{"id":10215,"date":"2024-07-11T22:36:51","date_gmt":"2024-07-11T21:36:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10215"},"modified":"2024-07-11T22:36:51","modified_gmt":"2024-07-11T21:36:51","slug":"x-men-heir-of-apocalypse-3-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10215","title":{"rendered":"X-Men: Heir of Apocalypse #3 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>X-MEN: HEIR OF APOCALYPSE #3<\/strong>
\nWriter: Steve Foxe<\/strong>
\nPenciller: Netho Diaz<\/strong>
\nInkers: Sean Parsons & Lorenzo Ruggiero<\/strong>
\nColour artist: Alex Sinclair<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Clayton Cowles<\/strong>
\nEditor: Annalise Bissa<\/strong><\/p>\n

APOCALYPSE<\/strong><\/p>\n

We get another recap of Apocalypse’s fight with the X-Men in X-Men<\/em> #35 – which the footnote insists on calling Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #700, just to make absolutely sure that there’s no danger whatsoever of readers being able to find the bloody thing on Marvel Unlimited or Amazon. Apocalypse attempts to explain what the hell was going on there and doesn’t really make matters much clearer. He starts by claiming that Krakoa was Professor X’s vision (which it wasn’t, and that was a large part of the point of Immortal X-Men<\/em>). He accepts that he was rejected by mutantkind, but conflates mutantkind entirely with the X-Men (and Xavier’s vision), and utterly ignores the fact that he was trying to claim control of a Krakoa which had developed without him for several years (which seemed to be the point of\u00a0X-Men<\/em> #35). Nor does it really explain why his selection of contestants is predominantly made up of the very people who he claims rejected him.<\/p>\n

Charitably, let’s assume that Apocalypse is simply reinterpreting his rejection in the way least humiliating to him. At any rate, he recognises that he is no longer welcome as a mutant leader on Earth and needs to find someone else for the role – essentially what he said in issue #1.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Apocalypse is unmoved by Archangel’s “I survived you” speech – in his eyes, that’s precisely the point, and the more mutants he can strengthen in this way, the better. He claims not to care much about human life one way or the other, but he’s much more concerned about preserving mutant life and, as 99% of readers will have guessed, he’s been teleporting all the failed combatants to safety in suspended animation when they died.<\/p>\n

Notably, Apocalypse’s son Genocide, who he lured here, is not<\/em> among the characters shown in suspended animation, so apparently Exodus really did just kill him last issue by squashing him into a ball.<\/p>\n

THE CONTESTANTS<\/strong><\/p>\n

Armageddon Girl, Rictor, M <\/strong>and Exodus<\/strong> all turn out to be alive and well in suspended animation.<\/p>\n

Mr Sinister<\/strong> is the only contestant (as far as we know) who actually asked to be in this tournament. He claims to have found out about it by listening in to Apocalypse’s other pitches via nanotech bugs, and cheerfully offers himself up as an heir. Since Mr Sinister gave himself a mutant gene during his life, Apocalypse doesn’t regard him as a true mutant and dismisses him as a “pretender”, but apparently Apocalypse is somehow persuaded by Sinister’s argument that, having become a biological mutant, he has a stake in mutants succeeding.<\/p>\n

For some reason, the remaining contestants allow Sinister to continue tagging along with him even though he’s quite openly trying to get fellow contestants killed. In fairness to Sinister, this is apparently what Apocalypse considers to be the game, but it doesn’t explain why everyone else is willing to keep him around. The only reason given for this is that it would be too traumatising for the human bystanders if they saw Sinister get killed right in front of them. But weren’t we told last issue that Exodus had “relocated everyone within a one-mile radius”? And if that’s the reason, why not just shoot him as soon as they’re underground?<\/p>\n

When Sinister does<\/em> attempt another betrayal, Emma Frost makes him jump over a ledge to his death. To be fair, he does seem to think at first that he can resist her, so either he had psi-shielding which he wrongly thought was up to the job, or he decides for some reason to play along.<\/p>\n

Emma Frost<\/strong> is uncharacteristically dispirited in this issue, presumably because she’s taking the apparent deaths seriously. A flashback shows Emma accepting Apocalypse’s invitation to participate in the contest, and spelling out that beneath her cynical persona she cares deeply about the fate of mutantkind. This is a fairly standard interpretation of the character, but quite why she’s spelling it out in dialogue to Apocalypse, of all people, who knows.<\/p>\n

Gorgon<\/strong> gets turned against the other contestants by Mr Sinister using a “control disc”; Mirage knocks him out with a psychic arrow before he can do any damage, but he gets killed by an explosion soon after.<\/p>\n

Wolverine<\/strong> (Laura) gets taken out in the same explosion, without contributing much to the plot. That leaves Cable, Mirage, Forge<\/strong> and Cypher<\/strong>, none of whom do much of interest in this issue either. Those are the four characters who haven’t yet had flashbacks explaining how they became contestants, which might be significant – or might just mean that the characters who “die” early had to have their flashbacks first.<\/p>\n

GUEST STAR<\/strong><\/p>\n

Archangel<\/strong> starts the issue by attacking Apocalypse, but seems to stop fighting when Apocalypse claims to have been humbled by his experiences in X-Men<\/em> #35. Frankly, his role here is just to listen politely to Apocalypse’s exposition.<\/p>\n

OTHER SPECIFICS<\/strong><\/p>\n

Page 6: “I survived your twins. Survived the death seed. Survived what you made me.”<\/strong> Unless I’m missing something, this is a bit confused. The Death Seed was a plot point from Rick Remender’s Uncanny X-Force<\/em> run in 2011. According to that story, Apocalypse had implanted the Death Seed into Warren in order to turn him into Archangel, and it was later triggered to turn Archangel into Apocalypse’s heir; that storyline ends with Archangel apparently dying and being reborn as an amnesiac. The “twins” are probably meant to be the Apocalypse Twins from Remender’s 2013-14 Uncanny Avengers<\/em> arc, but (1) Archangel wasn’t in that arc and never fought the Twins, and (2) despite their name, the Twins were actually the children of Archangel himself. (They died at the end of the storyline.)<\/p>\n

Page 9: “The translator’s good for something beyond gossiping to landmasses.”<\/strong> Sinister is referring to Cypher’s role as Krakoa’s inerpreter.<\/p>\n

Page 9: “I wager you appreciated by comprehensive gentics work when it came time to fertilise those golden eggs your lot abused so readily.”<\/strong> Sinister is reminding Forge of the fact that his genetics library was used as the basis for resurrection on Krakoa. He has a point about the system being “abused”; the mutants did become extremely cavalier about getting themselves killed while on Krakoa, something that was only heavily flagged as an issue in Way of X<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Page 18: “It would be so easy to be someone else… I tried it under absolutely horrendous conditions and pulled off the charade beautifully. Even as a brunette.”<\/strong> Emma is referring to her stunt using the alias “Hazel Kendal” during the Fall of X arc, principally covered in Invincible Iron Man<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Page 23: <\/strong>The giant figures attacking the remaining contenders are versions of the (Krakoan-era) Horsemen of Apocalypse – possibly the same statues that we saw at the beginning of issue #1, although the colouring is different.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. X-MEN: HEIR OF APOCALYPSE #3 Writer: Steve Foxe Penciller: Netho Diaz Inkers: Sean Parsons & Lorenzo Ruggiero Colour artist: Alex Sinclair Letterer: Clayton Cowles Editor: Annalise Bissa APOCALYPSE We get another recap of Apocalypse’s fight with the X-Men in X-Men #35 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10215"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10218,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10215\/revisions\/10218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}