{"id":11084,"date":"2025-05-21T22:07:56","date_gmt":"2025-05-21T21:07:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11084"},"modified":"2025-05-21T22:07:56","modified_gmt":"2025-05-21T21:07:56","slug":"exceptional-x-men-9-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11084","title":{"rendered":"Exceptional X-Men #9 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #9<\/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> His “affective core”, as visited by Emma, consists of him sharing a meal with his family and friends – despite the fact that we’ve repeatedly seen him blowing off his father’s attempts to have these sorts of moments with him. Emma seems surprisingly touched by it, and describes it as “lovely”.<\/p>\n

He’s a powerful enough telepath for it to be worth Emma’s while borrowing his power in order to defeat Sinister.<\/p>\n

Bronze<\/strong> and Mel\u00e9e.<\/strong> They\u00a0bluff their way out of Axo’s clone collapsing with a ludicrous tale about a school science project, which people are apparently willing to accept. Well, it is the Marvel Universe.<\/p>\n

They accept the instruction to remain at the dojo while the grown-ups deal with Mr Sinister, but they’re understandably bored and frustrated. Whether because of that or because they’re taken by surprise and railroaded, they fall for Sinister’s fake Iceman. Rather than making a positive contribution to defeating Sinister, their main role is to stay calm and get themselves out of trouble without having to divert the attention of the established X-Men.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Mel\u00e9e can make other people invisible or intangible as well as herself.<\/p>\n

Kate Pryde. <\/strong>Once her suspicions are raised about Sheldon Xenos, she quickly figures out that the initials SX are a pun on Essex (Sinister’s surname). Quite rightly, she tells Mel\u00e9e and Bronze that Sinister is completely out of their league and that they should stay away from him. She’s clearly concerned that they’ll get killed, but in her monologue to camera, she reflects that she also didn’t want to find herself in a position of responsibility for young mutants again.<\/p>\n

Mel\u00e9e is surprised to learn that “Kitty” is a hacker; Kate used to do this sort of thing all the time back in the 80s, when that was a shorthand for teenage genius.<\/p>\n

She has an actual costume, presumably provided for her by Emma (and with the obligatory X-symbol on the belt).<\/p>\n

Emma Frost. <\/strong>Emma has confidence in the trainees (or at least claims to), and says that “They’re X-Men.” She certainly seems better than Kate at keeping a level head under pressure.\u00a0She apparently needs to borrow power from Axo to help defeat Sinister. For some reason, she passes out afterwards – this is the cliffhanger, so it’ll doubtless be explained next time.<\/p>\n

Iceman.<\/strong> His first thought on seeing the collapsed Axo clone is to suggest Regeneration-Linked Degenerative Sickness – the condition that Magneto is supposedly suffering from over in X-Men<\/em>. Iceman has heard about it via Rogue. As Emma points out, this is a completely impossible theory because RLDS is meant to be a side effect of Krakoan resurrection, and Axo was never resurrected.<\/p>\n

This is one of those rare stories where people get frozen in ice and somebody worries that they might suffocate.<\/p>\n

Mr Sinister has an Iceman clone which he made from shards of Iceman. According to Sinister, Iceman was “the one who got away”. This is footnoted to Iceman<\/em> #5, without specifying which one. They’re thinking of Iceman<\/em> vol 4, the 2018-19 miniseries by Sina Grace and Nathan Stockman where Sinister did indeed try to get control of Iceman.<\/p>\n

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

None, although Axo’s father and sister appear in his “affective core” symbolic panel.<\/p>\n

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

Mr Sinister. <\/strong>This version of Sinister initially seems to be vulnerable to telepathy, which means Emma can control him singlehandedly. However, she can’t free Axo from Sinister’s machines safely without splitting her attention, and Sinister’s backup plan is to cause chaos with the duplicate Iceman. Later, though, he claims that he’s Emma’s equal in telepathy, and since she needs to call on Axo for help, he seems to have a point. So perhaps he was playing possum. Back in the late 1980s, and specifically around the “Inferno” crossover, Sinister was indeed presented as a powerful telepath. That’s fallen away over the years, presumably due to his endless re-tooling of his body once Kieron Gillen’s interpretation of the character became standard. But there’s no reason why he can’t get it back.<\/p>\n

It’s still not really clear what exactly Sinister was trying to do with Axo. Emma says that Sinister is “siphoning Alex’s empathic neural core”, whatever that means.<\/p>\n

It’s also not entirely clear why he sends the Iceman clone to get the other two students, given that his plan seems to hinge specifically on Axo’s powers. Perhaps it’s just about keeping the X-Men distracted.<\/p>\n

According to Emma, the Axo clone does have a psionic signature, but it’s “a sketch or a vague outline”. Whether this is standard for all of his clones is hard to say. The Iceman clone seems a lot more coherent than the Axo one – perhaps something about Axo’s powers caused a problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #9 Writer: Eve L Ewing Artist: Carmen Carnero Colour artist: Nolan Woodard Letterer: Travis Lanham Editor: Tom Brevoort THE CORE CAST Axo. His “affective core”, as visited by Emma, consists of him sharing a meal with his family and friends – despite the fact that we’ve repeatedly seen him blowing off his father’s […]<\/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-11084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11084","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=11084"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11086,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11084\/revisions\/11086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}