As always, this contains spoilers, and page numbers are going by the digital edition.<\/p>\n
PAGE 1 (COVER):<\/strong> The X-Men fighting the Orchis Project footsoldiers.<\/p>\n PAGE 2:\u00a0<\/strong>The epigraph comes from the captions in which Professor X reacts to the apparent deaths of the Orchis Project team, later in the issue.<\/p>\n PAGE 3:<\/strong> Straight into the credits this time. The issue title is “It Will Be Done”. That refers back to Cyclops’s dialogue in\u00a0Powers of X<\/em> #2 when he was briefed on this suicide mission. (“Does it need doing?” “Yes” “Then it will be done.”)<\/p>\n The small print reads “The House of Xavier and the way we treat our children.” “Children” here seems to refer at the same time to mutants in general (the Mother Mold compares mutants to the titans, the children of the primordial gods); the X-Men in particular (Xavier seems to have them in mind in his closing monologue); and the machines themselves (the Mother Mold says that “while you war, we children sit in judgment of those above us”). As others have pointed out, Hickman seems quite keen on mother imagery in this series.<\/p>\n PAGE 4: <\/strong>A data page on previous events which have led to the near extinction of mutants. The banner – “Look at what they’ve done” – cuts across the usual matter-of-fact tone of these pages. The list of anti-mutant criminals and their body counts is largely drawn from\u00a0X-Force<\/em> #3 (2008), which had a double-page spread introducing the Human Council of the Purifiers and giving their affiliations and body counts. The Human Council were former big-league anti-mutant villains who had become infected with the techno-organic virus so as to become part of Bastion’s collective, so it’s a story that fits quite well with Hickman’s\u00a0broader themes. He’s added two names to the list: the Scarlet Witch and Mr Clean.<\/p>\n “Genosha – Sentinel | Trask | Mummudrai<\/strong> Genocide”: <\/strong>The mutant nation of Genosha was wiped out by Sentinels in New X-Men<\/em> #115-116 (2001). The “mummudrai” was Cassandra Nova Xavier, the main villain of Grant Morrison’s New X-Men\u00a0<\/em>run, who activated the Sentinels using DNA which she copied from a minor member of the Trask family, Donald Trask III.<\/p>\n The number of mutants lost in the genocide is given here as 16,521,618. That figure comes from the body count credited to Bolivar Trask, the Silver Age creator of the Sentinels, in X-Force\u00a0<\/em>#3.\u00a0That was obviously intended as a reference to the Genoshan slaughter, since\u00a0New X-Men<\/em> also gave a Genoshan population figure in that ballpark. (The\u00a0New X-Men<\/em> figure was slightly lower, but the attack was already underway by that point.) The implication seems to be that Trask’s Sentinels\u00a0only<\/em> killed people at Genosha, which is a bit odd.<\/p>\n Crediting Trask with the millions of deaths on Genosha is more symbolic than logical, since his involvement with that attack was limited to building the technology which Cassandra Nova went on to use, and his original Sentinels mainly aimed to capture and contain. Trask died in X-Men<\/em> #16 (1965) when he sacrificed himself to stop the Master Mold. After being revived by Bastion, he seemingly died again in X-Factor\u00a0<\/em>#206 (2010) when he\u00a0took advantage of a brief lapse in Bastion’s control to commit suicide by shooting himself. Quite how that works when techno-organics are involved… well, maybe we’ll find out.<\/p>\n Hickman also has the attack wiping out 94% of mutants, though New X-Men<\/em> #116 put it at simply “more than half the world’s mutants”.<\/p>\n “Decimation – Mutant Erasure by the Pretender Wanda Maximoff”:<\/strong> This refers to the Scarlet Witch de-powering most of the world’s mutants in\u00a0House of M\u00a0<\/em>#7-8 (2005), which led to the “Decimation” and “198” storylines in which the X-Men were guarding the 198 mutants that still had powers. Hickman has 986,420 mutants being depowered here;\u00a0House of M<\/em>\u00a0just had the X-Men speculating on numbers ranging from “tens of thousands” to “a million, maybe”. Though it’s not mentioned here, mutants were re-powered in\u00a0Avengers vs X-Men<\/em> #12 (2012). Unlike the others on this list, the Scarlet Witch merely de-powered the mutants (though some did die when they dropped out of the sky and such like), but the list seems to treat the two as equivalent.<\/p>\n Scarlet Witch used to be a mutant and the daughter of Magneto, but that was retconned in\u00a0Uncanny Avengers<\/em> #4 (2015), and she’s now a human who was given powers by the High Evolutionary. That’s why she’s described as a “pretender” and included on the list of human villains.<\/p>\n “The Lights”:<\/strong>\u00a0New mutants have often been referred to as “lights” in earlier stories, more in reference to the visual for Cerebro than anything else. Hickman uses it specifically to refer to an increased number of mutant births since new mutants started emerging again.<\/p>\n Steven Lang and Project Armageddon:<\/strong> Steven Lang was an anti-mutant bigot who obtained access to the Trasks’ Sentinel designs through the US government and built his own Sentinels under the auspices of Project: Armageddon in the early days of Chris Claremont’s run. The “mutants killed” figure of 29 comes from\u00a0X-Force<\/em> #3, and it’s not entirely clear what it really refers to, since it doesn’t seem to come from his published stories.<\/p>\n Mister Clean and the Church of Humanity:<\/strong>\u00a0Mister Clean was a maniac who was killing mutants in the tunnels beneath London in Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #395-398 (2001). He’s not a very notable villain, but he certainly killed more people than Lang’s credited body count of 29, which is probably why he’s\u00a0on the list. He was a follower of the anti-mutant Church of Humanity, who were introduced properly in the following arc, and proved more to be more enduring villains. He seemingly died in\u00a0Uncanny<\/em> #398.<\/p>\n Graydon Creed and the Friends of Humanity:<\/strong>\u00a0Creed was the son of Sabretooth and Mystique, and the Friends of Humanity were a grassroots anti-mutant organisation who appeared regularly in the 1990s. Creed is meant to be dead at the moment.<\/p>\n Cameron Hodge and the Right:<\/strong>\u00a0Hodge was a childhood friend of Angel who manipulated the original X-Men into their ill-advised “posing as mutant-hunters” phase, and ran the paramilitary “Right” group, before turning into a mad techno-organic thingie. Big in the 80s and 90s.<\/p>\n The Leper Queen and the Sapien League:<\/strong>\u00a0A hate group\u00a0from Peter Milligan’s\u00a0X-Men<\/em> run circa 2006. When the\u00a0X-Force\u00a0<\/em>list was prepared, they were a lot more prominent.<\/p>\n Donald Pierce and the Reavers:<\/strong> Major cyborg villains of the late 80s and 90s who, unlike the other villains on this list, continue to appear sporadically – most recently, they were in Matthew Rosenberg’s\u00a0Astonishing X-Men\u00a0<\/em>run. Despite that, Pierce’s body count apparently hasn’t increased since X-Force\u00a0<\/em>#3. In fairness, their interest seems to have drifted off the anti-mutant agenda in recent years.<\/p>\n William Stryker and the Purifiers:<\/strong> The villain of 80s graphic novel\u00a0God Loves Man Kills<\/em>\u00a0and his religious bigots. Stryker continues to show up periodically, most recently in the last\u00a0Weapon X\u00a0<\/em>series.<\/p>\n PAGES 5-6:\u00a0<\/strong>Professor X, Magneto and other X-Men in Krakoa work together to make psychic contact with the X-Men attacking the Orchis Forge. The Stepford Cuckoos, Storm and the Beast need no introduction. Trinary joined the X-Men in\u00a0X-Men Red<\/em>\u00a0and she’s a technopath (she psychically speaks to machines). Aside from cameos, I think this is her first significant appearance outside that series.<\/p>\n The Krakoan team are shown merging their minds together in order to communicate with the team in space, fitting the repeated theme of individuals forming a greater whole. The captions seem to say that the Beast contributes “observation”, Trinary “analysis”, Storm “invocation” and Professor X “connection”. Beast and Trinary seem to be the wrong way round there, and it’s vague what Storm is actually contributing – animating the water, I suppose.<\/p>\n