{"id":8957,"date":"2023-04-12T21:46:52","date_gmt":"2023-04-12T20:46:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8957"},"modified":"2023-04-13T08:37:23","modified_gmt":"2023-04-13T07:37:23","slug":"x-men-21-annotations-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8957","title":{"rendered":"X-Men #21 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 #21<\/strong>
\n“Lord of the Brood, part three”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Gerry Duggan<\/strong>
\nArtist: Stefano Caselli<\/strong>
\nColourist: Federico Blee<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Clayton Cowles<\/strong>
\nDesign: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen<\/strong>
\nEditor: Jordan D White<\/strong><\/p>\n

COVER \/ PAGE 1.<\/strong>\u00a0Cyclops and Rogue fight the Brood. This continues the fight scene which has been shown over the covers of recent issues of\u00a0X-Men<\/em> and\u00a0Captain Marvel<\/em> (which is where Rogue has been appearing).<\/p>\n

In\u00a0Captain Marvel<\/em> #47, Captain Marvel’s team defeat a bunch of Brood and rescue Rogue. Binary is found hooked up to some sort of organic machinery. In what might politely be termed a high degree of plot convenience, it turns out that Binary can only be freed if someone else takes her place, and Captain Marvel duly makes the required heroic sacrifice. Rogue explains that the Brood faction in the\u00a0Captain Marvel<\/em> arc are led by a Brood Empress who resents Broo’s control over them and took the opportunity to break free of him when it arose. (X-Men\u00a0<\/em>has established that this was brought about by Nightmare, but the\u00a0Captain Marvel<\/em> cast don’t know this yet.) The Empress blames the Kree for creating the King Egg that gave Broo control over her race in X-Men\u00a0<\/em>vol 5 #9, and has a convoluted scheme to convert superheroes into Brood in order to use them as an army against the Kree; the part-Kree Captain Marvel is particularly key to this plot. The issue ends with the heroes largely defeated and a groggy Captain Marvel apparently unable to register the giant Brood Empress looming over her.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

None of this really matters to the\u00a0X-Men<\/em> issues, but both threads are meant to come together in\u00a0Captain Marvel<\/em> #48 for the finale.<\/p>\n

PAGE 2.<\/strong> Opening quote: Cyclops argues that the Brood ought to be wiped out. The previous issue opened with a line to similar effect.<\/p>\n

The quote is attributed to “an early meeting of the Krakoan War Captains”. There’s a data page later on where Bishop, Cyclops, Magik and Psylocke discuss this issue in their capacity as Captains, but that line-up would be post-Inferno<\/em> and surely wouldn’t be an “early” meeting. So perhaps Cyclops has been banging on about this for a while now.<\/p>\n

PAGE 3.<\/strong>\u00a0Forge and M bring Knowhere to the solar system.<\/em><\/p>\n

This doesn’t flow very well from the previous issue, which\u00a0already<\/em> had a scene that ended with Forge and Monet transporting themselves and Knowhere back to their own dimension. So apparently this overlaps with that scene, which is a bit clunky. (Page 17 seems to confirm that this is them returning to the mainstream universe.)<\/p>\n

M is indeed meant to be a technical genius, though it’s not exactly something that comes up very often.<\/p>\n

PAGES 4-7.<\/strong>\u00a0Jean fights Nightmare.<\/em><\/p>\n

“[Nightmare] was seeking revenge for [Jean] laying her hands on him in a previous adventure.”<\/strong> In issue #4.<\/p>\n

“Release your grip on the Brood…”<\/strong> Jean hasn’t taken on board the plot – which was explained fairly clearly last issue, and Nightmare explains it again on the next page. Nightmare isn’t directly controlling the Brood, he’s simply broken Broo’s control over them (or many of them) and attempted to take advantage of them just doing what they do when left to their own devices. Clearly it’s intentional that Jean gets it wrong; she’s firmly in the pure-and-heroic camp in this issue and she’s firmly giving the Brood the benefit of the doubt. Note also that she takes it as read on page 7 that this will be an uncontroversial view among the X-Men. (“The X-Men will save as many as we can. Even the Brood.”)<\/p>\n

“I try never to kill, because I can do so without effort…”<\/strong> Given Jean’s powers, this is probably true even without resorting to Phoenix-level effects – after all, most people have no possible defence against her breaking their neck or dropping them from a height. I’m not at all convinced about the wisdom of having her casually despatch magical threats, though; everyone needs\u00a0some<\/em> weak spots, and B-tier\u00a0Dr Strange<\/em> villains should surely be more of a challenge for Jean.<\/p>\n

“What is one will be two by the end of your day…”<\/strong> Nightmare is presumably alluding to the argument that Scott and Jean are about to have about the ethics of Brood slaughter.<\/p>\n

“And then you’ll still have the fall of your kind to witness.”<\/strong> Nightmare is advertising… sorry, foreshadowing “Fall of X”.<\/p>\n

PAGE 8.\u00a0<\/strong>Recap and credits.<\/p>\n

PAGES 9-15.\u00a0<\/strong>Talon and Synch deal with the Brood-infected refugees.<\/em><\/p>\n

Well, so much for Nightmare’s plan. The whole idea of this was for the X-Men to take the infected refugees to other worlds and trick them into spreading the Brood. But since the infection becomes apparent while they’re still in transit, the X-Men never get a chance to do that, so the plan just fails. Huh.<\/p>\n

If Nightmare’s fallback plan was for the Brood to just kill the X-Men, then that doesn’t work either – Synch boots everyone into space, apparently reasoning that they’re all functionally dead anyway. The narrator is very keen to stress this for us: “Synch didn’t kill those folks, but he couldn’t save them either.” In the case of infectees who hadn’t yet turned into Brood, it’s far from clear that this is true. If you take someone with terminal cancer and chuck them off a cliff, you have killed them, and the fact that they were going to die anyway in the near future doesn’t change that fact.<\/p>\n

At any rate, implicit in the narrator’s reasoning is that killing the Brood is just fine and doesn’t count. Cyclops, Synch and Talon all seem to be basically on board with this view.<\/p>\n

“I wish I’d pushed harder for the Atlantic archipelago of Krakoa to become a safe haven for refugees.”<\/strong> Cyclops would like to remind us that it is just the Brood that he wants to kill. He is, of course, correct that Krakoa’s “no humans allowed (unless you’re an established supporting character)” policy results in practice in a very, very right-wing stance on refugees; generally, writers in this period have tried to rationalise that sort of thing away with an “oh well, they’ll let them stay the night in an emergency, that’s fine, right?” approach.<\/p>\n

“The Vault mission was hell, but at least there was nobody else to fail.”<\/strong> In other words, during the centuries they spent trapped in the Vault (subjectively), at least nobody else was depending on them. I suppose that’s true once they give up hope of saving Darwin.<\/p>\n

PAGE 16.<\/strong> Data page: the War Council discuss what to do with the Brood. Basically, Cyclops and Bishop both view them as something to be wiped out. Bishop’s rationale, explicitly, is that while the Brood are\u00a0basically just animals and since they’re a danger to others, they’re fair game to be wiped out. Of course, the Brood are absolutely not animals in any standard sense – they’re not just sentient, they’re capable of reasoned thought and speech. Hence Bishop’s focus on them lacking a “culture” – which, as far as we know,\u00a0is<\/em> true, in the sense that they’re just queens and drones. There’s no such thing as Brood art.<\/p>\n

The claim that they’re an existential threat to all life is… questionable. They’ve been around as a space faring race for a long time and they’ve never posed an uncontainable threat. There’s some difficulty in containing the spread of the infection during the period when they can pose as human, but at the end of a day, individual Brood are fairly easy to kill. Still, they’re undoubtedly a race of predators who target other sentient races.<\/p>\n

“Specialised hybrids of several mutants…”<\/strong> Bishop is contemplating chimera, which is one of Mr Sinister’s experimental themes (as seen in particular in “Sins of Sinister”, but it’s come up before, particularly in\u00a0Hellions<\/em>).<\/p>\n

“No more Brood.”<\/strong> Somewhat bizarrely, Bishop’s big idea is to clone a Scarlet Witch and use its powers to alter reality so as to wipe out the Brood, just as the Witch did with “No more mutants” at the end of\u00a0House of M<\/em>. It’s not at all clear that this would work, given the ambiguity about how far Wanda’s powers are magical rather than biological, and at any rate, it’s a wildly reckless proposal to create a reality-altering weapon based on a national hate figure (even if she’s been forgiven in\u00a0Trial of Magneto<\/em>) and use it to commit genocide. Wanda, bear in mind, didn’t actually kill mutants, she just depowered them and turned them into normal humans. Cyclops is actually up for this; Magik and Psylocke are not, though Psylocke seems to have been at least open to hearing about a pre-emptive strike more generally.<\/p>\n

PAGE 17.\u00a0<\/strong>Magik, Jean and Broo pick up Forge and M.<\/em><\/p>\n

“A decapitated Celestial head”\u00a0<\/strong>is exactly what Knowhere is. Apparently Forge had no particular agenda in retrieving Knowhere beyond curiosity and appropriating the well-known space station for Krakoan use (which, to be fair, does sound potentially useful).<\/p>\n

PAGES 18-21.\u00a0<\/strong>Cyclops and Jean argue about the Brood.<\/em><\/p>\n

Psylocke\u00a0<\/strong>presumably sends this distress call somewhere during\u00a0Captain Marvel<\/em> #47.<\/p>\n

Cordyceps Jones.<\/strong> Despite what Cyclops implies here – and perhaps what he believes – Jean did\u00a0not<\/em> kill the fungal parasite Cordyceps Jones when he fought the female X-Men in issue #12. Instead, and Polaris contained him in a metal sphere. Cyclops stops short of invoking Dark Phoenix, doubtless because it wouldn’t be a very good parallel – but you have to suspect that it plays a part in Jean’s determination not to participate in a wholesale slaughter of any species, even the Brood. Moreover, as she mentions in the last panel, Jean’s connection with Dark Phoenix gives her a pressing need to believe in the possibility of redemption for monsters.<\/p>\n

Obviously, Cyclops and Jean’s argument about the Brood is the crux of this issue. Cyclops is really taking a traditional X-Men approach to the Brood, but what’s unusual is that he’s doing it to Broo’s face, and in circumstances where an opportunity to get the Brood back under control is at least on offer. And even Jean only makes the case that “some” Brood can be saved. At any rate, the story puts Jean in the position of saving some of the Brood from the X-Men themselves.<\/p>\n

Forge is privately on Jean’s side here, or at least willing to go behind Cyclops’ back to make resources available to her – that may feed into the trend of his moral standards getting rather higher now that he’s away from X-Force and hanging around with more traditional superheroes.<\/p>\n

PAGES 22-24.\u00a0<\/strong>Jean takes Broo and some of his followers to Knowhere.<\/em><\/p>\n

Jean is very explicitly positioning the Brood as the victims and the X-Men as the oppressors here.<\/p>\n

PAGE 25.<\/strong> Trailers. The story continues in\u00a0Captain Marvel<\/em> #48, also out this week, where Binary dies in freeing Captain Marvel from the Brood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. X-MEN vol 6 #21 “Lord of the Brood, part three” Writer: Gerry Duggan Artist: Stefano Caselli Colourist: Federico Blee Letterer: Clayton Cowles Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen Editor: Jordan D White COVER \/ PAGE 1.\u00a0Cyclops and Rogue fight the Brood. […]<\/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-8957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8957","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=8957"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8965,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8957\/revisions\/8965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}