{"id":10902,"date":"2025-03-20T23:54:53","date_gmt":"2025-03-20T23:54:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10902"},"modified":"2025-03-20T23:54:53","modified_gmt":"2025-03-20T23:54:53","slug":"exceptional-x-men-7-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10902","title":{"rendered":"Exceptional X-Men #7 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #7<\/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

This isssue is bannered as an “X-Manhunt” tie in, with the tag “Collateral Damage” instead of a part number. On his Substack, Tom Brevoort described it as a “red skies” crossover and he wasn’t kidding – the “crossover” consists of a two page scene in which the cast learn that “X-Manhunt” is happening, exchange some thoughts on it, and then get back to the plot. That’s literally it.<\/p>\n

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

Emma Frost.<\/strong> The issue opens with a five page monologue by Emma accompanied by a montage of images from her life. The general thrust is that she’s been through a cycle of building safe havens for mutants, trying to escape the human world, and seeing them collapse – hence, she’s experimenting with “something else”. Presumably, by that she means training the mutants within the human world instead of withdrawing from it. (The Massachusetts Academy had mostly human students, but it was still an elite boarding school and so outside the normal world in other ways.) This is more something that Kate insisted upon, but she seems to be coming round to it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Axo calls her “aloof and manipulative”, and sees her as an ominous example of what happens if you actually use psychic powers like his. Kate defends Emma (presumably to preserve mentor-ish authority) but Emma doesn’t actually contest it, nor could she.<\/p>\n

She regards Krakoa as a lost homeland even for mutants too young to have gone there.<\/p>\n

Kate Pryde.<\/strong> She has conflicted feelings about Professor X, or at least feels obliged to present him to the kids as a morally ambiguous figure.<\/p>\n

Axo.<\/strong> He’s suckered by the sense that Mr Xenos understands him. But he has qualms about Xenos’ harvesting of personal data, apparently because his powers have made him particularly cautious about accidentally invading people’s privacy. When Xenos starts pitching really dodgy privacy-invading ideas to him, Axo tries to make his excuses and get out.<\/p>\n

He seems frustrated that the others don’t understand him and seems to doubt whether they genuinely like him at all (despite his increased control over his powers). He claims not to be bothered about how he looks and is glad to have learned to switch his powers off – though he seems unsure about that when Xenos argues that he’s constraining his mutant “gift” for no reason.<\/p>\n

His powers are ineffective against Mr Sinister; Sinister claims this is because he has no real emotions to manipulate, but see below. It’s possible that this lack of feedback is what makes Axo (wrongly) feel that his relationship with Xenos is untainted – he can subconsciously sense his lack of effect on the guy. Sinister seems to think that Axo’s powers can help him manipulate the emotional profiles of his app users.<\/p>\n

He is indeed the “tarnishedmoodring” that Sophie Cuckoo was exchanging messages with in NYX<\/em>; her name is “just_sophie”.<\/p>\n

Mel\u00e9e.<\/strong> She doesn’t mind getting a black eye in training, and thinks it’ll “look badass”. Her fighting is still underwhelming at best – despite having the more aggressive attitude, it’s Bronze who comes off better ins parring.<\/p>\n

She sends the others “ten videos about mutant politics a day”, including ones about Krakoa. She considers “important history”, but also views as something that happened to the previous generation. Despite this, the story seriously wants us to believe that none of the kids, including Mel\u00e9e, has ever heard of Charles Xavier – a man whose involvement with the X-Men has been a matter of public record since the Grant Morrison run, who was a major figure in the very Krakoa that Mel\u00e9e has been researching, and who telepathically addressed the whole world to announce the founding of Krakoa, an event that she must surely have experienced first hand. None of the adult characters seem to find this odd, so apparently we really are supposed to accept this as a gap in the next generation’s knowledge.<\/p>\n

Despite her spotty knowledge of mutant history, Mel\u00e9e has heard of Fred Hampton (1948-1969) and has at least a superficial knowledge of his views on revolutionary education.<\/p>\n

Bronze.<\/strong> She quite likes the idea that their group is a “fight club”. She gets upset rather quickly when Axo loses his temper with the group and voices his doubts about the genuineness of their friendship.<\/p>\n

Iceman.<\/strong> He runs in to trigger the two-page X-Manhunt tie-in scene.<\/p>\n

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

Mr Sinister.<\/strong> Xenos is really Mr Sinister, which is obvious from the cover. This makes the reveal an odd cliffhanger – though to be fair, the cliffhanger isn’t just the reveal, as it also extends to Sinister refusing to let Axo go.<\/p>\n

As Xenos, he accepts Axo’s concerns about personal data, but argues that someone else will use the technology if he doesn’t, and at least he’s a “responsible steward”. He claims that it doesn’t matter to him what people say about his appearance, because he’s the boss. An obvious question is where this business, with what seems like a substantial human staff, actually came from – has Sinister been building it in the background for a while, or was there a real Xenos that Sinister replaced?<\/p>\n

Sinister tries at first to keep up his Xenos persona while selling Axo on his real plan – which is something to do with emotional signatures – but drops the charade once it’s clear that Axo isn’t buying it. Sinister claims that Axo’s powers don’t work on him because he has no emotions to manipulate, but this seems dubious – for all his shallowness and disconnection, the Krakoan-era Sinister certainly had emotions, <\/em>even if they were things like frustration at his plans failing. Possibly a better argument would be that Axo’s powers require some genuine empathy to play off, which Sinister does lack.<\/p>\n

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

Page 2: Emma’s photographs of past loves show Cyclops (in Hellfire Gala costume), Iron Man (and their mock wedding from Invincible Iron Man<\/em> vol 5 #10) and… well, given the pointy ears and the water, I assume that’s meant to be Namor. There’s a document with a Hellfire Club seal in the bottom left.<\/p>\n

Pages 3-4: This is the party to launch Krakoa, from the end of House of X<\/em> #6. Storm and Siryn are among the flying characters, and Magneto is clearly visible in the foreground. I’m not sure who the two people with him are – one looks like Bling but the build seems wrong. To Emma’s right, Exodus, Dazzler, Cyclops, Wolverine and Jean Grey are all celebrating (and a blonde woman in a yellow costume with lots of pouches who I suspect is a miscoloured Hope).<\/p>\n

Page 5: This seems to be a montage of Emma teaching children in Genosha before the Sentinel attack (given the human buildings in the background); a shot of Utopia, the X-Men’s mutant “nation” in San Francisco Bay; a shot of Krakoa; and a panel conflating the Sentinel attack on Genosha with Emma cradling a dead body that I don’t honestly recognise – perhaps just a generic victim of Orchis’ attack on the Hellfire Gala.<\/p>\n

Page 13 panel 1: Mel\u00e9e quit the team and returned in issue #5.<\/p>\n

Page 15 panel 4: Fred Hampton was the deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party, who was killed by US law enforcement in Chicago.<\/p>\n

Page 18 panel 5: The “rumours of the new adult-onset mutants” are the 3K storyline in X-Men<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #7 Writer: Eve L Ewing Artist: Carmen Carnero Colour artist: Nolan Woodard Letterer: Travis Lanham Editor: Tom Brevoort This isssue is bannered as an “X-Manhunt” tie in, with the tag “Collateral Damage” instead of a part number. On his Substack, Tom Brevoort described it as a “red skies” crossover and he wasn’t kidding […]<\/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-10902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10902","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=10902"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10902\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10905,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10902\/revisions\/10905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}