{"id":7990,"date":"2022-06-24T23:29:16","date_gmt":"2022-06-24T22:29:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7990"},"modified":"2022-06-25T09:25:23","modified_gmt":"2022-06-25T08:25:23","slug":"immortal-x-men-3-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=7990","title":{"rendered":"Immortal X-Men #3 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/Unknown-9.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7991 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/Unknown-9.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"181\" height=\"279\" \/><\/a>IMMORTAL X-MEN #3<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>&#8220;The New Testament of Irene Adler&#8221;<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Writer: Kieron Gillen<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Artist: Lucas Werneck<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Colourist: Dijjo Lima<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Letterer: Clayton Cowles<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Design: Tom Muller &amp; Jay Bowen<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Editor: Jordan D White<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>COVER \/ PAGE 1.<\/strong>\u00a0Destiny, with most of the other Quiet Council members shown within her cloak.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 2.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Flashback: Irene Adler&#8217;s powers emerge.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This is a more dramatic version of page 13 panel 4 of\u00a0<em>X-Treme X-Men<\/em> vol 1 #1. As narrated by Sage in the original scene, &#8220;Irene Adler was a child of privilege, born to an age when science and romance walked hand in hand and into a society that felt its birthright was to rule the world. When she was 13, her mutant power became active. She gained the ability to perceive the future, in all its myriad permutations. It came upon her with a terrible rush and an irresistible force, like an avalanche threatening to overwhelm the girl.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The original art shows Irene riding the horse shown here, in broadly this landscape, but doesn&#8217;t really contain anything to show that her powers are emerging.\u00a0<em>Immortal<\/em> adds the horse rearing up, and the visions which she sees in the sky. From left to right, these appear to be:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Logan and Kitty hiding from Sentinels in &#8220;Days of Future Past&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Phoenix<\/li>\n<li>What appears to be a symbolic image of Krakoa.<\/li>\n<li>The other members of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants as\u00a0they\u00a0appeared in &#8220;Days of Future Past&#8221;, when they were trying to assassinate Robert Kelly.<\/li>\n<li>The Shadow King hovering over what looks to be Legion, presumably from the Muir Island Saga or thereabouts.<\/li>\n<li>The original X-Men.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>PAGE 3.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Flashback: Irene writes her diaries.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This is an expanded version of page 13 panels 5-6 of\u00a0<em>X-Treme X-Men<\/em> vol 1 #1. Again, as per Sage in the original: &#8220;Somehow she managed to resist this onslaught. She sat down at her desk and began to write. Over the course of the next thirteen months, she transcribed the events she beheld in her mind&#8217;s eye, one volume for every month. She crafted a comprehensive records of the years to be &#8211; the future of the world, of humanity, of mutantkind! Her challenge, once she realised what she&#8217;d accomplished, was to determine which scenario was the true timeline, and which the most desirable. And if necessary, bring the two together. Unfortunately, her &#8216;gift&#8217; had a price. She could &#8216;see&#8217; the future, but she had become physically blind.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This version spells out a little more clearly the point of the diaries and the reasons why they were written obscurely. Irene expected her initial precognitive vision to fade over time, and so she made a coded record of what she had seen so that she would have access to it in the future. \u00a0This\u00a0is slightly at odds with\u00a0<em>X-Treme X-Men<\/em> #1, where Sage goes on to tell us that &#8220;Much of the entries in her diaries was written in languages unknown to her, in code and in pictograms, involving places she&#8217;d never heard of and scores of people yet unborn.&#8221; But it&#8217;s not an outright contradiction, because (1) Sage is relating hearsay, and (2) it&#8217;s perfectly possible that Irene\u00a0<em>both<\/em> saw and recorded codes and obscurities that she didn&#8217;t yet understand\u00a0<em>and<\/em> that she deliberately obscured the material that she did understand.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 4-5.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Mystique and Emma talk about Irene.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Destiny collapsed at the end of the last issue, muttering &#8220;You&#8217;re a ghost.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The visions in page 4 panel 3 are just a repeat of the art from page 2 &#8211; which might suggest that Destiny is re-experiencing the sort of precognitive vision that she had when her powers first emerged, though it has the odd result that she sees the Brotherhood from a story in the past. Maybe she&#8217;s also\u00a0<em>remembering<\/em> how her powers emerged.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Frost<\/strong>&#8216;s nose job was established back in the Morrison era.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;Storm is off at another Arakii challenge.&#8221;<\/strong> We&#8217;ve seen in\u00a0<em>X-Men Red<\/em> that the Arakii seem to be accepting Storm as a leader figure now, but she might just be attending at a significant challenge to someone else &#8211; such as Vulcan&#8217;s challenge to Tarn in\u00a0<em>X-Men Red<\/em> #3.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;Never die again without warning me.&#8221;<\/strong> I think this is an original line, but she would have said it somewhere around\u00a0<em>Inferno<\/em> #2.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 6.<\/strong> <em>Flashback: Irene meets Raven.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sexual inversion<\/strong> was a late 19th century theory regarding homosexuality. By the standards of its time it was a relatively progressive attitude, in as much as it sought to understand homosexuality as an innate disposition. Broadly, the theory regarded same-sex attraction as an aspect of transgenderism, or at least conflated the two concepts.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Raven.<\/strong> Irene doesn&#8217;t actually tell us here\u00a0<em>why<\/em> she sought out Raven, and there may simply be a logical loop here &#8211; she can see so many futures where they&#8217;re happy together that that becomes the motivation for her to seek Raven out. In\u00a0<em>X-Treme X-Men<\/em> #1, Sage claims that Irene wanted to try and understand her visions and shape the destiny of humanity, and enlisted Raven to help with that. Raven, at that point, is said to be working as &#8220;a consulting detective&#8221; &#8211; an allusion to the fact that Irene is named after a Sherlock Holmes character, and was originally implied to be that character. Sage claims Raven and Irene were easily able to manipulate events for &#8220;personal success&#8221;, but found &#8220;social engineering &#8230; next to impossible&#8221; and failed with it repeatedly.<\/p>\n<p>Note that Raven is doing nothing to conceal her mutant appearance despite the fact that she&#8217;s a shapechanger and could do so very easily. Whenever Raven appears in public like this, it&#8217;s a choice.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Queen Victoria.<\/strong> There is a long standing urban legend that Queen Victoria did not believe that lesbians existed, which is why the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 only dealt with male homosexuality. In fact, there had been criminal laws against male (but not female) homosexuality dating back to the 16th century.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 7.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Flashback: Destiny explains nexuses.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The first panel is another image of the Brotherhood during &#8220;Days of Futures Past&#8221;. Beyond that, Gillen is trying to define (or redefine) the idea of a nexus point to explain how Destiny tries to understand the myriad futures that she can see. Essentially these are the events with the greatest influence on the overall outcome. Since she gives climate change as an example, she clearly doesn&#8217;t mean events in the sense of things that happen at a specific point in time, but in a rather broader sense. Irene&#8217;s focus is on trying to identify the key events to be favoured or avoided, and then figuring out how best to influence the direction of history to get the world where it wants to be (which, of course, is the harder bit).<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 8.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Flashback: Destiny dies.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Destiny was murdered in\u00a0<em>Uncanny X-Men<\/em> #255 by Legion, who was under the influence of the Shadow King at the time. She seemed to allow this to happen, and she explains here that this was because she knew that it would enable Krakoa to happen &#8211; but not why. Apparently, it&#8217;s because she would at some point have killed Moira, presumably because (as established in\u00a0<em>House of X\u00a0<\/em>#2) Moira&#8217;s powers screw with Destiny&#8217;s predictions of the future and so Destiny wouldn&#8217;t have appreciated all the consequences of doing so. Perhaps Destiny also failed to appreciate the consequences of killing Moira back in\u00a0<em>House of X<\/em> #2.<\/p>\n<p>Importantly, Destiny also tells us here that &#8220;Krakoa was the limit of my vision.&#8221; In other words, everything in Destiny&#8217;s Diaries covers the period up to Krakoa. This might explain why she&#8217;s having another wave of precognitive visions now (and why the story is called &#8220;The New Testament of Irene Adler&#8221;).<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 9-11.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Hope is briefed by the Quiet Council.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>As their newest member, Hope is learning what Emma shared with the rest of the Council at the end of\u00a0<em>Inferno<\/em> #4, i.e. Moira&#8217;s hidden role in founding Krakoa.<\/p>\n<p>Hope received her Cerebro helmet from Mystique, posing as Professor X, in flashback in\u00a0<em>Inferno<\/em> #2. That&#8217;s also where Sinister was visited by Mystique, though it seems pretty clear that he always realised who he was dealing with.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;Burning all this down was my other option.&#8221;<\/strong> During the Hickman run, Mystique repeatedly told us that Destiny had told her to destroy the island if she couldn&#8217;t be brought back.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 12.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Destiny&#8217;s new visions.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This mirrors the layout of her first visions at the start of the issue. Form left to right&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A burning island, presumably Krakoa.<\/li>\n<li>Some sort of building with a statue of Magneto, Apocalypse and a third figure at the top. Somewhat reminiscent of the giant statue from Genosha.<\/li>\n<li>The upcoming Avengers \/ X-Men \/ Eternals\u00a0crossover\u00a0<em>Judgment Day<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li>Mr Sinister with an X-Men team wearing his diamond logo.<\/li>\n<li>Exodus being worshipped by a mutant crowd (we only see their hands but they&#8217;re clearly not all human hands). Hope told us last issue that Exodus gets more powerful from having followers.<\/li>\n<li>Magik, in demonic form, standing over the bodies of the defeated X-Men.<\/li>\n<li>Is that Phoenix?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>PAGE 13.<\/strong> Recap and credits (!).<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 14.<\/strong> <em>A diagram of Destiny&#8217;s vision.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The reason why there is &#8220;less future&#8221; is because, as we established in issue #1, Mr Sinister has created a bunch of clones of Moira MacTaggert, and keeps killing them in order to reset time to the point of their creation. He also uses them to send back knowledge of the abandoned timeline. In issue #1, Sinister said that there had been twenty five deleted timelines already. Twenty-one are shown here. But since Destiny sees the future, presumably these are the potential futures\u00a0<em>from here<\/em>, all of which end with Sinister resetting the universe. This either ends the timeline or at least prevents Destiny from seeing further. (If time literally does end at these points then it creates problems for the continued existence of characters like Kang, though arguably they come from potential futures that have already diverged from the timeline.)<\/p>\n<p>Needless to say, most of these are cryptic references for now:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Limbic Infernality<\/strong> could be anything.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The Spark Inquisition<\/strong> sounds like Nightcrawler&#8217;s philosophy\/religion from\u00a0<em>Legion of X<\/em> going off the rails.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Judgment Day<\/strong> is the upcoming crossover.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Nimrod Extinction Event<\/strong> sounds like Nimrod getting his way. There are three of them on the list.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The Empire of the Red Diamond<\/strong> sounds like Sinister and his red diamond X-Men from the previous splash, in which case we can probably expect to hear more.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The Storm System<\/strong> could be anything involving Storm.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The Broken Sword<\/strong> could be anything.<\/li>\n<li><strong>A New Krakoa<\/strong> and <b>Krakoa Dissolution<\/b> are self-explanatory.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Cassandra Supernova<\/strong> will be Cassandra Nova from\u00a0<em>Marauders<\/em> getting out of control.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The Reign of [Apocalyse]<\/strong> presumably involves him coming back to claim the throne.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Legion-XII<\/strong> will be something to do with Legion, but otherwise could be anything.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Canticle for Talia<\/strong>\u00a0is odd. A canticle is a hymn. This sounds like a reference to Walter Miller&#8217;s novel\u00a0<em>A Canticle for Leibowitz<\/em> (1959) about a monastic order preserving knowledge in the centuries after a nuclear war until humanity is ready for it again. The only obvious Talia in the X-books is Nocturne from the Exiles, but who knows what she has to do with that. Talia was a descendent of Mystique in her home timeline, though.<\/li>\n<li><strong>AvX VI<\/strong> seems to be yet another retreat of\u00a0<em>Avengers vs X-Men\u00a0<\/em>(a crossover which was billed as\u00a0<em>AvX<\/em> at the time).<\/li>\n<li><strong>The Dominion of Orchis<\/strong> is straightforward.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The Immolation of Judases<\/strong> sounds alarmingly like Exodus getting out of hand. He refers to Sinister as &#8220;Judas-Prime&#8221; in the next scene.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The Gene-Corsairs<\/strong> show up in the next scene.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Unity <\/strong>could be anything.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The Expanse<\/strong>, also spelled\u00a0<strong>eXpanse<\/strong>, is explained in the next scene as an interstellar mutant church-empire.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>PAGES 15-17.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>Flash forward: a god-powered Exodus kills Sinister and inadvertently reboots the timeline.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Straightforward enough, though an indication of how powerful Exodus would be if he had a serious religion behind him.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 18-20.<\/strong>\u00a0<em>The Quiet Council meeting continues.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Mystique is completely correct that Xavier lied about promising to bring Destiny back.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;Professor Xavier is a jerk&#8221; <\/strong>is the title of\u00a0<em>Uncanny X-Men<\/em> vol 1 #168, and Kate&#8217;s pose resembles her appearance on the splash page.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Destiny&#8217;s entrance<\/strong> down the stairs echoes her coming down the stairs for her dramatic entrance in\u00a0<em>Inferno<\/em> #1.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 21-23.<\/strong>\u00a0<i>Destiny and Mystique.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>We couldn&#8217;t really have noticed that none of the futures involved Mystique &#8211; we didn&#8217;t see enough of them, and they didn&#8217;t exactly feature Destiny prominently either &#8211; but evidently she can tell that. The obvious question is\u00a0<em>how<\/em> Mystique can be absent from these futures. Does something happen to put an end to resurrection? Does she get excluded from resurrection for some reason? Or does she simply get separated from Destiny in such a way that she ceases to play an important part in Destiny&#8217;s life and therefore doesn&#8217;t register in her visions of the future?<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 24.<\/strong> Trailers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. IMMORTAL X-MEN #3 &#8220;The New Testament of Irene Adler&#8221; Writer: Kieron Gillen Artist: Lucas Werneck Colourist: Dijjo Lima Letterer: Clayton Cowles Design: Tom Muller &amp; Jay Bowen Editor: Jordan D White COVER \/ PAGE 1.\u00a0Destiny, with most of the other Quiet [&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-7990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7990","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=7990"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7995,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7990\/revisions\/7995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}