{"id":12294,"date":"2026-08-26T22:48:25","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T21:48:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12294"},"modified":"2026-08-26T22:48:25","modified_gmt":"2026-08-26T21:48:25","slug":"x-men-36-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12294","title":{"rendered":"X-Men #36 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>X-MEN vol 7 #36<\/strong>
\n“A Theft”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Jed MacKay<\/strong>
\nPenciller: Netho Diaz<\/strong>
\nInker: Sean Parsons<\/strong>
\nColourist: Arthur Hesli<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Clayton Cowles<\/strong>
\nEditor: Tom Brevoort<\/strong><\/p>\n

COVER:<\/strong> The Chairman, taking Magneto’s bloodstained helmet from him. Once again, this issue is billed as a\u00a0DNX<\/em> prelude.<\/p>\n

THE X-MEN:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cyclops, Temper, Kid Omega, Psylocke, Beast, Magik\u00a0<\/strong>and\u00a0Juggernaut.<\/strong> To be honest, there’s not much to say about the core cast as individuals in this issue. Temper and Kid Omega continue to fight as something of a duo. Kid Omega has a routine where he can telepathically provide his team-mates with a video-game style map of their environment and the locations of their opponents; Psylocke regards this as a bit gimmicky, but genuinely useful.<\/p>\n

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

Magneto.\u00a0<\/strong>We get some further explanation of Magneto’s mysterious condition, originally identified by the X-Men as “resurrection-linked degeneration sickness”. In the “Age of Revelation” event, we learned that nobody in that future timeline had any memory of Magneto having this condition. Now, in this issue, the Chairman says that Magneto’s condition is due to “information sent from the future, encoded into your DNA”. Magneto says that “we” have the same theory, presumably meaning at least himself and the X-Men’s Beast.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The “message” would presumably be one of the two messages that were sent back in time in\u00a0X-Men: Age of Revelation<\/em> using Schwarzchild’s powers – one sent by the Chairman, in the body of the future Beast, and the other sent by the real<\/em> future Beast after he returned. Quite why either of them would choose to send the message by encoding it onto Magneto’s DNA isn’t explained yet. According to the Chairman, the message is the last piece of information he needs to create his X-Virus, which would tend to suggest that it’s the Chairman’s own message. Cyclops also concludes at the end of the issue that the Chairman wanted Magneto’s DNA for this purpose.<\/p>\n

Magneto is underwhelmed by the Chairman’s invocation of the “Magneto was right” slogan, which he associates with platitudes – it dates from the Grant Morrison run when he was being treated as a Che Guevara figure. He refuses to endorse the X-virus plan, not because it involves violence but because it involves genocide. On that basis, Beast just beats him up and takes cell samples.<\/p>\n

Ben Liu.\u00a0<\/strong>For some reason, it’s Ben who’s the first to figure out that Magneto was the real target, and he seems particularly agitated about it.<\/p>\n

Animalia\u00a0<\/strong>and\u00a0Xorn\u00a0<\/strong>are also around.<\/p>\n

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

The Chairman.\u00a0<\/strong>He says that he’s close to re-creating the X-virus from the “Age of Revelation” timeline, but that mentions that he’s had to use workarounds, because he doesn’t have access either to Revelation’s powers, or to the Technarch biomass that Revelation took advantage of.<\/p>\n

He claims to be able to fix Magneto’s powers, but might just be bluffing in order to get his hands on the sample. Still, his clear preference is to recruit Magneto rather than just to take the samples. He talks up how much Magneto has done for mutantkind over the years, and his symbolic value – some of this seems to be acknowledging his own radicalisation during the Krakoan era, and recognising Magneto’s importance in legitimising Krakoa at the time.<\/p>\n

The Chairman claims that Magneto became the X-Men’s teacher during his time as a\u00a0villain<\/em>, and quotes\u00a0The Merchant of Venice<\/em>: “The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard, but I will better the instruction.” In the original context, this is Shylock promising revenge for the way he has been treated by Christians.<\/p>\n

Joseph.<\/strong> 3K don’t actually know that Schwarzchild is a prisoner of the X-Men. Instead, their mission is to keep the real X-Men occupied while the Chairman goes after Magneto. Joseph chooses to tell Cyclops that it’s all a distraction once he’s been defeated – possibly just to try and turn a defeat into a victory and regain his dignity. H<\/p>\n

He insists on being called Magneto, as he did in issue #24, and is obviously irritated when anyone calls him Joseph. He refers to the 3K X-Men as “my X-Men”, and generally carries himself as their leader, but they don’t seem to have any time for him. They certainly don’t show any teamwork with him, and Cyclops defeats him singlehandedly.<\/p>\n

Once defeated, he calls “mother” for extraction – in other words, his creator Astra, who is a teleporter.<\/p>\n

The 3K X-Men (Constellation, Galatea, Juice, Psychovore and Timebomb).\u00a0<\/strong>Kid Omega says that Cassandra Nova has “psychically hardened” them to the point where he can’t simply shut them down remotely. Presumably he means that they have the same sort of psychic traps as Schwarzchild and Ben Liu did in previous issues.<\/p>\n

The 3K X-Men are really not happy about being saddled with Joseph as their new leader, and actively cut him out of their communications channels. Timebomb winds him up by calling him “Joseph”, and tells the others that he’s a “petulant child” who hasn’t earned his place among them. She may, of course, also be aggravated that she didn’t get promoted to take Schwarzchild’s place after he was booted out of the group. Still, Galatea sides with her, and Psychovore talks about cutting Joseph down to size once the mission is complete. The only one who seems to accept Joseph as their leader, even grudgingly, is Juice, and he seems to be so slow on the uptake that he hasn’t previously twigged how his teammates feel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

X-MEN vol 7 #36 “A Theft” Writer: Jed MacKay Penciller: Netho Diaz Inker: Sean Parsons Colourist: Arthur Hesli Letterer: Clayton Cowles Editor: Tom Brevoort COVER: The Chairman, taking Magneto’s bloodstained helmet from him. Once again, this issue is billed as a\u00a0DNX prelude. THE X-MEN:\u00a0 Cyclops, Temper, Kid Omega, Psylocke, Beast, Magik\u00a0and\u00a0Juggernaut. To be honest, there’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,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12294","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=12294"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12296,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12294\/revisions\/12296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}