{"id":9163,"date":"2023-06-07T22:23:33","date_gmt":"2023-06-07T21:23:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9163"},"modified":"2023-06-07T22:23:33","modified_gmt":"2023-06-07T21:23:33","slug":"x-men-23-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9163","title":{"rendered":"X-Men #23 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 #23<\/strong>
\n“When Cometh — The Stark Sentinels”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Gerry Duggan<\/strong>
\nArtist: Joshua Cassara<\/strong>
\nColour artist: Dee Cunniffe<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Clayton Cowles<\/strong>
\nDesign: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen<\/strong>
\nEditor: Jordan D White<\/strong><\/p>\n

COVER \/ PAGE 1.\u00a0<\/strong>The X-Men fight a Stark Sentinel.<\/p>\n

PAGES 2-6.\u00a0<\/strong>Mother Righteous visits Dr Stasis.<\/em><\/p>\n

“[T]here’s nothing that Dr Stasis enjoys more than eating with clones of his family.”\u00a0<\/strong>This is a callback to early issues, in particular issue #2, where Stasis is living in a suburban home and killing off each new family as they prove unsatisfactory. Evidently he’s now relocated full time to the Orchis Forge, but that hasn’t stopped him from recreating his throwback suburban household there.<\/p>\n

Rebecca Essex <\/strong>was Nathaniel Essex’s wife before he became Mr Sinister. She appears in his origin miniseries,\u00a0Further Adventures of Cyclops & Phoenix<\/em> (1996). Her basic role is to become increasingly disturbed by his behaviour, die in chidlbirth, and refuse to forgive him, prompting him to turn to Apocalypse.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Mother Righteous is not literally Rebecca Essex, any more than Stasis is the original Nathaniel Essex. She’s one of the four suit-themed clones that the original Nathaniel created, as seen in\u00a0Immortal X-Men<\/em> #8. However, she and Stasis both appear to agree that she is not simply a Nathaniel Essex clone but (apparently) a Sinisterized version of Rebecca. Since the original Rebecca was saintly and long suffering, there may be an element of self-loathing at play here.<\/p>\n

At the same time, note that Righteous is upset not just about the cloning of “herself”, but also about their son – which seems to be the main message that she’s come to deliver, notwithstanding a passing mention of her interest in Orchis. The original Rebecca was very upset by Nathaniel’s experiments on the body of her late son.<\/p>\n

“You thought you were the original Nathaniel Essex?”<\/strong> Stasis made this claim to Cyclops, very forcefully, in issue #12.<\/p>\n

PAGE 7.<\/strong> Recap and credits.<\/p>\n

PAGE 8.\u00a0<\/strong>Data page: a quote from Cyclops. Superficially he’s talking about tactics, but the end of this issue may suggest that he’s thinking of turning back to Emma Frost as his relationship with Jean becomes rocky.<\/p>\n

PAGES 9-11.<\/strong>\u00a0The Stark Sentinel makes its debut.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Stark Sentinels<\/strong> tie us in with events in Duggan’s\u00a0Iron Man<\/em>, where Orchis member Feilong took over Stark Unlimited and used its access to Stark’s technology to build these things. They’re basically giant Iron Man suits, and they debuted in\u00a0Invincible Iron Man<\/em> #5.<\/p>\n

The idea of giant Iron Man Sentinels has been done before – it was central to the plot of the 2014-15 crossover event Axis<\/em>. Those ones were built by Iron Man under the influence of the Red Skull. We’re probably being invited to politely forget about them.<\/p>\n

The firefighter that the Sentinel attacks is apparently a real mutant, but we’re told later on that the main purpose of this exercise is to draw the X-Men into a fight, so the Sentinels may not be programmed to attack mutants on sight. After all, one of their main functions is to get good publicity for \u00a0Orchis.<\/p>\n

PAGES 12-20. <\/strong>The X-Men fight the Stark Sentinel.<\/em><\/p>\n

Big fight scene, innit?<\/p>\n

PAGE 21.\u00a0<\/strong>Orchis discuss their success.<\/em><\/p>\n

Randall’s Island\u00a0<\/strong>is, at the moment, mostly parkland. It may have been selected as the site of Orchis’s private prison in reference to an announcement last year that asylum seekers would be housed there – though that idea seems to have been abandoned after a few weeks.<\/p>\n

“I’m already receiving a signal from the machines inside their teleporter.”<\/strong> Presumably the idea is that Magik has been infected with nanites when she got a minor cut on the face in page 18 panel 3. The narration on that page indicates that this was a major part of the plan – though we’re told here that they were hoping to get Jean too.<\/p>\n

PAGE 22.\u00a0<\/strong>Data page – a weird op-ed by Dr Stasis appearing as a paid column in “all major newspapers”. In this version, Orchis present themselves as seeking to fill the void left by SHIELD, which is also how they’ve been depicted in\u00a0Iron Man<\/em>.<\/p>\n

“We’ve been at a crisis since the moment … Charles Xavier … intruded … into our very minds.”<\/strong> Stasis is referring to Professor X’s admittedly heavy-handed announcement of the existence of Krakoa, as shown in a flashback in House of X <\/em>#6.<\/p>\n

PAGES 23-24.\u00a0<\/strong>Scott visits Emma.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Kingpin<\/strong> arrived on Krakoa in issue #20, relying on his marriage to Typhoid Mary. Nothing much has happened since. Emma used to work for him back in the day, as shown in\u00a0Devil’s Reign: X-Men<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Ms Marvel<\/strong> died in\u00a0Amazing Spider-Man<\/em> #26, though she’s got a movie coming up, so she’ll obviously be back soon. Scott was “close to [her]” because when he was a time-travelling teenager, they were both members of the Champions. Emma refers to a “previous conversation” – the fairly obvious reading here would be that Ms Marvel is not an Inhuman as previously claimed, but a mutant who can be resurrected on Krakoa. This would have the happy side effect of finally detaching her from Marvel’s failed attempt to make the Inhumans into the new mutants for reasons of corporate synergy (i.e., they had the movie rights to the Inhumans but not the X-Men), which was in full force at the time of her debut.<\/p>\n

PAGE 25.<\/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 #23 “When Cometh — The Stark Sentinels” Writer: Gerry Duggan Artist: Joshua Cassara Colour artist: Dee Cunniffe Letterer: Clayton Cowles Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen Editor: Jordan D White COVER \/ PAGE 1.\u00a0The X-Men fight a Stark […]<\/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-9163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9163","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=9163"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9165,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9163\/revisions\/9165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}