{"id":9532,"date":"2023-10-26T20:48:44","date_gmt":"2023-10-26T19:48:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9532"},"modified":"2023-10-26T20:48:44","modified_gmt":"2023-10-26T19:48:44","slug":"dark-x-men-3-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=9532","title":{"rendered":"Dark X-Men #3 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\/10\/91aztE0T-IL._AC_UY436_QL65_.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-9533 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/91aztE0T-IL._AC_UY436_QL65_-195x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"195\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/91aztE0T-IL._AC_UY436_QL65_-195x300.jpg 195w, https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/91aztE0T-IL._AC_UY436_QL65_.jpg 284w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 195px) 100vw, 195px\" \/><\/a><strong>DARK X-MEN vol 2 #3<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>&#8220;Darker with the Day&#8221;<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Writer: Steve Foxe<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Artist: Jonas Scharf<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Colour artist: Frank Martin<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Letterer: Clayton Cowles<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Design: Tom Muller &amp; Jay Bowen<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Editor: Jordan D White<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>COVER \/ PAGE 1.<\/strong>\u00a0The Dark X-Men fight the Bamf Dragon.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 2.\u00a0<\/strong><em>Flashback: Emplate arrives on Krakoa.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This is mostly recap of things we&#8217;ve already been told, although the actual panels are new.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Panel 1 shows Emplate shortly after arriving on Krakoa, alongside Selene and Gorgon; Exodus is present, though it&#8217;s maybe an overstatement to say that he&#8217;s welcoming Emplate rather than tolerating him. Emplate&#8217;s actual arrival on Krakoa can be seen in the background in\u00a0<em>House of X<\/em> #5.<\/li>\n<li>Panel 2 shows Apocalypse and Cypher introducing Emplate and Selene to their role of monitoring Krakoa to make sure that its feeding on mutant energy remains in safe limits. This hasn&#8217;t actually been seen before, but it was mentioned in\u00a0<em>X-Men<\/em> #3 (2019).<\/li>\n<li>Panel 3 shows Emplate watching his three sisters from a distance; they&#8217;re not actively rejecting him, though it&#8217;s a pretty safe bet that they would. But the main emphasis of this panel is simply that he&#8217;s\u00a0<em>irrelevant<\/em> to them.<\/li>\n<li>Panel 4 shows Azazel showing up to call in whatever debt it is that Emplate owes him &#8211; this arrangement has been clear in the previous two issues, but it&#8217;s not clear yet what the debt actually is.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 3-4.\u00a0<\/strong><em>The Dark X-Men defend the Morlocks from the Dark Angel.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Dark<\/strong> <strong>Angel<\/strong> was captured by Orchis in issue #1 and apparently given this mask by the alternate Goblin Queen last issue.<\/p>\n<p>Considering that he&#8217;s a villain,\u00a0<strong>Emplate<\/strong> does put up a proper right against Angel. Mind you, he <em>is<\/em> under attack himself, and it&#8217;s also a rare opportunity for him to feed legitimately on a mutant.\u00a0<strong>Azazel\u00a0<\/strong>simply refuses to get involved, and while you could make a case that he&#8217;s a schemer villain who couldn&#8217;t do much against Angel in a direct fight, he seems to be enjoying leaving it all to Emplate.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Morlocks<\/strong> seen in this scene are <strong>Callisto <\/strong>(with the knives),\u00a0<strong>Beautiful Dreamer<\/strong> (in the hat) and <strong>Shatter<\/strong> (with the pattern on the side of his face), both of whom were in the previous issue, plus\u00a0<strong>Sack<\/strong> (emerging from the hatch). Sack was a member of Marrow&#8217;s Gene Nation terrorist group in the mid-90s. This seems to be his first appearance since being killed by a Nimrod during the &#8220;Second Coming&#8221; crossover in 2010 (specifically, <em>New Mutants<\/em> #14). Obviously he was resurrected on Krakoa.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 5.\u00a0<\/strong>Recap and credits.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 6.<\/strong> <em>Madelyne&#8217;s group arrive at Flourish&#8217;s home.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Flourish<\/strong> (Marisol Guerra) is the girl who was seen surrounded by mushrooms last issue, though she wasn&#8217;t named. She&#8217;s a character from the short-lived\u00a0<em>Storm<\/em> ongoing in 2014-15. Zero did indeed overrun her town with cyborg zombies (along with many other locations), in\u00a0<em>Storm<\/em> #11.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 7. <\/strong><em>Havok, Zero and Albert dream (kind of).<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Havok<\/strong>&#8216;s dreams show him in his Goblin Prince costume, fighting Sentinels who look a lot like his big brother Cyclops. It&#8217;s basically a collection of neuroses.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Zero<\/strong>&#8216;s dreams seem to show him happy and at peace in a world of his own creations.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Albert<\/strong>, being an android, doesn&#8217;t dream at all but simply lapses into stasis without Zero to control him.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 8.\u00a0<\/strong><em>Madelyne Pryor dreams.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>As the narrator says, while these\u00a0<em>are<\/em> Madelyne&#8217;s major nightmares, it&#8217;s familiar territory for her &#8211; unlike Havok, she seems to have come to terms with them sufficiently to brush them off.<\/p>\n<p>Madelyne is wearing the pilot costume that she often wore in her early appearances, and which tends to get used these days to symbolise pre-corruption, civilian Maddie. Panel 2 shows her creator Mr Sinister with her abducted child Nate. Panel 3 shows a dead Jean Grey \/ Phoenix. Finally, we have what appears to be Death, holding a scythe and Havok&#8217;s headdress. The point may be that Madelyne&#8217;s efforts last issue to keep Havok alive are merely delaying the inevitable.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 9.<\/strong> <em>Feint enters the citadel alone.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Since Feint carries actual equipment with her, she had the foresight to bring a respirator, and so she gets to be the last X-Man standing, despite her rookie status. As soon as she leaves, the Bamf Dragon teleports in &#8211; the transformed Nightcrawler who accompanies the alt-Goblin Queen who&#8217;s working with Orchis.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 10.\u00a0<\/strong>Data page. A basically straight account of Flourish&#8217;s pre-Krakoa back story, coupled with an explanation of why she didn&#8217;t find a home on Krakoa despite what might seem incredibly useful powers for the environment. There seems to be a parallel here with the opening page, showing Emplate failing to fit in.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 11-12.\u00a0<\/strong><em>Gambit defeats the Dark Angel.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Apparently, by killing him. At this point, I&#8217;d be pretty confident that we&#8217;re going to get some sort of resurrection available (at least for a window) at the end of &#8220;Fall of X&#8221;, since Warren&#8217;s a core character. Gambit seems surprisingly willing to jump straight to this approach instead of just trying to wound the guy, but maybe he just figures that with so few mutants left, he can&#8217;t risk the whole team getting wiped out. Even so, nobody seems terribly bothered about it on the next page. It&#8217;s an odd scene. I suppose, given the death mask, it&#8217;s conceivable that this is some sort of duplicate and that it&#8217;s not really Warren under there, but Gambit doesn&#8217;t know that.<\/p>\n<p>Despite his choice to sit smugly on the sidelines, Azazel doesn&#8217;t put up much resistance to a direct order for Gambit &#8211; though it probably doesn&#8217;t hurt that Gambit didn&#8217;t ask Azazel to actually fight Angel directly.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 13.\u00a0<\/strong><em>Gambit talks to Callisto.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Callisto politely declines the offer to go and hang out with demons, which seems reasonable enough, and Maggott apparently thinks this sounds like a better deal.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 14.\u00a0<\/strong>Data page &#8211; just the lyrics of a song for a dead Morlock. Again, it seems odd that the deaths of these background characters get more emphasis than Warren.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 15-16.\u00a0<\/strong><em>Feint talks to Flourish.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Flourish basically indicates that she has created her own haven for the remaining mutants in Mexico &#8211; i.e., those who were too far from a gate to be marched through one. Since <em>she<\/em> could &#8220;come and go whenever I wanted&#8221;, presumably she did have a gate on hand, so it&#8217;s not entirely clear why she was able to resist Professor X. Let&#8217;s chalk it up to some weird anomaly involving her powers and move on.<\/p>\n<p>Feint gives her a strength-in-numbers pitch in which she indicates that she really does accept Madelyne&#8217;s wonky group as the X-Men, or at least the current version of the X-Men.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 17-20.\u00a0<\/strong><em>The Dark X-Men drive off the Bamf Dragon.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Madelyne correctly identifies this as a corrupted alt-Kurt Wagner, presumably by telepathy.<\/p>\n<p>Havok&#8217;s body does indeed seem to be collapsing here, at least when placed under the strain of using his powers at full blast.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGES 21-22.\u00a0<\/strong><em>Feint defeats the Bamf Dragon.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Feint is giving Flourish&#8217;s group the regular X-Men pitch, either convincing herself that this is still the proper X-Men, or at least turning a blind eye to the problems on the view that it&#8217;s the best option for the mutants here. She&#8217;s evidently picked up some proper fighting skills with her shape changing powers since we last saw her, probably through her training with Bishop.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 23.\u00a0<\/strong><em>Flourish rejects the Dark X-Men.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Flourish blames the attack on the Dark X-Men, which is probably true in a narrow sense, but doesn&#8217;t alter the fact that Orchis know where she is now. Madelyne accepts that decision, claiming that she won&#8217;t force anyone to follow her &#8211; but immediately invokes the &#8220;To me, my X-Men&#8221; line to position herself as the X-Men&#8217;s leader, and dismisses Flourish and her group as undeserving of help. Presumably she doesn&#8217;t like having her purported role as a hero rejected, even by someone like Flourish who rejected the real X-Men too.<\/p>\n<p><b>PAGE 24.\u00a0<\/b><em>Orchis make their next plan.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Agents Krol and<\/strong> <strong>Vallens<\/strong> are not particularly impressed by the outcome of this skirmish &#8211; even though the &#8220;asset destroyed&#8221; they mention is apparently Angel.<\/p>\n<p>The alt-Goblin Queen&#8217;s next target is\u00a0<strong>Chasm <\/strong>(Ben Reilly), the clone of Peter Parker who&#8217;s been a prisoner in the Limbo Embassy since &#8220;Dark Web&#8221;. We saw him briefly in issue #1.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PAGE 25.\u00a0<\/strong>Trailers. The Krakoan reads GOBLIN QUEENS.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. DARK X-MEN vol 2 #3 &#8220;Darker with the Day&#8221; Writer: Steve Foxe Artist: Jonas Scharf Colour artist: Frank Martin Letterer: Clayton Cowles Design: Tom Muller &amp; Jay Bowen Editor: Jordan D White COVER \/ PAGE 1.\u00a0The Dark X-Men fight the Bamf [&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,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9532","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=9532"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9534,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9532\/revisions\/9534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}