{"id":5537,"date":"2020-08-26T20:46:17","date_gmt":"2020-08-26T19:46:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=5537"},"modified":"2020-08-26T20:46:17","modified_gmt":"2020-08-26T19:46:17","slug":"hellions-3-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=5537","title":{"rendered":"Hellions #3 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

HELLIONS #3<\/strong>
“Nothing People”<\/strong>
by Zeb Wells & Stephen Segovia<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

COVER \/ PAGE 1.<\/strong> Madelyne Pryor, as the Goblin Queen, stands over a pentagram displaying the Hellions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGE 2.<\/strong> Another epigraph from Nightcrawler, as in the first two issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 3-6.<\/strong> Madelyne talks to Havok.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’ll skip over the irritatingly stupid grimdark bit. The four panels on the right hand side of page 4 are basically recapping Madelyne Pryor’s history up to Inferno. The first panel shows Madelyne in her pilot outfit from when she had just met Cyclops (though I’m not sure she ever wears precisely this outfit on panel). She talks about how she gave that up to be with Havok’s brother Cyclops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The second panel shows her while she was pregnant with Nathan Summers. Scott and Madelyne were actually still together at the birth (just before Uncanny X-Men<\/em> vol 1 #201), but Scott did indeed leave shortly after when his “first love” Jean Grey returned. What Madelyne doesn’t spell out here is that she turned out to be a clone of Jean Grey, even though she didn’t know it at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The third panel, with Madelyne as a blank figure, is a reference to a dream sequence in Uncanny X-Men<\/em> vol 1 #233, in which Madelyne imagined all of her identity being taken from her and given back to the real Jean, leaving her as a blank. (This was one issue after she had seen Scott and Jean together on television and realised why Scott had left her.) The “nowhere place” is presumably the X-Men’s Australian ghost town base, where she was living at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fourth panel shows her in the present as the Goblyn Queen, but it was also the next part of her character’s original evolution, as “Inferno” followed within a year or so of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Havok’s speech refers to the romantic subplot between himself and Madelyne that ran from roughly Uncanny X-Men<\/em> vol 1 #221 through to Inferno in Uncanny X-Men<\/em> vol 1 #239-243. As Havok says, the end impression was that Madelyne was using him as a stand-in for his brother to try and recreate an imitation of her marriage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 7-8.<\/strong> Credits and recap page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 9-11.<\/strong> Psylocke faces down Wild Child.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 12-15.<\/strong> Madelyne and Havok continue talking while the Marauders try to break into Nanny and Orphan-Maker’s armour.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It’s very, very unwise to pretend I don’t exist. It’s my least favourite thing.”<\/strong> The idea here is that Madelyne’s driving motivation remains – as in the pre-Inferno era – the sense that she’s being ignored, overlooked and cast aside. As she mentioned in the previous issue, Madelyne returned a while back but, well, nobody seemed to care. Clearly, she’s not happy about that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You shot me in the head and stole my baby.”<\/strong> The Marauders stole Madelyne’s baby on Mr Sinister’s orders in Uncanny X-Men<\/em> vol 1 #206. The actual attack is shown in flashback in Uncanny X-Men<\/em> vol 1 #215, and it involved Scalphunter and Arclight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“He made us like this, in this lab.”<\/strong> Madelyne was a clone of Jean Grey created by Mr Sinister in the lab underneath the orphanage. This particular Scalphunter presumably was too, though by all appearances the Marauders have originals out there somewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 19-22.<\/strong> Psylocke defeats Wild Child.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGE 23.<\/strong> Data page. Somebody reflects on Psylocke’s role in the group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As in previous issues, it’s unclear who’s writing this. It clearly isn’t<\/em> either Cyclops or Psylocke, both of whom are referred to in the third person. It’s clearly a member of the X-Men from some time back, who served under Cyclops as team leader. Maybe the most likely candidate is Nightcrawler, who must keep getting epigraphs for a reason. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“She was raised from youth by a mystical ninja murder cult.”<\/strong> The Hand, as shown in various flashbacks in Fallen Angels<\/em>. (Ah, Fallen Angels<\/em>. It seems so long ago already.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The writer suggests that the Hellions will wind up following Psylocke rather than Mr Sinister, and also wonders why Psylocke has agreed to work for him. In Fallen Angels<\/em>, Psylocke’s motivations for agreeing to work with Sinister were left somewhat vague (beyond her initial need to reach Apoth, which is no longer an issue). In the final issue, she agreed that Sinister could call on her “if I believe your need is just”. She also disbanded the just-formed Fallen Angels <\/em>team because the book was being cancelled<\/s> because she had come to realise that given her own disturbed past, she would wind up making them all like her. Perhaps she thinks that the Hellions are so bad to start with that that would be an improvement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 20-21.<\/strong> Madelyne announces her great plan.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Basically, she’s so determined to be noticed that she’s going to unleash all of the cloned Marauders as an army of mutants who will flood Krakoa and kill everyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Only fools will argue I never existed.”<\/strong> Madelyne is presumably alluding to the hazy question of what exactly she is. Inferno implied that she was a clone that had no mind or soul of its own until it was animated by the same part of Jean Grey that had previously been borrowed by Phoenix (and was initially rejected by Jean due to all the Dark Phoenix stuff). On that reading, Inferno ends with Madelyne being reabsorbed into Jean, so that Madelyne apparently never existed as anything more than a splinter of Jean. Obviously, that’s inconsistent with the fact that she later came back – but that was done by Nate Grey, and there’s a plausible reading of those stories too on which the revived Madelyne is some sort of copy of a psychic echo. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 22-24.<\/strong> The Marauders breach Orphan-Maker’s armour.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back in X-Factor<\/em> vol 1, it was repeatedly suggested that Orphan-Maker was wearing containment armour for a very good reason, though the main implication seemed to be that it was arresting his development and preventing him from reaching puberty and manifesting mutant powers that would be in some way horrifically uncontrollable and destructive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGE 25.<\/strong> Wild Child comes to his senses.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 26-27.<\/strong> Trailers and credits. The Krakoan reads NEXT: BOW DOWN.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. HELLIONS #3“Nothing People”by Zeb Wells & Stephen Segovia COVER \/ PAGE 1. Madelyne Pryor, as the Goblin Queen, stands over a pentagram displaying the Hellions. PAGE 2. Another epigraph from Nightcrawler, as in the first two issues. PAGES 3-6. Madelyne talks […]<\/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,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5537","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=5537"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5539,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5537\/revisions\/5539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}