{"id":9312,"date":"2023-08-10T23:01:29","date_gmt":"2023-08-10T22:01:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9312"},"modified":"2023-08-10T23:01:29","modified_gmt":"2023-08-10T22:01:29","slug":"children-of-the-vault-1-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9312","title":{"rendered":"Children of the Vault #1 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/A1YWa40ViZL._AC_UY436_QL65_.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-9313 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/A1YWa40ViZL._AC_UY436_QL65_-195x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"195\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/A1YWa40ViZL._AC_UY436_QL65_-195x300.jpg 195w, https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/A1YWa40ViZL._AC_UY436_QL65_.jpg 284w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 195px) 100vw, 195px\" \/><\/a><strong>CHILDREN OF THE VAULT #1<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>&#8220;Tomorrow&#8217;s Children&#8221;<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Writer: Deniz Camp<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Artist: Luca Maresca<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Colourist: Carlos Lopez<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Letterer: Cory Petit<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Design: Tom Muller &amp; Jay Bowen<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Editor: Sarah Brunstad<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>COVER \/ PAGE 1.<\/strong> The Children of the Vault &#8211; specifically, Serafina, Perro and Fuego &#8211; stand triumphant over Cable and Bishop.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 2-4.<\/strong> <em>The Children of the Vault emerge from suspended animation.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This sequence pretty much assumes that you&#8217;ve been reading\u00a0<em>X-Men\u00a0<\/em>and know what&#8217;s going on. For anyone who doesn&#8217;t:<\/p>\n<p>The Children of the Vault debuted in\u00a0<em>X-Men<\/em> #188 (2006), by Mike Carey and Chris Bachalo. The basic idea is that they were an attempt to create vastly evolved humans by having them develop in a bubble society within a time distortion vault, so that centuries of development pass for them without any significant time passing on Earth. They&#8217;re not mutants, they&#8217;re technologically enhanced posthumans. Traditionally, the Children of the Vault believe that they&#8217;re the destined inheritors of the world. During Jonathan Hickman&#8217;s run, we established that they tend to create endless iterations of the same characters, supposedly always working towards improvement.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>In\u00a0<em>X-Men<\/em> #15-17, Forge trapped the Vault inside a collective dream created by Krakoan technology, to keep them out of everyone&#8217;s way. As he flagged at the time, this depended on Krakoa itself continuing to function. In\u00a0<em>X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023<\/em>, Krakoa stopped functioning, and Forge&#8217;s systems failed. We saw Forge himself realising that in\u00a0<em>X-Men\u00a0<\/em>#25, but there&#8217;s not much he can do about it right now. In the dream world he had created for them, they conquered the world.<\/p>\n<p>The Children seen here are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Serafina<\/strong>, the chrome one. Her established power is indeed control of machines. Note that there&#8217;s a wrinkle here: in <em>X-Men<\/em> #16-17, Forge encountered a Serafina while inside the City, and that was supposedly\u00a0<em>after<\/em> the Children were put into suspended animation. So did she somehow end up here after he left, or is this a different Serafina from a later iteration?<\/li>\n<li><strong>Aguja<\/strong>, the blonde in green.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Martillo<\/strong>, the big guy with the enormous hammer.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Sangre<\/strong>, the one covered in circles.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Cadena<\/strong>, the one in the big helmet.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Perro<\/strong>, the blue guy.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Fuego<\/strong>, the one whose head is on fire.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The Vault itself has been housed in the former Wild Sentinel facility in Ecuador since\u00a0<em>X-Men<\/em> #193 (2006); the Sentinel itself has no particular significance to the story beyond that.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 5.\u00a0<\/strong>Recap and credits.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 6-8.\u00a0<\/strong><em>Rodrigo Mu\u00f1oz drinks poisoned water.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>These are lithium evaporation ponds, used to extract lithium from brine. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.euronews.com\/green\/2022\/02\/01\/south-america-s-lithium-fields-reveal-the-dark-side-of-our-electric-future\">Read more about them (and see what looks suspiciously like the photo reference) here.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Tierra Desnuda is not (as far as I can tell) a real place in Chile. It means &#8220;the Bare Earth&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 9-10.\u00a0<\/strong><em>Cable resists Orchis&#8217;s mind probe.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Cable <\/strong>&#8211; or this version of him, at least &#8211; was last seen in\u00a0<em>X-Men Red\u00a0<\/em>#10. According to the narrator, Orchis ambushed him and captured him at some point after that. It&#8217;s not mentioned in this issue, but we saw the younger Cable get captured by Orchis too, while trying to attack their base in\u00a0<em>X-Men<\/em> #24.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;What is, is&#8221;\u00a0<\/strong>was the Askani mantra endlessly repeated in\u00a0<em>Cable<\/em> stories of the 1990s.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Dr Faustus<\/strong> is a Captain America villain dating back to the late 60s. He&#8217;s basically a neo-Nazi psychiatrist.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 11-16.\u00a0<\/strong><em>Bishop rescues Cable.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Bishop<\/strong> was among the mutants who escaped with Emma Frost&#8217;s group at the end of\u00a0<em>Hellfire Gala 2023<\/em>, but apparently he&#8217;s gone off on his own in the intervening weeks.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;Cable and Bishop have a long, bloody history together in the far future.&#8221;<\/strong> This is &#8230; putting it mildly. In the 2008-2010\u00a0<em>Cable<\/em> series, Bishop pursues Cable and Hope through time, attempting to kill Hope because he believes that she&#8217;s destined to be a historical disaster. On the shaky pretext that he&#8217;s going to wind up cancelling out the entire timeline anyway, Bishop then starts committing literally genocidal levels of destruction simply in an attempt to narrow Hope&#8217;s location down. The story was widely viewed at the time as destroying the character beyond redemption; the only reason it didn&#8217;t was that later writers just started ignoring it at the earliest \u00a0opportunity and basically pretended that it had never happened. This issue is kind of trying to have it both ways, alluding to a long history of antagonism without actually saying outright what it involved.<\/p>\n<p>Despite often being portrayed as having advance knowledge due to his time travel, Cable apparently\u00a0<em>didn&#8217;t\u00a0<\/em>know that the Fall of X was about to happen. Of course, time is fluid.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 17.\u00a0<\/strong>Data page. This consists of brief summaries of three missions that Bishop has been on since the Gala, leading up to him learning about Cable&#8217;s location.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8220;If You Give A Mutant a Cookie&#8221;<\/strong> is a reference to\u00a0<em>If You Give a Mouse a Cookie<\/em> (1985) by Laura Numeroff &amp; Felicia Bond, which is a &#8220;slippery slope&#8221; story.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 18-19.\u00a0<\/strong><em>The &#8220;Children of Tomorrow&#8221; make their debut.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Rather than just going on the usual campaign of conquest, the Children of the Vault are presenting themselves as a new superhero team, the Children of Tomorrow, who are going to make the world better Authority-style. Left to right, the group seen here are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Capit\u00e1n<\/strong>, the Superman-type guy on the left.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Prisa<\/strong>, the girl with the purple hair.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Serafina<\/strong>, billing herself as &#8220;the Voice of the City&#8221; &#8211; meaning the A.I. of the Vault City.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Ferro<\/strong>, apparently a cross between Perro and Fuego.<\/li>\n<li><strong>\u00c1tomo<\/strong>, in the cape and with the weird left arm.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Luz<\/strong>, the blonde.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Luz is from one of Mike Carey&#8217;s Children arc, and debuted in\u00a0<em>X-Men: Legacy<\/em> #238 (2010). Capit\u00e1n, Prisa and \u00c1tomo are all new characters.<\/p>\n<p>We see a range of people around the world hearing Serafina&#8217;s message and reacting to it, in what seems like a callback to Professor X declaring the founding of Krakoa in\u00a0<em>House of X<\/em>. Conspicuously, everyone reacting is fro countries that don&#8217;t normally get much page time in Marvel &#8211; no North Americans or Europeans, nobody from China or Japan or Korea. (We do see the Australian authorities reacting on page 23, to be fair.)<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 20-23.<\/strong> <em>The Children of Tomorrow do good deeds and people react.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>The Dadaab Refugee Camp<\/strong> is one of the largest refugee camps in the world, run by the UNHCR.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Rocinha<\/strong> is the largest favela in Rio de Janiero &#8211; the art really shows a wider area than just Rocinha itself.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Al-Jaraib\u00a0<\/strong>is indeed a town in Yemen, but I&#8217;m not sure if there&#8217;s any particular significance to it.<\/p>\n<p id=\"firstHeading\" class=\"firstHeading mw-first-heading\"><strong><span class=\"mw-page-title-main\">Nurda\u011f\u0131<\/span><\/strong><span class=\"mw-page-title-main\"> is a district in Turkey rather than a city. It was hit by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake in February, killing 2,500 people, which is presumably why it&#8217;s been selected here.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Orchis<\/strong> are represented here by Director Killian Devo and Omega Sentinel Karima Shapandar.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 24-26.\u00a0<\/strong><em>Cable takes Bishop back to his base.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;d have thought they&#8217;d have found some clothes before they made it to Hell&#8217;s Kitchen on foot. And if mutants are meant to be lying low to avoid provoking Orchis, this is a funny way of going about it.<\/p>\n<p>Cable had a base in Hell&#8217;s Kitchen back in the James Robinson\/Joe Casey runs on his solo title in the late 1990s.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 27.\u00a0<\/strong><em>Flashback: Bishop&#8217;s attacks on Orchis.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This is a bit of a weird flashback, dropped into the middle of a scene without much warning and really just repeating what we were already told in a data page.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 28-29.\u00a0<\/strong><em>Cable identifies the Children&#8217;s viral idea in Bishop&#8217;s mind.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>As Cable explains, this is not telepathy as such; the idea of liking and trusting the Children is itself contagious.<\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;Nurse Hetty&#8221; AI persona on Cable&#8217;s arm is obviously based on Betty Boop.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 30.\u00a0<\/strong>Data page, in which we&#8217;re reminded that there are precedents for this sort of thing.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Weapon XVI<\/strong>, the so-called &#8220;Allgod&#8221;, was indeed a weaponised religious belief that attacked religious people (but was ineffective against atheists). Its only appearance was in <em>Dark Reign &#8211; The List: Wolverine<\/em> (2009).<\/p>\n<p><strong>Hawkspox\u00a0<\/strong>seems to be new.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Hexus the Living Corporation\u00a0<\/strong>was the villain from\u00a0<em>Marvel Boy<\/em> #2-3 (2000) by Grant Morrison and JG Jones. It&#8217;s basically a hive mind crossed with a conceptual villain.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The techno organic virus\u00a0<\/strong>is a slightly weird inclusion here, since it isn&#8217;t conceptual in the slightest; we get a basically accurate description of its established role in current continuity. Presumably it&#8217;s here simply because it&#8217;s a virus villain. Cable&#8217;s variant is the version given to him by Apocalypse to keep him under control. The &#8220;Storm\/World Variant&#8221; is the version that Storm was infected with in\u00a0<em>Giant-Size X-Men: Storm<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 31-34.\u00a0<\/strong><em>Bishop and Cable go on the streets.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>And the Children&#8217;s idea has become pervasive.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 35.<\/strong> Trailers. The Krakoan text reads: LAY YOUR HAMMER DOWN.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. CHILDREN OF THE VAULT #1 &#8220;Tomorrow&#8217;s Children&#8221; Writer: Deniz Camp Artist: Luca Maresca Colourist: Carlos Lopez Letterer: Cory Petit Design: Tom Muller &amp; Jay Bowen Editor: Sarah Brunstad COVER \/ PAGE 1. The Children of the Vault &#8211; specifically, Serafina, Perro [&hellip;]<\/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-9312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9312","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=9312"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9314,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9312\/revisions\/9314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}