Immortal X-Men #18 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
IMMORTAL X-MEN #18
“Happily Ever After”
Writer: Kieron Gillen
Artist: Juan José Ryp
Colour artist: David Curiel
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. A giant Mother Righteous toying with Professor X, Jean Grey, Emma Frost and (oddly, because he’s not even a cast regular) Cyclops.
PAGE 2. Mother Righteous lets Jean lead her through the White Hot Room.
Mother Righteous is our narrator for the issue, breaking the pattern of each narrator being a member of the Quiet Council. That said, she has (effectively) been among the leading figures in the makeshift version of Krakoa within the White Hot Room, which probably qualifies her.
Mother Righteous started following the addled Jean Grey into the desert at the end of the previous issue. As she explains later on, she assumes (correctly) that Jean will be drawn to the location where she can try to ascend to Dominion status.
Mother Righteous has cast herself in previous issues as working within the logic of stories. An obvious example, and possibly relevant to this issue, is when Sebastian Shaw complains to her about not getting the control of Krakoa that he expected, in issue #14: “You made a deal with a magician. A speller. A storyteller. You make a deal in a story, and it’s never quite what you wanted.” Here, she sees the appeal of transcending time and space as being to leave the ongoing effort of participating in the story and enjoying a permanent happy ending. Of course, there’s a further degree of irony here since she really is part of a story, and she can’t really escape it, because the Dominion plot is merely another part of the story.
PAGE 3. Recap and credits.
PAGES 4-5. Destiny’s liffe is saved.
This is the aftermath of Mother Righteous turning Krakoa against the refugee mutants in the previous issue. She tried to kill Destiny last issue to prevent her from passing on any warnings about her (Mother Righteous’s) plans. Just before she did so, Destiny realised that because she was already outside space and time, she could speak freely about the Dominion, and tried to warn Mother Righteous not to proceed with her plan – we’ll find out later why that would have been in her interests. Mother Righteous was then disturbed before she was able to conceal the body, and Elixir heals her.
In narration, Mother Righteous explains how her “thank you” magic works – she can use it as a hook to pull people into one of the lamps that hovers around her, but more commonly she just uses it as a hook that she can cash in once and bring about a response.
“I burned up Mystique’s promise to lash out at her missus.” In issue #12, Mother Righteous forces Mystique to kill Destiny. Destiny is promptly resurrected, but loses her vote on the Quiet Council as a result.
“Burned up Rasputin’s to take on Hope.” Also in issue #12, where Mother Righteous gets Rasputin to hold Hope at bay when she tries to get back into the Quiet Council chamber.
“Burned up what was left of all my Krakoan favours to make Krakoa angry to give me a chance to get away after stabbing Destiny myself.” Last issue.
PAGE 6. Jean leads Mother Righteous to her destination.
“I used about half of the favours to play with the mutants’ connection to the gates when they were forced to walk through them by Orchis.” In X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023. This confirms what was already fairly obvious: Mother Righteous is responsible for the mutants ending up in the White Hot Room, rather than on Arakko, as Orchis had planned.
“The place mutants are all kind of connected to.” I’m not sure the White Hot Room has traditionally been connected to mutants in general, as opposed to specifically the Phoenix. We’ve seen non-mutant characters visit the White Hot Room before – off the top of my head, Echo was connected to it while she was the Phoenix, and a whole bunch of characters visited it in the 2022 Defenders: Beyond miniseries.
Still, it’s overwhelmingly connected with the X-books, and maybe that’s enough of a link to serve as a limitation for a character like Mother Righteous.
“I take a tiny fraction of their mutant gift and make myself a mutant-me homunculus…” In issue #15, Hope verified that Mother Righteous (or more accurately, her projection into the White Hot Room) was a mutant, at least as far as she could tell: “She is a mutant. Her gift is really diffuse. Like Legion’s gift but microscopic. Many gifts, none of them solid.”
PAGES 7-8. Professor X and Mr Sinister arrive on Muir Island.
The red diamond in page 7 panel 1 is the transport diamond that Sinister conjured up in the previous issue.
Muir Island was traditionally Moira MacTaggert’s base of operations (and the place where she grew up), so Sinister is claiming that her link with that location in all timelines made it an especially suitable location for his “Moira Engine” – the collection of Moira clones that he could use to reboot the timeline every time it went in a direction he didn’t like.
Professor X openly questions whether the one-dimensional murder robot appearing in other titles is really a continuation of the same character. You and me too, Chuck.
“Jeffries gas.” Apparently a gas based on the mutant powers of Madison Jeffries.
“I have my own hidden backups, which should include the data from the Sinister timeline.” We were told in Sins of Sinister: Dominion that Sinister had been denied all of the knowledge of what happened in the “Sins of Sinister” timeline, but Sinister is claiming here that he believes there to be a whole set of back-up data that wasn’t erased – he simply never had time to access it before being thrown in the Pit.
PAGES 9-10. Mother Righteous and Jean Grey arrive at a tower.
“Filled a universe with himself and set it on fire…” The “Sins of Sinister” crossover, again.
“The ol’ Arthur C Clarke thing.” Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Originally from a letter he wrote to Science magazine in 1968.
The point here is that the four Sinister clones were created to explore different routes to Dominion. Mother Righteous is supposed to be pursuing magic, while mutants were meant to be Mr Sinister’s angle. But, as Mother Righteous points out, the actual impact of magic in the Marvel Universe, at least at her power level, boils down to a bit of manipulation around the edges. Her rationalisation for harnessing the power of mutants herself is that their powers are so inexplicable as to amount to magic in practice, which (given the story-based nature of her magic) is good enough to count as far as she’s concerned.
PAGES 11-12. Professor X and Mr Sinister discuss the data from the other timelines.
Professor X is apparently reading the minds of people around the world in order to fill the blanks in his engineering knowledge.
Sinister’s argument is basically that the Dominion’s point of vulnerability is the event at which it leaves space and time and achieves transcendence; if that event could be erased from history then it’s at least possible that the Dominion wouldn’t survive (though Sinister allows for the possibility that, once it’s transcended, it’s outside causality altogether).
The concept of it not having “come into full power yet” is a bit confusing in the context of something which, by definition, is outside time. But I think the point here is that the Dominion’s power to affect events in the real world is much more limited prior to the point of its own creation, because of the risk of cancelling itself out. Once the point of the Dominion’s transcendence has passed, it will be able to use its full power much more freely. Sinister assumes that if the Dominion could intervene more freely, then it would do so.
Jonathan Hickman’s original conception of the Dominions seemed to envisage that there were a whole bunch of them out there and that they probably just didn’t care that much about the little people. But then, his concept was also an entire hive-mind; we’re talking here about a one-person Sinister Dominion.
Professor X reveals that Sinister’s records already contain information about timelines where the two other Sinisters – Dr Stasis and Orbis Stellaris – tried and failed to become Dominions. Sinister has never mentioned this before, even as something which eliminates them from consideration, and we’ll find out shortly why that is.
“Legion was my first option…” Mother Righteous was originally introduced in Legion of X.
“I rule me.” Legion’s mantra, mainly from X-Men Legacy.
PAGE 13. Mother Righteous marches Jean Grey into blank space.
Legion rejected Mother Righteous and vanished in X-Men: Before the Fall – Sons of X #1. As she says, Legion does still owe her a favour, and since he isn’t among the mutants in the White Hot Room, she hasn’t cashed it in yet.
“From Stasis, I learned Orchis was going to kill Jean.” Presumably during one of the conversations in X-Men: Before the Fall – Sinister Four #1, or something similar. Killing Jean was (understandably) a priority for Orchis in X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023.
“In the Empire of the Red Diamond future…” Again, “Sins of Sinister”. The suggestion is that Mother Righteous gained the knowledge to carry out this plan from the information that was sent back in time from the “Sins of Sinister” timeline.
PAGES 14-15. Professor X tells Mr Sinister about the data from the previous timelines.
It turns out that two of Sinister’s aborted timelines saw Dr Stasis and Orbis Stellaris attempt to achieve Dominion status, and fail. Not only does Sinister not remember any of that, he can’t even see it on the screen. Presumably, this is how all four clones were designed, for the reasons that we’ll come to at the end of the issue.
Sinister suggests that Mother Righteous is able to trick people into accepting her in large part by taking advantage of story logic, which works for her due to magic. Of course, in a sense, it works for everyone in the Marvel Universe.
PAGE 16. Data page. A note by Mother Righteous about the mechanics of her power. Part of the angle here seems to be that Righteous (at least for her own consumption) treats the mystery of magic as a rather mundane feature to be taken for granted. The fact that it’s vague, hazy and mysterious is, as far as she’s concerned, simply a stock feature of magic that marks it as the sort of thing that she can take advantage of.
“Pocky’s mutant magic.” Apocalypse’s theory of mutant magic, from Excalibur. Righteous is very sceptical about this idea that the mutant gene is somehow literally connected to magic, but allows for the fact that the basic concept would be consistent with the notion of blood magic. For her purposes, however, all that matters is that a lot of mutants believe it to be true, in part because of the way Krakoan society has promoted “mutant essentialism”. This is the same term that Professor X used to refer to Krakoa’s more identity-driven tendencies in issue #13, when talking to Cypher, and he made clear that that he “despise[d] the concept”. In at least one sense, he was right: Krakoa’s national mythology amounts to a story that Mother Righteous was able to exploit.
PAGES 16-22. Mother Righteous tries to ascend, and fails.
Mother Righteous has forgotten the basic message she gave to Shaw in issue #14: that she operates by story logic, and therefore there must be a twist. She gets repelled by the Dominion in the same way that Mr Sinister did in “Sins of Sinister”. Destiny then steps in to explain why this didn’t work.
PAGE 23. The fifth Sinister AI switches on.
The narrator compares the four Sinister to clones to mere information-gathering AIs; all they were supposed to do was gather the necessary information and report back to the real Sinister AI, which was then going to use their acquired knowledge to become a Dominion. And, apparently, since it had already set up the four Sinisters in that way, it’s in a position to block their respective ascensions without interfering with its own back story.
The four broken chambers, in which the Sinister clones were created, were first seen in issue #8. The basic layout of the room is similar in that issue, but the ceiling design is rather cleaner, and doesn’t have the crown-logo light seen here.
PAGE 24. Data page: the final AI declares itself to be the ghost of the original Nathaniel Essex, and takes the name Enigma. The line “You were told you had new gods” refers to Magneto’s speech to the human ambassadors in House of X #1 which, in this reading, becomes another example of Krakoan-era mutant hubris.
PAGE 25. Trailers. The Krakoan reads RISE OF THE POWERS OF X. This is the final issue of Immortal X-Men, but the story continues into that book.
I thought she was eating them on the cover.
Is that an homage cover? It seems familiar.
Worth noting we’ve seen the Crown at the end of Defenders Beyond, when Loki cautions us to “Look for the fifth business.”
Ah. I figured that the Essex-Dominion would end up being the original Nathaniel Essex. He created the clones to become masters in each of those four areas, which would somehow feed the knowledge back to the original, leading to the creation of a Dominion on the level of sufficiently advanced AI. I did not foresee that there were not two Dominions, there was only one, as the “machine god” is the same as the Essex Dominion.
“Is that an homage cover? It seems familiar.”
Perhaps you’re thinking of Avengers West Coast #56? Though that seems just dissimilar enough to strike me as a case of convergent ideas rather than homage.
The vision of the crown in Defenders Beyond #5 is described as “a single glimpse of the ENIGMA to come.”
And the sheet music we see behind Sinister in the first panel of Immortal X-Men #1 is “Nimrod,” from Edward Elgar’s “Enigma Variations”!
“Not only does Sinister not remember any of that, he can’t even see it on the screen. Presumably, this is how all four clones were designed, for the reasons that we’ll come to at the end of the issue.”
I think the answer was that the Dominion was blocking Sinister’s perceptions- it needed to insure that its own existence. Similarly, we saw that in Immortal X-Men 1, Sinister was unable to perceive through his Moiras that Selene would turn against the Council after they refused her membership. The Dominion needed that to happen to ensure its own existence- Selene’s acting the Council led to Selene’s death, which led to Stasis going to Mother Righteous to resurrect her. during which he mentioned the plan to kill Jean, which led to the events of this issue.
The reason why Mother Righteous needed the Krakoans in the White Hot Room was because the presence of so many living minds rendered Jean helpless.
One thing that I’m wondering about- is the real Mother Righteous still in her sanctuary or did Enigma destroy her homonculus and teleport the real Mother Righteous to the White Hot Room? Because if the real Mother Righteous is still in her sanctuary, she can communicate what happened to the heroes on Earth.
Note that Destiny claims that every time she tried to talk about a Dominion, it went poorly. And at the end, Enigma says I’m a ghost. In issue 1, we saw Destiny try to tell Sinister something in 1919 and he collapsed after saying “You’re a ghost”. Clearly what happened was that Destiny tried to tell Sinister the truth about Essex’s plan and the Dominion attacked Sinister.
Also, note that before his “death” in Immortal X-Men 8, Essex said “You’re a ghost”.
As Richard said, we saw the Crown in Defenders Beyond, and it was described as the symbol of a Dominion called Enigma, an enemy of Eternity.
Also, in Immortal X-Men 8, when Mystique asked how Essex survived his death in 1891, Destiny responds “Somewhat ENIGMATTCALLY”.
@Mark Coale: I thought it was an homage to UNCANNY X-MEN 243 (which would be appropriate, since that was a Sinister cover), but no, that’s wrong, too.
It’s definitely an homage cover, though. The whole layout is extremely familiar.
@Richard
‘Worth noting we’ve seen the Crown at the end of Defenders Beyond, when Loki cautions us to “Look for the fifth business.”’
And where it was even referred to as the Enigma. In retrospect, it’s a bit weird that Defenders Beyond culminates in the big reveal of villains for, as it turns out, an entirely unrelated series.
“Can’t a girl just want to snack on a tasty Summers?”
So we know why the Enigma Dominion from Defenders Beyond is such a threat now. It literally eats stories and repurposes them for itserlf. Since Gillen and Ewing like narrative stuff so much, this makes it an extreme threat to the MU, beyond that of a normal Dominion.
Wonderful art again. Aside from the page imagery towards the end, Xavier’s face kept impressing me in its detail and emotion.
I wouldn’t say that it makes it more of a threat than Hickman’s Dominion. Ewing and Gillen just enjoy meta-level narratives. The end point is the same either way.
Hickman’s Dominion would continue to assimilate information and eliminate anything other than intelligence until there was nothing except the Dominion in the universe. It’s the end state of evolution, where reality creates God.
Ewing and Gillen are just acknowledging that the Marvel Universe is a fictional construct, but it’s really the same.
@Chris V- more than that, remember in Children of the Vault 3, Serafina said that Orchis wasn’t in control, because the Dominion “wears them like a glove… a mind beyond comprehension forces their every move”. We had a discussion about whether this was supposed to be the Sinister Dominion or a machine Dominion. As it turns out they were one and the same. So Karima and Nimrod serve Enigma. Enigma probably was responsible for Kamala being sent back in time in the first place. It needed Orchis to ensure that the events that led to its creation took place. This was also foreshadowed in Immortal X-Men 3 where one of Destiny’s visions was labelled “the Dominion of Orchis”.
Note that Moira said in issue 24 that she didn’t like Cable because he’s of Essex. My guess is that she turns against Orchis once she realizes the Dominion they serve is Essex.
In fact, this is more evidence that the narrator of those “Fall of the House of X” data pages is Moira. The narrator seems to know more about the workings of Orchis than the workings of the Quiet Council after Moira left Krakoa and joined Orchis and makes a point to commend Jean Grey for her kindness. (Because she feels guilty about killing Jean.) “The Fall of the House of X” is probably written by a repentant Moira trying to explain her actions to the world (and especially Kevin and Rahne,)
There was a clue before this that Essex’s motives for creating the Sinister clones wasn’t noble-in the 2023 Hellfire Gala, the narrator tells us that Essex created the clones to dominate all life.
@yIU
IIRC Ewing had a third Defenders mini planned that didn’t get the green light. I assume it would have included the Enigma in some fashion.
I think the cover might be a homage to Transformers issue #75?
https://tfwiki.net/mediawiki/images2/2/20/MarvelUS-75.jpg
That should be “Karima being sent back in time”.
One other thing- in X-Men Red 10, the aliens that Stellaris used to fix Vulcan wonder if their “sublime master” would want them to use Manifold’s abilities to destroy everything around. And Stellaris tells them not to. And the aliens respond “Of course we meant you, great Stellaris”. So are we to assume that the aliens serve Enigma, were sent to keep an eye on Stellaris and considered him to be only a shadow of their master?
ChrisV: “I wouldn’t say that it makes it more of a threat than Hickman’s Dominion.”
Mostly I just mean that it’s positioned as one. Like you said later, Hickman’s Dominions have the potential end state of consuming all intelligence they find interesting, so they’re theoretically a threat. Being consumed by a Dominion is a bad end for humanity, but I don’t recall the Dominions being treated as anything inherently bad to the cosmos itself.
On the other hand, Defenders Beyond was treating the Enigma Dominion as a future threat to Eternity itself. There’s nothing yet saying that it’s more powerful than other Dominions, just that something about it seems more of an existential threat.
The Dominion we saw in Powers of X had some threshold of intellect it waited on before consuming a society. Making a guess since they’re going for consumptive AI thematics, Enigma won’t know when to quit and will want to consume everything. That would put it up as a threat to Eternity — what happens when a Dominion tries to effectively become the Ninth Cosmos by consuming and regurgitating the Eighth?
Also, I’m curious about the name Enigma when there’s already the Enigma Force out there. I can’t see how the two might align, but it’s also too much of a coincidence.
I sent Kieran a message on blue sky about the cover, so maybe we will get an answer. (And if we don’t, maybe Al can ask him.)
@Jon R – Hickman’s original definition of Dominions stated that they were afraid of Galactus, or at least that Galactus was a natural predator to them alongside the Phoenix. Whereas in the Defenders mini, the Beyonders claim that the Enigma Dominion is so powerful that their destruction of the entire multiverse in Time Runs Out/Secret Wars was actually a failed attempt to stop Enigma from coming into being. Seems like Enigma is much more powerful than the Hickman-era Dominions, since anything that frightens the Beyonders should have little to fear from Galactus.
@Citizen Bane- I think the idea is that Enigma is more powerful than a “normal” dominion because (a) it’s the combination of four attempts to create a Dominion and (b) it’s power derives from both the Phoenix Force and the M’kraan Crystal.
Did we see the stories with Orbis Stelaris and Dr. Stasis’ attempts at becoming the Dominion?
@Luis Dantas- they didn’t happen in the mainstream reality. They happened in realities that were erased by the Moiras, which is why we never saw them. The point is that despite the realities being erased by the Moiras, the energies were still channelled back to Enigma.
I also can’t quite pinpoint the cover reference. It seems like it would be a direct homage. There are shades of (Uncanny) X-Men 117 (Psi-War! with the Shadow King’s gaping mouth), (Uncanny) X-Men 135 (with Dark Phoenix grabbing the logo) [and for that matter X-Men 56 with the Living Monolith, which 135 seems to be referencing), and perhaps even New Mutants 39 (with the White Queen dangling the Hellions).
Oh and is it just me or does Ryp have a bit of a foot fetish?
CitizenBane: I don’t think it’s that this specific Dominion is more powerful than others in the Beyonders’ eyes. They talk a few times about how they’re linear in nature and can’t risk getting to direct blows with a non-linear threat. That should apply to any Dominion. Dominions just have a type-advantage against Beyonders. 🙂
I think the problem is that this particular Dominion is specially aggressive and there are reasons why the things that have a type advantage against *it* aren’t going to come to the table. Phoenix we have a reason for — Jean’s been battered around and the Phoenix might not be in a great position to act as normal. If Enigma has something planned to distract Galactus, then all its natural enemies are off the board. And Stellaris probably had a few things around that Enigma could purpose to keeping Galactus distracted.
That’s not saying it *isn’t* more powerful than a normal Dominion, just that it doesn’t necessarily have to be.
Obviously, this Enigma is the Amalgam character, a combination of the Kingpin and the Riddler. The X-books are clearly leading into the next Mavel/DC crossover event.
@Jon R – but being non-linear alone doesn’t explain it. Even if you could go back in time to a Beyonder’s origins, that won’t do you much good, because you still have to fight a Beyonder. They’re not like baby Hitler confined to a cradle; they were ready to bust universes from the get-go. Doom had the same idea in Time Runs Out; he realized the Beyonders were linear since they hadn’t gone back in time to stop him, but even though he has time travel tech he didn’t go back in time to stop the Beyonders. Either he knew he couldn’t pull it off, or it didn’t occur to him, and the former is far more likely given that something so obvious should have occurred to Doom.
So, a character has a master plan based on weaponizing the Power of Story — in a Kieron Gillen comic. Doomed doomed doomity-doom doomed.
Too bad she never thought to get a thank-you from someone like Deadpool, who might have been able to warn her.
I hate dominions, they’re near-impossible to do right in a serial shared universe, they’re plain dumb when done wrong, and we’re a couple of years away from some bad guy beating up a dominion to show how big a threat he is.
Warning: lots of general rambling because I just like the topic. Nothing in this is saying what I think Will Happen, just what strikes my mind.
@CitizenBane: Oh sure, you have to have something to back up your non-linearness to fight the Beyonders. If I get a time machine, the most I can do against the Beyonders is introduce the Secret Wars 2-era singular Beyonder to soap operas and hopefully distract him for a decade or three.
I just don’t think there’s anything yet in the text that necessarily says Enigma is going to be more powerful than normal Dominions. Maybe it is going to be! Maybe it’s just its particular drive that makes it more aggressive. The last data page made it sound like it wants to eat everything.
Basically what’s driving my wondering is that Gillen and Ewing seem to be working together on this at least some. Ewing’s cosmic stuff is often not about who has a higher power level, but how it’s applied. In the same story, Loki and Blue Marvel were both able to mess with the Beyonders. They couldn’t win, but they weren’t helpless. Knowledge of the rules and limitations can let you swing for the fence.
So I feel like by that measure, Galactus and the Phoenix Force aren’t a Dominion’s predators because of pure power, but because their purposes can directly go against a Dominion. A Dominion is pure concentrated knowledge and intellect. Galactus is the ender of worlds and species with an endless hunger. Phoenix is the thing that wipes away the old or diseased and brings a fresh page. They’re both the thing that you’d narratively expect to come reap a bad Dominion that’s a threat to everything.
The Beyonders are more about engineered creation and setup. They’re perfectly capable of destroying things, but general Destruction isn’t part of their metaphysical portfolio. Sure, as far as power levels go they’re definitely normally above Galactus and possibly above a random Phoenix host. But on a metaphysical level they don’t have any specific weapons against a formed Dominion, as far as we know.
What could a Dominion do to a Beyonder in return? Like you said, the Beyonders are born extremely powerful. But just before the Beyonders talked about non-linear threats, we got a reminder of what the original Secret Wars Beyonder went through and how it messed him up. So what could a non-linear being of amassed knowledge and intellect do to a Beyonder? What would happen if they arranged for the pinhole that corrupted the SW Beyonder’s upbringing to open to every Beyonder in their cribs. Mass chaos as they all go off exploring the concept of desire and the other cosmic beings are overwhelmed.
That’s something that could have occurred to Doom and might have been in his capabilities. But Doom wouldn’t go through with it because a universe of wild Beyonders remaking reality as they see fit is a very bad place to be. If you exist outside of time and space it’s not *your* lawn that they’re partying all over, though.
I also thought that the tower Jean led Mother Righteous too might have been a bit of an homage to the tower the Phoenix force encountered in Classic X-Men #43 and helped construct.
It is slightly surreal how ingrained video game logic is in the culture now: we don’t even need to explain how the spades and clubs and diamond symbols are lit up in the end when the ascensions happened in erased timelines.
It’s just the persistent progress mechanic from so many roguelite games.
I liked Immortal X-men, but I thought this issue was a miss. It committed the cardinal sin of having Mother Righteous’s plan be foiled by Enigma, not any of the mutants we’ve been following. It also told us that Stellaris and Stasis failed rather than showed us (though rushing through Mother Righteous so soon after Sins of Sinister was a mistake). This was a bad issue to end the series on.
I just don’t care about the Dominion stuff, they’re the 2020s equivalents of the Externals to me.
* The cover also reminds me a bit of the cover to JLA (1997 series) #6
* It’s probably been mentioned before, but “Enigma” is also a synonym of “mystery,” and “mystery” word Ewing uses quite a bit in his other Marvel works, usually in connection with transcendent cosmic entities.
Nothing to add other than I am really enjoying the thought and long term plotting that Spurrier and Ewing bring to these books. It’s clever in a way I think we’re really going to miss next year, and follows up on Hickman’s Big Ideas. Yes it’s getting a bit high concept, characters are a little in see to it, and maybe not usual x-fare but I’m enjoying it.
Enjoyed Mother Righteous’ inevitable comeuppance. And the revelation all the Sinisters are in effect AI training data.
How does one fight a Dominion? I agree with @Si, I’m sure it’ll be resolved by Captain America punching it in the mouth or the next big bad doing similar
I think that the connection Mother Righteous does between mutants and the White Hot Room is the Phoenix Force itself. If we goes back to Messiah War, whit the birth of Hope comes a flashing of energy that was similar and confused with the Phoenix Force, even more, in AvX the main plot was that Hope was the intendet target. Now, if we see what Hope’s mutant power is, she can control mutant energies: restore, empower, mimic, you name it. So, maybe the X-gen has always being connected with the Phoenix Force, and that’s the reason algo Jean is the perfect host… as much as Hope is. I think the X-Gen is a frament of the Phoenix Force that is shattered or manifested among humanity… and that’s the reason and connection that Mother Righteous stablished between te White Hot Room and Mutankind
If it hasn’t always been, it is now – Hope (and Scarlet Witch) end AvX by breaking up the Phoenix Force and using it to kickstart new mutants appearing all over the world.
So while it doesn’t apply to mutants who emerged before AvX, all other mutants are literally connected to the Phoenix Force.
“* The cover also reminds me a bit of the cover to JLA (1997 series) #6”
I think this is the one I was thinking of it being.
@Omar- yeah. but as Douglas pointed out, Nimrod is part of Elgar’s Enigma Variations. And Enigma appears to be the deity Nimrod serves. I think that was a big part of the thinking behind the name, especially since that was the tune Sinister was humming in Immortal X-Men 1.
@Jenny
That’s the cover I was thinking of, so I’m going to +1 your suggestion. It may add some credence that Gillen was a fan of the old TF comics I believe, though I don’t know how much influence the writer has on covers.
Queen’s “News of the World” album cover, it self inspired by an Astounding Science Fiction cover, seems like an inspiration. https://bohemianrhapsody.fandom.com/wiki/Frank_the_Robot
[…] X-MEN #18. (Annotations here.) This is the final issue – or, if you prefer, the book morphs into Rise of the Powers of […]
I’ll come in late with KNights of Pendragon #1 (https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Knights_of_Pendragon_Vol_1_1)
It’s not close enough that I think it’s the source of any potential homage, but I’ll chuck it in anyway.
Update: I reposted my question to Kieron on Bluesky and said we were discussing it here, where I think he has posted in the past.
So, if he sees it, maybe we will get an answer.
@Jenny – Transformers 75 was my first thought too: the big bad, consuming our heroes as part of their end goal. Plus KG is a old school TF fan.