{"id":10485,"date":"2024-10-24T21:30:43","date_gmt":"2024-10-24T20:30:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10485"},"modified":"2024-10-24T21:30:43","modified_gmt":"2024-10-24T20:30:43","slug":"x-men-6-annotations-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10485","title":{"rendered":"X-Men #6 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’re going to be running off the normal schedule for the next couple of weeks, so expect things to be running a few days late. As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>X-MEN vol 7 #6<\/strong>
\n“Bark”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Jed MacKay<\/strong>
\nPenciller: Netho Diaz<\/strong>
\nInker: Sean Parsons<\/strong>
\nColourists: Marte Gracia & Fer Sifuentes-Sujo<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Clayton Cowles<\/strong>
\nEditor: Tom Brevoort<\/strong><\/p>\n

THE X-MEN:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cyclops<\/strong> is team leader, chairing the X-Men’s meeting. He’s a little more reluctant than Magneto to acknowledge Ben and Jennifer as proper mutants, but does accept them.<\/p>\n

Temper <\/strong>spots that one of the protestors outside the Factory – and they’re a small group – has a child who makes the “Midnight Bark” (or “Midnight M”) hand signal at her. Rather than tell Cyclops, she decides to take maters into her own hands and asks Magik to help, presumably seeing her as someone else who likely to agree. Note that she doesn’t go to Kid Omega, her ex, who had already made clear to her that he wasn’t really interested in messing with the protestors. She evidently isn’t put off by the warnings that she might start some sort of incident by taking matters into her own hands.<\/p>\n

Magik<\/strong>‘s long distance chess game from issue #4 gets another mention – her opponent in that story apeared to be Colossus. The game is apparently something she’s keeping private, but she doesn’t seem\u00a0that<\/em> upset that Temper knows about it. She seems mainly amused by Temper’s response to the girl – she cautions that it could be a PR trap but seems quite happy to leave it up to Temper to decide what to do about it. The risk of starting an outright fight with O*N*E doesn’t really seem to bother her either.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Kid Omega<\/strong> no longer feels motivated to use his powers to screw with the protestors for the sake of it (which is the sort of thing Gerry Duggan-era Emma Frost would do casually). He seems to be growing out of it.<\/p>\n

Psylocke<\/strong> and Juggernaut<\/strong> are there for the team meeting.<\/p>\n

SUPPORTING CAST:<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Beast <\/strong>is trying his best to serve his role as team scientist – and seems to be doing perfectly well – but gently reminds everyone that his memories date from several years in the past, so he’s actually a bit behind the cutting edge. He’s finding that another source of frustration.<\/p>\n

Magneto <\/strong>is quite happy to accept that anyone who has an X-gene is a mutant, no matter how they got it, and is quite insistent that the X-Men take the same line. There is<\/em> a precedent for this in Krakoa, where Mr Sinister was accepted as a mutant on the basis that he had added a mutant gene to his own body. Magneto also seems to have in mind that 3K’s technique could be used to cure his own power loss, and clearly that might inform his view that Ben and Jennifer are true mutants. (We still don’t know exactly what happened to him.)<\/p>\n

Xorn<\/strong> and Glob Herman<\/strong> are both there for the team meeting. Glob seems to be responsible for catering, and is very happy with his work.<\/p>\n

Benjamin Liu<\/strong> is awake and apparently stable after last issue’s psychic rescue. He decides to stay at the Factory for now, if only because he ruined his life when he was mentally unstable (prior to issue #2) and has nowhere else to go.<\/p>\n

Jennifer Starkey<\/strong>, from issue #4, also decides to stay at the Factory, if only because she fears for her safety if she goes home.<\/p>\n

Piper Cobb<\/strong> is the mutant girl who attracts Temper’s attention, and it’s her first appearance. She claims that she attracted a Wild Sentinel to the town, which is apparently the disaster that led to the giant disabled Sentinel looming over the town – we’ve heard about this since issue #1 but still don’t know the details. Piper describes this event as the “Iron Night”.<\/p>\n

VILLAINS:<\/strong><\/p>\n

3K<\/strong> don’t appear in this issue, but are discussed at length. The fact that Cassandra Nova was last seen stuck in the distant past in Marauders <\/em>has not been forgotten – Psylocke specifically flags it as a mystery. Our attention is also drawn to the fact that the six Fourth School mutants were abducted by 3K in issue #1 (which the X-Men don’t know for sure, but correctly guess), while Ben and Jennifer were released into the wider world for some reason. Beast suggests that they might be viewed as failed experiments, or 3K might be monitoring them in some way.<\/p>\n

Rose Ellen Cobb<\/strong> is Piper’s mother; she’s a grassroots anti-mutant protestor who genuinely believes the conspiracy theory about a mutant contagion, but she doesn’t seem to be anything worse than that. For my purposes, she qualifies as a villain by showing up outside the X-Men’s house to wave a placard about, but she seems to be basically just gullible and well-intentioned. She does misquote Cyclops, but she seems genuinely to believe what she’s saying (see below).<\/p>\n

Fabian Cortez<\/strong> gets a passing mention, when the Beast suggests that his power-manipulation abilities might help Magneto. As Beast says, the two “have history”, but it’s not particularly positive – Cortez basically exploited Magneto’s name and reputation to build a power base as leader of the Acolytes. Still, they did work together on Krakoa.<\/p>\n

The Truthseekers<\/strong> are mentioned as the source of the videos that Rose watches. The video we saw in issue #3 was indeed captioned as a “Truthseeker expose”. We’ve also seen the Truthseekers as a (rather more suspect) grass roots anti-mutant activist group in NYX<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Wild Sentinel<\/strong> is how Piper describes the giant Sentinel still looming over the town. The Wild Sentinels were the self-building version of the Sentinels who first debuted in New X-Men<\/em> #114, though they tended to have weird and haphazard shapes, while this one seems conventionally humanoid.<\/p>\n

REFERENCES:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Page 5 panel 2: “Sure, I could get in their heads. Dig up the dirty, petty thoughts about each other that everyone has, put those thoughts in their mouths…”<\/strong> Kid Omega may be referring to his disruption of the UN General Assembly in X-Men: Schism<\/em> #1, right at the end of his career as a villain.<\/p>\n

Page 6 panel 2: “We have encountered adult-onset mutants on three occasions. The Orchis Fourth School agents in Santo Marco. Benjamin Liu in San Francisco. And Jennifer Starkey in Detroit.”<\/strong> Issues #1, #2 and #4 respectively.<\/p>\n

Page 6 panel 3: “We also have a sample … collected in Santo Marco by Magik.”<\/strong> She cut off one of the Fourth School mutants’ hands on page 27 of issue #1.<\/p>\n

Page 7 panel 1: “We now know that there is no ‘mutant contagion’.”<\/strong> The rumour started after issue #2.<\/p>\n

Page 10 panel 2: “Welcome to the species, you two. I hope you… You know what? Forget it.”<\/strong> Magik is about to deliver the “Welcome to the X-Men, I hope you survive the experience” line.<\/p>\n

Page 10 panel 4: “I remember when you were a budding mutant terrorist…” <\/strong>In the Omega Gang, circa New X-Men<\/em> #135. Quentin glosses over the fact that he was the group’s leader.<\/p>\n

Page 13 panel 1: “Our cold war with O*N*E”.<\/strong> As mentioned in issue #3.<\/p>\n

Page 15 panel 1: “That Scott Summers… bold as brass in San Francisco, admitting that they’re infecting us…”<\/strong> Rose is referring to Scott talking to Ben Liu in issue #2, when he said that Ben had developed mutant powers as an adult. In issue #3, Agent Lundqvist said this conversation had been on social media and that it had sparked the “mutant disease” theory. So Rose is misquoting Scott, but it’s not entirely clear whether she’s seen the video herself or merely heard about it second hand.<\/p>\n

Page 15 panel 2: “I had a crush on Cyclops, when we were the same age.”<\/strong> Temper is referring to the All-New X-Men<\/em> \/ X-Men Blue<\/em> period, in which the Silver Age X-Men were brought to the present day as teenagers and stayed for an absurdly long time before being sent back home. Temper was part of the cast of All-New X-Men<\/em> vol 2 along with the Silver Age team.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’re going to be running off the normal schedule for the next couple of weeks, so expect things to be running a few days late. As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. X-MEN vol 7 #6 “Bark” Writer: Jed MacKay Penciller: Netho Diaz Inker: Sean Parsons Colourists: Marte […]<\/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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10485","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=10485"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10487,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10485\/revisions\/10487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}