{"id":12158,"date":"2026-07-15T20:45:45","date_gmt":"2026-07-15T19:45:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12158"},"modified":"2026-07-15T20:45:45","modified_gmt":"2026-07-15T19:45:45","slug":"x-men-33-annotations-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12158","title":{"rendered":"X-Men #33 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>X-MEN vol 7 #33<\/strong>
\n“Anomaly, part 3”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Jed MacKay<\/strong>
\nPenciller: Tony S Daniel<\/strong>
\nInker: Mark Morales<\/strong>
\nColourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Clayton Cowles<\/strong>
\nEditor: Tom Brevoort<\/strong><\/p>\n

COVER:<\/strong> Magneto, in his classic costume, holding off a hail of bullets – precisely the sort of thing he can’t do any more.<\/p>\n

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

The Beast.\u00a0<\/strong>Well, he’s still in charge in this issue, but it’s not really about him. Magneto rather marginalises him, and he can’t do much to help Kid Omega and Ben Liu. He does manage to persuade Department H to back off, though, even if it happens off panel, so you can chalk that up as another successful bit of diplomacy from him.<\/p>\n

Ben Liu.\u00a0<\/strong>Kid Omega references him being experimented upon by 3K and then dumped on the streets, which is the lead-up to his debut in issue #2. There are some brief flashbacks in this issue to the experiments themselves.<\/p>\n

Kid Omega views him as a newbie who isn’t as hardened as the other X-Men (which is obviously right). This lack of faith seems to encourage Ben to step up and help to defuse Schwarzchild’s psychic traps, though really his only contribution is to experience some pain while Kid Omega does all the work. The booby traps set by Cassandra Nova are supposed to take the interlopers to their “Black Bug Rooms” – from\u00a0New X-Men<\/em> #116 – which Kid Omega describes as a manifestation of your shame and fear. For Kid Omega, this apparently works, though it takes place off panel. In Ben’s case, he ends up in Schwarzchild’s room – presumably because he has the same traps himself, which screws up how it works, but it’s not directly explained.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Ben’s initial reaction is to try and kill Schwarzchild. When Kid Omega catches up to him, he claims to be too exhausted to prevent the killing, but ultimately persuades Ben that killing Schwarzchild would just cost the X-Men a lead, slow down 3K’s defeat, and leave other innocents open to similar experiments. Ben accepts that, but makes clear to Kid Omega that he still intends to kill the guy later.<\/p>\n

Kid Omega.\u00a0<\/strong>He’s seemingly reluctant to press gang Ben into helping with Schwarzchild, and stalls for time (thoughtfully, by recapping the plot). It’s hard to tell how much he’s\u00a0genuinely<\/em> unwilling to force Ben’s hand and how far he’s trying to engineer Ben into making his own decisions – it may well be a bit of both. He claims to be willing to let Ben kill Schwarzchild, since it’ll stop the guy’s powers raging out of control. His argument for not doing it is entirely pragmatic; he says he’s not going to take the moral high ground given the things he’s done himself, presumably referring to his time in X-Force and as an outright villain.<\/p>\n

Magneto.\u00a0<\/strong>He tells Beast that he’s put a “failsafe” in place to kill Schwarzchild if need be. That seems to mean if Schwarzchild’s powers are still out of control when Magneto’s temporary power boost wears off. In practice, it’s not clear that he really\u00a0does<\/em> have a failsafe in place – it seems to be more of a euphemism for warning Beast that he’ll kill the guy if need be. His preference is still to take Schwarzchild alive, if only to interrogate him, and he’s willing to cut Beast out of the decision-making in order to keep his hands clean. (There’s a lot of emphasis in this series on Beast being not only more innocent than the Chairman version he replaced, but even than the rest of the X-Men.)<\/p>\n

He seems genuinely surprised when Kid Omega actually manages to complete the job. Kid Omega\u00a0tells him “This is why all your kids hate you”, which is a slightly harsh description of Magneto’s current relationship with Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch and Polaris.<\/p>\n

Xorn.\u00a0<\/strong>He’s healing the injured Department H men, as promised last issue.<\/p>\n

Animalia.\u00a0<\/strong>She’s delighted that Ben has saved some lives, though she seems not to appreciate that his motivations are more mixed than that.<\/p>\n

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

Schwartzchild.\u00a0<\/strong>Kid Omega takes Cassandra Nova’s psychic booby trap seriously. He acknowledges that he sorted out the trap that Cassandra Nova left in Ben Liu’s mind (in issue #5), but reasons that he needed Psylocke’s help for that, and that Schwarzchild, as one of 3K’s X-Men, is likely to have been a higher priority in terms of protection. In further support of that, he points to the fact that 3K bothered to replace the arm that Schwarzchild lost to Magik in issue #1.<\/p>\n

In his own black bug room, Schwarzchild seems to be traumatised by the fact that 3K rejected him (in issue #24) despite his devotion to the cause. Ben interprets this as displacement – he thinks Schwarzchild is afraid and ashamed of the experiments on unwilling victims (such as Ben himself) that Schwarzchild was indirectly party to. This really isn’t what Schwarzchild says, though, and while there’s a legitimate parallel with what Ben sees, he could also just be projecting.<\/p>\n

It’s not entirely clear how Schwartzchild is actually shut down. The story is more interested in Ben deciding whether to kill him. But presumably, once Ben decides to let him live, Kid Omega finishes the job off.<\/p>\n

Department H. <\/strong>Their spokesman – the officer who was dealing with Beast last issue – is referred to simply as “Agent”. Not unreasonably, he wants to fulfil his orders by taking Schwarzchild into custody. This seems like the sort of thing that Department H\u00a0should\u00a0<\/em>be doing, but Beast obviously has no time for them and, in the nicest possible way, tells them to stay out of the way while the grown-ups deal with it. According to Beast, the agent actually agrees and lets the X-Men deal with it in thanks for helping his men – they’ve tacitly agreed to present it as the X-Men overpowering Department H.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN vol 7 #33 “Anomaly, part 3” Writer: Jed MacKay Penciller: Tony S Daniel Inker: Mark Morales Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo Letterer: Clayton Cowles Editor: Tom Brevoort COVER: Magneto, in his classic costume, holding off a hail of bullets – precisely the sort of thing he can’t do any more. THE X-MEN: The Beast.\u00a0Well, he’s still […]<\/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-12158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12158","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=12158"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12160,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12158\/revisions\/12160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}