{"id":5073,"date":"2020-02-04T22:02:15","date_gmt":"2020-02-04T22:02:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=5073"},"modified":"2020-02-04T22:02:15","modified_gmt":"2020-02-04T22:02:15","slug":"new-mutants-6-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=5073","title":{"rendered":"New Mutants #6 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As always, this post contains spoilers, and the page numbers go by the digital edition. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

COVER \/ PAGE 1:<\/strong> Armor, Maxime, Manon, Glob Herman and Boom-Boom sit awkwardly on the steps of Beak’s burning farmhouse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 2-3:<\/strong> Recap and credits. This is “Not as Hoped” by Ed Brisson, Flaviano and Carlos Lopez.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 4-17.<\/strong> Everyone fights the drug dealers. The kids nearly escape, but T\u00famulo kills Beak’s parents, then kills himself, claiming that his government will blame the mutants.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, 13 pages, but it’s basically an extended action sequence, which mostly speaks for itself. Of note along the way…<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Boom-Boom.<\/strong> She’s clearly drunk, and seems irritated that Armor isn’t more grateful for her assistance. But we’re also reminded that beneath it all, Boom-Boom is still pretty competent, even if Armor seems to see her as a bit of a liability. She can take down the drug dealers without her powers, and she was the only person on Krakoa who figured out that Armor’s crew needed help. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maxime and Manon.<\/strong> Their ethical standards and common sense both remain very doubtful – we’ll come back to that in a bit. However, when Glob Herman calls them on their dubious decisions, they don’t come across as sociopathic – they promptly justify their actions as well-intentioned self-defence, simply using the most obvious route. That said, nor do they respond to any of the points about their moral decisions – it’s a purely practical point from Glob (lack of subtlety and the risk of attracting more guards) that makes them concede the point. Note that while nobody points it out here, Maxime and Manon have (indirectly) killed two of the drug gang, which breaks the laws of Krakoa. They also try to kill more, by getting the gang to turn on one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Glob Herman.<\/strong> Glob comes across pretty well here, for a character who’s often portrayed as sad-sack comic relief. He’s the one who steps up to talk sense into Maxime and Manon; his idea of how to use their powers is objectively better; and he actually subdues an armed gang member in straight hand to hand combat. Brisson often writes Glob as a character who rises to the occasion when the situation is too pressing for him to become self-conscious, and this seems to be in that vein.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Angel.<\/strong> Angel gives a speech at the end making the point that if she surrenders to T\u00famulo then Beak will die from his gunshot wound, so that somebody is going to die whatever happens. Of course, most mutants in the Hickman era are pretty relaxed about the threat of death, due to the resurrection protocols. Either Angel isn’t aware of them, or she’s so far out of the loop that they don’t come to mind in the heat of the moment – and either way, nobody else flags it to her. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

T\u00famulo<\/strong>, in contrast, is surprisingly willing to shoot himself, though he does seem to hesitate. It’s clear enough why he thinks this will encourage an anti-mutant stance from his government; it’s less obvious why he thinks that is worth dying for himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGE 18.<\/strong> A data page on the Bohem Cartel. It’s basically a very large drug cartel, and we’re given assorted names for people involved. “Bohem” is apparently the name of the town or city where they have their base of operations; I don’t think we’ve seen it mentioned before. It’s Spanish for “Bohemian”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of the other henchmen are established characters, as far as I know. So far as the nicknames are concerned, the guy on top is “the King”, and the two main lieutenants are “the Red” and “the Yellow”. The three guys shown under the Red are also colours: the Purple, the Orange and the Green. But the three listed under Yellow are not: aside from T\u00famulo, the others are the Sarcophagus and the Death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 19-20.<\/strong> Angel and her family race to the hospital in T\u00famulo’s truck, while the Krakoans are left behind<\/em> to reflect on how badly things went.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only Glob seems really upset about it. Maxime and Manon look blank, Armor is taking stock of the situation, and Boom-Boom is checking her phone (though admittedly, she’s trying to figure out how they can get back to civilisation, which is a reasonable thing to do).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGE 21.<\/strong> A data page with an article from something called “DOX”, apparently an anti-mutant website, reporting on the mutant-related shooting in Nebraska. The implication seems to be that Dox is a website which exposes mutants trying to live in the normal world, through tip-offs from readers. Their account of events appears to be based on leaks from the local police. The author either doesn’t know who the victims were, or doesn’t want to spoil his angle by explaining that drug dealers were involved – it’s ambiguous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 22-25.<\/strong> On Krakoa, Armor and Glob find that Maxime and Manon have altered the memories of Beak and all his families, so that they believe that Beak’s parents actually died years ago.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Again, the angle seems to be that Maxime and Manon kind of mean well, but are alarmingly lacking in basic moral instincts – a disturbing thing in a telepath. They claim that they were trying to make themselves useful because they know nobody else trusts them (understandably, given the circumstances of their debut in Extermination<\/em> and their all-purpose creepiness). Armor and Glob decide that reversing this would only make matters even worse, but it’s pretty clear that we’ll be getting back to this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note that we’ve seen some suggestions that everyone on Krakoa is being psychically affected to some extent anyway, making them prone to get on board with the whole Krakoan culture. Beak, Angel and co all seem surprisingly cheerful now that they’re on Krakoa, but Maxime and Manon’s interference makes it difficult to tell whether there’s anything else going on there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 26-27.<\/strong> The Krakoan text in the trailer reads: NEXT: BIRD OF PREY.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and the page numbers go by the digital edition. COVER \/ PAGE 1: Armor, Maxime, Manon, Glob Herman and Boom-Boom sit awkwardly on the steps of Beak’s burning farmhouse. PAGES 2-3: Recap and credits. This is “Not as Hoped” by Ed Brisson, Flaviano and Carlos Lopez. PAGES 4-17. Everyone […]<\/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":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hoxpox"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5073","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=5073"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5073\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5074,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5073\/revisions\/5074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}