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

UNCANNY X-MEN vol 6 #9
“Off the Leash”
Writer: Gail Simone
Artist: Andrei Bressan
Colour artist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

THE X-MEN:

Rogue. She’s willing to lead the team but wants “everybody” to have a say in decisions – which in practice seems to mean just the established team and not the Outliers. She assigns each of the veterans to mentor one of the kids. Wolverine endorses this decision and calls her a “pretty fine leader”, though she seems genuinely unsure whether he’s being backhanded by comparing her to Professor X and Cyclops. (This seems like paranoia on her part, since there’s no obvious reason for him to be sarcastic.)

Gambit. He’s annoyed that Nightcrawler didn’t buy the beer he asked for in issue #6. Other than that, he doesn’t have much to do in this issue.

Wolverine. He’s sure that each of the Outliers is hiding something – that’s fairly obvious in the case of Ransom and Calico but less so with Jitter and Deathdream. As in issue #2, he doesn’t trust them, but he now thinks the bigger problem is that they don’t “trust themselves”. He approves of Rogue’s mentoring scheme and volunteers to take responsiblity for Ransom. Logan seems to identify to some extent with Ransom as a triggerhappy loner. He apologises for being less than welcoming to the newcomers, and gives Ransom some praise as a lyncphpin of his group. His instinct is to keep an eye on the Outliers when they’re sent to the mall, but Jubilee talks him out of it, with the predictable disastrous consequences.

Jubilee. She’s slightly surprised to be assigned to mentor Deathdream, but Rogue argues that he needs some of her “sparkle”. (Jubilee’s also a former member of the undead, which seems at least vaguely relevant.) Jubilee does in fact make reasonable headway in bonding with him, and decides that the Outliers need to reconnect with their teenagerdom by hanging out at the mall like she used to. She seems to have in mind her normal life before she became a runaway and met the X-Men. Somehow, she has access to $1600 in cash to hand out to the Outliers as a mall budget (is this really going to attract less attention in 2025 than having someone tag along with a credit card?).

Nightcrawler. He argues with Gambit about beer. He can tell that Calico and Jitter should be left alone and steers Gambit away from them.

Ransom. He overhears the X-Men talking about how they don’t trust the Outliers, though he leaves before hearing the rest of the conversation. (Surely Wolverine senses him in the woods.) He immediately heads off to pack his bags and calls his cousin to pick him up, but Wolverine talks him into staying. This is all consistent with his explanation in issue #3 that he ran away from home at age 13 because it’s “better to belong to nothing than to belong where you aren’t wanted”. Apparently, being unwanted by the X-Men would be a dealbreaker for him even if the Outliers wanted him around.

The cousin, it turns out, is Sunspot, which he clearly hasn’t mentioned to the X-Men yet.

He seems unimpressed with his $400 shopping budget, saying that his shoes cost that. Again, he told us that he was from a rich family in issue #3, but if he’s been on the run since he was 13, how long has he had these shoes? For that matter, how does he have a mobile phone? The fact that he’s in touch with Sunspot might be significant here.

As Wolverine points out, he does behave like a team leader when the Wolfpack attack, and he’s very protective towards his fellow Outliers – whether that’s because he feels strongly about them as individuals, or simply because he feels responsible given his group role, is open to interpretation.

Calico. She enjoys dance, and says it was the “only thing I ever loved aside from, you know” – presumably meaning her horse Ember. Her paranoid and protective mother never let her dance with a partner, so Jitter dances with her. Nightcrawler seems fairly convinced that this is a “private” meeting between the two of them, but Jitter takes it as read that Calico wants a “male” partner, and you have to wonder whether same-sex relationships are even in Calico’s frame of reference.

She’s never had money of her own to spend before and has no idea whether $400 is a lot.

Calico doesn’t bring Ember to the mall with her – the Outliers are quite explicitly driven there in a van – but when the Wolfpack attack, Calico calls Ember’s name and the horse inexplicably appears. Nobody has time to ask about this. Calico obviously wasn’t able to do this when she was a prisoner in Graymalkin, but was that because Ember was too far away, or because her powers were being suppressed? As usual, she’s quite effective in a fight when powered up, but her tactical sense isn’t up to much, advising Deathdream to find somewhere to hide instead of guarding him.

Jitter. She uses her power – which she explained in issue #3 as being able to do anything for one minute – to be the best male ballet dancer in the world in order to partner Calico. She normally shops at thrift stores and doesn’t seem sure what to do with $400. Understandably, she doesn’t even try to use her skill-based powers against the Wolfpack and instead focusses on escaping.

Deathdream. He spends his time dramatically lurking around a nearby graveyard, but does seem to want Jubilee’s company. He dodges her questions about what he does to relax (we get a flashback of him rising from the dead to the horror of the people who seem to be about to autopsy him).

He tells Jubilee that he talks to his dead parents sometimes, but “They don’t remember me, and they are not fun to look at.” He mentioned in issue #3 that his mother was dead, but in that story he said that she had been able to tell him about his birth, which doesn’t seem to fit with them not remembering him. (He said that he spoke to her “months after she died”, so surely she must have been around for a few years at least?)

He doesn’t know what cinnamon pretzels are, but he really likes them, to the point where he drops his persona briefly.

His initial reaction to the Wolfpack is the same response we’ve seen from him to every threat so far – to stand unfazed and summon the dead to sort it out for him. Under this artist, they appear as indistinct inky black figures. Unfortunately, Deathdream’s dead “can’t see inorganic things”, which apparently extends to the Wolfpack cyborgs, and so they’re unable to fight for him, leaving him defenceless. (This might suggest that they aren’t actually ghosts but some sort of psychic attack.) He seems genuinely touched that Calico rescues him, and calls her “the first person to care if I die since I was 6 years old” – is that when his parents died?

The Wolfpack kill him, but we already know that his power allows him to die and return to life. What we don’t know is whether he can do that after major physical injury. We’ll find out next issue!

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS:

Ember shows up when Calico summons her, as already mentioned.

Sunspot is in touch with his cousin Ransom, and arranges for a car to collect him (presumably, Sunspot isn’t in New Orleans himself). We haven’t seen Sunspot since “Fall of X”. Technically, we don’t know that Ransom has told him about Haven, but presumably Sunspot knows that he’s with the X-Men and is keeping quiet about it for some reason. He tells Ransom not to “take any crap”.

Monet St Croix appears in the background of page 24 panel 4 as a prisoner at Graymalkin – in full costume, so apparently she’s only just arrived. We previously saw her in the bonus page of issue #1, in a flash forward where she seemed to be fighting Jitter and Deathdream.

VILLAINS:

The Wolfpack is the latest name for the cyborg Sentinel dogs that debuted in the Sentinels miniseries and appeared in the “Raid on Graymalkin” crossover. According to the sales pitch, these cyborg dogs are “urban”, “light, easy to transport”, with “unparallel tracking capabilities” and “loyal unto death”. They’re “safe” and “highly motivated”. Certainly, they’re a lot less obtrusive than a purple humanoid robots the size of a house. Despite being cyborgs created from stray dogs, the Wolfpack are apparently run by AI. In reality, the Wolfpack are dangerously uncontrollable, and even the kill switch doesn’t work. They kill a test subject at the prison, despite Larry Trask’s genuine attempts to stop it.

Wolfpack Sentinels have been stationed in numerous cities where the X-Men are active, in the hope that a training opportunity might present itself. According to Larry, the New Orleans contingent are “wonky” and prone to bloodlust – but the ones in the prison didn’t work properly either, so is the failure of this project being kept secret from Corina Ellis? Still, once unleashed in a shopping mall, the New Orleans Wolfpack do appear to attack the correct target and do as expected.

Jerry Greentree, a new character, seems to be a mid-ranking prison official working who gives the order to send the Wolfpack after the Outliers. He’s not meant to do this and we don’t find out in this issue what his motive is. Even the underlings who implement the order seem doubtful about the wisdom of letting the Wolfpack out in public. For some reason, the prison staff can only detect the Outliers when they leave Haven – something was shielding them before (maybe the Eye of Agamotto?).

Corina Ellis. She’s not happy about the Wolfpack being sent into the field, mostly because it screws up their media launch. She seems unaware that they were even out there in training.

Captain Ezra has a background cameo at the Prison.

Larry Trask gives a sales pitch on the Wolfpack Sentinels in which he talks up their abilities; their continued uncontrollability seems to come as a surprise to him. He’s alarmed to see the Wolfpack in action too, but unlike Ellis, his concern is that the technology isn’t ready. He also seems genuinely perturbed to see them being used against “kids”.

His role here sits a little oddly with Sentinels. In that book he was the Sentinel programme director, using nanotech to turn human soldiers into Sentinels. He’s a mutant with precognitive powers, and claimed to be motivated by visions of particular mutants who would “take us to the brink of extermination”. He had been foisted on Ellis against her will, and the dogs were her idea, in an attempt to create a Sentinel programme under her own control. Ellis’s first attempts were regular cyborg dogs, which were disasters because they rejected the implants. In this story, however, he seems to have been collaborating on creating them. Maybe Sentinels #5 will tie that together more neatly.

An unnamed foreign dignitary identified as “your eminence”. Larry’s audience for his sales pitch. Possibly this guy is meant to be President Lopez of Terra Verde from X-Men #8, but if so, he’s remarkably relaxed about the Beast no longer being for sale, plus he’s gained a sash. He was once a supporter of the original Sentinel project, but it apparently didn’t go well. Neither that fact, nor the obvious uncontrollability of the Wolfpack Sentinels, prevents him from ordering a consignment, with the intention of using them to kill political opponents.

FOOTNOTES:

Page 1 panel 1: Larry’s father is Bolivar Trask, the creator of the original Sentinels.

Page 9 panels 2-4. Nightcrawler ignored Gambit’s request for “Besson’s Dark” in issue #6.

Page 10 panel 1. The “prophecy that one [of the Outliers] might end all mutants” comes from Harvey X in issue #1 – though as I keep pointing out, Harvey didn’t actually say that. What he said was that one of the Outliers “is the Endling”, which would mean that one of them would be the last surviving mutant, but not that they would actually be responsible for bringing that about. Page 18 panel 1 refers to the same prophecy.

Page 10 panel 2. Logan was blinded by Sarah Gaunt in issue #3 and was still blind as of issue #6. He seemed fine in issues #7-8, though, so it seems a little odd that Rogue is talking as if he’s only just got his sight back. Presumably this is right after “Raid on Graymalkin” (which would fit with the X-Men still not having found out that much about the Outliers’ back stories).

Page 18 panel 3. Wolverine is basically correct that Ransom has always been the first Outlier to fight, though whether that points to him being keen to defend his friends or just triggerhappy may be more open to interpretation. In issue #2, Ransom throws the first punch against Wolverine (admittedly, after Gambit has just accidentally blasted the Outliers with the Eye of Agamotto). In issue #5, everyone is basically gathered outside Haven ready to fight Sarah Gaunt’s forces, so the issue of someone acting first doesn’t arise. In issue #6, Ransom promptly squares up the school bullies who attack Deathdream. In issue #7, he throws the first punch against Cyclops’ team (because he thinks Cyclops is about to fire on them).

Page 25 panel 2. Larry Trask’s “mutant hotspots” are the settings of X-Men, Exceptional X-Men, NYX and this book – i.e., most of the current team books. X-Force don’t really have a static base of operations and presumably nobody’s mad enough to try testing Sentinels on the government-sponsored X-Factor.