GENERATION X-23 #7
“Homecoming”
Writer: Jody Houser
Artist: Marco Renna
Colour artist: Erick Arciniega
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editors: Mark Basso & Alanna Smith

COVER: Wolverine (Logan) with the regular cast. Surprise! is turning herself into a second Logan. The avian X-66 also appears on the cover, despite the fact that she was separated from the group at the end of issue #5, and doesn’t appear in this issue. This also happened in the previous issue, presumably to avoid spoilers for issue #5 when the covers appeared in the solicitations.

WOLVERINE (Laura):

She says the whole series has only taken a week, and she hasn’t had time yet to figure out a plan for what to do with the Generated. It seems odd that she found time to get costumes made for them, but I guess that’s genre convention for you. Logan sensibly advises her that she needs to start taking the initiative.

Her initial reaction is to refuse to let the Generated return to Facility-23, but she backs down partly because Logan argues that they’ll just go without her, and partly because she decides on reflection that knowing more about where she came from helped her come to terms with her past.

When telling the Generated about the Pit on Krakoa, she glosses over it as “a kind of prison” – it was, of course, meant to be a sort of suffocating suspended animation, and in practice it was worse than that. She still feels the need to distance herself from it and blame it on the Quiet Council. I don’t remember her having any qualms about it at the time, though. Still, she’s evidently keen to downplay things about Krakoa that the Generated would baulk at.

SUPPORTING CAST:

Wolverine (Logan). The previous issue ended with Laura finding him unconscious in her home. It  was one of his safehouses in the first place, and he says that he didn’t realise that she was still living there. No specific reason is given for him being out cold, but this story takes place between Wolverine #21-22 (he mentions having an appointment lined up with Cecilia Reyes, which happens in Wolverine #22). On that basis, the suggestion seems to be that he’s simply hiding away due to his health problems, and passed out because of that.

He ducks all questions about his state of health, although he does assure Laura (truthfully) that he’s having it dealt with. The Generated seem to come as a nice distraction for him, letting him slip into his normal grumpy mentor persona in what seems like a low-risk situation. When cut, he claims not to notice (which Laura regards as nonsense).

Scout has told Surprise! that Logan “is on, like, every superhero team” and “acts grumpy to hide all his big soft feelings”. In fact, right now, he’s only on the Louisiana X-Men team, but he certainly has been ubiquitous in the past.

Scout. She doesn’t get the hint that Logan is going to duck any questions about his condition, but gets fairly easily deflected anyway. She tells him that “I just had my healing factor turned off for a whole day, so I’m kind of an expert now” – that’s issues #4-5. She feels the need to point out to Logan that he could bleed to death without his healing factor – in fairness, she was so used to her own healing factor that the possibility didn’t occur to her in issue #4 until someone else pointed it out.

She and Surprise! are still acting as a duo, and they have a double team move worked out where Surprise! impersonates the missing X-66 in order to fly her into battle. They haven’t quite worked out the kinks yet.

She doesn’t like Surprise! impersonating her, and has extracted a promise that Surprise! will only do it “in emergencies, or if it was really funny”. (Not that Surprise! actually honours it.)

When asked why they don’t just kill Orphan-Maker, she does point out the apparently notorious dangers of opening his armour, but also makes clear that it wouldn’t accord with her self-image as a hero.

Surprise! She has a temporary star tattoo on her face. As in the previous issue, she seems to have trouble understanding boundaries, and doesn’t quite get why Scout doesn’t like being impersonated. She’s impressed by Scout’s fighting skills, though, and keen to learn how to do it.

She’s sincerely interested in learning more about Facility-23, but finds the place “creepy” when returning there. Nonetheless, she initially assumes that the defence robots will be friendly since “we’re the ones they protect”.

When impersonating X-66 with her shapechanging powers, she can fly, but with much less skill than the original. This seems to be a matter of practice rather than a limitation of her powers. While in Facility-23, she defaults to her normal form when they aren’t in combat, rather than impersonating someone more resilient, so perhaps there are time limits involved.

She insists on her codename being pronounced as if it had an exclamation mark – even when someone is trying to warn her of danger. (Laura and Logan both seem to find this amusing, rather than alarmingly disconnected from reality.)

Time Bomb. She seems to be taking on the role of spokesperson for the three remaining Generated, although Surprise! is a naive child and Port doesn’t speak, this is hardly surprising. Nonetheless, she’s rather more prone than the others to pushing back on things that don’t make sense – she queries what it means for Laura to be a “mostly clone” of Logan, demands an explanation of Nanny and Orphan-Maker, and calls out Krakoa for imprisoning children. Despite having spent her life as a prisoner of Facility-23 until last week, she talks as if this is obviously wrong.

Her justification for returning to Facility-23 (which she claims the others agree with, and they don’t dispute it) is that they were clearly lied to by X-Infinite and so they don’t know the truth about their background. They also might find out more about the risk of them exploding or melting down, which X-Infinite certainly seemed to think was a real problem in earlier issues. She doesn’t regard Facility-23 as her home.

She and Port have come up with a double team move where she produces a time bomb and they teleport it into the middle of the opponents. This actually works well, making a big improvement on her performance in the previous issue.

Port. Beyond helping out with the double team and teleporting the group into Facility-23, they don’t get all that much to do in this issue.

VILLAINS:

Facility-23. After issue #4, Facility-23 was occupied by Facility troops, but by the time our heroes arrive in this issue, they’re all dead. Logan says that they were killed days ago by “some kinda energy weapon”. The protective robots have been weirdly re-assembled, presumably by Nanny, and now have extra limbs and multiple heads.

The room where the Generated teleport in is the same living room where they introduced themselves to Laura and Scout in issue #2.

Nanny is occupying a part of the complex which is littered with what seem to be recently dead scientists and soldiers, and has a nursery full of babies labelled as “X-HR-248”, “X-HR-165” and so forth. This is puzzling, because the Generated were living alone in Facility-23 for a while prior to issue #1. They surely can’t have thought that they were leaving babies behind, so who was feeding them in the run-up to issue #1? Or did they only arrive after issue #4?

Nanny and the Orphan-Maker. Laura recaps how Nanny and Orphan-Maker were consigned to the Pit on Krakoa in Hellions #18. As she says, that was a punishment for Orphan-Maker killing humans, and Nanny chose to join him. Laura and Logan both seem to be unaware that Nanny and Orphan-Maker escaped in Sabretooth & The Exiles #1-5, even though Temper was also in that story. (Obviously the other possibility is that it’s been overlooked and this is a continuity error, but we’ll see how it goes next issue.) That story ended with Nanny and Orphan-Maker going their own way, apparently with a number of powerful mutant babies that they’d rescued from Orchis.

Orphan-Maker is lying in bed with his armour hooked up to medical equipment. It’s not clear whether he’s conscious or not – there’s no one in the room for him to talk to. As always, we’re reminded that he’s a terrifyingly powerful mutant who has to be contained in his armour. Laura describes him as a “mutant child, sort of”, presumably alluding to the ambiguity about whether Orphan-Maker is still a physical child despite being in an adult-sized suit of amour.