X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic #44-49: X-Men Green III
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #44-49
Writer: Steve Orlando
Artist: Emilio Laiso
Colourist: Rachelle Rosenberg
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Jordan D White
For those of you who aren’t subscribed to Marvel Unlimited – or who just aren’t interested in reading all six or so Infinity Comics that come out each week – X-Men Unlimited remains the closest the line comes to a core title. There are Unlimited titles for the Avengers and Spider-Man books too, but they’re peripheral – the Spider-Man one is quite keen on doing Spider-Verse stories, for example. X-Men Unlimited is like that about half of the time, but also has running stories that it returns to, the main one being “X-Men Green”.
The tone of these stories has noticeably shifted from the first arc with Gerry Duggan. By accident or design, that arc winds up trying to have its cake and eat it, by being half-heartedly disapproving of Nature Girl’s eco-terrorism, but with a definite overtone of “yeah but corporations amirite”. We’re meant to basically agree with Krakoa letting them escape, after all. Over the following arcs – this is the third – the tone has shifted emphatically to “dangerous lunatics”. Of the group, only Nature Girl is really even motivated by environmentalism, and even she has lost touch with reality, allowing her to be manipulated by Hordeculture (who, for the most part, are played as straight villains in this story). Sauron has weird obsessions about avenging the dinosaurs, and Curse just likes having an excuse to destroy stuff.
Since it’s not great PR for a group claiming to be the X-Men to be carrying out terrorist attacks, the book starts with the Marauders sending makeshift teams out to rescue the humans, contain the damage, and generally be the nice reassuring superheroes. I quite like the Red Cross outfits used for this purpose, even if Magik grumbles about the way they look. They’re maybe a bit too close to Captain Britain, but they’re fine for a mutant rescue crew. Steve Orlando, being Steve Orlando, takes the opportunity to give some panel time to background characters like Brutha Nature and Birdy, underused ones like Triage, or insanely obscure ones like Alchemist. No? She was in the Pryde & Wisdom miniseries in 1996 and nothing else, ever. But nothing turns on whether you recognise her, so that’s fine – mainly, this is meant to be Kate rounding up some reasonably trustworthy people with relevant powers, and she ticks the box for that.
That first chapter leaves us in no doubt whatever about where our sympathies are meant to lie. Nature Girl is a psychopath. The ersatz Marauders are doing more good than she is. The oil drilling crew are helpless victims. Even Hordeculture, in the next chapter, vouch for Nature Girl being a psycho who “doesn’t care about saving the planet, not really”. Given the general political slant of the X-books and their writers this is… interesting. Perhaps the calculation is that given the way the first arc actually played out, they really want to distance this bunch from the likes of Extinction Rebellion.
Hordeculture’s big idea is to cause chaos (for whatever reason) by getting X-Men Green to break out the Armageddon Man. Again, since it’s Steve Orlando, this guy is a pre-existing character, but not one you’re especially likely to have heard of. His only previous appearance was in X-Force #88-90, from the John Francis Moore / Jim Cheung run. He’s supposed to be one of the first post-atomic mutants, kept in containment because of his uncontrollable power to continually create natural disasters. You don’t really need to know any of the details of that story – which is handy, because it isn’t on Marvel Unlimited – but it probably does help to know that he’s a pre-existing concept, since otherwise he just sort of shows up out of nowhere.
Anyway. Nature Girl knows she’s being manipulated but figures that her connection to all things natural will somehow help her to soothe the Armageddon Man and get him under control. She seems to vaguely figure that they’re both embodiments of nature’s wrath, and therefore she’ll be able to channel him into something more productive. Of course, so far as the rest of the story is concerned, she’s not something more productive, which is where it’s all going to go wrong.
But first, it’s time for an issue of the Quiet Council asking Cypher about how these guys got out of the Pit. This is as close as the arc gets to sympathising with them, as Destiny strongly hints that she knew what was happening and let them go, and Cypher gives a rather disingenuous claim that the Quiet Council was overruled by the Earth itself. Cypher’s approach here made sense in Duggan’s intended reading of X-Men Green but reads very weirdly in the context of everything else that goes on in this arc. Still, Orlando is quite creative in finding a way to make an entire issue of committee discussion visual, with Cypher intentionally winding people up so that he can read their body language, something that Emilio Laiso’s art plays with endearing impishness.
He’s rather good with the poor beleaguered Armageddon Man too, who’s barely a character – after all, the premise of the guy is that he never had the opportunity to do much more than be locked in a containment unit – but is given a confused, hangdog look that makes clear that there’s nothing especially angry about this guy. According to Nature Girl, he really does just want to be useful, which she interprets as “terrorist attacks on cities”. At which point, it all falls apart because Sauron is killing animals for not being dinosaur enough, and Curse gets a bit antsy about the fact that Nature Girl’s reaction is to try and kill him.
The twist is basically that Curse is responsible for all of this, because she used her powers to wish for a circle of friends, and since all her wishes are cursed, it wound up transforming Nature Girl into someone sufficiently murderous to go on enjoyable rampages with her. Nature Girl won’t believe it, Curse tries to wish her back to normal, and… oh, that’s the end of the arc. Huh.
Obviously we’re coming back to this, but it does feel like a strange place to break. Still, this is a pretty good arc if you don’t mind the sense of conspicuous repositioning compared to the earlier X-Men Green stories – it’s a lighter read than Marauders and the art is really good, with a nice clean line that seems to work well in the vertical scrolling format.
The part I found most interesting in this segment was the note that X-Corp has replaced the energy draw from the oil plant with geothermal power. Setting aside the possibly unintentional implications of a mutant corporation taking over the role of human industry devastated by mutant terrorism, it’s interesting that this continues the trend of portraying the mutants as essentially separate from humanity and bearing no responsibility for climate change and ecological devastation despite their immense economic might.
Am I the only one thinking that Doug’s hiding the information from the Quiet Council by encoding his thoughts in a language he invented doesn’t make sense? For one thing, Xavier was able to telepathically translate Lilandra’s thoughts into English, and Sh’iar has to be more difficult than anything Doug could come up with- Doug is HUMAN, at least, not from another galaxy. For another, couldn’t they just have Hope copy his power?
Didn’t Lilandra help Xavier telepathically connect with her mind? Lilandra was the one who reached out to Xavier due to sending his thoughts during that stunt to defeat the Z’Nox.
Also, we know that Xavier was unable to read the kind of Krakoa. That was why Xavier needed Doug to translate Krakoa’s language for them. Xavier was, basically, making broad guesses based on what he was able to understand. Taking that into consideration, Doug could probably hide his thoughts in a suitably complex or alien invented language.
*sensing Xavier’s thoughts, not sending
I thought Cypher said that Krakoa overruled the Quiet Council, rather than the whole planet.
As for Cypher stopping telepathy by thinking in a new language, that doesn’t make any sense with the way telepathy is usually portrayed, it’s true. Often you see telepathy as a way of overcoming language barriers. But Rule of Cool, it’s a fun twist on his powers, encrypting his own mind, so why not.
@Michael
I am probably overthinking it, but…
Hope (and Synch) can probably copy Doug’s power, but it does not necessarily follow that they would be capable of understanding a new language of his creation, particularly if it is an antilanguage (a language that is meant to hide messages from people outside the group of native speakers).
But if we are talking about using his powers to protect from mind-reading, the situation becomes a bit more interesting. The implication seems to be that Doug can choose his own native language at will, which makes a sort of sense. IIRC we have seen such frequent (and rather convoluted as well as selective) claims that people such as Wolverine and Longshot are resistant to telepathy for all kinds of odd reasons that I sort of have to assume that Doug can have that too if he wants to.
It could be interesting to explore how Doug’s abilities interact with telepathy proper. But I don’t think that this story had a lot of room for that.
@Si: Nah, Doug specifically denies that Krakoa was the one who released them. It’s superimposed over flashbacks of the actual event so the reader knows he’s lying.
As for a power duplicator – that would probably work, but not immediately. Doug’s power is learning languages, not automatically speaking them. It would take Doug time to learn the “most complex language ever”, so it would for Hope as well – and that’s if Doug doesn’t start shifting his mental language.
I quite like the idea that Doug thinks in his own personal conlang. That would be an interesting concept to explore even beyond how it impacts telepathy.