{"id":7211,"date":"2021-10-08T19:50:05","date_gmt":"2021-10-08T18:50:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7211"},"modified":"2021-10-08T19:50:05","modified_gmt":"2021-10-08T18:50:05","slug":"new-mutants-22-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7211","title":{"rendered":"New Mutants #22 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/Unknown-26.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7212 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/Unknown-26.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"182\" height=\"277\" \/><\/a><strong>NEW MUTANTS vol 4 #22<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>&#8220;Shadows &amp; Mirrors&#8221;<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>by Vita Ayala &amp; Rod Reis<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>COVER \/ PAGE 1:<\/strong> The Shadow King in profile, with the New Mutants fighting inside his mind.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 2-4.<\/strong> <em>Inside the Shadow King&#8217;s illusion, the New Mutants make a last stand to defend Krakoa.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The horde of attackers include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Some good old fashioned\u00a0<strong>Sentinels<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>Former X-Man <strong>Omega Sentinel<\/strong>, currently allied with Orchis as seen in\u00a0<em>House of X<\/em> and\u00a0<em>X-Men<\/em>. I&#8217;ll come back to her.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Nimrod<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Belasco<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>S&#8217;ym<\/strong>, Magik&#8217;s former sidekick demon turned insurgent, and one of the main villains from the original Inferno.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The Brood<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>The First Horsemen<\/strong>, who aren&#8217;t actually enemies of Krakoa any more.<\/li>\n<li><strong>AIM<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>Some people from\u00a0<strong>Orchis<\/strong>, including the helicopter in the top right and the evolved apes in the middle of the page.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Some of these guys are interesting. Many of them are the usual suspects, or people that the New Mutants or Shadow King would naturally be aware of from living on Krakoa. But what&#8217;s Omega Sentinel doing there? Nobody&#8217;s ever come back from Orchis&#8217;s space station with an account of what happened there. So why has Shadow King included an X-Man, albeit an obscure one, in this scenario? It could just be an error, but&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 5.<\/strong> Recap and credits.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 6-9.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Lost Club visit Scout.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This is all fairly self-explanatory, and a reconciliation between Gabby and her friends at the end of this storyline. Their efforts to help her and get the Five to resurrect her were seen in the previous two issues.<\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;Scarlet Witch thing&#8221; is the investigation into the death of the Scarlet Witch as seen in\u00a0<em>X-Men: Trial of Magneto<\/em> #1-2. As Gabby says, Laura and Daken (principally Daken) are both caught up in that investigation.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 10-12.<\/strong> <em>The Shadow King &#8220;negotiates&#8221; with the New Mutants.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The Cairo marketplace is his original home, and he seems to have chosen it simply as a place that is homely and reassuring (for him, but he may not be too conscious of the difference). This is his soft sell phase.<\/p>\n<p>The Shadow King says that &#8220;as per your own request, you&#8217;re my guests.&#8221; We didn&#8217;t actually see what happened when the New Mutants arrived &#8211; the previous issue ended with them on their way to see him, and Shadow King awaiting their arrival.<\/p>\n<p>The character who says she &#8220;can&#8217;t think of a single reason I would allow myself to fall under your thrall again&#8221; &#8211; not identifiable from the art &#8211; is almost certainly Karma, who was possessed by him circa\u00a0<em>New Mutants<\/em> vol 1 #30. That&#8217;s also what she&#8217;s alluding to in page 10 panel 3. The line\u00a0<em>might<\/em> conceivably belong to Wolfsbane, who was being manipulated by the Shadow King in this series.<\/p>\n<p>Magik&#8217;s line of dialogue in page 10 panel 5 doesn&#8217;t make any sense to me and feels like a non sequitur.<\/p>\n<p>The Shadow King&#8217;s basic pitch is that nations always rise and fall, that Krakoa will be no different, and that he worries that mutants are getting complacent so that they won&#8217;t be ready to survive the inevitable. This doesn&#8217;t entirely make sense as he describes it &#8211; he&#8217;s comparing the fall of Constantinople over many centuries with the collapse of a newly-minted Krakoa. Somewhat more realistic is his stance that he thought Apocalypse would handle this problem, but he moved into the gap once Apocalypse departed for Amenth (at the end of &#8220;X of Swords&#8221;).<\/p>\n<p>By way of context, we were told in issue #19 that the &#8220;Shadow King&#8221; on Krakoa is the mutant host Amahl Farouk with a reduced influence from the Shadow King psychic entity that normally possesses him. The implication, then, is that Farouk genuinely means well, but that the Shadow King may be twisting the way he goes about it.<\/p>\n<p>Ironically, Shadow King says that Xavier and Magneto believe &#8220;that they have discovered the secret to an indestructible nation.&#8221; In fact, <em>House of X<\/em> and\u00a0<em>Powers of X<\/em> made clear that Moira has warned them that they always lose, and we&#8217;ve seen that they&#8217;re heavily preoccupied with trying to get rid of Orchis as an existential threat. So they believe no such thing. Either Shadow King doesn&#8217;t know that, or he&#8217;s playing along with Krakoa as the New Mutants see it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 13.<\/strong> Data page. A prose piece about Farouk as a child persona trapped within the Shadow King. This seems to be a description of Charles Xavier&#8217;s first encounter with Farouk, in flashback in\u00a0<em>X-Men<\/em> vol 1 #117. The &#8220;girl&#8221; pickpocket is the young Ororo. There seems to be a suggestion that Farouk&#8217;s own mind was entirely dormant until this encounter with Xavier, after which he had some more awareness.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 14-15.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Scout and Lost Club set off after the New Mutants.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>All self-explanatory.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 16-17.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>The Shadow King continues his pitch.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The New Mutants&#8217; argument is that all Farouk is doing is harming children to prepare them for something that might never happen. Farouk disagrees, but interestingly, his specific response is &#8220;Without need for rest, the machines will hunt us to extinction.&#8221; This is very much Moira&#8217;s central concern, and the one that Xavier and Magneto are supposedly motivated by. Does he know more about all that than he&#8217;s letting on? He does point out that he &#8220;know[s] the truth of countless dimensions&#8221;, probably alluding to the fact that the Shadow King is meant to have multiversal aspects. In other words, even if he hasn&#8217;t seen Moira&#8217;s specific past lives, he may well have a similar perspective about how things tend to turn out.<\/p>\n<p>At any rate, Farouk then shifts into a rather more conventional villain analysis that the mutants have to be predators in order to avoid being the prey. This earns him a lecture about how anti-mutant sentiment would be justified if the mutants acted like that, and the usual blather about mutants being a higher order of being who in some vague and unspecified way are able to transcend human categories. It&#8217;s hard to tell how much we&#8217;re meant to accept that stuff at face value and how much Farouk&#8217;s riposte about youthful idealism is meant to be semi-legitimate.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 18-20.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Back to the warfare illusions.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Gorgeous art, but it speaks for itself in plot terms.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 21.<\/strong> Data page. The thrust is that he&#8217;s running them through the scenario multiple times in the hope of getting them to the realisation he was after. Curiously, the last one mentions a brief interruption by an anomaly, which doesn&#8217;t seem to feed into the rest of the issue. Presumably we&#8217;ll get back to it next issue.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 22-24.<\/strong> <em>Lost Club arrive.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>And they find the New Mutants unconscious and under Farouk&#8217;s power.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 25.<\/strong> Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: FALL OF THE SHADOW CHILDREN.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. NEW MUTANTS vol 4 #22 &#8220;Shadows &amp; Mirrors&#8221; by Vita Ayala &amp; Rod Reis COVER \/ PAGE 1: The Shadow King in profile, with the New Mutants fighting inside his mind. PAGES 2-4. Inside the Shadow King&#8217;s illusion, the New Mutants [&hellip;]<\/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-7211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7211","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=7211"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7213,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7211\/revisions\/7213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}