NYX #5 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
NYX vol 2 #5
Writers: Jackson Lanzing & Collin Kelly
Penciler: Francesco Mortarino
Inker: Elisabetta D’Amico
Colourist: Raúl Angulo
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Editor: Annalise Bissa
THE CORE CAST:
Prodigy becomes a public figure after his fight with the Krakoan last issue, with the Truthseekers gathering outside his apartment, and anti-mutant laws being proposed by the City Council as part of Empath’s plan to foment racial hatred (of which more in a bit).
Sophie seems to have been convinced, at least to start with. But as the vote draws near, she turns on Empath’s group and decides to side with Kamala, David and co after all. She telepathically sends all the protestors home, apologises, and is immediately accepted by Kamala, though Anole and Laura are a lot less forgiving. To be fair, Kamala is mainly trying to get the group to focus on the real problem. Sophie claims that the Cuckoos voted on whether to join Empath’s plan, but doesn’t actually say how she voted. However, her dialogue with the Cuckoos towards the end of the issue strongly implies that the “vote” was unanimous.
Sophie fights off the Cuckoos’ influence and frees the Council members who were affected by Empath’s control. This apparently causes her to burn out her powers, at least temporarily.
Kamala has the solution to all this, which is to get out there and, in just 24 hours, stage a political campaign to appeal to America’s better nature, employing “intersectional solidarity”. This is entirely successful. She also gives an inspirational speech about diversity at the end, which defuses a potential riot immediately. It is just possible that this issue could have been better timed.
Anole and Wolverine both join the campaining.
SUPPORTING CHARACTERS:
Dante, David’s boyfriend, continues to hang around and look supportive without doing a great deal.
Kamala’s activist friend Nakia Bahadir shows up to help campaign in page 11 panel 2; the dialogue gives her name as “Nadia”, which is probably a typo. Brother Aamir Khan is still confused by cousin Bilal’s bigotry but ultimately comes down on Kamala’s side.
Local helps Wolverine with her campaigning (and despite his alliance with Mojo, he’s clearly not a villain in this issue).
The Morlocks show up to support Anole; Caliban and Mammomax appear, but have no dialogue.
VILLAINS:
Empath‘s plan appears to run like this:
- Have Julian commit terrorist attacks as “the Krakoan”, which are also a cover for the assassination of City Council members (something that apparently almost nobody spots).
- Replace the assassinated council members with pawns under Empath’s control. (How? Doesn’t that require a by-election?)
- Lure Ms Marvel into a public fight in Times Square against the Krakoan.
- Somehow leverage this to create anti-mutant sentiment (despite it being a fairly routine event for Marvel New York).
- Propose a law to ghettoise mutants.
- Pass it using the puppet council members plus the public outrage.
- Once New York’s apparently substantial mutant population is sufficiently outraged, install Empath as their leader (using his powers).
- ???????
- New Krakoa!
Empath seems to be controlling some of the council members who weren’t killed, since we’re told that the vote was going to be unanimous until Sophie breaks his hold on the Council, but the eventual vote is 22-29 against. Quite how any of Kamala’s last-minute campaigning actually affects the outcome is left rather unclear, given that the psychic battle appears to be by far the bigger issue from what we see on the page.
The other four Stepford Cuckoos are still on board with the plan, but Sophie is able to fight off their influence. They seem more annoyed at her breaking with the group than anything else.
The Krakoan appears in the first panel, being taken away by the police after last issue’s fight.
Cousin Bilal seems to be a fully paid up member of the Truthseekers here.
GUEST APPEARANCES:
The She-Hulk makes her traditional cameo appearance as the only lawyer in the Marvel Universe now that Daredevil is being a priest.
Doop, of all people, shows up to protest in favour of mutants. We haven’t seen him since the end of the Kraokan era.
OTHER REFERENCES:
Page 8 panel 5: Despite what Sophie says here, Empath was never a student at Xavier’s School. Sophie could have known him on Krakoa, though.
Page 9 panel 3: “a huddle mass, yearning to breathe free”. Empath is quoting “The New Colossus”, the poem by Emma Lazarus on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
Page 11 panel 4: The pink sign on the left probably reads I (heart) MUTANTS, which is a bit odd considering it’s a muant carrying it. The yellow sign reads MORLOCK PRIDE. The green one is mostly obscure; the word we can see is the second half of “MUTANT”. The pink sign on the right reads MUTANT ARE HUMAN (sic).
Page 12 panel 1. The big tree in the background is the Treehouse, the X-Men’s New York base during the Krakoan era; apparently, the Truthseekers are ambitiously proposing to attack this enormous thing with a chainsaw.
Page 13: Anole’s sign reads EVERYWHERE IS KRAKOA NOW.
Page 14 panel 1: “Stryker was right.” The Reverend Stryker, best known as the villain from the God Loves Man Kills graphic novel.
Paul> Kamala has the solution to all this, which is to get out there and, in just 24 hours, stage a political campaign to appeal to America’s better nature, employing “intersectional solidarity”. This is entirely successful. She also gives an inspirational speech about diversity at the end, which defuses a potential riot immediately. It is just possible that this issue could have been better timed.
What, like 15 years ago? 25?
As much as this month of all months throws just how much of a fantasy that working is into sharp relief, it isn’t as if the… let’s be polite and euphemistically call them “tensions”… have just appeared in the past few months since Lanzing and Kelly started writing this series.
This is not the first poorly timed political comic starring Kamala Khan. Around late 2016, in Kamala’s second volume by G. Willow Wilson, there was a plot involving HYDRA trying to get a young hipster member elected as mayor of Jersey City. Ms. Marvel decides the only way to win is to give wonderful speeches and help her pals with grass roots campaigning. They manage to get the better candidate, a woman running on a THIRD PARTY PLATFORM, elected. Not only was it clearly intended for a Hillary victory, but it features the most improbable thing to ever happen in an American comic book; a third party candidate winning a major election without a heap of money. This is literally impossible. Aliens being real is more likely. I am dead serious. There are better odds of Deadpool emerging from a comic book and running amok in real life than a third party candidate, much less a progressive woman, winning a mayoral election in the U.S.
But, hope springs eternal at the Marvel bullpen, I suppose. But the fact that Marvel writers cannot read the room within their own country may help explain why sales stink. Heck, they can’t even be bothered to do as much research on their own local politics as Paul, who lives across the pond.
For additional annotations, the main NYX trio (Ms. Marvel, Sophie, and Prodigy) have a cameo in this week’s SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MEN #9. Sophie is dressed in her usual White Queen Mini-Me cosplay and Prodigy has no problem being seen in public alongside Ms. Marvel, walking into a Coffee Bean that also features both costumed Spider-Men. They were called in by Miles to see if a new superhuman cast member is a mutant. They confirm she isn’t. Miles’ subplot is he’s rediscovered some unrequited romantic pangs for Kamala which have never been dealt with since died, was reborn, and then stopped hanging out with him or the Champions in exchange for the X-Men. I doubt it’ll go anywhere, but he does try to ask her out for a coffee date. Miles is also dating Starling (the Vulture’s vigilante daughter).
Just thought that last bit might interest someone.
Poor Miles is in a weird love quadrangle now,because he’s linked to Ghost Spider, especially with the movies being so big. I don’t know if they play up the romance angle any more, but they’re definitely “special friends”.
Speaking up and rallying the kids is sort of Ms Marvel’s thing, for better or worse. She also did it all the time in Champions, which was then subverted in the Kamala’s Law storyline (can’t remember the proper name of the event, don’t want to trudge through everything Google will throw up if I search for “Kamala”). I suppose it’s an old person’s idea of what young people do.
This issue had very strong “If we’re cancelled at issue #5, here’s our ending for the series/TPB” vibes.
And like others, it’s a lot harder to accept such an easy conclusion based on extremely recent political events.
I was convinced that the mutant with lobster claws was Mudbug from Wolverine and the X-Men but I looked it up and Mudbug was much more crayfish in appearance, so I suppose this guy’s new?
Si: You’re thinking of Outlawed. Don’t feel bad, I pretty forgot its name as well.
I’m thinking even if many of these people were opposed to the anti-mutant agenda, a fair number of them would run in the other direction simply based on the somewhat smug, sickeningly sweet display by Ms. Marvel. Which, well, the character is named Kamala, so other than not realizing how this comes across, it’s not so completely removed from the moment.
Hey, she could get around a 1/3 of those people who think exactly like her to join her campaign though, I’m sure, which is something…I suppose.
I think “an old person’s idea of what young people do” was the unofficial subtitle of that entire Champions series.
Well, I come to NYX for the focus on characters I like, not necessarily for superhero fight scenes (so David defeating Hellion last issue didn’t bother me much) or coherent evil mastermind plots.
That being said.
…why kill the councilmembers if you use telepaths to swing the vote your way anyway?
Suer, sure, you could say that handpicked replacements were molded by Empath over months, ensuring their conditioning doesn’t break or something. You could say that. This comic doesn’t. (And also the plot requires Sophie to break the mental hold they’re under anyway, so it’s moot).
It’s not only overtly complicated, it also turns Hellion into an actual supervillain who has killed… well, we don’t know how many people. More than just the councilmembers, probably.
And while Julian was the bad boy of Xavier’s Academy, whose plots revolved around his potential to become a supervillain, he never went that way. So for it to happen basically offpanel is… I’m kinda miffed. I liked Julian. Hope there’s a way back for him.
(The writers can always say he was controlled by Empath after all).
Anyway, back to convoluted. Last issue The Krakoan’s attacks were drawing an X-marks-the-spot pattern to lure Kamala to a fight. But also the councilmembers arranged themselves to be killed along the X-pattern? That’s awfully nice of them.
Anyway. Maybe it’s because I’m reading this book an ocean away from New York, I wasn’t bothered by the naive optimism. Naive optimism is kind of built into cape comics from the start anyway.
But yeah, the timing for this issue is awful.
I’d definitely support a “Empath was behind everything” because he has a very long history of being The Absolute Worst and this isn’t exactly too far removed from the sort of stuff he’s done in the past whenever he’s not directly supervised.
I mean, he’s the sort of guy who ranks right up there with Mandrill and Purple Man for creepy sexual predators who should never be allowed out in public ever again. Seriously, if Emma showed up just to shut down Manuel’s brain, I wouldn’t shed a tear.
I feel like Outlawed got disrupted by all the shipping and production issues that came up during COVID, but I might be confusing it with Empyre. I didn’t buy anything connected to the latter, and all I bought that tied into the former was the Power Pack mini-series Ryan North and Nico Leon did, which did not seem to be approaching the concept in an entirely serious manner (which was fine, i got some laughs out of it.)
I remember that Ms. Marvel comic. I was mostly just annoyed at feeling like the comic was lecturing me, especially living in a place where my vote does not do a damn thing even on the local level, forget state or federal. But I didn’t mind that Ms. Marvel’s efforts worked in-story. That’s not the sort of thing that’ll shatter my suspension of disbelief.
Also, I think it helped G. Willow Wilson had established Ms. Marvel was pretty well-liked and respected by the residents of jersey City at that time, so she might actually be able to sway people at the level of city government enough to have an effect.
I think Lanzing & Kelly were trying to find a way to have the mutants resolve conflict through peaceful means as a way to break away from the violence that David talked about last issue. Unfortunately, they did so by having Ms. Marvel make a big speech. Ugh.
I like this book. It’s been so good up until this issue. But… a big speech defusing a situation and convincing people to not fight? And the police being supportive of the pro-mutant protestors? I was already feeling bad about current events, and I put this comic down feeling worse.
There was a time I thought it was unrealistic how gullible and hateful Marvel civilians were. Dark Reign, for example. The idea that a huge chunk of Americans would support Norman Osborn, a blatantly corrupt businessman with a documented history of violence against women, clear mental health issues, and weird hair? That would be ridiculous!
Welp.
Timing aside, the evil scheme is nonsensical. Sophie was sent undercover in order to lure Ms. Marvel into fighting a supervillain? The thing she already does on her own? Why replace council members when you’re mind controlling them anyway? Did Empath and the Cuckoos mind control law enforcement into not noticing the obvious patterns of dead council members who are also at geographically significant locations?
I’m also annoyed at Ms. Marvel’s Pollyanna-ish insistence that Sophie is her best friend now. She’s optimistic, but that seems out of character. Or maybe everyone is being controlled, why not?
I think’s Empath’s plan was that once the mutants were concentrated in a small area, they would look to him, Julian and the Cuckoos for leadership. And then they would stage a revolution which would seize control of New York City. and perhaps other parts of the United States.
Empath says that Hellion killed “the ones we can’t turn.” Presumably, some humans are naturally resistant to Empath’s and the Cuckoos’ powers and that’s why Hellion had to kill them. (Although, there does seem to have been a lot of them on the City Council.)
Note that Empath says that he was funding the humans’ “social networks” in order to cause anti-mutant hate crimes. So presumably the Truthseekers and Purifiers are being funded by Empath, and possibly controlled by him without realizing it.
“Page 8 panel 5: Despite what Sophie says here, Empath was never a student at Xavier’s School. Sophie could have known him on Krakoa, though.”
He did help Amara recuperate at the Xavier Institute after M-Day but Sophie was dead by then.
Everyone forgave Sophie way too easily considering the magnitude of her crimes. She was part of a plan that killed humans and mutants, stirred up hatred against mutants and she turned a blind eye to Empath and her sisters abusing their slaves.
Then again, the solicits for issue 7 have Synch angry at Prodigy for absolving Sophie of her crimes. But that’s just going to look hypocritical. “When I was in Generation X we never would have forgiven a Frost for killing humans and manipulating the ingenue. Um, never mind.”
Several readers were confused about whether or not Nakia know Kamala’s secret identity now, since Emma wiped it from her mind earlier. (Kamala is wearing a red scarf and her bangle but not her costume in the scene with Nakia.)
I know that Sophie is sometimes depicted as the most powerful and/or skilled of the Cuckoos but I’m not buying that she could defeat all of the other four Cuckoos so easily and still have enough power to free all those people from Empath’s control, even if she did temporarily burn out her powers.
Part of the problem is that Lanzing and Kelly don’t know how to write a cool telepathic duel. But really, the problem is that the New Quiet Council’s scheme was thwarted WAY too easily. The heroes don’t look heroic if they can thwart the villains too easily.
One major problem with this series is that the Cuckoos plot requires ignoring Emma’s and Quentin’s relationships with the Cuckoos. At this point, the main characters no everything about the plan with Empath and the Cuckoos. Shouldn’t they be telling Emma what happened to the Cuckoos? Why isn’t Emma coming to New York to chew out the Cuckoos? And if Sophie is having trouble using her telepathy, Emma should be the first person to ask for help. But there’s no interaction between the Cuckoos and Emma because Emma’s in a different book. We’ll see how Exceptional X-Men handles this.
Similarly, as recently as Sabretooth War, Quentin was deeply in love with Phoebe. Shouldn’t he be coming to New York to confront her? This would be ironic for obvious reasons. But again, he’s in a different book. Again, we’ll see how MacKay’s X-Men handles this.
You could do an examination of how the Krakoan resurrections led many mutants to feel indifferent to death in general, and so became far more willing to kill. You could argue that Hellion started killing at that time, and developed a taste for it, and Nightcrawler and Shadowcat did the same but at some point realised what they were doing and recoiled.
@AMRG- The interesting thing about Sophie’s and Kamala’s guest appearance in Spectacular Spider-Man is that Sophie has her powers. So either that takes place before issue 3 or if it takes place after this issue, then Sophie will be getting her powers back.
Spectacular Spider-Men 9, by the way is notable since it’s the first time Hydro-Man appeared in a print comic book since his death in Carnage. Hydro-Man was brought back in one of the Infinity books a few months ago but this is the first time he’s appeared in print since then. And since Boomerang was just brought back in Sinister War, I’m sure Shocker will be teaming up with both of them again soon.
The Other Michael: “This issue had very strong “If we’re cancelled at issue #5, here’s our ending for the series/TPB” vibes”.
This! Absolutely this. When I saw the final double page spread, I actually paused and wondered why they would cancel the series this early. I was fully prepared for the next page to be a brief letter bidding readers farewell, or rebranding it as a mini with a follow-up soon to come.
And yeah, this is bloody awful. Empath’s plan relies on the notion that if mutants were indeed ghettoized in New York, 1) no major supers would oppose this, 2) no remaining X-Men came to the forefront to fight it, and 3) that out of all the many telepaths, mutants, wannabes and socially ascending fuckwads in the city, the masses would be sure to flock to him.
…Uh?
This isn’t just silly, it’s actually really poor plotting that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny in the slightest. And the “love will save the day” climax feels so disingenuous it is actually downright offensive to the intelligence of the readers, and to the messy reality of electoral politics.
I wish they would just have fully owned up that Sophie had coerced the vote into being, and create that basic conflict for her as everyone feels from the complete inefficiency of any other response.
Instead we get cartoon drivel that messes up it’s open internal logic (and level of silliness) by having a go at the concept of “intersectional solidarity”.
I’m sorry, but… No. Preachy liberalism? Give me Orchis fascism, supernatural world catastrophe, or some random adventure in Mojoverse instead.
So disappointing.
This one was a rare miss from Lanzing and Kelly, for me. I really expected Khan to take off her mask and reveal her secret identity (which… is the mask really that effective at keeping it from her family?). And then for that to cause some of the protesters to change sides, realizing that mutants are just members of their own community. Instead, as Paul said, it was just a speech… a really, really tone-deaf speech.
Overall, I’m still on board with this book, but this wasn’t a good end for the first arc, and it’ll hopefully recover in the second one. I get where this is trying to be the successor to the various “Young X-Men” books, but maybe the lesson here is that the new generations need some adult supervision… maybe bring in Cannonball or Kate or Jubilee or even Husk to show what growing up looks like.
I don’t know why someone who can change the shape and size of any body part at will even needs a mask (besides convention of course). How hard would it be for Ms Marvel to be a bit taller and thinner than Kamala, with a bigger nose and no detached earlobes?
That’s like when Reed would change his face during that time he and Sue had secret identities during the Byrne years when they lived in the suburbs.
Watsonian answer: Kamala has a healing factor but it only works if she’s not shapeshifting, so it’s to her advantage if she can revert to her base self as Ms. Marvel.
Doylist answer: So that her racial and ethnic identity isn’t secret.
“Anyway. Maybe it’s because I’m reading this book an ocean away from New York, I wasn’t bothered by the naive optimism. Naive optimism is kind of built into cape comics from the start anyway.
But yeah, the timing for this issue is awful.”
You may be right. Over on Bluesky (non-incel Twitter), Mark Waid posted that he doesn’t think he can write superhero comics anymore because they require a basic belief in the inherent goodness of most people, and after last Tuesday, he no longer has that belief.
Which… yeah. Same.
Wasn’t Waid the one who wrote the “an old person’s idea of what young people do” Champions’ series, as Sean put it?
As another annotation, while it is true that Jennifer Walters and Matt Murdock (and to a much lessor degree Foggy Nelson) represent 100% of Marvel’s lawyers, there is another reason besides both Murdock and Nelson being unavailable for Walters to be in the position that she was in NYX.
During Rainbow Rowell’s run on SHE-HULK, Walters was contacted by Nightcrawler, who represented Krakoa, and officially hired as the lawyer for the mutants. It was considered the biggest client base for the law firm that she was running alongside Mallory Book. Now, of course, there is no Krakoa anymore, but a link to the mutants would still stand. I remember at the time I was just thrilled that mutants were not represented by Logan or Cyclops, which tended to happen a lot in cameos at the time.
Also, I love how people within Marvel have such low faith in their own strategies that every opening arc for any ongoing title has to be written in a way to serve as the only arc it will have due to swift cancellation. If you’re planning on books being cancelled so swiftly, maybe…publish less of them? Just a thought? Bueller?
If only there was a lawyer who was also a mutant. One with previous ties to the X-Men. Maybe one with the power to turn into a big green monster…
Yes, of course I mean Evangeline Whedon.