X-Men #19 annotations
X-MEN vol 7 #19
”Revelation”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inker: Sean Parsons
Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
REVELATION
The X-Men don’t appear in this issue at all. Instead, the de facto star of the book is Doug Ramsey in his new guise as Revelation.
We last saw Doug in X-Men: Heir of Apocalypse, where he won Apocalypse’s tournament, accepted the hazily-defined role of “heir” (with Apocalypse himself retreating to Arakko), and was transformed by Apocalypse. The actual transformation took place off panel in that story; here, the first two pages show it in flashback, with Doug’s body being eaten away and rebuilt. He has nightmares about this every night, but still talks positively about the experience.
Apocalypse also gave Doug pale skin, lightning bolt designs on his face and upper arms, a gold robe, and weird marking on his bald head. Doug has backtracked heavily on this: while he’s kept the name “Revelation”, he’s grown his hair back, which “makes me feel more like me”. He wears a “Krakoa was for lovers” T-shirt. His personality appears basically unchanged from the Krakoan era.
He lives in the Pacific Northwest with Bei and Warlock, in what seems to be a nice little rural cabin. In Heir #4, Apocalypse described them as Doug’s “first disciples” – Doug acknowledges that line here, but rejects it, calling them his “family” instead. They certainly act like one.
His transformation has significantly increased his resistance to injury, and he can be thrown out of a window with no apparent harm. His mutant power has also been enhanced. Bei describes him as “speak[ing] with the authority of Apocalypse himself”, while Doug and Warlock both prefer a more prosaic description that he can use language to control people, who are essentially compelled to do as he says. Doug takes the ethical implications of this very seriously, regards it as akin to mind control, and singles out Professor X as an example of the sort of telepath he wants to be better than.
Doug refers to a time on Krakoa when he told Professor X “We need to be good, or we’re nothing” – this is Immortal X-Men #13, where he persuades Professor X to disband the Quiet Council. Doug says he still believes what he said.
When held at gunpoint by a Z*E*R*O agent, he uses his powers to make the man put his gun to his own head. Bei kills the man before Doug can do anything else. It’s deliberately left unclear what Doug would have done otherwise. He objects to Bei killing the man, but that doesn’t resolve whether he was planning to psyche the guy out and let him go, or kill him personally (in which case he’s aggrieved that Bei is being overly protective of him). Bei clearly thinks it’s the former, but makes a point of not translating that speech for Doug’s benefit. She says that he needs to get used to taking lives in order to fulfil his mission and clearly thinks he isn’t there yet.
From the look of it, since we last saw him, Doug has been adjusting to his new powers, pondering what his mission might mean in practice, and doing absolutely nothing to actually advance it. Nonetheless, he seems to take the mission seriously. He takes his mission to be “survival of the fittest”, but recognises that Apocalypse failed on his own terms (which was the whole premise of him appointing an heir) and isn’t sure what the motto means in the real world.
Doug regards himself as having been the “least fit” of the New Mutants, since he was the first of them to die (in New Mutants #60).
Doug says at one point: ”I used to hack computers. Now I can hack people. But we have to hack the planet.” Apparently this is a movie reference that Bei and Warlock don’t get. I think it’s Hackers (1995), but to be honest, I’ve never seen the film either.
SUPPORTING CAST
Bei. Despite Doug’s power-ups, he still can’t understand Bei’s psychic speech (as was always the case). Although she seems to be speaking to him at the start of the issue, she’s actually using sign language alongside her dialogue. Quite why she’s “speaking” to him at all isn’t entirely clear, but perhaps Doug can still “hear” her tone of voice – or simply likes to hear her voice alongside her signs. Once, when she wants to make a relatively complex and abstract point about cultural relativism, she asks Warlock to translate..
Bei is pleased that Doug has reverted to type. She regards “survival of the fittest” as a concept “encoded into every aspect of [Arakkii] society” due to its wartorn history, but recognises that her notions will be culturally specific and unhelpful in trying to lead earth’s mutants. Privately, she clearly anticipates that the mission will inevitably lead to lives being lost, and that Doug having to do this personally. Doug doesn’t seem to fully appreciate that she thinks this, and she makes a point of not translating the speech where she says it. It appears to be something that she views as a regrettable necessity.
Warlock. Cheerful hanger-on as always. You rather suspect he’s only in the issue because that’s what Heir set up.
He considers his own Technarch culture to espouse a form of survival of the fittest, but evidently doesn’t think it’s very helpful to Doug’s mission. The basic idea is that the Technarch are necessarily the fittest in their own minds; suitably fit cultures are absorbed and everything else is destroyed.
He appears to serve as a sort of alarm system for the building, detecting Z*E*R*O’s approach. He can be temporarily knocked out with an EMP.
Apocalypse. His voice is heard in the opening flashback: “For centuries, I have believed that my methods were the only way forward for mutantkind. That I could become mutantkind’s great monster in the darkness, driving the species forward through fear and might. You have lost much, Doug Ramsey. And death can be a passage towards rebirth.” These are excerpts from a speech in Heir of Apocalypse #4, though it comes from the sequence where Apocalypse is persuading Doug to accept the position, not the later scene where Doug is actually transformed. The cuts include Apocalypse musing that perhaps Doug is well suited as an heir because his skill in politics and diplomacy is more important than Apocalypse’s direct power.
VILLAINS
Z*E*R*O. A group of renegade O*N*E members who have taken it upon themselves to murder dangerous mutants. They wear… well, they look like armed ICE agents, bluntly. Doug takes this to be a sign that he’s dealing with a black ops unit rather than the regular US government forces. How quaint. But he seems to be right, at least in the sense that the regular O*N*E authorities would not go as far as carrying out assassinations.
When first challenged by Doug, the Z*E*R*O member who confronts him claims to be a O*N*E agent. But he quickly concedes that his group acting without authority. They claim that the “[b]rass doesn’t realise that we’re in a state of gene war”.
Somehow, Z*E*R*O are aware that Doug is the heir of Apocalypse – he doesn’t seem to regard this as particularly surprising, so maybe it’s reasonably widely known in superhero circles.
Doug’s initial guesses are that Z*E*R*O might be Gene Nation or Sapien League. These are the same two examples of anti-mutant propagandists that Ben Liu gave in the previous issue, despite the fact that Gene Nation was a pro-mutant terrorist group. Either there’s another group of the same name that we haven’t met yet, or this is a repeated error.
Oh it’s Hackers alright
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3CKgkyc7Qo
I’m frankly surprised that Warlock never watched the movie Hackers while with the New Mutants.
If we go by the original publication dates, the movie was well after Warlock was hanging around with the New Mutants watching movies, and Warlock would have been dead at the time the movie was released. With the sliding timescale, these considerations don’t matter, and Doug must have been watching the movie a good two decades after it was new.
We need Doug to deny the heritage of Apocalypse and take up the gnarly mission of “Zero Cool” Dade and “Acid Burn” Kate. It would be all the more preferable if Doug also started listening to the music of Orbital.
For this issue, maybe Doug suspects that Gene Nation and similar groups might want to threaten him in order to impose a specific agenda or direction?
The promo image for the Age of Revelation crossover released today shows the X-Men crucified ten years from now. And the Timeslide issue showed a future where Revelation had taken over the world and turned it into a nightmare. But Doug seems so reasonable in this issue. I suspect there’s a reason for that…
Judging from this issue, it looks like BeI and not Doug is going to be the real villain of the Age of Revelation crossover. But there’s something odd going on. Note that this issue Bei uses the phrase “Great Work”. And it’s bolded so that we would notice it. That’s exactly the same phrase the Chairman used in issue 1.
I don’t know where this is going. The simple explanation would be that Bei is the Chairman but that would make no sense for a number of reasons. Maybe Bei is secretly working with the Chairman? Or maybe “Great Work” is an Arakki phrase or a phrase Apocalypse used and the Chairman has some connection with Arakko or Apocaypse?
Did we ever learn what happened to Brand after her confrontation with the Fisher King? Could she be the Chairman?
@Steven Kaye- No, we never found out what happened to Brand after her confrontation with the Fisher King. The problems with her being the Chairman are the same as with Bei being the Chairman: (1) Wyre referred to the Chairman as Mister and (2)the Chairman claimed to have a clone army.
I mainly know Hackers because Jay and Miles did a special episode about it
For some reason, my mind went to “The Core” when DJ Qualls says “You want me to hack the planet?”
I just miss the time when Warlock being hit by an EMP grenade would be a brief aside in which he quickly recovered in order to show the reader that he’s not a robot, he’s an alien with organic systems of a type, but now it’s just a quick way to get him out of the picture because he sucks or he’s annoying or overpowered or the author is embarrassed to have him around or whatever.
@Pat, hah , you’re not the only one , I did too !
And it was theorized on /Co/‘s weekly X-titles’s storytime thread that the Chairman may be the Stryfe who was in Steve Orlando’s Marauders , since he was jailed in the ancient past by Threshold along with Cassandra Nova , which is why he wears a Cerebro-style helmet (both Charles Xavier and Stryfe now have both TP and TK after all) and why the Chairman is all about about clones (since Stryfe is the OG Marvel Evil Clone)
Ah, so the mediocre Percy book starring Stryfe is a clever distraction! It all makes sense!
Anyway, I enjoyed this. After the Heir of Apocalypse trials (which could have been an e-mail) I wasn’t looking forward to Dougalypse, but this take actually makes me interested in him.
Bei remains a mostly blank slate, though. Big aggro wife with nothing else going on. (Other Big Bardas are available). Maybe MacKay can change that.
The most I care about the Chairman is reading the replies here. I hope they do something interesting like pull a Green Goblin. “The Chairman unmasked at last! It’s… wait, who the hell are you?”
“I’m Some Guy! We’ve never met.”
“But surely Wolverine has a past link …”
“Nope!”
“They wear… well, they look like armed ICE agents, bluntly.”
Do they? Or are ICE agents just looking their part as generic supervillain henchmen? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
@Si: Wouldn’t that be more like Electro (in his first appearance) or the original Crime-Master?
The Green Goblin turned out to be a recently established character with ties to one of the supporting cast, and Steve Ditko has pointed out how he set up the Norman Osborn reveal in earlier issues in response to an urban legend that he wanted the Goblin to be a nobody.
Personally, I’m hoping it turns out to be Frank Sinatra.
Maybe Doug will build a team of horsemen style upgraded mutants with Hackers handles:
Crash Override – Wizkid
Acid Burn – Angel Salvatore
Zero Cool – Sunspot
Cereal – Nature Girl
Lord Nikon – Blindspot
Phantom Phreak – Beak
Razor and Blade – The St. Criox twins as mini penances
Now anything less than the reveal of the Chairman as Eugene “The Plague” is going to be a huge letdown. It would tie together the 3K and Revelation plotlines.
People will argue that one clue doesn’t fit Eugene.
Ah. Easily fixed. “Eugene? What have you been up to since 1995?” “Cloning. Lots of cloning.”
Can we just talk about Hackers every week?
The Chairman is Peepers. He wears the Cerebro helmet to cover his eyes so no one knows it’s him. Magneto will find out, feel betrayed, and ask, “Peepers, WHY?!?” “Because,” Peepers will reply, “I’m a man of… vision.”
If we’re patient, Paul’s Daredevil villains series will eventually bring us the AOL CD-ROM-era glory of System Crash.
My nominal office for the past year as been in LLoyds of London, so When I last watched Hackers a month or so ago, it was really exciting to see my workplace (when i’m not at a desk at home 80 miles away,) as the headquarters of the Mega Oli conglomerate Ellison.
“If we’re patient, Paul’s Daredevil villains series will eventually bring us the AOL CD-ROM-era glory of System Crash.”
Oh, good. Cause I re-read that story less than a month ago, and if someone put a gun to my head and demanded I recount one thing that happened in it, I would use my allotted response time for prayer.
See also: Snake Root
Paul, I’ve got the special edition Hackers blu-ray, I’ll give you it away with you next time you’re round, it’s a movie that’s very much tied to an aesthetic of its time but is hugely enjoyable
So Doug is definitely not the Chairman, and contrary to what we feared after Heir of A., his character has not been turned upside down.
In fact, having Doug basically remain the same person, but with vastly upgraded powers and unsure what to do with them, is probably the best use of him at the moment. A rare case of a pleasant surprise during FtA.
Regarding the Chairman: among all candidates that have so far been mentioned, my favourite is definitely Krakoa Beast. He meets all the criteria and would play nicely into the question as to how current Beast will turn out.
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