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Aug 24

A.X.E.: Judgment Day #3 annotations

Posted on Wednesday, August 24, 2022 by Paul in Annotations

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

A.X.E.: JUDGMENT DAY #3
Writer: Kieron Gillen
Artist: Valerio Schiti
Colourist: Marte Gracia
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER / PAGE 1: Makkari, Jean Grey and Iron Man, presumably inside the Progenitor.

PAGES 2-3. Recap and credits.

PAGES 4-5. The Progenitor judges Captain America.

The Progenitor is still going by the name he had in the Avengers arc that introduced him, despite his resurrection with an apparently altered personality. You have to wonder what the connection is between this guy and the very Celestial-like, though somewhat lower powered, Progenitors from various Al Ewing stories, most recently X-Men Red #2. But that’s probably a story for another time.

Ajak initially tries to rationalise away what she’s done. She’s apparently programmed to worship the Celestials as a religion, and so much of what she’s doing involves trying to explain or reinterpret that religion to get to a place she can live with.

Captain America is judged by the Progenitor as a “failure”, which leads Iron Man to conclude that nobody is going to pass the Progenitor’s test. But a couple of points are worth noting here. Firstly, what the Progenitor actually said in the previous issue was “If there is more that is just than wicked, you will live.” It’s not obvious that the Progenitor is actually judging Captain America by that standard here. If it wasn’t for the thumbs down, you’d wonder whether the Progenitor is just expressing an opinion. Secondly, the Progenitor seems to be judging Captain America by his own standards – which would imply that other people will be judged by a less exacting standard. In fact, taken to its logical conclusion, it would mean that the lower their ambitions and ethical standards, the more likely they would be to pass.

PAGE 6. A civilian montage.

These are the same six civilians we saw on similar pages last issue, except with Arjun’s widow Komali taking his place. There’s a striking disparity between the way the Progenitor acts and talks in the rest of the story, and the conversational tone of its narration here. Presumably that’s going somewhere.

“Britain doesn’t even recognise them.” The UK withdrew recognition of Krakoa at the first Hellfire Gala, in Excalibur #21 (2021).

PAGE 7. Druig talks to Uranos.

Uranos believes that any deviation at all is excess deviation, which it is the Eternals’ duty to destroy – the logical consequence being that just wiping out life on Earth is the best way forward. More logically (in a sense), he reasons that if the Progenitor rejected Captain America for failing to fulfil his mission, then it will judge the Eternals for failing to fulfil their own mission by wiping out the mutants. Presumably even Uranos would be concerned about the Progenitor wiping out life on Earth if that included the Eternals themselves.

Druig seemingly agrees with this plan, but he seems a lot more keen than Uranos that the Earth should be spared – he insists that “the world hasn’t failed its test yet”, and he certainly stops short of releasing Uranos himself again. That invites the question of why he goes along with renewing the attack on Krakoa. Perhaps he’s just hedging his bets, or perhaps he’s got more going on.

PAGE 8. Iron Man and co make plans.

Ajak is unwilling to countenance simply switching the thing off, but Phastos is more of a practical engineering type and perfectly happy to countenance it. He makes clear that he would be compelled to resist such a plan if he knew it was happening, but he interprets the principles flexibly enough that he can discuss it as a hypothetical.

PAGES 9-10. The Quiet Council meet.

Mr Sinister makes telepathic contact with Destiny to tell her about the plot – we haven’t seen him use his psychic powers much recently, but they’ve been established since the 1980s.

Destiny reveals that there’s a risk that destroying the Celestial would cause considerable devastation. She says that it wouldn’t happen. In a sense, as we see later on, she’s right. Does she know how matters pan out, and if so, what does she see as the advantage in pursuing this route? Or does the Celestial confuse her visions of the future too? Or does she actually see a risk of the plan working and creating massive devastation, but lie about the risk because it’s the only option? After all, she’s very keen in this issue for the X-Men to remain ignorant of the implications of what they’re doing.

The vote passes by 5-3 with one abstention. The three traditional heroes all vote against, but they’re outvoted by an interesting alliance, with Hope voting alongside the villains and the morally ambiguous. Emma abstains, perhaps to avoid taking sides when there’s no need to, but it’s not clearly explained. Kate objects that Destiny is taking advantage of the absence of Professor X (temporarily dead) and Storm (who has somehow returned to Mars, presumably to appear in X-Men Red). But even if you assume that both of them would have voted against, Sinister is also missing, and he would certainly have voted in favour, since he was the one who recommended this idea in the first place. So the vote would still have passed, unless Emma cast a no vote to deadlock the Council.

“Jean and Scott left this circle due to moral quibbles.” In “X of Swords”, just before they re-formed the X-Men.

“Summers risked the Earth with the Phoenix to rebirth our species.” In Avengers vs X-Men, the event miniseries that ended the “no more mutants” era.

PAGE 11. The Deviants arrive on Krakoa.

The Deviants can use the gates because they’re the ultimate source of super powers on Earth, and the mutants are in some sense descended from them. Kro has been the Deviant leader dating back to the original Eternals comics; he’s flanked by Ransak and Karkas. The rest are generics as far as I know. Kro tacitly acknowledges that the Deviants have rarely actually won a battle against the Eternals, but at least they have plenty of experience in slowing them down.

PAGES 12-13. Sinister’s leak is exposed.

Straightforward.

PAGES 13-19. X-Men versus Eternals, and an illusory armageddon.

The mutant strike team members seen on panel are:

  • Cyclops, Jean Grey and Synch of the X-Men, plus a fiery woman who’s presumably Firestar.
  • Wolverine, Domino, Kid Omega and Beast from X-Force. Kid Omega’s appearance could be a mistake,
  • since he disappears at the end of X-Force #29 and he’s still missing as of X-Force #30, which was (as yet inexplicably) billed as a “Judgment Day” tie-in. But maybe they get him back in the course of the tie-in arc and in advance of this scene. You never know. Or maybe the whole thing is an illusion so it doesn’t matter.
  • Exodus and Colossus from the Quiet Council.
  • Archangel from X-Corp
  • Iceman, who is currently between teams.
  • Doop, who I’m not sure is even technically a mutant, but okay.
  • Magik of the New Mutants (still in her black costume, but there’s no obvious problem with the recent “Labors of Magik” arc in New Mutants taking place after Judgment Day).
  • Cable from X-Men Red.

PAGE 20. The aftermath of the illusion.

The four judgments that the Progenitor delivers in passing seem consistent with judging people by their own self-image – Kro is more accepting of his place and of the limits of what he can achieve than Emma, Irene or Raven.

Jean jumps to the conclusion that Sinister concealed the risks of the explosion from everyone else, but in fact, as Sinister quite fairly points out, he did tell the Quiet Council, and they decided not to tell the X-Men. He’d probably have voted for that too… but he didn’t lie about it.

PAGE 21. More planning.

An obvious point to raise here is that Sinister does have the option of simply resetting time by killing one of his Moira clones and giving the X-Men another run at this story with the benefit of greater knowledge of what to avoid. Of course, presumably that’s one reason why Gillen has hauled him off to the other side of the world. But Destiny knows about the Moiras too. Still, as long as she sees another way forward, she’s probably prefer not to go there.

PAGES 22-23. Sersi and Jack of Knives free Starfox from the Exclusion.

Ur-Luciva, the warden of the Exclusion, has been mentioned in the current volume of Eternals but never seen. Since all Eternals characters are mapped on to mythological figures (the original implication being that the stories were based on them, before the Eternals were brought unambiguously into the Marvel Universe), Ur-Luciva is presumably a Lucifer figure, and the Exclusion is Hell in the Catholic understanding of an exclusion from communion with God.

Starfox is Eros, who took the codename when he joined the Avengers. He was a member between 1983 and 1985, and his thing was to affect emotions and stimulate pleasure. There was a phase in which this was seen as decidedly uncomfortable, resulting in a rather heavyhanded overcorrection in She-Hulk #12-13 (2006), but he’s been pretty much rehabbed since then and, as you can see, is being repositioned as something more gender-fluid. It’s not entirely clear what he’s doing in the Exclusion, but he hasn’t previously been seen as a “proper” Eternal – he’s Thanos’s brother from the spin-off group on Titan. Thanos was presented as an Eternal during the recent Eternals series, and by extension Starfox must qualify too. Nonetheless, his on-the-margins status within the Eternals might have something to do with his being here.

PAGE 24. Trailers.

Bring on the comments

  1. K says:

    When Emma said “we need another Xavier”, I thought she meant they were going to just preemptively resurrect some extra Xaviers for extra firepower.

    And with everybody dying left and right in the Krakoa defense, why not just make extra fodder copies of your big guns?

  2. Chris V says:

    That’s exactly what happened in Moira’s Life Nine during the Mutant/Man-Machine Supremacy War. They need Sinister to clone the mutants for that, I believe. If a mind is downloaded from Cerebro into a body, I don’t believe they can use that mind again while the individual is alive. Of course, turning the cloning process over to Sinister opens up the possibility that he will sabotage the clones, as happened during Life Nine.

  3. Jenny says:

    I think it’s notable that the Progenitor’s illusionary Captain America form is specifically Cap’s original costume, with his badge shaped shield.

  4. Mike Loughlin says:

    Captain America getting the thumbs down worked to show that no one is safe. I wonder if we’ll get a better sense of how the new Celestial judges, but even if it’s left mysterious I’m still intrigued. I also wonder how Destiny and/or the QC will find a work-around for the Moira clones. I guess each one will have to be “cured” before being killed? I wondef if we’ll see one reset the timeline at some point.

  5. Chris V says:

    Sinister has been killing the Moira clones for his own purposes for months now.

  6. Ceries says:

    It’s not clear to me if the Celestial also showed the rest of Earth that the mutants were willing to risk killing millions (in a hemisphere, notably, that they aren’t in anymore) in order to kill it. If so, that could be interesting for human/mutant tensions going forward.

  7. Si says:

    The old “Good Guy is judged a failure because he strives to be better, but Bad Guy is judged a success because psychopaths live up to their own standards” trope?

  8. Uncanny X-Ben says:

    I mean, Mystique and Destiny are bad guys and they got the thumbs down.

    Emma is certainly self assured, at least on the outside.

    My knowledge of Kro only comes from the current series, in which he’s a perfectly reasonable nice guy doing his best to lead a broken people.

    Ceries- I really hope the humans did get to see the mutants try to sacrifice them, that makes the entire thing a lot more interesting. So I’m guessing it won’t happen

  9. GN says:

    Chris V> If a mind is downloaded from Cerebro into a body, I don’t believe they can use that mind again while the individual is alive.

    I don’t think that’s true. As long as the Cerebro unit is functional, they can download as many copies of a mind into husks of its mutant body (or even into husks of other mutants) as they want. There is a legal restriction against this, not a technological one.

    The only limitation with Cerebro is that telepaths can’t read the minds stored (presumably as electronic signals of some sort) within the logic crystals. The mind has to be loaded into a body before they can psychically interrogated (such as with Selene in IXM 2).

    K> And with everybody dying left and right in the Krakoa defense, why not just make extra fodder copies of your big guns?

    It’s illegal. Krakoa passed laws that say that only one copy of an individual can be around at all times. It was in the HOX 5 datapages. This is why they are so against clones and why they established X-Factor to verify the death of a mutant before resurrection can begin.

    The only exception to this rule is X-Force, whose members they can clone as many times as they want without any proof of death (such as in Inferno 1, with the Orchis Forge siege).
    For a Quiet Council member like Xavier, they have to wait until he physically dies before the Five can create a new body (though he gets priority resurrection as a QC member).

  10. GN says:

    Paul> Kro has been the Deviant leader dating back to the original Eternals comics…

    If I remember my Kirby Eternals correctly, Brother Tode used be the Emperor of the Deviants in early issues, with Warlord Kro serving as his abused general. After the death of Tode and the royal family, leadership switched hands a lot with Priestlord Ghaur and Warlord Kro taking over at various points.

    Gillen cut out the fat and reestablished Kro as the only current leader, which works for his take of sympathetic Deviants since Kro is the most reasonable leader they ever had.

  11. GN says:

    Paul> An obvious point to raise here is that Sinister does have the option of simply resetting time by killing one of his Moira clones and giving the X-Men another run at this story with the benefit of greater knowledge of what to avoid.

    Sinister’s been through Judgment Day before – he said so himself in IXM 4. Though presumably he and/or Krakoa have never survived it before because he’s reset time to try and fix things. This implies that he somehow managed to escape the North Pole in previous iterations (or maybe got one of his clones to kill Moira for him). One difference (we know of) in this iteration is that he learns of the existence of Doctor Stasis, of whom he seems to have no previous knowledge of.

    As to why Sinister doesn’t just go further back to stop JD from happening altogether (by destroying Avengers Mountain or something), it’s because he NEEDS JD to happen. If we look at the ‘future mind-map’ from Destiny’s visions in IXM 3, the road to ‘The Empire of the Red Diamond’ (which is presumably Sinister’s endgame) passes through ‘Judgment Day’. So JD has to happen, and Sinister and Krakoa both have to survive it in order for Sinister to achieve his goals.

    And hey, Marvel just announced a ‘Sins of Sinister’ X-Books crossover coming early next year, so it looks like Essex survives this iteration of Judgment Day and gets to establish his empire after all. Though I don’t expect it to last for very long.

    https://aiptcomics.com/2022/08/22/marvel-the-sins-of-sinister-x-men/

    Fingers crossed that the Heart and Spade versions of Sinister get to show up along with Doctor Stasis. Who’s inside Orbis Stellaris – is it another version of Sinister too? Whatever happened to the Claudine Renko version of Sinister?

  12. Krzysiek Ceran says:

    IIRC she appeared – and survived – the Dead Man Logan miniseries and it’s her last appearance to date?

  13. MasterMahan says:

    At this point, it’s unclear if the resurrection process even can create functional duplicates. The Five aren’t making clones with memories – they’re explicitly the same person. Souls exist in the Marvel Universe, and somehow the Five are putting them back. All we’ve seen are two Eanys, and neither did so well until the number went back down to one.

  14. Michael says:

    @Uncanny X-Ben- Emma sees herself as a protector of children, but she’s recently been confronted with the fact that to Angelica, she was her abuser. Not sure about Mystique and Destiny, though.

  15. Luis Dantas says:

    Sinister’s thoughts have strongly hinted that he has a good if flawed general idea of the near future since Immortal X-Men #1.

    I am guessing that there is at least one previous timeline where Destiny used one of Sinister’s Moira clones as a reset button. That would half explain their similar collapses in early issues of Immortal X-Men.

    I am also guessing that it won’t work this time and probably never did. No way Moira has the mutant power to involuntarily turn back the clock for the whole universe.

    Brother Tode, the original leader of the Deviants, died in an early 1980s Iron Man annual from the time when Rhodey was still getting used to the suit.

    It turns out that Arak is correct after all. Arbitrary as the Progenitor’s credentials are, his judgement is indeed fair. He seems to judge people by how sincerely they want to expand their own moral standards and scope. That excludes patriotic references almost by definition, and would certainly put Kro under a good light, at least going by his recent behavior.

    This is refreshing if accurate; Jim Starlin completely mangled it in a similar situation back in the late 1980s when he wrote Infinity Crusade. It will be interesting to see the Fantastic Four being judged (thumbs up all the way for the whole team). Hopefully we get some good writing from the judgements of Tony and Starfox as well. Druig, Sinister and Exodus are not going to make it at all.

  16. Luis Dantas says:

    IIRC Starfox has been explicitly accepted by the Earth’s Eternals as one of their own (albeit a Titan-born one) way back in 1984’s Avengers #248. He even participated in the formation of the Uni-Mind at the time.

    Presumably that is the precedent that establishes that Thanos, too, should count as an Eternal.

  17. SanityOrMadness says:

    Paul> Starfox is Eros, who took the codename when he joined the Avengers. He was a member between 1983 and 1985, and his thing was to affect emotions and stimulate pleasure. There was a phase in which this was seen as decidedly uncomfortable, resulting in a rather heavyhanded overcorrection in She-Hulk #12-13 (2006), but he’s been pretty much rehabbed since then and, as you can see, is being repositioned as something more gender-fluid. It’s not entirely clear what he’s doing in the Exclusion, but he hasn’t previously been seen as a “proper” Eternal – he’s Thanos’s brother from the spin-off group on Titan. Thanos was presented as an Eternal during the recent Eternals series, and by extension Starfox must qualify too. Nonetheless, his on-the-margins status within the Eternals might have something to do with his being here.

    Well, Mentor was always an Earth Eternal, although I think Sui-San (Thanos & Starfox’s mother) wasn’t until Gillen retconned it. The thing about Starfox being resurrected (after being killed off in a recent-ish Guardians of the Galaxy run) isn’t that he qualifies as an Eternal – since Thanos did, and it’s the whole plot of one of Gillen’s Eternals one-shots that Mentor was trying to have “real” Eternal children – but whether he’s connected to The Machine to be resurrected and when that happened. Thanos tried & failed because everything that’s happened to him had gummed up the works, but presumably that wouldn’t apply to Eros.

    Maybe that Avengers uni-mind Luis mentions is when it happened?

    As for why he’s excluded, presumably it’s guilt-by-association. Mentor & Sui-San are locked up literally for being Thanos’ parents, so presumably it extends to Thanos’ brother.

  18. Luis Dantas says:

    I don’t think that there was a lot of exploration of why Thanos is so different from his own brother and parents so far, but the recent Eternals run has Phastos assuring that he is somehow both a legitimate Eternal and a legitimate Deviant.

    IIRC in Avengers Annual #10 Vision has a thought balloon describing Thanos as a mutant demigod.

    Can it be that Thanos is the Eternal equivalent of a run-of-the-mill mutant and that makes him a Deviant as well?

    Perhaps this event will have something more to say about the exact natures of Deviancy/deviation (as defined by the Celestials and the Machine) and mutancy.

    Both the setup for the event and this issue strongly hint that there is some form of significant similarity between the two situations/natures. But there must be some significant difference as well – Deviants were originally said to never resemble their own parents, while that is clearly not the case for mutants, even if they have been treated as a separate species in recent years.

  19. GN says:

    The Starfox reveal is actually a solution to a mystery that Gillen has been slowly hinting at since the first issue of his Eternals run.

    When I read Eternals 1, I suspected that Gillen was hiding something from the readers and that it involved Starfox; a suspicion that only grew when I read the Thanos Rises issue which didn’t mention him. The announcement of a Starfox one-shot for Judgment Day sealed the deal for me – I knew my theory was correct, so it’s nice to see it confirmed in this issue.

    I’m busy right now so I’ll type out the entire theory here later but the gist of it is that Eros is Eternal number 101, the one who was added to the Machine (go look at the list of Eternals in issue 1 again!). I also suspect that he might take over as the leader of the Eternals once this event is over – Thanos’s short reign was foreshadowing his brother’s longer reign.

  20. Luis Dantas says:

    I assumed from Eternals #1 that Starfox (original name Eros) was the Eternal imprisoned in Exclusion that went by the initial “E”.

  21. Dave says:

    “No way Moira has the mutant power to involuntarily turn back the clock for the whole universe”.
    Then how is Sinister getting his foreknowledge? How did any of HoX/PoX work?

  22. Luis Dantas says:

    I don’t know, @Dave.

  23. Karl_H says:

    GN> “Eternal number 101, the one who was added to the Machine (go look at the list of Eternals in issue 1 again!)”

    I’m looking at the list and it does appear that there are 101, but where are you getting “added to the Machine”?

    Good catch!

  24. Mike Loughlin says:

    Moira’s power is ridiculous, but “resets the 616 reality in time when she dies” is how it’s presented on-page.

    When the FF are judged, I predict thumbs being up for Ben & Sue and down for Reed (has done questionable things) & Johnny (lacks drive & maturity- if he’s a different character now, just wait until a writer decides to go “back to basics”).

    According to the internet, Thanos is an Eternal with a Deviant gene (aka a mutation). I would rather not have him show up in AXE. Uranos fulfills the same function, and we just had a lot of Thanos in the recent Eternals series. I’m fine with focusing on other characters.

  25. Jenny says:

    Whose that getting bisected by Ikaris during the battle scenes? The one right before Exodus attacks him.

  26. Uncanny X-Ben says:

    They’re already building to the Thanos has the Infinity Stones and Mjolnir crossover story from Cates’ Thor, so I’m thinking he’s out for this one.

    He could just have not left at the end of Gillen’s Eternals if he planned on using him.

    Unless of course he’s going to ride to the rescue like Norman Osborn.

    And then my fellow Americans will probably elect Thanos president or something.

  27. Uncanny X-Ben says:

    Jenny- I couldn’t figure it out myself.

  28. Si says:

    I don’t find Thanos all that interesting. He’s another one of those unstoppable forces that keeps getting stopped, so every time he’s used he gets that much less relevant.

  29. Chris V says:

    I don’t think this is true of Thanos. He is more complex and tragic of a figure. His one goal in life is to be loved by Death. Yet, he is an Eternal, so he cannot die. Hence, he is one of the few living beings that Death could never love. He claims he wants to prove himself worthy of Death’s love. In reality, he wants to lose in the hope that he will finally die and be able to be with his one true love forever…except, he cannot truly die.

  30. neutrino says:

    @Jenny It’s supposed to be Firestar.

    @Chris V Thanos has died multiple times. Death has brought him back.

  31. Chris V says:

    I realize Thanos has been killed multiple times, and that Death continues to reject him. He finds himself back in the place he hates, so he’s driven to try to prove himself to Death in the hope she’ll finally love him.
    There was something introduced to his story about Thanos having “low self-esteem”, he secretly wanted to be defeated because he believed he wasn’t “worthy of being a god”. Come now. No, instead, he knew that a god can never die, so he wanted to lose. That’s why he continually leaves ways for himself to be defeated. He wants to be killed in the hope that the next time he won’t return.

  32. Pseu42 says:

    Kind of funny that the Progenitor uses the same trick here that Her Royal Whyness Opal Luna Saturnyne did in her X of Swords pre-rumble dinner party: give everyone a vision of the Bad Thing that would happen if they broke the rules and tried to get out of the trial without going through it.

  33. neutrino says:

    Thanos has been brought back by Death, but not because he was rejected by her. In the Silver Surfer, Death brought him back to correct the cosmic imbalance. The part about him losing because he felt unworthy was in Infinity Gauntlet by his creator, Jim Starlin, so I’ll go with his version.

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