{"id":7144,"date":"2021-09-22T22:40:11","date_gmt":"2021-09-22T21:40:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7144"},"modified":"2021-09-22T22:40:11","modified_gmt":"2021-09-22T21:40:11","slug":"x-corp-5-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7144","title":{"rendered":"X-Corp #5 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

\"\"<\/a>X-CORP #5<\/strong>
\n“Closing Costs”<\/strong>
\nby Tini Howard, Alberto Foche & Sunny Gho<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is the final issue of X-Corp<\/em>. It’s possible it gets relaunched in some form after\u00a0Inferno<\/em>, but I suspect it’s going to wind up as another\u00a0Fallen Angels<\/em>. You can see what they were going for, but it just never quite worked.<\/p>\n

COVER \/ PAGE 1<\/strong>. Angel symbolically falling, and the face of…. I don’t know, honestly. Himself as Archangel?<\/p>\n

PAGES 2-3.<\/strong>\u00a0The Madroxes guard the Noblesse soldiers.<\/em><\/p>\n

These are the guys who were captured last issue trying to storm X-Corp’s HQ.<\/p>\n

“Ces b\u00eates nous gardent prisonniers.”<\/strong> “These beasts keep us prisoners”, though the printed version is missing the circumflex.<\/p>\n

“…cet endroit pue comme des mutants.”<\/strong> “This place stinks of mutants.”<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

“You’re complaining that we kept you in holding for the weekend?”<\/strong> Um. These guys were captured in the first half of last issue. Since then, Monet has had time to race round making all sorts of deals and buy out Kol’s company from under him. Madrox seems to confirm that they’ve been there for a couple of days at least. So if they’ve spent that whole time sitting on a bench at gunpoint instead of being in some sort of cell – which is certainly how this plays – then you can see why they might not be thrilled.<\/p>\n

“Is Doc dead? Wouldn’t we be dead?”<\/strong> The prime Madrox was killed at the end of last issue, as the first shot in Kol’s attack. It’s not entirely obvious why they call him “Doc” when they all ought to share his knowledge, though I suppose it’s something to call him instead of “Madrox”. \u00a0Cable<\/em> #9 already established that the Krakoan resurrection protocols allow Madrox to be resurrected even if his duplicates are still aound.<\/p>\n

PAGE 4.<\/strong> Recap and credits. “Closing costs” is an American term for the costs of carrying out a transaction over and above the price (legal fees and such like).<\/p>\n

PAGES 5-7.<\/strong> Archangel and Penance fight Fenris.<\/em><\/p>\n

Fight scene, isn’t it? The recap page suggests that this is supposed to be the big fight that follows when Kol is “[n]o longer constrained by the polite politics of the boardroom”. But… that doesn’t work. He\u00a0already<\/em> sent a squadron of soldiers to attack in the previous issue. We just saw them.<\/p>\n

“If you stick to the mutants…”<\/strong>\u00a0Monet is allowed to kill the mutants because they can be resurrected. Humans are protected by Krakoan law.<\/p>\n

“We tried to come to you first.”<\/strong>\u00a0Sort of. Fenris did try to talk to X-Corp in issue #2, but they already had a meeting with Sara St John lined up.<\/p>\n

PAGES 8-11.<\/strong>\u00a0Trinary rescues Sara from the Noblesse soldiers.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Noblesse soldiers are out of control thanks to their power-enhancing drugs, so Sara achieves essentially nothing in her attempted infiltration before needing rescues.<\/p>\n

“She isn’t an AI.”<\/strong> Trinary seems to be clarifying here that her power to “speak” to machines should be understood pretty loosely. She’s not literally communing with some sort of hidden intelligence, unless there’s actually one there.<\/p>\n

“Je dois tuer.”<\/strong> “I must kill”, though spread over two panels and with an English word in the middle for some reason.<\/p>\n

PAGES 12-14.<\/strong> Archangel and Penance are still fighting Fenris.<\/em><\/p>\n

“My brother and I have always known we were stronger<\/b> together.”<\/strong> Andrea is alluding to Krakoa’s obsession with mutants using their powers in combination to achieve even greater effects, and suggesting that her brother and her are the prototype for that. This isn’t really true. One of them fires force beams, the other fires disintegrator beams; they don’t really work in combination, they just have a limitation on their powers.<\/p>\n

“We just wanted to build an empire on the bones of human companies too, you know. Just like you and Xavier did.”<\/strong> Broadly fair. The whole premise of the Krakoan era is that the mutants’ pharmaceutical monopoly gives them economic dominance.<\/p>\n

“When it suits me, I am Krakoan.”<\/strong> Andrea expects (reasonably enough) to be resurrected if she dies. The big plan is to copy the designs for the valuable bandwidth generator, get them off site, and then cover their tracks by blowing up everything. The mutants will be resurrected, but the memory gap will mean that bandwidth theft is unknown.<\/p>\n

Quite why Kol, a pharmaceutical businessman, is associating himself with this plan is less than clear. Maybe he just wants revenge. Maybe he believes that Fenris are going to cut him in.<\/p>\n

“If you ever set foot on Krakoa again you’ll beg the Five to leave you dead.”<\/strong>\u00a0It’s almost impossible to get banished from Krakoa as a mutant. Archangel might be suggesting that Fenris’ willingness to kill their human allies is going to land them in the Hole with Sabretooth.<\/p>\n

“Warren and I were some of the first to come back the new way.”<\/strong> Monet is referring to the fact that they were part of the suicide mission against Orchis in\u00a0House of X<\/em> #4, which led to the first on-camera resurrection. There had been resurrections before then, but only of people who had died long before. Monet and Warren were indeed among the first to die knowing that they might come back.<\/p>\n

PAGES 15-17.<\/strong>\u00a0Kol and Selene.<\/em><\/p>\n

“People know about you, killer.”<\/strong> Kol is probably referring to Selene’s involvement in the “Power Elite” arc in\u00a0Captain America<\/em>, where she did indeed kill people and was handed over to Krakoan justice. Quite why she isn’t in the Hole has never been very clear, and it feels most likely to be a breakdown of communication.<\/p>\n

“I am a walking pharmaceutical experiment.”<\/strong> Kol apparently has some sort of terminal illness which is neutralised by experimental drugs. In effect, he’s another type of technologically-enhanced human, and thus another of those posthumans everyone on Krakoa worried about so much.<\/p>\n

PAGES 18-19.<\/strong>\u00a0The Madroxes absorb Fenris’s energy.<\/em><\/p>\n

Um. Madrox’s powers are supposed to be about absorbing kinetic energy, so it makes sense that he can absorb the force blasts. But the disintegrator…?<\/p>\n

“That’s the patented Madrox workflow!”<\/strong> Callback to the one-man workflow explanation from issue #3.<\/p>\n

PAGE 20.<\/strong> Data page expanding on what the Madroxes were just doing. Again, this is a callback to a similarly-designed data page from issue #3.<\/p>\n

PAGE 21.<\/strong> Mastermind traps Kol.<\/em><\/p>\n

Speaks for itself.<\/p>\n

PAGES 22-23.<\/strong>\u00a0Madrox is resurrected.<\/em><\/p>\n

He’s reunited with Layla Miller and their son Davey. Issue #3 made some play of how he wasn’t spending time with them because he was busy at work. As Trinary points out, Madrox never wanted the board seat anyway.<\/p>\n

For whatever reason, Warren is impressed enough to agree to Trinary joining the board despite his previous reservations about her criminal record… which haven’t really come up. Not sure there’s any particular reason for him to change his view on that.<\/p>\n

PAGE 24.<\/strong> Data page. An X-Corp press release identifying Warren as Chairman and the directors as Monet, Selene, Mastermind and Trinary. I believe this is the first time we’ve been given a real name for Trinary.<\/p>\n

PAGE 25.<\/strong> Trailers. Since this is the last issue, the Krakoan reads NEXT: INFERNO.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. X-CORP #5 “Closing Costs” by Tini Howard, Alberto Foche & Sunny Gho This is the final issue of X-Corp. It’s possible it gets relaunched in some form after\u00a0Inferno, but I suspect it’s going to wind up as another\u00a0Fallen Angels. You can […]<\/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-7144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7144","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=7144"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7146,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7144\/revisions\/7146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}