Expatriate X-Men #3 annotations
EXPATRIATE X-MEN #3
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artist: Francesco Mortarino
Colourist: Raúl Angulo
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: The Darkchild holds the X-Men in her hand.
This is the final issue of Expatriate X-Men. The parent title Exceptional X-Men isn’t returning in 2026, but X-Men United appears to be its spiritual successor.
PAGES 1-4. The Providence city wall attacks the X-Men.
This picks up directly from the end of issue #2, which ended with Ms Marvel discovering that there was 3K technology underneath the Flotilla – on re-reading, the idea seems to be that it’s on the hull of the boats, and the storytelling problem is that issue #2 jumps from Ms Marvel reaching underwater to retrieve Lyrebird to being underwater with him, with no apparent moment where she actually goes underwater. Anyway, as soon as this secret is exposed, Melée and Rift teleport the ship to the edges of the Limbo Lands, where they immediately come under attack. The opening caption here establishes that the attacker is the city wall itself, which is “semi-sentient”.
As Ms Marvel points out, the team were hired in issue #1 precisely to bring Lyrebird to the Darkchild, so they were led to believe that she was expecting them.
PAGES 5-8. Darkchild explains the plot.
Colossus understandably tries appealing to his relationship with Illyana, although it looks very much as if she shows up in response to the alarm going off rather than because of anything he’s done. Online translators give his one line of Cyrillic dialogue as “stand”, but I suspect it’s meant to be “stand down”.
Darkchild and Juggernaut appear as they did in Amazing X-Men. However, the city itself looks far more Limbo-like than it did in Amazing, where it was presented as a superfically normal-looking city where ordinary humans lived in stressful misery. It’s possible that the areas right next to the border are made to look worse in order to scare off attackers.
Back in issue #1, Mystique hired the X-Men to bring Lyrebird to the Darkchild in exchange for intelligence. She expressly refused to say why. Darkchild now reveals that she hired Lyrebird to bring the X-Men to her domain, and that he engineered the deal with Mystique. This explains the scenes in issue #2 where Lyrebird turned out to have fire powers that he’d previously been concealing, suggesting that he never needed the X-Men’s help to escape captivity in issue #1.
Issue #1 also revealed that Melée had made a side deal with someone, which involved heading to the Limbo Lands but making sure that Darkchild didn’t get Lyrebird. Darkchild reveals here that she knows (presumably through magic) that Melée’s employer was 3K, and that the deal involved smuggling 3K technology into the Limbo Lands. However, this doesn’t explain why 3K were concerned that Lyrebird should be kept out of Darkchild’s hands.
Somewhat out of nowhere, it also transpires that Lyrebird and Illyana had a daughter, Nika, who somehow “sustains the Limbo Lands”, apparently meaning that she anchors their presence as an intrusion on Earth,. It’s not at all clear when this would have happened, even allowing for time distortion in Limbo. Since Lyrebird doesn’t regard Darkchild as the same person as Illyana (and specifically doesn’t regard her as Nika’s mother), Nika must have been born before Illyana died and was reborn as Darkchild. That happened in the raid to free Fabian Cortez, which we saw in X-Men: Age of Revelation Infinity Comic #4, which appeared to be not very far into the future at all. Obviously, given Illyana’s powers, there’s some potential for time-travel to short-circuit a pregnancy. We haven’t even seen Lyrebird yet in the present day comics.
PAGES 9-10. Melée explains the plot.
Melée confirms her deal with 3K and explains that 3K were offering to help bring back Kitty Pryde in exchange. Everyone else in this book believes Kitty to be dead, but Melée believes that Revelation has trapped her in intangible form. Melée is in fact correct, as seen over in X-Men: Book of Revelation #1. She’s also correct that Kitty has been trapped in her intangible state before (specifically, while recovering from her injuries in the aftermath of the “Mutant Massacre” storyline back in the 1980s).
When faced with the argument that Kitty wouldn’t want the whole team to be sacrificed just for her, Melée offers a very tenuous justification to the effect that Kitty is one of Doug’s former teammates and would somehow be able to assist in taking him down. This doesn’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny, because plenty of other X-Men are still around and some of them are dealing with Revelation on a regular basis. It feels much more like rationalisation.
PAGES 11-14. The X-Men destroy the ship rather than give it to Darkchild.
Of some note, Bronze actually seems able to take a direct hit from Juggernaut without blacking out, though it clearly does her some damage.
PAGES 15-16. Lyrebird fails to rescue Nika.
Nika apparently can’t exist outside the Limbo Lands; Lyrebird appears to have misinterpreted this as a bluff by Darkchild to stop Nika from leaving. However, Nika seems completely happy and relaxed in Limbo.
PAGES 17-19. The X-Men and the Flotillans head for Philadelphia.
Darkchild is apparently persuaded that, despite previously claiming that the Flotilla had fallen to her, the letter of Lyrebird’s deal has been complied with, and so the X-Men should be free to leave. This is a bit puzzling since Lyrebird’s deal with her was to bring the X-Men to the Limbo Lands in exchange for Nika. The more fundamental point is that Nika was unable to leave and so Darkchild doesn’t seem to have honoured her part of that bargain. It’s also not really clear why Darkchild wanted the Flotilla to be brought to Limbo in the first place, though the obvious explanation would be that she wanted her brother with her. Colossus does in fact choose to remain behind.
To be honest, it’s not really obvious why everyone suddenly decides to head to Philadelphia now either, beyond the bare fact that that’s where the plot of the Finale one-shot is going to take place. But apparently these characters will be in it.
“X-Men United appears to be its spiritual successor”
What about its rival book, X-Men City?
@James Moar I prefer X-Men Arsenal. I’ve been using that joke since X2 came out.
However about this book, just wow. Wow. A character we’ve never seen before has a child with Illyana that’s come out of nowhere and doesn’t seem to have been foreshadowed at all. For some reason Mystique wanted them together, but we’ll just assume the “Destiny wanted it” excuse, that’s as good as anything.
I want to apologize to the writers of Dynasty for bringing Amanda Carrington out of nowhere, but they at least foreshadowed that by having Alexis slip up when talking about the number of children she had. That looks a lot better compared to this.
They’re Americans. Would probably be the X-Men Ligers or something.
@Sam – Adam Carrington came out of nowhere also. Previously unmentioned abducted child, turns up alive in the third season.
This one made pretty much no sense. I guess it’s a reaction to complaints that Eve Ewing moved too slowly in Exceptional, but cramming in a ton of plot here, but with no time spent to explain the why of any of it.
And speaking of why… why did Colossus and Mystique get the cover treatment when Colossus got approximately five lines in the whole series and Mystique didn’t even appear after the first issue? Instead, all the least interesting characters are now heading to Philadelphia to presumably play a background role in the big finale.
While I’ve liked some of the Age of Revelation, it didn’t do much to make the worse parts of the From the Ashes writing room better.
In fairness, if Age of Revelation IS an alternate reality and not a true potential future, Illyana could have had her daughter years before she died.
The television show this story reminded me of was the short-lived show Revolution. One of the characters, Monroe, had a son whose existence his former friend, Miles, hid from him. Monroe started becoming unstable after his parents were killed in a car crash. The problem is that if you do the math, the kids was born years before Monroe’s parents died. So there was no reason for Miles not to tell Monroe about his son before the car accident.
And that’s exactly the problem with this story. If illyana had a daughter with Lyrebird before Maria Hill shot her. then why wouldn’t she tell her friends and family about Lyrebird? But nobody seems to know who Lyrebird is. I can just imagine this conversation:
Illyana: I’m having a baby with Lyrebird. I’m going to tell everybody.
Kitty: You shouldn’t do that.
Illyana: Why?
Kitty: You could be killed and resurrected as a dark and twisted version of yourself. And Lyrebird might need to trade an entire team of X-Men for the freedom of your child.
Illyana: That makes sense.
I think they’re going to Philadelphia to rescue Kitty. Which is what Melee should have done in the first place instead of trusting 3K.
It sounds to me like most if not all of the clues that this is an alternate reality can easily be confused with shoddy plotting.
Actually, even if it is deliberate, the fact that it can be confused with shoddy plotting is itself shoddy plotting.
It would be fun if all this ends with Revelation standing in front of Cyclops, who is plugged into a What If machine. Revelation says “this is what I’m afraid of. You have to stand guard against my worst impulses, my friend.”
And Cyclops says “Of course. But why is your VR world programmen to have two different feral girls who have a child from a previously unmentioned romantic relationship?”
“Don’t call me an incel!”
Better yet, Doug wakes up to find himself plugged into a dream machine by Apocalypse. “This is what I offer you as my heir. All the glory. All the regret. The power to change the very world. Will you accept my offer?”
Doug responds, “No.”
We can forget about everything that’s happened since “From the Ashes” started and Marvel gets a second chance to do this right.
I like your ending better.
I’m just astounded at some of the choices made in this event. It’s like wires got crossed between “10 years later” and “30 years later” or something.
Cloak and Dagger get married, have a kid.
Laura meets a dude we’ve never seen before, gets married, has a kid, gets widowed.
Illyana meets a dude we’ve never seen before, has his kid, is killed, comes back as Darkchylde.
And all of these kids are of an age that these people better get to having them real soon now to fit into the timeframe.
(At least the nature of Limbo makes Illyana’s situation -vaguely- plausible)
Some characters barely age.
Some seem to age way more than they should, like Kurt and Gambit.
And meanwhile, we’re supposed to just nod and go “okay, sure, makes sense.”
Age of Revelation is not going to go down as a classic X-Men event.
The more X-comics I read, the more convinced I become that they shouldn’t publish final issues. “Next issue: Honestly, it’s kind of a mess, True Believers! We bet you Magnificent Marvelites can come up with something way less disappointing! So, work those imaginations, save yourself 5 bucks, and join us in a couple months for… a New Beginning! Again!”
If you’re going to have an interconnected line of books, like the x-book, then it seems like you need some sort of proofreader who can review the scripts and make sure there’s a basic level of consistency.
That way you don’t get stuff like someone killing themselves to stop a virus that can’t reach the Pacific in a decade from getting into space. Or whether a character has a child who really should have been mentioned before now.
Some sort of, I don’t know, edit person.
I forgot that Alex and Lorna ALSO had a kid. We’re up to enough AoR children to field a new team… uh-oh
@MasterMahan: you… you can’t possibly mean a… an…
An editator?!
A editer?
An.. e.. dit.. rrrr…
@The Other Michael: I count five. Don’t forget Temper and Ransom.
I’m kind of surprised Ayodele didn’t bring in his prophesied Storm and Wolverine kid, but good for him.
@MasterMahan: The *really* frustrating thing is that Brevoort really only has the one gimmick – tri-annual crossovers – and yet every single one he’s presided over during FtA has been a disjointed shitshow:
* Raid on Graymalkin ending in a draw, with nothing resolved and an Inmate X tease that went nowhere
* X-Manhunt changing the stakes and what’s happening with Xavier every issue (are his powers out of control? Is he driving people crazy? Is it a toomah? Is the toomah important? Nope there it goes)
And now AoR, which really could’ve just been a six-issue arc of Adjectiveless.
The bleakest thought is that we’re basically doomed to go through this BS every four months until the X-books get a competent editor again.
[…] X-MEN #3. (Annotations here.) So here we are, at the tail end of the “Age of Revelation” crossover, with just next […]
Last issue, I thought this was too much plot for a three issue miniseries and it could probably use a fourth one. This issue, I think six to eight issues would still be not enough to fit all the set ups and actually working, comprehensible and emotionally effective payoffs.
And yet… I kind of enjoyed the gonzo nature of it. Pirate X-Men on riverboats! Against Shinobi Shaw and demons! Implied sexytimes! They’re on a train now!
Honestly, if the jump to trains happened at the end of last issue and this one was on rails from the beginning, I might have liked it more.
There is something here. It was messy and chaotic and nigh incomprehensible, and yet… I had fun.
So what are Lyrebird actual powers???
I “translated” that bit where Doop says a phrase in the Doop language. It translates as “A PHRASE IN THE DOOP LANGUAGE”.
I don’t know what I expected.jpeg
@Charmed One: All we know is fire. Darkchild does call him Lyrebird, so presumably it’s his real name and he some sort of mimickry powers… but I highly doubt he’ll ever appear again to confirm.