{"id":5745,"date":"2020-10-15T20:01:29","date_gmt":"2020-10-15T19:01:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=5745"},"modified":"2020-10-15T20:01:29","modified_gmt":"2020-10-15T19:01:29","slug":"new-mutants-13-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=5745","title":{"rendered":"New Mutants #13 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

NEW MUTANTS<\/strong> vol 4 #13<\/strong>
“X of Swords, Chapter 7”<\/strong>
by Ed Brisson & Rod Reis<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

COVER \/ PAGE 1<\/strong>: Magik and Cypher sparring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 2-4.<\/strong> Magik calls Cyclops to call him home.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cyclops and Cable are still on the SWORD orbital base, where we left them in X of Swords: Creation<\/em>. The timeline of their subplot is deeply confused, since essentially no time seems to have passed for them while Chapters 2 to 6 have passed for everyone else, but I’ll come back to that in the Cable <\/em>#5 annotations. At any rate, Magik is bringing them up to speed on the premise of the crossover. They don’t return immediately, and Magik will give them another call in Cable<\/em> #5 to chase them up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

“That sword you got from Shinjuku.”<\/strong> Shinjuku is a district of Tokyo, but that’s not where Cable got the Light of Galador sword, so presumably Magik’s just being sarcastic about its design. The sword is a major plot point in Cable<\/em> but doesn’t really need to concern us here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 5-6.<\/strong> Recap and credits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 7-10. <\/strong>Warlock reassures Cypher; Magik spars with him.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The general theme of Cypher as a non-combatant who’s out of his depth in battle goes back to his role in New Mutants<\/em>, where Warlock would form a suit of protective armour. Poor Cypher has a power that would be massively useful in the real world, but not so much in the superhero genre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Which I<\/strong> suppose we’re not keeping a secret any more”<\/strong> Cypher has been pretending to have a techno-organic arm ever since arriving on Krakoa. Giant-Size X-Men: Nightcrawler<\/em> revealed that it was actually Warlock. Judging from Cypher’s comment here, he hasn’t actually<\/em> told anyone about Warlock yet, but it’s going to become pretty obvious when he shows up with his sword without doing any questing. (Magik was in GSX: Nightcrawler<\/em>, and learned about Warlock there.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Krakoa.<\/strong> Krakoa’s line of dialogue is obviously meant to say something like “mind the trees”. The actual text is placeholder – if you compare with the cipher used in X of Swords: Creation<\/em>, where he had some long decipherable speeches, it simply reads GIBBERISH.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGE 11.<\/strong> Data page on the Soul Sword. This is a very well established piece of X-Men history, and there’s nothing new here; all of this dates from Illyana’s earliest appearances as Magik in the early 80s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 12-13.<\/strong> Krakoa tries to persuade Cypher to drop out.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Krakoa doesn’t want to lose his translator; Cypher feels honour bound to sign up. Note though that, as we’re reminded later, Krakoa can also speak through Mondo, if he really has to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Krakoa’s dialogue<\/strong> is just placeholder text again. (The first line is GIBBERISH again. The second is LOREM IPSUM DOLOR SIT AMET. The third seems to be LIAM NONUMMY.) But the thrust is obvious from Cypher’s dialogue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Hellions: <\/strong>Their side mission was set up in the preceding chapter, Hellions<\/em> #5. Professor X voted against it there, but I guess that if once it’s happening, he’s going to root for it to work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGE 14: <\/strong>Data page about another Otherworld realm that was mentioned in X of Swords: Creation<\/em> but hasn’t been seen yet. All of the information here is new.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 15-20.<\/strong> Magik and Cypher spar; Exodus tries to persuade Cypher to die.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Magik reiterates the point that Cypher is going to be completely out of his depth here. She obviously expects him to get killed quickly and offers to at least try and look out for him. (Of course, this sort of arc usually ends with Cypher turning out to be unpredictably essential to victory…)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Exodus understandably expects Sinister to fail – even Sinister thinks it’s a suicide mission, after all. He wants Cypher replaced by somebody else as a champion of Krakoa. His big idea is to kill Cypher, knowing that he’ll be revived in due course (once resurrections are up and running again), and that in the meantime somebody better can take is place. Cypher is surely right when he says later on that Saturnyne isn’t likely to stand for this. Mind you, magical stories are<\/em> often very hyper-literal in their rules, and often reward people for finding silly loopholes. At any rate, Exodus backs off rather than proceed in the face of Cypher’s opposition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGE 21.<\/strong> A brief data page about Warlock, telling us nothing we didn’t already know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 22-23.<\/strong> Krakoa tries again to persuade Cypher to drop out.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cypher used Mondo as a vehicle for Krakoa in early issues of the series. Krakoa made it very clear that he didn’t like it, so he must feel very strongly about talking Cypher out of this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGES 24-26.<\/strong> More sparring, and Cypher takes his place at the hub.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea that Cypher can read body language has come up before, and was pushed for a while a few years back, but seems to have faded out of fashion again. In any event, being able to read Magik’s movements is only going to take him so far if he doesn’t have the skill to do anything about them in response.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAGE 27.<\/strong> Trailers. The Krakoan is presumably meant to say NEXT: VESCORA (the alien villains in the next chapter), but it actually says NEXT: VESCDRA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. NEW MUTANTS vol 4 #13“X of Swords, Chapter 7”by Ed Brisson & Rod Reis COVER \/ PAGE 1: Magik and Cypher sparring. PAGES 2-4. Magik calls Cyclops to call him home. Cyclops and Cable are still on the SWORD orbital base, […]<\/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-5745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5745","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=5745"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5745\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5752,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5745\/revisions\/5752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}