Exceptional X-Men #9 annotations
EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #9
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artist: Carmen Carnero
Colour artist: Nolan Woodard
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort
THE CORE CAST
Axo. His “affective core”, as visited by Emma, consists of him sharing a meal with his family and friends – despite the fact that we’ve repeatedly seen him blowing off his father’s attempts to have these sorts of moments with him. Emma seems surprisingly touched by it, and describes it as “lovely”.
He’s a powerful enough telepath for it to be worth Emma’s while borrowing his power in order to defeat Sinister.
Bronze and Melée. They bluff their way out of Axo’s clone collapsing with a ludicrous tale about a school science project, which people are apparently willing to accept. Well, it is the Marvel Universe.
They accept the instruction to remain at the dojo while the grown-ups deal with Mr Sinister, but they’re understandably bored and frustrated. Whether because of that or because they’re taken by surprise and railroaded, they fall for Sinister’s fake Iceman. Rather than making a positive contribution to defeating Sinister, their main role is to stay calm and get themselves out of trouble without having to divert the attention of the established X-Men.
Melée can make other people invisible or intangible as well as herself.
Kate Pryde. Once her suspicions are raised about Sheldon Xenos, she quickly figures out that the initials SX are a pun on Essex (Sinister’s surname). Quite rightly, she tells Melée and Bronze that Sinister is completely out of their league and that they should stay away from him. She’s clearly concerned that they’ll get killed, but in her monologue to camera, she reflects that she also didn’t want to find herself in a position of responsibility for young mutants again.
Melée is surprised to learn that “Kitty” is a hacker; Kate used to do this sort of thing all the time back in the 80s, when that was a shorthand for teenage genius.
She has an actual costume, presumably provided for her by Emma (and with the obligatory X-symbol on the belt).
Emma Frost. Emma has confidence in the trainees (or at least claims to), and says that “They’re X-Men.” She certainly seems better than Kate at keeping a level head under pressure. She apparently needs to borrow power from Axo to help defeat Sinister. For some reason, she passes out afterwards – this is the cliffhanger, so it’ll doubtless be explained next time.
Iceman. His first thought on seeing the collapsed Axo clone is to suggest Regeneration-Linked Degenerative Sickness – the condition that Magneto is supposedly suffering from over in X-Men. Iceman has heard about it via Rogue. As Emma points out, this is a completely impossible theory because RLDS is meant to be a side effect of Krakoan resurrection, and Axo was never resurrected.
This is one of those rare stories where people get frozen in ice and somebody worries that they might suffocate.
Mr Sinister has an Iceman clone which he made from shards of Iceman. According to Sinister, Iceman was “the one who got away”. This is footnoted to Iceman #5, without specifying which one. They’re thinking of Iceman vol 4, the 2018-19 miniseries by Sina Grace and Nathan Stockman where Sinister did indeed try to get control of Iceman.
SUPPORTING CAST
None, although Axo’s father and sister appear in his “affective core” symbolic panel.
VILLAINS
Mr Sinister. This version of Sinister initially seems to be vulnerable to telepathy, which means Emma can control him singlehandedly. However, she can’t free Axo from Sinister’s machines safely without splitting her attention, and Sinister’s backup plan is to cause chaos with the duplicate Iceman. Later, though, he claims that he’s Emma’s equal in telepathy, and since she needs to call on Axo for help, he seems to have a point. So perhaps he was playing possum. Back in the late 1980s, and specifically around the “Inferno” crossover, Sinister was indeed presented as a powerful telepath. That’s fallen away over the years, presumably due to his endless re-tooling of his body once Kieron Gillen’s interpretation of the character became standard. But there’s no reason why he can’t get it back.
It’s still not really clear what exactly Sinister was trying to do with Axo. Emma says that Sinister is “siphoning Alex’s empathic neural core”, whatever that means.
It’s also not entirely clear why he sends the Iceman clone to get the other two students, given that his plan seems to hinge specifically on Axo’s powers. Perhaps it’s just about keeping the X-Men distracted.
According to Emma, the Axo clone does have a psionic signature, but it’s “a sketch or a vague outline”. Whether this is standard for all of his clones is hard to say. The Iceman clone seems a lot more coherent than the Axo one – perhaps something about Axo’s powers caused a problem.
“Whether this is standard for all of his clones is hard to say. The Iceman clone seems a lot more coherent than the Axo one – perhaps something about Axo’s powers caused a problem.”
This is odd. The Axo clone didn’t act anything like Axo and apparently didn’t have his powers and then disintegrated. The Iceman clone is able to fool Bronze and Melee and give Bobby a hard time for a few minutes. My guess is that whatever affected the Axo clone has something to do with R-LDS, since Sinister alluded to traces of resurrection last issue and Bobby mentioned R-LDS this issue.
Bobby claimed he had a concussion this issue after being hit by Sinister in ice form. That might have been a joke but in issue 6 he ate chips in ice form. Ewing doesn’t seem to get that Bobby’s ice form is meant to be animate ice- she seems to think that it’s more akin to Colossus’s organic steel. Peter can be hurt badly in armored form by physical force but Bobby just reforms himself every time he’s damaged.
Some Iceman fans complained that he was less powerful than he should be this issue.
Sinister seemed far more powerful this issue than he’d been during the Krakoan period. Of course, the usual explanation for why Marvel’s mad geneticists- Arnim Zola, Sinister, Jackal- is that they’re periodically experimentally on themselves.
Regarding Emma’s collapse at the end of this issue, some people have speculated that Emma will lose her telepathy after this issue. If that happens, my guess is that Doug will offer to restore it if Kitty joins him. (We were reminded that Kitty used to be a hacker this issue and that was when she was working with Doug.)
I think it makes sense the Iceman clone is more advanced than the Axo one. Sinister has had the DNA for longer and presumably gone through multiple iterations, not to mention Iceman’s public appearances and Sinister’s direct experience with him he could draw his personality from. Sinister just got Axo’s DNA and it’s been what like a month (?) in universe since anyone even knew he existed.
@Paul:
“It’s still not really clear what exactly Sinister was trying to do with Axo. Emma says that Sinister is “siphoning Alex’s empathic neural core”, whatever that means.”
Isn’t this just more of ‘He wants to use Axo’s empathic abilities to build more complete profiles’ (and maybe avoid the unconvincingness of Axo Clone rev. 1 in future efforts)?
No-Prize: the clone of Axo degenerated because as a as established in Netflix’s Resident Evil series, if a clone is force-grown , that is the only time they actually develop clone degeneration sickness , and the faster the force-growth , the faster the clone-degeneration , and if Axo’s clone was force-grown within hours , then his degeneration would thus be extreme .
Are we sure this wasn’t a joke on Iceman? The Iceman clone was as poorly created as the Axo, except no one could tell the difference between the defective clone and real Iceman.
If any character has an excuse for varying power levels, it’s Sinister. My No-Prize explanation is that Krakoa Sinister depowered himself in the hopes of being underestimated.
Bonus points for the kids actually listening when they’re told to stay out of danger and let the adults rescue their friend. I’m not sure why Essex thought having more enemies would make things better for him, or how fake Iceman got the kids there so fast, but still, bonus points.
Oh, Sinister was definitely purposely acting the fool on Krakoa. He was the trickster in “paradise”. Hickman set it up from the beginning, having Sinister outsmart Xavier, and giving himself years to tamper with the DNA samples. He wanted everyone to underestimate him.
I’m still thrown by him using Thunderbird’s X-gene to genetically engineer himself into a mutant, considering that Thunderbird’s mutant power is strength and stamina.
There was an unrevealed “Sinister Secret” where Sinister wrote that “it was no secret which mutant’s X-gene he used, but the question as to how he got Thunderbird’s DNA was a secret”.
I always thought the perfect swerve was going to be that Sinister was lying about his X-gene, and he really used Destiny’s DNA. Of course, the reveal was that he had cloned multiple Moiras.
@MasterMahan- Bronze and Melee were useless in the battle. But Sinister knew their presence would distract Kitty.
Uhh, I don’t know if keeping Exceptional in its own bubble is a good thing. I read more upcoming storylines in Uncanny and Adjectiveless, which at least has me intrigued. But are there any forthcoming storylines in Exceptional that will show improvement? Look, I understand they are trying to rehabilitate Kitty, but there has to be more to this than…this.
Kitty’s monologue wasn’t I thought, “to the camera”, but to *Axo*, his power working on her.
I like this series very much. I don’t read it for superhero/supervillain fights for two reasons.
Reason #1: there haven’t been any before this issue.
Reason #2: now that we got it, it was nothing to write home about. Serviceable, but not very inspired. Maybe another enemy clone or two would have made it livelier – as it was, it was a lot of innefective punching and Emma doing telepathy without any depiction of said telepathy. So it was two people standing in a basement.
I liked Bronze and Melee taking care of the melted clone, them running into Kate was a good bit, well-timed. So, decent, but I’m going to assume fights aren’t Ewing’s forte.
I guess here’s hoping for another 9 issues without them, then 😉
Well, 9 issues is probably about as much as Exceptional has left in the tank.
Kate’s aside was definitely presented in the same way these “to the camera” bits have been done thus far, but Emma reacts to it in the next panel, so it has to have been meant as spoken dialogue.
[…] X-MEN #9. (Annotations here.) Well, it’s taken us nine issues, but we actually have a fight with a villain. And instead of […]
@Michael: As Paul says, Emma discounts the R-LDS because Axo was never resurrected.
@Chris V: Sinister only found out about Moira being a mutant at the end of Inferno. The Moira Engine was created after Hickman left by Gillen in Immortal X-Men.
In Immortal, Sinister explicitly says he reduced his power levels to avoid raising concern about him.
@neutrino- But she thought Axo was the real Axo at that point, not a clone. My guess is that whatever causes R-LDS also has can affect clones.
Gillen said he was using story notes left behind by Hickman for the idea behind “Sins of Sinister”, so the Moira Engine would seem to have been where Hickman was planning to go also.
Although, yes, it is true that Sinister only found out about Moira being a mutant when Xavier, Magneto, and Emma decided that the Quiet Council should know their secrets. Which, I guess, still leaves open how Sinister knew about some of his “Sinister Secrets”, considering they were events taking place in the future.
The fights are sometimes the least interesting part of a super-hero comic, particularly an X-title starring teenage characters. I’m fine with this series having minimal physical conflict. I want to know these young mutants’ experiences and relationships, how Kitty and Emma approach mentorship and how they work together, and how the oppressive forces of the world (not necessarily super-villains) try to bring the characters down.
I understand why someone wouldn’t like that sort of thing. Making a “hang out” super-hero title isn’t the safest bet for longevity. I’m just enjoying this book for what it is.