X-Men #34 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN vol 6 #34
“Love-Hate”
Writer: Gerry Duggan
Artist: Joshua Cassara
Colour artist: Romulo Fajardo Jr
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. Assorted cast members in front of Krakoa. On the left, Cypher is in the branches, and below him we have Firestar, Forge, Synch, Talon, Magneto, Wolverine and Shadowkat. On the right are Sunfire, Polaris, Magik, Emma Frost, Apocalypse, and a reunited Scott and Jean.
PAGE 2. Paul Neary obituary.
PAGE 3. A montage of Professor X.
Panel 1 shows him with the original X-Men in the very early Silver Age. At least, Iceman’s appearance suggests the very early Silver Age; Scott and Jean are holding hands, but they didn’t become a couple until long after the X-Men dumped the black and yellow uniforms.
Panel 2 is Professor X in the foreground of Krakoa, specifically the Green Lagoon bar, in happier days. In the background, from left to right, we have Black Tom Cassidy, the Blob, Penance / M, Apocalypse, a character who I think is probably meant to be Guido, Emma Frost, Jean Grey, Cyclops, Magneto, Colossus, Mystique Destiny, Domino and Forge. The choice of characters is quite heavy on cast members from X-Force, which artist Joshua Cassara also worked on.
Panel 3 is an inverted image (subtle!) of Professor X as an ally of Orchis, as seen in the current issues of Fall of the House of X and Rise of the Powers of X, with Omega Sentinel in the background.
PAGES 4-5. MODOK arrives in New York.
The narrator is recapping the current position of the plot in Fall of the House of X.
We last saw MODOK fleeing the Orchis space station in Fall of the House of X #2. He’s still wearing his space helmet from that issue, so apparently he’s come straight here. It’s not the first time we’ve seen Orchis concealing their activities in New York barges – there’s another one in Cable #1. MODOK’s plan for this issue seems to boil down to causing chaos for the hell of it, or maybe to test another of his experiments. He might just be amusing himself while waiting to see if the world ends. But he’s also torching Orchis’ remaining reputation in New York, deliberately or otherwise.
PAGE 6. Recap and credits.
PAGES 7-8. Some Orchis soldiers attack the Daily Bugle.
Ben Urich’s captions still echo Frank Miller’s Daredevil run.
These particular Orchis soldiers seem to have snapped even before MODOK affects them, presumably on seeing Orchis collapse around them. As usual in a Gerry Duggan X-Men story, Firestar seems entirely untroubled at killing them.
PAGES 9-10. Ms Marvel and Wolverine (Laura) fight other Orchis soldiers.
Pretty straightforward. Let’s assume Ms Marvel’s weird grin is her trying to be upbeat for the civilians.
PAGES 11-12. Shadowkat rescues Caliban.
Emma updates the mutants on Professor X’s involvement with Orchis. You might question quite what the morale advantage is of doing that, since Emma’s unlikely to be that committed to honesty for its own sake, but maybe she’s figuring that Nimrod will make the alliance known to mutants sooner or later anyway.
Caliban was last seen in issues #15-17, where Forge used him to create a living mutant-tracking harness for use against the Children of the Vault. We’re told that he’s been in Orchis custody throughout “Fall of X”, having failed to get through a gate in time. He’s apparently been asleep, since he doesn’t even know whether they’ve been experimenting on him. (Given his ability to track mutants, the answer is almost certainly yes.)
Shadowkat’s claim that Professor X “stoped us from fighting and winning the night of the Gala” is extremely questionable – the X-Men didn’t invent a cure to Orchis’ poisoning of Krakoan medicines until months later, and Orchis had already decimated them with pure force even before using that leverage – but she’s evidently of a mind to blame Charles for what’s been happening of late.
PAGES 13-19. The X-Men defeat MODOK.
“That’s not my name!” MODOK stands for Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing; MODOK seems to be objecting to Firestar calling him a “machine”. And indeed he isn’t one – that’s why he’s not with the AI contingent of Orchis.
“You only fight the X-Men once.” He’s literally fought them before in this series, in issue #8. They gave him a rap on the knuckles and told him to be nicer in future. And Laura was there.
Synch and Wolverine. This is the first time we’ve seen Synch with Laura since her older duplicate Talon, Synch’s partner, died in issue #31. (Strictly, Laura is a duplicate of Talon, not the other way around, but I suspect that’ll be quietly forgotten about.)
PAGES 20-23. Shadowkat and Wolverine.
This feels like another rather accelerated subplot, but the idea is clear enough: Caliban is playing the trusting innocent role that he played with Forge in issues #15-17, but gets to be less naive here than usual and to serve as a moral anchor who wants to see the X-Men behave like proper superheroes. Shadowkat’s routine of taking refuge in the dark ninja act finally collapses when confronted with that response, and then with the more authentic version of the act in Wolverine (Logan); she apparently decides that she wants out of this life, which presumably leads into her post-Krakoa status quo.
She hands over her sword to Wolverine; this is one of the two swords she retrieved from the X-Men Mansion in issue #25, apparently gifted to her by Ogun.
Most of the illuminated signs on the final page are in Japanese (which I can’t read), but one of them is in Krakoan. It says THANK YOU (mis-spelled with the T and H as separate characters). This is Duggan and Cassara’s last full issue – issue #35, the final issue of the run, is also legacy number #700 and features contributions from a long list of creators.
PAGE 24. Trailers. The Krakoan reads TO ME MY X-MEN.
That insert of Firestar yelling she loves the smell of burning MODOKs in the morning or whatever crap Duggan actually typed, bludgeoned into the page in a way that doesn’t flow at all, is an encapsulation of, basically, all of Duggan’s worst instincts as a writer.
Just… horrible.
Also, it’s been years since I was in New York, but is Little Tokyo that drenched in Japanese neons?
I’m finding it difficult to conceptualize that Marauders was actually an example of Duggan reining himself in.
MODOK should have used a hologram to make himself look like Carnage, then Firestar definitely would have left him alone.
What’s funny is, I’ve actually got no problem with some superheroes killing. I even think there are examples of heroes with No Kill rules that are ridiculous. But seeing so many characters toss away their rule so blithely just makes me feel like I’m being clubbed to oblivion by the bluntness of Duggan’s pen.
Paul has been too charitable by not annotating the number of dialogue bits Duggan has actually lifted from movies.
Honestly, between HoX throwbacks and movie quotes, Duggan is barely composing dialogue.
The Japanese characters ありがとう is arigatou, or thank you. The Chinese characters everywhere else make no sense to me. Not a native speaker, but looks like the artist was picking and choosing randomly and it’s not clear what he was even trying for. It’s not related to words of thank you but maybe someone else can tell.
The dialogue in the Firestar & Ms. Marvel scene was execrable. The Shadowkat plot was forced. MODOK remains a lame add-on.
And yet, this is probably the least-bad Duggan issue of Fall of X.
I thought the Synch & Laura scene worked. Cassara and Fajardo, Jr. did a great job on the art. I would love to see Cassara illustrate some horror comics, albeit with different coloring. Wolverine acted like himself. It’s too little, too late, but not as bad as FothHoX or the last few issues of X-Men.
Also, what about Kamala? She tosses a can of gasoline at MODOK as Firestar was shooting microwaves at him. It certainly seemed like she was trying to kill- or at least permanently injure- MODOK.
Besides the obvious meta reason why Talon can’t come back, is there another reason? I thought all the Krakoans who died in the Orchis conflict were to be resurrected in the White Hot Room.
Oh, Cassara and Fajardo Jr. rocked this.
The very same week where Ewing’s Thor spouting action-movie cliches and “killing” people in public is clearly not a good thing…
@Rinone- it was mentioned earlier that the Quiet Council decreed that if the Lauras died, only one would be brought back.
[…] #34. (Annotations here.) One of the problems with Marvel’s approach to crossover events is that they take a storyline […]
@Michael thank you!
I fully believe that Talon won’t come back…until some writer decides to bring her back. Or maybe there will be a (most likely terrible) story about Synch trying to turn the other Laura into Talon.
@Michael: But Talon was the one who was supposed to come back.
I guess Duggan forgot MODOK has a forcefield that can withstand nuclear blasts. How does Kamala feel about helping to kill living things that used to be humans?
Talon and X-23 agreed that Talon had precedence for ressurrection by the Five, sure.
I suppose that means that if the Five are still actively ressurrecting people by the time X-23 dies then they will choose to bring Talon back and allow X-23 to remain dead.
But I don’t think that means much now. There are no moral grounds for killing X-23 in order to enable Talon’s return. And who knows if the rules against ressurrecting duplicates are still valid?
It matters little. There are many ways in which either or both Lauras may return after dying, as so often happens in the genre. If editorial and writers want to bring them back, they will return.
It wasn’t precedence. X-23 got the name “Wolverine” and Talon got resurrection. If the old rules were in place, Talon would be the only one brought back. If they aren’t, she would still be resurrected along with everyone else.