X-MEN UNITED #6
“Shadow Play, part 2”
Writers: Eve L Ewing & Evan Narcisse
Pencillers: Tiago Palma & Eduardo Pansica
Inkers: Tiago Palma & Oren Junior
Colourist: Brian Reber
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Annalise Bissa

COVER: A generic image of Beast, Nightcrawler and Axo in action, with Axo’s colour-changing matching the other two. Nothing along these lines happens in the issue.

Curiously, this story is billed as “Shadow Play, part 2”. The previous issue was indeed entitled “Shadow Play”, but it was the second part of a storyline that had begun in the previous issue. Still, if Marvel say it’s part 2, then part 2 it is.

By way of recap, then: In issue #4, Iceman ropes Cyclops, Emma Frost, Rogue, Deathdream and Ben Liu into a team-building exercise that involves an RPG in a fantasy landscape created using Ben’s powers. An outside entity hijacks the scenario and Deathdream gets dragged away into a portal. In issue #5, Deathdream emerges back in Graymatter Lane, and alerts the other students. It turns out that “all of the adults” are also missing. One of the students, Mal Chance, is privately approached by the Shadow King, who is apparently responsible for all this. A psychic attack on the students as a whole is fended off by Sophie Cuckoo.

THE X-MEN:

The other adult X-Men who vanished last issue turn out to have been Kitty Pryde, Magneto, the Beast, Psylocke, Nightcrawler, Gambit and Wolverine. They find themselves in a desolate landscape which the three Louisiana X-Men identify as the Penumbra, from the “Dark Artery” arc in Uncanny X-Men #13-16. This issue describes it simply as “a place of eternal torment for those who murder mutants”, which is fair enough as a one-line summary.

Shuvahrak claims that their dark counterparts represent the following sins against other mutants:

• Wolverine has “filicide”, presumably because he’s killed so many other mutants. He shrugs this off as something he’s well aware of and has spent plenty of time thinking about already.
• Nightcrawler has “hypocrisy and coercion”. This is presumably to do with his religious beliefs and (depending on your point of view) his rather inconsistent application of them, where the main problem with Wolverine killing people is that it might be bad for Wolverine’s soul, for example. An unsympathetic point of view might see Nightcrawler’s expressions of religion as somewhat manipulative at time. Some of these points also seem to represent the X-Men’s own sense of guilt, rather than necessarily an objective view of their behaviour.
• Beast has “temporal manipulation”, which would be the time he brought the Silver Age X-Men to the present day in the Brian Bendis All-New X-Men series. However, this doesn’t logically apply to the Beast currently in the X-Men, who’s a clone of the original Beast from an earlier point in his personal timeline.
• Gambit has “treason and massacre”, presumably referring to his role in leading the Marauders to the Morlock tunnels, which enabled the Morlock Massacre. Gambit is supposed to have been unaware that the intention was to kill the Morlocks.
• Magneto has “abuse and torture”, which could cover a lot of his behaviour in his Silver Age days.
• Psylocke has “vicious reprisal”, which again is pretty open-ended in terms of her history.
• Kitty Pryde has “mercurial abandonment”, probably referring back to the Exceptional X-Men character arc about her running from the X-Men.

Emma Frost, Cyclops, Iceman, Rogue and Ben Liu make it back to Graymatter Lane from the fantasy realm. Emma immediately starts fighting the psychic attacker as if she was defending her own children, consistent with the defensiveness that’s been a part of her character ever since the original Hellions were killed. Emma seems able to restore normalcy pretty much immediately, but drives off the attacker without figuring out who it is.

Emma is very panicky about the idea of the kids learning about the Shadow King as a threat, but Cyclops and Magneto both argue persuasively that secrecy is just going to create doubt that the Shadow King can exploit. Cyclops seems to see this as a metaphor for how the fractured X-Men teams need to come together, and Emma is driven to concede that Cyclops was apparently right to be worried about the risk of infiltration back in issue #1.

Emma also suggests that what’s happening might be something to do with the threat (or warning, depending on your point of view) that she received from Lourdes Chantel in issue #4 just before the main storyline kicked off. If that’s right – and it is how stories tend to work – then the actual villains behind this story would presumably be the unidentified women we saw Lourdes talking to at the end of the scene.

Prodigy effectively chairs the group discussion to figure out what might be going on.

Magik and Storm have cameos.

STUDENT MENTORS:

Bronze. She still has the Lockheed clone Marigold perched on her shoulder at all times.

Rift. He returns Calico, Loolo and Loa to Haven House. Again, I’m going to point out that this series can’t get its basic premise straight: we were specifically told last issue that people’s bodies remain in the real world when they enter Graymatter Lane. (“And their bodies are back wherever they left them when they entered the campus.”) Somehow, this doesn’t stop Rift being able to transport Calico, Loolo and Loa direct from Graymatter Lane to Haven House, where only Calico should have a body waiting for her.

Axo. He recognises the seriousness of the Shadow King being able to access to Graymalkin and seems to fear that it’s an unfixable problem.

Melée just has a cameo.

SUPPORTING CAST:

Calico. We’re clearly before she gets her New Mutants costume (since she isn’t wearing it, and Gambit’s still around). She takes the lead in her field group, which makes some sense since she’s the one most familiar with the location. However, she comes across as much more normal and balanced in this story. She seems able to hear Shuvahrak talking in the Penumbra, when the others present can’t – presumably because she’s been to the Penumbra before.

The rationale for Calico returning to Haven House at all has also changed since last issue. In issue #5, it was Scout who decided to send one team to the Factory and one to Haven House, apparently in the expectation of either finding the missing X-Men’s sleeping bodies or finding clues about where they had been taken. In this issue, Calico claims that she came up with the idea of returning to Haven House, partly because it has a vaguely magical way of helping out, and partly because she didn’t have any other ideas beyond asking an adult for help.

Loolo. She does her obnoxious warrior routine.

Loa. Her powers can’t phase through a force field.

Chelsea St Juniors. She’s under the Shadow King’s influence, and makes a clumsy attempt to hold Calico, Loolo and Loa at bay with her force field powers.

Ember. Calico rides him into the Penumbra with no apparent resistance; he wasn’t at all keen on the place last time.

Sophie Cuckoo. She refers to Emma as “mother”, apparently unironically.

Scout. She argues that the Shadow King is responsible, based on her experience of being manipulated with him in the Krakoan-era New Mutants series. Emma seems to regard this as news too terrifying to be shared with the rest of the kids, and Scout is quite put out at what she sees as an attempt to shut down her contribution.

Wither shows up at the end of the issue, with next issue’s guest star Blade in tow. Wither has done very little since dying in X-Force #25 back in 2010. He did get resurrected on Krakoa but didn’t do much beyond making cameos. His only other appearance of any significance since then was in a Gwenpool two-partner in Love Unlimited Infinity Comic #43-44, where he seemed to have learned how to control his powers.

Ms Marvel, Galicia, Ransom, Deathdream, Jitter, Indra, Icarus, Mal Chance and Match all have cameos.

VILLAINS:

Shuvahrak (?). In the Penumbra, the X-Men are confronted by a group of evil duplicates of themselves, led by a person who sounds like Shuvahrak from the Dark Artery storyline, but looks like an evil duplicate of Emma Frost. This person seems surprised that they perceive her as Emma, and her behaviour is absolutely nothing like the largely impassive Shuvahrak from “Dark Artery”, being much more chatty and human-like. None of the X-Men seem to register this, however.

She speaks in white-on-black speech ballons with a wavering white outline, which is how Ransom’s dialogue appeared when Shuvahrak was speaking through him in Uncanny X-Men #16. She says that she “told you X-Men specifically never to return”; that was also in Uncanny X-Men #16. (“Go. Never come back here. Never.”)

Shuvahrak claims that “When I was doomed to guardianship of this realm, I was told that its name is Ojiji”, also known as “the Mirror-Mirror” or “the Wraith Lands”. “Ojiji” is Yoruba for shadow, but is apparently also used figuratively to refer to a “shadow self” – a person’s hidden side, broadly. She claims that the X-Men’s shadow-selves go to this realm even while alive, to suffer penance for their betrayals of other mutants. There’s nothing about this in “Dark Artery”, where the whole point of the Penumbra was that Shuvahrak had created it as a place of punishment for humans who had betrayed mutant relatives. The story also seems confused about whether the shadow version of the X-Men are hidden sides being punished for their treatment of other mutants, or simply some sort of symbolic representations of their sins themselves.

She claims that the X-Men were brought to the Penumbra by “your ancient kinsman … the first shiver in an unknown shadow”, presumably meaning the Shadow King. She suggests that he simply wanted them to be exposed to their shadow-selves.

Since Shuvahrak and her companions all vanish as soon as Calico and her team show up, it’s possible that this is all an illusion of some sort. However, the very fact that Calico can reach them by way of a short run from Haven House seems to confirm that this really is the Penumbra.

The Shadow King. The voice that speaks to Chelsea is the Shadow King, recognisable by the green border (which is how his voice appeared last issue when speaking to Mal Chance). Since Shuvahrak also has black-on-white dialogue, this is less than ideal in terms of keeping them distinct.