{"id":8071,"date":"2022-07-15T21:02:09","date_gmt":"2022-07-15T20:02:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8071"},"modified":"2022-07-15T21:02:09","modified_gmt":"2022-07-15T20:02:09","slug":"marauders-4-annotations-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8071","title":{"rendered":"Marauders #4 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

\"\"<\/a>MARAUDERS vol 2 #4<\/strong>
\n“Extinction Agenda, part 4”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Steve Orlando<\/strong>
\nArtist: Eleonora Carlini<\/strong>
\nColourist: Matt Milla<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Ariana Maher<\/strong>
\nDesign: Tom Muller<\/strong>
\nEditor: Jordan D White<\/strong><\/p>\n

COVER \/ PAGE 1:\u00a0<\/strong>Tempo checks her phone while a battle rages around her (at a different speed).<\/p>\n

PAGE 2.<\/strong> Neal Adams obituary.<\/p>\n

PAGE 3.<\/strong>\u00a0Deathbird fights the Kin Crimson.<\/em><\/p>\n

We’ve seen brief subplots of Deathbird fighting the Kin Crimson’s allies in previous issues. According to Delphos in the previous issue, Deathbird was “cast … halfway across the universe”. But the opening caption here indicates that she’s fought her way back to the Shi’ar capital on Chandilar.<\/p>\n

The Crystal Claws\u00a0<\/strong>are a group led by Erik the Red from the 1995-6\u00a0Captain Marvel\u00a0<\/em>series, presumably being retconned here into allies of the Kin Crimson. In the original story, they were trying to install a brainwashed Adam X as the Shi’ar Emperor.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

PAGE 4.\u00a0<\/strong>The Marauders fight the Kin Crimson on the Krag.<\/em><\/p>\n

Xandra was killed at the end of the previous issue, which barely gets a mention here. That plot thread was followed up in\u00a0X-Men Red<\/em> #4, which reveals that Xandra was able to get a telepathic message to Professor X before she died, making it possible to resurrect her on Krakoa. The Marauders don’t know that, of course (unless Psylocke noticed something).<\/p>\n

The story has to work a bit to justify Kate defending Bishop from an energy attack – which, as he says, he ought to be able to absorb. The “poison idea” thing is a nice concept but feels a bit of a reach from what’s surely just a mentally controlled symbiote?<\/p>\n

PAGE 5.\u00a0<\/strong>Recap and credits.<\/p>\n

PAGES 6-7.\u00a0<\/strong>The Marauders fight their way past the Kin Crimson.<\/em><\/p>\n

Presumably Psylocke knows that Kate will be resurrected – given that the problem of how to resurrect her was solved at the end of Gerry Duggan’s run – and she’s just angry because the Kin Crimson presumably\u00a0did<\/em> intend to kill her for good.<\/p>\n

Tempo<\/strong> helps them make their getaway by slowing down the Kin Crimson in time.<\/p>\n

Boost fruit.<\/strong> Power-boosting fruit previously mentioned in issue #1, grown by the mutant Gregor Smerdyakov.<\/p>\n

PAGES 8-11.\u00a0<\/strong>The Marauders reach the Chronicle.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Chronicle\u00a0<\/strong>turns out not to be a book, but a person who is (apparently) kept frozen until it’s time to have his body regrown so that more memories can be added. The idea is presumably that the data is kept extra secret by relying on his healing factor to reconstitute it each time. The Marauders immediately conclude that this is torture, but the Chronicle seems to be a true believer who’s perfectly happy with his lot.<\/p>\n

Lupak glands.<\/strong> Steve Orlando really likes to dig up bizarre backwater continuity, doesn’t he? This is a plot point from the 2015\u00a0Wolverines<\/em> series – the one that followed the\u00a0Death of Wolverine<\/em> miniseries and ended unresolved. Daken was in that book, which is what he’s referencing here. According to that series, the Lupak gland is not simply invisible, but exists in a separate dimension and serves as a repository for the Lupak’s soul. The point was that a “dead” Lupak could have a new body cloned for it, and then its soul could be restored from the mysterious gland. It would probably all sound less silly if they hadn’t used the word “gland”.<\/p>\n

At any rate, Orlando’s idea is presumably that the Chronicle can be relied upon to reconstitute its memory banks each time that it’s re-grown thanks to the data being stored extradimensionally in this gland. Per\u00a0Wolverines<\/em>, some sort of technology ought to be needed to make the gland vulnerable to a conventional physical attack. I’m not entirely clear what Daken actually\u00a0does <\/em>here – it seems to trigger the regrowth of the Chronicle’s body, so presumably he can’t be destroying the gland (which would permanently kill the guy).<\/p>\n

I don’t recall Daken actually killing Fang, as this story seems to suggest, but they certainly fought a lot.<\/p>\n

PAGES 12-15.\u00a0<\/strong>Flashback: The First Blood Spilled.<\/em><\/p>\n

Threshold\u00a0<\/strong>is new. The five heroes who defend the community against the Shi’ar seem like some sort of proto X-Men.<\/p>\n

The prehistoric Shi’ar<\/strong> are already a spacefaring race, allied with the Lupak, but they’re still much more avian. This is the early form of the Shi’ar, to which Deathbird is supposed to be a throwback.<\/p>\n

The Obliterator.<\/strong> The “living doomsday weapon hired to obliterate the mutants” is the guy with the weapons on his shoulders on page 14, referred to as “the Obliterator” on pages 15 and 16. Although presented here simply as a mercenary, he’s actually a relatively obscure Elder of the Universe, introduced in the 1987\u00a0Silver Surfer<\/em> series.<\/p>\n

PAGE 16.\u00a0<\/strong>Data page: The First Blood Spilled. Basically spelling out what we saw in the last scene.<\/p>\n

PAGE 17.\u00a0<\/strong>Flashback: The aftermath of the First Blood Spilled.<\/em><\/p>\n

Xorrian science<\/strong>, and its use to alter Shi’ar evolution, was already mentioned last issue.<\/p>\n

Phoenix.<\/strong> The woman with the Phoenix firebird, leading cavemen against giant bears, is Phoenix of the Avengers of 1 Million BC, from Jason Aaron’s\u00a0Avengers\u00a0<\/em>run.<\/p>\n

Okkara<\/strong>\u00a0is the island that split into Krakoa and Arakko, as part of a war with the demons of Amenth, all as covered at length in the back story to “X of Swords”.<\/p>\n

Eric the Red’s attacks<\/strong> on the X-Men run from\u00a0X-Men<\/em> #97 to #105 or so. The original suggestion was simply that Eric had been sent to deal with the X-Men before Lilandra could make contact with them and enlist their aid in stopping Shi’ar Emperor D’Ken.<\/p>\n

PAGES 18-19.<\/strong>\u00a0The Marauders discuss their next move.<\/em><\/p>\n

Apparently the surviving Thresholders are not people who have been held prisoner for billions of years, but rather time travellers who have been kept in quarantine. The suggestion is that they fled into the future when Threshold fell.<\/p>\n

PAGE 20.\u00a0<\/strong>A data page on Tempo and time travel. However, Tempo’s\u00a0powers are not normally said to include time travel – what she does is to speed it up or slow it down. Maybe the boost fruits are meant to make the difference here, but this seems to indicate that she can indeed time travel and alter things – it’s just that by definition nobody remembers the changes.<\/p>\n

Nature Girl<\/strong> went “radical” in the “X-Men Green” stories in\u00a0X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic<\/em>.<\/p>\n

If the X-Force time travel incident is a reference to a published story, I don’t recognise it.<\/p>\n

PAGE 21.<\/strong>\u00a0Tempo takes the Marauders back in time.<\/em><\/p>\n

Tempo’s claim that it’s more dangerous to travel into the recent past than the distant past seems counter-intuitive, but makes sense in light of the data page. The idea is that changes to history generally have little effect on the overall direction of history because the timestream usually flows around the obstacle and corrects back to the same course. More recent time travel poses greater risk of paradox because there’s less time for the timeline to resume its original direction.<\/p>\n

PAGES 22-23.\u00a0<\/strong>The Marauders arrive in the past.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is presumably meant to be\u00a0X-Men<\/em> vol 2 #42-43, when the Avalon space station was destroyed in a battle between Exodus and… the character seen here. He’s the son of Apocalypse from the “Age of Apocalypse” timeline, and at this point he had just arrived on Earth. He was going by the deeply unfortunate name “Holocaust”, which was wisely changed to “Nemesis” a little later on. So that’s a retcon but probably a deliberate one. Also, he didn’t have his containment armour in the original story; he arrived in the mainstream Marvel Universe without it, and had to get a new one from Sebastian Shaw in a later story. That’s probably just a continuity error.<\/p>\n

PAGE 24.<\/strong> Trailers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. MARAUDERS vol 2 #4 “Extinction Agenda, part 4” Writer: Steve Orlando Artist: Eleonora Carlini Colourist: Matt Milla Letterer: Ariana Maher Design: Tom Muller Editor: Jordan D White COVER \/ PAGE 1:\u00a0Tempo checks her phone while a battle rages around her (at […]<\/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-8071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8071","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=8071"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8073,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8071\/revisions\/8073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}