GENERATION X-23 #8
“Human Resources”
Writer: Jody Houser
Artist: Emilio Laiso
Colour artist: Erick Arciniega
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Mark Basso & Alanna Smith

COVER: Laura and Gabby in action against a mostly off-panel Nanny, with a battered Logan lagging behind.

PAGES 1-3. Laura and co find a massive hole in Facility-23.

Laura’s narration on page 1 is just a recap of the previous issue. As I pointed out before, Laura is apparently unaware that Nanny and Orphan-Maker escaped from the Pit in Sabretooth #5 (2022), and then went on to appear in Sabretooth & The Exiles. Logan also talks later on as if he thinks they were both last seen in the Pit. I’m not entirely convinced that anyone working on this comic knows about the Sabretooth stories, but fortunately, nothing really turns on it.

Wolverine isn’t healing because this story takes place between Wolverine #21-22, at which point his healing factor is suppressed by nanotech. There’s no particular plot reason for him refusing to explain this – he evidently just doesn’t want to talk about it and get interrogated. Most other books have ignored this storyline (which is now over), but for this book’s purposes, it’s actually quite handy that he can’t try to dominate the scene.

Laura refers to Peter being “resurrected older” – that’s Hellions #9, where he’s physically an adult after his resurrection. However, he still has the mind of a child.

Time Bomb remains understandably alarmed by the fact that children were imprisoned on the Pit in Krakoa, and Laura doesn’t really have much of an answer to this beyond saying that it’s all terribly complicated and didn’t happen often. Fortunately, Time Bomb’s immediate concern isn’t so much the ethics of Krakoan society as the fear that mutants might punish her if she loses control of her powers – which has been something of an issue for her in terms of suppressed anger since leaving the Facility. This is about as much character time as any of the individual Generated gets in this issue

There’s a massive stairwell leading down from Facilty-23 which wasn’t there before; everyone assumes, probably correctly, that this is Nanny blasting her way down to some underground hidden laboratory which the Generated never knew about. It’s not entirely clear how Nanny knew about it either, since according to her explanation later in the issue, she seems to have come to Facility-23 solely with the intention of using its above-ground facilities to treat the injured Orphan-Maker.

PAGES 4-5. They descend the stairwell.

Surprise! tries impersonating Orphan-Maker, apparently in the hope of fooling Nanny. Her efforts are woefully unconvincing in a way that we haven’t seen before – she doesn’t seem able to replicate his size, even though she was able in the past to copy wings. Perhaps this is because she hasn’t had so much exposure to Orphan-Maker.

PAGES 6-11. They encounter Nanny, and Laura calms the situation.

Wolverine mentions that he was turned into a baby once; that’s X-Men Annual #10 (1986). The X-Babies debuted two years later as a callback to that story.

Surprise! reverts to her normal appearance on page 6 but goes back to looking like Orphan-Maker on page 7 – or trying to, anyway. This seems to be an art error, because she’s already back in Orphan-Maker form as she dives for cover, so she can’t have had time to use her husk ability between panels.

Nanny is really keen on singing in rhyme in this story, although she does speak normally at points. She’s always had a tendency to sing, but it’s somewhat dialled up here. She seems to think that she’s defending the babies, and that Laura and co have come to “steal” them – although at the end of the issue she simply leaves them to Laura anyway. Possibly she calms down a bit after this point and decides that a bunch of human babies can just be left to the X-Men to sort out.

The art shows Nanny as absolutely enormous in this scene. This seems to be an art error by guest artist Emilio Laisa, as she was drawn at normal scale by Marco Renna in the previous issue. She’s shown floating in much of this issue; she did traditionally have a little rocket backpack that allowed her to fly. She seems to take no visible damage from Wolverine’s adamantium claws, though he’s not at top form here and it’s at least possible that she’s meant to have dodged.

When Laura addresses Nanny by her real name (Eleanor), she seems to accept it as an attempt to treat her with respect. When asked to help the Generated (meaning to help them discover their origins), Nanny initially assumes that Laura is asking her to raise them, but seems uncharacteristically uninterested in the idea. She seems to be preoccupied with Peter and the babies.

Nanny says that Orphan-Maker “gave his very all to keep us alive in that nasty little Pit”. This is weird, because the Pit was meant to be a form of suspended animation; it may just be how Nanny remembers the experience there.

PAGE 12. Nanny recaps how she came to the Facility.

Basically she just says that something happened to injure Peter, and she already knew about Facility-23, so she came here to get him fixed. She killed all the guards who had shown up after the Generated left, and reprogrammed some of their security robots to keep people at bay.

She doesn’t clearly explain how Peter became injured, beyond saying “Dear Peter used his powers and hurt his precious head”. Since Peter’s unspecified powers are supposed to be world-threatening if they ever get used, this is very odd, and you’d think that Laura or Logan would pick up on it more.

PAGES 13-15. Nanny takes Laura and Gabby to see the babies.

Laura insists on benching Wolverine because he’s injured, though she doesn’t give that reason out loud. He’s not happy about it, but seems to back down, either because he accepts the reason or because he doesn’t want to undermine Laura in front of the Generated.

Confusingly, Nanny seems to be leading Laura and Gabby back up the very stairwell that they just came down – which would imply that all the babies were on the surface to start with, and begs the question of what was down the hole. However, in the next scene, Time Bomb seems very clear that Nanny has taken them to a section of the complex that the Generated have never seen before. So maybe it’s meant to be a different stairwell?

Nanny seems to be saying that the babies are not mutants, but ordinary humans. The implication is that the Generated may be abducted human children who were given powers as an experiment. We get a one panel flashback to issue #5, where the time traveller X-80 showed Laura this conversation between X-Infinite and Dr Chiles; the line of dialogue comes from there. If this is correct, then it obviously sets up a storyline of trying to find the Generated’s real families.

We’re never told who was looking after the babies after the Generated left Facility-23, but presumably it was automated in some way.

PAGES 16-17. The Generated and Wolverine arrive in the nursery.

Nanny somehow escapes during this, apparently deciding that the human babies can be left to the X-Men after all. Nobody mentions what happened to the Orphan-Maker, but presumably she spirits him away too, despite his injuries. She was able to transport him there in the first place, after all. It’s not entirely clear why she even feels she has to flee, although she might assume that Laura and Logan will feel obliged to try and arrest her for killing the guards.

Nobody specifically says what happens to the babies either, in fact, but presumably they’re just handed over to the authorities.

PAGES 18-19. Laura and Logan talk.

This is Logan’s pep talk to Laura about how to be a mentor figure, not a position that came particularly naturally to him either (though it’s been a standard role for him for well over a decade now). It’s really this scene that justifies his inclusion in the story, which would otherwise have played out much the same way without him.

Laura mentions that of the other Generated, “one exploded” (X-73, in issue #2), “one disintegrated into time” (X-80, in issue #1) and “two are missing after a building fell on them” (X-Infinite and X-66, in issue #5). I think this is the first time it’s been clarified that Laura assumes the latter two are still alive – I’d rather assumed that she though they’d died in the collapse.

PAGE 20. X-Infinite works on the scorpion monster.

This weird scorpion cyborg thing was last seen in issue #4, where Laura identified it as looking like “part of Kimura”, her old handler from her own days at the Facility. Presumably X-Infinite retrieved it from the building collapse.