{"id":8662,"date":"2023-01-13T22:47:07","date_gmt":"2023-01-13T22:47:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8662"},"modified":"2023-01-13T22:47:07","modified_gmt":"2023-01-13T22:47:07","slug":"x-men-18-annotations-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8662","title":{"rendered":"X-Men #18 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

\"\"<\/a>X-MEN vol 6 #18<\/strong>
\n“Wounded Wolves”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Gerry Duggan<\/strong>
\nArtist: CF Villa<\/strong>
\nColourist: Matt Milla<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Clayton Cowles<\/strong>
\nDesigner: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen<\/strong>
\nEditor: Jordan D White<\/strong><\/p>\n

COVER \/ PAGE 1.<\/strong> Synch fights vampires while using Wolverine (Laura)’s powers. And yes, they are vampires, not just random nobodies. Some of them have fangs.<\/p>\n

PAGE<\/strong>\u00a02.\u00a0<\/strong>Opening page – a quote from both Jean and Scott. I’m sure this has probably appeared in dialogue somewhere during the series, but I don’t have time to trawl through the back issues, I’m afraid.<\/p>\n

PAGE 3.<\/strong>\u00a0Beast recaps the plot.<\/em><\/p>\n

Laura seemingly died covering Synch’s escape from the Vault, and was resurrected on Krakoa, in\u00a0X-Men<\/em> vol 5 #19. The original, older Laura was rescued from the Vault last issue and happily reunited with Synch, her partner from her time inside the Vault, who has been pining for her ever since he escaped. (The resurrected version had no memories of their time together).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The information that she’s joined the X-Men is new – but unsurprising, since she was so happy to be reunited with Synch.<\/p>\n

Beast clearly suspects that she’s an impostor planted by the Children of the Vault, but it’s basically his job these days to be cynical and wrong.<\/p>\n

PAGES 4-5.<\/strong>\u00a0Synch and Laura head to Detroit.<\/em><\/p>\n

Laura is going to see her duplicate younger self to talk about the awkward fact of there being two of them. The younger Laura\/Wolverine is in Detroit fighting vampires alongside Dazzler and Jubilee. Those three are fighting Vampire Nation in the current\u00a0X-Terminators<\/em> miniseries, which isn’t finished yet. The next scene clarifies that this is effectively a sequel, with the vampires making revenge attacks on Dazzler during her US tour, and Jubilee and Wolverine coming along to help once again.<\/p>\n

“Gabby”<\/strong> is Laura’s younger clone sister, Scout – mostly a\u00a0New Mutants<\/em> character these days.<\/p>\n

PAGE 6.<\/strong> Recap and credits.<\/p>\n

PAGES 7-10.<\/strong>\u00a0Laura, Synch and the X-Terminators fight vampires.<\/em><\/p>\n

Old Laura has a hologram helmet for… some reason? It doesn’t really fit the colour scheme of her costume and it seems very out of place, but maybe there’ll be a reason for it in the end.<\/p>\n

Jubilee seems to assume that future Laura is just another time travelling doppelganger. It’ll be interesting to see whether that’s the line generally taken to explain the duplicate Lauras on Krakoa – the idea that resurrection can create duplicates might give more than a few Krakoans an existential crisis.<\/p>\n

PAGES 11-13.<\/strong>\u00a0The rest of the X-Men rescue Orchis scientists from a space station explosion.<\/em><\/p>\n

Orchis’s<\/strong> orbiting space station, the Bloom, makes its first appearance but gets some background in the next data page. Since\u00a0Judgment Day<\/em>, Orchis has been clearly positioned as a public and popular outfit, and presumably (like Feilong’s station on Phobos) this station is mainly being presented as a legitimate scientific outfit. In fact, this does seem to be a genuine explosion rather than a trap, though the scientists are predictably cagey about explaining what they were up to.<\/p>\n

OSHA\u00a0<\/strong>is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. (The British equivalent is the Health and Safety Executive.)<\/p>\n

PAGE 14.<\/strong> A memo from the Beast about the Orchis’ space station. Despite the Beast being a raving lunatic these days, this seems to be broadly sensible – except for the bit of the end where he suggests cloning a non-mutant spy, presumably in the expectation that they’ll get killed.<\/p>\n

“Wolverine (Kinney) managed to infiltrate the organization’s Phobos base…”<\/strong> In issue #10.<\/p>\n

“[W]e’ve … breached their Mother Mold Foundry multiple times, and at great loss of life. Mostly Wolverine’s (Logan).”<\/strong> As covered in\u00a0Inferno<\/em>\u00a0#1 (2021).<\/p>\n

PAGES 15-19.<\/strong>\u00a0The two Lauras talk while fighting vampires.<\/em><\/p>\n

The vampires are kind of in this story as random bad guys to make it more than just “Laura and Laura go for a coffee”.<\/p>\n

“I wanted to see the body.”<\/strong> Wolverine is suggesting that she always suspected that she was a doppelganger – perhaps reasonably, given that it was always unclear how anyone had verified that she had died.<\/p>\n

“We’d already been used so much…”<\/strong> Wolverine is about to say something about their long history (and origin story) of being exploited as living weapons. The interesting point is why she mentions it in this context. Is she suggesting that Beast deliberately engineered her resurrection in circumstances where the protocols weren’t actually met? It would fit with his attitude at the start of the story, and explain why he gets mentioned twice in a story that’s otherwise irrelevant to him.<\/p>\n

“They resurrected you with a full adamantium skeleton, huh?”<\/strong> Laura is meant to just have adamantium claws, but Duggan wrote her with a full skeleton after her resurrection. This seems to have started out as a continuity error, but it was explained as an error on Proteus’s part in issue #10.<\/p>\n

“If something goes bad for one of us, they’ll only bring one of us back.”<\/strong> This is in line with what we’ve been told before about the Krakoan policy on resurrecting clones (i.e., don’t). In particular, this general policy was a plot point in\u00a0Hellions<\/em>, though an exception was eventually made for Madelyne Pryor in order to appease Alex Summers. The Five were increasingly objecting to the refusal to resurrect clones with clear individual identities, though, and Scout (a clone of Laura) was in fact resurrected on Hope’s authority in\u00a0New Mutants<\/em>. Scout seems a pretty compelling precedent for the idea that both Wolverines should qualify for resurrection – but young Laura is technically right about it being the ostensible rule.<\/p>\n

The two Lauras don’t apparently want to hang out with one another, despite the increasing “Wolverine family” vibe that younger Laura has had with Scout, Daken and Logan. Still, the weirdness of being such direct copies with such an extensive common history (not something Laura shares with Scout) may make the difference.<\/p>\n

PAGE 20-21.<\/strong> The two X-Men return home.<\/em><\/p>\n

Jubilee and Synch were members of Generation X together back in the 1990s, which probably explains why they’re the two who seem most comfortable together (even if the subjective age gap is now massive).<\/p>\n

PAGE 22.<\/strong>\u00a0Jean Grey vouches for Laura as real.<\/em><\/p>\n

Beast continues to insist that he doesn’t trust her. But given his behaviour in\u00a0X-Force<\/em> and\u00a0Wolverine<\/em>, if he really thought that, he wouldn’t even be discussing it with the Quiet Council; it makes more sense if he’s making a show of not believing her, maybe to cover his tracks for having engineered the resurrection of a duplicate in the first place.<\/p>\n

For some reason Beast seems to be sitting at the Quiet Council desk, which might be an art error, or might just mean that he’s making a show of importance when the Council isn’t actually sitting. The fact that he’s clearly positioned as the most cynical person in the room is especially telling when\u00a0Sebastian Shaw<\/em> is apparently present.<\/p>\n

PAGES 23-24.<\/strong>\u00a0The Starjammers have been infected by the Brood.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is setting up a crossover with\u00a0Captain Marvel<\/em> next issue. The Brood, of course, are the aliens who infect people with eggs that grow and take over the host.<\/p>\n

“To my dear sons … the ones I knew about and the ones I never did…”<\/strong> The sons Corsair knows about are Cyclops, Havok and Vulcan. He ‘s implying here that there could be more, though the last time somebody suggested there might an extra Summers brother it set up the notorious “third Summers brother” dangler that meandered through most of the 1990s.<\/p>\n

PAGE 25.<\/strong>\u00a0Carlos Pacheco tribute page.<\/p>\n

PAGE 26.<\/strong> Trailers.<\/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 6 #18 “Wounded Wolves” Writer: Gerry Duggan Artist: CF Villa Colourist: Matt Milla Letterer: Clayton Cowles Designer: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen Editor: Jordan D White COVER \/ PAGE 1. Synch fights vampires while using Wolverine (Laura)’s powers. And […]<\/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-8662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8662","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=8662"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8662\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8664,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8662\/revisions\/8664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}