GENERATION X-23 #2
“A Numbers Game”
Writer: Jody Houser
Artist: Jacopo Camagni
Colour artist: Erick Arciniega
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Mark Basso

COVER: Wolverine (Laura) fights X-73, while the rest of the Generated watch.

WOLVERINE:

Laura can sense that it was used in the past for similar training sessions to the ones that she was put through. Having expected to find prisoners similar to herself, she’s puzzled by how relatively normal the Generated are, and struggles to understand why they haven’t simply left. She’s keen to recruit them into the mutant community.

SUPPORTING CAST:

Scout. She’s happy to play along with the Generated calling her a super hero, in a rather tongue in cheek way. Generally, she seems happy to meet these new Facility creations, and particularly keen to chat with X-99 (the girl near her age).

The Generated. The six characters that Laura and Gabby met at the end of last issue are “the Generated” – or at least, that’s what X-Infinite calls them. They appear to be clones made from a mixture of mutant DNA in an attempt to give them multiple powers. This might be another way of saying that they’re chimeras, which was meant to be a big deal in the Krakoan era for a while. The woman that Laura met in the previous issue, X-80, apparently had elements of Kiden Nixon’s DNA.

According to X-Infinite, all of the Facility staff and all the other inmates were killed by a child who had been given some sort of lethal gas power. The survivors seem to be prone to degeneration which, when it goes wrong, can go explosively wrong. This is what X-80 was asking Laura to help with last issue, but her fellow survivors seem to think that she might have been trying to get away from them in case she hurt them.

The individual Generated are…

X-66. The bird girl. She also has mind-reading powers. According to X-73, she and X-Infinite are a couple, and she’s certainly the one who seems most closely aligned with him. She shares his view that they’re not mutants, and seems confident in their self-taught fighting skills.

X-73. The metal guy, who seems like a scrawny Colossus. He calls X-74 his “best friend” – presumably they were created at around the same time. He’s quite excited to meet some actual superheroes, and addresses Laura as “ma’am”. Nobody draws attention to it, but he and X-74 have clearly practised the Fastball Special. He explodes in a fiery explosion at the end of the issue, which X-Infinite blames Laura for.

X-74. The girl with the white hair. She seems to have some sort of energy powers. She distances herself from X-73’s comment that they’re all “defective”. She seems a little bit unhappy about X-66 and X-Infinite’s leader role and their tendency to have private telepathic conversations. She seems to genuinely enjoy the training sessions.

X-92. An elf-like character (possibly Nightcrawler-ish) who doesn’t speak and only appears reaching out of a portal. The portal seems able to teleport around, and sometimes appears on the surface of an object, but can also  just hover in mid air. It’s not clear what’s on the other side. She’s the only Generated who doesn’t introduce herself to the team; X-99 says that she’s “really shy and like to hide inside the walls and stuff”. She does nonetheless make a real effort to join in the training exercise.

X-99. The young girl who can imitate other people by tearing her skin off – possibly a mix of Husk and Mystique. Most of the time she just tears off part of her face to imitate their voice, but she can copy a person outright and replicate their powers – she can fly when copying X-66. She’s really excited to see Wolverine and asks for an autograph. She considers herself “super nice and helpful”. She seems confident that X-Infinite will find a cure for their condition, even though he hasn’t so far. She really enjoys the training sessions, which she treats as a game. When asks why they don’t leave the Facility, she replies “But this is our home!”

X-Infinite. The seemingly normal looking one is described as being incredibly smart but doesn’t seem to have any other powers. Laura suspects that he named himself. He  starts off relatively friendly, and seems frustrated that he hasn’t been able to do more to cure his friends’ degeneration. His argument for staying in the facility is that they’re still getting regular supply shipments and if they left, they would be homeless and have nothing.

However, he rejects any notion that the Generated are mutants, claiming that while they were based on mutant genetic material and created by humans, they’re “something entirely different from either”. By implication, he doesn’t regard Laura and Gabby as mutants either, and he calls Laura “X-23”. He argues that the Generated are their own community and that their “generated number” represents their true identity. Basically, he’s willing to embrace being a created entity, and seems to resent mutant culture as a rival claim on the Generated. Part of this, you suspect, is that he’s the established leader within the group, and he’d rather be a big fish in a small pond.

Note that his dislike of mutant culture doesn’t seem to be universally shared in the group – X-73 and X-99 in particular seem really enthusiastic to meet the heroes, and even X-66 is less confrontational.

VILLAINS:

Facility 23. This version of the Facility is apparently named in honour of X-23. All the staff have been dead for months – nobody explains what they did with the corpses – but X-99 has been impersonating a “Dr Chiles” to keep up reports that the training is progressing as planned. Either this is fooling the ultimate owners of Facility 23, or they’re playing along, because food supplies continue to arrive.

CONTINUITY:

• Wolverine’s origin story is covered in the X-23 miniseries (2005).
• The flashback on page 1 panel 3 shows Wolverine being held at gunpoint by her clones Zelda, Bellona and Gabby in All-New Wolverine #2 (2015).
• Laura met X-80 in the previous issue.
• The “mutant-nation experiment” that X-Infinite refers to is presumably Krakoa, though it could be Genosha.