GENERATION X-23 #9
“Have a Nice Trip
Writer: Jody Houser
Artist; Marco Renna
Colour artist: Erick Arciniega
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editors: Mark Basso & Alanna Smith

COVER: Wolverine (Laura) fights the scorpion robot thing that hasn’t got a name yet.

PAGES 1-7. The Generated beat up some bigots.

“An actual wolverine given to us by a super hero who talks to squirrels.” Jonathan was given to Laura and Gabby by Squirrel Girl in All-New Wolverine #7.

“These past few months…” The next scene confirms that we’ve jumped forward three months from the previous issue. That fits with the Generated’s performance having improved. This is apparently the Generated’s first outing against actual bad guys, and while they’re at the lowest level, they’re still at least plausibly capable of doing Surprise! some harm.

Port is still not getting directly involved in combat, but given the nature of their powers, that seems eminently sensible – instead, they just yank the bad guys around from a distance and let Time Bomb attack remotely. Port seems to be talking a little more than before, though still in single words.

X-80 shows up at the end to watch proceedings, but we’ll get back to her.

PAGE 8. Flashback: The Generated are told that they used to be human.

In the previous issue, Laura and co learned that the Facility was experimenting on human babies in an attempt to turn them into mutants, which at least implied that the Generated might be. This issue, perhaps cutting to the chase given that the book ends next month, we’re told that they have in fact found files suggesting that Time Bomb and Surprise! were both abducted human children, although nothing has been found for Port. Laura suggests that it just hasn’t been found yet, although you suspect there’s a reason for it.

At this stage, at least, Time Bomb and Surprise both claim to identify simply as the Generated and to have no interest in exploring their roots.

PAGE 9. The Generated have pizza.

This includes a couple of flashback panels, one of which suggests where the book might have gone if it had made it past issue #10: an underground school for visible mutant children run by a retired teacher in her house.

PAGES 10-11. Time Bomb tells Laura that she wants to find her family.

“‘Three was like my brother, and since he died…” X-73 died in issue #2.

Time Bomb evidently fears that by looking for her birth family she could be seen as rejecting her current quasi-adoptive family, and Laura reassures her accordingly.

PAGES 12-13. The others learn Time Bomb’s decision.

Surprise! predictably reacts in exactly the way that Time Bomb feared, but Laura promptly  shuts that down. Port asks to come along – which means talking unprompted, something they very rarely do – and this leads to a whole road trip.

PAGE 14. The group set off for Maryland.

X-80 randomly shows up to tag along as well. Since X-80 is a time traveller, she’s experiencing these events out of sequence; at this point in her personal timeline, she’s confused to find X-73, X-66 and X-Infinite missing from the group. (Really, there’s no reason for her to assume that they aren’t just upstairs, but we’ve only got 20 pages.)

PAGES 15-20. The group are attacked on the road.

X-80 is brought up to speed on what happened in the first arc, and insists that she doesn’t remember it. This is because it hasn’t happened for her yet, but until Laura tells her that she was older when she appeared in that arc, X-80 seems open to the possibility that her memory might just be extremely confused.

Rewind. Oddly enough, despite Gabby’s reasonable assumption that the name might be taken, it seems not to be.

The attackers comprise:

• X-Infinite, obviously.
• X-66, but she seems to have been attached to the scorpion cyborg thing that was working for the Facility in previous issues. Last issue, X-Infinite had the previous cyborg unconscious and said that he had “a much better use for these parts”. It’s hard to tell how X-66 feels about this. Strapping a flyer to a massive robot scorpion doesn’t exactly seem like synergy.
• Bellona. The woman in black and red with the X on her face is Bellona, another of the Laura clones who first appeared at the same time as Gabby. She hasn’t appeared in the X-books since All-New Wolverine #18 in 2017. Her only subsequent appearance in the wider Marvel Universe was in the 2023/4 Daredevil: Gang War miniseries, where she was basically a mercenary criminal working for Madame Masque.
• One of the Stepford Cuckoos. This is really odd, not just because the Cuckoos are not natural allies for X-Infinite, but because there’s just the one of them, and they normally come as a package deal.