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

NEW MUTANTS vol 4 #32
“The Sublime Saga, part 2: Swap Out”
Writer: Charlie Jane Anders
Main story artist: Alberto Alburquerque
Main story colourist: Carlos Lopez
“Young Shela & Morgan” artists: Ro Stein & Ted Brandt
“Young Shela & Morgan” colourist: Tamra Bonvillain
Letterer & production: Travis Lanham
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Sarah Brunstad

COVER / PAGE 1: Wolfsbane, Escapade, Cerebella, Leo and Morgan surrounded by U-Men.

PAGES 2-4. Escapade as a U-Man.

Escapade tried using her powers to escape by swapping places with a guard last issue, but couldn’t get it to work. Evidently she pulled it off on a second attempt.

The mechanics of Escapade’s powers remain hazy, which is fair enough up to a point – she doesn’t fully understand them herself, and therefore she can’t explain them to us. One aspect of her power is simply to swap roles with someone, and apparently this works not by altering her appearance but as a kind of illusion that makes everyone around her accept her in the role. No doubt at some point we’ll get into question such as “does it work against people with psychic defences” and “does it work against people watching on TV”. Where people nearby are concerned, it seems that (at least at her current level of skill) Escapade occupies a sort of mental blind spot where they fail to register most of the anomalies about her appearance, and just accept her as long as she doesn’t do anything too glaringly wrong.

When Escapade says that the New Mutants did everything they could to make her feel welcome on Krakoa, it’s not clear whether she’s talking about the core cast, or the teen trainees that she actually spends her time hanging out with.

The U-Men are in full banality-of-evil mode here and in most of the issue. They’re also more dangerous than usual, since in this arc their power-transplanting schtick actually appears to be working most of the time.

The 3rd Species is the book that John Sublime had written in his debut arc by Grant Morrison. The bookshelf of copies (with two awkwardly propped up to face the camera so that we can recognise it – one of those things that probably wasn’t as easy to render in comics as the writer thought) flags the cult-like element of the U-Men.

PAGE 5. Recap and credits.

PAGE 6. The U-Man is stuck with the other prisoners.

Wolfsbane, Morgan and Leo evidently can see the U-Man as he is, despite Escapade’s powers. Maybe it’s because they know what she was doing, or maybe it’s because the U-Man isn’t making an attempt to behave like her. Morgan tells us that Escapade’s targets always (or at least often) behave like this, which is convenient, since it explains why the guy hasn’t simply run over to the door and yelled for help.

The incident with Escapade’s school principal was mentioned in her profile page in Marvel’s Voices: Pride (2022).

Morgan maintains his position that the mutants are hiding by retreating to Krakoa, and is naturally irritated to find the U-Man agreeing with him. It’s not played as “the U-Man agrees with him, therefore he’s wrong”, though – the U-Man is more at cross purposes with him.

PAGES 7-8. Cerebella asks Escapade to kill her.

Cerebella, who is entirely familiar with the ground rules of the Krakoan era, asks Escapade to kill her if she can’t be freed. After all, she knows that she’ll just wake up alive and well back on Krakoa. Escapade is freaked out by the idea, but also gets halfway through telling us that she isn’t convinced by this whole resurrection thing. That’s important, because a lot of Escapade’s motivation is to do with her vision of Morgan’s death. But… Morgan’s a mutant. The plot only works if Escapade thinks his death is more than a minor inconvenience. That might just be a plot hole being papered over, but it feels like it’s a deliberate feature of the story – Cerebella and Leo also flagged it to Escapade last issue.

Cerebella starts off very friendly towards Escapade (even allowing for the fact that she’s come to rescue her) but turns against her very quickly when she won’t free her. Clearly, a big part of Cerebella’s motivation is fear about being returned to slavery with Sublime – she says that “I’ve already killed so many people thanks to him”, which I’m not sure has been clearly established, but it’s certainly true that he used her as a weapon against opponents. It’s perfectly likely that she was forced to help capture mutants for dismemberment. She takes that out on Escapade and accuses her of taking the moral high ground for her own sense of righteousness.

PAGE 9. Data page – more of the Cerebella journal that we saw some of last issue.

I covered last time the awkward question of how Martha ended up stuck in the fishbowl for as long as she did, and why she ended up with the name No-Girl. The original intention (leaving aside the question of whether it was a misreading of Morrison’s script) was probably that she chose it herself, and presumably the X-Men just didn’t have the capacity to clone her a new body – but it’s less obvious why she wasn’t allowed to be resurrected once she was on Krakoa. She suggests here that it was the same argument that was used with Cosmar in issue #15 – that she ought to embrace it as an aspect of being different, even though it was nothing to do with her powers. Presumably, like Cosmar, she put herself forward for the Crucible and was rejected.

Sublime’s back story as a sentient bacteria is also a major plot point over in Marauders at the moment, but the two arcs seem to be unrelated.

PAGES 10-12. Escapade helps Cerebella to escape.

Escapade’s solution is to do a swap within a swap, taking Cerebella’s place on the gurney. Apparently Cerebella doesn’t become confused as a result, but maybe that’s because it’s a simple location swap rather than a role swap – sublime notices immediately that something has changed.

Cerebella switches back to talking up and defending her friends, implicitly including Escapade, once she’s dealing with Sublime.

PAGES 13-14. Cerebella rescues the others.

Fortunately, the first swap wears off quickly and Escapade reappears in the U-Man’s place.

Apparently the U-Men are into cryptocurrency, which seems like the sort of thing Sublime would throw into his cult of gullibility. In Escapade’s debut story from Marvel’s Voices: Pride (2022), a similar low-rent cult had made their own social media network.

PAGE 15. Data page – an email from Morgan to Shela at some point in the recent past. Dr Ravager, whoever he may be, has never appeared on panel, but the Pride story alludes to a long history of Escapade stealing stuff from Z-list villains.

PAGES 16-19. The mutants continue their escape.

Sublime – somewhat like Emma Frost – instantly recognises that Escapade’s powers imply that she’s a reality warper, and therefore very intelligent indeed.

The video screen that Wolfsbane sees is showing the map of Krakoa with a red dot zooming in on the Akademos Habitat (i.e., where the kids live), but the colouring makes this less than obvious unless you’re really going to zoom in.

PAGE 20. Cerebella and Leo overhear the U-Men.

Kick is the drug that Sublime used to infect mutants during the Grant Morrison run – the implication apparently being that he’s going to try and infect the Krakoan youth that way, just as he did once before.

Dr Barrington is the scientist who was working with weird animal creatures in issues #8 and #12, in a storyline that went nowhere. She later showed up working with the U-Men in Children of the Atom, and she’s currently working with Orchis in Sabretooth and the Exiles.

PAGES 21-24. Escapade and Morgan escape.

“Deontology versus consequentialism.” In other words, morality judged by the intrinsic qualities of an action, versus morality judged by the consequences which the action has. Morgan seems to suggest that he thinks Escapade is being too simplistic in drawing absolute lines without regard to consequences, and that the fundamental problem of the rank and file U-Men is that they want the world to be simple.

Considering that Morgan knows the details of the vision – he describes them in the email earlier in the issue – it’s interesting that he doesn’t have the same reaction to the rooftop. It’s possible that he just doesn’t make the connection, though, having only had it described to him.

PAGE 25. Trailers.