NYX #9 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
NYX vol 2 #9
“X-Manhunt, part 2: Charles”
Writers: Jackson Lanzing & Collin Kelly
Artist: Francesco Mortarino
Colour artist: Raúl Angulo
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Annalise Bissa
This issue is part of the “X-Manhunt” crossover, and also a tie-in to One World Under Doom (though that’s not billed on the cover). And it’s also the penultimate issue before cancellation with issue #10. So a lot to do.
THE CORE CAST.
Sophie Cuckoo. Her powers have returned to an extent, but she says they’re “still glitching half the time.”
She’s still playing Summoner, which was previously mentioned in issue #6 as a game that she’d become obsessed with after losing her powers in issue #5; it was indicated that she was spending more time on the chat function than actually playing the game, and we learn here that she’s talking to someone called TarnishedMoodRing who seems to be a boyfriend. The art indicates that the game has Krakoan-era mutant iconography – at least in a meta sense, with the graphics using the font that we as readers recognise from Krakoan-era logos, and what looks to be a version of the Marauders symbol.
Sophie describes Summoner as “an adaptive game” and claims that it’s not losing that ends the game, but “accepting the loss”. Kamala, who knows much more about gaming than Sophie does, regards this as gibberish but doesn’t push the point. She does express some concern about how much time Sophie is spending on the app, but the revelation of the boyfriend seems to put her mind at ease on that point.
(EDIT: As pointed out in the comments, the boyfriend is very likely Axo, who was playing the same game in the last issue of Exceptional X-Men, and whose powers fit with the username.)
Prodigy. His immediate reaction to Professor X’s arrival is to try and throw him out. Not only is Professor X a wanted man, Prodigy regards him as the mutant “whose sins buried our last chance at a homeland” – which seems unduly harsh, but somewhat reflects the way Professor X has positioned himself following the end of the Krakoan era. He claims that NYX are not a “paramilitary force” or “child soldiers” – standard criticisms of the X-Men, even though in previous issues he claimed that mutant culture was the X-Men. Mind you, he didn’t say that that was necessarily a good thing…
Prodigy is (or at least claims to be) completely unfazed by the prospect of Doom having control of the last seed, if only because he can’t see what possible use it could be to someone who already ruled the world. Generally speaking, everyone in this issue seems incredibly relaxed about the minor inconvenience of Dr Doom having taken over the world, although Doom’s general approach in this storyline has been to encourage life to go on as normal and leave established structures in place. And given the mutants’ dealings with the US government over the last couple of years, including when it was sponsoring Orchis, maybe they just regard Doom as a sideways move, or even an outright improvement.
Anole. He correctly expects that bringing Professor X to NYX will get a hostile response, but is a little disappointed that he seems to be the only person who wants to help; his motivation is that he regards Krakoa as a friend and sees the seed as something that could let Doom control Krakoa itself.
Ms Marvel. She agrees with Prodigy that NYX – which, after all, is just a community centre – was the wrong place for Professor X to go to for help, and shares Prodigy’s concern that having the Professor around is dangerous. But, as the one NYX regular in this issue who does regard herself as an active superhero (Laura doesn’t appear), she is willing to show up.
GUEST STARS.
Professor X. His objective in this story is to retrieve the last remaining Cerebro unit from the Treehouse, which he believes will let him help Xandra. To create a distraction, he tries to recruit some allies to storm the Treehouse for a completely different reason: to retrieve the last remaining seed of Krakoa, the one that Dr Doom collected in X-Men #35. This isn’t a total lie – the seed is genuinely there, but Professor X has no real interest in it. He’s just exploiting the mutant identity of the people who still trust him in order to achieve his own goals. He first approaches the Morlocks to help, but apparently only Anole is up for going on the mission.
He shows no sign of any of the hallucinations he was having in the previous chapter (which, to be fair, seemed to be something affecting the Graymalkin guards too). He does claim that his powers have been “weak” since escaping the prison, though that might just be a pretext for Anole’s benefit.
Somehow, he’s obtained codes to deactive the Doombots in the Treehouse. We’re not told how. He seems to be using telepathy on one of them, which doesn’t make a huge amount of sense, though there are some scattered examples of him using telepathy on sophisticated but non-sentient AIs.
The narration is extremely negative about Professor X throughout, but the narrator does turn out to be Mojo at the end, so we should be slightly cautious about how literally we’re supposed to take it.
Volta. Last seen in X-Men #35, she’s one of Doom’s Latverian mutants from the Gerry Duggan run. She appeared in that issue collecting the seed we see here. She has little interest in Mojo’s blathering and tries to cut the meeting short when he starts rambling about meta things. (EDIT: Mojo at least badly injures her, but on usual Marvel Universe rules, I wouldn’t say she’s verified as being actually dead.)
SUPPORTING CAST.
Dante. Is hanging around NYX helping with the catering. He has no dialogue.
Sobunar. He verifies that the seed really is in the Treehouse – apparently he can feel this “through the ecosystem”. He’s apparently willing to vouch for Professor X to that extent, but not minded to get involved any further.
Loolo. She stands next to Sobunar (as does another random Morlock who we haven’t seen before).
Synch. He’s sitting on a couch in NYX and has no dialogue.
Local is a prisoner of Mojo, who turned on him in the epilogue of issue #6. Mojo plans to use his connection to the city to help transform it in conjunction with the Krakoan seed.
VILLAINS.
Dr Doom. Rules the world. He doesn’t appear in this issue, but he does occupy the Treehouse with his Doombots, and despatches Volta to negotiate on his behalf with Mojo over the seed. Evidently Doom regards meeting Mojo in person as beneath his dignity.
Mojo. As “Mr Friend”, he approaches Doom to “negotiate media rights for the discoveries soon to be found in this place”, whatever that means. Presumably “this place” is the Treehouse. Mojo is very meta in this issue, but presents himself less as a TV/video entity and more as a fourth wall comics entity. He claims that his interest in the seed is “to close a plotline”. His actual plan seems to be to bring back a Krakoa of sorts, using Fauna’s powers to help it grow, in order to deliver on the promise he made to all of those mutants who have been following him through the series to date. But Mojo is going to embed himself into this new Krakoa.
When Ms Marvel says Anole’s name, Mojo’s amazed to find out how it’s pronounced. (It’s uh-NOH-lee – presumably Mojo thought it was AN-ohl.)
Fauna. We last saw Fauna in issue #1, where he was falling under Mojo’s influence. Presumably it was Fauna who told Mojo about the seed (which he saw Volta take). Mojo describes Fauna as his “majordomo”, alluding to the long suffering functionary who always used to accompany Mojo in 80s and 90s stories – surely his actual functions are beyond little Fauna, though?
FOOTNOTES.
Page 4 panel 1: The graffiti (“Had a home, it went into another dimension”) obviously refers to Krakoa going to the White Hot Room at the end of the Krakoan era – although if this guy literally lived on Krakoa, then either he somehow avoided being taken to the White Hot Room at the Hellfire Gala, or he chose to come back in X-Men #35.
Page 4 panel 2: “Is this what you’d hoped when you first built that hubristic monument to mutantdom in Westchester?” Presumably referring to the X-Men Mansion, although it must mean the school as an institution, since Xavier didn’t literally build the mansion – he inherited it from his parents. The art in this panel shows the Morlock tunnels, though nobody is in sight.
Page 4 panel 3: The workman putting up the Wanted poster seems to be an echo of the many panels in this series of Prodigy’s graffiti art.
Page 4 panel 4: This is the X-Men’s Krakoan-era New York base, the Treehouse, but the guards outside are now flying Doom’s flag, because One World Under Doom is in progress.
Page 5 panel 2: Sophie lost her powers in issue #5.
Page 10: The flashback is a straight recap of a scene from X-Men #35.
Some readers have theorized that Sophie’s boyfriend “TarnishedMoodRing” is Axo from Exceptional X-Men.
How was Sonubar able to sense the Krakoan seed “through the ecosystem in his blood”? I think this is a reference to X-Men Red 17, where Sonubar is able to sense Kaorak walking through the Martian oceans. But he was only able to do that because the oceans on Mars came from Sonubar’s blood. He doesn’t have any power to sense plant life.
Note that Mojo kills Volta.
Re: Xavier being able to control the Doombots- it was mentioned in Byrne’s FF that Doom had programmed some of his Doombots to think thoughts to confuse a telepath who might try to read their minds. So if a telepath could read their minds, a telepathy might be able to control them.
Xavier’s behavior is completely inconsistent throughout this crossover. In Uncanny X-Men, he was hallucinating. In this issue, he’s sane but cruel and manipulative. In Storm, he’s sane but repentant.Yes, he has a brain tumor but still…
Xavier’s behavior this issue is horrible, even for him. He leaves Kamala and Anole to die at the hands of Mojo, even while Kamala is begging for help and as a result Mojo escaped with what he needed to recreate New York City in his own image.
As I said, this easily qualifies for a spot at the Top 10 moments Xavier was an asshole.
That being said, he barely knows Kamala and Victor, they were never his students. It’s a betrayal, but not a personal one.
Then again, he barely knows Xandra, too. He met her… once?
Spoilers for X-men #13 preview pages but it sounds like the mind virus linked to his tumour is still in play. I guess that might be pointed to to explain Xavier’s erratic and inconsistent behaviour between titles.
I suspect Mojo’s narration will be taken at face value, and might very well be intended to, but we know from whenever Xavier’s been narrating recently that he’s not thinking himself a good man lately so we can at least point to Mojo colouring the lens. You could also take the lines about there being something dangerous inside Xavier as refering to the illness if you wanted.
Props to the Hivemind for doing their best here. They needed to set up the finale while also advancing the crossover.
Xavier is his most hateable here. He’s the uber manipulator. While we could feel sorry for him in Uncanny, here he just screws with some mutant kids for convenience.
I think they need to redeem his character before the movie reboot, but as others noted, it’s tough… what purpose does he still serve? I’d rather see Charles with the Illuminati (though Emma has taken the mutant seat of late) where he can hang out with other bastards who do what’s distasteful but necessary.
@John- The problem is that the members of the Illuminati all are supposed to have considerable influence in the Marvel Universe. (That’s one of the objections to Emma being on the Illuminati right now- currently, she only is teaching three students. It’s necessary because the Illuminati is appearing in West Coast Avengers and Emma’s influence on Firestar for both good and bad is a theme but still..) So in order for Xavier to be on the Illuminati again, you’d have to get people to trust Xavier again.
It’s just so heavy-handed, is the thing. David has a problem with paramilitary forces? Was he not there when Purifiers blew up a busload of his then-human schoolmates? Did Nimrod not rip him to shreds in a surprise attack two seconds after becoming an X-Man? Meanwhile Synch was invoking Arakko norms a few issues ago, yet sits out an opportunity to do some Sacred Land nonsense?
I expect Doom’s thrown some sort of mind whammy on the world which has suppressed their resistance for the most part, which is why so many people don’t seem to care about him taking over. For the most part, those who resist are heroes who traditionally have opposed/dealt with/interacted with him, so perhaps the better you “know” him, the less it works. Since an -awful- lot of folks seem to be either neutral or outright complicit in his current takeover.
The wings and beard of “Had a home” guy make him look awfully like a down-on-his-luck version of the 616-edition of Mimic. I don’t think we ever saw him in Krakoa–last we saw, his wings were amputated to “fix” O5 Angel and he died fighting Ahab before the team got returned to the past. So maybe he was restored on Krakoa and then wound up back on Earth.
I expect Doom’s thrown some sort of mind whammy on the world which has suppressed their resistance for the most part, which is why so many people don’t seem to care about him taking over. For the most part, those who resist are heroes who traditionally have opposed/dealt with/interacted with him, so perhaps the better you “know” him, the less it works. Since an -awful- lot of folks seem to be either neutral or outright complicit in his current takeover.
The wings and beard of “Had a home” guy make him look awfully like a down-on-his-luck version of the 616-edition of Mimic. I don’t think we ever saw him in Krakoa–last we saw, his wings were amputated to “fix” O5 Angel and he died fighting Ahab before the team got returned to the past. So maybe he was restored on Krakoa and then wound up back on Earth.
Mimic was on Krakoa. He showed up in a few background scenes, and I believe he was listed as a replacement for Hope in The Five, if she were to be killed.
I kind of assumed the homeless guy was Mimic, returned to his old looks of wings, long beard and hair (and there’s a small effect over his eye, which might be a miscolored optic beam indicator). Possibly also with his mental health problems returned, making it hard for him to find a stable home after Krakoa fell.
Mimic is a fighter so he would have been in the final battles (off-panel maybe) and not part of the civilian White Hot Room exile.
Ah, note to self to refresh the comments before leaving a new one so as to not say what others have already said, haha.
Mimic was in Gillen’s Immortal X-Men as the first pick to try and resurrect Hope after Sinister assassinated her; he caves under the pressure and Synch takes his place instead.
@The Other Michael- One World Under Doom suggests that the civilians (as opposed to the government officials) are following Doom of their own free will. It’s just that Doom has framed Bucky and Songbird for killing the population of Shelbyville and the general public believes it because of their shady pasts. (These are MARVEL civilians after all.)
It’s worth a mention that One World Under Doom is being used and written as a MAGA metaphor. At least that is the expressed point of the most recent issue of Fantastic Four, which is also written by Ryan North so the crossover will make it a key side-series to OWUD. Supporters of Doom are wearing his flag akin to MAGA caps in real life. And many nameless characters (i.e. your token waitress or angry mob civilians) say things about not liking Doom personally but liking some of the things he’s doing, such as demonizing the vampires left behind from Blood Hunt (or seeming to outright kill Baron Zemo and Red Skull, or trying to manipulate Hydra into doing beneficial things).
This even includes the idea of vampires being a metaphor for the whole, “they’re eating the cats and dogs” slur of Haitian immigrants from the 2024 American Presidential campaign season. The problem, IMO, is that unlike immigrants or people of color, vampires ARE objectively dangerous, or at least were always treated that way on a universal basis, even by the superheroes, up until this year. But the metaphor seems obvious.
So the reason why the world is rolling on despite Doom running it is more than him doing some magic hoodoo with the world leaders. It’s that the masses are being manipulated into thinking he’s at least getting things done or going after groups they hate, in a vague but clear Trump metaphor. The latest issue of FF, at least, was written in mid-November (which is when Tom Brevoort dated the letter column for it), so by then they had to know Harris had lost and this comparison is deliberate. Whether it works or not is subjective.
Doom, at least, is more intelligent, competent, and even honorable than America’s current tyrant. I imagine many Americans would trade Trump for Doom in a heartbeat. But perhaps that’s also a point. The first issue of OWUD ended with Tony and Reed insisting the public would turn on Doom if they caught him in a lie, only for them to realize the masses don’t care if they’re being lied to so long as the liar is doing what they think is just or targeting groups they hate. This was, frankly, true of humanity since before WWII, but superhero comics have always been a bit of fantasy, so it’s a hard truth.
Which is ridiculous. Captain America, as a symbol of the United States, at least worked as a metaphor for Trump with “Secret Empire” (regardless of the quality). Trump and Dr. Doom are not the same, and Ryan North shouldn’t be trying to force a square peg into a round hole.
The guy who is uniting the world, ending all wars, putting down outright fascists, and forcing universal healthcare and education for all should not be a stand-in for Trump. I was hoping that North would go further and actually challenge the majority of comic readers who are left, instead of yet once again preaching to the choir.
Have Doom actually creating utopia…but at the expense of democracy, freedom, and free will. How would the typical current Marvel readers feel about this? In a world divided by nationalism, wars, and with Trump as president of the US, would they side with Doom or continue to cheer on the superheroes who are doing their job, even though it would mean a return to the status quo? Where is the challenge?
I wasn’t interested in OWUD when it seemed as if Dr. Doom was going to be turned into a stand-in for international Communism (which at least looked sort of intriguing). I’m so glad I’m not bothering with IWUD if it’s turning into another “You, dear readers, are so good for not supporting Trump, just like me, the writer” lecture.
Doom is a fascist, he just extends the state to the entire world. As for sacrificing freedom, plenty of fans say the Phoenix 5 did no wrong.
Have you been looking for a chance to join the powerful illuminati brotherhood. Well here is your chance to join the illuminati brotherhood to be rich, powerful, famous, wealthy, protected and respected. The Illuminati is a brotherhood were loved is shared and plans to establish the new world order you are receiving $2,000,000 million USD. Contact grandmaster Mohamad jneinatti This WhatsApp +2348137765413 OR E-mail him: Mohamadjneinatti@gmail.com he will guide you on how to join the illuminati immediately
It’s not much of a Brotherhood if they let Emma join, right? 🙂
hello
small correction: in the paragraph on Loolo, you talk about a Morlock never seen before.
the Morlock with the blue NY cap and crab claws has already been seen several times, small panels, in episodes NYX # 3 and 5.
I seem to have seen Volta alive and well in solicitations
For the Morlock blue cap with crab or lobster arms. It is very specifically marked: “NYC” on it
@Mark Coale- it’s weird how the spammers work sometimes. I remember once that on the Gentlemen of Leisure site, we were discussing the original Inferno and suddenly spam appeared advertising a spell caster to help with your love life.