UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #31
“Mars Needs Mutants, part two: The Devil I Know”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artists: Jim Towe & David Baldeón
Colour artist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER: One of the Nur holding an unconscious Rogue, with UFOs above. This doesn’t happen in this issue – indeed, Rogue doesn’t appear at all. The slogan “They Came From Beyond!” might just be generic, but there was a film called They Came From Beyond Space in 1967 (based on Joseph Millard’s 1941 novel The Gods Hate Kansas, which seems a bit harsh, but I’ve never been there so I’ll have to take his word for it).

This issue also include part two of “Mind and Matter”, a serialised 5-page back-up strip for Marvel Voices celebrating Disability Pride Month. It’s got nothing to do with the X-Men, so I won’t be covering it. At least in the digital edition, there doesn’t seem to be any indication of where you can read part one – if you were wondering, it’s in Amazing Spider-Man #32.

THE X-MEN:

Nightcrawler. He tries diplomacy with the Nur, but doesn’t get anywhere – in fairness, they probably can’t understand him. Eventually he manages to teleport out of their ship and get MacKenzie to safety with him. The suggestion seems to be that while their technology was interfering with his powers, this was an unintended side effect, and it was simply a matter of him figuring out what was happening.

Jubilee. She’s very happy with how the Outliers are fitting in at school, and quite enjoying this quasi-maternal role. Of course, Jubilee was in a quasi-maternal role with a toddler for years, until the Krakoan era kicked that into touch. In Rogue’s absence, she seems to take the lead. She puts on her sunglasses to fight – it might be partly to avoid blinding herself, but it’s not like the others need them when she’s around.

Mutina calls her “mall baby” and “food court” in reference to her back story as a runaway hanging out in a mall, which is where the X-Men first met her in issue #244 (1989). As in previous issues, there’s a question mark about how Mutina knows about this in the first place, in order to refer to it.

Gambit. Before he’s interrupted, he starts telling Jubilee about his conversation with Rogue about the Outliers (in issue #26, where he essentially proposed informally adopting them).  As in the previous issue, Rogue is missing. Gambit says that she told him that she was “off doing a consultation”, and that he left her a message, but she hasn’t replied.

Wolverine is also present at the dance. He still has two sets of adamantium claws in this story, so it’s either before or after the current arc in his own book (depending on how quickly he resets to his normal status quo).

Monet St Croix. She interrogates Ezra about the true purpose of Graymalkin and isn’t very happy about what she hears. (See below.)

Quicksilver. As usual, he’s present playing a supporting role to Monet but doesn’t really add much.

SUPPORTING CAST:

Banshee. He’s there to hear Ezra’s interrogation, and he’s naturally outraged about the experiments that were planned for his daughter.

MacKenzie DeNeer. After Nightcrawler teleports her to safety, she duly phones the New Orleans authorities as requested. They immediately recognise her as “Kurt’s special friend”.

Jitter. Without using her powers to copy someone else’s abilities, she only knows how to waltz (which, judging by the other dancers, is not appropriate to the current music). Naturally, Calico doesn’t mind. At the end of the issue, she gives Jitter the “My Little Mutie” toy that she bought last issue.

Deathdream remains nervous around his date Marlys Zerbe, despite her encouragement. She claims that he’s a good dancer, though obviously we can’t tell. He claims that sometimes he can die for a week without even noticing, “and I start to smell”.

Ransom is already fighting the Brood when we first see him in this issue. There’s an apparent mismatch with what we saw in the previous issue: in that story, Ransom and Brood were approached by a group of Brood carrying the same guns as the Nur, and both he and the Vig were squaring up to fight them. As this issue starts, Vig is hanging back and letting Ransom get on with it (though he does join later) and the Brood seem to have lost their uncharacteristic guns.

For some reason, when the Vig sends Ransom to get help against the Brood, he specifically looks for Jubilee on the grounds that “I need someone thoughtful”, even passing up the help of Gambit and Wolverine.

The school kids listen to his natural authority when he gets them to evacuate.

The Vig initially doesn’t fight the Brood (despite the ending of the previous issue), claiming that the kids in the school are none of his concern. But then he changes tack and joins in after all. This might be because he thinks it’ll win Ransom’s trust and make Ransom more likely to accept the Vig’s offer from the previous issue, ultimately placing Ransom in his debt. It could also be that the Vig, as a basically regular criminal, draws the line at letting aliens attack a school. Or it could be both.

Certainly, once the Nur show up, he makes an apparently genuine decision to provide cover while Ransom gets help – and with Ransom out of the way, Vig does fight the Nur single handedly rather than trying to make a break for it. He’s powerful enough to tear a Brood apart with his bare hands and manages to break the helmet of one of the Nur, who responds by tearing his arm off. Given his reptilian appearance, it may be that it’ll grow back. Even if it does, he quite naturally finds it very painful, and quickly passes out from either shock or blood loss.

Mutina. She wasn’t in the previous issue, but she shows up at the dance to warn everyone about the aliens. As in the previous arc, she maintains her sarcastic persona but what she actually does is basically helpful. She also claims that she’s shown up because she still wants to join the X-Men, as per issue #22.

VILLAINS:

Captain Ezra. According to Ezra, Graymalkin Prison was a cover for a hidden underground laboratory to turn mutants into “Wolverines” at the behest of “governments, tech barons and arms manufacturers”. He claims that the idea was to enlist mutants who had been through trauma and offer to “make them whole” – this presumably has something to do with the self-loathing mantra that some of the trustees were reciting earlier in the run. Ezra’s explanation is illustrated with a symbolic panel of some of the prisoners, in Weapon X-style helmets and with extended claws, fighting the Avengers (or rather, the recently-disbanded roster from the Jed MacKay run). The ones shown are Siryn, Omega Red, Wild Child and Blob; Siryn is coloured in her grey trustee costume, but this may be an error, since everyone else is wearing their normal costume.

Ezra explains that they were at best able to achieve an approximation of Wolverine’s powers. He says they couldn’t replicate his healing factor “precisely” (it’s not clear what they did manage), and that they could coat the bones with something cheaper than adamantium and give them non-retractable claws. A symbolic panel shows Siryn with claws bearing a “Trask” logo – Lawrence Trask was seen working on Sentinels at Graymalkin in the Sentinels mini but it’s not clear how that fits with Ezra saying that the Sentinels were a cover story.

According to Ezra, Corina Ellis was unaware of this underground laboratory, and was only hired so that the prison would have access to her partner Scurvy’s telepathic powers. Basically, she was a useful idiot being employed as an unwitting front. This at least explains how an otherwise unqualified podcaster got the job, although if it also resulted in her brother being incarcerated at the prison, then it may ultimately have been responsible for the whole operation falling apart (in the previous arc).

Ezra was apparently aware of all this even while following Ellis’s orders day to day – it’s not clear how far Scurvy was aware of it, but presumably he had a hand in keeping the trustees in line. It seems that they never actually got as far as making any of the prisoners into “wolverines”. Ezra seems mildly disapproving of the idea of non-retractable claws on grounds of cruelty, but otherwise comes across as broadly okay with all this, which broadly fits with his characterisation as an amoral professional who is willing to be involved with things like Graymalkin but would behave like a hero if he had been hired by the right side.

Banshee and Quicksilver express some scepticism about this story, apparently on the grounds that it doesn’t seem like a very practical scheme, but presumably this is leading towards Monet and co investigating the sub-levels in future issues.

The Nur. The aliens in the blue and black armour from the previous issue are called the Nur – or at least, this is Mutina’s approximation based on reading their mind. She warns that she might be wrong, and claims that their language is too alien to be translated. The only one who speaks gets a blank speech balloon, which tends to confirm what she says.. Understandably, they aren’t interested in Nightcrawler’s attempt to talk to them, and show no apparent interest in his claim to be under the protection of Lilandra Neramani, though even if they could understand him, it’s not obvious why they would care what Lilandra thought about anything, given that she’s in exile.

Mutina claims that they want to kill “the young ones”, which she initially takes to mean the students, before realising that they’ve come to exterminate a Brood hive under the school. If so, the Nur may actually be the good guys here, depending on how you feel about the Brood as vermin or characters. That may be the point of the story.

They seem to come in different sizes – of the three who show up at the school, one towers over the others, though they all seem to be wearing variants of the same uniform. The large one is some kind of giant green alien. He, at least, comes from a chlorine-based atmosphere. They seem largely resistant to any form of attack, although the Vig is able to break one of their helmets, and they can be gunned down with their own weapons. According to Nightcrawler, something about their technology “seems to ignore basic physics” in a way that interferes with his teleporting powers (though this may be an unintended effect).

The Brood. They apparently have a hive under the Outliers’ school. The handful who showed up outside the school last issue get despatched by the Nur; they don’t have the guns that they were carrying in the previous issue, which makes me wonder whether that was an art error.