As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

MARAUDERS #19
“Fire & Ice”
by Gerry Duggan, Stefano Caselli & Edgar Delgado

COVER / PAGE 1. Kate, Callisto and Bishop, posing with the Marauders flag in a pile of junk.

Incidentally, it’s been seven weeks since issue #18 came out, which is an unusually long gap.

PAGE 2. Opening quote from Wolverine, in the “Patch” identity he uses in Madripoor. This is pretty standard stuff for Madripoor, though it’s obviously an exaggeration – Madripoor also has a steady supply of victims, and several Wolverine supporting characters wouldn’t really fit into this description. It’s maybe true of the sort of people Patch hangs around with, mind you.

PAGE 3. Recap and credits. One point worth clarifying: the Marauders’ instructions to stay out of Madripoor come from the Madripoor government with the backing of the United Nations, not from Krakoa.

PAGE 4. The new Reavers run wild in Lowtown.

Picking up from the cliffhanger of the previous issue. The Reavers are meant to be henchmen injured by the X-teams, who have submitted to cyborg treatment as a result. This mission has nothing to do with any sort of revenge, but evidently the Reavers are still up for a bit of generic henchman work.

Note that the narration calls the cyborgs “post-human”, a buzzword in Krakoa-era X-books for technologically enhanced humans, which plays into the cosmology from Powers of X.

PAGE 5. Homines Verendi watch from the balcony.

There’s some seriously wonky law here. Chen Zhao seems to be telling us that the Marauders can’t intervene because they’d “risk forfeiting the recognition they crave at the United Nations.” That really doesn’t work, for at least two reasons. First, we surely all know that that’s not the consequence in the real world of ignoring a UN resolution. And second, the whole reason why Krakoa got recognised so quickly in the first place was supposed to be a combination of massive leverage and outright manipulation of the vote – why would anything the Marauders do change that?

To be fair, it’s probably true that ignoring a UN resolution would at least cause Krakoa some diplomatic problems. But we devoted an entire issue of X-Men to the X-Men showing up at the global elite and treating them with disdain because they had all the power. It’s rather hard to buy that diplomatic consequences are much more than a mild inconvenience for Krakoa, given the wider direction.

PAGES 6-8. The Marauders decide to intervene surreptitiously.

Pyro and Iceman create the necessary distraction while Kate swims ashore to plant a new gate. As we’ll see, the plan seems to be to get some of the Morlocks – the ones who don’t live on Krakoa – to go in and sort out the Reavers, with a deniable place of entry that prevents them being directly tied to Krakoa.

The story also tries to draw out the parallels between Iceman and Pyro, who provide the title of the story: Iceman is the buttoned up one who’s cutting loose with the Marauders, Pyro is the crazy one who’s atoning here. To be honest, this fits Iceman’s back story better than Pyro’s, which (at least in some versions) has him starting out as a novelist.

PAGES 9-10. Kate plants her flower.

The guys in the ship are from the UN peacekeeping force seen at the end of the previous issue.

The father and daughter couple are the fishermen who retrieved Lockheed from the water in issue #7, and nursed him back to health. Kate already thanked them for that in issue #17.

The hospital was opened in the previous issue.

PAGES 11-13. Callisto rounds up some Morlocks to help.

This is the Morlock community which declined to come to Krakoa, and instead chose to live in Rio Verde, Arizona, back in issue #7.

Most of the Morlocks, of course, were non-combatants or outright cannon fodder. The ones Callisto rounds up here – who conveniently happen to be just passing, it seems – are among the more threatening. They are…

• Masque, who’s a regular character. He became a “doctor” in the previous issue by using his face-altering powers in the Lowtown hospital to do legitimate cosmetic surgery on hare lips and the like.
• Marrow, referred to only as “Sarah” here, started off as a terrorist and went on to be an X-Man for a while.
• Hump and Brute are the two big hulking guys, as you might expect. They were Masque’s henchmen in the final issues of the first New Mutants run.
• Bliss, the redhead with the prehensile tongue and second head, was one of Masque’s followers in Uncanny X-Men vol 1 #261-263 – during which he used his powers to turn her into a copy of Jean Grey. That’s why she’s wearing Jean’s X-Factor costume from that period. The creators may be under the impression that she’s an obscure character who hasn’t been seen since – in fact, she was brought back by Ed Brubaker in Uncanny X-Men #487, and she’s appeared plenty of times since, mostly as a background character. From those appearances, we know she didn’t keep her Jean Grey look. Let’s assume that she asked Masque to change her back for some reason. She was last seen hiding out with Blindfold in the Morlock tunnels in Uncanny X-Men vol 5 #11.

Masque is rightly unimpressed with any suggestion that the sewers are the natural point of entry for the Morlocks just because they used to live in a hidden community in the New York tunnels. After all, given a choice they went to play golf in Arizona.

PAGES 14-16. The Morlocks fight the Reavers.

The Reavers can’t be that impressive if Masque can take one of them out. He has no combat-relevant powers – for this purpose, he’s just a guy with a club.

Hump asks whether the Reavers are “human” or “post-human” because of the Krakoan rule against murdering humans. As he points out, this may be academic if they stay clear of Krakoan law. Bliss is evidently aware of the existence of “the hole” – the suspended animation type place where Sabretooth is supposedly held. Note that Hump’s question seems to assume that “post-human” classification makes you fair game because you’re no longer human. This is, of course, the mutants’ own terminology.

PAGE 17. Kitty returns to the boat.

PAGES 18-19. Bishop blows up Max von Frankenstein’s building.

Bishop does this on his own initiative, which is curious. Of course, Bishop has connections with the Beast, and he’s focussing not on the justice question of the treatment of Lowtown, but on the whole project of creating post-human cyborgs. You suspect the Beast would be more interested in that last bit.

PAGES 20-21. The Morlocks drive back the Reavers.

Masque discovers that he’s been misled – the hospital was the only building that the Reavers weren’t attacking. To be fair, Callisto didn’t know that when she enlisted Masque’s aid. But it begs the question of why the hospital was left. Maybe Homines Verendi thought it would attract too much negative attention even for Madripoor. Maybe they figure it’s better to have the mutant outpost where they can see it.

PAGES 23-24. The Morlocks celebrate in their new bar.

This is the bar that they bought in the previous issue. Masque refers to it as the Princess Bar, which was Wolverine’s old bar. The Princess Bar was a bit more classy than this, though, so it’s not clear whether the idea is that he’s bought the actual Princess Bar from a new owner who let the place go downhill, or simply that he’s renaming this one after the original.

I’m not immediately convinced about the idea of renaming Lowtown as Mutietown based on the presence of a relative handful of mutants (even if the Rio Verde contingent are going to relocate here en masse, surely there’s an actual population here already…?)

PAGE 25. Data page trailing the Hellfire Gala. It’s an interview with Jumbo Carnation; Jumbo died in a high profile way in New X-Men vol 1 #134, and since resurrection remains a Krakoan state secret, his official story is that he faked his death. The page title indicates that this article has attracted the attention of the X-Desk, i.e. the CIA’s mutant monitors.

PAGE 26. Trailer. The Krakoan reads NEXT: FAREWELL.