X-Men #3 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN vol 7 #3
“Scott Summers vs. The United States of America”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Ryan Stegman
Inkers: JP Mayer & Livesay
Colourist: Marte Gracia
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
THE X-MEN:
Cyclops tries unsuccessfully to persuade Rogue not to attack Graymalkin; we’ll see Rogue’s side of that conversation in Uncanny X-Men vol 6 #2, which won’t be out for two weeks. Cyclops is clearly aware of the fact that Graymalkin has been turned into a prison over in Uncanny X-Men and thinks that Rogue’s group are hopelessly outpowered by whoever’s in charge of it. Scott evidently had plans of his own to deal with this, and he’s going to have to accelerate them now.
At some point between the end of Krakoa and issue #1, Scott sued the US government over his treatment by Orchis. For some reason, he accepted the Factory as a settlement. So yes, the X-Men are there legally. Scott acknowledges that there was an “implication” that the US government expected the X-Men to stay in Alaska, but seems clear that he never agreed to anything. His ultimate position is that the US government would much rather his group were acting as the X-Men than acting as the Brotherhood, and those are the only two choices he’s offering them. He argues that he’s doing the government a favour by keeping his roster under control, and flags how dodgy they are: most of them are former villains, and Magik’s half demon.
Cyclops is aware of X-Factor (obviously, because publicity is the group’s whole thing). He’s surprisingly dismissive about Havok as their leader – “my brother has never been able to operate on my level”. But he’s talking for the benefit of a hostile audience, Agent Blumqvist, and might just be playing up to expectations.
The final page shows us that Scott is having some sort of periodic attacks of sickness, and he’s working hard to keep up his leader persona.
The Beast is the first person Scott calls to discuss Rogue’s decision to move on Graymalkin, which is interesting.
Magneto still seems to be confined to his floating chair. He attempts to bond with Temper, arguing that they’re both been tempered by experience. It doesn’t go well.
Temper‘s new codename is explained in terms of things like tempered steel, which fits with her powers being based on temperature extremes. Obviously, the other sense of “Temper” is not a coincidence. She’s still bitter about being sent to the Pit in the Sabretooth miniseries. Magneto correctly identifies that she and Nekra were sent to the Pit for killing people, and assumes that her objection to him must be simply hypocrisy. However, Temper seems more aggrieved by the whole fact of Krakoa being presented as a utopia; the premise of the Exiles group from Victor LaValle’s Sabretooth stories was of course that they rejected it as a false paradise and went their own way.
Temper is now surrounded by people who loved Krakoa, or (in the case of Beast) have bought into the hype. That annoys her intensely, but it also begs the question of why she’s even here. Then again, she seems to place great importance on mutants being able to find one another rather than being separated around the world, so maybe she’s just willing to put up with everyone else’s attitude to Krakoa.
Temper refers to her origin story from Uncanny X-Men #528, where she killed a bunch of paramilitaries who came after her. For a long time, this was presented as a traumatic event that left her convinced that she was a monster. She’s now outright asserting the parallels between this event and defending her home from O*N*E’s soldiers, and the contrast is clearly intentional.
Kid Omega, Magik, Juggernaut and Psylocke help to stop the O*N*E intruders.
SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
Paula Robbins meets Scott for the first time. As in issue #1, she seems perfectly cordial and mostly interested in lowering tensions; Scott reciprocates.
VILLAINS
The O*N*E are back. This is the Office of National Emergency, the military agency that debuted in the Decimation era with bizarre ideas like posting Sentinels outside the X-Men Mansion to defend the surviving mutants. They stopped appearing in the X-books a while back, but they’ve still been around on the fringes of the Marvel Universe – their last appearance seems to have been in a USAgent miniseries in 2021.
The O*N*E are now led (or at least represented) by Agent Lundqvist, who’s new. He doesn’t like Cyclops, who “made me look bad in front of the entire country”, for reasons we’ve yet to discover. It might be to do with the incident hinted at in previous issues where the X-Men saved the town of Merle from something Sentinel-related. Lundqvist is trying to throw his weight around, and sends a bunch of Shrike soldiers into the Factory in a blatantly illegal mission to seize the last Cerebro unit. He seems clearly anti-mutant, and it’s not clear whether he’s acting on any particular instructions here or just abusing his authority to pursue a grudge.
Lundqvist does alert Cyclops to something genuinely relevant: he was caught on camera in San Francisco acknowledging that Ben Liu’s mutant powers had emerged in adulthood. This has apparently caused panic in itself, leading to fears that something is infecting normal humans and turning them into mutants. There’s some implication in issues #1-2 that 3K are working on precisely that. Lundqvist just seems pleased that Cyclops will find it annoying.
The Vanisher is working with O*N*E. We’re not told why, but one of the Shrike soldiers mentions that he’s getting something unspecified in exchange for helping out, so apparently it’s just not money. He seems to think that they’re out of their depth with the X-Men, and he’s probably right. We last saw Vanisher in the big crowd scenes at the end of the Krakoan era.
OTHER SPECIFICS:
Page 5. As already mentioned, we’ll see the other side of this conversation in Uncanny X-Men vol 6 #2. The “four strays” Cyclops mentions will be the group who showed up right at the end of Uncanny #1. Rogue, Gambit and Wolverine were all in that issue; Jubilee wasn’t, but we saw her deciding to join Rogue’s group in Free Comic Book Day: Blood Hunt / X-Men.
Page 6 panel 4: “Chief Robbins. I’m sorry I missed you the other day.” Issue #1. Scott was off on a mission when Robbins visited the Factory in that issue.
Page 9 panel 6: “As much as it pains me to admit it, Cyclops was right.” Kid Omega is alluding to the “Magneto was right” slogan he used to use. Apparently, Cyclops was anticipating that O*N*E would break in (though not specifically their target).
Page 10 panel 1: “I assume this is about San Francisco.” Issue #2.
Page 11 panel 3: “Orchis killed score of my species…” All of this comes from the “Fall of X” storyline.
Page 13 panel 1: “Do not speak Ben Liu’s name out loud.” Ben Liu is the mutant they rescued from San Francisco in the previous issue, after faking his death to avoid panic about his reality-warping powers. So far as we know, he’s still unconscious.
Page 19 panel 2: “The world’s last Cerebro.” This is one of the big room Cerebro designs introduced in the Morrison/Quitely era, rather than the miniaturised versions that were being used on Krakoa. The one in the X-Men Mansion was destroyed on the orders of Corina Ellis in Uncanny X-Men #1, so perhaps Lundqvist is on the same page as her.
Page 22 panel 4: “I killed men just like you…” This is Temper’s origin story from Uncanny X-Men #528.
Page 24 panel 3: “If it comes to it, I can always call my wife.” Phoenix is in space, but we’ve seen in her series that she’s in regular psychic contact with Scott.
I liked this installment. I appreciate that it didn’t just sweep the end of Krakoa under the rug. I would like to get more Magneto – I assume seeing him fight some soldiers would give something away, but I’m hoping we don’t go too much longer just seeing him sit around menacingly.
Paul> The final page shows us that Scott is having some sort of periodic attacks of sickness, and he’s working hard to keep up his leader persona.
I mean, the implication is clearly that he’s having panic attacks after all the Hellfire Gala-FotHoX stuff, including the things he lists as having sued the US government over.
(And, really, if that’s a swerve and it’s M-Pox 2: Legacy Boogaloo or whatever, it would be a bad one)
Definitely seemed like a panic attack to me. Cyclops is angry and stressed and I feel like that will make for good stories.
Can’t remember which thread it was in, but I recall someone here mentioning that editorial had upcoming plans to explain away some of Scott’s past bad behavior? Maybe these attacks
are leading to that?
Agreed, this was the most enjoyable issue yet. I have much more faith in where this series, and maybe the whole editorial line, is going. That short conversation with Rogue helped connect and differentiate the titles. And Scott’s team now has a clear raison d’etre. It’s not Extinction Team v2.0, but Cyclop’s Brotherhood. Interested in seeing how MacKay handles this panic attack subplot.
MacKay also has a good handle on Idie’s character, in what has the potential to be a character defining run. Nothing about the previous two issues gave me that confidence. And picking up on LaValle’s work while calling back, again, to Gillen’s first run, Temper makes a perfect foil for Magneto.
“But he’s talking for the benefit of a hostile audience, Agent Blumqvist, and might just be playing up to expectations.”
True, outright shade isn’t really Scott’s style, but he’s also not wrong.
@Moo- I mentioned it. Breevort discusses it here:
https://aiptcomics.com/2024/05/06/x-men-monday-tom-brevoort-from-the-ashes/
“And frankly, I could just be out of my mind, but I have — as everybody in the office is sick of hearing me talk about — I have what I think of as the unified field theory of the Scott and Jean relationship that sort of explains or clarifies why a bunch of — maybe let’s call them ill-considered storytelling decisions made over the years — happened the way they happened, and how they actually all make sense if you look at it from this perspective. So we’re going to try and build up and peel back the onion and reveal that backstory dramatically over the course of telling a bunch of stories here.”
Yeah, I had the same thought that this is leading up to an explanation for Scott’s past behavior, especially since he had hallucinations during Simonson’s run. (They went away after Scott shot his optic blasts at Jean with enough force to blow a hole in a wall- there’s no way any writer could get away with having mental health problems just vanish after domestic violence today.)
Scott is worried about Rogue’s plans to assault Graymalkin Prison in part because Warden Ellis has Philip, a powerful telepath, on her side. (Am I the only who finds it funny that no matter how many “Red Triangle Protocols” the writers come up with, the X-Men will never able to protect themselves against evil telepaths.)
The group that exposed the truth about Benjamin Liu was the Truthseekers, the same group that appeared in NYX.
“Temper refers to her origin story from Uncanny X-Men #528, where she killed a bunch of paramilitaries who came after her.”
I’m not sure if she was referring to her origin story or her killing the pirates, which is why she was sent to the Pit. She says “I killed men just like you. Men who came into my home, like you did. With weapons, like you have. And I was made to pay for it.”
The “I was made to pay for it” line makes me think that she was referring to killing the pirates, which is why she was sent to the Pit.
in any case, MacKay seems to be making the point that Magneto was a hypocrite for sending Idie to the Pit but Idie should have been able to subdue the pirates non lethally.Which is fair.
“…no way any writer could get away with having mental health problems just vanish after domestic violence today.”
Ohhh, I remember you now. You’re *that* Michael. The “Scott’s a wife-beater” Michael.
I think there’s a wide misunderstanding concerning hallucinations, with the idea that hallucinations always occur exclusively with a major psychological health condition. There is a term called brief psychotic disorder, which is usually triggered by an external stressor. Scott having his dead first love return, waking out on his wife for his ex, and seemingly losing his child could certainly qualify as a proper reason to trigger hallucinations in Scott.
I don’t see any positive from revisiting these events in Scott’s life to try to diagnose Scott as being “mentally ill” or being controlled in some way by a villain.
I thought this was well done and an excellent setup issue.
X-Force however…
Come to think of it, Chris Claremont and Louise Simonson were pretty brutal with Scott back in the 1980s. I get the sense that Claremont hated the character, or at least did not hesitate to promote Wolverine at Scott’s expense when given the opportunity.
It is shocking how surprised I am to see actual character development for Scott. It feels like I never saw him show emotions before. In these three issues he shows a stoic façade not too different from, say, that of the Matthew Rosenberg take on Scott in 2019’s “Uncanny X-Men”. But we also get a rare look into his inner thoughts.
Not sure on what people are disliking about X-Force. This take is better than most.
I know that Claremont was pretty peeved when other people started messing with his plans and “his” X-characters. He definitely wanted to retire Scott to Alaska, but X-Factor put the kibosh on that idea. Not to mention Jean coming back, and not even in a book Claremont was writing(!).
Anyway, I’m not sure Claremont hated Cyclops as much as he hated losing control of the franchise he had taken to the top of the charts. Maybe some of that came out in Scott’s characterization? But before then, Claremont had shown that Scott could handle Logan pretty effectively when he had to.
Claremont has said publicly that he was very fond of Scott. At least, right up until he walked out Madelyne, which, it seems, soured him on the character, but he quite liked Scott up until that point. He intended for Madelyne to be the “happily ever after” that he felt Scott had earned and deserved. It was the fan in him that wanted to give him that.
I know much has been said here about Madelyne’s eerie resemblance to Jean, with some readers here questioning the mental health of a guy who decided to marry someone who resembled his dead girlfriend, but to me, that’s overthinking it. You have to put this stuff in historical context. This was the 80s, and hoaky contrivances to generate (cheap) melodrama was very 80s. Not just in comics, but in film and especially in television. It was the decade of the doppelganger. Lookalikes and previously unmentioned twins were crawling out of the woodwork across all storytelling mediums.
But after X-Factor took a wrecking ball to Claremont’s intentions for Scott, the Scott/Jean/Maddy situation became Simonson’s problem, and Claremont said it took at least a couple of years for her to figure out what to finally do about it. So, I’d put that whole hallucination bit down to it Simonson just winging it and workshopping ideas in an attempt to figure out what to do about the mess she inherited.
@Michael
Idie mentions that she hadn’t intended to bring down the pirate lethaly back in the Sabertooth mini. She just had the bad luck to have done it at a time where the punishment was a fate worse than death.
LaValle’s mini series was about questioning the fairness of the justice system? What it means to “deserve” it?
This issue was a step up from the previous two. I remember Idie being less aggressive, personality-wise, in the LaValle Sabretooth comics, but it makes sense that she would become more jaded after those comics. Cyclops was well-written here, and the panic attack at the end of the issue added another possible story avenue. The action sequences were decent. I hope the series continues on this trajectory.
I’m still not crazy about the art, but it didn’t actively bother me for most of the issue.
I have a feeling mental health will come into play here, but not necessarily hallucinations. I don’t know that McKay will be able to square away ALL of the problematic writing decisions involving Cyclops from decades ago and I am fine with that. Telling a good story about mental heath responsibly that also does the character justice and good enough for me.
@Moo- It’s a bit more complicated than that. Claremont’s idea was that it was unhealthy for Scott to try to be SURE that Maddie wasn’t Jean. It’s a theme in Claremont’s work that the need to be sure is unhealthy- Magik is only able to avoid becoming Belasco when she spares his life knowing that there’s a chance he’ll come back and abuse her again, Reed Richards is only able to help Kitty in the X-Men/ Fantastic Four series when he stops trying to be sure that the story in the “diary” isn’t true. There is some truth to that idea- the inability to tolerate uncertainty is a major factor in OCD. Note that when Lilandra tries to kill Maddie, Scott is too obsessed with the idea that Maddie might be Jean to worry about how Maddie must feel or get angry at Lilandra. But later on, after having accepted that Maddie isn’t Jean despite not meeting Jean in the afterlife, Scott is worried about Maddie and angry enough to kill Mastermind.
Regarding Scott nearly killing Jean, oddly enough in a period of about six months just as Shooter was leaving as EIC and Defalco was coming in, THREE characters nearly killed the significant others at Marvel- Scott nearly killed Jean, Alex nearly killed Lorna and Storm nearly killed Forge. It’s just bizarre.
I do think that fan anger at Scott’s nearly killing Jean played a role in the decision to turn Maddie into the Goblin Queen. Note that during Inferno Scott consistently refuses to use his optic blasts against Maddie, unlike with Jean a couple years before.
@Rinoa- I think the issue here is that a key tool for treating anxiety is understanding that attempts to avoid fearful thoughts will often backfire and make the anxieties worse. But Scott’s ex-wife was turned into an evil baby-killing sorceress just because she THOUGHT about hurting him.
Psychiatrist: Scott, avoiding the fearful thoughts will just make them worse. Thoughts aren’t harmful. I mean, plenty of women think about hurting their children and they don’t hurt their children.
Scott: My wife was magically turned evil and nearly killed our child just because she thought about revenge.
Psychiatrist: Um, never mind.
Marvel has spent DECADES avoiding why Maddie’s transformation into the Goblin Queen was problematic for mental health. There are millions of people with OCD and other disorders who have thoughts of hurting people and doing horrible things and they’re afraid to seek help because even though their conditions are harmless, other people can’t accept that. Thought-action fusion is one of the most horrible concepts for people with mental health issues. And Maddie’s transformation into the Goblin Queen was thought-action fusion personified.
I thought that the “panic attack” read as PTSD. And certainly Scott has had more trauma than most. And a hostile encounter with Mr. Orchid-lite seems like just the sort of thing to set off any PTSD from the last six months or so.
Having seen so much media where the protagonist is hideously tortured, only to suffer zero long-term effects — I actively hope that this is the direction they’re going in. Not to tear down Scott, but to show an unexplored side of his character.
I liked this. Though at this point I wouldn’t mind a quiet issue – we’ve had three separate fight issues, none of them presented a challenge for the team, so they weren’t very engaging.
(Though at least the Shrikes were sneaky and the heroes had to think at least a little bit, I appreciate that).
On an unrelated note, I hope MacKay will introduce other people from the town and we won’t have the sheriff as the sole representative.
It would be such a change for mutants to have a background cast of normal humans to interact with. God, I miss that.
@Lo- But Nekra claims she intended to kill the pirates. Honestly, either Lavelle or MacKay should have shown a flashback of the pirates’ deaths so we could see what Idie did or did not do. Instead, we’re each arguing based on our own ideas of what she did.
“It’s a bit more complicated than that.”
@Michael- No, it isn’t. Scott has a neurotic tendency to go into doubt mode whenever something good happens to him, and that’s been a staple of the character since back when Stan Lee was writing him.
“I don’t know that McKay will be able to square away ALL of the problematic writing decisions involving Cyclops from decades ago and I am fine with that.”
@Rinoa – Good, because it won’t matter whether everything gets squared away or not. Nothing McKay does with Scott is going to immunize him against future writers making creative choices with regards to Scott’s decision-making and behavior that he/and or Brevoort wouldn’t agree with, so what’s the point? I wish creators would stop concerning themselves with trying to “fix” past stories and just focus on the present.
[…] #3. (Annotations here.) The O*N*E try to raid the Factory and it doesn’t go well. We’re still doing […]
If this team is Cyclops’s Brotherhood as Joseph S. says, then he’s simply following in the footsteps of Alex, who had his Brotherhood in the 90s. I guess he just copies everything from the smarter Summers brother.
@Sam And Alex’s Brotherhood turned out to be a feign, didn’t it? I’m curious to see what role Magneto will play here in that context. In any case, I like the idea of Scott flirting with villainy while operating as a hero, affirming the priority of mutants without being a supremacist. It feels sufficiently like a synthesis of the previous versions of the character.
@Joseph S. It’s unnecessarily complicated (like most 90s comic book plots). Alex was kidnapped for the Dark Beast to do evil things to and was next shown on the Brotherhood (I think he tried to kill Cyclops, but I don’t think that should be held against him; it was 90s Cyclops). Then inbetween appearances, he somehow shook off the brainwashing and took control of the Brotherhood, keeping them from doing anything too evil (I think they helped some X team with something in an African village?) probably because someone in editorial decided that having him go from mutant hero to mutant terrorist was a bad direction if they ever wanted to use him again, especially in the grim and gritty 90s (for example, Gene Nation murdered a whole lot of people in their appearances). Sure, sure, “Mind Control!” I hear you shout, but that hasn’t always been accepted as a good excuse in comics.