{"id":10823,"date":"2025-02-26T22:13:49","date_gmt":"2025-02-26T22:13:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10823"},"modified":"2025-02-26T22:13:49","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T22:13:49","slug":"x-men-12-annotations-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10823","title":{"rendered":"X-Men #12 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

\"\"<\/a>X-MEN vol 7 #12<\/strong>
\n“Work Release”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Jed MacKay<\/strong>
\nPenciller: Netho Diaz<\/strong>
\nInkers: Sean Parsons & John Livesay<\/strong>
\nColourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Clayton Cowles<\/strong>
\nEditor: Tom Brevoort<\/strong><\/p>\n

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

Cyclops.<\/strong> The alien mercenaries want him so that he can be used as a hostage to keep Phoenix under control – or at any rate, that’s what they understand that their unnamed employer wants. For once, he doesn’t really contribute a great deal to the X-Men’s victory, but he remains as calmly confident as ever while waiting for his team to sort it out. He offers to break Alpha Flight out of jail if they want, but seems to regard it as their choice whether to play along with Department H.<\/p>\n

Juggernaut.<\/strong> He can be stopped with “inertia foam” – since he isn’t as powerful as he used to be, presumably he isn’t literally unstoppable any more. It’s also possible that the foam doesn’t completely stop him but slows his progress to such an extent that it comes to the same thing in the heat of battle.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Magik.<\/strong> She can be defeated with a ray that induces vertigo – presumably it’s her own choice to then call up a stepping disc and teleport to safety rather than try to fight, since it’s not obvious why vertigo would make her teleport. She seems remarkably unfazed by being a snowbound landscape in a costume with plenty of exposed skin – let’s be generous and say magic’s playing a role in her not freezing.<\/p>\n

Temper.<\/strong> She believes that she could destroy the Acanti ship singlehandedly, but that would kill all her teammates aboard.<\/p>\n

Kid Omega.<\/strong> Serves mainly to relay messages back and forth in story, but that’s arguably significant in itself – with no authority figure to kick against in this story, he simply focusses on the mission and gets on with it.<\/p>\n

Psylocke.<\/strong> Everyone forgets about her (or she used her telepathy to shield herself) so she gets to destroy an Acanti heart singlehandedly.<\/p>\n

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

Alpha Flight.<\/strong> Look, they don’t have their own book at the moment, and this issue seems to be setting up longer term storylines, so they’re supporting cast for now.<\/p>\n

Aside from last issue’s cameo, we last saw Alpha Flight in “Fall of X”, where they were pretending to work for the Canadian government as a cover for helping mutants to escape Orchis, and wound up in jail. Despite the fall of Orchis, Alpha Flight haven’t been pardoned for trying to avert genocide – even though nobody’s suggested that people are still languishing in American jails from that period. So apparently we should take it that in the Marvel Universe, Canada is fascist-adjacent. I have my doubts about whether this is tenable in the current climate, but it’s worth pointing out that Jed MacKay is Canadian, and that the Canadian government’s Department H have been portrayed as Basically Evil by many writers down the years.<\/p>\n

Department H has set up a project where the imprisoned Alpha Flight members are allowed to go on missions under the supervision of one of their agents. Most (but not all) of the team have agreed, and there are at least a few hints dropped that all is not quite as it seems here. We’re not told directly what sort of missions they’re serving on, but this one is perfectly above board. Plus, Vindicator talks about the Alphans being motivated by their desire to be heroes, Guardian talks about them saving lives, and Puck says they’re better off doing good than being in prison – so by all appearances their actual missions are genuine superhero work. No particular reason is given for why the whole team don’t make a break for it as soon as the mission is over, beyond the fact that Guardian doesn’t want to – are there actually any security measures in place, or does the program just rely on their goodwill?<\/p>\n

Guardian.<\/strong> James Hudson has often been presented as a compromised figure – sometimes he’s hinted to have been involved in Weapon X – but for the purposes of this story he’s a straightforward national hero. He claims that he and Alpha Flight have more symbolic weight in this role than they would do as fugitives. He claims to be “shaming” the authorities, which implies that the public know that Alpha Flight are serving from prison. He also claims that “I’ll be free soon enough,” without explaining why.<\/p>\n

He chafes somewhat at being given orders by Vindicator – more because she’s been foisted on the team and she’s taken Heather’s identity than because she’s asking for anything unreasonable. He’s reluctant to call her “Vindicator” (or keeps forgetting), but does use her codename in front of the X-Men, with a stumble.<\/p>\n

Puck.<\/strong> Not much to be said. He’s here just to do his hero thing.<\/p>\n

Snowbird.<\/strong> It’s specifically flagged up that Narya is a “living goddess of the north” (more accurately, a demigoddess) and doesn’t recognise human authority, and that this makes it odd that she’s willing to sit around in prison and co-operate with the programme. She promises a “reckoning” for Vindicator “speaking to a goddess” by giving her orders.<\/p>\n

Marrina.<\/strong> She wasn’t<\/em> in jail at the end of the last series, but escaped with the refugee mutants to Chandilar. We’re told that she actually turned herself in in order to be with her teammates because “Alpha Flight is all she has”, though this is Arsenault’s interpretation (as relayed to Department H). It doesn’t entirely make sense, because there are other Alphans out there that Marrina could still turn to, such as Northstar – and she’s spent plenty of time apart from them over the years.<\/p>\n

Shaman.<\/strong> He went to jail with the rest of the team, but we’re told he declined to join the programme on ethical grounds. Arsenault says they “need further leverage on him”. Nonetheless, the general impression is that everyone actually in the team has made a free choice to be there, and could (like Shaman) have turned it down, at least for now.<\/p>\n

Vindicator.<\/strong> The new Vindicator is Department H’s Agent Arsenault (she doesn’t get a first name). At least when addressing the Department H council in flashback, she says that Alpha Flight are both heroes and criminals, that having them in jail is “a waste of resources of both the superhuman and public-relations varieties”, and that the new project can take advantage of the Alphans’ desire to do good coupled with the state’s control over them as prisoners. It’s at least possible<\/em> that Arsenault is playing to her audience here rather than giving her unvarnished opinions.<\/p>\n

As Alpha Flight’s “handler and new leader”, Arsenault wears a black and white version of the Vindicator armour. It’s not clear whether this was her idea or the Department H council’s (the dialogue faintly implies the latter), and we’re not given a reason for the colour change.<\/p>\n

She’s quite bossy and rubs the team up the wrong way, but this could just be her trying to impose her authority on a group that she knows hate her, particularly when Guardian is right there as a competing authority figure. The actual content of her orders seems reasonable, and she seems entirely competent in action. Guardian proposes a plan that involves himself, Vindicator and Temper combining their powers, with the X-Men’s lives at stake if it goes wrong, with no apparent qualms as to whether she can pull it off – so apparently he does trust her on that level.<\/p>\n

Once the aliens are defeated, she poses alongside the other X-Men and Alpha Flight members as if she were a hero like any other.<\/p>\n

Corsair.<\/strong> He doesn’t contribute much in this story. He takes the captured mercenaries off the X-Men’s hands by arranging to hand them over to the Kree\/Skrull Empire authorities (which would be Hulkling right now, so relatively sensible).<\/p>\n

The Beast.<\/strong> He contacts Cyclops at the end of the issue to let him know that Professor X has escaped, setting up next month’s crossover.<\/p>\n

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

Xanto Starblood.<\/strong> The alien mercenaries are mostly unnamed generics, and their leader Captain Karkos is new, but Xanto Starblood is an existing character who showed up in two storylines in\u00a0Jason Aaron’s\u00a0Wolverine and the X-Men<\/em> run (and never appeared again, until now). As he says here, he’s an expert in “extreme zoology”, which in this case means that he knows how to hijack an Acanti as a ship in the style of the Brood, and knows how to tailor countermeasures to the X-Men’s powers. He was apparently some sort of celebrity author in the wider galaxy and quite what he’s doing joining this sort of mercenary expedition isn’t clear.<\/p>\n

The only two characters that he’s met before are Kid Omega and Temper, but both of them spend the story on the Marauder, so they never meet him. Xanto says that he was hoping to “get my hands on” both of them, but it doesn’t seem to be that high a priority for him: the contract was just to get Cyclops, and he’s perfectly happy to ignore his personal agenda and head for space once Cyclops is captured. At best, any interest in Quentin and Idie seems to be a mild preference.<\/p>\n

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

Page 5 panel 2: Guardian died in Alpha Flight<\/em> vol 1 #12 (1984). And again in Alpha Flight<\/em> vol 1 #100 (1991). And again in New Avengers<\/em> vol 1 #16 (2006). He’s quite fragile.<\/p>\n

Page 7 panel 4: Heather Hudson, the original Vindicator, has been in a coma since last year’s Alpha Flight<\/em> miniseries.<\/p>\n

Page 8 panel 4: By “a Nova”, the alien presumably means a member of the Nova Corps, not a star.<\/p>\n

Page 10 panel 3: Temper and Kid Omega were Xanto Starblood’s students at the Hellfire Academy in Wolverine and the X-Men<\/em> during 2012-2013.<\/p>\n

Page 11 panel 4: George Street is the entertainment district of St John’s, Newfoundland.<\/p>\n

Page 25 panel 2: Alpha Flight “stood up for us” by helping mutants to escape Orchis in last year’s Alpha Flight<\/em> miniseries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. X-MEN vol 7 #12 “Work Release” Writer: Jed MacKay Penciller: Netho Diaz Inkers: Sean Parsons & John Livesay Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo Letterer: Clayton Cowles Editor: Tom Brevoort THE X-MEN: Cyclops. The alien mercenaries want him so that he can be used […]<\/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-10823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10823","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=10823"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10823\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10825,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10823\/revisions\/10825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}