X-Men #25 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN vol 6 #25
“From the Shadows”
Writer: Gerry Duggan
Artist: Stefano Caselli
Colour artist: Marte Gracia
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. Kate Pryde, back in ninja mode, kills an Orchis footsoldier by phasing X-shaped swords through his head. The swords are drawn here with different hilts – one of which seems more pirate-like, per her Krakoa design – but that’s not actually reflected in the interior art.
The X-Men logo is now distressed, to fit the Fall of X theming.
PAGE 2. Opening data page: a quote from Kate Pryde, now on a battered version of the traditional layout. This is the only data page in this issue, unless you count the Orchis poster right at the end, but Astonishing Iceman confirms that they’re still a part of the format. The quote is from the flashback towards the end of the issue where she’s killing Orchis soldiers and telling them that the X-Men no longer exist, so that these rules no longer apply.
PAGES 3-5. Flashback: Kitty Pryde talks to her rabbi about Krakoa.
This flashback takes place shortly after the flashback that opens Marauders vol 1 #1, where Kitty discovers that she can’t use the gates and breaks her nose (hence the bandage here).
I’m fairly sure the rabbi is an original character. Back in Marauders #1, Kitty was resentful of the whole Krakoan project, and Susan’s advice to her here is basically to have faith in God’s plan. This doesn’t seem to have given her much consolation when we first see her in Marauders #1, and she’s less than convincing here in telling Susan that she even believes in God at all. At any rate, we’ve come full circle since this flashback, with Kate embracing Krakoa, seeing it destroyed, and then getting the ability to access the gates after all.
“I heard your teacher’s voice in my head.” Professor X’s announcement of the founding of Krakoa in House of X. We’re in the days immediately after that.
PAGES 6-7. Flashback: Kate retrieves her swords from the X-Men Mansion.
According to the narrator, this is “hours” after Orchis attacked Krakoa in X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023 – hence, Kate is still in her Gala outfit. This must follow soon after the flashback at the end of the issue, which explains what happened to her immediately after that issue.
The X-Men Mansion is in ruins. During the Krakoa era it was largely abandoned, but still overgrown with Krakoan growth. Presumably the attack on Krakoa has caused some of the Krakoan vegetation to die out, though it’s not clear when all this graffiti happened – if it’s immediately post-Krakoa, they’ve been awfully quick about it.
Kate retrieves two swords and a note from Ogun. In the 1984-5 Kitty Pryde & Wolverine miniseries, Ogun trains her in ninja skills and generally attempts to brainwash her in an attempt to turn her into a new host body for him. Obviously, Wolverine saves her. This is where the codename Shadowcat originally comes from – Kitty coins it in narration in issue #5, at which point she’s mostly free of Ogun’s influence and going after the bad guys herself. However, the original story is consistent with it being a name that Ogun used for her earlier. On the other hand, there’s no obvious place in the original story for Kitty two receive (and keep) two whole swords from Ogun, so presumably this is a note he sends her at some later point. In the context of the original plot, it seems to be a threat reminding her that she will never be fully free of his influence; the suggestion may be that she’s finally embracing that in these dark times.
PAGES 8-10. Dr Stasis holds a press conference.
We’re now in the present day time frame, and “weeks” have passed since X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023. The newspaper cover date for that story fits its publication date, so evidently we’re meant to have jumped forward. Of course, the X-books will catch with “a few weeks” by next issue, so fair enough.
Dr Stasis give the same cover story about the Hellfire Gala that we were told to expect in the one-shot. We’re told that the gates have been left up for their propaganda value, no doubt anticipating the obvious plot objection of why Orchis have kept them around to be so useful to Kate. Presumably Orchis are also using them for transport purposes – why not?
Plastered over the gates are copies of the “Magneto can no longer use this gate – Thanks, Orchis!” poster seen at the end of the issue.
Firestar is not, of course, a genuine traitor; she’s infiltrating Orchis at the request of the dying Jean Grey, who also altered the memories of senior Orchis personnel to make them think she had been with them all along.
“In the vacuum left behind by S.H.I.E.L.D.’s fall, Orchis has risen to the challenge of defending mankind.” Orchis have positioned themselves as the replacement S.H.I.E.L.D. rather more emphatically over in Invincible Iron Man than in the regular X-books, though we’ve seen them take credit for the defeat of the Progenitor in Judgment Day.
Ben Urich is in the foreground of page 9 panel 5 as one of the reporters at Orchis’ press conference. He’s not identified and doesn’t get any dialogue, but he was prominent in earlier issues of this run as a sympathetic reporter who Cyclops gave crucial stories to.
Woofer is the guy that the X-Men rescued from an Orchis pop-up clinic in issue #22 (much like the one seen in page 10 panel 2). They brought him back to the Treehouse with them, but presumably he stayed out there in the wider world.
An obvious question, to put it mildly, is what the hell Woofer and the Hollywood mutant seen in the next panel are doing on Earth at all, given that the central premise of Hellfire Gala 2023 is that Professor X is forced to send all of mutantkind through the gates, and that only a handful of mutants who can resist him are able to stay behind. We’re already backsliding on that, and it’s a point that really should have been addressed more clearly. The idea may simply be that a small minority of mutants inevitably didn’t get to the gates in time because they were too far away from a gate, or physically unable to get to one, or whatever – and Orchis figure a few stragglers are acceptable because it looks a bit dodgy if mutantkind disappears entirely overnight, or because they need some target for propaganda. But I can’t see any good reason not to just spell this out directly – if Woofer’s not immune to psychic powers then surely he ought to remember Xavier trying to send him through the gates.
Woofer is being dumped on Arakko, which is currently in a civil war as per X-Men Red. However, the very fact that Orchis actually have taken him to Arakko suggests that Professor X was wrong in Hellfire Gala 2023 to think that Orchis had redirected the gates – it seems possible that Orchis really did think they were sending all the mutants to Arakko.
Captain Krakoa is an Orchis impostor who stole Cyclops’ old costume and murdered some politicians in Avengers / X-Men: Free Comic Book Day 2023. We haven’t seen his “Brotherhood” yet.
PAGE 11. Feilong meets the US President.
The War Machines seem to be new, but they’re basically just giant War Machine armour as Sentinels, the same as the Stark Sentinels with Iron Man.
Note that Feilong is now justifying their activities by talking about the inevitable invasion by Arakko. An obvious question here is what the motivations of most of the Orchis members actually are here, given that thus far their anti-mutant agenda has appeared to be basically sincere. Stasis probably does have an ulterior motive – he’s more interested in becoming a Dominion – and Feilong may be interested in personal power, but how does Orchis actually hold together once the mutant threat is defeated?
PAGES 12-15. Dr Stasis confronts Cyclops.
The Henry Gyrich Center for Behavioral Studies is named after the late Henry Peter Gyrich, who was a member of Orchis, and who was killed by Abigail Brand at the end of S.W.O.R.D..
Cyclops has survived his fall in Avengers / X-Men: Free Comic Book Day 2023 while fighting Captain Krakoa, but he’s paralysed and, because this is a grimdark storyline, they’ve sewed his eyes shut. Stasis tries persuading Cyclops to get the remaining mutants to go quietly, and unsurprising Cyclops isn’t going for it. It’s not obvious that Stasis can have any ulterior motive here, unless of course he’s planning to send the mutants somewhere else (though if so, why is Woofer on Arakko?).
Cyclops is “Prisoner Ten” – not Prisoner X, note.
PAGES 16-19. Shadowkat and Synch in the X-Men’s safehouse.
The X-Men – in the sense of whoever’s left from the group that escaped the Gala – have set up a safe house in the Morlock tunnels. As well as Shadowkat and Synch, Emma, Rasputin, Talon and Ms Marvel are all involved. Synch and Talon are still acting as team leaders, the role that they were set up for with the abortive X-Men team from Hellfire Gala.
Synch is at pains to stress that Kate is, for some reason, uniquely able to use the gates after Orchis’ interference – he can’t do it by copying her powers, and nor can Rasputin (who has Kitty’s phasing powers too), so apparently it’s not just a powers thing.
Kate’s room has a poster on the wall with the Marauders poster.
“I did her thing once. Go back and fix the failings of the previous generation.” In “Days of Future Past” – though that was an alt-future Kate Pryde returning to the present, rather than “our” Kitty going back into the past.
“I don’t even know where Lockheed is.” Interesting question. The dragon wasn’t at the Hellfire Gala and presumably he’s still on Earth somewhere.
“I survived living with a Wolverine longer than anyone.” Synch is referring to the long time he and Talon (as Wolverine) spent in the Vault with its time dilation effect during the Hickman run.
PAGES 20-23. Shadowkat visits Arakko and meets Woofer.
The mutants from Earth that we see here are presumably a handful of people who have been dumped here by Orchis in the same way as Woofer, or who happened to be on Arakko anyway when the war broke out.
Presumably Kate wants Woofer to take a census of the Earth mutants on Arakko, not the entire planetary population – but if so, it’s interesting that she implicitly doesn’t regard the Arakkii as proper mutants.
“Didn’t you testify before Congress?” She did, in X-Men Gold #9, of all places.
“I was hoping to find some of my friends – Sunfire, Polaris and Forge.” Shadowkat must surely have figured out before now that the mutants who got marched through the gates did not arrive on Arakko – it’s been weeks. Maybe it’s meant to be a “hope against hope” beat. We’ll see Forge later in the issue and find out where he went. Polaris is presumably with all the other mutants. Sunfire went to Otherworld in issue #24 and got stuck there; we’ll apparently see his story in upcoming issues of X-Men Unlimited.
PAGE 24. Flashback: Forge on a distant world.
This is evidently where Forge winds up after being marched through the gates in Hellfire Gala 2023. A few points are worth noting here. First, this is not Mars, but neither is it the “meat grinder” that Professor X feared in Gala, nor does it even seem particularly dangerous. Second, Forge appears to be alone – where’s everyone else? And third, the very fact that there’s a gate here means that somebody has been here before to plant it.
Forge concludes that the gate is not working because Krakoa has been “incapacitated” – the idea that it’s been hacked doesn’t seem to occur to him. As we saw in issue #15, Forge trapped the Children of the Vault within a time bubble to distract them from taking over the world. But, as he pointed out, this would only work as long as Krakoa remained alive to support it. So Orchis have inadvertently released the Children of the Vault, and we’ll pick up on their story in their miniseries.
The three characters shown emerging from the pods appear to be Perro, Serafina and Fuego. However, Serafina wasn’t in one of those pods when Forge encountered her in issues #16-17, which suggests that she’s either an art error or an attempt to use her character design as the starting point for a generic Child of the Vault.
PAGES 25-27. Flashback: Emma Frost takes Kamala Khan home.
We last saw Emma in Invincible Iron Man #8, when she was spirited away to safety by Iron Man in the aftermath of the Gala. This obviously comes after the resolution of that story.
The idea that Emma can erase everyone’s memories of Kamala being dead is supposed to build on her role as a fixer for the Kingpin as shown in flashbacks in Devil’s Reign: X-Men, but it really does stretch credibility far too far in this instance. Kamala didn’t just die publicly, there was an entire memorial service which got its own one-shot. How many people is Emma altering the memories of?
Since she’s clearly joining the X-books’ cast, and her family don’t get named here, her parents are Yusuf and Muneeba and her brother is Aamir.
PAGE 28. The X-Men meet with the Uncanny Avengers.
This is the team who’ll be appearing in the upcoming Uncanny Avengers miniseries – apparently Captain America’s way of supporting the mutants is to put together an Avengers team which is basically an X-Men squad in plain sight. Although Iron Man is here for the meeting, according to the solicitations the actual team members are Captain America, Rogue, Deadpool, Quicksilver, Psylocke and M.
PAGE 29. Emma asks Kate what happened at the end of the Gala one-shot.
PAGES 30-41. Flashback: Kate slaughters Orchis soldiers.
The rationale here is that her ability to use the gates is such important information that she has to kill everyone to keep the secret – but it’s also a repudiation of the “Murder No Man” law now that Krakoa no longer exists to have laws.
Again, Kate brings up Ogun as her teacher, and implies that she’s patterning herself more on him than on Xavier now. She’s not in the best of moods, understandably.
Although Jerusalem happened to be the setting of a key scene in House of X #1, the bookending with the rabbi in the opening scene and the narrator’s reference to reclaiming a homeland and a people pushed to the brink of extinction suggest that Duggan is drawing a rather more direct parallel with Kitty’s Jewish identity.
“When I was up on the Bloom, I was sucked out into space, and they saved me!” Issue #18, though if we saw this specific soldier in that issue, he was just a generic masked guy.
PAGE 42. Kitty announces that she’s going to kill Firestar.
On the one hand, this is an obvious problem with Jean’s plan for Firestar. On the other, is Firestar really a top target here…?
PAGE 43. Recap and credits. The “recap” is simply “The Fall of X has begun” – Astonishing Iceman has a conventional recap in the same space. The small print still reads “mutants of the world” as before, but the general design is distressed – the wonky Krakoan text reads “FALL OF X”.
PAGE 44. Another chance to enjoy the Magneto poster.
PAGE 45. Trailers, again with the design battered. The header still reads “Krakoa is for all Mutants” followed by NEXT in Krakoan, but it’s messed up. The Krakoan text that follows reads UNHOLY MATRIMONY.
Humans will still give birth to mutants. The population is extremely heavily skewed towards baseline humanity currently. The precipitating event which led to the secret formation of Orchis (although not their activation) was the tipping point, where the mutant population reached a point of more and more mutants being born until humanity became a distinct minority, leading baseline humanity down the path to extinction.
Basically, humans are going to give birth to more and more mutants until the vast majority of births will be Homo Superior. Orchis haven’t solved this wider issue yet.
We saw in Moira’s Life Six and Life Nine that humans turned to genetic engineering as a way to ensure that the X-gene would be bred out of the population.
It would seem that Orchis’ wider goal would be the pursuit of turning baseline humanity into post-humanity, as seen in Life Six and Life Nine.
The destruction of Krakoa and moving most mutants off Earth would seem to be a way to buy Orchis time to pursue their ultimate goal.
This wasn’t too bad, just a bit sloppy in some parts.
How fast can Orchis make it to Mars to drop people off there? And if they control the gates, why not just send the stragglers to Mars that way?
Also, when Kitty is fighting the Orchis soldiers, she throws one guy at another and they…somehow end up phased together? Kitty’s powers have never worked that way.
Tbh I thought the implication was that all the mutants had been sent to The Vault, which would have been an interesting reveal but in reading this, I guess it was just Forge and it’s not clearly The Vault
Why is Stasis walking around unmasked at a press conference? Sinister appeared publicly at both galas and the public knows what he tried to take over the world through the resurrections. Isn’t anyone wondering why this guy looks just like Sinister except for a spade on his head instead of a diamond?
Duggan has said in interviews that the reason that there are still mutants on Earth is that some mutants were too far from the gates or physically unable to get to the gates.
(And in this week’s Amazing Spider-Man Annual, Maddie is surprised by how many mutants are seeking refuge at the Limbo Embassy, so it seems like a lot of mutants didn’t go through the gates.)
Interesting that Marvel has no problem portraying Biden badly. Back in the Dark Reign crossover, Brubaker basically had Obama go, “Sorry, Steve, there’s nothing I can do about Osborn- I’m just the President”.
Re: Stasis’s willingness to send the mutants to Mars- we know that he’s planning on becoming a Dominion soon, so he figures that he’ll be able to destroy the mutants at his leisure once he’s omnipotent and immortal. I do wonder if the other members fo Orchis have a plan to kill the mutants on Mars, though.
Why doesn’t Forge remember Orchis attacking the Hellfire Gala?
I’m not liking that Duggan is basically turning Kitty into Beast 2.0- the supposed genius who does “necessary” evil things but in reality is an idiot who is wrong all the time. She threatens an innocent man who’s the victim of ethnic cleansing- that’s a way to get him on your side, Kate! Then, she goes to kill Firestar without considering the possibility that she might be undercover.
(As an aside, 911: Lonestar also had one of the main characters nearly murder an undercover agent wrongly believing the agent killed his father and suffer no consequences for that. I hope they don’t do the same thing with Kitty.)
I guess that Kitty wants to murder Firestar because she “betrayed” the X-Men- Traveller is a mutant who betrayed his own kind but he was always a villain- he never was loyal to the X-Men.
It’s also worth noting that the reason Emma wound up becoming a hero is that Firestar spared her life after Emma betrayed and abused her. And now Kate, without irony, is refusing the same mercy to Firestar after her “betrayal”.
It does make you wonder though- does Emma suspect Firestar is faking? Is she going to try to stop Shadowkat?
By the way, I know that Ogun’s first language was Japanese, or maybe he was attempting a pun, but spelling it Shadowkat is just silly.
Warren Ellis’ portrayal of Obama in the pages of Thunderbolts was quite a bit more even-handed. Granted, Marvel still decided to do a story featuring Obama meeting Spider-Man.
Technically, while Obama was president in the 616 (even had a comic with Spider-Man…) and Trump was at least alluded to, I’m not sure Biden is the president in the Marvel Universe.
Not least because a US President has been assassinated by Elektra (actually he was a Hand puppet that dissolved in the presence of Elektra to Frame her) in Zdarsky’s Daredevil some months ago. So even if Biden was Marvel president, he’s not anymore.
I don’t think that this POTUS was even particularly meant to _be_ Joe Biden. We don’t see his face, after all. He is just a generic POTUS.
In any case, times changed. Back in the day Obama was a harbinger of a sort of hope. That was after GWB and before Donald Trump, though. One of the things that changed since is that we now have a better sense that, for good and also for worse, POTUSes aren’t the be-all end-all of politics – and they definitely aren’t always worth of reverence and awe.
You know, Feilong bringing up the fact that he is in point of fact a Chinese national is a bit awkward, because frankly I think that American society is WAY too openly hateful of the Chinese these days for the kind of full-throated embrace of Orchis we’re seeing here to make sense when Feilong is one of their primary spokesmen.
It’s okay, last issue Daredevil managed to save the US President from being trapped in hell forever!
But really, ever since Dark Reign you really can’t say that any US President has come off great in the pages of Marvel.
Also, I may have said too soon that Fall of X won’t be all that grim. Let’s see how it evens out.
Orchis is a remarkable difference on its own, though.
I don’t think there is much of a real life parallel to the reputation boost that it got from the end of Judgement Day and now claim of being a protection from those evil mutants.
And is Feilong even very visible? It seems to me that Statis is much more the public face of Orchis, at least in this issue.
I’m not sure Forge’s fate necessarily tells us much about what happened to everyone else who walked through a gate. Note that he wakes up no longer wearing his gala outfit. This *could* just be an art error, but given they did remember to put everyone else in their gala outfits, and given how they went out of their way to devote a panel to him RESISTing at the gala, I wonder if the idea is *something* happened to him between now and then, placing him in unique circumstances.
“Presumably Orchis are also using them for transport purposes – why not?”
They mention later on in the issue that the gates being shut means ORCHIS can’t use them, either. Guess it’s a binary on-off thing. Which also addresses wwk5d’s comment about why they don’t use them for Mars transport.
“An obvious question, to put it mildly, is what the hell Woofer and the Hollywood mutant seen in the next panel are doing on Earth at all, given that the central premise of Hellfire Gala 2023 is that Professor X is forced to send all of mutantkind through the gates, and that only a handful of mutants who can resist him are able to stay behind.”
Duggan clarified in the Cerebro podcast that only those mutants close enough to a gate (most of them) walked through one on time. Those who were too far away from one are still on Earth.
“I think that American society is WAY too openly hateful of the Chinese these days for the kind of full-throated embrace of Orchis we’re seeing here”
In the Marvel Universe they probably hate mutants even more.
Marvel makes use of Schrodinger’s president. He’s a generic president not meant to be anyone in particular one moment, the actual real life POTUS the next, depending on the story.
In the Hellfire Gala issue, it was stated that if any mutant returned to Earth from exile, Orchis would kill humans. Iceman and Shadowkat are operating openly. I guess Orchis is following the that agreement to the letter, as Iceman didn’t return from exile and Shadowkat’s disguise gives her plausible deniability. Still, that’s awfully sporting of them. Why don’t they just say, “if you don’t stop opposing us, we’re killing humans” in a way that the public won’t hear? Or kill humans remotely and say mutants are doing it? What will happen when the Uncanny Avengers go public? Again, they can trigger the poisoned meds and blame Beast or Black Tom or Nature Girl or whomever.
I actually liked that Kate was driven to murder the Orchis agents due to grief and rage. It makes sense, given the mass slaughter (that may or may not be true) or Krakoans. I’m sure there will be little to no consequences for her actions as long as Duggan is writing her, however.
The rest of the issue: theEmma/Kamala scene was dumb, for reasons pointed out above. I’m sure her funeral was recorded, and there’s no way Emma had access to the superhuman community or Kamala’s extended family. Stefano Casseli’s art was good throughout. The opening scene didn’t land for me. I don’t know how Woofer will possibly take a census on Arakko, and I’m sure it will just happen anyway.
“I have been called many things.”
“Ariel.”
“Sprite.”
“Kate.”
“Kitty.”
“Constanza.”
“John.”
“But definitely not Shadowcat, lol.”
“And now… I am become… ShadowKat.”
Such desperately stupid writing. Kate acknowledges she must kill the Orchid agents as quickly as she can, so that word does not get out that she’s free and capable of using the gates. She then proceeds to explode two different agents to pieces by phasing grenades into them.
I liked the mystery surrounding Gorge’s situation. Otherwise, I found very little to like here. Is there any conceivable reason for Emma not to have scanned Firestar’s true allegiance? For the public are large to completely abhor mutants, while Dr. Stasis spouts propaganda from his black lips? Is this a story about ethnic transition, because current Psylocke is comparatively nice?
Why are the Avengers the only group of superheroes to show some trust and willingness to help? Wouldn’t them campaigning as a whole against Orchis solve this plot in two seconds?
Just… No. Thank you, but no.
“Kate acknowledges she must kill the Orchid agents as quickly as she can, so that word does not get out that she’s free and capable of using the gates. She then proceeds to explode two different agents to pieces by phasing grenades into them.”
I mean, that sounds like a pretty dang quick way to kill people.
“Is there any conceivable reason for Emma not to have scanned Firestar’s true allegiance?”
I’m not sure she would’ve had a chance. By the time of Firestar’s ‘betrayal’, Xavier was pretty much the only mutant left at Mykines.
“Wouldn’t them campaigning as a whole against Orchis solve this plot in two seconds?”
Eh, look at how many celebrities and stars lean left and are politically active. Yet that still doesn’t keep the right out of power.
I don’t think the rabbi is an original character? I seem to recall that Kitty had a female rabbi who was going to officiate her wedding to Colossus, and who accordingly made appearances in X-Men Gold, unless I’m forgetting or mixing up with another character. The same rabbi then officiated Rogue and Gambit’s wedding after Kitty called it off with Piotr.
It has been five years since X-Men: Gold #30, but Rabbi Yarkin does not seem to be the same character.
She seemed to be considerably younger, a different body type, and definitely had dark hair.
Oddly, we never got a very clear look at her face.
Of course, there is a very high chance that Kate is connected to more than a single female Rabbi.
So… Kate accidentally falls through *one* gate, hears an announcement that the gates are now shut down, and concludes from this that she can now deliberately use the entire transit system any time she wants, and that that’s a tactical advantage worth killing for. Hm.
And if this is building towards Shadowcat vs. Firestar, I wonder if the story will pick up on their shared history with Emma.
I’d kind of hope that immediately after the last panel, Emma says “Wait just a moment”. I don’t think that’ll happen, but it probably should. Even if Emma hasn’t scanned Firestar, she should know there’s something up there. *Maybe* you could believe Firestar made a mistake and gave Orchis information she shouldn’t have out of concern about Krakoan overreach, but no one who knows her should buy that she’s actually all-in with Orchis.
Kate’s clearly lashing out and doesn’t know Firestar well, so I get her reaction.
Salome: Yeah, the refusal to mention Shadowcat while talking about the names she used was kind of weird. “Now.. I am Shadowkat!” “Oh, you’re Shadowcat again?” “No! Shadowcat doesn’t describe my pain! Shadowkat does!” “…Shadowcat?” “Shadow*kat*!!” “Um… Kate, why don’t you.. sit down while I fetch Dr. Sampson?”
wwk5d: “And if they control the gates, why not just send the stragglers to Mars that way?”
Not wanting to admit to the public they have access to the gates? When Stasis was talking to the public he implied the gates were completely dead. In fact, there’s no reason for Orchis to mention that they had an override to let them use the gates in the first place. They can just act like all their forces invaded the Gala on droppods and keep this resource a secret. Feilong’s base on Phobos probably needs supply runs anyway, so they can add a brig to the ship and drop people off on the way.
Also security would suggest that you don’t turn mutant access back on for anybody if you can help it.
One of the biggest problems with the Krakoa era, and especially the post-Hickman books, is that there are way too many pages to fill. It’s not that these books are decompressed, but what plot there is is stretched thin and the pages are full of filler dialogue that advances nothing and fleshes out nothing.
This really is an exhausting era for the X-books that I don’t expect to look back on fondly.
I’m a bit sad we now have murderdeathkill Kat. I know she’s been a bit stabby of late, and she has killed before. But they were very specific story beats that messed her up! When even Kate’s concluding that the X-Men now casually murder, there’s no hopeful characters left.
I get why, it’s just a bit sad and can’t be rowed back on!
I’m always willing to overlook continuity stuff when setting up a new X-Men premise, but ho boy. I don’t think this one is bad, but if the (post) Hickman age is supposed to be characterized by good planning, but not Claremont-level vague idea mentioning to develop years later, you would think someone would have gotten their stories straight about what the setup is at the end of Hellfire Gala and going into this.
So all the mutants went through the gates, except the ones who had Xavier resist training. But they didn’t end up on Mars. Except some did end up on Mars, there are mutants on Earth, there are mutants in other places because the gates were inconsistent, but the gates are usually pre-seeded…
I guess we could say that Orchis’ warning that they would kill mutants that return to earth doesn’t account for mutants already on earth, but…what?
Also the unity team has Deadpool on it? I get the meta reason why, but I dunno Steve Rogers, were you really that desperate?
Also, Firestar is a rogue agent, but I thought in Hellfire Gala that mainly meant Jean implanting Doctor Stasis with the idea. The fact that everyone, from Rogue in Hellfire Gala to Kitty here, is going after Firestar is kinda weird. Like many other commenters here are saying, Orchis took the teleporters out, but not the telepaths. Surely someone can do a cross-check there.
If there was a clearer line of thought from Hellfire Gala to this one, I think I’d be more satisfied. This, combined with the scattershot feel of the back half of Hellfire Gala visually, feels messy. I don’t know if that’s editorial (probably not by how many Orchis agents Kitty gruesomely takes out in this issue; that probably does some damage to the character for a bit) or creative, but this feels inconsistent in a Decimation/The 198 way.
“When even Kate’s concluding that the X-Men now casually murder, there’s no hopeful characters left.”
There’s Synch and Ms Marvel. And Iceman’s book is quite upbeat.
Deadpool proving himself to Steve Rogers was a big part of Duggan’s runs on both the Deadpool solo and his previous Uncanny Avengers, IIRC, so it’s not that out of the left field.
I don’t know, I kind of liked this issue. It helps that there’s a big focus on Kate and Emma, the two characters Duggan definitely cares about (and I liked how he wrote them in Marauders). In the other hand, some parts are ridiculously grimdarky. Sure, sew Cyclops’s eyes, why not. (Wouldn’t the energy seep through the holes? Did they use adamantium thread?)
I am reminded of the Decimation era in that I didn’t like the status quo, but I liked some of the books.
I don’t like this status quo, but I liked this issue more than most of the Duggan run. And the Dark X-Men looks like it might be fun. And I’m interested in the Ms Marvel mini.
“I mean, that sounds like a pretty dang quick way to kill people.”
The main problem to me is that the narration mentions Kate hid the corpses but I cannot imagine how much work it’d take to hide all these gory remains of the guys that were exploded. Also feels way too psychopath-y even for this character turn of Kate.
I’m not too bothering by not all mutants leaving Earth either, cause it makes that not everyone would be close to a gate. It doesn’t betray the main feature of this status quo that is hiding the mutant paradise while scattered mutants struggle.
I’ll echo the general sentiment that this was better than the Gala, but at this point the very premise is way too broken to me – it’s just Duggan playing the greatest hits as usual, though his time he’s at the “mutants scattered and at their lowest point” point of his checklist.
I also don’t mind this direction for Kate, but I guess part of that is the art being really competent – Caselli can do some great facial expressions.
The most bizarre thing to me is how different the tone here is from the Gala issue. If it was two different writers it would be easier to rationalize, but why does the Gala, the issue that sets the new status quo for the whole line, gets such a lighthearted and juvenile writing while this comes off much more serious and dark? It’s bizarre.
They make a big deal about Kate being able to use the gates but… couldn’t Sync just use Magik’s abilities? We know he can access them by “muscle memory.” Granted, I suppose without the Five to resurrect him, the aging as a side effect might be an issue, but if ever there was a situation that warranted the emergency measure, surely it’s this one?
I don’t really see the issue with portraying Kate as bloodthirsty when under heavy stress. The precedents go at least back to the original Mutant Massacre.
She has killed on purpose before. Her then-sweetheart (Colossus) did as well going back to the 1980s and is in fact about to lead a version of a black ops team (X-Force). One of her best friends is the chief butcher and hypocrite of Marvel. She has spent a couple of years now as leader of a smuggling operation and member of a ruling council that includes the likes of Magneto, Mystique, Mister Sinister and Exodus. Her closest buddies in that time include Emma Frost. A major early plot of her time in Krakoa was her vengeance against Sebastian Shaw. For a long time her best friend has been a literal ruler of demons.
We are not talking about an innocent teenager, and arguably have not for decades. She is an experienced murderer, a partner of murderers, and on occasion an overseer of murderers.
There are many unresolved ethical questions hanging over most of the main X-Men, perhaps mainly as an artifact of sorts of the insistence of putting the same characters through shell-shocking situations regularly for decades. They must be kept commercially viable somehow, so glossing over the consequences is expected at this point.
That may be one of my main disappointments over the Krakoa era. It was a perfect opportunity to bring about significant exploration of those ethical questions, but that just was not in the cards.
A fight between Kitty and Angrlica will likely tug at the heartstrings of Marvel fan boys of a certain age.
I wonder if Orchis know where the mutants are, they are intend on deporting the left behind and they suggested that exiles could easily return with out the threat of retaliation. I think they did plan to send them to Mars but the gates were cursed by curse which is why she was at the gala.
I wonder if we will learn Kate’s reasons for targeting Angelica at this time.
One reason may be simple situational confort. She switched in a very short time from seeing herself as one of the very few reliable and ethical members of the Quiet Council to becoming a bloodthirsty terrorist. It may be affecting her self-image more than she realizes.
Angelica is a grim reminder of that hurt self-image, in the form of a person that was worse abused then herself, by her current mentor no less. Worse than that contrast is the similarity; far as Kate knows right now, both of them have betrayed their principles out of pragmatic interest in survival. It may be very hard indeed for Kate to tolerate Angelica’s existence at the moment.
Which is not to say that there aren’t genuine arguments for making her a prime target (again, going by what Kate knows or can reasonably guess).
Firestar is clearly being used effectively to hurt the general reputation of mutants, and making it that much easier for humans to buy Orchis’ claims. Jean’s plan may well pay off, but it is not without risks of backfiring badly. It is also noteworthy that her role is in direct competition and opposition to Kate’s own efforts at building an underground resistance of sorts; you can’t very well sympathise with one without hurting the other, and at first glance Kate is asking her colaborators to accept a lot more danger to themselves.
“In the Hellfire Gala issue, it was stated that if any mutant returned to Earth from exile, Orchis would kill humans. Iceman and Shadowkat are operating openly.”
Like you say, they’re very specific about the rule only applying to mutants who left Earth in the first place and then returned. EVERYBODY in the Hellfire Gala issue immediately seems to understand that this means Orchis can’t go and kill all the humans until a mutant returns, but that some mutants can just stay on Earth with impunity.
Which makes no sense at all, of course, but it does still mean all the missing mutants just have to stay away now or fear the consequences…
“ever since Dark Reign you really can’t say that any US President has come off great in the pages of Marvel.”
All Marvel Universe Presidents are basically okay with sentinels, Project Wideawake, Genoshan slavery, Negative Zone concentration camps….
“POTUSes aren’t the be-all end-all of politics – and they definitely aren’t always worth of reverence and awe.”
In real life POTUSes never were worthy of reverence and awe. Not one of them. Especially whichever one I or anyone else happens to like at any given time.
“Marvel makes use of Schrodinger’s president. He’s a generic president not meant to be anyone in particular one moment, the actual real life POTUS the next, depending on the story.”
I remember Marvel President definitely being Jimmy Carter but also possibly maybe Richard Nixon.
Zoomy-Or, you know, all the mutants can come back, en masse, forcing Orchis to kill all the humans giving the planet to the mutants. It’s the most ridiculous evil supervillain plan ever created. If Orchis are convinced that mutants are an existential threat to all human life, and Orchis claim to be the last defence of the human race against extinction, their plan must be based on the magnanimity of those same mutants who are a threat to the continued survival of the human race.
Chris-Yes, I don’t think that people needed W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and/or Biden to come to that realization about the US president. I think a lot of people already realized this a long, long time ago.
Zoomy: It’s a loophole on the face of it, but it makes sense as a threat IMO. This is the sort of threat that even if you don’t have a moral problem with killing random people (and obviously the heads of Orchis don’t), you don’t want to go firing off unless you have to. It escalates too fast and sooner or later someone’s going to be too angry to be dissuaded.
The intent was to make sure that the mutants who go through the portal will police their own. Whoever steps up in Xavier’s place after Moira killed him would hopefully care about human lives and try to keep a lid on anyone wanting to come back. (This assumes that Orchis did intend to send the Krakoans to Arakko or somewhere else they could get back from and that things did go wrong, but that seems to be the general consensus atm.)
But you can’t really use the threat against a random assortment of individuals. Woofer might care and turn himself in if the threat was against every mutant on Earth, but what about Sabretooth? What about the random mutant who doesn’t know about Orchis and thinks it’s a bluff?
If worst came to worst for them, they might try to privately get a threat to Bobby to surrender or they’ll start killing, but right now they have other things to try.
tldr; It’s a threat that works better against a self-policing society/government than rag-tag individuals.
I don’t know who the current president is in the Marvel Universe, but several have appeared on-page: Ford (in Defenders), Carter (in X-Men, with Claremont giving him a phonetic accent), Reagan (X-Men, Captain America), Bush 1 (X-Men 1), Clinton (Incredible Hulk, Captain America), Bush 2 (Black Panther), and Obama (Spider-Man). I don’t recall Trump or Biden being depicted clearly on-panel. I prefer the “generic president” approach, it gives creators greater flexibility.
I totally get why Kate would go after Firestar- collaborators and betrayers merit intense hatred and anger. Why didn’t anyone read Angelica’s mind? Maybe there weren’t any telepaths powerful enough in her proximity, or maybe Orchis extended some sort of psi-shield to her. I’ll allow it, although an on-page explanation would be nice.
It was very heavily implied that Nixon was the president during Englehart’s Cap. He wasn’t clearly shown though.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Cap run featured constant references to Trump being the president. He was never shown on-panel though.
So, you can conclude that Nixon and Trump were also presidents of the US in the Marvel Universe.
Has everyone just forgotten that the Sidri took over the mansion back at the beginning of Hickman’s run? Or did that get dealt with at some point and I’ve forgotten that?
@Ylu:
It’s not that it isn’t quick, as much as that it is gratuitously loud, and bound to call attention to whatever is happening near the gate. It makes absolutely no sense as a stealth maneuver, and even less so given the story’s heavy-handedly instance on portraying Kate as a ninja-like assassin (down to the character redesign).
Plus, like Miyamoris says: why do that at all, if you’re going to be cleaning up the entire scene afterwards? What’s effective about ripping somebody’s heart out from their chest, for that matter?
The entire scene is cathartic and fuelled by loss, yet calculated down to the very last detail, and performed with callous cruelty all the way through. It’s completely spontaneous (immediate assumptions about the implications of having fallen through the gate) and thoroughly coreographed in a way that, for me, doesn’t gel.
I don’t think it’s radically out of character per se, but I don’t buy the execution.
Luis Dantas:
And this is where I’d disagree: while Kate is very obviously aligned with people quite comfortable with killing, and probably comfortable doing so herself, nothing in her backstory points to this kind of exuberant display of acrobatic violence. There’s a difference between killing and doing so in a highly stylized, gruesome, and exhibitionistic capacity. Plus, she’s the first to cite this as a rupture, directly stemming from the death of the X-Men.
It just doesn’t work. Not because Kate is an innocent teenager. But because she’s skipped from headmistress to team leader right through a brief period of experimentation that obviously tested her self-perception to… a Wolverine. Literally, a Wolverine.
It could be an interesting arc, maybe – but the story beats aren’t there.
And yeah, the writing is just insufferable at points. Duggan has been doing this thing of increasingly introducing prose narrative in his X-Men stories, and it doesn’t really pay off. None of it feels like it couldn’t be expressed through dialogue or action. At this point I can’t even tell if it’s wildly decompressed or overly compressed or both, but the pacing through Hellfire Gala and this feels like a mess.
@Mike Loughlin- Yes, but you’d think Kate would prioritize Moira over Firestar since (1)Kate knew Moira better than Firestar and therefore it’s more of a betrayal and (2) Moira is higher up in Orchis than Firestar. Admittedly, Moira survived having her robot body torn in half, so Kate might be unsure what. if anything, can kill Mora.
@Michael: fair. My best guess is that a) Kate’s extreme emotions and trauma are being directed toward the immediate traitor; b) as you suggest, she might think Moira is out of her league; or c) she has no idea how to get to Moira, but thinks Firestar is a more accessible target and thinks she knows how to get her.
@Rob – a data page in Wolverine #23 ‘resolves’ the Sidri plot – while everyone on Krakoa had better things to do with their time, Danger took over the mansion and the Sidri flew up the chimney and away who knows where. Deadpool scribbles a note that the storyline must have been abandoned.
Salome:
“It’s not that it isn’t quick, as much as that it is gratuitously loud, and bound to call attention to whatever is happening near the gate. It makes absolutely no sense as a stealth maneuver, and even less so given the story’s heavy-handedly instance on portraying Kate as a ninja-like assassin (down to the character redesign).”
Since the Orchis people were letting loose with their guns, I doubt silence would’ve been a priority for Kate. The cat was already out of the bag there.
@Luis Dantas: She’s not a murderer. The resolution of the Kitty Pryde and Wolverine series that Duggan calls back to was that Kitty might kill to sve her own life or another’s, she wouldn’t murder. Wolverine was ready to kill her if she hadn’t passed.
“We are not talking about an innocent teenager, and arguably have not for decades. She is an experienced murderer”
A bit of an exaggeration…ok, more than a bit.
Famously, the president wasn’t shown in Secret Empire, although Englehart probably wanted to use Nixon but wasn’t allowed.
[…] #25. (Annotations here.) “Grindhouse of X”, it says on the recap page, and … I dunno, I think the tone […]
Nixon was shown in the story around FF 102-104, in which oddly enough the villain was Magneto. And both FDR and Eisenhower were shown as Presidents in later stories set in their terms’ time periods.