{"id":12486,"date":"2026-11-06T23:07:34","date_gmt":"2026-11-06T23:07:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12486"},"modified":"2026-11-06T23:07:34","modified_gmt":"2026-11-06T23:07:34","slug":"dnx-4-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=12486","title":{"rendered":"DNX #4 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>DNX #4<\/strong>
\nWriter: Jed MacKay<\/strong>
\nArtist: Federico Vicentini<\/strong>
\nColour artist: David Curiel<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Clayton Cowles<\/strong>
\nEditor: Tom Brevoort<\/strong><\/p>\n

COVER:<\/strong> The Fantastic Four and the X-Men surrounded by newly transformed, zombie-like mutants. Nothing like this happens in the issue.<\/p>\n

PAGES 1-3.\u00a0<\/strong>Flashback: The Age of Revelation Beast sends his message back to the present.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is a continuation of a scene from\u00a0X-Men: Age of Revelation Finale<\/em>. In the original scene,\u00a0the Age of Revelation Beast swapped back into his body, and quickly figured out from speaking to Animalia that he had swapped minds with the Chairman instead of with the X-Men’s version of the Beast. Then he asked Schwarzchild to help him send “an information burst” to the past. We don’t see any of these characters again, before the world ends a few pages later.<\/p>\n

In this version, the Beast continues by helpfully recapping the plot of “Age of Revelation” for the benefit of any newcomers. Interestingly, he suggests that the Age of Revelation X-Men weren’t aware that the Chairman was alive at all, and apparently still thought he had died at the end of Benjamin Percy’s\u00a0X-Force<\/em> run. Since 3K were framed for the release of the X-virus in the “AoR” timeline, presumably it did have a version of the Chairman, who got killed by Revelation before the X-Men found out his identity.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The AoR Beast says that when his mind was in the past, he was “in some sort of cybernetic, synthetic form”. This is the human-looking body that the Chairman used in MacKay’s\u00a0X-Men<\/em> up to that point, in which he vaguely resembled Professor X. The idea that this synthetic body had locked itself down in response to the mind swap was previously established on the last page of\u00a0Age of Revelation Finale<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The AoR Animalia’s shock at this revelation is because she’s the AoR Beast’s partner, and spent the “Age of Revelation” crossover treating the Chairman as a younger version of him; there were various discrepancies in his memory of events which served as hints as to his true identity.<\/p>\n

The AoR Schwarzchild correctly realises that the Chairman will return to the present day knowing that he (Schwarzchild) eventually joins the real X-Men, and predicts that the Chairman will attempt to kill him in the past. The Chairman does indeed try to do so in\u00a0X-Men<\/em> #24, though we find out in\u00a0X-Men\u00a0<\/em>#31-33 that Schwarzchild survived.<\/p>\n

Obviously, the AoR Beast figures out that the Chairman will have acquired knowledge of the X-Virus, which he’ll try to use in the present day. The purpose of sending data back to the past was to try to give the X-Men the information they would need to counter that knowledge. We find out later that it’s information on a bacterium to neutralise the X-virus. Quite why the AoR X-Men weren’t using it themselves isn’t altogether clear, but they may not have had the resources to manufacture it, or it may be that they thought it would be a waste of time unless they dealt with Revelation first.<\/p>\n

This data has to be “encode[d] in living DNA” for reasons that aren’t terribly clearly explained; I think the idea is that the only option on hand is to jury-rig something using the mind-swap technology, and that this is the best it can do in the circumstances.<\/p>\n

PAGES 4-5.\u00a0<\/strong>The Beast briefs the X-Men and the Fantastic Four.<\/em><\/p>\n

Beast dutifully recaps some more of the plot: the message was sent to Magneto’s DNA, which messed up his powers and led to the misdiagnosis of “Resurrection-linked Degeneration Sickness” from the early issues. It’s an open question how far RDS was always intended to be misdirection (MacKay\u00a0was<\/em> building his 3K plot from day one), or whether it’s a dropped plot that’s simply been repurposed in this way.<\/p>\n

As the footnote says, the Fantastic Four extracted the data in\u00a0Fantastic Four<\/em> #18.<\/p>\n

Reed is not quite right to say that the X-virus “spread throughout North America” in the AoR timeline, but it had certainly covered a fair chunk of it, and was continuing to grow.<\/p>\n

Understandably, Reed has “qualms” about releasing Hank’s untested bacterium into Juniper, but seems willing to accept that there’s no alternative in the circumstances. We’ll come back to the wisdom of this. Cyclops sees the top priority as being to stop the spread of the virus, but consistent with his treatment of Ben Liu and Animalia, he regards the newly transformed people of Juniper as new mutants. Like the Chairman, he’s clearly expecting a town where the survivors will be newly blossoming mutants.<\/p>\n

PAGES 6-8.\u00a0<\/strong>The Chairman in Juniper.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Chairman initially sees Juniper as a great success – the virus cloud is everywhere – and regards himself as having shed the baggage of 3K to begin a new world. He starts talking as if he’s created a paradise before twigging that there are no mutants around, aside from a single horrendously mutated person. It turns out that his version of the X-virus doesn’t actually work: it turns people into mutants, but not viable ones.<\/p>\n

Of course, we already know that the Chairman’s version of the X-virus is not identical to Revelation’s. In\u00a0X-Men<\/em> #36, he told Magneto that “Without Revelation’s power, without the Technarch biomass he used to create it, I’ve had to find workarounds.” He also said that “the last piece I need is the information encoded within your DNA”, and we’re reminded of that later in the issue: “I had the data from my time in the future, the genetic templates from the information in Magneto’s blood, it should have worked.” So the idea seems to be that the Chairman has outwitted himself by incorporating the very message that was meant to stop him – except instead he’s created a version of the X-virus that just kills people instead of making new (living) mutants. This also begs the question of what happens when the X-Men and FF deploy the AoR Beast’s bacteria, because this isn’t the X-virus that they were designed for.<\/p>\n

PAGES 9-10.\u00a0<\/strong>Frank Bohannon and<\/em> O*N*E.<\/em><\/p>\n

Cyclops called Bohannon last issue, and despite the usual fencing, Bohannon has indeed deployed O*N*E to try and isolate Juniper. His rather draconian quarantine approach – shoot anything that tries to leave – is at least potentially defensible in the circumstances, but he also seems more concerned about controlling the media.<\/p>\n

We saw Agent Lundqvist among the people in Juniper in issue #2, where he was certainly exposed to the virus. At least one of his colleagues knows and cares about this, but Bohannon writes him off as a lost cause. Again, in itself, this isn’t unreasonable – the quarantine really should be a higher priority – but Bohannon really does seem to want to abandon Lundqvist in all senses.<\/p>\n

PAGES 11-12.\u00a0<\/strong>The Chairman changes his plans.<\/em><\/p>\n

These mutants clearly are not going to be the future of mutantkind, due to their inability to keep breathing. So he’s going to go back to the drawing board and wipe out Juniper in the meantime – not to stop the virus from spreading, but just to avoid the embarassment of it.<\/p>\n

PAGES 13-14.\u00a0<\/strong>Cyclops briefs the heroes.<\/em><\/p>\n

Again, Cyclops is expecting a town full of new mutants. He’s also assuming that the X-Men, as mutants, will be immune to the X-virus – though from the look of it, the Chairman was indeed immune to it, so this is probably a fair guess.<\/p>\n

PAGES 15-20.\u00a0<\/strong>The heroes arrive outside Juniper.<\/em><\/p>\n

And there’s an enormous force field there. You can’t teleport through it, and we already saw Juggernaut fail to punch through 3K’s force fields in\u00a0X-Men<\/em> #34.<\/p>\n

Cyclops tries to appeal to the Chairman by telling him that he’s won, and “Made More Mutants” (a reference to the Krakoan laws), only to learn that everyone is dead and that the Chairman is planning to nuke the place – at least, presumably that’s what a fusion bomb is. The Chairman actually has a fair point when he says that the bomb isn’t really killing anyone because they’re all dead from the virus already. Nonetheless, this is all an exercise in his ego, rather than in containment. And so we’re heading to a face-off between Scott and Hank to end the story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DNX #4 Writer: Jed MacKay Artist: Federico Vicentini Colour artist: David Curiel Letterer: Clayton Cowles Editor: Tom Brevoort COVER: The Fantastic Four and the X-Men surrounded by newly transformed, zombie-like mutants. Nothing like this happens in the issue. PAGES 1-3.\u00a0Flashback: The Age of Revelation Beast sends his message back to the present. This is a […]<\/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-12486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12486","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=12486"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12489,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12486\/revisions\/12489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}