{"id":10807,"date":"2025-02-20T22:56:45","date_gmt":"2025-02-20T22:56:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10807"},"modified":"2025-02-20T22:56:45","modified_gmt":"2025-02-20T22:56:45","slug":"exceptional-x-men-6-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10807","title":{"rendered":"Exceptional X-Men #6 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

There are a ridiculous number of new titles out this week – eight ongoing titles in total, plus one miniseries – so I won’t be doing annotations for all of them.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #6<\/strong>
\nWriter: Eve L Ewing<\/strong>
\nArtist: Carmen Carnero<\/strong>
\nColour artist: Nolan Woodard<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Travis Lanham<\/strong>
\nEditor: Tom Brevoort<\/strong><\/p>\n

THE CORE CAST:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Axo.<\/strong> He’s the only cast member sympathetic to the stated goals of Sheldon Xenos’ Verate app. He identifies with Xenos as a fellow visible mutant and feels that his teammates don’t know what this is like. He’s receptive to Xenos’ attempts to befriend and mentor him, and inclined to trust him. He understands why people are sceptical about the data privacy issues, but makes an impassioned argument (no doubt informed by his connection with Xenos) that everyone else is being too insular and paranoid in dismissing the possibilities offered by a fellow mutant and his technology.<\/p>\n

Axo uses his powers to save Xenos from two apparent muggers; they turn out to be stooges at the end of the issue, but Axo’s powers apparently don’t pick up on this. It’s possible that the whole thing is an act and that Axo doesn’t realise this, but the idea seems to be that their true emotional state is consistent with what they seem to be doing. It’s still a risky play by Xenos, since Axo uses his powers to make them talk about how much they hate what they’re doing. Luckily, their answers are consistent with both their cover story and the truth.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Bronze describes him as “Mr Cynical”, “Captain Sarcasm” and “eye-roll king”, which isn’t exactly how he’s been written to date, but he seems to recognise (and be comfortable with) this description of himself.<\/p>\n

Bronze\u00a0<\/strong>and Mel\u00e9e<\/strong> mostly spend the issue voicing the obvious arguments against Verate’s collection of DNA and exploitation of people’s insecurities – this is Axo’s issue.<\/p>\n

Kate Pryde.<\/strong> She’s in favour of the teens establishing boundaries between themselves and Emma, and in favour of them getting jobs together for team bonding. She’s delighted to be kissed by Nina but worries about whether a relationship with her will be poisonous to someone normal.<\/p>\n

Emma Frost.<\/strong> The kids are concerned that they’re financially dependent on her, and Emma seems taken aback that this is a concern. Nobody seems to dispute that Emma is<\/em> spending money on the kids, but it’s not at all obvious what she’s spent it on, other than the costumes that she gave them. After all, they live at home, and the dance studio was loaned free of charge by Priti.<\/p>\n

She opposes the kids getting jobs because she wants them to focus on their training – she’s not interested in normalcy, or at least regards it as an impossible goal. When asked by Kate whether they’re “capable of normalcy”, she hesitates before saying that she’s not the one to ask.<\/p>\n

Iceman.<\/strong> He’s there for the training sequence at the start.<\/p>\n

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

Priti.<\/strong> Kate’s flatmate is starting to look too good to be true (and it seems to be intentional). Having given the kids her dance studio, she now offers them all internships with her consulting firm. When they show up, she seems to be under the impression that they’ve been given a brief about Verate to think about, and barrels through their protests that they have no idea what she’s talking about.<\/p>\n

The consultancy firm seems to be fairly well established – there are plenty of other people around. But she’s working for Xenos, and she steers Bronze and Mel\u00e9e away, to let Xenos talk to Axo alone. She could<\/em>, of course, just be getting rid of them because they’re being embarrassingly critical of the client, and that’s clearly meant to be the surface reading. But she wasn’t bothered by their obvious lack of preparation, Xenos’ entire plan seems to be to insinuate himself with Axo, and like I say, Priti seems a little bit too good to be true. I’m leaving her in “supporting cast” for now, but… well.<\/p>\n

Mr Luna<\/strong> (Axo’s father) and Ana Luna<\/strong> are Axo’s immediate family. There’s no mention of a mother. The father seems entirely pleasant and supportive and is clearly disappointed that Axo doesn’t want to spend family time with them, but doesn’t push the point. Little sister Ana has health problems, presumably also the sort of thing that Verate is advertised as helping with.<\/p>\n

Dani\u00a0<\/strong>is also hanging around at the Luna family home. We last saw her in issue #2 when Axo went to watch her play soccer (she had two lines of dialogue). Ana really likes her. Her mother works late and she’s responsible for putting younger sisters to bed, though apparently they’re old enough to be left at home on their own. She’s obviously a regular presence in the Luna household and you could infer that she’s either an actual or potential girlfriend for Axo, but they don’t really act towards one another in a way that suggests any particular intimacy.<\/p>\n

Nina.<\/strong> Having previously invited Kate to a school soccer game for a date, she now offers a relative’s 90th birthday party. Kate is delighted.<\/p>\n

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

Sheldon Xenos.<\/strong> Xenos is the Chicago-based mutant entrepreneur behind the Verate app (or at least, we assume he’s a mutant – he certainly has massive visible horns). Presumably this is public knowledge – he has no apparent concerns about being seen in public – but if so, it’s odd that we haven’t seen people associate the app with mutant ownership in previous issues. You’d think it would come up more.<\/p>\n

He claims to be motivated by a desire to help people, driven by his own genetic experiences. But at the very least, this version of events is clearly pitched to be the story that Axo wants to hear. Xenos is quite clearly trying to manipulate Axo into accepting his mentorship. That said, it could <\/em>be partially true – nothing in this issue outright contradicts his stated claims about his goals for the app. In terms of what we’ve seen on the page, it’s even possible that his motivations are purely commercial and no more sinister than any other data harvesting operation… but common sense tells us that’s not how X-Men stories work.<\/p>\n

The name of the app is pronounced as something closer to “verity”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. There are a ridiculous number of new titles out this week – eight ongoing titles in total, plus one miniseries – so I won’t be doing annotations for all of them. EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #6 Writer: Eve L Ewing Artist: Carmen Carnero […]<\/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-10807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10807","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=10807"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10814,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10807\/revisions\/10814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}