Uncanny X-Men #8 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #8
“Raid on Graymalkin, part four: Finale”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Javier Garrón
Colourist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
This is the final part of the “Raid on Graymalkin” crossover, continuing from X-Men #9.
THE X-MEN (LOUISIANA):
Rogue argues with Cyclops mainly about his approach to Professor X, even though their decisions on everything else seem almost identical. She’s still outraged that Cyclops is willing to leave Professor X in Graymalkin, even when the Professor himself agrees. Her strength of feeling seems to be in part because she views Professor X as the “first” person who “believed in me”, something which probably wouldn’t go down well with her adoptive mother Mystique. Bizarrely, she yells at Cyclops for having Magneto on his team, even though he’s been on the X-Men’s side for years – maybe she’s just reaching for something to say.
Gambit, Wolverine, Nightcrawler and Jubilee are all here but don’t do much to stand out.
Jitter thinks Magik is cool. Ransom apologises to Wolverine for hitting him when they first met, which seems a bit random. Calico is surprised and delighted that the other Outliers came to save her, and declares that they are all “mutant friends”. Ransom and Deathdream both seem a bit less enthusiastic about all this than she is.
SUPPORTING CAST:
Cyclops reprimands Rogue for “bringing kids into a war zone” – given that the Schism was all about Cyclops wanting to train mutants as soldiers, presumably it’s the lack of training and experience that bothers him about the Outliers, more than their age. He continues to argue that Professor X should be kept under lock and key, and that “He’s not who we thought,” presumably referring to his alliance of convenience with Orchis in Rise and Fall.
Magik, Psylocke, Juggernaut, Temper and Beast are also here, but again, they don’t do much to stand out.
Professor X still refers to the teams as “my X-Men” and “my people”, which rather supports Cyclops’ point in the last chapter about Xavier’s possessive attitude to them. On the other hand, Rogue is very much on board with being “my X-Men”, and Xavier undercuts Cyclops in another way by choosing to stay in the prison.
He takes seriously Scurvy’s claim that he has a fatal brain tumour. When fighting Scurvy in psychic form, he appears in his Krakoan-era costume, complete with the Cerebro helmet.
VILLAINS:
Scurvy gets an origin flashback. (His first name, Phillip, isn’t new – it came up in his debut in Free Comic Book Day: Blood Hunt / X-Men.)
According to Scurvy, he used to be handsome. He met Corina Ellis when he went on her podcast to argue that “not all mutants were dangerous”. They had a relationship which he seems to recall as flirtatious, but seems, reading between the lines, to involve her getting him to use his psychic powers for her benefit. He doesn’t explain what happened to him physically, but the implication is that it’s to do with his brain tumour (of which more below).
In the previous chapter, Corina told Scurvy to prove that he really was as powerful as he claimed. He reads this as her doubting him, and thinks it’s the first time this has happened. He seems to find this unsettling at the least. He appears to be in love with her, and describes himself in narration as a “fool” who will be despised by his “own people”, so he’s not completely lacking in self-awareness.
He is indeed a powerful enough psychic to hold his own against Professor X (even if he loses in the end) and to keep two teams of X-Men in paralysing pain and suspended in mid-air. This is apparently what Ellis referred to in the previous chapter as the “White Light Protocol”. He seems to be able to throw everyone around as well – at least, I assume that’s what he’s doing on page 8 when Juggernaut falls on top of Rogue. Admittedly, Psylocke doesn’t seem to be subjected to the attack and Kid Omega isn’t around. Professor X appears able to shrug the attack off.
In a slightly confusing speech, Scurvy tells Professor X that “You are not the only one of your kind. There are five of us. Were five of us. The boy. Harvey X, he was called. He died… We call ourselves the Avians, and we wanted no part of your bloody wars.” Is Professor X one of the Avians or not? Scurvy claims that all of the Avians, and Professor X (if he’s not one of them), have a fatal tumour on the brain steam. The mysterious “Inmate X” is said to be the “last Avian”, which begs the question of who the others were – even if Professor X, Scurvy and Harvey X all count, there’s still one more.
Corina Ellis: We see for the first time the podcast that was mentioned in X-Men #35 (when the board who appointed her to run the prison described her as a “glorified podcaster”). She tells us that mutants killed her brother.
She has a network of “sonic-cannon-equipped satellites” in space, emblazoned with the P logo we’ve seen before – this week’s Sentinels confirms that the P stands for Perimeter. She claims that she can use it to destroy both X-Men bases – or possibly the entire surrounding towns – though she does back down to the extent of letting Jubilee and Beast go.
Captain Ezra is still the basically professional one. Note that he calls Scurvy by his real name.
Blob, Wild Child and Siryn appear as trustees. They have a pledge to recite about being innately evil and shameful. Siryn appears to have free will and claims that Ellis is not bluffing.
Sarah Gaunt is still chained up in the basement.
REFERENCES:
Page 4 panel 2: Corina slapped Scurvy on page 12 of X-Men #9.
Page 9 and page 10 panel 1: Rogue visited Harvey X, and Harvey X died, in issue #1.
Page 13 panel 2: “When we first met, I’m sorry I belted you.” Issue #2. Wolverine marched up to Ransom and told him to go away, Gambit accidentally hit Ransom with an energy blast from the Eye of Agamotto, and Ransom threw the first punch.
Page 20 panel 2: “We have Sarah Gaunt incarcerated. You brought her to us, Rogue.” Issue #5.
Siryn seems way out of character. Seems like a weird choice for a trustee.
Ooof, with the best will in the world, this was *rough*. Too many individual character beats seem off – Rogue chastising Cyclops for having Magneto on his team when she used to date him; Ellis being portrayed as a cartoonish villain (satellite lasers? Seriously?) who at the same time is apparently meant to have pathos because of her dead brother; no one else besides Rogue and Scott having any opinion about Graymalkin and the mutants imprisoned there… it’s a level of amateur writing I wasn’t expecting from Simone.
This whole thing is just not great, it’s like…a vase suspended at the moment of shattering or something, it’s recognisably X-Men but every part of it is busted.
This whole crossover has been rough, and this was the roughest installment. You’ve got a ton of X-Men, and almost none of them did anything but stand there are watch a conversation. And the status quo is that we’re exactly back where we started – Ellis let Beast, Calico and Jubilee go, but got to keep Siryn, Blob and dozens of other nameless mutants.
While the plot will have to move on, I can’t imagine how either team can actually let this go. Even if Cyclops wants to leave Xavier locked up, there’s still a whole prison he wanted to break, and one that now has doomsday weapons. And Rogue is still mad they didn’t spring Xavier.
The whole dialogue between Cyclops and Rogue seemed poorly characterized, and it’s bizarre that Wolverine never piped up as Cyclops’s most frequent foil.
Lastly, hasn’t it been the case for decades the Juggernaut is immune to telepathy as long as his helmet holds?
Is there a line by Ellis where she says, “Who’s a glorified podcaster now?” as she reveals her doomsday lasers? That would put this right over the top.
I guess the concern about Graymalkin seeming too much like a low-rent Orchis wasn’t seen as a problem to the extent that they wanted more of a comparison with Orchis. It’s becoming all the more obvious they made a major misstep by ruining Hickman’s Orchis. I think this would work somewhat better if the remnants of Orchis were left after Fall and Rise to serve as villains for now. The original Orchis (minus the AI contingent), not the genocidal/Nazi Orchis from post-Hickman.
Yeah, this doesn’t work at all. The big moment of confrontation with the two teams facing Ellis feels completely unearned, like the draft of a pin-up foldout lacking any genuine emotional pull: there’s just nothing there.
No history, no ongoing character relations (or tensions), no intricate team dynamics, no content whatsoever. Just s glorified set piece to prop up Scott and Rogue as they respectively lecture the reader on their Very Strong Opinions.
That “Magneto is evil” bit alone was enough to break my suspension of disbelief completely, and it made me overly aware that Simone does not actually have a strong grasp on the characters’ publishing history (see: everything and anything written at any time other than the 90s or the 60s, but maybe especially X-Men: Legacy, with Rogue, Magneto and Gambit in cahoots).
I get the debt of gratitude with Rogue and Xavier, but I also think family history has been rewritten so much that this doesn’t really gel with Mystique and Destiny’s existence..
Also, what a weirdly uneventful climax. Not only do we default to status quo, but this creates absolutely no momentum for upcoming issues of either series.
A crossover acting as a teaser…?
Aff. I don’t know.
On top of all the other reasons this doesn’t work, the panel homaging “Professor Xavier is a jerk!” is really jarring. Even if it’s meant to be some sort of layered meaning thing, Rogue is one who likes Xavier in this story! Just like a gigantic wink in the middle of the story for no reason.
Guys, the satellites are even more stupid than you think. They’re not space lasers. They’re *sound-based weapons*. In space.
Warden Ellis had a remote control, ready to activate laser satellites, and the following actions…
… Psylocke or Prof. D mind zap her, Cyclops blasts the control out of her hands, Gambit uses magic to disable it, Nightcrawler teleports the control away, Magik teleports Ellis to another dimension, Jubilee cries the control with her fireworks,Temper freezes or flame blasts the control…
… never occur to any of them? Two teams of X-Men plus Xavier just give up?
Also: “Let my people go” felt forced and wrong. The conflict between Rogue and Cyclops was flimsy. If you have a dozen or so X-Men, give them something to do.
Nice art, at least.
“He doesn’t explain what happened to him physically, but the implication is that it’s to do with his brain tumour (of which more below).”
Scurvy says “She wanted to know about my powers. I told her, every time I used them, it ate at me. Inside.” Presumably the idea is the more he uses his powers, the quicker he dies, which is why he was reluctant to use them in X-Men 9.
I’m not liking the implication that Xavier has had a brain tumor since the early days of the X-Men. His body has been killed and resurrected or cloned both before and during Krakoa and somehow that never healed it? Plus, you’d think the other characters would have noticed by now. In the X-Men/ Alpha Flight crossover in 1985, Maddie gets turned into a healer who can sense sickness. Wouldn’t she have noticed? In X-Men 200-201. Xavier almost dies and is saved by Sh’iar technology. Somehow the brain tumor was never noticed?
“Cyclops reprimands Rogue for “bringing kids into a war zone” – given that the Schism was all about Cyclops wanting to train mutants as soldiers, presumably it’s the lack of training and experience that bothers him about the Outliers, more than their age.”
No. that doesn’t work either- aside from the time he brought baby Nathan with him into battle with some trolls, Scott had no problem bringing Kitty along on a rescue mission several hours after she discovered her powers.
“Bizarrely, she yells at Cyclops for having Magneto on his team, even though he’s been on the X-Men’s side for years”
Yeah, criticizing Scott for having Xorn on his team would make more sense.
” She claims that she can use it to destroy both X-Men bases – or possibly the entire surrounding towns”- She says Merle, not the Factory, so I think she was threatening the entire town. Which means that this is another “Xavier backs down after anti-mutant villain threatens to kill humans” story, just like the last Hellfire Gala.
The whole thing with the satellites was a contrived ending to prevent the X-Men from winning. First, If Dr. Ellis’s plan was to use the threat of destroying towns to get the X-Men to back down, then why didn’t she tell the X-Men about her satellite weapon sooner? If Xavier had defeated Scurvy a little earlier and Illyana teleported them out, they would have gotten out before she told them about the satellites.
Second, once Scurvy was defeated, why couldn’t Xavier and Kwannon just telepathically prevent the people controlling the satellites from pulling the trigger?
“Her strength of feeling seems to be in part because she views Professor X as the “first” person who “believed in me”, something which probably wouldn’t go down well with her adoptive mother Mystique.”
I think Rogue means that Xavier was the first person to believe she could be a *good* person. Mystique and Destiny raised her to be a member of the Brotherhood of EVIL Mutants. And Mystique and Destiny have a skewed sense of right and wrong. By the time they adopted her, Mystique had left her own son to die and Destiny had helped Sinister experiment on children. Deep down, Rogue knows they should never have been allowed to raise her.
So who do we think Inmate X is? The clues are he’s a telepath and he’s dying. I’ve heard several people speculate it’s Nate Grey, since he fights both criteria.
Agreed with everyone that this was a bad issue. The biggest problem is that Breevrot mandated that Scott’s team and Rogue’s team had to be at odds. So we get scenes like Rogue punching Scott into a cliff for no real reason. But another problem is it felt like nothing happened. The X-Men didn’t rescue Charles and Siryn, they didn’t find out who Inmate X is.
Even more baffling to me than the Magneto thing is Simone writing Siryn like she’s always been a villain and not like only having that be a thing she did for charitably half a year at best.
“cries” should be “fries” above.
@Taibak: seriously? I didn’t closely enough to pick up on the “sound weapons in space” thing, but… wow, that’s dumb.
Also. I do think it’s fairly explicit that 1) Scurvy is artificially aged and drained by the use of his powers, hence his appearance (waning from their use, rather from the supposed tumor) and 2) that Xavier is being very explicitly addressed as an Avian himself, both given the bizarre tumor bit and the way the phrasing (admittedly clumsy) goes.
That being said, if we’re doing the Neo again…
Xavier has been a member of the Bird People all along. Who’d have guessed? It puts the reintroduction of Red Raven in the pages of X-Men in a very different light.
They’re doing the Inhumans taking the place of mutants again…but this time with Red Raven.
One more thing- Kwannon is called “Pyslocke” this issue. Well, that’s one way to distinguish her from Betsy.
I’m assuming the other unnamed Avian is Cassandra Nova since the only visible commonalities among them seem to be baldness and telepathy.
This really felt like a crossover that no one really wanted to do yet but had to for scheduling reasons. It wasn’t long enough for the material, at least when you count two issues having to mostly tell the same story from both sides.
Other ways to handle the threat: Everyone leaves, Scott immediately calls Carol Danvers to cash in that alliance with the Avengers, Scott teleports his team back in five minutes later to inform Ellis that the team with the space station have now dealt with the killer satellites and are monitoring for similar satellites. Ellis can keep the Professor, but he’ll be taking her “trustees” now along with any other of the unnamed mutants they’re holding. (Convoluted but the point is that you should probably not have him and the Avengers pledge togetherness immediately before giving him a killer space satellite plot.)
More in general.. Ellis keeps going between interesting and not. I do like the idea of someone who’s engaging in a psychological war with the X-teams. I didn’t like having them go so far to the “hated and feared like never before” well from the start of this era, but that aside the basic idea of her is better than your generic Sentinel or person just trying to zap them all dead dead. But then this crossover gave us her underestimating the X-Men badly earlier to a stupid extent and just playing the generic villain more. The parts about the Trustees is interesting — I’m taking it as another spin on the Hounds and conversion therapy references. Breaking down the characters and then rebuilding them obedient to her vision. That’s not original but it’s more interesting for a psychological villain. More of this, less generic supervillain with laser satellites! Please.
@Jon R: The Trustees would have been *infinitely* more palatable if they were mutants who actually sought out Greymalkin for the purposes of “conversion therapy” – I could see Wild Child reciting that pledge based on where he was when we last saw him, maybe even Toad. But having it be Blob was just gross and uncomfortable, and not in the way Simone probably intended it to be.
Given that we all know Gail Simone is a much better writer than this storyline would suggest… and we’ve seen considerable evidence towards Breevort’s heavy-handed influence on the current status of the line…
I’m apt to put a lot of the blame on Breevort and suggest he’s just not the best editor for the situation. I think he’s maybe just a little -too- old-school and rooted in the ’90s and trying to embrace all the old stuff (titles, logos, lineups, crossovers, minis…) in a desperate grab for the imaginary lost audience who hasn’t read X-Men in 30 years.
I’m legit dismayed that the X-Men didn’t do more to rescue the trustees. Siryn is literally family, Blob has proven himself over the past few years, and even Wild Child is okay when given a chance. But to be all “Eh, okay, see ya” as they take Jubes and Beast and call it a day…
Also, I’ll believe Xavier has a tumor when I see and they give us a convincing reason HOW he has it given that he’s on his what… fifth or so body? I don’t buy Scurvy as a reliable narrator.
I really just want to see what Gail can do when not editorially constrained. But she’s like PAD in the ’90s or Al Ewing anytime–brilliant when left alone, but far too often derailed by crossovers, editorial interference, and other factors.
Regarding some of the issues raised:
– Juggernaut was immune to telepathy when he had the Cyttorak armour and was his avatar. Now (since the 2020 Juggernaut miniseries) he wears armour made from the ‘scraps’ of Cyttorak’s previous armour and is no longer directly an avatar, so he may not have the same mystical advantages he had previously.
– Rogue’s comment about having Magneto on the team I think, rather than a judgement of Erik himself, was intended to highlight how Cyclops was concerned about not appearing to be a terrorist group releasing the criminal Xavier when he publicly has the most feared mutant on the planet among his ranks.
– Corina Ellis had no remote command for the satellites. As far as the X-Men knew, even by attacking her telepathically it is not certain that anyone else from the command centre could operate the satellites. And in all likelihood telepath defences must have been provided inside the prison.
– Syrin is written as being forced to serve among the Trustees, she is in tears when she tells Rogue that Ellis is not bluffing. And Blob seems to repeat phrases that have been brainwashed into him.
In general, I think the main difference between the two teams should be that Cyclops’ group should be the one “waving the mutant flag”, also acting in a “political” manner by demanding a more formal recognition for mutants, while Rogue’s should be the supergroup more open to coexistence among humans and mainly concerned with helping others and providing a safe haven for those on the run.
This is why Cyclops is most concerned about the repercussions of storming a prison which, as far as we know, is supposed to be a totally legal facility full of righteously indicted criminals, or at least that should be the public image of it. Cyke intervenes only to negotiate the release of Beast (on whose guilt regarding the crimes of his former version there would be a discussion that would give Jen Walters and Matt Murdock a headache…).