X-Men: Heir of Apocalypse #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN: HEIR OF APOCALYPSE #4
Writer: Steve Foxe
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inker: Sean Parsons
Colour artist: Alex Sinclair
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Annalise Bissa
APOCALYPSE:
Well, he selects an heir. Or at any rate, he refers to it as “my decision”. But it’s not clear how much choice he actually has in the matter, beyond selecting the contestants in the first place. The function of the contest seems to be to whittle the field down to four. But before Apocalypse goes off to speak to the final four one at a time, he also says that “my heir must accept their role”. On one view, only one of the contestants actually does accept the role (or perhaps Apocalypse is exercising some judgment about what amounts to acceptance). Note that in their dream scenes, Apocalypse appears to the three “losers” in his pre-Krakoa villain design, while only the winner sees him as Krakoan Apocalypse – which is how he still appears in the real world.
Once again, Apocalypse says that his heir will continue his work, but also that he expects them to oppose him. It’s not clear how this squares in Apocalypse’s mind; perhaps he wants someone who thinks for themselves, but has such confidence in his agenda (or in the effects of the power-up he’s going to give them) that he’s sure they’ll wind up on his track in the long run.
THE CONTESTANTS:
The final four are Cable, Forge, Mirage and Cypher. All four are symbolically “killed” by the giant statues of the Horsemen (from the cliffhanger of issue #3), which moves them on to their respective dream scenes with Apocalypse. The scene tries to tie each character to a different Horseman, with mixed success.
Cable, reasonably enough, represents War. Apocalypse suggests that he has shaped Cable’s life as much as his parents did (which is probably fair), and posits that Cable might be poised to take over from him as a mentor figure with the next generation, just as he did when he took over the New Mutants. Cable makes clear that he is only here to try and avert whatever Apocalypse has planned. Presumably this is why he gets rejected.
Forge represents Famine, on the exceeding tenuous grounds that “You are an ideasmith in a world that suffers from a famine of new ideas.” If you say so. We’re reminded of Forge’s pitch for sustainable cities at the last Hellfire Gala, but Apocalypse also accuses Forge of creating inventions (such as the neutralizer) without any real consideration of what might be done with them. The basic idea is that Forge lacks vision; he creates things without any real understanding of the wider implications. This might tie in somewhat to his depiction in the new X-Force series, where he seems to be pretty much trusting in his inventions to point him in the right direction without much deeper understanding.
Mirage represents Pestilence, on the grounds that she’s a stagnant character caught in developmental limbo. While the pestilence angle is a bit of a reach, the basic idea is valid: Mirage is a character who was created as a leader of the next generation of X-Men, yet never actually evolved into that role (even though teammates like Cannonball and Sunspot did). She didn’t become an X-Man and she got supplanted by later trainee characters decades ago. The character has gone basically nowhere in the last 25 years – certainly nowhere that stuck. Mirage rejects this view of herself, and is confident that her role in training successor generations has been a worthwile life.
Cypher represents Death, with his scene playing up that his emotional connection to Krakoa was greater than any other mutant – we’re reminded that he was bonding alone with Krakoa for months before the rest of the mutants even showed up. The loss of Krakoa is an even greater trauma for him than it was for everyone else, and he’s not willing to move on. As a result, he’s the one character who embraces Apocalypse’s analysis of him as someone who wants to bring Krakoa back from the dead.
Cypher duly gets a power-up into a sort of golden Apocalypse figure, now calling himself Revelation. What this actually means in practice. The two characters most closely associated with him – his wife Bei the Blood Moon and his soulmate Warlock – are presented to him as his “first disciples.” Bei is 100% on board with all this. Warlock seems a little bit less certain. Revelation tells us that he won’t be using force to shepherd mutantkind, and he’ll be listening to the next generation of mutant leader, but he’ll also “reveal to them the error of their ways.” Evidently he regrets taking such a passive role in mutant affairs on Krakoa.
As for the rest of the contestants, Rictor is depressed to find that following in Apocalypse’s footsteps wasn’t his destiny after all, and says that he can’t even face Apocalypse. He never gets the chance anyway – Apocalypse doesn’t come back to speak to the losers, though he does leave them a teleporter to get back to Earth. Wolverine (Laura) explains that she signed up simply in order to make sure that nobody too awful won. Emma Frost and M are… also there.
The rest of the contestants didn’t bother hanging around after being woken up, and they all went home off panel. We’re told that Armageddon Girl and Gorgon left immediately; Exodus was “cordial” but didn’t want to hang around; and Mr Sinister was driven away after he was caught trying to tinker with the machines.
GUEST APPEARANCE:
Archangel is still hovering around on the fringes of the plot. He releases the losing contestants from their suspended animation while Apocalypse is off making his decision.
OTHER SPECIFICS:
Page 7 panel 2: “When Krakoa returned to our time, I found myself opposed by those who had grown up without my guidance.” Apocalypse is referencing X-Men #35 (or Uncanny X-Men #700, if you prefer).
Page 7 panel 3: “Much like the children you [Cable] once mentored who had rejected both Xavier and Magneto.” The New Mutants, who adopted Cable as a mentor after rejecting Magneto. It’s a little debatable to say that they’d already rejected Professor X at that point (he just wasn’t around), but by the time that the New Mutants evolved into the more paramilitary X-Force, they’d certainly split from Xavier’s vision of what the X-Men ought to be.
Page 11 panel 2: “Your [Forge’s] living ‘city of tomorrow.'” This was Forge’s gift to humanity at the final Hellfire Gala, unveiled a few pages before the Orchis attack in X-Men: Hellfire Gala (2023).
Page 12 panel 3: “The neutralizer gun. Technology you developed to depower mutants.” Forge created the neutralizer gun (circa Uncanny X-Men #184) to deal with the Dire Wraiths, not specifically in order to depower mutants. It just happened to do that too.
Page 13: The art shows the baseball diamond at the X-Men Mansion (unused for once, but a standard location for downtime scenes). The X-Men in the final panel are Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler and a very early Kitty Pryde, in a costume she’d already dropped before the New Mutants were formed. She does briefly wear a standard Xavier School uniform circa X-Men #168, but not with the mask.
Page 14 panel 1: The original New Mutants – from left to right, Sunspot, Mirage, Karma, Wolfsbane and Cannonball.
Page 14 panel 2: The art shows Generation X, the next iteration of a teenage X-team: M, Jubilee, Chamber and Skin are shown.
Page 14 panel 3: This panel shows 21st century students from various runs: Anole (an Academy X character), Transonic (Generation Hope), Glob Herman (Grant Morrison’s New X-Men) and the second Sprite (Wolverine and the X-Men).
Page 15 panel 2: “Selene fought me and my friends and got her ass kicked. So did you other fellow Eternals.” Mirage is referring to the lengthy closing storyline from the X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic, which ran alongside Fall of the House of X.
Page 16 panel 2: “And you [Cypher] are one of the only mutants who defied the wishes of the Quiet Council.” Apocalypse is probably referring to Cypher helping Nature Girl to escape the Pit in X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic #12, and to the way he tried to ameliorate conditions in the Pit in the first Sabretooth miniseries.
Page 16 panel 3: The art shows Cypher taking his traditional position in the Quiet COuncil chamber, reclining on Krakoa’s branch and watching from the background.
Page 18 panel 2: “I was one of the first mutants to walk on Krakoa. For almost a year, I lived alone on the island…” In a flashback in Powers of X #4, Professor X introduces Cypher to Krakoa and asks him to start work on the Krakoan project; Cypher says it will take “months, maybe a year if I’m terrible at this”.
There was also a scene in Immortal X-Men #13 where Doug confronts Xavier telling him that Krakoa is a “sick country” because “the Quiet Council has made Krakoa sick”. I guess that isn’t “defying” the Council but that’s the example I first connected that line. Doug also never trusted Xavier and infected Krakoa with Warlock’s techno-organic virus so that he could spy on the Krakoans. In that sense, Doug was defying the Council from the beginning of Krakoa.
Forge did create the neutralizer to remove the powers of any super-powered being. He developed it based on studying the technology of Rom’s neutralizer gun. He shows the working prototype to Val Cooper in Uncanny X-Men #184, along with a mutant detector device. He did specifically know it could depower mutants when he created it (along with, potentially any super-power), and he didn’t seem to have a problem with that use of it. His main concern was that he wasn’t sure if there would be psychological effects of using the neutralizer on a human and wanted to test/perfect his invention before allowing the government to use it.
That Revelation design is quite awful.
Doug is unrecognizable – then again, he’s a skinny white blond boy with no discernible characteristics, I’m not sure if it was possible to Hulk him up and keep him recognizable.
But even forgetting that aspect, the all-gold outfit is… a lot.
Poor Moonstar. She’s never had the place she deserved. My theory is that it’s because she was shuffled off in the new mutants/X-Force relaunch; her powers weren’t comic book visual friendly, like Cannonball and Sunspot; and she was a nuanced, therefore ‘difficult’ character to write.
Maybe also as she has less connective tissue with the main X-Men cast than the others (Cannonball, Magik, Wolfsbane?).
Just let her be on the main team you cowards! Danni, Sam and Kitty for leaders 🙂
This new Cypher look is a travesty. Honestly. It’s up there with robot Moira for me in terms of stupid directions.
Poor Dani has always suffered from the curse of not possessing a useful combat-ready, flashy power like most of her teammates. (Flight, superstrength, werewolf, lava, teleportation are all so much cooler than ‘greatest fear/desire’, after all.) I suspect that’s part of why Xuan got shuffled off so quickly — possessing people mentally isn’t flashy, and it’s a bad guy power more often than not — and it’s CERTAINLY why Doug was murdered in Louise Simonson’s run… This is also why Dani got upgraded to making her illusions tangible, and later to “psychic bow and arrow.” (And of course she got the ‘flying horse and Valkyrie’ addon as well…)
Where her teammates could remain relatively stable powerwise (until Roberto got the flight upgrade), Dani was always being meddled with by the writers. No wonder she was written out in the X-Force era, in favor of more combat-useful powers like swords, claws, and strength.
And yet she makes a great counselor, teacher, leader and heart of the team, and deserves a place at the big kids’ table, or at least a more prominent role guiding younger mutants. She may not have the flashiest of powers, but she has experience.
And that leads me to Doug. Because well… I hate this direction for him. Once again, writers going “lol, language powers” and deciding he needs a change or an upgrade. Rictor was Apocalypse’s disciple, Cable’s been Apocalypse’s direct counter for decades, Exodus has the religious convictions, so they would have made sense in a way to take up his work. This feels like the idea floated around that Doug was the secret big bad of the Krakoan era… a fundamental misunderstanding on the character.
I just hope this doesn’t do any permanent damage to Doug as character, but… I doubt that many people truly care. He has a small but dedicated fanbase, but he’s never been horribly popular.
In retrospect. Simonson’s New-Mutants-in-Asgard story pretty much killed any chance of Dani becoming a major character. Dani spent eight months possessed by one of Hela’s fire demons and at the end of it decides to stay in Asgard. The Asgardian story was considered one of the worst New Mutants stories at the time. So Dani not only spent years in Limbo but her departure was associated with a horrible story. Fabian Nicieza decided to bering her back as a member of the MLF, reveal she was undercover and have her join X-Force. But unfortuately he took over a year to do so and he was fired from X-Force just as she was about to rejoin. Jeph Loeb had her vanish without explanation and it wasn’t until 1997 that she rejoined X-Force under John Francis Moore. So basically that was 8 years later and she never really regained that lost momentum.
John Francis Moore wrote her well from issues 67 to 101, but she was written out after issue 101 because Claremont wanted her to become Forge’s apprentice. But she only got a couple o appearances in that role before that plot was dropped.
Well, I am cautiously onboard.
Doug has been developing in recent years. This series positions him as a mover and shaker without establishing what exactly his new powers and motivations are.
Saddling him with a terrible visual too, true. But that can be fixed.
More of an opening scene than a true series, but this last issue accomplishes a worthwhile task (even though I am still not sold on the weird art and the earlier three issues were almost entirely dispensable). There is also some commentary on Cable, Forge and Dani that I like.
More and more I find myself wondering what the best ways of dealing with decades of history for comic book characters are. Cable and Forge may have been in more evidence than Doug and Dani, but they are at least as stagnant as either. Cable, particularly, is very nearly a slave to his own original role and pretty much says as much here.
And that is probably the best possible use of the character, which is why I am surprised that he is so overused. I contrast him with Dani, who is also IMO in the best possible role for the character and may never find a better one. She is great as the heart and soul of those close to her. What did she gain by becoming a Valkyrie? So little that people rarely even mention that. Emphasize that aspect of her and you end up writing stories that don’t need or truly use her.
Doug is a great character, and is now perfectly positioned to be literally the protagonist of his own stories. Paul has criticized him for his apparent naivete, and maybe this is the opportunity to confront that. The opportunity for true moral dilemmas is now open for him. He may and probably will end up confronting people that he has had decent relationships with soon. Perhaps Forge, perhaps members of the former Quiet Council.
I could do without the vanity scenes with Laura, though. They were considerably worse than pointless. Allow her to be her own person already, darn it. This “Wolverine” thing has to go, as does her expressed willingness to be an obedient servant of Wolverine.
The amusing thing is, Dani is probably the least static New Mutant, or a close second to Sunspot. She started out called Psyche and had fear illusion powers. She changed her name, and added desire illusion powers. Then she added valkyrie powers. Then her illusions became solid. Then she got psychic arrows. Then she got weird blue cosmic powers. Then for a really long time she had no powers, but kept semi-regularly appearing in comics anyway. And now she’s back to the arrows. She was an angry kid who hated white people, a leader, a demigod, a counsellor, a teacher, a spy, and of course a superhero. She’s never been a full X-Man, but she has featured semi-prominently in various non-X-books in a way very few mutants have.
If anything, it’s the lack of stability that has haunted the character, not stagnation.
That goes back to what I was saying, that no one really knows -what- to do with the character and no one has really taken up her cause post-New Mutants/X-Force to give Dani that solid identity in a way which elevates her.
Sunspot’s been reconfigured to be the swashbuckling master planner/superspy/rich guy who happens to have powers, courtesy of Hickman and Ewing. Cannonball has been reconfigured as semi-retired family guy, which, which entirely in character for him, has also done him a disservice of removing him from active story participation (and then it’s Sam and Bobby as the Those Two Guys trope.)
Xuan’s identity has become wrapped up in both disability (her artificial leg) and LGBTQ (out and proud lesbian dating that one with the wings) which gets her invites to all of the Pride/Marvel Voices storylines, at least. (Throw in that she’s a woman of color as well, and she’s a perfect Bingo square for representation! I don’t see anything wrong with it, as it keeps her active and visible, but I’m worried that her stories tend to revolve around her identity and not her character…)
Rahne is well… Rahne. I miss the days of her being an innocent, sheltered werewolf with a kind of traumatic past. Most of the developments she’s seen over the years have not aged well (Being turned into a mutate bonded to Alex Summers? Kissing a student? Getting pregnant and losing the baby in that bizarre X-Factor storyline? Her power to become a -pack- of wolves? Her death right before Krakoa?) Frankly, very few of the changes she’s seen since the New Mutant days have been good ones. I love the character but man, I hate just about everything that’s been done to her in attempts to push her beyond her original depiction.
(we don’t talk about Amara, of course. Retcon after retcon after retcon.)
Where was I going with this? Ah yes. The damage done when writers can’t decide what a character should be like, and how 40 years of indecision can really saddle characters with a lot of awful baggage. Doug skipped over it by being dead for a while, but this stint as Revelation reminds me of the time Chamber got an Apocalypse-branded makeover as well and how well that stuck. Or Jubilee as a vampire.
The thing about Wolfsbane is you can’t keep doing the naïve waif thing for long without it being weird, but Ms Marvel shows you can absolutely do the religious, lowercase conservative, nice character, and it only really becomes an issue in crossovers when she has to hang around with psychopaths. Revising Wolfsbane to be your average stereotype werewolf was just dumb. Plus all the terrible storylines of course.
The thing about animal women is that male writers can’t seem to avoid storylines where they can’t control themselves sexually. Tigra got turned into a joke for the longest time because of Englehart’s and Byrne’s takes on her but she seems to have recovered under MacKay’s pen. And Rahne got brainwashed into being obsessively in love with Alex and only avoided an even more degrading storyline because PAD left the book.
The difference between Kamala and Rahne is that Rahne DID have a darker side buried under the nice Christian girl as demonstrated by the issue where she seemed to seriously consider letting a town of bigots die. Claremont;s take on her was that her passionate nature was repressed by her Christian upbringing and hate is as much a passion as love.
The art on this mini was surprisingly lively and fun.
Poor Doug, though. “Revelation” is kind of an inspired new codename for him, but the direction and the costume are clearly terrible. He’s been dead, he’s been technorganic, he’s been a zombie, he’s been powered up, and now he’s going to be a villain? Aside from Hickman, apparently no one can figure out how to use Doug without drastically altering his character DNA.
As for Dani, I think her drift/instability began after all of her main character conflicts were resolved. Two to three years into New Mutants she had come to terms with working with Xavier, vanquished the Demon Bear, reunited with her lost parents, and shown an expansion and mastery of her powers that some of the other students never did during that run. If anything, she suffered from being Claremont’s favorite. It’s the same predicament he left Storm in, only with Dani it took 1/3 the time. Nothing left but to turn her into a Valkyrie, I guess?
I still dream of someone writing a New Mutants book that re-solidifies the characters who have drifted over the years (Dani, Amara, to a certain extent Rahne). Zeb Wells made a good start, but he didn’t go quite far enough. I don’t think it would take much to rehabilitate some of the original NM and make them prime X-Men material. If we can have this pointless Apocalypse mini, then certainly someone can spare a few issues of some book to figure out what Dani’s powers actually *are* at this point.
As pointed out above, Dani just needs a writer and/or editor to give her the right push. Synch was an afterthought for about 20 years until Hickman brought him back and Duggan made him a main character in X-Men. Spider-Woman and Luke Cage languished in obscurity until Bendis wanted to use them in New Avengers, and now they’re Marvel mainstays.
Dani’s past baggage hasn’t been emphasized in her recent appearances in New Mutants. no one mentioned reality-altering or being undercover with the MLF or any other weirdness. I don’t recall Ayala or another NM writer emphasizing her Valkyrie status or using energy bows, either, but my memory is not always stellar when it comes to that kind of stuff.
She’s reverted to a mature version of her original self; less angry, possessing her original powers, and keeping relationships she’s formed with several other X-characters. I hope an X-writer realizes her potential sometime soon.
[…] HEIR OF APOCALYPSE #4. (Annotations here.) This was a patchy miniseries. The basic idea of Apocalypse deciding to withdraw to Arakko but being […]
I always thought that if Dani was still on the New Mutants when Cable arrived, she wouldn’t have let him take over, and she would have kicked his butt if he tried. She’s a very strong personality with excellent tactical abilities, and her powers are probably better suited for battlefield manipulation (have to move this guy/this squad) than one on one combat. This isn’t even going into her sometimes empathic bond with animals or her Valkyrie stuff. She’s awesome, and it’s a shame that writers don’t realize it.
As for removing Karma from the New Mutants, I always thought that was because Claremont had some idea of using her in Wolverine. I know she appeared there in Madripoor, but she seemed to disappear quickly (and Claremont wasn’t on Wolverine for that long).
@Sam- Karma disappeared from the New Mutants about a year and a half before she showed up in Wolverine. It’s not clear that there were even plans for a Wolverine series at that point, since Shooter was still editor-in-chief when she left New Mutants. Wolverine doesn’t appear to have been greenlit until Defalco was Editor-In-Chief.