X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN: HELLFIRE GALA 2023
“The Hellfire Gala”
Writer: Gerry Duggan (with Jonathan Hickman)
Artists: Adam Kubert, Luciana Vecchio, Matteo Lolli, Russell Dauterman, Javier Pina, R.B. Silva, Joshua Cassara, Kris Anka, Pepe Larraz & Valerio Schiti
Colour artists: Rain Beredo, Ceci De La Cruz, Matthew Wilson, Erick Arciniega & Marte Gracia
Letterers: Virtual Calligraphy
Design: Tom Muller with Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. A montage of assorted characters in their Gala costumes, with Nimrod and Dr Stasis looming ominously behind them.
PAGE 2. Flashback: Emma and Cyclops discuss whether to tell Ms Marvel that she is a mutant.
This is the “previous conversation” that Emma referenced in X-Men #23, when she broke the news to Scott of Ms Marvel’s death in Amazing Spider-Man #26. It’s not made clear here what prompted Emma to raise the question of telling Ms Marvel that Cerebro detects her as a mutant. But we’ll see in the next scene that Emma sees Kamala as a popular figure who would be good for mutant/human relations.
PAGES 3-6. Ms Marvel is resurrected on Krakoa, and learns that she’s a mutant.
Ms Marvel’s established back story has her as one of the people with latent Inhuman lineage whose powers emerged when the Terrigen Bomb spread a cloud of mutagenic Terrigen Mist around the Earth following 2013’s Infinity. This was the period when Marvel were trying to shoehorn the Inhumans into the role that mutants traditionally served as the Marvel Universe’s all-purpose origin story. A decade down the line, I can’t think of any other characters with that origin story who are still in use, and you can see why Marvel might want to prise Kamala away from it.
“You’re an Inhuman and a mutant. We didn’t even think that was possible.” Much of the Inhumans vs X-Men arc from 2016-2017 turns on the point that the Terrigen Mists were generally fatal to mutants.
“I understand you and the White Queen know each other from some business with the Infinity Stones.” The Infinity Wars miniseries from 2018, where Kamala and Emma were on the “cosmic Avengers” team that Loki recruited to stop Gamora from destroying the universe.
The Champions. Teen superhero team introduced in 2016. Technically I think they’re still active, but their book was cancelled in 2021. The original team included both Ms Marvel and the teenage version of Cyclops who, at the time, was time-travelling from the Silver Age as part of Brian Bendis’s All-New X-Men.
“We’ll call upon your family later, and we’ll rewrite their last few days.” Emma may not realise this, but Fallen Friend: The Death of Ms Marvel has a lot of characters attending prayers at Kamala’s mosque in commemoration of worshippers understood to have died or vanished in Amazing #26 – which, as far as the civilians are concerned, includes both Kamala and Ms Marvel. A whole bunch of superheroes show up for that, though not any of the X-Men. (Wolverine attends, but this is after he quit Krakoa in his own series.)
PAGE 7. Recap and credits.
PAGES 8-9. The Stepford Cuckoos welcome guests to the Hellfire Gala.
The Mykines Lighthouse Keeper. As in the last two years, we’re on the island of Mykines. The unnamed lighthouse keeper has appeared before, and he can be seen flirting with Jumbo Carnation in Duggan’s Marauders vol 1 #17 (on page 12).
I’m not going to attempt to identify every background character in these group shots, because we’d be here all year.
Forge’s proposals to solve housing shortages and food insecurity were previously mentioned in X-Men #22 as his suggestion for regaining the hearts and minds of the humans.
PAGE 10. Cyclops responds to the alarm at the Treehouse.
Cyclops. This leads in to the X-Men story in Free Comic Book Day 2023: Avengers / X-Men, where a mystery Orchis agent breaks into the Treehouse, poisons it, and steals the Captain Krakoa battlesuit. Cyclops is defeated and thrown from the building to his apparent death.
Juggernaut has been on the X-Men before, during the Chuck Austen run. He’s most recently been in the cast of Legion of X. The little bow tie on his armoured costume is adorable.
PAGE 11. Mystique and Destiny argue.
Kate Pryde‘s inability to use the gates was a major plot point in the first Marauders series and has never been explained. We’re being reminded of it now because it plays into the post-credits sequence.
Mystique and Destiny were also arguing in FCBD 2023: Avengers / X-Men. In that story, they’re in the Gala when Destiny stops and announces that “Something’s happening”. She says that “A soldier has returned to the field of battle and matters are more complicated.” She then asks where Rogue is, and is told that “She just flew off at mach three.” Destiny then insists that they have to leave at once, and drags Mystique away, despite Mystique’s protest that they should wait for Rogue to get back. Destiny replies that Rogue will find them when the time is right.
Since Rogue doesn’t “fly off at mach 3” until page 17, this argument is apparently earlier in the evening. Obviously, Destiny knows what’s going to happen (or picks up on it in the course of the evening) and has absolutely no intention of being around for it.
The Rogue & Gambit miniseries ended with Destiny obtaining a mind-controlled Manifold and putting him away for later. Destiny also discusses this plot thread with Rogue in X-Men #24, where she asks Rogue to trust her and insists that “Mutantdom dies with Manifold” (meaning, presumably, that if Manifold dies, then mutantdom dies too – therefore, Manifold must be kept safe at all costs). None of this is directly referenced in this issue, probably because it would make the backdoor for the cliffhanger a bit too obvious.
Romeo is Iceman’s Inhuman love interest, most recently seen in the Marvel’s Voices Infinity Comic Iceman arc from last year.
PAGES 12-13. Professor X talks with Ms Marvel.
Xavier broadly agrees with Emma about the desirability of Ms Marvel coming out as a mutant but he’s a lot more sympathetic to her needing time to decide. By the standards of the last few years this is a relatively friendly version of Xavier – he even takes off his helmet for her, and Rasputin IV stresses its significance when she appears – perhaps because Kamala looks up to him as a superhero authority figure, and he’s getting to do his old teacher/mentor routine with someone who trusts him.
Rogue’s Terrigen poisoning is a storyline from Duggan’s Uncanny Avengers run in 2015-16.
PAGE 14. Rasputin IV speaks to Ms Marvel.
“I have come from a future with gifts of the five, but not the Five.” Presumably, Rasputin is referring to the fact that she’s a chimera of five mutants.
PAGE 15. Dmitri and Wyn.
This page is a trailer for Jonathan Hickman’s upcoming G.O.D.S., and it’s credited as being co-written by Hickman. Wyn debuted in the G.O.D.S. story in FCBD: Avengers / X-Men, a vignette where he meets Dr Strange on a rooftop and they exchange some cryptic comments about good and evil. Dmitri is new.
For reasons which aren’t made clear, Wyn asks Magik whether, at the start of the Krakoan era, “one of you stood at the top of the world and told a gathering of humans” that “mankind had new gods now”. He’s referring to Magneto’s address to the human ambassadors in House of X #1. Magik wasn’t there for that scene, but evidently either Magneto or the Stepford Cuckoos have relayed it to her.
PAGES 16-17. The Avengers leave to deal with an emergency.
Kingpin and Typhoid Mary arrived on Krakoa in issue #20 and haven’t really done anything yet; this issue suggests that Kingpin will be playing a bigger part going forward.
The Avengers are leaving to appear in the “Uncanny Avengers” story in FCBD: Avengers / X-Men, in which Captain Krakoa attacks the Capitol – citing the same “new gods now” line mentioned in the previous scene. Per that story, Captain America declined his invitation to the Hellfire Gala his year; Orchis try to assassinate him, and Rogue goes to help.
“The rumours of a civil war on Arakko are beginning to spread.” In current issues of X-Men Red.
Sebastian Shaw is not at the Gala because, presumably, he’s been tipped off about what’s about to happen.
PAGES 18-20. Meet the new X-Men team!
Cyclops and Jean are standing down, because Talon and Synch have plenty of experience – subjectively, they’re centuries old thanks to their time in the Vault. The newly elected team are Synch, Talon, Cannonball, Prodigy, Frenzy, Dazzler, Jubilee and the Juggernaut.
PAGES 21-22. Oh. Never mind.
Nimrod smashes down from space and kills… if not all of them, certainly most of them. We’ll see later that Synch, Talon and Juggernaut definitely survive, but Dazzler, Cannonball, Prodigy, Jubilee and Frenzy are all graphically killed on panel. So right now, there is no X-Men – or if there is, it’s just those three.
PAGES 23-27. Everyone fights Nimrod.
Magik can’t teleport the human guests to safety because her powers are blocked by nanotech. That happened while she was fighting a Stark Sentinel and got a small cut on her face in X-Men #23.
Iceman is seemingly killed – although he’s got a solo book starting next week, which suggests Orchis are jumping the gun in proclaiming him Definitely Dead. Oddly, the two characters shown reacting to his death are Romeo and Kate Pryde, who was dating him immediately before he came out as gay. (Christian Frost, or Jean Grey as his oldest friend present, would have been more obvious choices.)
PAGE 28. The Stark Sentinels attack.
The X-Men’s fight against the single Stark Sentinel was in X-Men #23.
“Jean, can you reach Storm?” Yet again, Storm is somewhere else when the big disaster is happening. In fairness, there’s a civil war on.
PAGES 29-31. Dr Stasis, Karima Shapandar and M.O.D.O.K. arrive.
Stasis infiltrated the pharmaceutical factories in a subplot during last year’s Hellfire Gala, and X-Men #22 revealed that millions of humans would have taken the drugs and be susceptible to M.O.D.O.K.’s device. To be honest, it doesn’t speak brilliantly about Krakoan production standards that nobody noticed this in a whole year.
Hordeculture. Orchis obtained the details of how to hack the Krakoan gates from Hordeculture’s Opal Vetiver in X-Men #22.
PAGES 32-33. Kate Pryde takes out a Stark Sentinel.
Her good old fashioned technology-disruption power still works – and again, we’re reminded about the gates thing.
Kingpin seems genuinely concerned about Mary. Note that Karima dismisses him as a “human” even though she’s in Orchis – Karima is more interested in AI.
PAGES 34-36. The fight brings down the tower.
Either Juggernaut is just a big powerful thing that Nimrod can chuck around, or his magic is supposed to make it particularly easy for him to be thrown through stuff.
PAGES 37-40. Jean Grey is murdered.
This sort of “I am extremely powerful and you can’t stop me doing what I want” speech is something Jean has delivered to a number of villains over the Duggan run – this time she’s explicitly announcing her intention to alter Orchis’s minds – but this time Orchis have seen her coming, and Moira gets rid of her. Moira seems to view this as revenge on Charles as much as anything to do with the wider agenda.
Orchis’ supply of Blightswill was previously established in Bishop: War College. It cancels mutant powers.
PAGES 41-43. Professor X surrenders and freezes all the mutants present.
When he tries this stunt on a worldwide level later, the trained X-Men are mostly able to resist, but presumably it’s a different matter when he’s this close by. Some of them do manage to resist the direct instruction to go through the gate, even at this range.
PAGE 44. Dr Stasis dictates terms.
“Right now, they [the gates] all point off-Earth.” Xavier says later that they’re meant to point to Arakko, but Stasis doesn’t actually say this. We’ll come back to this.
“Nightcrawler just went on an assassination spree.” In Before the Fall – Sons of X (under mind control, obviously).
“A mutant clone caused an inferno in New York again.” The Dark Web crossover – the clone is Madelyne Pryor. This one actually doesn’t have anything to do with Orchis.
“The first time a returned mutant is found on Earth, we will kill a human…” The word “returned” seems to be significant here, since obviously some mutants are still on Earth at the end of the story, and it seems unlikely that Orchis are planning to kill an increasing number of humans every time the mutant Avengers appear in public. With the nature of exponential growth, they’d run out of humans rather quickly.
PAGES 45-46. Dying Jean gives Angelica her new mission.
The thinking here is that since Firestar has always been something of an outsider to the X-Men, she’s the one who can be passed off as a secret informant and therefore infiltrate Orchis, with a bit of judicious manipulation of Stasis’ mind.
PAGE 47. Professor X orders mutantkind through the gates.
“Go, my X-Men” is obviously an inversion of “To me, my X-Men.”
PAGES 48-49. Mother Righteous claims Atlantic Krakoa.
Page 48 panel 1 is part of the departure montage, with Nightcrawler – who quit Krakoa after Before the Fall – Sons of X – managing to resist using the “Red triangle” psi technique. That’s why it was brought up again recently in X-Men Red.
Krakoa’s Atlantic outpost has been mentioned a few times in the Krakoan era but we’ve never really seen much of it. At any rate, Mother Righteous apparently gains power from collecting things which have some sort of iconic quality to them. But, for whatever reason, she’s preserving the Atlantic version of Krakoa. No doubt we’ll find out why in due course.
PAGE 50. Mutants worldwide file through the gates.
The mutants in Madripoor will doubtless include all of the ex-Morlocks who set up home there in Marauders.
Only Kate and Emma are expressly shown resisting at the Gala itself.
If everyone’s walking to the nearest gate, how long must this be taking?
PAGE 51. Data page – more about the red triangle protocol.
The alias “Hazel Kendal” for Emma Frost comes from Duggan’s Invincible Iron Man #6.
PAGES 52-53. Jean continues to brief Firestar.
Of note here is the appearance of Curse, who died in X-Men Green and has apparently managed to get herself resurrected on Krakoa despite being, shall we say, a low priority due to her innate nuisance factor. Curse’s resistance to psychic control is part of her powers, as established in the X-Men Green arc, which is why she’s able to object to Xavier’s directions.
PAGE 54. Jean bids farewell to Cyclops.
Cyclops has survived his fall, which is pretty remarkable, though you have to wonder what sort of treatment he can expect at the local hospitals.
The Treehouse is on fire, and presumably we won’t be seeing it again except as a ruin.
PAGE 55. Jean bids farewell to Wolverine.
Consistent with the modern reading that she loved him too – you could argue that she wants to be in contact with Wolverine in her dying moments, but equally it might just mean that Cyclops was the higher priority in case she didn’t have time to get to both.
It’s not clear where Wolverine is, but he quit Krakoa in this week’s Wolverine and evidently he’s been at a gate somewhere, resisting the command to go through. Jean specifically wakes him up from his trance – possibly so that he can defend himself against the Orchis soldiers who might otherwise have been able to pick him up and chuck him through the gateway. Or maybe she just wants the satisfaction of letting him kill them.
PAGES 56-58. Destiny tells Mystique to listen to Professor X, and Exodus bundles the Five through a gate.
Note that Destiny does go through the gate, which tends to suggest that her powers tell her that whatever lies on the other side is acceptable – at least in the long run. Mystique refuses to co-operate and falls to her apparent death while trying to resist Professor X without the benefit of his training. But… Dr Stasis does point out that her body is taken away by the sea. You’d think he’d know how this works.
M.O.D.O.K. is pleased that the Atlantic Island has disappeared off the satellites, which presumably means Mother Righteous told Orchis she was going to do that – otherwise they’d be puzzled.
PAGES 59-60. Lourdes teleports the remaining mutants away.
Kingpin sides with the mutants against Orchis – he’s married to a mutant, after all, and the relationship appears genuine. He’s duly taken away with the group.
PAGES 61-62. Lourdes dies from the effort.
Lourdes’ death here is an echo of her original death at the (human) Hellfire Gala in Classic X-Men #7.
We never get a clear group shot of exactly who’s in this remaining band, but it seems to include Emma Frost, Kate Pryde, Synch, Talon, Bishop, Psylocke (Kwannon), Rasputin IV, Daken, Aurora, Northstar, Angel, Forge and Ms Marvel, along with a few characters who aren’t easily identifiable in the Hellfire costumes. Firestar remains behind to begin her new cover. Quite how Ms Marvel managed to resist Xavier is not obvious, but maybe Emma helped.
PAGE 63. Orchis celebrate.
Looks like we can add Juggernaut to the list of the dead. Again, Moira seems preoccupied with revenge on Professor X.
PAGES 64-65. The remaining X-Men find themselves locked out of the gates.
“So that’s how that looked.” Kate is referencing her own attempt to walk through a Krakoan gate in Marauders vol 1 #1.
PAGE 66. Orchis kill all the humans at the Gala.
Well, of course they do. They’re witnesses.
PAGES 67-72. Rogue rescues Professor X.
“You invited Nathaniel Essex onto the island, and he almost ended all life on Earth.” Sins of Sinister, which the compromised Quiet Council decided to make known to the general public in Immortal X-Men #12.
Professor X claims here that the mutants were supposed to be going to Arakko (which he was never told on panel) and that since he can’t sense any of them, he assumes that they’re all dead. Since Arakko is another planet, this depends on him being able to reach it using the previously-established telepathic relay system. Professor X doesn’t seem to be saying that he actually sensed them die – surely if that had been the case he’d have picked up on it while they were going through the gates. (Mind you, he apparently didn’t notice that he was losing contact with them as they went through the gates either. Maybe he just wasn’t able to pay attention to that sort of thing.)
The very fact that Destiny chose to go through the gates – having previously spent several issues teeing up a cosmic-powered teleporter – rather suggests that everyone will be back in the end, and that the reason Xavier can’t sense them on Arakko is that they went somewhere else. But we’ll see.
Xavier returning to Krakoa on his own (and the “Population: One” caption) seems to echo him going to live on Genosha after it was reduced to rubble by Sentinels. And is the population really one? What about Krakoa itself? What about Mr Sinister and Fenris, down in the Pit?
PAGES 73-76. Trailers, which are particularly keen to stress that Ms Marvel is an X-book now.
Oddly, the list of upcoming books includes Ghost Rider #17 (which is part of a crossover with Wolverine) but not this week’s Invincible Iron Man #8, which picks up Emma Frost’s story as she turns to Iron Man for help with the Stark Sentinels. Iron Man winds up bundling her into his armour in order to get her to safety from a Stark Sentinel, and the issue ends with her being rocketed to safety against her will.
PAGES 77-78. Kate falls through a gate.
Apparently Kate is now the only person who can use the gates. This one takes her to the Krakoan embassy in Jerusalem, which is where Magneto addressed the ambassadors in House of X #1.
“I can’t think of any other characters with that origin story who are still in use”
Looking into this, Lunella Lafayette (Moon Girl) appears to be. Though the recent cartoon apparently has her as a human.
Duggan writes Orchis so weirdly. They go from deluded believers in the greater good to mustache-twirling supervillains under his pen. I suppose that’s more marketable, but to have Karima go from an anguished survivor of a future where the mutants murdered the last remaining traces of machine civilizations, who as a result has fallen into the same trap they did of believing survival to be a zero-sum game to dancing cheerfully with Doctor Stasis is jarring, not to mention…whatever Moira’s deal is now.
Wasn’t one of the members of Fantastic Force from back in the day a mutant inhuman?
I liked: the art, Jean Grey’s last stand, the Firestar plot, some of the character interactions, the red triangle word balloons.
Everything else: Ugh.
The new X-Men team looked promising. There was a good mix of powers and personalities. Half the team was made up of people of color, and there was LGBTQ+ representation. Then, most of the team is murdered. Just like when Ms. Marvel was killed off, non-white/straight characters were sacrificed for shock value while the white characters get the spotlight.
Also, I hate mass casualties in comics. I’m sure the “dead” mutants aren’t dead, but I don’t like reading a story that ends on such a despairing note. Eeeevil Moira is stupid. The G.O.D.S. teaser was pointless. Ms. Marvel’s resurrection was awkward; they couldn’t find something more for her to wear while an older man stands over her? More bad optics.
Orchis:“Mutants and humans are natural enemies in the fight for survival. The two sides can never coexist. We must save humanity at any cost, even if the only way is to raise up baseline humans to become post-humanity. Now, if we see any more mutants returning to this planet, we will murder every human on the planet if we must.”
What might have been under Hickman. I see glimmers of the direction this story might have gone had Hickman continued writing the book.
No. We have to establish that the mutants have been the heroes all along, and Orchis are another group of mutant hating psychos. Oh, and Moira is a Silver Age supervillain. What subtlety?
Have we -ever- seen Atlantic Krakoa before this issue? I don’t remember it coming up at all outside one or two brief mentions in data pages, but I’m not reading everything.
Jenny-Devlor was described as a “mutant Inhuman”, but they never really defined what was meant. They said because the Terrigen Mist granted him shapeshifting powers, this made him a “mutant”. It seems very unscientific, as it was never shown he had the X-gene. I’m not sure why getting the power of shapeshifting should automatically make him a mutant.
There was rather a disappointing sense of been-there-done-that with this one. Wave a magic wand to take 99.9% of the mutants out of the picture – it’s been done so many times just recently. Maybe there’ll be a better twist to come…
Didn’t the original Illuminati mini series by Bendis and Cheung reveal that the Beyonder was a mutant who went through Terrigenesis and that his powers came from being the first Inhuman/mutant hybrid? I admittedly haven’t kept up on my Beyonder retcons since then though.
The “Population: One” thing is yet another instance of Duggan and Gillen not quite being in sync – aside from Sinister and Fenris, Krakoa also took Cypher into the Pit at the end of Immortal #13.
Cypher is also on Krakoa, right?
Wow, this book is A LOT. Here are a smattering of my thoughts:
• Still not a fan of the funky, white-washing coloring that occasionally occurs with characters of color. Kamala’s skin tone when she’s resurrected makes her look ethnically ambiguous.
• Making Kamala both mutant and Inhuman is unnecessarily complicated. If this was always the endgame, why even kill and resurrect her in the first place if you were just always going to say, “She’s been a mutant since the day she was born”? Utterly pointless and unsatisfactory. (Still love that she’s a mutant now, however.) Half-baked doesn’t even begin the describe the lack of care or thoughtfulness put into how she’s been handled the last couple of years.
• I actually quite enjoyed Xavier’s interaction with Kamala. His emphasis on her autonomy to choose when or if she should come out as a mutant feels oddly natural after being confronted with various failures of hubris and lack and empathy (LoX, Red, IXM). Autonomy, identity, and consent have been major recurring themes throughout the Krakoan era, and I’d welcome Xavier adapting all of these into a gradual face turn for him throughout Fall of X.
• Similarly, I like how this hints at what Kamala’s new status quo might be: A Muslim American woman dealing with a new, genuinely interesting crisis of identity, and how she might reconcile her desire to protect her secret identity and family versus becoming the new face human-mutant public relations. I hope they put a lot of TLC into developing her new relationships with her mutant compatriots so that there is actual tension here.
• Ms. Marvel’s Gala costume is a banger. Fantastic design.
• Really felt like the GODS cameos were unnecessary, although I like the idea of Magneto’s mic drop scene with the human ambassadors permeating throughout the grapevine of Krakoan society as a “you should have been there”/urban myth story.
• The brutal murder of the most racially diverse group of democratically elected X-Men ever moments after their announcement is such a gut-punch bummer on so many levels in equal quantities of shocking and appalling. It’s easily the most interesting and exciting lineup since the inception of the Hellfire Gala, and it’s genuinely upsetting that it will take awhile–if ever–to get to see this lineup realized.
• I still can’t get over how lazy and one-dimensional Moira’s become since her heel turn. X Lives/X Deaths thoroughly ruined her character.
• I’m really intrigued and excited by Firestar’s new double agent status quo. Her scenes with Jean were gorgeous.
• Lourdes’ sacrifice was unexpectedly emotional. It’s small, quiet, well-executed moments like this that make me want to learn more about their stories.
• While everything seems to indicate that the “marching mutants through a meat grinder” thing is a swerve, I’m going to be really upset if it turns out not to be the case. Forcibly segregating mutants off-planet for plot purposes was a disappointing direction already, and regressing the mutant status quo by combining the worst qualities of House of M + Decimation but through lenses of coerced genocide would be too much for me.
• I’m glad that Jean, Cyclops, Storm, and Wolverine (to an extent) are taken off the board here for the foreseeable future. Besides maybe Ms. Marvel, I’m interested to see who steps up to spearhead the mutant revival/rescue.
• Justice for everyone who has been making the correct observation that appointing dyed-in-the-wool villains into positions of power on an unelected government was, indeed, A Bad Thing.
• Destiny pleading with Rogue to kidnap Manifold + Krakoa ensaring Doug into the Pit make sense now in light of how everything spectacularly falls apart at the Gala. Still doesn’t make the ending of the Rogue/Gambit mini (i.e., a white woman putting a black man in stasis against his consent) any less icky, however.
This was just… weak.
And bleak.
What I liked: Xavier with Kamala. Firestar as a triple agent. Kingpin picking a side (He’s never been a good guy. He’s just more complicated than he appears when Daredevil is around).
What I didn’t like: The rest of it, but especially the entire “genocide” thing. Also, Moira has just become a cackling madwoman now. Definitely a waste of a character.
@Moonstar Dynasty: the worst parts of House of M, Decimation and Lemire’s run – we’ve done “mutants banished to another dimension” too, and not that long ago
I thought they’d scatter the Krakoan population to the four winds, with a sizable number going to Arakko. They would have to deal with a hostile world, while the main characters support and help them. Maybe they could regroup somewhere in space, eventually come back stronger and defeat Orchis, and figure out if they want a new Krakoa.
I don’t like the idea that they’re in stasis or something (probably in Mother Righteous’s bubble), even if it’s better than killing them off. Duggan can’t handle writing stories with any complexity, though, so I should have expected this nonsense.
They could have set this up as when “Age of X-Man” occurs since the entire period was quietly ignored, other than Krakoa bringing the murdered mutants back to life.
I realize the timeline doesn’t fit, but this seems very close to a retread.
A.)Majority of mutants disappear, most likely to another dimension.
B.)Remaining mutants are more hated than ever.
C.)Humanity is glad that mutants are almost extinct. This would give more of a rationale.
The only upcoming story I am looking forward to is the Children of the Vault mini-series. I will probably end up disappointed by the plot (even though it has a very good writer based on the writer’s last series), as it probably will be nothing like I am hoping.
I’m less keen on gratuitous slaughter too, but it does give the whole event a Red Wedding vibe.
Also the ‘dead X-Men’ bu Nimrod each represented a different decade/generation of mutants. I guess that’s what they were going for. Though killing off the ethnic and sexual minorities wasn’t a good look, again. I’m confident there’s a plan though.
Lots of story beats being pulled together which is neat.
Are we done with Robot Moira now? She was so cartoonist it was ridiculous. Have we also determined she doesn’t reset the timeline now??
Also weird choice that Rogue kills Moira – they have no recent history? If only some of the Rogue/Destiny had been played up, that’ll have more punch.
Firestar plot is a good one!
Also ‘almost no mutants left on Earth, the X-Men on their last legs’ was the status quo immediately before Krakoa, in the Rosenberg run.
Which I’d rather liked. A lot. But to go from ‘Krakoa is flourishing’ immediately back to ‘everything is grimdark and shit’ is a bit of a whiplash.
Also… The actual comics coming out of it don’t seem to actually be that dark? Kurt will cosplay Spider-Man, Iceman is getting what seems to be a heroic miniseries, Uncanny Avengers will probably be a superheroic adventure romp because Duggan doesn’t really work in other registers and Ms Marvel The New Mutant definitely doesn’t seem like it will be a downer.
I just don’t get the feeling that this Hellfire Gala oneshot actually sets the tone for what is coming. Almost like it was mean-spirited on purpose.
It’s weird. But parts of it were very good. The pages drawn by Larraz were extraordinary. (I also didn’t like that it was a jam issue, it didn’t gel together well).
I don’t think Hellfire Gala’s tone was supposed to be grimdark either — there were a lot of jokes, including even the “stinger.” Nimrod was sillier-than-normal. Stasis was hamming it up, Modok was Modok. The events were horrifying, but I thought they tried to keep the issue upbeat and brightly colored — I’ve certainly seen far more dour crossover-tragedies.
There was definitely good stuff for me. Xavier falling off his “must be better” wagon to again choose for everyone is something that Gillen should do some good stuff with. The amount of prep-work that Orchis did do to make this work for them (though individual threads could be iffy). It was (generally) a good payoff.
Individual moments for various characters.
On the other hand… Kamala’s first scene with resurrecting felt very much like Duggan getting that plotline out of the way. Nimrod’s personality continues to make me twitch in ways it didn’t under Hickman. Eeeeevil Moira.
I said before with the Before the Fall special about the bombed town that “media smears hero” plots are things I’m tired of unless done very well, and this one didn’t work for me well at all. From Iron Man, the public story Orchis spread is apparently that the diplomats found out about the tainted drugs so the mutants killed them all. And then..? Orchis showed up to avenge them? The Krakoans deliberately pulled the Avengers away before the diplomats suddenly realized the drugs were poisoned? I can understand if this is meant to just convince a certain percentage of the world, but usually these plots involve 99% of the population buying that the picture of Captain Universally Beloved kicking a puppy is real and has no other context. This doesn’t feel set up well enough to actually pull one over on the entire population, but presumably that’s what it’ll do.
I guess that Orchis put up a communications blackout that kept any of the people there from tweeting what actually happened. One person mentioned finally managing to get a signal on his mobile to receive that “everybody died” story, but that’s the extent. Good thing that no one else communicated during that blip he got through on?
And lastly, this doesn’t really work without establishing that this Gala was badly attended compared to the others. Which, fine, if you want to say that with the Krakoans’ current PR problems most people aren’t attending, that’s understandable. But a key detail of the first two Galas is that random heroes were there, celebrities were there, politicians were there, Doom was there, etc. We have a panel when the Cuckoos are there showing people drawn as if they’re supposed to be from RL, so maybe celebrities showed up? Otherwise it’s just diplomats and the Avengers. That’s not a small thing.. if the Gala was normally attended, the plot wouldn’t have worked like it did, and you’d think the writer of the first two Galas would have explained why it wasn’t normal.
I still generally liked where the issue goes, but those bits are just so very.. convenient. For a plotline type that I’m really tired of in general.
@Mathias X:
Yes, the inconsistent tone of the oneshot is one of its drawbacks. I don’t mind Stasis and Nimrod hamming it up, but Kate cracking jokes in the middle of the carnage was way off.
Maybe she’s drunk again under Duggan.
Anyway,I can’t believe Krakoa has already fallen and we still haven’t had any payoff on the stupid evil Russian mind control plot.
Evilgus-Moira is no longer a mutant. She was “cured” by Mystique using Forge’s gun in “Inferno”. She can no longer reset the timeline.
Only Benjamin Percy and Gerry Duggan can reset the work put into Moira by Hickman.
Orchis killed all the humans at the Hellfire Gala. So they probably killed Conan O’Brien and Eminem?
I don’t think Romeo and Kate being the ones responding to Iceman’s death was too odd. Romeo is Bobby’s current lover(or at least his date to the gala) while Christian is presumably an ex. And him and Kate have been shown to have a very close friendship after he came out and spent a lot of time together in the Krakoa era in Marauders.
“which are particularly keen to stress that Ms Marvel is an X-book now.”
Also, the cover for a future issue of that series has someone who died in this issue…
“Just like when Ms. Marvel was killed off, non-white/straight characters were sacrificed for shock value while the white characters get the spotlight.”
I’d say we saw a decent number of POC and queer characters survive (Northstar, Bishop, Daken, Psylocke, Synch, Forge, Ms. Marvel…). And we know Iceman is coming back.
“Ms. Marvel’s resurrection was awkward”
How was it awkward? She was more covered up than pretty much anyone else we have seen resurrected…
“Making Kamala both mutant and Inhuman is unnecessarily complicated. If this was always the endgame, why even kill and resurrect her in the first place if you were just always going to say, “She’s been a mutant since the day she was born”?”
Her mutant powers will probably be in line with the powers her movie character has. But yeah, an unnecessary way to have her be a mutant as well.
“Still doesn’t make the ending of the Rogue/Gambit mini (i.e., a white woman putting a black man in stasis against his consent) any less icky, however.”
I don’t see it as icky. Just bad writing. But given the way things had to go down in this issue, I can’t see Destiny telling him why he needs to disappear for a bit, and had he known, he probably wouldn’t have gone along with her plans. If I had to guess, I would say his powers might be needed to teleport all the mutants who went through the gates to one central location somehow, assuming they aren’t all dead.
This issue was a downer. Mutant Massacre mixed with No More Mutants. Some nice bits as other pointed out, but few and far between. The Firestar subplot has potential, and it could be interesting seeing the X-people regroup and fight back. Wonder how Rachel and Betsy will react to all of this, and if and when they will join the fight. Moira is pretty much ruined as a character (as if she wasn’t already due to Inferno).
Well, lets see where things go from here…
Am I really the first to notice Paul’s annotations cut off mid-sentence?
I liked this issue. It’s clear that this is not the end of the story, just the end of the second act. This is The Empire Strikes Back moment (ORCHIS Strikes Back?) for the Krakoa era before the mutants rally together and reforge their country.
My favorite moments:
1. Everything Jean did, but especially the Jean-Firestar scheme to infiltrate ORCHIS.
2. Kate now being the only mutant to be able to use the gates, a reversal of Marauders 1.
3. Xavier alone on Krakoa, charging Rogue with avenging the mutant homeland.
The ending of this issue confirms that ‘Fall of X’ is the ‘Fall of the House of X’ mentioned in the Before the Fall manuscript pages. Those pages also describe a ‘Rise of the Powers of X’ to follow the Fall, so I would expect a ‘Rise of X’ branding for the X-books early next year.
I can see why they might want to kill Kamala and resurrect her as a mutant but I’m not sure why they went about it the way they did. Ideally, you would have Kamala appear in a X-book and get killed by Orchis. Alternately, if she had to die in a Spider-Man book, you might have Judas Traveler show up to get revenge on Osborn for manipulating him and trying to kill him and use his illusion powers to trick her into electrocuting herself.
Instead, she was killed off in a Spider-Man arc focusing on why Peter and MJ broke up. And she only appeared in a few panels of the first five parts. making her suddenly sacrificing herself to save the day in the last part really awkward. I wonder when the Spider-Man office found out she was supposed to die and be resurrected.- judging from Jordan White’s interview, it wasn’t the original plan when she started appearing in Spider-Man. I wonder if they already started working on the Rabin arc when they told Kamala had to die.
(Of course, that raises the question of what Wells was doing when he brought Kamala into his run in the first place. She appeared in only a few pages.)
I can’t believe Marvel made such a big deal, including a funeral issue, out of a death that only lasted TWO MONTHS. Two months is a CLIFFHANGER, not an actual death. I can’t count the number of characters that seems to die and turned up alive a couple of months later.
Why did Scott and Emma insist on keeping Kamala’s resurrection a secret from other heroes? I realize they wanted to give Kamala the option of outing herself as a mutant but Captain America isn’t a mutant and he was resurrected. Besides, if Kamala ever appeared publicly again, everyone would know she returned from the dead SOMEHOW. But as we saw in the extra page of the Fallen Friend issue, Logan went to the funeral to keep up appearances and Scott lied to the Champions when they asked him about it directly.
I’m not buying that Rasputin would hold Kamala in such high esteem. Everything she knew about the present she learned from Sinister. Has Sinister even MET Kamala?
Kamala refers to herself as Ms. Marvel the First. Carol Danvers and Sharon Ventura might take issue with that. 🙂
Jesus, that was appalling. The constant shift between art styles was jarring and unnecessary, and suggests this wasn’t really thought through and put together on time. Add to that the generic script, the undifferentiated character voices, the monochromatic dullness of Stasis, Kamala, or Moira…
I appreciate that this pulls so many threads together and tries to use them all to the best effect, by converging on the one attack. But the demonstration of it felt heavy handed with explanations, and kind of lacking in flow…?
We also barely get to breathe with each sequence. The Kamala opening, in particular, is deeply distracting – i.e., open an issue on the collapse of Krakoa with a completely unrelated character, with nothing but her genetic profile at stake… -, and the movement between different scenes feels very sudden and awkward.
I think another strong example with be the announcement of the X-Men vote – we spend no time settling into the ambiance of the event before the information is dumped on us, only for any rising of enthusiasm whatsoever to be completely undercut by most of the team being assassinated.
That was maybe the single cheapest, ugly narrative gimmick, and ir was too jarring in its pacing not to read as deeply calculated and insensitive.
In fact, that’s something that permeates the entire issue – obviously, a lot of things are happening at once, and most of these moments are shockers. But we don’t spend any time with them, so they never fully register…
Mystique’s death, in particular, was spectacularly stupid and unmotivated. And I couldn’t help but read Jean’s death as absurdly prolonged – are we not told she is immediately killed and/or deprived of her powers? What’s the narrative or even subjective time of her ploy with Firestar and her farewells to Scott and Logan?
Damn, there are even explicit spelling mistakes in the finished issue.
I just… I just can’t.
Sorry: some silly mistakes there, and the first sentence should read “Stasis, Karima, or Moira”. My bad.
@wwKd: They had a group of characters earning the trust of their fellow mutants and ready to show the world what they can do… ha ha, they’re dead! Those POCs weren’t really going to get to be X-Men!
Why did Frenzy, Prodigy, and Jubilee have to die? They could have killed off one of them, but three mutants of color in a franchise that should have more? Using so many POCs as cannon fodder comes off as insensitive, at best.
Also, I think mutants coming out of those eggs naked *surrounded by other people* is weird and gross. They drew Kamala with a flimsy robe because a naked 16 year-old being looked at by other people, especially without her consent, is very wrong. They could have drawn her fully dressed w/ the professor (who could download her memories from another room) walking in after.
Why did any of the characters have to die? You make it sound like it was mostly POC mutants who were killed, which isn’t how it played out. It would have been ridiculous if the only mutants we saw killed were of European ancestry. It looks like the “new” X-men team will focus on Emma and the mutants with her, which include POC, so I guess it could be a pretty diverse team after all. The cover for the next X-men issue looks like it Psylocke on the cover, which gives me hope that it won’t just be a book focusing on Emma.
Seems kind of funny for people to only be voicing how weird the resurrection process is now, but oh well.
Some nice bits there, indeed.
What I liked:
* The X-Men are moving towards better acknowledgement of the MCU.
* Firestar’s plot.
What I did not like:
* Orchis is just too unbelievable at this stage. It is way too unrepentantly evil, way too self-assured… and way too faceless. That undercuts their ability to be taken seriously, particularly given the extremes of this issue.
* Not a fan of Jean Grey being paired with Wolverine under any circunstances. Never was, never will be.
* Introducing a genuinely innovative team of core X-Men just to slaughter them literally in the next scene is blunt and almost offensive. Particularly given how little and how ill characterized use Duggan makes of his own main characters in the current X-Men book.
* The scale of events is just too overwhelming. I am not generally a fan of miniseries, but this is one stance when one would be well justified.
* As others pointed out, Moira is all but destroyed as a character. Karima hasn’t exactly been shown with depth either. ORCHIS in general is just way careless and self-assured. Can they really afford going through so many risks of being exposed as the butchers that they turned out to be?
* The power levels inflation keeps piling up. Xavier apparently has no true challenge in controlling literal hundreds of thousands of characters – and worse, ORCHIS is counting on that with no clear contingency plans. Jean Grey might as well have astral travel powers now. Nimrod is fully confident that he can defeat a contingent of superhumans that would give Thanos pause.
* No subtlety, no use of several very interesting opportunities for nuance. USAgent (I expect it to be him) pretty much tramples over Cyclops in the Free Comicbook Day story for no good reason, despite Scott having a good tactical mind and a long range powerful attack. Several characters lose pretty much everything that they have in their lives and barely any beyond Xavier even shows any emotional reaction to that.
* The trend of writing every book as if they were X-Men Unlimited anthologies continues. We are a hair width’s away from the situation where books ought to be named after their writers for expedience’s sake.
* The Red Triangle protocol is an exciting idea, but it was used too superficially. I hoped for longer scenes showing, at least, Emma and Nightcrawler (who seems to have been the first to actually employ it) wild at it in their inner mentalscapes.
* Gerry Duggan. I am just not impressed by his writing. His plots are very ambitious, but their implementations are consistently mundane and underwhelming even as they tell us otherwise.
I wonder if Captain America’s book will be put on hold while he is with the Uncanny Avengers.
ylU > Have we -ever- seen Atlantic Krakoa before this issue? I don’t remember it coming up at all outside one or two brief mentions in data pages, but I’m not reading everything.
I believe we’ve been seeing it in nearly every issue of X-Force. The Pointe (old headquarters of X-Force) used to be in Atlantic Krakoa before Beast took it for a walk. AK also showed up in Duggan’s X-Men 1 when the team left their X-Bot there as a lighthouse.
Team Zissou > Didn’t the original Illuminati mini series by Bendis and Cheung reveal that the Beyonder was a mutant who went through Terrigenesis and that his powers came from being the first Inhuman/mutant hybrid?
Not exactly, that story was actually trying to say that The Beyonder was a stand-in for Marvel writers. It was a story about storytelling. The Beyonder is inconceivable to characters in-universe which is why Xavier and Black Bolt saw whatever they wanted to see. Brevoort has lamented before that the Bendis Beyonder issue was too subtle, which is why when he did Secret Wars with Hickman, they really hammered in the idea that ‘the Beyonders’ was an evil version of Marvel Editorial trying to reboot the Marvel Multiverse.
(Note: This was all before Ewing tied the Beyonders into his Celestials-Aspirants-Firmament cosmology, making them fully fictional characters. Ewing instead positioned the One-Above-All as a metaphor for the creative force.)
Luna Maximoff used to be a mutant-Inhuman hybid though, until it was revealed that Quicksilver was not a mutant. Luna is now a Nuhuman.
Salomé H. > Mystique’s death, in particular, was spectacularly stupid and unmotivated.
Mystique isn’t dead. If the story meant for her to have died, she would have been shot by ORCHIS like Lourdes. Instead, Mystique got injured by Xavier’s forceful telepathy and fell into the ocean. She’ll probably turn up (as an amnesiac?) somewhere, most likely in Nightcrawler’s book, Uncanny Spider-Man.
Spurrier also has a Nightcrawler + Mystique one-shot, X-Men Blue Origins, coming out next year about their shared history.
Mike Loughlin > They had a group of characters earning the trust of their fellow mutants and ready to show the world what they can do… ha ha, they’re dead!
I agree, but to be fair to Duggan, each elected X-Men team usually lasts for about a year of publishing time. Fall of X is a period of X-books running from August to December. The Five aren’t dead, they’re just trapped wherever all the gateway mutants are, which means that resurrection can continue once the Five are free. I think there still is a chance that we’ll see Synch and Talon leading this X-Men team next year in ‘Rise of X’.
Mike Loughlin > I think mutants coming out of those eggs naked *surrounded by other people* is weird and gross.
It may seem weird and gross to us as human readers of these books, but is this necessarily how the mutants see it? HoX made the point that while mutant culture can be seen as alienating by those who are not them, to mutants it feels ascendant. After all, the initial X-Men tagline was “the strangest superheroes of all!”.
Kamala was an engineering intern at Oscorp before she died. I don’t think she’s still sixteen.
@wwk5d & @GN: if naked resurrections in front of a crowd is a mutant-culture thing, ok, but Kamala has not been a part of that culture (until now) and has every right to be uncomfortable with it. I haven’t expressed my dislike of that idea because before because it hasn’t been presented as someone underaged being leered at by an adult. The only other minor being resurrected that I recall was Gabby, and I don’t remember her resurrection including Prof. X standing over her just after she emerged from the egg.
“Why is a creepy old man staring at me while I’m naked.”
“It’s mutant culture.”
“Make him stop, please.”
“Do you not want to be one of us?”
Mutant culture: encouraging perverts since 2019
They admitted that they manufactured everything about “mutant culture” in the most recent issue of Immortal X-Men, during the debate about the Quiet Council.
Mystique stated that democracy was a human concept, not a part of mutant culture.
Kate retorted that setting up utopian projects which lead down a path towards totalitarianism is a very human trait.
Thereby deflating the entire concept of mutant culture. It’s all made up on the spot and can be used to justify anything. Especially, when it’s been demarcated to the masses by an oligarchic elite which included megalomaniacs like Apocalypse.
Democracy is mutant culture, unless a person is opposed to it, then democracy is diametrically the opposite of mutant culture.
In the same issue, Xavier finally wakes up to realize that he’s embraced Magneto, Apocalypse, Sinister, and (from the negative) Moira’s ideology: that mutants and humans are somehow separate.
The resurrection process, based on Hickman, was always meant to look disturbing to the reader, drawing comparisons with pod people. Krakoa was Moira’s plan to isolate mutants on an island, away from everyone else, convinced of their own superiority and the greatness of their own culture, stagnating, while the rest of the world moved forward. As long as mutants were convinced they were immortal, they wouldn’t care about anything outside of themselves. If they did ever come to realize they had been trapped, alone, on a preserve, it would already be too late.
I get why Jean chose Firestar- she’s the one of the heroes who has been most wronged by a Council member/ long time X-Man (Emma).But I’m not buying that anyone that knows Firestar would believe that she would side with Orchis to get revenge on Emma or betray her own kind. Cap or Iron Man or Iceman would be suspicious that it was either mind control or that she was conning Orchis.
And Orchis should be suspicious too. They know that Emma, Maddie, Kwannon and Synch- four powerful telepaths- escaped. And Stasis suddenly starts claiming that Angelica is his spy and he never mentioned this before. And none of them is suspicious?
Note that in X-Men 24, Destiny said “There is a turncoat on the X-Men. A great betrayal that will turn the tide.” Was she talking about Angelica? Xavier? Did she want Rogue to think that Angelica was a traitor so that Angelica could fulfill her mission?
“Quite how Ms Marvel managed to resist Xavier is not obvious, but maybe Emma helped.”
Duggan said in a podcast that telepaths taught the Red Triangle protocol to the survivors that didn’t know it. It would have been nice if that explanation had actually made it into the STORY.
“M.O.D.O.K. is pleased that the Atlantic Island has disappeared off the satellites, which presumably means Mother Righteous told Orchis she was going to do that – otherwise they’d be puzzled.”
But the captjons tells us that no one alive knew that no one alive knew that Mother Righteous trapped the island in her lantern.
Note that Magneto warned Storm in Judgement Day that Xavier would do something stupid and doom them all and told Storm to watch him. And that’s the main reason why Orchis supported Genesis- to keep her away from Xavier at the Gala. It’s also why Selene and Shaw didn’t care.when it was announced the Council was being disbanded- the plan was never for them to take power over Krakoa but to break down Xavier psychologically so that he’d agree to Orchis’s demands. (Although I’m still not sure why Krakoa seemed to think disbanding the Council was a mistake since it had nothing to do with the outcome- maybe Gillen and Duggan weren’t on the same page?)
I couldn’t tell if one of the redheads at the Gala was supposed to be Maddie. This is important since next week’s Amazing Spider-Man Annual is a tie-in to the Gala and feature Janine invading the Limbo Embassy to free Ben. We’ll probably get more clarity next week.
It’s odd that the survivors split up instead of staying together. Some join the Uncanny Avengers ,some join Maddie, some go to Canada.
“Anyway,I can’t believe Krakoa has already fallen and we still haven’t had any payoff on the stupid evil Russian mind control plot.”
The stupid evil Russian mind control plot is supposedly being concluded in the next X-Force arc.
I like that Fall of X is not actually shaping up to be grim, and this issue went a long way towards assuring us of that.
I mean, I remember Time Runs Out, which assured me that this phase as Hickman originally planned it would have been miserable and yet completely unmemorable at the same time.
@Michael: “Although I’m still not sure why Krakoa seemed to think disbanding the Council was a mistake since it had nothing to do with the outcome- maybe Gillen and Duggan weren’t on the same page?”
I’m not sure that Krakoa did think it was a mistake. Krakoa could have stopped or cautioned Doug at any time but only interfered after the vote was done. My impression was that Krakoa thought disbanding the Council was necessary but also knew something was coming. So Krakoa let it happen to fix the immediate issue with peoples’ distrust in the government poisoning Krakoa, then yoinked Doug off to safety. It was time for the Fall pruning in hopes of a better eventual Spring.
Now, *what* did Krakoa know about what was coming and how?
@Diana: Wow, okay, somewhat depressing to learn that. I mercifully never read the Lemire run.
@Evilgus: Moira is highly likely not dead since she’s part-cyborg now, and she was still barking orders as Rogue rips her asunder. (Glad Rogue is back to being awesome again.)
@wwk5d: Besides the newly elected X-Men, Jean, and Lourdes, who else actually dies on panel? *That* is the key difference–whether intentional or not, the decision to explicitly show casual, graphic maiming of Black bodies in addition to having an Asian woman’s head curb-stomped into oblivion is unbelievably poor optics when the preceding page is, in and of itself, and triumphant celebration of diversity.
Black bodies in the US, in particular, have long been regarded as disposable–something to be exploited and violated without consent–in our long history of media. That’s why it’s an eyebrow-raising decision to show 3 defenseless, overlooked, and narratively underserved POCs brutalized in this way on an island that apparently consists of 99% white people, while their white counterparts get to die nobler deaths in defense of their country AND have the emotional beats of their respective deaths expanded upon through effective mourning panels. Unconscious bias is a helluva drug.
Speaking of which: I just noticed the sad, tiny “pop” effect on Jubilee’s pyrotechnics when Nimrod murders her. I know the utility of her powers have always been somewhat of a joke, but man, this is depressing. What a way to completely rob her of her dignity, especially after her ultra-fun and spirited showing (and mild, overdue power boost) in the X-Terminators mini.
Unrelated: Did I miss an explanation for why Cyclops is back in his ’90s uniform?
Before I forget a third time: This book did Armor dirty. Whatever happened to Bishop vouching for her to make the cut this year at the end of War College? #justiceforarmor
The timelines of this issue and the FCBD special don’t *quite* match up–Rogue “just flew off at mach three” before Cyclops is attacked at the Treehouse. But Rogue flies off to rescue Steve Rogers, who’s responding to the attack in Washington D.C., which is by the false “Captain Krakoa” (who I have a suspicion is Nuke), who has stolen the suit in the scene at the Treehouse!
(And then when Tony arrives in Invincible Iron Man and asks if anyone’s hurt, Steve says just his motorcycle and his pride. Er… what about those Orchis folks who blew themselves up in the FCBD issue?)
Also, while Cyclops appears to be in the capable hands of EMTs, remember that last time that happened it was Doctor Stasis…
Kubert’s art in the first scene here seemed really off, especially Kamala, who doesn’t look like herself! Otherwise I mostly loved the art here.
Was nobody running surveillance on this year’s Gala? You’d think Sage would have made sure to record everything.
I also note that one of Dazzler’s established powers is self-resurrection.
Isn’t Orchis who whatever funded by various govs ? I guess everyone important invited to the gala got a equivalent of the fabled “don’t fly on 9-11 “message.
Orchis is made up of elements from agencies like SWORD, SHIELD, and groups like Hydra and AIM, but they’re independent of governments.
In addition to Lemire’s and Rosenberg’s runs, this is borrowing heavily from Days of Future Past.
@Neutrino: To the best of my recollection, even Days of Future Past didn’t depict an entire team getting liquified in one blow. It was a protracted losing battle that chipped away at the roster, and (most critically) even the ones who died got to fight back to the end.
Douglas: Not just Dazzler, but isn’t Cannonball supposed to be immortal too?
They’re on Ryker Island.
@Douglas- It can’t be Nuke. Destiny said his rank was truly earned. Nuke never made captain because he was too unstable.