X-Corp #3 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-CORP #3
“The Madrox Workflow”
by Tini Howard, Valentine de Landro & Sunny Gho
COVER / PAGE 1. Corporate Madrox, with a bunch of dupes tessellated behind him.
PAGES 2-3. Who is Dr Jamie Madrox?
This is a more or less straight recap of Madrox’s back story. Madrox’s family tie to Los Alamos, and his powers emerging at birth, both come from his debut in Giant-Size Fantastic Four #4, as does the panel of him with Professor X and Mr Fantastic. I’m pretty sure the bit about his childhood interest in science is new. When first introduced, Madrox’s gimmick was that he was a naive farmboy (his parents moved to Kansas soon after he was born) whose parents had died and who was living alone on the farm as a community of one.
The idea that some Madrox duplicates were going out to learn about entire skills and then return with what they had learned, contributing to the skills of the whole, comes from Peter David’s X-Factor. Howard entirely ignores the usual depiction of Madrox as a bit of a comedy figure or (at the very least) everyman, which admittedly wouldn’t make much sense for something written in the tone of X-Corp pseudo-advertising. The idea that Madrox is “brilliant” is, um, novel. Still, the idea that his accumulated skills would allow him to work efficiently by churning out the duplicates and then reabsorbing them periodically to work as a one-man team… that makes sense.
PAGE 4. Data page. The workflow chart that Madrox posts for his duplicates, which is self-explanatory. “Ex uno plures” (from one, many) is of course an inversion of the US motto Ex Pluribus Unum.
They’re working on an “ionospheric bandwidth generator”, of which more later – henceforth, we’ll call it the IBG.
PAGE 5. Recap and credits.
PAGE 6. Data page.
It’s pseudoscientific gobblegook, but the upshot is that X-Corp has built a thingummie that will allow unprecedentedly fast broadband. This is the IBG.
This press release is intended for release when the IBG is activated, which hasn’t happened yet. The small print in the top left says “X-Corp PR queued up.” The bottom right references Sofia Mantega, their PR head; the last line of the press release repeats the “Simply Superior” slogan from the video in issue #1.
PAGES 7-9. Warren and Monet at the Technology TALKS conference.
That’s the X-Corp HQ hovering over the conference centre in page 7 panel 1.
In page 7 panel 2 we can see the logos of stock Marvel Universe technology companies Stark Unlimited and Roxxon on their respective stalls, plus a sign that reads “It’s here – Ionosphere – Noblesse”. Angel’s dialogue explains that Noblesse have (somehow) found out about the IBG and are trying to spoil the launch.
Monet sees women-only networking events as a ghetto. This scene doesn’t quite work, because if Sofia and Trinary are only going because Monet’s going, and Monet doesn’t want to got, then why don’t the three of them just… not go?
PAGES 10-12. Madrox and Layla.
The four mutants using their energy powers to charge up the EBG are Vulcan from the cast of X-Men, Bishop from Marauders, Neal Shaara from X-Treme X-Men (the third Thunderbird, but evidently we’ve decided it would just be confusing to call him that), and Sunspot from the original New Mutants. They do indeed all having solar-energy-fuelled powers.
Layla Miller, Madrox’s wife, makes her first appearance of the series. Evidently we’re working with the idea that she isn’t a mutant, since she isn’t on Krakoa. There is some material in Peter David’s X-Factor run that expressly casts doubt on whether she’s a mutant: see in particular X-Factor vol 3 #20, when she was unaffected by Quicksilver’s Terrigen Crystals, and #26, when she was scanned as both a human and a mutant. Their son Davey makes only his second appearance here, having previously appeared in Uncanny X-Men vol 5 #11.
This scene is a standard trope of the guy who’s so wrapped up in his work that he misses important events in the lives of his family, with Madrox getting around it by sending a dupe to cover the event. There’s an obvious tension in the fact that Madrox clearly treats the dupes as extensions of himself who aren’t proper people, but still thinks they’re up to the task of acting as father for key family moments.
PAGE 13. Monet and Sara St John.
Sara’s dealing with Fenris were last issue. She claims that the Struckers told her that they had the same access to X-Corp facilities as any other mutant; that’s probably true, since Angel said last issue that it was the Struckers’ actions that had prompted him to change that policy. Monet’s main objection to Sara seems to be her willingness to deal with Fenris at all, given their neo-Nazi tendencies. This is an interesting one in terms of the internal logic of Krakoa. You can see why writers don’t want to have Fenris hand-waved away, but it’s hard to see how that comes to be consistent with the sort of general amnesty that’s been extended to the likes of Mister Sinister and Apocalypse.
PAGE 14. Sofia and Trinary.
“You’re like a feminist Robin Hood!” I know the point of this is to have Trinary go “ah, but it’s so much more complex than that”, but it really does just lampshade how one-dimensional she is.
PAGES 15-17. Things go wrong with the IBG.
The art on this issue is lovely, but the plotting is quite heavy handed. For random reasons, a thing has gone wrong. The nice dupe who spent the day with the family has to sort it out and gets incinerated before Madrox can absorb his memories. Yes, right, we get it.
PAGE 18. Angel, Sara and Trinary.
Monet has flown into a rage after encountering Sara’s psychic shields. We’re apparently meant to take it that these shields not only defend but cause pain to the scanning psychic. If Monet is just reacting badly to being blocked, then she’s wildly overreacting – why shouldn’t people be shielding their minds from her? Everyone talks as if these things are commonplace, though if that’s the case you’d think we’d hear a lot more of them. To be fair, psi-blocks have long been something that may or may not exist, depending on the requirements of the plot.
PAGES 19-22. Sara and Monet.
Monet does her usual mutant-first schtick here, which is getting pretty boring and we’re only three issues in. Sara’s argument in response seems to be blindingly obvious: there is scope for competitors to mutant technology precisely because many people don’t like or trust mutants. (And bluntly, who in their right mind would entrust their data transfer operations to Krakoa?)
Kol have also apparently dusted off the old idea of a cure for mutant powers. Sara makes the entirely reasonable argument that many mutant powers are basically curses and that some people would be happier without them. Krakoa’s general policy on such things is that technology that can eliminate mutants must not be allowed to exist – see e.g. X-Men / Fantastic Four #4.
It’s not entirely clear what happens at the end. Sara injects Monet with what’s apparently a prototype cure, and she collapses. On the next page, she seems to have flown out through the ceiling. So either she flies into a panic and escapes, or somebody else abducts her. We’ll find out next issue, I guess.
Doreen Green is Squirrel Girl, if you don’t know.
PAGES 23-24. The big launch.
It doesn’t work. We’ll find out why next issue.
PAGE 25. A brief back-up strip based around the storytelling gimmick of following several Madrox dupes in parallel sequences of panels.
PAGE 26. Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: FAILURE TO LAUNCH.
I forced myself to stop reading X-Corp and Excalibur. The writing, for whatever reasons, is just too confusing, non-sensical and unsatisfying. I want to give Howard the benefit of the doubt that editorial / working within Hickman’s framework is the problem, but both titles suffer and other authors seem to make it work much better.
Thank you for doing these write ups Paul. It allows me to keep up to date without actually reading the issues 🙂
There’s really no reason Dad Dupe couldn’t himself send a dupe to manually vent the thing, but that wouldn’t exactly suit the point being made. Which is a weird angle to play for the guy who can literally be everywhere at once. I guess that’s the point, and in a way it could make for an interesting contrast to the questions raised by resurrection.
Oh, good lord, why is Squirrel Girl being mentioned? She’s the first comic I’m reading to my son, why is she getting dragged into the quagmire that is 2020’s X-Men?
Soon she will be involved in a mutant orgy and talking about how humans are inferior.
Don’t worry, Doreen is just mentioned in passing as giving a talk at this business conference or whatever it is. I doubt she’ll show up, feels more like just an Easter egg.
Magneto is on the Quiet Council, so that might have something to do with the double standard being applied to Nazis like Fenris.
I would say that Monet is severely overreacting even if the psy-shields do cause pain. Since when would scanning someone’s mind without permission not be considered hostile? I have no problem with the character doing it, but it’s weird that the story is inviting us to see Monet as the wronged party there.
Madrox seems to have been heavily retooled for his role here. In fairness, X-Force has done a much more drastic reworking of Beast than what’s here (but I don’t like that storyline either). It does occur to me that Madrox’s casualness about reabsorbing dupes roughly parallels the Krakoans’ casualness about dying.
I found the whole conversation about the women’s meeting off-putting, and I agree that it’s unclear why Monet bothers attending.
In theory, a book like this should fit well with the rest of the line — there are tons of red flags about the Krakoa era, and hiding them behind a “friendly” corporate image is a story with some relevance in the age of companies like Disney, Amazon, etc, that are outwardly innocuous but actually ruthlessly focused on corporate profits. But the execution here is really rough, and Howard seems more interested in having the characters compete with other corporations, a direction that doesn’t interest me in the slightest.
To be fair to X-Force, amoral Beast has been brewing for a while.
It saddens me this book gets more posts than Way of X.
It has nothing to do with quality.
It can be more fun to talk about a comic with many questionable elements versus a solid book.
Way of X is basically a mini-series and is in the middle of its story.
It’s a quality comic, but one where nothing major happened in the current issue either.
Way of X and SWORD are the only two X-books I am continuing to buy each month, until “Inferno”.
So in this issue, Stark Industries is name dropped, but then we’re supposed to be impressed by IBG, which is supposedly unprecedentedly fast broadband. Starkphones, conversely, have been around for years and have enough bandwidth to genetically engineer people on the fly using an app on a moment’s notice. In the Marvel Universe, I don’t think it’s really possible for mutant technology to seem remotely impressive when Stark, Reed, Doom, and the Wakandans already exist.
Howard’s Excalibur has the same issue – Apocalypse, Rictor and the text pages bang on endlessly about the superiority of mutant magic, but in practice, it takes them twelve issues of fetch quests and multiple murders in order to build a magic portal. Would Dr. Strange need more than a single panel to pull that off? When the bar is “magic/tech can do literally anything in the MU”, positioning the mutant version as superior seems impossible to accomplish.
Yes, I don’t know if this is meant to show mutant hubris or if they expect the reader to not ignore it.
Krakoa should be attempting to move society towards being post-scarcity and remove the drive for profits.
That would be an interesting direction for this book.
The funniest part of Monet’s dissing Nazism is that her biggest product was designed by Doctor Nemesis, who spent WW2 operating as a Nazi Fifth Columnist under the name Doctor Death and was a true believer in Nazi ideology. Real consistent, Monet.
A lot of the “revolutionary mutant technology” stuff just requires dumbing down the rest of Marvel Earth, like it’s supposed to be amazing that mutants have invented really fast internet when Iron Man has built a Dyson sphere around the Sun.
There’s also Mr. Sinister’s time as Josef Mengele’s lab partner. Yes, Fenris are bad, but focusing on just them only makes the acceptance of everyone else worse. Look at last issue, where Monet goes from telling Fenris how much she despises them to gushing over Selene, a woman who claims to have murdered entire cities. Selene has caused more harm than Fenris ever have.
And seriously, doing the workaholic dad bit with the guy whose power is negating that is a dreadful example of trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole. Make or send another dupe! Have Family Man make another dupe before he sacrifices himself so the memories are intact! Problem solved!
I still wish they would explain away the Fenris issue by pointing out that Nazi ideology is human ideology. It isn’t the fact that they support fascism that the Krakoans find so abhorrent, it is that they are dragging outdated human ideology (race, nation) to the clearly superior mutant utopia.
Apocalypse is forgivable because he believed in mutant supremacy. It’s an unifying ideology for Krakoa.
Fenris’ ideology is dangerous because it could challenge the tenets of Krakoa: “Krakoa is for all mutants.”
Either that or explicitly make it apparent that Magneto is one of the two rulers of Krakoa, and Magneto has made it known that Fenris are welcome on the island but that they should be shunned as long as they embrace Nazism.
Otherwise, it just comes across that the writer is interjecting themselves in to the fiction to let us know that “this is a fictional universe, but Nazism is not fiction, and we do not support such an evil creed”.
It’s hard to get people excited about “unprecedentedly fast broadband” even in the real world these days, and we don’t have Stark/Richards/whatnot to compete with.
Fast internet? Roxxon’s genetically engineered always-hungry bears from Thor were more interesting than that.
It’s only issue #3 so it obviously can’t hit every potential plot point, but Krakoa getting into the agriculture business seems like a no-brainer given that growing plants is their whole thing. And there’s no obvious existing MU figure to render their achievements moot unless Doom set his irrigation policy in Supervillain Team-Up or something.
I think Chris V. hit on the most interesting idea seeded so far, that X-Corp is a post-scarcity corporation that does not need to care about turning a profit. Interesting idea. Frankly not not hopeful it’ll go anywhere given Howard’s track record, but credit due to an interesting idea.
“It’s hard to get people excited about “unprecedentedly fast broadband” even in the real world these days, and we don’t have Stark/Richards/whatnot to compete with.”
It’s even harder to get people excited about “unprecedentedly fast broadband” when these people just terraformed Mars.
“a dreadful example of trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole”
A good description of her writing style here and on Excalibur.
“Otherwise, it just comes across that the writer is interjecting themselves in to the fiction to let us know that “this is a fictional universe, but Nazism is not fiction, and we do not support such an evil creed”.”
Murdering hundreds (if not more) of people is tolerated and accepted. Being incompetent Nazis? No redemption for you!
Thisdiscussion always brings me back to Doom crying about 9/11. One of the stupidest things in so many levels.
This series is pretty awful, but I think I get the Fenris point. The difference with historical Nazis is that Fenris are still Nazis. They haven’t reformed, it’s still driving ideology for the characters.
Well, Andreas reformed, back in New Thunderbolts. But Warren Ellis and then his sister’s revival seems to have dragged him back into the ideology of hate.
None of the “evil mutants” have really reformed though.
They agree to follow Krakoa’s laws.
They are living on an island that espouses mutant superiority and are hoping to see their dreams of mutants dominating humans become reality.
I wonder how many readers were rooting for Sara?
Dr. Nemesis spent post-WWII hunting Nazis, so his reform seems genuine.
In addition to the hypocrisy of working with the likes of Sinister and the Gorgon, Monet was gushing over Selene, who had been allied with actual Nazis the Red Skull and Baron Strucker in the Power Elite, as opposed to cosplay ones like Fenris.