As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

X-MEN vol 7 #4
“Upstarts”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inker: Sean Parsons
Colourist: Marte Gracia
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

THE X-MEN:

Cyclops stays behind at the Factory and sits out this mission, so plays a relatively minor role.

Magik is assigned as team leader for the mission, which makes sense given her role as one of the Captains of Krakoa. Granted, it means she’s chosen for the job over the Beast, but since he doesn’t even want to go, that seems fair enough. Beast is impressed with her performance in the field and thinks she’s a born leader, but he may not fully realise quite how fatalistic she is. According to Magik, she thinks there’s no hope of mutants ever winning, and her goal is just to “keep from losing for as long as possible”. Krakoa is the elephant in the room where this worldview is concerned; was she expecting it to fail all along, or just rationalising it after the fact?

Temper and Juggernaut make up her limited field team. Juggernaut gets to give a speech about how he’s opted into making mutant affairs his business, and that the X on his helmet is a crosshairs that he chooses to wear.

Kid Omega and Psylocke don’t appear at all. We’re told that they’re “in the middle of a psychic rescue”, apparently elsewhere in the Factory. Presumably they’re trying to wake the comatose Ben Liu, but we’re not told that in terms.

The Beast doesn’t want to go on missions, which he claims is because his scientific work is so important: “Have you forgotten what’s happened to Magneto? What could happen to any of us? We are all of us ticking time bombs…” Magneto (who doesn’t appear either) has lost his powers and is in a wheelchair, as confirmed in X-Men: From the Ashes Infinity Comic #13-14. We’ve yet to find out what actually caused this. Beast seems to be suggesting that it’s either something that could affect mutants generally, or maybe something that this particular group was exposed to somewhere before the series began.

Then again, is Beast just reluctant to get back into being an X-Man given his recent history. Interestingly, this week’s From the Ashes issue reasserts the position that this character is, strictly speaking, a Beast clone with a copy of Beast’s memories and not the original Beast – something that seemed to have been played down.

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS:

Jennifer Starkey, this issue’s new mutant, is a new character.

Glob Herman is hanging around the Factory being domestic.

Colossus appears to be the person Magik is playing text message chess with. This is the first time we’ve seen him post-Krakoa.

VILLAINS:

The Upstarts are a group of villains who are hunting new mutants and killing them on live stream, for no stated purpose other than to be loved by their audience. They have a logo with a yellow circle and a black U that seems to evoke a smiley face.

The group is a revival (of sorts) of the Upstarts from early 90s X-Men, in which a bunch of new villains competing to kill as many mutants as they could in the hopes of earning points to win a mysterious prize from the Gamesmaster. The whole storyline eventually petered out in New Warriors #46.

Trevor Fitzroy, who leads the new group, was a member of the original Upstarts, although his motivation there was to win the Gamesmaster’s never-specified prize, rather than to pursue fame. That said, it’d be stretching a point to say that early 90s Fitzroy had any terribly clear agenda, and some stories do present him with the somewhat flamboyant persona he describes here. Quite what Fitzroy stands to gain in practical terms from streaming on the dark web is less than clear, and perhaps it’s just a cover story for his team. He claims that he wants “the very worst” humans to love him, and suggests that this is more about building some sort of power base.

Fitzroy was last seen during the Matthew Rosenberg pre-Krakoa run on Uncanny X-Men, where he died. Presumably he was resurrected on Krakoa at some point.

The other three Upstarts are Ocelot, Orbit and Orifice. As Juggernaut notes, these bozos are from the opening arc of X-Statix, and haven’t been since. They were members of O-Force, a rival fame-chasing superhero team who were chosen in a reality TV show. In fact, Orifice didn’t even get that far – he was a candidate who didn’t make the final team. Ocelot claims here that they murdered people on TV as part of the show; he’s referring to O-Force’s first televised mission where they rescued some actors from group of supposed kidnappers. The narrator in X-Statix #2 does indeed say that the kidnappers were fakes who were hired by O-Force’s management, and that O-Force killed them during the “rescue”.

That aside, O-Force were generally presented in the X-Statix arc as a bunch of amateurs playacting at being superheroes. Their second mission was against reality-warper Arnie Lunt, a genuine villain who completely outpowered them. Basically, their plot function was to show that X-Statix had some substance by comparison.

Ocelot claims that they’re here for fame, which matches their back story and Fitzroy’s stated agenda. Presumably Orbit and Orifice are here for similar reasons.

The Sugar Man is sponsoring the Upstarts, although he just wants them to gather the new mutants who have been appeared in recent issues, and sees Fitzroy’s obsession with image as a nuisance. The agendas don’t really align, so presumably this is the best muscle that the Sugar Man could find (and he must have been pretty desperate).

The Sugar Man is a mad geneticist from the Age of Apocalypse timeline who came to the mainstream Marvel Universe as the end of that crossover and floating around doing mad scientist things throughout the 1990s before drifting down the pecking order. He was found dead in Matthew Rosenberg’s Uncanny X-Men #1 (2018), but apparently got resurrected on Krakoa in a fit of generosity. He did make one appearance during the Krakoan era, in a one-panel cameo among a bunch of minor villains in Amazing Spider-Man #39 (2020), which could previously have been dismissed as a likely error.

OTHER SPECIFICS:

Page 1: There are a couple of trivial problems with the art on the chess board. According to the text messages, Magik moves second, which means she should be black. And the move she texted was e6, but in the art she’s moved d6. (Her opponent’s moves are correctly shown, though.) Oh, and why is her opponent’s number shown as blocked when she’s clearly communicating with them?

Page 6: “We isolated the landmarks immediately visible in their video.” What landmarks? The art shows Fitzroy in front of a studio backdrop.

Page 7: “Go hide in a shanty with Rogue and her crew.” The Uncanny X-Men cast.