Children of the Atom #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
CHILDREN OF THE ATOM #4
“Captured”
by Vita Ayala, Paco Medina & David Curiel
COVER / PAGE 1: The Young X-Men – as I guess we’re calling them – in battle with the new U-Men. Since it’s his spotlight issue, Marvel Guy is front and centre.
PAGE 2. Benny wants to be left alone.
Peter Corbeau Preparatory. In issue #1, the school was simply called “Corbeau Preparatory” (and we saw the sign on the building). The establishing shot in that issue bears very little resemblance to what we see here. Peter Corbeau was a scientist supporting character who originated in Incredible Hulk but showed up from time to time in X-Men as a friend of Professor X, particularly in the early years of the Claremont run.
Benny basically doesn’t like the company of others beyond a small circle of friends he feels comfortable with. Following the pattern of the previous issues, we’re taking turns with each character getting a spotlight issue, and it’s now his turn.
“What’s with the sunglasses inside?” Carmen was undergoing some sort of transformation at the end of the previous issue, which was evidently temporary. But the glasses might be something to do with that – though she does remove them almost immediately to look at her phone.
PAGES 3-5. The Young X-Men learn about the Hellfire Gala.
The headline is inaccurate – it says that “Krakoa opens its doors to humanity for one night only”, but in fact the Hellfire Gala doesn’t take place on Krakoa itself.
Unlike every other X-book this month, this is not a Hellfire Gala tie-in – after all, the whole premise of the book is that the stars really want to go to Krakoa but can’t. Since the Gala is a newsworthy event, it naturally comes to the cast’s attention, and they’re very interested in it – but it doesn’t really alter what they do, since they’ve been persistently trying to get through the gates for the whole run of the series.
“It means that it isn’t impossible to get through the gates!” Buddy’s understanding of Krakoan gates is clearly quite hazy. We already knew that normal humans could use the gates when accompanied by a mutant – that’s been clear since House of X #1 – but evidently this information hasn’t filtered down to even obsessive mutant fans like her.
Buddy optimistically assumes that the gates will just be made accessible to normal humans in general. That’s not how it works, and as the others point out, if it was how things worked, the gates would be heavily guarded. Buddy is optimistic to the point of irrationality; Benny’s role here seems to be to be the somewhat-downer voice of reason who pours cold water on the group’s more absurd ideas, but not to the point of really resisting them. Carmen isn’t taken by this idea either, but doesn’t push back against it quite so hard. Benny seems to share the team’s aims in theory, but to be well aware that it’s all a complete waste of time – a mixture of angsty teen disillusionment and genuinely just being sensible, from the look of it. He seems to be here mainly because the group serve as a social anchor for him; at the same time, he would have been happier with them just living a quiet life and doing normal things. He’s evidently the emo member of the group.
“It’s for specific humans. As in, not us.” I think this is the first time that any of the main cast have explicitly acknowledged in dialogue that they are humans, not mutants.
Cole is reacting quite understandably to the Young X-Men’s treatment of him in the previous issue (where Carmen was absent), in which their interest in him as a potential avenue to superpowers was grindingly obvious. However, Carmen is the one team member who he doesn’t have a particular reason to criticise. It’s interesting that it’s Benny who steps in to defend Carmen’s honour rather than one of the more assertive characters.
PAGE 6. Recap and credits (in the regular format, because this isn’t part of the crossover).
PAGES 7-8. Flashback: The future Young X-Men experiment with equipment.
While it’s been heavily implied already, this scene confirms that the team are simulating superpowers using technology, presumably salvaged from the spaceship that crashed in the flashback in the previous issue. Aside from Benny, they’re not using the powers that they’ll eventually wind up with. The laser that Jay Jay is waving around presumably gets modified into Cyclops-Lass’s visor. Once again, Benny comes to Carmen’s defence. Benny does stick with the pheromone device we see here, but also seems to appreciate that messing with people’s minds is a much more dangerous exercise than just shooting at them – in some respects, anyway. It’s not immediately clear why he chooses to stick with that device – it doesn’t seem to be about exercising power over others, since he’s mainly stuck to innocuous uses like putting people to sleep. Maybe it just seemed the most suitable power for the team’s (by appearances) least athletic member.
Calvert Vaux Cove is a bay on the edge of Calvert Vaux Park in Brooklyn, and does indeed have an abandoned boat lying in it. The art in the establishing shot is obviously based on the main illustration from its Atlas Obscura page. Calvert Vaux himself was a landscape designer, best known for his work on New York’s Central Park. Calvert Vaux Park was renamed after him in 1998.
PAGE 9. Data page. Apparently Benny is releasing mutant-themed music on Soundcloud. And again, very angsty.
“Feintly Frosted Stitches” is the name of Carmen’s cosplay channel, as we saw last issue. So apparently she’s collaborating on music with him. Quite what the audience make of a “featuring” credit for a sewing vlog…
One of the commenters is “ArchivistX”. As established in issue #1, that’s Buddy.
All four team members so far have had some sort of online activity – Buddy as ArchivistX, Carmen with her cosplay, Gabe with his fitness advice, and now Buddy with his music.
PAGES 10-15. The team meet in Benny’s basement.
“Before my dad replaced his old family with a new one.” Benny clearly hasn’t got over his parents’ break-up. He tells us later on that this happened when he was four. Here we’re given the impression that he’s simply living with his father and stepmother, which makes his wording a bit odd. He clarifies later that he “lived with my mom most of the time, but when she was out in the field, I’d stay with Dad and his new family.” He puts that in the past tense, which seems to imply that something has happened to his mother, and that he’s now moved in permanently with his father’s side of the family. The house looks pretty high end compared to the homes of the other team members – there’s a water feature outside, polished floors, designer stairs, a grand piano, what appears to be a lute on display. Benny’s bedroom is a windowless basement where he plays the drums (and presumably also the guitar, given his Soundcloud write-up).
Carmen wants to talk to Benny about her transformation from the previous issue, but doesn’t get far enough before the rest of the team show up. He’s an interesting choice since they clearly aren’t that close. Granted that Jay-Jay is a child and Buddy is, well, likely to respond unhelpfully, Gabe might have seemed the more obvious choice for someone looking for support. Maybe Carmen thinks that Benny will respond in a more level-headed way than the rest of the team. And he does seem supportive.
Buddy’s grand plan is to try and trick the gates by using Cole’s stolen clothes in the hope that they might fool a DNA scan. Carmen calls this “us[ing] parts of him without him knowing”, which is a stretch, but is obviously intended to set up a parallel with the U-Men when they show up later.
Benny seems somewhat star-struck about the prospect of meeting the X-Men; this seems a fairly crazy ambition, but then again, the group have previously drawn the X-Men’s attention. So it’s not mad to think that if they showed up on Krakoa, they would draw the attention of some of the bigger guns. Still, while Gabe seems desperate to meet the A-listers, Benny and Carmen look a bit more sceptical that this is anything that ought to be motivating them.
The Wolverine poster on Benny’s wall seems to be based on the promotional material for the 2013 Wolverine film. Benny also has Deadpool memorabilia around, which suggests that he thinks Deadpool is a mutant too. (I don’t follow Deadpool closely enough to know how much the general public know about the guy.) Obviously, he’s keen on the violent 90s characters, but has a heart of gold and all that.
The book that Cole has picked off the shelf in page 15 appears to be Strange Fascination by David Buckley, a biography of David Bowie.
PAGE 16. Data page – some sort of mutant-themed YouTube knock off with coverage of the Young X-Men. In the comments, Buddy is trying to build up the team’s reputation. Jay-Jay pops in to repeat his insistence that his codename is actually NightyNightCrawler, as he first said in issue #2. The recap page doesn’t care, and continues to call him Daycrawler.
CRADLE are, naturally enough, still looking for these kids.
PAGES 17-20. The Young X-Men (mostly) get captured.
Amazingly enough, if you keep going back to exactly the same secluded gate again and again and again, interested parties notice.
Benny gets to be the heroic one who saves his brother.
PAGES 21-23. The Young X-Men are held prisoner.
Benny spells out rather directly the character hook: he’s insecure about doing anything that will disappoint or alienate his friends because he fears how they’ll react, and so he clings to a narrow persona, but ultimately he’s a nice guy who stands up for his friends and family. He’s got some fairly conventional heroic qualities. He’s also the quiet one.
The villains are a new version of the U-Men, a Grant Morrison-era movement of humans who wanted to give themselves mutant powers using (involuntarily) harvested mutant organs. It didn’t work very well, but nothing ventured nothing gained, eh? The parallels with the Young X-Men’s own desire to somehow convert themselves into mutants are fairly obvious.
PAGE 24. Daycrawler gets the real X-Men.
Apparently? It seems a bit abrupt and context-free here. They’re a slightly odd group, too – big-hitters Storm, Marvel Girl, Cyclops, Nightcrawler and Wolverine, plus Pixie, Magma and Maggott.
PAGE 25. Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: SECRETS REVEALED.
Deadpool’s last status quo was that he was the King of Staten Island/Monster Island, and before that he was the hero who bankrolled the Uncanny Avengers, so presumably he’s a fairly well-known public figure in the MU. Granted, that status is fairly elastic for any character.
It’s possible those are the real X-Men on the last page, since they did end up getting a communicator back in #1-2. Although why anyone would trust Jay Jay with it is beyond me… maybe he got it from Benny’s room?
I’m really enjoying this book. The character and plot material have been layered quite densely, so every issue has felt substantial to me. It also helps that Vita Ayala has a strong handle on what real teenagers sound like. The dialogue and narration are a little on-the-nose at times, but in my experience that’s appropriate for kids this age.
I’ve not been as keen on Ayala’s run on New Mutants, but that may be because I’m not especially familiar with those characters. I may go back and reread the issues since they took over, since I’ve definitely had a hard time keeping track of the larger cast.
It’s interesting that they’ve spent the previous issues tip toeing around the fact that the aren’t mutants only to kind of throw the big reveal away and move on in this issue.
I think Carmen goes to Benny because he is the most reasonable and by far the least obsessive about what they’re doing.
I also think Benny is being set up as asexual. He stated he has no romantic interest in anyone and Gabe says both Carmen and Benny have something about them that makes a relationship between the two impossible. She’s a lesbian. I think he’s asexual.
The character stuff in this series is solid (agreed that Benny’s meant to be asexual), but I feel like the plot structure doesn’t work. We establish in this issue that the Young X-Men’s powers stem from an alien spaceship and tech therein. This allows them to cosplay as mutants, essentially. But they know they’re not actually mutants. The readers don’t until this issue confirms it (Carmen aside), but they’ve known the whole time, so why do they think they can go to Krakoa at all?
It feels like the plot is operating on the basis of what the readers know (they could be mutants!) instead of what the characters do (nope, until Carmen’s bit in #3). Maybe Ayala has a good rationale for the team being essentially delusional coming up, but this feels like an awkward fusion of a Big Mystery story and a series of character vignettes.
I’ve only read the first issue, but I very much got the impression that it’s all much more interested in allegory than in literal world-building. It’s a story of a bunch of schoolkids who have trouble fitting in, find each other, and forge an identity that binds them together in a subculture that they still can’t quite fully realise.
The superpowers and magical portals are just genre conventions, otherwise it could be about a group of American kids who are into anime.
The characters know full well that they are not mutants. That has been clear from the start.
They are essentially mutant-focused Otherkin; they know that they are not mutants, but are unwilling to let that accident of fate define their identities.
As they attempt to build a collective identity of their own, they face obstacles and deal with them in different ways, not least because their attachment to each other and their joint project comes in various shapes and forms.
It is an interesting study on identities, how they are formed, what they mean and what they do not mean.
I’m liking this series, anyway – the characters are all pretty well thought out, so it works as a story, even if there’s no great drama or mystery.
Jay Jay to turn out to be a mutant next issue? It’d be easy enough for a short-range teleporter to fake walking through the gate…
Seems like Benny is being set up as ace, which makes his choice of power very interesting. Also significant little character moment that he decides to keep that power precisely because it is the most dangerous (and thus prone to abuse or misuse; he trusts he can use the power more safely than his friends might, because he’s asexual?)
The stuff with Cole’s DNA makes a nice parallel with the U-Men, but I also got the impression that Ayala was drawing a parallel to the case of Henrietta Lacks, or at least to ethically questionable real-world instances of medical cell samples used without consent.
Again, not convinced that the first arc needed to be a series of spotlight issues (unless this book is gonna stick around for a bit), maybe even the first issue should have been more even and then do the spotlights, but as more issues come out it seems like it will read better in one sitting. I can kind of see now why the book may have been delayed to coincide with the Hellfire Gala. Considering how much misinformation circulates online, its not hard to imagine that the general public would have a hazy idea of how the gates work, what the rules are, etc.
Were we not supposed to know these kids weren’t mutants initially? It seemed pretty obvious to me after the first 2 issues.
While I appreciate the world building of how Krakoa is perceived by the outside world, at the the end of the day to me it’s just about a group of marginalized kids grafting onto another marginalized group via cosplay. And possible appropriation, too.
For the most part the characters are like-able but overall I prefer the writers work on New Mutants. Its not bad, but its not all that great either. Definitely reading it more from a completist sense than anything else, though I am curious to see what the endgame for all of this is.
Joseph S.- yeah I think Benny chose the mind control powers because he sees himself as the least likely to misuse them.