UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #38
“Soul Deep, part 2: In the Hands of a Wounded Child”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Luciano Vecchio
Colour artist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER: Wolverine and Nightcrawler in a swamp, apparently ready to fight an alligator or something. Nothing like this happens in the issue, but maybe it was always intended as a generic pin-up. For what it’s worth, the solicitations for this month listed Uncanny X-Men #37-38 as parts 1 and 2 of “The Scavenged”, but the actual story content in the solicitation seems to match with what we have here.

PAGES 1-4. Sarah Gaunt acquires a house.

Let’s start with the house. Sarah Gaunt’s back story, as related in the early issues of this series, involves her meeting Charles Xavier at Oxford University, entering a relationship with him, declaring after a month or so that she wants them to have children, and becoming vindictive when he rejects her. The broad strokes of that seem to be confirmed by Xavier himself.

What follows after that is a little less clear. Until issue #5, she had apparently convinced herself that she did in fact have a child with Professor X. Rogue reads Sarah’s mind in that issue (using copied telepathy), and claims that Sarah actually had a son almost a year after the break-up. The father remains unidentified. In a flashback in issue #4, Sarah claims that when her son was 9, they were living in New Orleans, and that he died in Hurricane Katrina; this apparently drives Sarah insane. The flashback on page 3 of this scene is a reference to that earlier flashback.

How far we can trust Sarah’s recollection of this must be debatable, particularly given that issue #5 establishes her own memories as unreliable. Interestingly, in issue #4 she gave her son’s name as “Brian”, while later in this issue she calls him “Peter”. This might be a continuity error, or it might reflect her recollection changing after her encounter with Rogue, or it might simply indicate that she’s not reliable.

At any rate, the owners of this house – the Bonners – do at least confirm that it’s built on the site of a house that was destroyed during the hurricane. They say it’s 10 years old, in which case it was built a decade after the hurricane.

That said… the Bonners are so receptive to Sarah showing up on their doorstep and offering to buy their house for a vast amount of money which she proposes to pay by cheque that you have to assume that they’re under some sort of mind control. Sarah did seem to be able to mind control her followers (including Fawn) in issue #4, although they were somewhat zombified in that issue.

Our attention is specifically drawn to the fact that Sarah is dressed for cold weather even though she’s in Louisiana in summer. In fact, she’s wearing the same clothes that she was wearing in the flashback in issue #2 where she first meets Xavier. The significance of this isn’t immediately clear.

The Scavenged, waiting outside, now have clothes rather than the rags they were wearing in the previous issue. Some of them look like they must have been quite challenging to put on over their non-retractable claws without tearing the sleeves open. Sarah is insistent on treating them as her children and demands to be addressed as a mother figure, matching her usual obsession. The Scavenged themselves are naturally grateful to her for rescuing them from Graymalkin last issue, but beyond that they seem understandably confused about what they’re doing here. Given Sarah’s influence on the Bonners, it could well be that she’s influencing the Scavenged too, but overall her pitch to them is that she’s the only benefactor they have.

Sarah seems to be trying to set up this home with the Scavenged as an inverted version of the X-Men’s home at Haven House with the Outliers/New Mutants.

PAGES 5-6. Dazzler argues with Agent Califf.

Dazzler finds a store room in Graymalkin which contains an assortment of X-Men belongings – from what we can see, there are a bunch of spare X-Men costumes, a photo of the original team, the roller skates and mask from Kitty Pryde’s garish Sprite costume, the “Bamf” doll that Illyana Rasputin had for a while in the 90s, and a painting of some sort, perhaps intended to be one of Colossus’ efforts.

Continuity purists may well question what any of this stuff was doing in the X-Mansion when it was seized and turned into a prison – it had already been stripped by Orchis before that, and during the Krakoan era it was more or less abandoned by the X-Men. (And it was blown up at least twice in the years after Kitty stopped using that costume.) Nonetheless, for the purposes of this story we’re apparently taking it that it still stored a reasonable number of belongings that somehow survived to the present day. And indeed, some were there in issue #1 when Warden Ellis arrived at the prison.

Joanne Califf was hoping that Dazzler wouldn’t see this material, though it’s not obvious why, since it would have been a fairly easy goodwill gesture to disclose it. What was she planning to do with it, that could have had any more value than that?

As Califf says, Ellis did indeed give orders for all personal items to be burned in issue #1. We’re told that the guards “never got around to it”. Given that Ezra always showed at least some concern for the prisoners, it’s possible that he just wasn’t willing to carry out such a pointless order, or at least that he had more important things to do. It’s also worth bearing in mind that we now know Ezra regarded Ellis as a sucker who believed she was running the prison but wasn’t really.

Dazzler seems convinced that Califf (or at least those she represents) is stalling on the time scales for removing the prison walls around the school, and the story is written in a way that suggests we’re meant to agree with her. This only makes sense if Califf is dragging her feet in the hope of somehow retaining control of the school, but it’s unclear why she’d be doing that.

PAGES 7-8. Sarah talks with the Scavenged.

Apparently this is the first chance they’ve had to properly talk to one another since escaping the prison last issue (even though they’ve had time to get costumes). Their code names from the previous issue are confirmed, and we get real names and some background data:

• Curare’s real name is Tessmina Cameron and she’s from Quebec. She says that she “was vetted for the Canadian Secret Service” and that it “didn’t work out” – this sounds like something to do with Department H.
• Polyphemus’ real name is Dario Ruiz and he’s from Barcelona. The name is a reference to a mythical cyclops and he seems to have kept it even though he thinks the prison staff thought he wouldn’t get the reference.
• Fawn is indeed the character from issue #1, and so all of her appearances among the regular prisoners in issues #28-30 were apparently continuity errors. She seems particularly uncomfortable with being in this group.
• Pilot’s real name is given simply as “Jibril”. He idolises his pilot father, and his wings are apparently a mutant power, which he can manifest at will.

Sarah’s flashback shows her fighting Rogue in issue #5. She says that she originally blamed Charles Xavier for giving her hope and taking it away, but that now she wants to replace him rather than kill him. This is handy, because he isn’t around to participate in the story. As Sarah says, following the “X-Manhunt” crossover and Imperial, he’s “off with some alien slattern”. She means Lilandra Neramani, and he’s meant to be helping their daughter Xandra to reclaim the Shi’ar throne. This was meant to be the focus of the Exiles series that got pre-emptively cancelled after the other post-Imperial cosmic books cratered, and thus far nobody has picked up Xavier’s storyline. Sarah knows about this because she picked up the psychic distress call that Xavier answered in issue #11.

PAGES 9-11. Agent Califf fails to stop the X-Men destroying the prison walls.

We’re not told exactly where Rogue and M came from – were they hanging around in the area, or did they fly up from New Orleans in this time? Califf duly goes through the motions of trying to prevent the X-Men from destroying the prison walls. The story is somewhat ambiguous about whether she’s just trying to do her job or whether she was broadly on side with the prison; she does talk about the government’s attempt to cage mutantkind not being “cost-effective”, which at the very least suggests that she doesn’t share the X-Men’s sense of moral outrage at the whole place.

PAGES 12-13. The X-Men enter the prison and get attacked by a Sentinel.

Although we’re now told that it wasn’t the real objective of the facility, Graymalkin certainly was working on experimental Sentinels, though they were mostly dogs and cyborgs, as seen in the Sentinels miniseries.

PAGES 14-20. The Scavenged attack Mutina.

This is intercut with the X-Men fighting the Sentinel, as if suggesting a parallel.

Mutina is apparently filming a sequel to her movie in New Orleans, and has been provided with a home in the Touro district (apparently a rather desirable part of town). Her age is given as 17, which I don’t think we’ve had before, though she was certainly positioned as being a peer of the Outliers. She mentions having “stage parents”.

She puts up a respectable fight on her own against the Scavenged, but her inner monologue seems a bit more nervous about the situation than her dialogue. At least part of her seems to see this as an opportunity to kill someone and get away with it, since she’d be legitimately acting in self-defence – the tone tends to suggest that she hasn’t actually killed anyone to date, something the X-Men were unsure about in issue #22, but it’s left open. She claims to be immune to poison and at the very least she seems to be resistant to Curare’s strychnine attack. Frankly, she’s doing quite well against all four Scavenged until Sarah herself intervenes and impales her.

This is effectively a continuation of Mutina’s face turn which has been building for a while now, although technically it remains an inter-villain fight. She looks kind of dead in the final panel, in which case she gets the tragic ending of going down fighting before she ever quite made the turn. But we’ll see.

The art in this issue shows Pilot’s wings as an energy projection, unlike in the previous issue, where they appeared to be physical.

Meanwhile, over in the subplot, the X-Men decide that the Mansion needs to be razed. Ironically, this suggests that Corina Ellis essentially succeeded in her claimed goal back in the epilogue to X-Men #35 (the final Krakoan era issue), which was to obliterate the school as a symbol and make it an object of fear among mutants.