NYX #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
NYX vol 2 #1
Writers: Jackson Lanzing & Collin Kelly
Artist: Francesco Mortarino
Colour artist: Raúl Angulo
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Annalise Bissa
The original NYX was a 7-issue series from 2003/4 about teenage mutant runaways in New York, best remembered for featuring the comic debut of X-23. This book is also set in New York, and also has Laura in the cast, but otherwise has nothing to do with the original NYX. Instead, this seems to be the street level book, about the mutants whose response to the fall of Krakoa was to move back to the big city and try to make a life there.
THE MAIN CAST:
Ms Marvel. Despite the title of the book, Kamala Khan still lives in Jersey City with her family, though she gives us an opening monologue about how she’s always been dazzled by New York across the river. She’s signed up for an “after-school school” at Empire State University where David Alleyne is teaching a course entitled “Examinations of Post-Krakoan Diaspora”. She uses her powers quite openly to swing or stride around the city at speed, and nobody seems to have any problem with that. Despite her openly associating with the X-Men during the “Fall of X” period, the general public (and even the anti-mutant bigots) seem to assume that she’s a non-mutant. She’s back to wearing her normal costume, rather than her X-Men uniform, and generally behaves as a solo superhero.
Kamala still wants to maintain her secret identity and live a normal life, which Sophie views as tragic and Laura views as cowardly. She’s still keen to befriend other mutants, though, and willing to go out for the night with Sophie in that spirit.
Both Sophie and the Krakoan (of whom more later) draw our attention to the fact that Kamala never got to live on Krakoa and has no direct experience of it. Her status as a character who commutes to be in the New York book seems to mirror that here; she remains firmly on the fringes of mutantkind. According to Sophie, other mutants associate Kamala with the fall of Krakoa, at least in the sense that they can’t readily separate her from it in their minds.
Kamala is somehow able to tell Sophie apart from the other four Cuckoos – she attributes this to being a “big fan”, but that doesn’t really explain how she can tell.
Sophie Cuckoo. Sophie has also signed up for David’s class, although she’s immediately disruptive and challenges his opening speech. She claims to have signed up to keep David honest, and tells Kamala that she can get away with this because she knew him back at Westchester. On the face of it, this is a continuity error: Sophie died in the “Riot at Xaviers” arc in New X-Men #137, over six months before David debuted in New Mutants #4. That said, she probably got to know David on Krakoa.
Or is it an error? The writers are clearly aware of “Riot at Xaviers”, because Sophie mentions it on page 12. In their earliest appearances, Sophie was the nicest of the Cuckoos, and the one who died heroically dealing with Kid Omega’s riot. She wasn’t properly resurrected until the Krakoan age (ignoring a couple of stories about abortive attempts), at which point she became something of a background character while the spotlight was on Phoebe.
Sophie never explains why she’s away from the other Cuckoos, and Kamala doesn’t ask, but we find out at the end of the issue that the other four Cuckoos have hooked up with Empath. This might explain why Sophie seems keen to build bridges with other mutants that she can make contact with, and is very enthusiastic about befriending Kamala, someone with whom she has nothing in common whatsoever.
Sophie interprets Kamala’s secret identity trope as tragic closeting, and seems oblivious to the reasons why Kamala might want to hold on to a normal life (or views it as false consciousness, perhaps). But she is quite impressed by Kamala, apologises for being pushy, and seems to be sincere.
Prodigy. Professor David Alleyne is now the youngest professor in the history of Empire State University, teaching a class about the Krakoan diaspora from personal experience. His opening address to the class emphasises the part about mutants protecting a world that hates and fears them, and frames Professor X’s dream as simply being that mutants tolerate this situation. This isn’t really a fair reflection of Xavier’s dream as opposed to the practical result of his methods. At any rate, he seems to be teaching a basically conventional class about the social aspects of the Krakoan population’s reintegration into human society. Sophie is unimpressed by this: she sees him as too willing to accept that a separate mutant nation is finished, and accuses him of legitimising humans by assimilating into their institutions.
Note that, for all that he presents himself as the representative of Krakoan culture, David is using his human name. He lives with his boyfriend Dante.
Anole works behind the bar in a club called KT, picking up on his role as a barman in the Green Lagoon. The art shows him has a young adult rather than a teenager. As I understand it, New York law does allow 18 year olds to serve alcohol even though they can’t legally buy it. The bouncer throws Sophie and Kamala out of the club at the end of the scene on a just-invented “no mutants” rule, but it’s unclear whether that has any impact on Anole.
Wolverine (Laura) attacks Ms Marvel to stop her from tracking down the Truthseekers. On the face of it, this is a very weird scene – these two characters have worked together in the X-Men during the “Fall of X” period, and Laura just tries to send Kamala away on the grounds that she’s out of her depth. If we’re taking her at face value, Laura objects to Kamala trying to live a normal life instead of devoting all of her time to superhero work, and sees it as evidence that she’s an underqualified dilettante. Perhaps Laura is also just resentful of someone who actually has a normal life. We only see her in costume and doing hero stuff, and there’s no suggestion that she’s doing anything to build a life.
Since Laura expressly destroys the phone that Kamala is trying to use to track the Truthseekers, it’s possible that she’s deliberately trying to steer Kamala away from her investigation. Maybe Laura knows more about what it’s going to discover. Kamala takes it at face value and thinks Laura has a “weird protector complex about me”.
Laura and Sophie both have the same quite distinctive belt buckle on their costumes.
THE SUPPORTING CAST:
Bruno Carrelli, Kamala’s usual best friend and sometime love interest, is spending the semester studying in Amsterdam, so we won’t be seeing much of him. Kamala leaves him an extended and somewhat rambling phone message (i.e., infodump) over the course of four pages, and says that she misses him.
Aamir Khan, Kamala’s brother, has apparently started a new job. He’s worried about his sister in the big city (which is in character for him) and troubled about all those dangerous mutants who are now back in regular society (which is less so).
Dante, David’s boyfriend, sits in the background for a page and gets no dialogue. David describes him as “patient”.
THE VILLAINS:
The Truthseekers are a bunch of grass roots anti-mutant activists who claim to be investigating a series of property damage incidents that they blame on mutants. What this means in practice is that they wander around filming things on their phones and threatening obvious mutants like Anole. Nonetheless, on a physical level, they seem like no more than a mugger-level threat. They’re actually right about a mutant being behind the incidents, but it’s not clear whether that’s pure coincidence, or whether they actually have some knowledge of what’s going on, or even whether they’re complicit in some sort of false flag operation with the Krakoan.
The Krakoan is the mutant responsible for these terrorist attacks – he wears a fairly traditional mutant-style costume, with a tattered red cloak and what seems to be a variant Cerebro helmet (though his eyes are visible). He has a Krakoan-style X-logo. Generally, he claims to be keeping alive the spirit of Krakoa, and berates Ms Marvel as someone who was never part of that community. At least some of what he says to Ms Marvel is clearly wrong – he says that “only I remain” when we find out later that he’s got a whole team – so a lot of this seems to be for public consumption. He takes off the helmet when he’s in private with his teammate.
The Krakoan turns out to be Julian Keller, formerly Hellion, who did essentially nothing while he was actually on Krakoa, at least so far as we saw on panel. Julian is a member of…
The (self-proclaimed) Quiet Council. This group consists of Empath, Hellion and the other four Stepford Cuckoos. They’re mutant supremacists who apparently want to level Manhattan and turn it into a new Krakoa, depending on how literally you take Empath’s speech. Empath seems to be in charge and it’s possible that the others are meant to be under his influence, though you’d have thought the Cuckoos would be able to resist. This agenda certainly isn’t in character for all of the Cuckoos, or for Hellion. What does link these characters is that they’re all former students of Emma Frost.
Empath has a rather neat new costume – a suit in his traditional Hellion colours, complete with the diagonal pattern on his waistcoat.
CAMEOS:
Minor Krakoan-era background character Fauna appears on the bonus page, being introduced to someone called Mr Friend, who looks appropriately sinister.
OTHER SPECIFICS:
Page 1. The nine highly stylised panels on this page mostly feature images of the cast going about their business, but not all:
- Panel 1 shows Empath from behind, in his Hellions costume, foreshadowing the reveal at the end of the issue.
- Panel 2 is (presumably) Sophie hailing a cab.
- Panel 3 is Anole working in his bar.
- Panel 4 looks like it might be Caliban, who doesn’t otherwise appear in this issue. He seems to be in jail, or at least looking angrily through a grill.
- Panel 5 seems to be X-Men themed graffiti.
- Panel 6 is a picture of some flowers, the significance of which isn’t immediaely obvious.
- Panel 7 is Laura dragging her claws along a wall.
- Panel 8 is an unidentifiable graffiti artist, but the art itself shows Prodigy.
- Panel 9 is presumably a stylised Ms Marvel looking out over New York.
Page 6 panel 2: “…a campus that was basically run by anti-mutant genocidal monsters last year…” In the miniseries Ms Marvel: The New Mutant.
Page 9 panel 1: “I never really got the name – Ms Marvel. I mean, you just a big Jean Grey fan or what?” Sophie is thinking of Jean’s original “Marvel Girl” codename. Kamala took her codename because she was a big fan of Carol Danvers – Sophie seems genuinely not to get the reference.
Page 10: “Mutants were an endangered community that had spent an inordinate amount of time doing one thing above all else: protecting its oppressor.” David is conflating mutants with the X-Men here, though you could probably make a case that at least from “Decimation” onwards, the mutant community was essentially indistinguishable from the X-Men in a broad sense.
The graphics on the screen behind show the familiar maps of Krakoa from the Hickman-era data pages, and the Krakoan language cipher.
“[I]ts cultural institutions, its language, its religion…” Krakoa wasn’t shown as having a distinct religion – Nightcrawler abandoned his plan to create a mutant religion in favour of a more secular philosophy. However, the Krakoan refers later in the issue to “worshipp[ing] at our church”, which might suggest that this book takes a different view of how we should read such things as the idolisation of the Five and the ceremonial arena fights.
Page 12 panel 1: “My sister’s ex-boyfriend threw a riot once.” “Oh, I… uh, I led a march one time. Roxx news called it a riot…” Sophie is referring to the “Riot at Xavier’s” arc from New X-Men #135-138 (2002-2003); the sister in question is Phoebe, and the ex-boyfriend is Quentin Quire. I think Kamala’s march will have been during the “Outlawed” arc from the 2020 run of Champions.
Page 19 panel 1: The song lyric in this panel seems to be original.
Page 25 panel 1: “The X-Men are outlaws!” Are they? They seem to be getting on with the authorities just fine in X-Men #1. But Hellion isn’t necessarily very concerned with accuracy here.
Page 28 panel 2: “I actually have a healing factor. It’s just, the more I use it, the less I can embiggen.” This is indeed established continuity – Ms Marvel #9 (2014).
Roxx News is an…unsubtle parody of Fox News introduced in Jason Aaron’s Mighty Thor v.1 #3. As the name suggests, it’s part of the Roxxon Corporation, Marvel’s go-to evil conglomerate.
It’s a bit early to be studying the post-Krakoa diaspora, isn’t it? A few months later, I imagine most Krakoans would still be looking for an apartment, never mind establishing new identities.
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On my first reading, it seemed to me like Empath is mind-controlling three of the Cuckoos, based on the pink power-signatures near their heads and the humans’. I guess that could be *their* power-signature, not his, but it’s awkwardly arranged if so.
I’m guessing the Cuckoo who’s standing right next to Empath is Esme, bc she’s usually pigeonholed as “the evil(est) one”.
I wonder if this series is going to explore Destiny’s prophecy about the Cuckoos from Inferno, because… If there’s ever a book to do that in, it’s this one.
Is it just me, or is Sophie remarkably blasé discussing the Riot at Xavier’s, considering she died during it? I don’t know; maybe that’s going somewhere interesting.
And finally: Kamala turning her own face into a mask to protect her identity? Wonderfully gross. Highlight of the issue IMO.
In the spirit of pedantry, Roxx News dates to at least Ewing’s Immortal Hulk, and might well go back to Jason Aaron’s Thor work, as he introduced the current take on Roxxon and its head Dario “the Minotaur” Agger, a ball Ewing has been happy to keep playing with.
Also, apparently Speed and Prodigy have broken up offscreen, and… Honestly, good. We need more civilian love-interests in cape comics, and Prodigy is a young adult! He should get to have multiple partners over his life!
The only downside is that, with his main tether to the X-Men gone, this is very bad news for Speed’s relevance in the Marvel Universe.
Dahhh, read that too fast and somehow read “Mighty Thor” as “Immortal”, since Roxxon’s media arm is a big part of that Thor run too!
Kamala is actually the THIRD Ms. Marvel. Does Sophie think they were all part of a Jean Grey fan club?
Note that Hellion has his biological hands back, not artificial hands.
Regarding the Cuckoos, note that pink stuff indicating telepathy is flashing around three of their heads but not the fourth. The consensus on the internet is that Esme is controlling the other Cuckoos with Empath’s help. Especially since Sophie mentions Esme three pages before the Cuckoos appear. Esme is the evilest of the Cuckoos.
The idea seems to be that Esme’s personality resembles Emma’s when she was teaching the original Hellions and Firestar. It’s possible Empath told her what Emma used to be like.
It does like like Esme is determined to take Emma’s place as a villain. It would be hilarious if she winds up killing a horse somehow.
Speaking of which, it might be nice to see Firestar show up, since she might want to get involved if the villains are Empath and Emma 2.0.
@Michael
To be fair to Sophie regarding the Ms. Marvels, she was created in 2001 and died a year or so later. (Like, remember, she’s an artificially-generated thing created by the Weapon Plus Program; she’s probably not an actual teenager yet in terms of age.)
Sophie wasn’t around for Carol Danvers’ time as Ms. Marvel, since she started going by Binary in the early-‘80s (long before Sophie’s introduction) and didn’t go back to being Ms. Marvel until after Sophie died. I doubt she’d be aware of Sharon Ventura, and she missed Dark Reign, so same for Moonstone.
Aaron never made much of Roxxon moving into media; his stories tended to focus on the idea of an oil company destroying the planet for profit.
Ewing writes them more as an all-around conglomerate that does whatever awful corporate stuff is needed.
I actually had to check to make sure Ewing hadn’t creating Roxx News, but it does look like he created RoxxTube in that Immortal Hulk run.
It’d be interesting if social media campaigns and stochastic terrorism aimed at mutants became plot element in the post-Krakoa X-books. I think the last time anything even vaguely like that happened was back in X-Men Gold v.2, with its version of Fox News and the Heritage Foundation.
Well, looks like Empath is once again back to being the literal f’ing worst, forgoing any possible growth he might have achieved during Krakoa. This is prime New Mutants “try to creep on and enslave teenage girls in the locker room,” “condemn Tom and Sharon to BDSM Hell,” “try to influence Emma Frost” Empath, once again making his mark as Top Five Creepiest Mind Controllers in the Marvel Universe. (Along side Purple Man, Mandrill for sure.)
I’m not entirely surprised to see Julian go full mutant supremacist in the wake of Krakoa. He always did have a pretty dark streak waiting to come out under the wrong circumstances, and I guess devoid of real friends he might have been easily swayed to Empath’s side.
The Cuckoos as villains is a much harder sell–it’s hard to tell if the pink swirlies are denoting that they’re controlling the humans in the room, or being controlled. Either way, it sucks to see them portrayed as baddies of this nature.
The “team” forming is interesting, but it remains to be seen just how this story develops.
I only noticed the visual detail with the pink power signature after reading the comments here – but then Sophie’s is the exact same colour in the scene that introduces her. Which struck me as off; I might be misremembering, but I have it more or less coded in my head that pink is non-Phoenix Jean Grey, and Frost and the Cuckoos usually a pale blue…?
Either way, that might suggest either that Sophie is likewise being controlled (ie, positioned and used in a certain way) or that the colourist just didn’t attick that thoroughly to the distinction.
I also wonder if the flowers might just be a subtle nod to Krakoa itself – the flowers and medicine, the whole aesthetic of the era.
Not sure I like this. In particular? I’m irked by Sophie’s anti-racist grandstanding when confronting a non-white character, and ingratiating herself to a second one… The rhetoric of race itself is too broken when it comes to the X-Men, and there’s no obvious reason for it to be in use when “specist” would do the trick nicely enough.
I also have no idea why Laura is this angsty and agressive – but my understanding of her is affected by the solo “All New Wolverine” run, which was all about her indeed having a place of her own.
And we saw her with Honey Badger like… two weeks ago? I’m not sure I grasp the perturbed vigilante shtick here, or that it’s the best angle for the character.
I wish this was maybe less keen on running towards a very anticlimatic reveal of the rough equivalent to a supervillain team/rehash of Hellfire Club shenanigans.
But I do like the feel of the characters. Here’s hoping they don’t rush too quickly through the quiet bits.
P.S.: Apologies for chaotic spelling and grammar…!
@Omar- We know that the upcoming Upstarts storyline in MacKay’s X-Men will involve social media somehow.
I thought Empath’s growth recently was limited to “yes he’s a horrible little psychopath not fit for any society, but he’s also sad and lonely because of it”. I can’t recall him actually wanting to be better or anything.
I’m happy to be corrected.
I didn’t expect to like this one since I generally bounced off the “Young X-Men” stories and just came back later for the highlights, plus I’m not really the target audience for Ms Marvel stuff.
But Lanzing and Kelly did a fine job writing this one, and I’ll probably pick up the series. I really liked their Guardians of the Galaxy reboot, even if it was somewhat self-contained and a limited story.
It was pretty obvious that Hellion was The Krakoan, but I’m still here for the Krakoa aftermath stories (as opposed to sweeping it under the rug).
I’m not 100% on board with this issue – the angle on Laura seems weird and I’m going to wait and see what’s going on with the Cuckoos before making a judgement. But it is interesting, I generally like the way the characters are presented and, well, Academy X is my ‘new mutants book’ and this is basically ‘Academy X: Young Adult Edition’, at least in terms of the cast.
I enjoyed this issue, but when did the Cuckoos become telekinetic? I’m cool with it, but if they’re Emma clones, and she’s only telepathy and diamond..?
I really liked setting Kamala and Laura’s nighttime argument at New York landmark The Hive given that Kelly and Lanzing call themselves Hivemind.
I liked this issue better than the previous 2 “From the Ashes” number ones. I think Ms. Marvel makes a great viewpoint character, Prodigy works as a mature voice of reason, Laura’s status quo could be interesting, and Sophie as the wild card makes sense. I haven’t read many comics with Anole as a featured character, so I don’t have much of an impression of him beyond “nice.” I’ve wanted a mutant comic in which the protagonists are a little more connected to a wider culture since the Morrison days, so I’m glad the first issue was a pretty good read.
Salloh: My reaction was that the rest of the Cuckoos have somehow fallen under Empath’s influence as well.
Re: the David/Sophie confrontation: I agree with you. On one hand, it allows an X-book to do something that very rarely occurs–allowing a mutant *and* actual POC to imbue meaning and legitimacy into the mutant analogy’s forced parallel with the Black Civil Rights Movement. That Prodigy is even able to allude to the mere existence of the structures of white supremacy is genuinely amazing to me here and had me positively giddy. (The only other two times this has happened that I recall are in X-Men Red and Greg Pak’s Storm mini.) This is precisely what’s been missing from all these books, and we desperately need more meaningful representation like this.
I’m also not opposed to Sophie going full-on Stepford Karen here–it feels very much like a logical character progression for a genetic progeny of the Frost bloodline, and sets up a dramatic, racial tension between her and David moving forward.
That said, three things about the scene gives me serious pause: 1) Sophie’s unhinged tirade goes unchallenged; 2) her arguments were personal attacks completely disconnected from anything David was saying; and 3) she gets to have the last word. This puts disproportionate burden and focus is put on David for being in the employ of a human institution and almost completely undermines David’s moment. And if people’s takeaway is bothsidesism and that Sophie somehow has equal footing with David here (spoiler: she’s not), that would deflate the scene completely for me.
At any rate the scene feels too deliberate to not be followed up on in future issues, so I’ll give the Lanzing/Kelly duo the benefit of the doubt for now.
@Matt Conner: Phoebe used a TK blast in Sabretooth War iirc, and apparently they have been portrayed executing very low level feats of TK sporadically over the last decade or so.
I am pleased that I enjoyed this much more than the writing duo’s other current works. Was Mr. Friend supposed to evoke or recall the dwarves from Darkhold?
[…] #1. (Annotations here.) So this was pretty good! This seems to be the street level book with mutants living in the real […]
“It’s a bit early to be studying the post-Krakoa diaspora, isn’t it?”
My experience in academia, admittedly 30 years ago, studying popular culture, was that we were discussing contemporary stuff in classes. My thesis (had I finished it) was on Tarantino and metatext, and Pulp Fiction had come out while I was writing it.
Sure, but this would be like doing the thesis while Reservoir Dogs was still coming out.
I don’t know, there’s probably oodles of fascinating data right at the beginning of such an event, even if results aren’t clear. I suppose we’ll see for real when the sea starts swallowing Pacific nations.
Studying something that’s brand new isn’t out of the ordinary because you’re doing it with academic material that isn’t brand new (e.g., readings on metatext in film). What is on the syllabus for an undergrad course on the Krakoan diaspora at this point? Unless more time has elapsed than it seems, it’s unlikely much research on the Krakoan diaspora has been completed, much less published.
If I were designing the class, I’d start with material about diasporas generally, move on to anything published about mutant social structure and/or psychology, finish with everything on record about Krakoa in particular (it existed for years in-universe, so there are at least articles if not entire books), and have the students write a final paper speculating about what the Krakoan diaspora might look like. Add in a guest lecturer (Hank?) and a Q&A panel, and you’ve got a whole semester.
The class would largely be speculative, but it would hopefully encourage students to understand the mutant experience more fully and prime the pump for some Master’s papers in the next 5 years or so.
I suppose the Marvel Universe could cover the concept of a mutant diaspora more generally, what with the whole history of Genosha, Mutant Town, the Russian treatment of Mutants in various 1980s stories, and so forth.
It’d be complicated by the lack of a historical mutant homeland, of course, but that’s part and parcel of the cimplexities of working with both the “mutants as minoritized people” and “mutants as minoritized
for randomly distributed difference (neurodivergence, disability, sexual and gender identity)” stuff.
In terms of pure plot concept, mutants are a (problematic) analogy to the second; in terms of plotting and characterization, they’re more often the first. And handling the complex forms of intersectionality that would do both elements well is quite challenging, especially within the superhero genre.