X-MEN vol 7 #41
“Quarantine”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inkers: JP Mayer & Sean Parsons
Colourists: Arthur Hesli & Dono Sánchez-Almara
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER: The X-Men and the FF in action. If you look closely in the background, they’re fighting a bunch of masked gunmen in black oufits, which isn’t really what the O*N*E guys look like, but close enough. This is the final DNX tie-in issue.

PAGES 1-3. Psylocke gives directions.

This picks up directly from the end of DNX #4. In that issue, the Chairman discovered that instead of turning a minority of the population of Juniper into new mutants and killing everyone else, his X-virus had actually just killed everyone, with some of them becoming unviable mutants in the process. He surrounded the town in a force field and apparently intended to blow it up by way of containment, if only to eradicate his own failure. The issue ends with Cyclops being allowed in to confront him, which we’ll presumably see in DNX #5.

Unlike the previous X-Men tie-in issues, this isn’t a character spotlight. Instead, it follows what the X-Men and the Fantastic Four are doing with O*N*E while the main confrontation is taking place. In Cyclops’ absence, Psylocke takes the lead – which is normal in the X-Men, but it’s notable that the Fantastic Four also defer to her.

Juggernaut remains silent when the Thing is teasing him; it’s written in this scene as if he’s just being grumpy, but we’ll see later on that he blames himself for what’s happened to Juniper.

PAGE 4. Deployment Site 1.

Magik and Juggernaut have been presented as something of a duo throughout this series, and issue #34 suggests that he has romantic feelings for her while she sees him as more of a big brother type (and may not even have picked up on his own feelings). She’s acting as if he’s in a normal mood and seems not to have picked up on his emotional state at all.

PAGES 5-6. O*N*E attack the X-Men and the Fantastic Four.

As Psylocke says, the X-Men called in O*N*E in the first place, in DNX #3. But with the force field already quarantining Juniper, O*N*E’s role is redundant.

Temper tells the Invisible Woman that Frank Bohannon “hired a squad of psychopaths to murder or destroy us all, like a couple of months ago”. That’s the “Danger Room” arc, in issues #26-30.

Magneto infers that Bohannon is blaming the X-Men for the disaster in Juniper so that he can at least be seen to have arrested someone for it. That might be true, but Bohannon has also shown an interest in building his own power base generally. It seems unlikely that he genuinely thinks O*N*E can handle both the X-Men and the Fantastic Four at the same time, but even attempting to blame them would help his political cause in the post-Armageddon landscape, of which more in a bit.

PAGE 7. Deployment Site 2.

Juggernaut finally speaks to complain that he doesn’t think this is a time for jokes. Magik doesn’t take the criticism well.

PAGES 8-11. Psylocke’s group continue to fight O*N*E.

Magneto’s helmet shields him from telepathy, so Psylocke can only give him direction by yelling. That makes it a slightly questionable decision for him to wear the helmet in the first place (at least with that shielding switched on), but perhaps he’s allowing for 3K having some weird up their sleeve. More likely, though, he just wants to Be Magneto Again after finally getting his powers back after 40 issues.

Psylocke gives clear orders not to kill anyone from O*N*E, but by the nature of this series, that may be a pragmatic call rather than a moral decision.

Ben is now able to summon up his flying saucers at will, and seems to have at least broad control over what they actually do.

Bohannon is aware that the Psylocke he’s dealing with is not Betsy Braddock (which would presumably have been obvious during the Krakoa period). He notes that he was able to sneak up on Betsy in Uncanny X-Men #225, which indeed he did. In that story, he claimed that he could “free the mind of all thought and being, while retaining my body’s ability to act” – in other words, to empty his mind and act on instinct – and he said that Betsy was better at spotting “active minds”, so that this technique allowed him to get close to her without her noticing. To be fair, she was distracted at the time, and she wasn’t actively looking for him. It doesn’t work on the current Psylocke, possibly just because she’s keeping a better lookout.

Bohannan also makes a curious comment that he too was “raised” to kill. I don’t think we’ve heard anything about his upbringing before.

PAGE 12. Juggernaut and Magik.

Juggernaut blames himself for failing to smash the 3K statue in issue #34, though quite how that would have achieved anything other than releasing the virus early is hard to see. Still, he’s not being rational here.

PAGES 13-18. Bohannan is driven away.

Bohannan says that he killed “plenty of Japanese” during the war; I don’t think he’s previously mentioned fighting in the Pacific. Back in his debut in Uncanny X-Men #215, he said he fought the Nazis. His casual racism – and, in fact, his general depiction in this series – is something of a throwback to that original concept of the character, which mellowed out rather quickly under Chris Claremont. In his first appearance, he and his colleagues are more in the way of reactionary conservatives appalled at the decline in standards.

The “warning” that Psylocke mentions was given to Bohannan in issue #30. When cornered, Bohannan argues that the X-Men can’t kill him because it would give the US government an excuse to destroy them. This is essentially the same line that Lundqvist tried in issue #10, which Cyclops brushed off by invoking Phoenix, and Psylocke gives a somewhat similar answer here. Psylocke certainly does seem to intend to kill Bohannan as threatened in issue #30, until Sue steps in; whether Sue realises that Psylocke is serious is another matter. That said, she seems to suggest that Bohannan is right about the consequences of killing him publicly.

Bohannan refers to “what happened in Symkaria” in Avengers: Armageddon #2. That suggests that this story is taking place between Avengers: Armageddon #2-3, since if it was any later, he’d have rather more epic disasters to point to. Armageddon ends with the world turning against superheroes and everywhere outside the USA banning them (it’s somewhat unclear at this point how this is meant to work for civilian superhumans); the USA don’t, but only because they don’t think they have the ability to enforce the ban. So basically the USA is looking for excuses to bring down superheroes where it can.

PAGES 19-20. An explosion goes off in Juniper.

We’ll find out in DNX #5 what that was about.