne era and briefly when Mantlo took over the book when Byrne went to do Hulk.
In a way, I’m glad I know little of the decades of what I understand is shabby treatment of the team and/or some of its members.
How do you pronounce Arsenault? Probably not the way it sounds in my head …
If you’ve read the Byrne and Mantlo runs, then you’ve read all you need to of Alpha Flight comics.
Si-Basically the same as “arsenal”.
“Evil government” has become a standard setting for Alpha Flight, and it’s really time they did something else with it. It’s Canada, for crying out loud!
If I was writing their next series, it would start with the Non-Evil Party coming to power in the latest election, and setting up the team to function with non-evil and non-manipulative government funding and generally get on with dealing with attacks from the spirit world and other dimensions and things. It’d be a nice change…
Si: It’s French. The “t” is silent.
Another annotation. Page 7, panel 3. “What a friggin’ skeet she is.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeet_(Newfoundland)
I can’t help but wonder if there’s a swerve coming regarding Arsenault. She just FEELS like she’s playing a con on someone…
(Any ex-Alphans around who could pull off a trick like that?)
As for other places Marrina could go, does Namor know she’s alive again?
The problem with Alpha Flight is how so much about what could be interesting about them has been taken away or changed over the years. Mac Hudson should have never come back to life, because having the team “leader” be non-powered Heather was more unique. Puck having actual dwarfism was much better than magic genie dwarfism or whatever. Aurora was actually created to have DID, unlike Hulk or Moon Knight. There’s a lot of stories in there, and yet writers tend to go for punchlines and weird Canadian fascist government ideas.
The magic genie dwarfism idea was incredibly stupid, but it was based on a misunderstanding by Mantlo of some John Byrne dialogue. Byrne wrote a line that Puck has to work through his pain each day, in reference to pain caused by Puck’s achondroplasia. Mantlo didn’t realize that this condition might cause Puck pain and decided to write a story explaining why Puck was suffering from so much pain.
I mean, yeah, you can argue that a secret from Puck’s past involving a genie is a dumb explanation, even if Byrne had left a dangling plotthread. Puck was supposed to be the “average Joe” of the group.
I do hope someone has a longer lasting premise for Alpha Flight once the “evil Canadian government” story has run its course. A solid status quo is the one thing no writer has ever been able to give the group. You can only rebel against the government so many times before it starts to get boring. @Zoomy’s suggestion above would be a great start.
I’ve always loved Marrina, but she feels redundant in many ways. AF doesn’t really need more fliers, and Snowbird already shapeshifts into animal forms. I wonder if more could be made of her water-controlling powers instead.
I’d argue the worst part of that Bill Mantlo story was how (iirc) it presented Puck’s condition as a tragic curse, as though aging extremely slowly in exchange for being short wasn’t an excellent trade-off.
To be fair, Byrne established that Eugene suffers from bouts of crippling pain, which he keeps on check with mental discipline.
Not everyone prefers a long life to the alternativas, nor should they.
Thom H. – I like Marrina too, but she was barely even a member of Alpha Flight before she originally left the book. Treating her like a core member is another of those weird writer choices AF has dealt with.
My personal take on Alpha Flight would be to play off the fact that shows like the X-Files and Supernatural filmed in Canada, and have them investigating and combatting weird “monsters-of-the-week”ish threats. Not under any kind of government purview, and not exclusively Canada-based. Alpha Flight are the weirdos you call in when some eldritch demons get woken up in Manitoba or Iowa or somewhere.
Si: Actually, both the ‘l’ and ‘t’ are silent. Arsenault is pronounced like ar-sen-oh (French doesn’t have emphases, but an anglicization would have a mild emphasis on the first syllable).
If we want to decide that Arsenault is someone in disguise with previous ties to Alpha Flight, there are certainly options.
Talisman. Dreamqueen. Heather herself. One of the Nemeses. Delphine Courtney. Witchfire.
So the name is definitely Arse, is the point I was going for.
@Trevor: Totally. Byrne seems to have added Marrina just to get to the Master of the World/Plodex stuff later, then wrote her off entirely. But she’ll always be integral to the team for me. She got an origin story flashback and everything.
I’m not sure I need the entire classic team (including Heather) together for it to feel like the “real” Alpha Flight, but the team should consist of mostly to entirely characters from the Byrne run. Subtract Sasquatch and Marrina, add Fang, put Heather in the Nemesis suit (like Ed Brisson did recently) and you still have an awesome team. (Honestly, I would have liked to see Talisman in there, too, but maybe next time.) Try to revive the team with mostly new characters, though, and it’s just not AF.
@Chris V- the other reason for Mantlo’s Puck origin was that Byrne mentioned that Puck had known Hemingway while working as a bullfighter in Spain. Byrne was thinking of Hemingway’s last visit to Spain in 1960 but Mantlo was apparently unaware of that and assumed that Puck had met Hemingway in the 1930s and therefore Puck had to be immortal.
Puck’s status as a tall guy who’s somehow been shrunk down is first revealed by Claremont in the X-Men/Alpha Flight miniseries. I’ve seen people assume Mantlo told Claremont what he had planned, but I’m not so sure, considering how rough the coordination between the miniseries and the Alpha Flight title was. The mini was meant to involve Byrne, but according to Byrne he dropped out when it became clear Claremont was lotting the book and not just scripting. Byrne says he expected someone else to plot, he would draw, and Claremont would script. Maybe Mantlo would have been the plotter? But Byrne says the plot he received was clearly Claremont, and I kind of doubt there was ever another plot. (If there had been, Byrne probably wouldn’t have backed out—he objected to drawing a Claremont plot.) Anyway, it’s all quite messy.
@Walter Lawson: I never heard the story about Byrne potentially drawing X-Men/Alpha Flight, but I’m glad he didn’t because we got 2 more issues of Paul Smith art.
This wasn’t a bad issue, even though it felt like a back door pilot for a new volume of Alpha Flight. I liked the Psylocke reveal; along with the villains, I’d forgotten she wasn’t accounted for until she showed up. I’m still waiting for the main plots to get going, however. After the upcoming crossover, I hope this series dives into the mutant activation story and sticks with it for a few issues.
The letters page of Alpha Flight #38 does assert that Bill Mantlo and Chris Claremont working together included the Puck scene in X-Men/Alpha Flight as a hint to what was going to be revealed about his origin.
Whether that’s true or not, who knows, but that and the rest of the story does have a pretty strong feeling of Mantlo’s approach to the team.
@Walter Lawson- Byrne didn’t just refuse because he was told the plotter would be someone other than Claremont- he also claimed that he was told that Kitty wouldn’t appear in the book and then when he got the plot Kitty was featured heavily. That’s what makes me thing that Byrne misunderstood- there’s no way the editors could have thought that Byrne wouldn’t notice Kitty while he was drawing the book. Unless the original plot featured Kitty dressed in white fighting in a snowstorm. 🙂
Re: Byrne claiming that he was told that there would be another plotter- I think that Byrne misunderstood. The credits for X-Men/ Alpha Flight say “Based on. a premise by Jim Shooter/ Ann Nocenti/ Denny O’Neil”. Apparently Shooter, Nocenti and O’Neil came up with the basic idea. However, since the story was supposed to feature the first meeting between Rachel and Scott, reveal that Maddie was pregnant and lead into a later story where Loki tries to get revenge on the X-Men, it was agreed that Claremont would actually write the issues. Byrne apparently misunderstood this as Claremont not plotting the issues.
Incidentally, since Denny O’Neil was the editor of Alpha Flight, it’s possible that the line suggesting Puck was a tall man once came from him.
Of course, the coordination between X-Men/ Alpha Flight and Alpha Flight wasn’t good. In the X-Men/ Alpha Flight series, Talisman is portrayed as only having the ability to disrupt magic, which isn’t how her powers were written in Alpha Flight at the time. The reason is that the X-Men/ Alpha Flight series was originally supposed to come out circa X-Men 192- there’s a gap of several months in X-Men 192 when it was supposed to take place. It was supposed to be where the readers learned that Maddie was pregnant. Unfortunately, due to Byrne’s backing out, it didn’t come out until X-Men 200, and the readers had already learned Maddie was pregnant. (It was also supposed to lead into the New Mutants Special Edition and Uncanny X-Men Annual but they wound up coming out around the same time.)
One interesting result of this is that it’s the reason why Baby Cable was born. Originally, X-Factor was supposed to feature Dazzler- Jean was supposed to stay dead. Maddie would give birth in X-Men 200 and then Scott would go off to X-FAactor with his wife and son in tow. But then Byrne suggested Busiek’s idea to revive Jean. So that meant Scott and Maddie would split. But by the time the decision was made to revive Jean, it was too late to change the X-Men/ .Alpha Flight series. Which meant that Scott now had a superfluous son.
Odd that this issue uses the same “you thought we lost, but we won!” twist that the most recent X-Factor did, but with Psylocke in place of Forget-Me-Not.
This is maybe the weakest issue of adjectiveless, and yet, I don’t know if Alpha Flight has ever looked this cool. Netho Diaz and Ryan Stegman’s art is so dynamic on this book that I would be open to reading an Alpha Flight series that used it.
I’m behind on both my blog and comic reading, so apologies for disrupting the time stream, but I’m compelled to weight in on this one
As a Canadian, even just a few months ago (possibly when McKay actually scripted this issue) I’d not only be fine with this “work release avengers” angle on AF, I’d be inclined to defend it. Canada’s legal culture, especially how it conceives of ‘rule of law’ as a principle, is somewhat hidebound relative to America. It’s one of those differences that’s so subtle that I recall a conversation with an American friend when we were both into our twenties and I was only just learning from him how prominent jury nullification is there, and he was only just learning from me how common crown (prosecutorial) appeals were here, yet so significant that it sparked a near-friendship ending argument because we were both so appalled by how the other guy could endorse such a clearly fucked up system. And there’s a longstanding legal principle that you can’t nullify the consequences of a bad law being correctly enforced per the law at the time, lest this render all laws “*du jour*”. (One can easily imagine the consequences of corporations having an expectation that any penalty inflicted on them would be reversed if the next legislative arrangement repeals whatever law they were penalized under).
Or more succinctly, there’s an old joke: how do you empty a swimming pool full of Canadians? You say “everyone out of the pool”
All of which is to say, I buy this, *in a vacuum*. But I’m not reading this in a vacuum. I’m reading this in a context where I personally reenact the Vichy Water scene from Casablanca 4-9 times per grocery shop. I wrestled a bit with whether I should even be reading Marvel right now, and have somewhat uncomfortably settled on the logic that it’s HQ’d in one of the bluer states, and since I’m still a physical copy holdout, I get them from a literal mom-and-pop that I’ve been going to since I was twelve. And even that logic might change. I’m reading this in a context where even the ‘good’ Americans, who assure me they’re on ‘our’ side, frequently do so by either stating their intent to personally emigrate here and ‘become Canadian’, or by posting the also-irritating-then Bush2 era “United States of Canada/Jesusland” meme (bonus points if it’s the one that asserts your right to carve out Alberta, the province *I fucking live in*, because someone from Ontario who you online dated for two weeks told you it’s ‘like Texas’), totally blind to how this can come off as just proof that even the ‘good’ Americans harbour weird fantasies about merging with and absorbing us. Or even better, the ones who protest they don’t *like* that ‘the cheeto’ might actually do it, but feel it’s really important to establish how quickly they’re sure an Actual Invasion When ch They Really Dont Want would result in Total American Victory, probably because we don’t have loose enough gun laws(none of this is made up, I’ve seen all of these).
So yeah kind of bad timing imo