X-Men #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN vol 7 #4
“Upstarts”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inker: Sean Parsons
Colourist: Marte Gracia
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
THE X-MEN:
Cyclops stays behind at the Factory and sits out this mission, so plays a relatively minor role.
Magik is assigned as team leader for the mission, which makes sense given her role as one of the Captains of Krakoa. Granted, it means she’s chosen for the job over the Beast, but since he doesn’t even want to go, that seems fair enough. Beast is impressed with her performance in the field and thinks she’s a born leader, but he may not fully realise quite how fatalistic she is. According to Magik, she thinks there’s no hope of mutants ever winning, and her goal is just to “keep from losing for as long as possible”. Krakoa is the elephant in the room where this worldview is concerned; was she expecting it to fail all along, or just rationalising it after the fact?
Temper and Juggernaut make up her limited field team. Juggernaut gets to give a speech about how he’s opted into making mutant affairs his business, and that the X on his helmet is a crosshairs that he chooses to wear.
Kid Omega and Psylocke don’t appear at all. We’re told that they’re “in the middle of a psychic rescue”, apparently elsewhere in the Factory. Presumably they’re trying to wake the comatose Ben Liu, but we’re not told that in terms.
The Beast doesn’t want to go on missions, which he claims is because his scientific work is so important: “Have you forgotten what’s happened to Magneto? What could happen to any of us? We are all of us ticking time bombs…” Magneto (who doesn’t appear either) has lost his powers and is in a wheelchair, as confirmed in X-Men: From the Ashes Infinity Comic #13-14. We’ve yet to find out what actually caused this. Beast seems to be suggesting that it’s either something that could affect mutants generally, or maybe something that this particular group was exposed to somewhere before the series began.
Then again, is Beast just reluctant to get back into being an X-Man given his recent history. Interestingly, this week’s From the Ashes issue reasserts the position that this character is, strictly speaking, a Beast clone with a copy of Beast’s memories and not the original Beast – something that seemed to have been played down.
SUPPORTING CHARACTERS:
Jennifer Starkey, this issue’s new mutant, is a new character.
Glob Herman is hanging around the Factory being domestic.
Colossus appears to be the person Magik is playing text message chess with. This is the first time we’ve seen him post-Krakoa.
VILLAINS:
The Upstarts are a group of villains who are hunting new mutants and killing them on live stream, for no stated purpose other than to be loved by their audience. They have a logo with a yellow circle and a black U that seems to evoke a smiley face.
The group is a revival (of sorts) of the Upstarts from early 90s X-Men, in which a bunch of new villains competing to kill as many mutants as they could in the hopes of earning points to win a mysterious prize from the Gamesmaster. The whole storyline eventually petered out in New Warriors #46.
Trevor Fitzroy, who leads the new group, was a member of the original Upstarts, although his motivation there was to win the Gamesmaster’s never-specified prize, rather than to pursue fame. That said, it’d be stretching a point to say that early 90s Fitzroy had any terribly clear agenda, and some stories do present him with the somewhat flamboyant persona he describes here. Quite what Fitzroy stands to gain in practical terms from streaming on the dark web is less than clear, and perhaps it’s just a cover story for his team. He claims that he wants “the very worst” humans to love him, and suggests that this is more about building some sort of power base.
Fitzroy was last seen during the Matthew Rosenberg pre-Krakoa run on Uncanny X-Men, where he died. Presumably he was resurrected on Krakoa at some point.
The other three Upstarts are Ocelot, Orbit and Orifice. As Juggernaut notes, these bozos are from the opening arc of X-Statix, and haven’t been since. They were members of O-Force, a rival fame-chasing superhero team who were chosen in a reality TV show. In fact, Orifice didn’t even get that far – he was a candidate who didn’t make the final team. Ocelot claims here that they murdered people on TV as part of the show; he’s referring to O-Force’s first televised mission where they rescued some actors from group of supposed kidnappers. The narrator in X-Statix #2 does indeed say that the kidnappers were fakes who were hired by O-Force’s management, and that O-Force killed them during the “rescue”.
That aside, O-Force were generally presented in the X-Statix arc as a bunch of amateurs playacting at being superheroes. Their second mission was against reality-warper Arnie Lunt, a genuine villain who completely outpowered them. Basically, their plot function was to show that X-Statix had some substance by comparison.
Ocelot claims that they’re here for fame, which matches their back story and Fitzroy’s stated agenda. Presumably Orbit and Orifice are here for similar reasons.
The Sugar Man is sponsoring the Upstarts, although he just wants them to gather the new mutants who have been appeared in recent issues, and sees Fitzroy’s obsession with image as a nuisance. The agendas don’t really align, so presumably this is the best muscle that the Sugar Man could find (and he must have been pretty desperate).
The Sugar Man is a mad geneticist from the Age of Apocalypse timeline who came to the mainstream Marvel Universe as the end of that crossover and floating around doing mad scientist things throughout the 1990s before drifting down the pecking order. He was found dead in Matthew Rosenberg’s Uncanny X-Men #1 (2018), but apparently got resurrected on Krakoa in a fit of generosity. He did make one appearance during the Krakoan era, in a one-panel cameo among a bunch of minor villains in Amazing Spider-Man #39 (2020), which could previously have been dismissed as a likely error.
OTHER SPECIFICS:
Page 1: There are a couple of trivial problems with the art on the chess board. According to the text messages, Magik moves second, which means she should be black. And the move she texted was e6, but in the art she’s moved d6. (Her opponent’s moves are correctly shown, though.) Oh, and why is her opponent’s number shown as blocked when she’s clearly communicating with them?
Page 6: “We isolated the landmarks immediately visible in their video.” What landmarks? The art shows Fitzroy in front of a studio backdrop.
Page 7: “Go hide in a shanty with Rogue and her crew.” The Uncanny X-Men cast.
When I saw all those O names my first thought was O-Force before
You even said it
…yeah, okay, I’m sold. It’s nothing revolutionary, but MacKay has a good grasp on the characters. And it’s the first time I’ve ever been entertained by an appearance of Trevor Fitzroy.
I wish a more coherent main plot would be formed by issue four, but I’m willing to wait some more.
That’s a truly terrible cover. Is it supposed to be someone looking at an issue of X-Men on their phone?
Does Star Wars exist in the Marvel universe? Ocelot could get a job as a Wookiee on the next SW show or movie.
For that matter, a lot of the odd looking super characters could go to Hollywood instead of being heroes or villains. But no, they have to keep punching each other.
I don’t know who asked for the return of O-Force in any capacity, but daaaamn those are some obscure goobers. I always felt like the mutants appearing in Milligan’s run were extremely fringe weirdos and wasn’t even sure if they were meant to be in continuity…
(I know they were, but this was an era simply FLOODED with adult mutants playing dress-up who clearly hadn’t come up through any of the established farm teams–a truly radical change from the days when the X-Men and Hellfire Club, etc, raced to recruit every new mutant in sight…)
So yeah, bringing them back is serious digging into the dumpster.
Meanwhile, Krakoa may have been a little TOO generous, if their queue prioritized people like Fitzroy and the Sugar Man–especially since one’s a time traveler from a dystopian future, and the other a refugee from a dystopian alternate timeline, and neither is what we’d call a model citizen who plays well with others.
(I can indeed think of a few people who might even have taken exception to resources being dedicated to their return. Might Emma and the original Hellions have something to say for Fitzroy, who murdered so many of them during the original Upstart period? Who was even asking for Sugar Man to be brought back? Sinister, to consult on matters of genetics? Yeesh.)
“For that matter, a lot of the odd looking super characters could go to Hollywood instead of being heroes or villains.”
I guess the problem is that having such a unique look typecasts you–just like Gar Logan discovered when no one wanted a green-skinned shapechanger after his show was cancelled… better by far to employ the ones with useful powers like shapeshifting. (Masque could make serious money in Hollywood if they went legit!)
I’m not sure how I feel about the idea that Peter always beats Illyana at chess. Personally, I think it would make sense the other way around.
Scott claims that he has to be at the base in case something happens. But he could be avoiding going into the field because of his seeming panic attack last issue. In early X-Factor he tried to lead the team while suffering from hallucinations and wound up almost killing Jean, so it’s possible that he doesn’t feel comfortable acting as field leader while in a mentally unwell state.
Speaking of Scott’s panic attack, now I’m wondering if it was really a panic attack brought on by trauma or a symptom of whatever happened to Magneto.
I’m not liking the idea that whatever happened to Magneto could happen to any of Scott’s team. None of the characters, either in MacKay’s X-Men or Simone’s Uncanny X-Men, have been acting like whatever happened to Magneto could happen to any of the members of Scott’s team. It defies belief that they wouldn’t mention it until now.
According to Breevort, the reason why Sugar Man is in MacKay’s run is because Ryan Stegman wanted to draw him but unfortunately, the schedule caused his first appearance to be one of the issues he had to skip.
Regardless, the Sugar Man makes sense as an antagonist for Beast. Sugar Man worked extensively with the Dark Beast and Beast himself came to him for help once in a moment of desperation. So he’s a reminder to Beast of what he might be.
“He did make one appearance during the Krakoan era, in a one-panel cameo among a bunch of minor villains in Amazing Spider-Man #39 (2020), which could previously have been dismissed as a likely error.”
One thing to note about that issue- he appears among a number of villains in the Foreigner’s casino. And many of the villains are later revealed to be agents of the Chameleon using the same serum which gave the Chameleon his powers. But not the Sugar Man. Nick Spencer, who wrote those issues. left open the idea that the Sugar Man survived.
Breevort really needs to cut it out with the hyperbole. On his blog he described the Sugar Man as ” a once-prominent X-Villain that you never expected to see again”.The last time he showed up was in Rosenberg’s run, and most of the deaths in Rosenberg’s run were undone. (Poor Evan being the exception.) So his reappearance is about as shocking as Baron Zemo surviving a fall to his death.
“It means she’s chosen for the job over the Beast, but since he doesn’t even want to go, that seems fair enough”
Also. Beast’s memories of the X-Men’s villains are years out of date. Imagine if the Sugar Man had shown up in person:
“Sugar Man. You have the mutant power to control sucrose, right? What’s that tongue? AARGH!”
Beast comments that Illyana is better than Scott was when he was her age. How old is Illyana supposed to be now? Beast’s memories stop approximately when Nathan was born. (I’ve never been clear about whether Doug and Illyana are younger than they’re supposed to be due to the years they spent dead.)
@The Other Michael- it’s possible that Sugar Man survived using his own powers- he once survived Magneto seemingly killing him.But yeah, Krakoa was definitely too generous, especially since they brought back Larry Trask (who, admittedly, died trying to make things right) without taking steps to make sure he couldn’t build Sentinels again.
I like to think that things like X-Statix, Moon Girl, Nextwave, et cetera are in a kind of semi-detached self managed canon along with licensees like Rom and Conan, and everything in Unlimited. Events can be canon if they are referenced in a fully canon story, otherwise they’re not. So Squirrel Girl is at ESU studying computer science, but she does not have a good-aligned Ultron tree protecting her parents.
Personally I’m all for canon being intentionally blurry round the edges.
I quite liked last issue, all things considered. But this one loses me a littlr bit. Granted, there are compelling directions settling for most of the characters, and there’s a vivid sense that this is all gradually moving forward – the pacing is really great.
But – and this might be because I read all of this week’s X-Books in quick succession – something doesnt really gel. I think I dislike the books more because of creative decisions that shale them that are really at odds with what I want to read – but the fact is this all reads as a bit of a slog.
Why os Fitzroy doing what he is doing? How does making snuff films reconcile with how public this fight is, and the idea that some kind of fame could emerge from all of this? What’s Fitzroy’s motivation – and just how many people are willing to explicitly emdorse it?
Because in this week’s other two titles, we learn Dazzler’s album has been mumber one for 8 weeks, while X-Factor half-heartedly pushed ahead with its PR stunt premise.
None of this gives a very grounded sense of what the public stance on mutants actually is, and why they could both a) be so explicitly and visibly villified by humanity at large while b) participating of highly public and pressumably well paid media jobs.
I also like and don’t like the relationship to Krakoa – I’m happy it’s there, yes. But it is way to recent to ammount only to an elephant in the room.
Why are none of these people grieving? Why does Krakoa disappear so completely once the place itself does? Where are the new mutant nationalists? The tensions between those who mourn Krakoa amd those who feel indifferent to it?
Somehow, in terms of world building, all of this feels horribly incomplete.
There’s no reason Rom shouldn’t be considered fully canon. Uncanny X-Men acknowledged there were shape-changing aliens known as Dire Wraiths which had infiltrated Earth societies. There’s no reason why an alien coming here and traveling around Earth to put a stop to that invasion should be considered of questionable canonicity.
There are elements of continuity which happen during the course of the Rom series as well, such as the death of Torpedo. I’d classify Rom as different from comics like X-Statix or NextWave (which are about the storytelling more than concerned with continuity).
Also, Joe-Star Wars does exist as a movie in the Marvel Universe. Nightcrawler discusses the movie in a Classic X-Men issue, revealing Chewbacca as his favourite character.
Another issue of Uncanny (although less definitive about the canon of such) does feature Kitty using Shi’ar technology to dress as Darth Vader.
@Michael – Had Illyana led a completely uneventful life, right now she’d be around 13 approximately. She’s definitely older, not younger than she’s supposed to be.
Paige Guthrie’s first appearance was in Rom Annual 3 (along with several other Guthrie siblings)
@Si, Chris V- Nextwave was originally intended to be non-canon, but writers kept referring to it. The discrepancies were eventually explained as a result of the reality warping powers of the entity that possessed Jason Quantrell.
Rom is definitely canon. The Wraiths made numerous appearances after Rom was canceled. The Wraiths appeared in New Warriors, Annihilation, Darkstar & the Wintner Guard, Fear Itself and Avengers Academy. And those stories had consequences – Mickey Musashi’s characterization is based on the fact that her best friend was murdered by a Wraith and Darkstar is in the body of a Wraith.
Well yeah, dire wraiths and spaceknights are canon, but Rom officially doesn’t exist. You might get a tangential reference of them, but you won’t see that toaster of a face in a flashback.
Granted, licensees aren’t a great example for my point.
Isn’t the current Magik a clone made by Belasco for personal reasons, in possession of all or part of the original’s soul? If so, she could be physically any age from 15 up to mid 30s. Literally she’d be 1 or 2 years old, unless wonky Limbo time comes into play, and mentally she’s something like 300.
Is every member of this team a clone?
Rom exists in the Marvel Universe, even when Marvel has no agreement with Hasbro. He just can’t be presented in a way that challenges Hasbro registered properties.
We saw him in human form at Rick’s wedding with Marlo and were told that he had died in 2000’s “Spaceknights #1”, which was confirmed a couple of times since.
This “current” Illyana, to the best of my knowledge, is a temporal alternate that arose at the aftermath of “Inferno” (the 1990s crossover). Even the previous version had spent an undeterminate number of years in Limbo during the Claremont run. Her age is very difficult to pinpoint.
Kitty dressed as Darth Vader likely ticks the boxes of many nerdss of a certain age.
And of course there was the New Mutants Special Edition (the Asgard one), where Enchantress shows off to Magik by turning her into a baby, then tries to make her elderly, but Magik stays a teenager even after Enchantress keeps going until after “an ordinary mortal would have been reduced to dust”. So maybe she’s eternally 16 until she dies.
If you want to be generous about Sugar Man, you could assume Beast, at his worst, put him ahead in the queue to be of help in one of his schemes (and also highlighting his turn into essentially Dark Beast)
“Is every member of this team a clone?”
Depending on how you view Krakoa resurrection:
Scott, Hank, Max, Kwannon, Quentin, and Illyana have all died and come back to life at least once, and/or been altered, de-aged, depowered, reimpowered, and otherwise now inhabit non-original bodies.
Idie and Cain are, AFAIK, pretty much in their original bodies.
(And it is SO WEIRD that everyone is calling Magneto “Max” now. It’s like… just not a name which suits him, in my opinion.)
While Colossus is the obvious implied person that Magik is playing — it’s *so* obvious that I wonder why they’re bothering to be coy about it. I figure about 50% chance it’s someone else (Sinister?), or if it *is* Colossus, there’s something weird about his appearance for some reason.
This whole era feels to me less like “A New Beginning!” and more like an interregnum. I am put in mind what Kieron Gillen said (years later) about his first X-Men run. He was given the editorial mandate that he was filling in space between AvX and Schism, and had to color within those lines (which he was perfectly willing to do). My guess is that Marvel has a major line-wide reboot already in the works, scheduled for whenever the X-Men join the MCU. And we’re just marking time until then.
Trevor Fitzroy *and* Sugar Man? I’d be hard pushed to think of two x-characters I like less.
There was Peter David’s retcon that Fitzroy used to be good until Layla Miller resurrected him without a soul. Maybe Krakoa thought his powers would be useful and took a gamble that they’d get the nice version back?
It seems odd Hank is so grumpy about going into the field, seeing how this is supposed to be fun-loving Avengers-era Hank. Antisocial lab-bound Hank is far closer to the modern version. I wonder if McKay is going for a reveal on which Hank died or if it’s just how he’s chosing to write him.
“And it is SO WEIRD that everyone is calling Magneto “Max” now. It’s like… just not a name which suits him, in my opinion.”
I’m with you. I’ve never met a Max who wasn’t a dog.
With this being a Beast arc and running alongside the FTA story, could the Sugarman be cover for or link to Dark Beast (who was mentioned directly in FTA). With Neo-Beast resolutely refusing to become his dark self.
@MasterMahan- I think that Beast being in a lab is an “appointment in Samarra” thing. He’s determined to avoid becoming like Beast Prime or Dark Beast so he’s avoiding violence and staying in the lab- but that’s just making him more like them.
Beast is having an arc on the Unlimited app where he tells his therapist that he’s afraid that if he returns to being a field-X-Man, he will once again turn evil.
Magneto had a similar character focus explicitly laying out how he’s depowered and sick now also.
I don’t know about putting such important character work in an app, but apparently Marvel thinks it’s a good business decision.
“I’m with you. I’ve never met a Max who wasn’t a dog.”
Yuuuup. Our dog is Max, so I’m never going to be able to take Magneto seriously by that name. He’s Erik, screw that stupid retcon.
Also agree with everyone that the ruling council should’ve exercised a little judgment about Fitzroy and Sugar Man. You want to bring back every existing mutant, even the bad ones, fine. But Sugar Man doesn’t belong in this dimension, and Fitzroy doesn’t belong in this time. At the very least, after they were resurrected, Proteus should’ve immediately sent them home. (But I guess that would’ve been irresponsible, given that they’re such cocks.)
I don’t know about American dogs, but Maximilian is a common enough name in Germany (#18 most popular boys’ name in 2020 according to that one website I just checked).
Except, well, he’s not called Maximilian, but Max – not only in dialogue, which would be an understandable use of the diminutive, but in all character bios and ‘official’ information. That part’s weird for me.
Max Brod was the biographer and close friend of Franz Kafka. I don’t know why, and have zero proof, but I got the idea they named Magneto “Max” after Brod.
There’s always Maxwell Smart. You can’t go wrong naming someone after him. I think that 80% of humans are naming their dogs after Secret Agent 86, whether they know it or not. Well, would you believe 69%? No? Missed it by that much.
@MasterMahan: Presumably, because Fitzroy died in an alternate future timeline, the Waiting Room wouldn’t have worked or just didn’t exist there. So all they’d have was his most recent Cerebro backup, which would be soulless, evil Fitzroy.
It’s still odd that a time traveler like Fitzroy wasn’t part of the very timeline -oriented Krakoa plot. And it’s a bit odd that so many alternate-timeline mutants were resurrected, though I suppose they’d all have Cerebro backups.
Not that anyone’s going to revisit the plot mechanics of Krakoan resurrection any time soon.
Max is also a perfectly acceptable name for the spunky teenage female sidekick in an 80s action adventure intended for kids but is probably a little too violent and scary when judged against today’s more overprotective parenting culture.
Also, Maxwell’s Hammer.
Hmm… House of M… Magneto… Max… House of Max… Maxwell House!
I get it now.
Fitzroy and Sugar Man could be alternate timeline versions, not necessarily the ones who died in earlier stories. I don’t remember if Fitzroy references being resurrected in this issue. Given how hostile Brevoort comes across when any fan asks him a question about earlier continuity, I’ll be surprised if we get an in-story explanation unless it’s plot-relevant.
This issue was okay, nothing special. I’m getting annoyed with the references to things that happened post-Krakoa/pre- FtA. Just tell the story, stop having people hint about the Bad Thing. The explanation probably won’t be very satisfying, anyway.
@Mike Loughlin- Breevort has said on his blog that “The situation that we were going to be left, according to Jordan White, was that any character that we wanted resurrected would have been resurrected by the end of the Krakoa era”.
So basically he’s assuming that any mutant character he wants to use was resurrected off panel.
@Michael: thanks for the quote. I get where Brevoort is coming from, not wanting to deal with a complicated set-up, but he should realize some characters requiring more explanation than others.
Fitzroy makes sense in this role, making the Upstarts edgy/murdery streamers, and if that’s what you’re doing then why not make reference to X-Statix? Let the penciler have fun with some Allred designs.
“I’m never going to be able to take Magneto seriously by that name. He’s Erik, screw that stupid retcon.”
I’m sure I’m not the only one here who regarded “Erik Lensherr” as the intolerable retcon we never accepted. Mutatis mutandis; the only constant is change.
Go back to “Magnus”!
“I get where Brevoort is coming from, not wanting to deal with a complicated set-up”
I feel like an X-Men editor with this kind of mindset is just setting themselves up for misery.
The problem most people had with “Erik Lensherr” is that it was part of Fabian Nicieza’s retcon that Magneto wasn’t Jewish. In X-Men Unlimited 2, Nicieza revealed that Magneto wasn’t Jewish but Romani. He justified it on the grounds that at the time Magneto hadn’t said he was Jewish- he said “The horrors of my childhood are happening again, except this time mutants are the victims instead of the Jews.” If you analyze that sentence, it’s technically not saying Magneto is Jewish.
Except that it’s impossible to imagine a Romani survivor of the Holocaust saying something like that. It’s the classic example of a writer thinking they’re being clever and technically not contradicting anything when in reality they’re just ignoring common sense.It didn’t go over very well and eventually “Erik Lensherr” was revealed to be an alias.
I’m not sure, either, how Nicieza concluded that a Scandinavian first name and a surname which doesn’t exist and isn’t one that would exist should make people associate Magneto as Romani.
Nicieza seemed to be trying to give Magneto a sort of nominative determinist names: Erik = eternal ruler, Lensherr = feudal master. It certainly doesn’t scream “Romani”.
“I feel like an X-Men editor with this kind of mindset is just setting themselves up for misery.”
Especially one with a public forum where he is inundated by fans who will ask the same questions week after week in hopes of getting the answer they want to hear.
[…] #4. (Annotations here.) Jed MacKay’s X-Men feels like it’s still at the phase of getting its pieces into place […]
@Mike Loughlin, Joe I- On second thought, I think that the lion’s share of the responsibility for this whole mess lies with Rosenberg, Hickman and Jordan White. Rosenberg has indicated that Hickman had already come up with the Resurrection idea by the time Rosenberg started writing X-Men and that’s why Rosenberg had so many of the X-Men’s enemies, including Sugar Man and Fitzroy, killed in his run instead of just having them teleport away or something. But it never occurred to Jordan to say to Rosenberg “Does it really make sense for the X-Men to resurrect Fitzroy and Sugar Man? Just have them escape.” Some of these villains, like Fitzroy, were never explicitly shown on Krakoa but I can understand why Breevort doesn’t want to keep them dead since their deaths were never meant to be permanent in the first place.
I haven’t gotten used to it yet after so many years of him being addressed as Erik, but I don’t mind the Max retcon. For an elderly Jewish man originally from Germany, it’s certainly not an unusual name.
Where _does_ the name Max come from?
Blame the movies, but “Erik Lensherr” is still the name I most associate with him. But given that his real name has apparently changed twice, at this point I don’t think he’ll ever have a definitive name.
The Max Eisenhart name comes from 2008’s Magneto Testament flashback mini (I presume Paul reviewed it, but it looks like it would be on If Destroyed, and the Internet Archive for that is spotty), which I think everyone assumed was de facto out of continuity until the name turned up again, which I’m not sure it did before Krakoa.