X-Men #36 annotations
X-MEN vol 7 #36
“A Theft”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inker: Sean Parsons
Colourist: Arthur Hesli
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
COVER: The Chairman, taking Magneto’s bloodstained helmet from him. Once again, this issue is billed as a DNX prelude.
THE X-MEN:
Cyclops, Temper, Kid Omega, Psylocke, Beast, Magik and Juggernaut. To be honest, there’s not much to say about the core cast as individuals in this issue. Temper and Kid Omega continue to fight as something of a duo. Kid Omega has a routine where he can telepathically provide his team-mates with a video-game style map of their environment and the locations of their opponents; Psylocke regards this as a bit gimmicky, but genuinely useful.
SUPPORTING CAST:
Magneto. We get some further explanation of Magneto’s mysterious condition, originally identified by the X-Men as “resurrection-linked degeneration sickness”. In the “Age of Revelation” event, we learned that nobody in that future timeline had any memory of Magneto having this condition. Now, in this issue, the Chairman says that Magneto’s condition is due to “information sent from the future, encoded into your DNA”. Magneto says that “we” have the same theory, presumably meaning at least himself and the X-Men’s Beast.
The “message” would presumably be one of the two messages that were sent back in time in X-Men: Age of Revelation using Schwarzchild’s powers – one sent by the Chairman, in the body of the future Beast, and the other sent by the real future Beast after he returned. Quite why either of them would choose to send the message by encoding it onto Magneto’s DNA isn’t explained yet. According to the Chairman, the message is the last piece of information he needs to create his X-Virus, which would tend to suggest that it’s the Chairman’s own message. Cyclops also concludes at the end of the issue that the Chairman wanted Magneto’s DNA for this purpose.
Magneto is underwhelmed by the Chairman’s invocation of the “Magneto was right” slogan, which he associates with platitudes – it dates from the Grant Morrison run when he was being treated as a Che Guevara figure. He refuses to endorse the X-virus plan, not because it involves violence but because it involves genocide. On that basis, Beast just beats him up and takes cell samples.
Ben Liu. For some reason, it’s Ben who’s the first to figure out that Magneto was the real target, and he seems particularly agitated about it.
Animalia and Xorn are also around.
VILLAINS:
The Chairman. He says that he’s close to re-creating the X-virus from the “Age of Revelation” timeline, but that mentions that he’s had to use workarounds, because he doesn’t have access either to Revelation’s powers, or to the Technarch biomass that Revelation took advantage of.
He claims to be able to fix Magneto’s powers, but might just be bluffing in order to get his hands on the sample. Still, his clear preference is to recruit Magneto rather than just to take the samples. He talks up how much Magneto has done for mutantkind over the years, and his symbolic value – some of this seems to be acknowledging his own radicalisation during the Krakoan era, and recognising Magneto’s importance in legitimising Krakoa at the time.
The Chairman claims that Magneto became the X-Men’s teacher during his time as a villain, and quotes The Merchant of Venice: “The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard, but I will better the instruction.” In the original context, this is Shylock promising revenge for the way he has been treated by Christians.
Joseph. 3K don’t actually know that Schwarzchild is a prisoner of the X-Men. Instead, their mission is to keep the real X-Men occupied while the Chairman goes after Magneto. Joseph chooses to tell Cyclops that it’s all a distraction once he’s been defeated – possibly just to try and turn a defeat into a victory and regain his dignity. H
He insists on being called Magneto, as he did in issue #24, and is obviously irritated when anyone calls him Joseph. He refers to the 3K X-Men as “my X-Men”, and generally carries himself as their leader, but they don’t seem to have any time for him. They certainly don’t show any teamwork with him, and Cyclops defeats him singlehandedly.
Once defeated, he calls “mother” for extraction – in other words, his creator Astra, who is a teleporter.
The 3K X-Men (Constellation, Galatea, Juice, Psychovore and Timebomb). Kid Omega says that Cassandra Nova has “psychically hardened” them to the point where he can’t simply shut them down remotely. Presumably he means that they have the same sort of psychic traps as Schwarzchild and Ben Liu did in previous issues.
The 3K X-Men are really not happy about being saddled with Joseph as their new leader, and actively cut him out of their communications channels. Timebomb winds him up by calling him “Joseph”, and tells the others that he’s a “petulant child” who hasn’t earned his place among them. She may, of course, also be aggravated that she didn’t get promoted to take Schwarzchild’s place after he was booted out of the group. Still, Galatea sides with her, and Psychovore talks about cutting Joseph down to size once the mission is complete. The only one who seems to accept Joseph as their leader, even grudgingly, is Juice, and he seems to be so slow on the uptake that he hasn’t previously twigged how his teammates feel.
@Michael: There’s a bit of “chicken/egg” with what you’re describing – did those books fail because the audience wasn’t there, or was the audience not there because editorial chose writers in their 60s like Mark Waid and Dan Slott to tell stories about teen characters?
I had no interest in Miracle Man on Avengers, until just now when I realised Marvel can have a derivative of Shazam on the same team as the character who now owns the name Captain Marvel. I bear DC Comics no ill-will, but holy dooly that would be the biggest kick in the groin.
Maybe they could write out Carol and have Miracleman become the New Captain Marvel.
@Diana,
I don’t think it’s the age of the writers, I think worry the audience is not there for a Teen Book outside of Miles. To go back to DC the Titans current run is anchored by Cyborg and Nightwing because Jon Kent and the new Wonder Girl, have not been big enough draws in their own books. Also even the young cast is not that young Stephanie is almost 35 years old now.
Back to X it looks like we may be getting an New Mutants spin off from Uncanny, but I would assume that that will live an die on the staff not the outliers, just like the last training book was the Kitty and Emma book.
Champions or young avengers could come back if they were more tightly tied to big names, Miles could lead the book, and but you need a couple of big names to sell it.
This may not be a youth book issue either as WCA for example struggled so maybe team books outside FF and the Core X-men and avengers arn’t seen as important.
Bringing things back to McKay’s X-Men, I have a feeling that DNX is going to be the same kind of non-event that Age of Revelation turned out to be. The Fantastic Four have no real business being involved other than to make it a crossover event and, just like with AoR, DNX would likely be a stronger story if it was just a major arc in the parent title only.
I hate being so damn negative all the time about the X-Men line, but things are just dire all across the board. I don’t think I’ve been this dissatisfied with the titles since the Terrigen Mist days, which is the last time I stopped reading before Krakoa brought me back. I love the X-Men, I just want their comics to be good again!
If you’re finally breaking the glass on the Marvel/Star Wars crossover, having Kevin Smith write it is depressing. His comic work has been largely unremarkable and unremarked-on since, what? Green Arrow? And he’s no longer a significant draw outside of people who are already buying the crossover, so that can’t be the reason. Jason Aaron would’ve seemed the obvious pick. Ryan North or Al Ewing might’ve turned out something interesting. As always, I think Rainbow Rowell could’ve done a great job. If you want to go with an older name, this is obviously the book Chris Claremont has wanted to write for his entire career. Even the Slotts and Kellys and Wellses of the world would probably turn out a more solid, readable, evergreen comic than the current incarnation of Smith is likely to. Weird, weird choice. (He’s not even the best choice out of the hosts of his own podcast.)
@Chris M- Accoding to Brevoort and MacKay, it was originally supposed to be an X-Men/ Avengers crossover. That would have worked since the Chairman was a member of both teams and Wanda has personal connections to Magneto. But then the Avengers got rebooted with Armageddon. It just doesn’t work the same way an X-Men/ FF crossover.
The problem is , aside from the just-too-expensive prices that only people with disposable income (i.e. People with Jobs beyond subsistence level) can afford , global Gen-Z / Gen-Alpha / Gen-Beta audiences , when they think of “kid/teen superheroes” , they think of best-selling Japanese manga series like Naruto or Attack on Titan or My Hero Academy , where the current levels of sexy fanservice & violent action & psycho-emotional melodrama & ThisIsDeep/TooDeepForYou edgelord philosophizing havent been seen in USAmerican corporate comics since the 1990s/2000s Dark Age heydays . I know its not PC to admit it , but when Marvel & DC “went woke” , it really did “go broke” and lost the demographic whose Gen-X/Gen-Y counterparts (i.e. their fathers or uncles) back in the day made the Image founders monetarily wealthy or at least financially stable, leaving middle-aged die-hards who still read out of lifelong habit (aka sunk-cost fallacy) but would now rather pirate than pay tsk tsk tsk
I’ve never liked the FF and the X-Men together. Marvel’s wholesome first family and their melodramatic freaks n’ geeks don’t fit tonally, as far as I’m concerned.
I wonder how Marvel is ensuring that Kevin Smith actually finishes the miniseries this time. I’d be wary of buying it just because of his poor track record.
– To be fair to Kevin Smith, I guess, he has completed at least three comics in the last two years (Archie/ Jay & Bob, Jays of Future Past, & the first issue of a Spider-Man/ Hulk mini) and a short story in one of the Batman/Deadpool crossovers. He might actually finish the Star Wars book… maybe…
– Nobody cares about Miracleman, the character. Remember when Marvel acquired Angela? How’d that work out?
In fact, I think most of Marvel’s characters don’t have the traction they need to break out to a wider audience. I’m talking about the comics, but I know tv viewership and (non-Spidey or Deadpool) movie attendance have declined. As pointed out above, teens like manga & anime. Marvel can incorporate manga storytelling and structures into their comics, but I doubt kids would flock to $5/ pamphlet American super-hero comics that read like imitation manga.
– Absolute WW is, indeed, excellent.
Absolute DC works because it is invigorating, well-done, and not yet over-extended. There are 5 ongoing Absolute series. Absolute Martian Manhunter, Green Arrow, and Catwoman were/are limited to mini-series. It reminds me of the beginnings of Krakoa, in that you have a sub-universe with a manageable amount of books to keep track of.
Readers and speculators both like the Absolute line. I hope DC doesn’t screw up the line, a la what happened during Fall of X or the original Ultimate Universe. Don’t add more ongoings, replace the characters people like with newer ones, overindulge in crossovers, or hire Jeph Loeb.
I think teen characters are a hard sell in today’s comic market because the average age of a comic reader in 2026 is between mid-30s and early-50s. Not exactly a prime demographic who want to read stories about characters who are the age of their children or grandchildren. The only exceptions would be if it was a character that they were reading about in their younger days who is still a youth-character. I’m sure there are some creepy middle-aged male readers who would read a comic about teenage girls if there was enough salacious content, but Marvel shies away from putting 16-year old girls in skimpy bikinis in 2026, so the creeps aren’t going to pick up those books either.
Angela was never really a draw though, was she? I never heard fans talking about how Angela was a great character. Miracleman might not be the draw that Marvel expects, but I’d say that Miracleman is a bigger deal than some random Spawn spin-off character, especially as Marvel acquired that character at a time when no one was reading Spawn anymore. Spawn has had a bit of a nostalgia comeback in the past few years, but there was a period in the late-‘90s through roughly 2020 when Spawn was a vanity project for McFarlane. The entire appeal of Angela was the Gaiman lawsuit. With Miracleman, at least fans also talk about how Alan Moore’s work on the character was a classic.
@Si – I think that’s a good point. Without proper evolution of her character, the fangirl/superhero and other caught between two worlds concepts (minus maybe the Pakistani-American one) does have an expiration date, especially in the shared universes of today where events and team ups are so much more common. The concept could’ve lasted longer in the Golden Age, for instance, when crossover and continuity mattered less.
I do think there is still a way to evolve her character to regain some of the success she previously had.
For the other point, “I mean, characters like Spider-Man had a similar start, it’s not impossible to cross over. But it’s not easy.” I feel like Spider-Man crossed over later in his existence, so maybe that’s part of it? But there are also some who feel that crossover with Spider-Man has hurt the character now and made him less relatable (me too, partially, although I don’t hate as much on current Spider-Man stuff as others).
@Michael – I was definitely a trade waiter for Willow’s run, and even getting into it a bit after it started, but I haven’t bought single issues consistently for almost two decades. When I talk about the title being strong under Wilson, I don’t always mean sales there. But it is something to note, given the shelf life point Si made.
For the teen comics debate, I do think hiring older writers to write them is part of the problem.
But I’ll also echo those talking about the older comics readers demographic – younger readers aren’t going to comic stores as much as they used to (Absolute comics might be turning that tide a bit, maybe in part because of the manga influences on the titles and art). But this is a debate that’s raged since I was a kid in the 90s: how do you get younger readers back in the comic stores?
I think younger readers are more likely to get graphic novels/trades and use Webtoons or other digital sources, but again, Abosolute comics seem to be breaking that habit a little bit, so how to leverage that approach?
“I’ve never liked the FF and the X-Men together”
They have had some decent stories together. The best one being their joint miniseries in the 80s that Claremont and Bogdanove worked on.
That was written by Claremont when he could do no wrong. I find the problem with the two teams interacting is that the FF should be about exploring and discovering, while the X-Men should be more grounded (ignoring their multiple space opera plots). I have never felt that the FF fit well with political messages, while the X-Men work best having at least a political subtext to their fiction. They don’t mesh well together. With the Avengers, you can question why the Earth’s greatest superteam isn’t more involved with the day-to-day, grounded issues facing mutants in the Marvel Universe, but I don’t want to see that sort of discussion with the FF (I don’t know, maybe some fans have more time for this). Even then, you get a terrible cross-over like A vs. X out of those two teams interacting. Really, the only interesting aspect to play off of between the two teams is the idea of family. Claremont did that, to some extent, with his mini-series, and I’m not sure how much more you can get from that one idea.
The two teams really played out how badly it can end up having them interacting with the mini-series during the Krakoa era. I don’t even know what Marvel was thinking with that mess.
I remember when the Miracleman reprint books were being offered. On the one hand, it was something I thought would never happen!
On the other hand, I recall someone in one of the comic retailer forums summing up all of our questions about how to order this being something along the lines of “Who is this book for? Besides comic shop owners of a certain age?”
I thought that was succinct and insightful, and it made me laugh.
I would care about Miracleman if Alan Moore was writing it. Otherwise… actually makes me want to actively avoid it.
As for younger readers, let us see how Marvel fares on Webtoons.
As for Midnight – I’m not a fan of Hickman, but I have to believe there’s some twist that didn’t make it into the solicits. It’s Hickman, right? It can’t just be ‘X-Men are vampires and are fighting other vampires’. There have been two Bloodstorms already, come on!
Spider-Man – eh. Still, I’ll check it out.
Fantastic Four – if I’m not a fan of Hickman, then I think are actively dislike Ben Percy’s work… but Kev Walker is a draw for me. I’ve started re-reading Kieron Gillen’s Doctor Aphra (try out A More Civilized Age podcast if you like discussions about Star Wars) and Walker’s art there is, well, fantastic.
The “older writers” problem has nothing to do with relatability as you might think. The “older writers” problem is simply because those writers are not fashionable young influencers who stir up shit on social media.
And if you hire those people as writers, well, you have a whole different set of problems.
“X-Men vs. Vampires” wouldn’t interest me, but Hickman writing and Nightcrawler as a main character (potentially) are draws. I’ll check it out.
“FF crossed w/ Cthulu mythos” doesn’t interest me, but Walker’s a good artist who mixed superhero and horror material skillfully in Thunderbolts. I’ll probably get the first issue and decide from there.
“Spider-Man plus body horror” doesn’t interest me, but Johnson has just enough cred to get me to try the first issue. Yes, his Hulk run lost the momentum it had before Infernal. I don’t dislike the book, though, and think it can bounce back.
@K: for me, the problem with older writers writing younger characters is that their separation from teen cultures leads to inauthentic teen characters. I like Mark Waid’s writing, but his approach to writing young characters post-2000 can be awkward and cringe-inducing. I can only imagine how off putting it must sound to an actual teenager.
It’s not a binary choice of older writer vs influencer, either. Bendis wrote young characters who sounded like young characters (or Borscht belt comedians) in Ultimate Spider-Man, v1. Vita Ayala had a good handle on the teen characters in New Mutants. Brian K Vaughan, Kieron Gillen, Allen Heinburg, Rainbow Rowell, and others have succeeded at writing teen characters when they were in their 20s and 30s.
@Mike Loughlin: Oh, of course. But realistically, only older readers are out here praising books for authentic voices, so you’re still not getting young readers that way.
Young readers care about: 1) brand, or 2) creators literally their own age.
How about Bob Haney writing teeny-boppers in the swinging ‘60s with his Teen Titans? You might get some Generation Z or Generation Alpha reading a book like that for the sake of irony.
@Chris V- Yes, fans still talk of how Moore’s work on Miracleman was a classic. But even in the 80s, Moore’s name on a book didn’t exactly guarantee high sales. DC has never released official sales figures on Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. But the estimates I’ve seen are around 60,000 an issue, which wasn’t that impressive for the 80s, even at DC. To be clear, he saved the title from cancellation and his run sold much better that Marty Pasko’s. (Supposedly. Marty Passo’s run on Swamp-Thing was one of the lowest-selling runs the Big Two put out in the 80s.)
Watchman was Moore’s magnum opus. It’s not clear how well it sold- the problem is that limited series had no statements of ownership. We do have the Capital City distribution sales figures but it’s not clear what fraction of the total sales they repersent. If an issue of Watchmen sold 30,000 issues through Captail City is that half of its total sales. a fifth of its total sales? The blogger RS Martin has said that he believes that it sold over 200,000 issues at a time when Avengers was selling 216,000 and West Coast Avengers was selling 205,000.
My point is that Moore’s name on a title definitely increased sales but wasn’t an automatic guarantee of high sales in his prime, like Byrne’s and Miller’s in their prime. So I’m not sure why one would expect a character from a. title he worked on 40 years ago to produce a huge increase in Avengers sales today.
Yeah, but a comic like Watchmen has been kept constantly in-print through TPB and has been a consistent top seller since it was first printed as a TPB. DC has made a lot of money off of Watchmen well after the point it was first published as individual comics. The same can be said for Swamp Thing.
A fan first coming into the world of comic books who isn’t interested in collecting something like Spider-Man is most likely to pick up the series considered classics such as a TPB of Watchmen or Swamp Thing.
How much money is Marvel making off of the Avengers or West Coast Avengers comics from the 1980s in 2026? Nothing like the guaranteed sales that DC can consistently count on with Moore’s 1980s output in Trades to this day. That’s why Moore’s name has actual value.
Bringing the Watchmen characters into DCU continuity sold very well for DC.
@K: ah, got it.
@Michael: many years ago, I read that Swamp Thing didn’t generate enough sales to yield royalties for the creators until the Crisis crossovers. The info might have come from Steve Bisette’s blog or an Alan Moore interview. Either way, I was mildly surprised.
@Chris V: I almost wrote a whole diatribe on how badly writers have bungled teen dialogue for the entire history of Teen Titans’ publication. I love me some Nick Carey art, but those early Titans comics are not good. Marv Wolfman’s melodrama punctuated by bad comic relief is also rough, but that George Perez art and storytelling is amazing. When I was buying Titans back issues, I made it two issues after Perez left the Baxter book before I couldn’t take it any more.
jumping in the teen books debate, there might be something to the age gap, but I think the larger issue is more simple. The comics themselves are trying the same thing but want different results — stop making school settings.
Ensemble characters in a school setting just can’t be enough of a setup anymore; it’s too generic and it feels empty. There is no story engine.
The Louisana X-Men tried to twist the gimmick with something about the Endling and having a bespoke villain with Sarah Gaunt but those were quickly abandoned. Remember the freshness of Avengers Academy which was about one of them being a villain, or the original Runaways? Strange Academy had a couple of things going for it, an actual POV character instead and one that was an outsider, i.e. didn’t actually know magic.
You can’t just have a school and automatically think having a setting means you have a story. Even the original X-Men premise from which all this is even drawn never lasted as a “school” as their comic was cancelled in the 60s and rebooted as we might say.
Have they said what “DNX” even means? As far as I can tell it appears to be an awkward pun on “DNA”, but I’m only getting that from context clues.
@Moonstar Dynasty: The Absolute Batman annual was pretty obviously inspired by the situation in Springfield, OH, where 12,000 to 20,000 Haitians appeared in a city of 60,000. The differences with the annual are that
1. the Haitians weren’t composed of only old women and children (they admit there are gang members among them),
2. they actually got the jobs (the Springfield natives were hoping to apply for them, but the employment offices were closed a week before the Haitians arrived, leading to suspicion that they were trafficked
3. there haven’t been any attacks on the immigrants, just complaints and rumors about eating pets.
Johnson is labelling anyone who disagrees with him on immigration as a white supremacist.
Let’s look at some real facts and figures: One-third of Springfield’s population had left Springfield since the late-1980s when the US’ industrial base began to die. Springfield’s government started the “Welcome Springfield” campaign in 2014 for the reason of attracting immigrants to Springfield to try to help grow the struggling economy. The first Haitian immigrants began to arrive in Springfield starting in 2018.
As far as attacks, well, yes, there actually have been. Not like presented in the Batman Annual, but that’s a superhero comic book. If a superhero is going to do anything in their story, they have to be given villains of some sort to fight. Otherwise, it makes the superhero look pretty bad. That’s why a superhero story might have the government create something like a Sentinel that the superheroes can punch, because it would break the conventions of “mainstream” superhero comics to have superheroes punching elected government officials. The Batman Annual wouldn’t have been very exciting if it featured Batman beating up the person(s) who had been vandalizing cars. There were, at least, six incidents of people reporting being physically assaulted. There have also been numerous bomb threats against many institutions in Springfield. While not the mass violence of the Batman Annual, it’s false to claim there have been no “attacks”. In Ohio, a bomb threat is classified as a fourth-degree felony. There again, though, that’s why a Batman Annual is fictional rather than an exact replication of the events (i.e. Richard Nixon was never the leader of a Secret Empire).
Wait just a minute…you mean Richard Nixon WASN’T the leader of the Secret Empire? I am now completely disillusioned.