{"id":11468,"date":"2025-10-15T23:16:36","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T22:16:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11468"},"modified":"2025-10-15T23:16:36","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T22:16:36","slug":"unbreakable-x-men-1-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=11468","title":{"rendered":"Unbreakable X-Men #1 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/81gHCa9ZEqL._AC_UY436_QL65_.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-11469 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/81gHCa9ZEqL._AC_UY436_QL65_-195x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"195\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/81gHCa9ZEqL._AC_UY436_QL65_-195x300.jpg 195w, https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/81gHCa9ZEqL._AC_UY436_QL65_.jpg 284w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 195px) 100vw, 195px\" \/><\/a><strong>UNBREAKABLE X-MEN #1<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>&#8220;Guarding the Gate&#8221;<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Writer: Gail Simone<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Artist: Lucas Werneck<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Letterer: Clayton Cowles<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Editor: Tom Brevoort<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>COVER:<\/strong> Age of Revelation Gambit, with the tombstones of Rogue and Marcus St Juniors, and&#8230; well, that looming face in the background might be Shuvahrak, but the green gloves seem more like Rogue.<\/p>\n<p>This is the &#8220;Age of Revelation&#8221; title standing in for\u00a0<em>Uncanny X-Men<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 1-8.\u00a0<\/strong><em>Rogue dies fighting Galactus.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;Seven years from now.&#8221;\u00a0<\/strong>The main time frame for\u00a0<em>Age of Revelation<\/em> is ten years into the future, relative to the present day. By this point, the Revelation Territories should be well established. However, this is Louisiana, and it&#8217;s not part of Revelation&#8217;s territory even in the main time frame.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Haven House.\u00a0<\/strong>The base of the X-Men team from\u00a0<em>Uncanny X-Men<\/em>. Evidently they&#8217;re still there years into the future &#8211; or at least they return there at some point.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The X-Men.<\/strong> The team at this point consists of Ransom (as team leader), Rogue, Gambit, Temper, Dome, Spider-Girl and Sentinel Boy. Taking them in turn:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Rogue<\/strong> still looks much as we remember. Notionally Ransom is the team leader but (maybe just because she&#8217;s the focal point of the scene) Rogue sure comes across as if she&#8217;s really in charge. It feels as if Ransom&#8217;s been recently promoted to this role, perhaps before he&#8217;s quite ready, and perhaps because Rogue never felt comfortable doing it. Rogue&#8217;s power absorption has been getting stronger with age (for no particular reason), to the point where she&#8217;s able to singlehandedly put Galactus out of commission for several years &#8211; although the effort of absorbing that much power somehow turns her into the giant statue we see later in the issue.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Gambit<\/strong>, again, is basically as we remember him &#8211; after all, the point of the issue is for him to be changed by Rogue&#8217;s death.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Ransom<\/strong>, as noted, is the team leader, though he seems understandably unsure what to do about a threat on the scale of Galactus. Maybe that&#8217;s the reason why the more experienced Rogue winds up taking more of a role.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Dome.<\/strong> This is Chelsea St Juniors, the daughter of the present-day Haven House. The rest of the family have died somewhere along the line. We saw Chelsea using her force field power in\u00a0<em>Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #10, where she told Nightcrawler that she wanted to be called Dome as a future X-Man.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Temper.\u00a0<\/strong>Currently a member of the Alaskan team, but there&#8217;s a subplot about a romance between her and Ransom; we learn later in the issue that they have a son, Clay.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Spider-Girl.\u00a0<\/strong>From the costume, this is apparently meant to be an older version of Makawalu Akana, the main character of the current <em>Spider-Girl<\/em> series &#8211; who is indeed a mutant.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Sentinel Boy. <\/strong>Never clearly identified, but evidently a boy piloting a Sentinel. The obvious candidate, particularly given this Sentinel&#8217;s rather cuddly design, is Juston Seyfert from the short-lived\u00a0<em>Sentinel<\/em> ongoing (who also appeared in\u00a0<em>Avengers Arena<\/em>). Juston recently resurfaced in the\u00a0<em>Sentinels\u00a0<\/em>miniseries having been partially transformed by nanotech; the idea might be that this is how he winds up.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>&#8220;Why not the Avengers or whatever the hell is left of the Fantastic Four these days?&#8221;\u00a0<\/strong>We don&#8217;t know at this stage what&#8217;s up with either of those teams.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shuvahrak. <\/strong>The Shuvahrak plotline is a sequel to\u00a0the &#8220;Dark Artery&#8221; arc from\u00a0<em>Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #13-16. The key points of that story are all explained in the dialogue. It established that Haven is near the Dark Artery, a sort of magical mutant graveyard, and that beneath the Dark Artery is &#8220;the Penumbra&#8221;, a kind of prison afterlife for humans who had betrayed mutant relatives. Shuvahrak was a sort of demonic ruler of the Penumbra, and presented as godlike. The original arc strongly implied that Shuvahrak had started off a Greta, the mutant who created the Penumbra, although it stopped short of saying so in terms. In that arc, Shuvahrak was rather keen to escape the Penumbra and tried to get one of the Outliers to take her place.<\/p>\n<p>This story is rather more specific than the original about the number of inhabitants of the Penumbra, with Ransom putting it at &#8220;a thousand&#8221;. Temper claims that they would rip mutantkind to shreads if they got out, which seems a bit pessimistic when Revelation&#8217;s around &#8211; and in fact they don&#8217;t live up to the billing in the closing pages. Nonetheless, they did clearly have great strength and endurance in &#8220;Dark Artery&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;Last time I did this, I burned my village to ash.&#8221;\u00a0<\/strong>This is Temper&#8217;s back story from her debut in\u00a0<em>Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #528 (2010).<\/p>\n<p><strong>Galactus.\u00a0<\/strong>His reasons for being here aren&#8217;t spelled out. The X-Men initially assume that he wants Shuvahrak, but he claims to be seeking simply a new herald, and wants to select Dome. We&#8217;re not told why she&#8217;s of interest to him. Rogue apparently gets credited by everyone with saving the world when she defeats Galactus, but it&#8217;s at best unclear whether the world was actually in danger here.<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Rogue Storm. <\/strong><\/em>You may be wondering how Rogue can have died fighting Galactus three years ago when she&#8217;s co-starring in another &#8220;Age of Revelation&#8221; book, <em>Rogue Storm.<\/em> This issue ignores that question entirely, but\u00a0<em>Rogue Storm<\/em> #1 does provide a fairly straightforward answer. According to that book, a couple of years into the Age of Revelation timeline, Rogue is split into two versions of herself, known as Rogue Green and Rogue Red. The one in this issue is Rogue Green. According to <em>Rogue Storm<\/em>, everyone regards Green as the original and Red as a copy, though there&#8217;s some suggestion that they might actually be equally valid. Gambit in particular remains committed to the &#8220;original&#8221; Rogue, leading the rejected Rogue Red to leave Haven House. Oh, and all of Rogue Red&#8217;s scenes in\u00a0<em>Rogue Storm\u00a0<\/em>are flashbacks which take place a couple of years before this issue&#8217;s Galactus flashback.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 9. <\/strong><em>Montage: Gambit goes into decline without Rogue.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Rogue&#8217;s wake is attened by Cyclops, Nightcrawler, Beast and two women who are probably Jubilee and M. In the context of the wider event, what&#8217;s notable here is that Cyclops is normally dressed and clean shaven as little as three years before the &#8220;main&#8221; time frame, where his X-Men seem to be beleaguered refugees.<\/p>\n<p>The boy in this scene is later identified as Clay Correa, the child of Ransom and Temper.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 10-11.\u00a0<\/strong><em>Gambit talks to Rogue.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Well, the statue, anyway. The fact that Rogue is still physically present &#8211; because what are you going to do with the enormous statue? &#8211; obviously isn&#8217;t helping Gambit to move on.<\/p>\n<p>Gambit still has his cats &#8211; presumably new ones but his point.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 12-14.\u00a0<\/strong><em>Galactus wakes.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Somehow, Galactus has ended up underwater, being ignored as a familiar sight by passing Atlantean patrol guards. Presumably this where he wound up while trying to teleport to safety, or something like that. It&#8217;s taken him three years to recover from his encounter with Rogue, but he wakes up and immediately makes contact with Shuvahrak (depicted as she was in &#8220;Dark Artery&#8221;).<\/p>\n<p>The Atlanteans mention being at war with Latveria, which is new information.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 15-17.\u00a0<\/strong><em>Lady Henrietta visits<\/em> <em>Haven to warn about Shuvahrak.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The monolith commemorating Rogue has a plaque next to it, which simply shows Rogue&#8217;s face and her real name; the rest of the text is illegible.<\/p>\n<p>Henrietta was introduced as the apparently immortal guardian of the Dark Artery in the original storyline. She seems to anticipate that Rogue will at some point be &#8220;ready&#8221; for a conventional grave in the artery, but gives the impression that she hasn&#8217;t spoken to Gambit in three years &#8211; she talks as if this is the first time they&#8217;ve spoken since Rogue died, despite being about five minutes walk from the house. Of course, on Henrietta&#8217;s timescale &#8211; which involves hanging around the Dark Artery being very patient &#8211; this may not register as much of a delay.<\/p>\n<p>Aside from the information that Shuvahrak has been sleeping for the past few years and has recently reawoken, Henrietta is mainly just infodumping for people who didn&#8217;t read &#8220;Dark Artery&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 18-20.\u00a0<\/strong><em>Gambit fights off the Tormented.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Having been released from the Penumbra by Shuvahrak (presumably at Galactus&#8217; instigation), the Tormented appear as a zombie horde. In practice, Gambit seems able to despatch them fairly easily, though there&#8217;s a suggestion that he&#8217;s making an unsuccessful attempt to blow himself up in the process.<\/p>\n<p>The cyborg dog that joins the fight is\u00a0Waffles, the Sentinel dog that Deathdream inadvertently freed in\u00a0<em>Uncanny X-Men<\/em>. Deathdream himself is up at the X-Men Mansion, as shown in\u00a0<em>Amazing<\/em> <em>X-Men.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>UNBREAKABLE X-MEN #1 &#8220;Guarding the Gate&#8221; Writer: Gail Simone Artist: Lucas Werneck Letterer: Clayton Cowles Editor: Tom Brevoort COVER: Age of Revelation Gambit, with the tombstones of Rogue and Marcus St Juniors, and&#8230; well, that looming face in the background might be Shuvahrak, but the green gloves seem more like Rogue. This is the &#8220;Age [&hellip;]<\/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-11468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11468","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=11468"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11470,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11468\/revisions\/11470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}