{"id":6548,"date":"2021-03-31T21:42:41","date_gmt":"2021-03-31T20:42:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=6548"},"modified":"2021-03-31T21:42:41","modified_gmt":"2021-03-31T20:42:41","slug":"x-men-19-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=6548","title":{"rendered":"X-Men #19 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

\"\"<\/a>X-MEN vol 5 #19
\n“Out of the Vault”
\nby Jonathan Hickman, Mahmud Asrar & Sunny Gho<\/strong><\/p>\n

COVER \/ PAGE 1.<\/strong> The Children of the Vault, being dramatic.<\/p>\n

PAGE 2.<\/strong>\u00a0Data page.<\/em><\/p>\n

It’s been a while since we’ve had an issue which is quite so keen on the graphics. It’s perhaps not immediately obvious on this page, but the timeline runs from the top of the page to the bottom, so Synch is kind-of being presented as the central rock in this group.<\/p>\n

PAGES 3-4.<\/strong> Wolverine, Synch and Darwin survive the explosion.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is the aftermath of the explosion from the previous issue (this being a rare two-parter in Hickman’s\u00a0X-Men<\/em>). The narrator is Synch, as clarified later. The reasons for that become apparent at the end of the issue, as he’s presumably the only one of the trio to retain memories of this after the event.<\/p>\n

The scale of the Vault, both in terms of the size of the city and the amount of time these three spend in it (thanks to its time dilation) is left vague, presumably to give it a sense of being impossible to grasp. We established last issue that despite the size of this city, there are only a comparatively small number of Children actually\u00a0living<\/em> in it, which makes it somewhat more plausible that the three interlopers can sneak around in there for so long.<\/p>\n

Quite\u00a0why<\/em> the Children are building such a huge city isn’t directly addressed. However, issue #5 presents the Children of the Vault as counterparts of the Children of Tomorrow from Hickman’s\u00a0Ultimates<\/em> run, and their City spread across Europe once released into the outside world. Perhaps this is the Children of the Vault developing the technology.<\/p>\n

PAGE 5.<\/strong> Recap and credits. The title, “Out of the Vault”, completes a trilogy with issue #5’s “Into the Vault” and last issue’s “Inside the Vault” – though in terms of the actual content, last issue was really more of the entrance, and it’s this issue that has the time spent inside.<\/p>\n

PAGE 6.<\/strong> Data page. This is largely self-explanatory.<\/p>\n

Horadar, from whom Synch picks up teleportation powers, is new. The new Children in this issue keep the established use of Spanish codenames; “Horadar” apparently means “to pierce” or “to bore”, in the tunnelling sense, which I suppose loosely fits with the teleportation powers.<\/p>\n

The “City brain” is the computer that we saw Serafina talking to in issue #5. It’s not immediately clear to me what the entry for “Time debt inversion” is meant to refer to.<\/p>\n

We’re told that the passage of time relative to the outside world is not consistent, contributing to the ungraspable nature of the whole thing. (In other words, we can’t try and work it out based on the passage of time in the real world.)<\/p>\n

PAGES 7-8.<\/strong> The mutants explore the City.<\/em><\/p>\n

Basically showing us some of the elements from the preceding data page. Synch claims to that they “gained a surface understanding of the Vault” after going through six of the Vault’s cycles – that would be two years, subjectively.<\/p>\n

PAGE 9.<\/strong> Data page. Again, this pretty much speaks for itself. The lines are showing splitting apart\u00a0before<\/em> the entry for the recon team “fractur[ing]”, and they don’t come together again for the entry about them “reform[ing]”. Nonetheless, there’s a definite sense here that desperation is starting to set in.<\/p>\n

Of the four Children whose DNA Synch takes, Fuego is the guy with the fire head. Horadar was mentioned on the preceding data page, and Diamante and Madre are new. Diamente, of course, is “Diamond”. We see him in stasis on page 12; he’s the guy with the strange brain dome on his head, and Synch calls him a “living repository of Vault history.” Madre is “Mother”, for reasons which will become obvious on the next page.<\/p>\n

PAGES 10-11.<\/strong>\u00a0The mutants escape Madre and fake death.<\/em><\/p>\n

Synch’s narration plays up the parallels between Krakoa and the Vault – “where,\u00a0like our mutant Arbor Magna<\/em>…”<\/p>\n

The plan to fake their death is basically to set off an explosion and cut off Darwin’s forearm so that they can leave it in the wreckage. He’ll grow it back, and hopefully the Children will believe everyone died. The reason why this turns out to be a bad idea is explained later: it gives the Children a DNA sample from Darwin, from which the City concludes that they need his powers in order to evolve to a fourth incarnation that can out-compete mutants.<\/p>\n

PAGES 12-13.<\/strong> Synch copies Diamante’s powers and knowledge.<\/em><\/p>\n

Synch compares this to Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and giving it as a gift to humankind (here, mutantkind). This didn’t work out so well for Prometheus, and nor will it for synch.<\/p>\n

The idea here is that Diamente’s power is<\/em> his complete knowledge of the Vault’s history, and so Synch can copy it and learn about their history. Obviously, he learns rather more detail than the recap we see here.<\/p>\n

The X-Men’s encounter with the first-generation Children was in the “Supernovas” arc that began in \u00a0X-Men<\/em> vol 2 #188, during the Mike Carey run. They also show up later in his run.<\/p>\n

The second generation Children, we’re told, was the City’s next attempt, and they got captured and killed by Orchis (along with a whole bunch of actual mutants). It’s not clear whether\u00a0all<\/em> of these second-generation Children got captured by Orchis, or just a small group. At any rate, we saw Serafina being freed by the X-Men and escaping in issue #1. She claimed in that issue that she “emerged before I was fully cooked”, and that she “had to” because “There are wild gods loose in the world”. Synch’s recap simply says that the second-gen Children were “produced and let loose on the world”, without addressing Serafina’s comments. This change of generation also apparently explains Serafina’s colour inversion.<\/p>\n

The third generation were\u00a0going<\/em> to be the final generation of Children – until Darwin’s DNA came along.<\/p>\n

PAGES 14-15.<\/strong>\u00a0The mutants go after the City itself and lose.<\/em><\/p>\n

Synch suggests here that it took quite a long time before Wolverine would let him call her Laura – though surely not\u00a0this<\/em> far into events. The idea here – as clarified on the next page – is that Laura and Darwin are captured, and only Synch\u00a0escapes<\/em>. The art doesn’t really convey that, since the final panel looks more like Synch is the one in a cell.<\/p>\n

PAGE 16.<\/strong> Another data page. All, again, pretty straightforward. Darwin’s line ends not because he’s dead as such, but because he’s trapped in continuous experiments by the Children and no longer has any agency.<\/p>\n

Synch’s brief escape from the Vault’s temporal bubble seems to be a necessary plot point to allow the other two to spend a century or more in captivity, without him dying of old age. It’s not entirely clear, though, why he doesn’t just tunnel out of the Vault entirely and call in the X-Men for help – certainly if he’s willing to wait a week before going back in.<\/p>\n

PAGES 17-20.<\/strong> Synch rescues Wolverine.<\/em><\/p>\n

From the look of it, he uses his accumulated skills to build some sort of improvised device that lets him fight past the guards. His narration has two main points worth noting. First, he’s now taking the very mutant-nationalist line that as a child, before his powers emerged, he was “posing as human”. These are the trends in Krakoan thought that aren’t so far removed from the superiority complex of the Children of the Vault.<\/p>\n

Second, he’s inverting an old trope about being willing to die for someone you love. Since mutants\u00a0can’t<\/em> die in the Krakoan era – not as long as the Five are still around to revive them, at any rate – such concepts don’t make sense to them. The next best alternative is an act of unbelievable endurance, which is what we’re seeing here.<\/p>\n

PAGE 21.<\/strong>\u00a0Another data page. Basically, on encountering the Krakoans, the City has decided it needs a fourth generation of Children, and Darwin is just ideal for getting them there.<\/p>\n

Unusually, Merbavon – the “Child disruptor” from whom Synch copies the field disruptor – doesn’t seem to have a Spanish name.<\/p>\n

PAGES 22-24.<\/strong> Synch escapes the Vault while Laura holds the Children at bay.<\/em><\/p>\n

Again, while the Children are completely unsympathetic here, there are definite parallels in their insistence that they’re the future of the planet. They even have an X design on their vault door.<\/p>\n

PAGES 25-27.<\/strong>\u00a0Synch and Wolverine are resurrected.<\/em><\/p>\n

The idea is presumably that Synch made it far enough out of the Vault before being killed that Professor X was able to take a back-up from him using Cerebro. As a result, he remembers the insane amount of time he spent there. Laura, who died in the Vault, wasn’t backed up, and so has no memories of any of that. From her point of view, she barely knows him. Synch seems remarkably relaxed about that, presumably because he accepts this as the real Laura – though the loss of the majority of her lifespan in memory surely stretches the boundaries of belief that it’s the “same” person being resurrected. Nonetheless, we can take it as read at this stage that the magic\/reality-warping aspects of resurrection are intended to be taken at face value, and that the people restored are “real”, whatever real means.<\/p>\n

Along similar lines, note that the resurrected Laura already has her adamantium claws, which seems to confirm that characters like her and Wolverine are restored in that form. Presumably this is something to do with Proteus’s reality-warping contribution to the exercise, and some sort of need (or desire) to replicate the previous body in certain core ways.<\/p>\n

Unusually, this issue has no trailer page, presumably because it used up its page budget on timelines.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. X-MEN vol 5 #19 “Out of the Vault” by Jonathan Hickman, Mahmud Asrar & Sunny Gho COVER \/ PAGE 1. The Children of the Vault, being dramatic. PAGE 2.\u00a0Data page. It’s been a while since we’ve had an issue which is […]<\/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":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6548","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=6548"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6550,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6548\/revisions\/6550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}