UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #14
“The Dark Artery, part 2: An Infectious Mind”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: David Marquez
Colour artist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

THE X-MEN

Gambit. He repeats his story from the previous issue about people panicking at the sight of his eyes when he was a child. He rejects Sadurang’s offer to return the Left Eye of Agamotto, a decision which Sadurang accepts without protest – but he makes sure to draw the prophecy of madness to the attention of the rest of the team.

Rogue. She vigorously defends her husband against Sadurang, to little avail. Gambit claims that you have to tread carefully with her when she’s in a bad mood (and makes a time-of-the-month reference).

Jubilee. Sadurang reminds her of Shogo, her adoptive son who turned into a dragon and remained in Otherworld after Knights of X. Sadurang claims that Shogo misses her, and advises her to visit.

Nightcrawler and Wolverine also appear.

We learn that the four Outliers were all drawn to Haven by the Dark Artery, for reasons we’ll discover next issue, although they believed at the time that the summons was linked to Sarah Gaunt. This goes some way to explain how four characters from such different parts of the world ended up together: they evidently met on their way to the Artery.

Jitter. In order to get into the Dark Artery, you have to explain your powers honestly to the Man-Thing. This results in the Outliers finally giving us plain English explanations of what they actually do. As expected, her power is simply to take on any talent for one minute and be “the best in the world” at it. (Quite how she knows that she’s literally the best in the world is unclear.)

Ransom. Once again, he stands up as the Outliers’ spokesman and is the first to address Man-Thing. Basically he absorbs any form of energy and uses it to power up his punches. So he’s a cross between Bishop and Sebastian Shaw.

Calico. Her initial explanation to the Man-Thing is that she has a special bond with Ember and that she can give the two of them any powers she can imagine. When Man-Thing rejects this, she admits that the real Ember died in the fire that burned down her family home (which we saw in flashback in issue #3) and claims to have no idea “what that thing outside is”. She’s always seemed quite devoted to this Ember up to this point, but there’s a suggestion that she’s in denial about it.

This explanation does apparently satisfy the Man-Thing, which points towards Calico’s description of her powers otherwise being correct.

Deathdream. Deathdream can change from living to dead and back again at will; he has dreams of the future; and he can control the spirits of the dead. He knew that Ember wasn’t alive, although he doesn’t seem to know any more than that. He seems to be implying that Ember is a ghost. When Ransom upbraids him for keeping this to himself, we get a one-panel flashback to issue #6, where Ransom similarly told Deathdream that he was showing a lack of concern for Jitter. (In that issue, Deathdream did in fact help fight back for Jitter but in a less obvious way; the theme here is more of Ransom not understanding than Deathdream being self-absorbed.)

Deathdream claims that he doesn’t experience emotions, but that he understands them in an intellectual sense, and he knew that being honest with Calico would upset her.

Everyone assumes that he’s been summoned to be the new guardian of the Dark Artery, although Henrietta stresses that he’s merely the most natural candidate among the Outliers.

SUPPORTING CAST

Henrietta Benjamin. In the present day, Henrietta holds the role of “the Guardian of the Penumbra”. She calls herself “Lady Henrietta”. She says that “we” called the Outliers to Haven. She’s apparently been stuck there since the flashback scenes and she’s rather keen to be relieved of her duties. In her narration at the beginning of the previous issue, setting off for Haven, she did seem uncertain about whether she would ever return home again; the implication is that she had some reason to think that she might have to stay. She certainly regarded the trip as a “duty”. Also, she told the guard at the train station that she wasn’t planning to stay in New Orleans because she had a “function to attend to”.

Her mutant power is to turn into a rock form, in which form she can control two rock giants to fight for her.

In the flashbacks, she trusts the XX symbol shown by her driver George. This is the same symbol that she herself made on the sign outside the boarding house in last issue’s flashback. Apparently, simply knowing this symbol illustrates that George is trustworthy. Compare the flashbacks in the previous issue, where she disregarded someone making the “Midnight M” sign on the basis that “He could be with the Service.” She has no such concerns about George.

The dating of the flashback is vague and contradictory, not helped by some historical errors. The New Orleans train station where she arrives is the Southern Railway Terminal, which wasn’t built until 1908. The previous issue also contained a reference to the Chicago Elevated Railways Collateral Trust, which would put us in the 1910s.

However… this issue also contains a sequence where Henrietta sees dozens of poor children in New Orleans who, according to her driver George, are “headed for the orphan train”. According to George, “they come from Appalachia, the Dust Bowl… all over, really. They get on a special train, take ’em to get adopted in the city.” He claims that they are not genuine orphans, but simply poor.

This is a bit confused. Orphan trains were real, and operated for about 70 years. They relocated children from orphanages in eastern cities to rural areas where they could be matched up with foster parents. It’s true that not all of these children were actual orphans – some children wound up in orphanages after being removed from their parents. But they weren’t random poor kids searching for a new life, as this scene seems to imply. More to the point, New Orleans was a place where children were brought by the orphan trains, not a place where destitute children began their journey. And the reference to the Dust Bowl complicates matters further: the final orphan trains ran in 1929, several years before the Dust Bowl began. The term itself wasn’t coined until 1935.

Ember. See above. The horse itself does not apply.

Marcus St Juniors and Alice St Juniors. They show up to react to Sadurang, but say nothing about the Outliers going to the Artery (which they knew about last issue).

VILLAINS

The Service. We see the same two agents from the previous issue: Jacob Miller, and a man simply called “Andrew”. Miller describes himself as “a sentinel of our purity”, with obvious echoes of the Sentinels. Having tailed Henrietta and George to the end of the road, they confront them at gunpoint without any apparent evidence of them having mutant connections – perhaps they already know that this area is significant. It’s not entirely clear what they were originally intending to do and what would have happened if George had obeyed the instruction to remain still.

Sadurang. He accepts Gambit’s refusal of his offer with apparent good grace and immediately offers to return him to New Orleans. He takes out Rogue without any apparent difficulty when she attacks him, though he does seem to opt for a method that’s designed to contain her.

Gambit calls him “the Conqueror Wyrm”. There’s a poem by Edgar Allen Poe called “The Conqueror Worm”, where the eponymous creature represents death, and a “wyrm” is an archaic term for a dragon.

Gambit reminds him of his comment in issue #1 that one of the Outliers was the Endling; Sadurang claims that it’s “difficult to say” but that he believes the Endling to have “female energy”.

He seems to know about Shogo, somehow.

GUEST CAST

The Man-Thing. He guards the Dark Artery. It’s not clear whether a version of him is here at all times, or whether he’s present for reasons connected with Henrietta summoning the Outliers.