Storm & The Brotherhood of Mutants #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
STORM & THE BROTHERHOOD OF MUTANTS #1
“Storm’s Seven”
Writer: Al Ewing
Artist: Paco Medina
Colourist: Jay David Ramos
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
STORM & THE BROTHERHOOD OF MUTANTS. This is X-Men Red, re-titled for the duration of the “Sins of Sinister” crossover. In practice, this is X-Men Red #10A. It’s part 2 of the crossover.
By the way, my plan for this year is to generally limit annotations to ongoing titles (or books like this that are stand-ins for them), partly so that I can make some time to catch up on reviews. I’m making an exception for Sabretooth partly because I’ve already started it and partly because it’s really good, but I’m going to skip over Bishop: War College and save that one for reviews.
COVER / PAGE 1. Storm being generally impressive amidst what’s presumably meant to be the rubble of Arakko.
The logo has a Sinister diamond in Storm’s name, but don’t worry, fans, she’s still herself. As pointed out in Sins of Sinister #1, Sinister can’t take advantage of Storm’s resurrections to mess with her mind, because she renounced the option of resurrection in order to prove herself to the Arakkii in X-Men Red #4.
PAGES 2-5. Storm recounts the destruction of Arakko.
The narrator is Storm, talking to Destiny, as we see on the next page. The destruction of Arakko was previous shown on page 38 of Sins of Sinister #1, as part of a montage sequence. According to the narrator there, Sinister’s primary objective here is to kill Storm by destroying the planet she’s on. “Invasion of Arakko with stage-two Chimera allows an insertion of a Legion clone into the planet’s core. With a psychic prompt, two seconds of complete loss of control are sufficient to destroy the planet.”
Page 3 panels 1-2 show Storm at the Quiet Council meeting where she learned that Sinister had corrupted the group. That scene, and Storm’s escape, comes from pages 29 to 32 of Sins of Sinister #1. Page 33 then showed Destiny and Mystique approaching Storm and proposing an alliance: “We will lose unless we are smarter. We will los unless… We must be on the same side.”
According to Storm, Destiny then persuaded her to hold back from launching an attack with the Arakkii forces. This advice did not go well. Storm has clearly figured out that Destiny’s motives are suspect, and we’ll see later on that she’s right.
In page 3 panel 3, Storm’s forces, from left to right, are as follows:
- Two unidentifiable background generics.
- Calderak, a minor bozo who challenged Storm unsuccessfully for her place on the Great Ring in S.W.O.R.D. #8.
- Lactuca the Knower.
- Sobunar of the Depths
- Weaponless Zsen
- Death, of the Horsemen of Apoocalypse. This guy has been hanging around in the vampire realms of Otherworld ever since “X of Swords”, and he isn’t a regular presence on Arakko. He may be what Storm is referring to by “We called in our favors.” Death has always seemed quite smitten by Ororo.
- Storm herself.
- Sunspot.
- Wrongslide.
- Warpath.
- Quick, one of the title characters. Her name is given on page 12 as Loolo Marshall. She’s the little girl that Craig Marshall from NASA was trying to save from Uranos in X-Men Red #6. Presumably he adopts her.
- Khora
- Nova
- Frenzy
- Wiz Kid
- More random generics.
Page 3 panel 4 shows the same attackers that were depicted in Sins of Sinister: the Sugar Man and a bunch of Ora Serratas.
The chimeras on page 4 are a combination of Multiple Man and Angel. According to Storm, Sinister publicly explains these creatures as Super-Skrulls, which would make a certain degree of sense. The Super-Skrull had all the power of the Fantastic Four plus the normal Skrull shape changing abilities.
The final panel on page 4, with Storm cradling the body of Sunspot, echoes the death of Magneto in A.X.E.: Judgment Day #4 and X-Men Red #7.
PAGE 6. Recap and credits. The title, “Storm’s Seven”, presumably reflects this being something of a heist story.
The wodge of Krakoan on the left just reads “Storm and the Brotherhood of Mutants”, though it kind of mis-spells THE by using the separate T and H symbols instead of the single TH character. (Oddly, it gets it right in BROTHERHOOD.)
PAGE 7. Data page – basically a recap of the set-up in an 1980s 3D style.
PAGES 8-11. Storm and Ironfire expose Destiny as an impostor.
It’s not Destiny, it’s Mystique. (Or rather, it’s not, but it’s designed to make the Arakkii thinks that they’ve already exposed Mystique. We’ll get back to that later.)
Mystique’s pitch is for Storm and the Brotherhood to break in to Sinister’s Muir Island facility, steal his Moira clones, and destroy them in order to reboot the timeline and avert the destruction of Arakko (or at least give themselves another chance to avoid it). Mystique is in fact telling the truth about the existence of this facility, and the fact that killing Moira will reboot the timeline, but naturally she has an ulterior motive.
Jon Ironfire is a new character and we’re obviously supposed to be wondering exactly who this guy is. We’re told on the roster page that he “can transmute his molten blood into any metal known, and extrude it in the form of weapons, armour and even his trademark horns.” Mystique tells us that he was once a “rebel without a cause”. The metal control thing sounds terribly reminiscent of Magneto; the way he extends his spike from the back of his hands is obviously reminiscent of Wolverine. Still, Mystique is pretty clear that this guy is an Arakkii.
PAGE 12. Data page: the team roster. Most of this is simply recap, but we’re also told that Cable has bonded with Xilo, the Arakkii living history repository, to take on those cultural memories. This presumably explains the more fibrous appearance of his normally cyborg parts.
PAGES 13-14. Wiz Kid demonstrates why Mystique can’t betray them.
As we’ll see later, this whole scene is a charade. Note that Wiz Kid starts the sequence to shut down Ironside raising the question of whether Mystique and Destiny can be trusted, and Quick interrupts the point that Wiz Kid was trying to make.
Asteroid S is apparently the name of Storm’s base, referencing Magneto’s old Asteroid M.
PAGE 15. The team fight chimeras.
You can’t say Sinister’s not thinking outside the box. Of all the mutant powers he might have chosen to clone for guards, Maggott and Marrow aren’t the most obvious choices. But hey, nobody’s going to be expecting piranha bones.
PAGES 16-17. Storm and co reach Sinister’s inner sanctum.
This huge black globe is apparently a “living forcefield” and a chimera in its own right. Wiz Kid claims that it has “Unuscione genes”, referencing either the minor Silver Age villain Unus the Untouchable, or his daughter Carmella Unuscione, who was a B-list member of the Acolytes in the 1990s. Skids was a member of the New Mutants for a little while (and also wound up in the Acolytes), and Armor made it all the way to the X-Men.
Most of the chimeras are generic, but one of them is clearly based on Glob Herman.
PAGE 18. Ironside fights off the Chimeras.
This, apparently, is his “rain of pain” move from “the Genesis War”. It feels like Ironside is being almost parodically set up as absurdly cool, though Ewing manages to do that without making him irritating; clearly this is all heading somewhere, which helps.
The “Genesis War” was presumably something to do with Apocalypse’s wife Genesis, who was back in Amenth the last time we saw her. Since Storm remembers these events, it has to be something from the last few years of this timeline, and not simply an event from Arakko’s time in Amenth.
PAGES 19-21. Wiz Kid turns out to be the real Mystique, and she teleports the Moiras away.
In other words, Mystique has tricked Storm and co into doing all the hard work, but it’s Mystique and Destiny who wind up in control of the Moiras. This is why the lab was empty when Sinister arrived to visit it at the end of Sins of Sinister #1.
Ironside tells Storm that “I keep failing you”, which is obviously something to do with his back story.
PAGES 22-23. Destiny and Orbis Stellaris talk.
Evidently these two have formed an alliance to keep the Moiras out of everyone else’s hands.
We saw Stellaris based at the World Farm in the previous arc of X-Men Red. He’s vague about his precise motives for not resetting the timeline, but clearly suggests it’s something to do with ascending to a Dominion hive mind as described in Powers of X. In Sins of Sinister #1, Sinister’s plan for Earth was to elevate it into such a hive mind himself, before it could get absorbed by a pre-existing Dominion.
Destiny claims that her motivation is simply to keep Mystique alive. She might be lying, or at least have some ulterior motive. But this is consistent with Immortal X-Men #3, where she found that (due to Sinister’s rebooting) the number of potential timelines had been vastly reduced, and that none of them contained a version of Mystique. For what it’s worth, the branching timelines shown in a diagram on page 14 of Immortal #3 do include an “Empire of the Red Diamond” – the timeline does continue beyond it, apparently ending in something called “the Storm System.”
Destiny may be on board with keeping a diseased timeline alive solely to keep Mystique around, but how does Mystique feel about this? Depending on interpretations, she’s often written as having more interest in wider mutantkind than that. Does she actually know what Destiny’s agenda here is?
PAGE 24. Trailers.
Thanks for doing these Paul and for getting them up so quickly, really great stuff that enhances every issue.
I think the chimera of Multiple Man and Angel is also Havok too
It would be hilarious if the Genesis war turned out to be Apocalypse’s wife vs. Cable’s son.
Destiny’s wiling to sacrifice the lives of billions just so Mystique gets to live. GIllen set this up nicely, reminding us in issue 8 that Destiny had experimented on children in the past.
It’s nice that Gillen actually knows how to write a lesbian super-villain couple as actually evil even if they do sometimes help the heroes, unlike DC with Harvey and ivy.
I wonder does Mystique know that Kurt turned into a monster or did Destiny lie about that?
GN was partially right about Mystique and Destiny taking the Moiras. i would have never guessed they were working with Stellaris instead of Mother Righteous but it does make sense. Stellaris needs the hive mind of a Dominion because his body is failing and Destiny wants to live forever with Mystique so a hive mind would suit her purposes well. Stellaris seems to be saying that if they do manage to create a Dominion, only one of them can dominate, though.
Forming a collective like a Dominion, there would be no individuality. That was the question about Ascension which caused the Librarian to hesitate.
However, remember the Librarian’s words to Moira about if post-humanity were to be assimilated within a Dominion. If they achieved Ascension before Moira reset the timeline, their knowledge would exist as part of the Dominion outside of time and space. The Librarian said the Dominion would stop Moira from preventing the rise of post-humanity, no matter how many lives she lived.
So, in that context, if Destiny can download her mind into a Dominion then have Mystique reset the timeline, Destiny would always exist outside of time and space. She could ensure that whatever caused Mystique to no longer exist in the alternate timelines she foresaw was no longer a possibility. Then, she could still live a lifetime with Mystique while resetting Sinister’s dystopian timeline.
“Page 3 panel 4 shows the same attackers that were depicted in Sins of Sinister: the Sugar Man and a bunch of Ora Serratas.”
Based on how they’re attacking, I think they’re supposed to be a Sugar Man/Banshee chimera and Ora/Cyclops chimeras. Giant mouth for a giant sonic scream, giant eye for a giant optic blast.
My guess is that Ironfire is an Eternal. His powers seem to be based on control over his own molecules, which is an Eternal trademark. The attitude also matches IMO. He claims to read and remember heat signatures, which may also be a hint in that general direction.
I will never remember the proper way to pronounce “chimera”, and it ruins these stories for me. I’ve looked it up a dozen times, but my brain insists it’s like “shimmerer” and won’t hold onto anything else. It helps if it’s spelt with a æ.
Maybe it’s the weight of expectations, maybe this warrants another read when I’m less sleepy, but I’m torn on this issue right now. I find it too fast-paced and it’s weird the most notable character moments are for two characters that are regulars at Immortal and not Red.
For once, I don’t get the feeling Ewing is putting a crossover in service of his own themes – it’s very contrasting to how X-Men Red tied into Judgment Day. Dunno.
“Storm’s Seven” is more directly a reference to “Blake’s Seven”, another story which, like this one, features a plucky band of rebels opposing an Evil Empire. Speaking of which, that first 3-D text page is very closely modeled on the opening to Star Wars (1977) (later renamed Episode IV: A New Hope).
I got the vibe that Ironfire was a chimera of Wolverine, Magneto, and others. This would be in the tradition of “mad scientist’s most advanced creation turns on them”. See for example, Ultron and Vision.
The upcoming Fall of X phase has hinted at the return of Apocalypse and Genesis, so I assumed Ewing was nodding to that with the Genesis War, not unlike seeding future stories in Immortal #3.
I’m not sure why everyone suspects Ironfire is anything other than what he seems, a regular Arakki mutant.
I liked this issue for what it was – a snapshot, a moment in time in a much larger conflict… Except the scale is so large that we won’t see most of these characters again? Mystique and Destiny will probably be alive 100 years later – Raven already lived that long, so what’s another hundred, Destiny was cloned young and she had a very long lifespan the first time around.
Storm? Not unless a plot contrivance happens. Quick and Jon, I guess, could have long lifespans since they’re new characters. Wiz Kid is probably already dead, Cable shouldn’t make it another hundred and who knows about Khora.
My point is – this was a nice snapshot. But the next issue will probably be another snapshot moving forward the big Sinister scheme, but not featuring these characters? And while I like Ewing’s plots, what I love about his books is the way he handles his characters. But those characters need space. I’m not sure three snapshots separated by centuries plays to his strenghts.
Also, and this is a quibble at this point – we’ll see if it becomes bigger in the future. This issue doesn’t actually move the big Sinister scheme forward. It fills in the gaps – what’s Storm up to? How did Sinister lose his Moiras? (alternative title: ‘Dude, where’s my lab?’)
But the only actually new piece is the reveal of the Destiny-Stellaris alliance. That’s not much.
@Krzysiek Ceran
” And while I like Ewing’s plots, what I love about his books is the way he handles his characters.”
I think this is a great way to put it.
While I was reading the SOS opening one-shot, seeing Hope mention Cable when we already knew he was taking Storm’s side put a few exciting questions in my head – was Cable playing double agent? What would be SWORD’s role in this new status quo and how would their turn against Krakoa come out to be?
There’s also the Ewing interviews where he mentions how this series would tap into how people view Storm, but I’m not really seeing it played on page right now. Like the base plot is there, you could make something about Storm being the salvation of an entire galaxy and taking too much on her shoulders again, but… there’s no time for much to sink in. I really wish I had liked this more, I like Ewing’s take on Storm, his Arakkii creations and even some personal favorites (Cable and Wiz-Kid), but this is not really giving the best impression of this event’s format contraints.
This event looks to have what I refer to as the “Age of Apocalypse” problem; where you know that everything is gonna go back to normal afterwards, so the individual parts really have to be good to make it feel worthwhile. And while this was a decent start from Ewing, there’s still that nagging feeling about the whole venture. Doesn’t help that we just had the Judgment Day event only 2 or 3 months ago.
Cheers. I’m happy to get reviews back in exchange for fewer annotations.
It’s cool that so much of the X-intrigue of late hinges on keeping a lesbian couple together. But geez — do they ever get to just enjoy being a couple? One or the other of them is always dead or about to be dead. Maybe it’s time to retire somewhere far, far away from other mutants.
Also, I’m happy to read whatever content you want to produce. Thanks for maintaining this happy little corner of the internet.
This was sort of interesting, but weaker than X-Men Red tends to be. Al Ewing tends to create weird situations that are sustained by the traits, reputations and expectations of his characters.
Storm, unfortunately, isn’t the best choice for that treatment. She suffers from a version of the same flaw that has rendered Wolverine at once omnipresent and unworkable: plenty of clearly defined character beats that just don’t make any sense together.
For decades now she has been a very reactive character, whose whole personality periodically resets to better fit the current plot arcs, despite a strange insistence of many writers in treating her as some sort of reliable mainstay. As an aside, I guess that may make Al Ewing a great fit for this book after all; the Hulk, too, had personality stability plots amidst rather exotic situations and weird creatures.
The flash-forwards only compound that problem. I have little idea of who present day Storm is in any given day, and none whatsoever of who she will be in six months. It is a bit of surprise to see that her very frequent personality shifts have somehow made her land in ten years time in a roughly similar place to that of the last few scenes. She just isn’t nearly that stable in the main continuity.
I think the Angel/Madrox chimeras also included Havok. That’s his energy blasts we’re seeing come out of Madrox’s chest.
Also, that looks like a Sugar Man/Banshee Chimera and Ora Serrata/Cyclops chimera to me.
YLu> Based on how they’re attacking, I think they’re supposed to be a Sugar Man/Banshee chimera and Ora/Cyclops chimeras. Giant mouth for a giant sonic scream, giant eye for a giant optic blast.
…what do you gain from giving an Ora clone optic blasts? Isn’t that a massive DOWNGRADE from the “real” Ora’s power?
[Not that save-or-die powers aren’t narratively toxic, and usually end with the character either being nerfed into the ground or losing/changing powers, but “a load of clones that can unmake stuff with a glance” seems stronger than”LASER BEAM!”]
I can imagine the reasoning is something like that Sinister doesn’t want them gone (at this point at least), he wants to take them over mentally; erasing them does nothing, but taking them out lets them either be resurrected as him or taken out and being able to be turned.
Yah, I can definitely see Sinister wanting to actually leave some bodies to experiment on/DNA to harvest.
I also wonder if this is a situation where Sinister doesn’t want to craft and deploy WMDs that could be used against him.
If he was clever (and hey, it IS Al Ewing), they’d say it’s a chimera of Cyclops and Uno, the mutant eyeball from last year’s X-Cellent limited series.
Re: Why blend Ora Serrata with Cyclops
Also, I get the feeling a lot of Sinister’s creations are made for funsies and motivated by “because I can” more so than effectiveness.
I mean, out of all possible combinations, Maggott/Marrow can’t possibly be the most effective defense against intruders, can it?
Gillen’s comparisons of this crossover to Age of Apocalypse, inevitably, invited me to imagine how this crossover would be done in the 90s.
For starters, I imagined this issue would have spent at least half of the pagecount in the base exploring team downtime and relationships. But downtime issues are out of fashion nowadays, and readers are impatient for plot advancement when they know the reset button is coming.
Like any successful writer today, Ewing is really good at developing team dynamics without downtime – but even he can only do so much with a single issue before we jump 90 years ahead.
With Age of Apocalypse, the Alpha issue set up the rest of the minis- here’s the status quo, here’s the X-Men, Nightcrawler & Gambit go on your fetch quests, here’s the deal with Cyclops and Beast, etc. Sins of Sinister did a little bit of that, but spent most of its page count on Sinister’s machinations. As such, I’m not sure what Storm & the Brotherhood are trying to accomplish beyond “stop Sinister.” I liked both SoS issues released so far, but I think the time jumps will make for clunky storytelling. I want to see what the characters do next, not have to become acclimated to a new status quo next round.
The inevitable cosmic reset shouldn’t be as much of a problem as some are making it out to be. In story, Sinister has been using his Moira clones for a while now, so this is just a scaling up of that. Likewise Destiny’s machinations, as well as the other Essex suits. But from the reader’s perspective, story is story. We’re still being shown characters we’ve seen before, and even new characters were already seeded or otherwise we’re getting a flash forward sneak peak, and their later appearances will be a counterpoint to their existence in these alt future issues.
On the one hand, “a book about the X-Men eating breakfast everyday” is exactly what I’m interested in. On the other hand, I lived through the Bendis era, so I can understand the urge to compress instead of decompress — we’ve already had so, so many crossovers get bogged down in conversation and downtime.
In my ideal world, we would get dense main-crossover books, exciting tie-ins, and then a book specifically designed around exploring the quiet elements of the alt world. I would have absolutely LOVED a Sins of Sinister Frontlines to expand on Sinister JJ.
@Krzysiek Ceran: Except the scale is so large that we won’t see most of these characters again?
Storm? Not unless a plot contrivance happens.
I can’t speak for Ewing, but if I were writing something, and I had a choice between using a plot contrivance, or saying the character who has her name in the title died of old age between issues, I know which one I’d pick.
(I think the plot contrivance I’d use would be a simple “Has it ever been stated in-universe that Storm doesn’t have reduced aging?” I daresay Ewing will come up with something cleverer.)
Unless the idea is to explore Storm as a symbol, maybe even a legacy and issues 2 and 3 will present a future where she’s first a historic leader of resistance and a thousand years later, probably, a deified icon.
Well, given how Storm was once reduced to a child by Nanny and then grew up again, who’s to say that didn’t affect her ability to age normally?
Or else maybe she evolves into an actual cosmic storm or something.
(Keep in mind that Destiny’s branching timelines in Immortal X-Men #3 have us traveling through Judgment Day, into the Empire of the Red Diamond and presumably towards something called the Storm System…)
I like this “event” because we’ve already been shown exactly how it will be undone at the appropriate time… the real surprise would be if some other method was employed… and also to which moment, exactly, the reset is linked and what changes, if any, come out of this.
I predict that the end of Sins of Sinister will, naturally, return us to the post Judgment Day timeline, whereupon the branching timelines offer either Nimrod Extinction Event or A New Krakoa. And given we’re heading into Fall of X, that hints at A New Krakoa to me.
Of course, we could be blindsided simply because Destiny is so absolutely determined to carve out a future with Mystique, and none of the ones she glimpsed in that issue had that happening.
You gotta admit, Sinister and Destiny playing timeline chicken is a heck of a show.
@The Other Michael- I think the real question is will the timeline be reset to before or after the Quiet Council members are resurrected Sinisterized? Will the future be prevented by having the Quiet Council members prevented from being Sinisterized or by having them cured shortly after they’re Sinisterized? I’m wondering if, for example, Sinister Emma will do something evil in front of Angelica and that will trigger Angelica.
@Michael: We already know the answer to that – the oldest Moira in the engine is Moira VI.10, the save point just before Sinister made his last (and ultimately successful) attempt.
If the timeline were to be reset one last time to that moment, Sinister’s only alternative would be to go back to before Judgment Day, and he’s not willing to do that.
Sinister creates a new save point right at the start of Immortal X-Men #10 – after the Quiet Council members have been murdered but before they get resurrected. The plot can’t reset any earlier than that because the next save point back would erase “Judgment Day” (which isn’t going to happen). So it’s pretty obvious that Sins of Sinister ends by resetting to the start of Immortal #10 but with some change that either prevents Sinister from interfering with the resurrections, or persuades him not to try.
@Paul: Not quite – the save point you’re referring to is the first iteration of Moira VII. But he never kills the last Moira VI (the end of IXM #10) because that attempt is ultimately successful
*end of IXM #9, that is.
@Hugh Sheridan “Thanks for doing these Paul and for getting them up so quickly, really great stuff that enhances every issue.”
I second that!