{"id":8941,"date":"2023-04-06T20:14:12","date_gmt":"2023-04-06T19:14:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8941"},"modified":"2023-04-07T20:55:25","modified_gmt":"2023-04-07T19:55:25","slug":"immoral-x-men-3-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8941","title":{"rendered":"Immoral X-Men #3 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

\"\"<\/a>IMMORAL X-MEN #3<\/strong>
\n“Sins of Sinister, part 8: Our Nine-Hundred-Years-and-Counting Mission”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Kieron Gillen<\/strong>
\nArtist: Alessandro Vitti<\/strong>
\nColourist: Rain Beredo<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Clayton Cowles<\/strong>
\nDesign: Jay Bowen<\/strong>
\nEditor: Jordan D White<\/strong><\/p>\n

COVER \/ PAGE 1:<\/strong> Sinister and Rasputin on the run from Exodus.<\/p>\n

PAGE 2.<\/strong>\u00a0Data page, with an opening quote from Candide<\/em>. Candide<\/em> is a satire on Gottfried Leibniz’s philosophy. Basically, Leibniz argued that if a better world was possible, God would have created that world instead. Therefore, this must be as good as it gets, and what appear to us to be flaws must in fact be optimum in the grand scheme of things, albeit for reasons that we may not be able to grasp. (This philosophy is often referred to as “optimism”, which didn’t have its modern meaning in Leibniz’s day; for modern readers, “optimum-ism” is probably a fairer reflection of what he was getting at.) \u00a0The basic joke of\u00a0Candide<\/em> is to bombard the characters with things that are obviously just plain bad and watch them try to rationalise it away.<\/p>\n

PAGES 3-8.\u00a0<\/strong>Rasputin boards Prayerworld 537-2389 and retrieves a mission.<\/em><\/p>\n

“Psychic log: the mission continues.”\u00a0<\/strong>As with the story title, this echoes\u00a0Star Trek<\/em>. Rasputin’s ponytail is used as an icon to mark her narration. She makes sure to tell us at the outset that she believes they’re working to save the universe. The crew members who were aboard the Marauder when Sinister stole it last issue have apparently all died and gone unreplaced.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Exodus.\u00a0<\/strong>As reiterated in early issues of\u00a0Immortal X-Men<\/em>, Exodus derives power from people’s faith in him; thus, the Prayerworlds are entire worlds of clones that are programmed to worship him. There are a whole bunch of different Exoduses, all with their own prayerworld, and they’re opposed to one another thanks to some sort of no-doubt-trivial schism.<\/p>\n

The art on page 4 seems intended to draw a parallel between Exodus (or at least, this particular giant Exodus) and Mr Sinister, both sitting in something vaguely throne-like and controlling, but both effectively reduced to meaninglessness.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0Immortal X-Men<\/em> #3, Destiny has a vision of a distant future, which she calls the “eXpanse” and descirbes as “The distant reach of a mutant church-empire.” She witnesses “a fiery starship the size of an actual star corner a second vessel”, which is “lined with cloned meat”, said to be batteries made of tissue cloned from Sebastian Shaw. That timeline ends with Exodus destroying Sinister. This\u00a0isn’t<\/em> the timeline we see here – the\u00a0Immortal X-Men\u00a0<\/em>#3 version of Exodus seems to be primarily motivated by avenging Sinister’s destruction of paradise – but there are obvious parallels, and it may explain why the Marauder<\/em> spaceship seems to be encrusted with organic growths.<\/p>\n

Edit:<\/em> As Jim Harbor points out in the comments, Exodus’s presentation here also seems to be a riff on Warhammer 40K and its Emperor; Gillen has previously written for Marvel’s Warhammer books.<\/p>\n

“We should be on the same side”\u00a0<\/strong>has been Destiny’s message to Sinister throughout\u00a0Immortal X-Men<\/em>.<\/p>\n

PAGE 9.\u00a0<\/strong>Recap and credits.<\/p>\n

PAGE 10.<\/strong> Data page, summarising more directly what happened to the members of the Quiet Council by the 1000th year of this timeline. Much of this is indirectly hinted at in later pages anyway. The Council itself has collapsed into competing factions.<\/p>\n