Exceptional X-Men #7 annotations
EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #7
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artist: Carmen Carnero
Colour artist: Nolan Woodard
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort
This isssue is bannered as an “X-Manhunt” tie in, with the tag “Collateral Damage” instead of a part number. On his Substack, Tom Brevoort described it as a “red skies” crossover and he wasn’t kidding – the “crossover” consists of a two page scene in which the cast learn that “X-Manhunt” is happening, exchange some thoughts on it, and then get back to the plot. That’s literally it.
THE CORE CAST
Emma Frost. The issue opens with a five page monologue by Emma accompanied by a montage of images from her life. The general thrust is that she’s been through a cycle of building safe havens for mutants, trying to escape the human world, and seeing them collapse – hence, she’s experimenting with “something else”. Presumably, by that she means training the mutants within the human world instead of withdrawing from it. (The Massachusetts Academy had mostly human students, but it was still an elite boarding school and so outside the normal world in other ways.) This is more something that Kate insisted upon, but she seems to be coming round to it.
Axo calls her “aloof and manipulative”, and sees her as an ominous example of what happens if you actually use psychic powers like his. Kate defends Emma (presumably to preserve mentor-ish authority) but Emma doesn’t actually contest it, nor could she.
She regards Krakoa as a lost homeland even for mutants too young to have gone there.
Kate Pryde. She has conflicted feelings about Professor X, or at least feels obliged to present him to the kids as a morally ambiguous figure.
Axo. He’s suckered by the sense that Mr Xenos understands him. But he has qualms about Xenos’ harvesting of personal data, apparently because his powers have made him particularly cautious about accidentally invading people’s privacy. When Xenos starts pitching really dodgy privacy-invading ideas to him, Axo tries to make his excuses and get out.
He seems frustrated that the others don’t understand him and seems to doubt whether they genuinely like him at all (despite his increased control over his powers). He claims not to be bothered about how he looks and is glad to have learned to switch his powers off – though he seems unsure about that when Xenos argues that he’s constraining his mutant “gift” for no reason.
His powers are ineffective against Mr Sinister; Sinister claims this is because he has no real emotions to manipulate, but see below. It’s possible that this lack of feedback is what makes Axo (wrongly) feel that his relationship with Xenos is untainted – he can subconsciously sense his lack of effect on the guy. Sinister seems to think that Axo’s powers can help him manipulate the emotional profiles of his app users.
He is indeed the “tarnishedmoodring” that Sophie Cuckoo was exchanging messages with in NYX; her name is “just_sophie”.
Melée. She doesn’t mind getting a black eye in training, and thinks it’ll “look badass”. Her fighting is still underwhelming at best – despite having the more aggressive attitude, it’s Bronze who comes off better ins parring.
She sends the others “ten videos about mutant politics a day”, including ones about Krakoa. She considers “important history”, but also views as something that happened to the previous generation. Despite this, the story seriously wants us to believe that none of the kids, including Melée, has ever heard of Charles Xavier – a man whose involvement with the X-Men has been a matter of public record since the Grant Morrison run, who was a major figure in the very Krakoa that Melée has been researching, and who telepathically addressed the whole world to announce the founding of Krakoa, an event that she must surely have experienced first hand. None of the adult characters seem to find this odd, so apparently we really are supposed to accept this as a gap in the next generation’s knowledge.
Despite her spotty knowledge of mutant history, Melée has heard of Fred Hampton (1948-1969) and has at least a superficial knowledge of his views on revolutionary education.
Bronze. She quite likes the idea that their group is a “fight club”. She gets upset rather quickly when Axo loses his temper with the group and voices his doubts about the genuineness of their friendship.
Iceman. He runs in to trigger the two-page X-Manhunt tie-in scene.
VILLAIN
Mr Sinister. Xenos is really Mr Sinister, which is obvious from the cover. This makes the reveal an odd cliffhanger – though to be fair, the cliffhanger isn’t just the reveal, as it also extends to Sinister refusing to let Axo go.
As Xenos, he accepts Axo’s concerns about personal data, but argues that someone else will use the technology if he doesn’t, and at least he’s a “responsible steward”. He claims that it doesn’t matter to him what people say about his appearance, because he’s the boss. An obvious question is where this business, with what seems like a substantial human staff, actually came from – has Sinister been building it in the background for a while, or was there a real Xenos that Sinister replaced?
Sinister tries at first to keep up his Xenos persona while selling Axo on his real plan – which is something to do with emotional signatures – but drops the charade once it’s clear that Axo isn’t buying it. Sinister claims that Axo’s powers don’t work on him because he has no emotions to manipulate, but this seems dubious – for all his shallowness and disconnection, the Krakoan-era Sinister certainly had emotions, even if they were things like frustration at his plans failing. Possibly a better argument would be that Axo’s powers require some genuine empathy to play off, which Sinister does lack.
FOOTNOTES
Page 2: Emma’s photographs of past loves show Cyclops (in Hellfire Gala costume), Iron Man (and their mock wedding from Invincible Iron Man vol 5 #10) and… well, given the pointy ears and the water, I assume that’s meant to be Namor. There’s a document with a Hellfire Club seal in the bottom left.
Pages 3-4: This is the party to launch Krakoa, from the end of House of X #6. Storm and Siryn are among the flying characters, and Magneto is clearly visible in the foreground. I’m not sure who the two people with him are – one looks like Bling but the build seems wrong. To Emma’s right, Exodus, Dazzler, Cyclops, Wolverine and Jean Grey are all celebrating (and a blonde woman in a yellow costume with lots of pouches who I suspect is a miscoloured Hope).
Page 5: This seems to be a montage of Emma teaching children in Genosha before the Sentinel attack (given the human buildings in the background); a shot of Utopia, the X-Men’s mutant “nation” in San Francisco Bay; a shot of Krakoa; and a panel conflating the Sentinel attack on Genosha with Emma cradling a dead body that I don’t honestly recognise – perhaps just a generic victim of Orchis’ attack on the Hellfire Gala.
Page 13 panel 1: Melée quit the team and returned in issue #5.
Page 15 panel 4: Fred Hampton was the deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party, who was killed by US law enforcement in Chicago.
Page 18 panel 5: The “rumours of the new adult-onset mutants” are the 3K storyline in X-Men.
“Emma’s photographs of past loves show Cyclops (in Hellfire Gala costume), Iron Man (and their mock wedding from Invincible Iron Man vol 5 #10) and… well, given the pointy ears and the water, I assume that’s meant to be Namor.”
There’s also the Cuckoos and bizarrely. Storm.
“Emma cradling a dead body that I don’t honestly recognise – perhaps just a generic victim of Orchis’ attack on the Hellfire Gala.”
That’s probably Lourdes Chantel.
“has Sinister been building it in the background for a while, or was there a real Xenos that Sinister replaced”
Sheldon Xenos’s initials are S.X.- in other words, ESSEX. The kind of pun Sinister enjoys. That suggests it’s a fake identity.
Melee. Bronze and Axe are the most ignorant teenagers in the world. So far they’ve never heard of Kitty Pryde, Emma Frost, Iceman or Charles Xavier. I’m surprised Sinister bothered to use a fake name- if he’d approached them as Mr. Sinister these idiots probably wouldn’t have realized he was a supervillain.
“Sinister claims that Axo’s powers don’t work on him because he has no emotions to manipulate, but this seems dubious ”
Ewing seems to be interpreting Sinister as having no emotions because of what Apocalypse did to Nathaniel Essex. As you said, that’s not how other writers have depicted ihm.
The ending demonstrates that the kids are not ready to handle an A-List villain. Axo had no idea what to do when he ran into a villain who was immune to his powers. I suspect that the kids’ inexperience will be a theme of the arc.
I recently read Eve’s new book “Original Sins” about the sordid history of indigenous and black Americans schooling and it only made me more confused as to why a lot of this book feels so milquetoast. Like – it’s fine, nearly good but having now read her nonfiction, and knowing she’s a cool, radical thinker, it just feels like her comics work lacks some of that verve.
It especially strikes me with stuff like Krakoa, which in Marvel time should be even more recent than it was for us, being entirely foreign to the kids here. And yeah, stuff like Fred Hampton – an important black radical figure – being made reference to by kids who only kind of barely know the world historic newsmakers from the mutant world?
I actually have to also think of the Prodigy subplot in NYX with mutants portrayed as a diaspora but in weird, sweeping ways that didn’t quite make sense. I know the 616 is a wild place where a lot happens but I wish there was a consistent sense of what the mutant community is like and how different branches of that community feel about mutant history
On some level, that’s one thing lost from Krakoa: it was entirely consistent but there was at least a sense that mutantdom had a character to it and something to sort of organize people’s thoughts about it. And post-Krakoa seems like an opportunity to do that too but no one seems to agree about what even happened – but not in a “every side has it’s own reasons for why and how things happened” way but, as noted – they don’t seem to agree if it was front page news or forgettable.
Which, yeah, brings me back to Eve. It feels like she’s the sort of person I’d expect to have a more considered take on things. But there is not a lot of care put into how this generation, even if they just missed it, feels about something like Krakoa. They must be basically the same age as the Children of the Atom folks who seemed to treat mutants as something everyone was kind of obsessed with (which makes sense, I think?)
It also seems like Prodigy was really cognizant, albeit again weird, about identifying a history of mutant freedom struggles. Not that these kids shouldn’t be also interested in black and queer and whatever freedom struggles, but isn’t it weird they don’t know about Professor X? Or about recent mutant history past some TikToks, seemingly?
Maybe I’m too leftist theory brained but I have a hard time not reckoning with that stuff as it comes up (or doesn’t)
“There’s also the Cuckoos and bizarrely. Storm.”
Well there is that cover to X-Men #152, with Storm and Emma scissoring.
I think the reason these kids seem so ignorant is that they’re supposed to be just ordinary kids who are mutants, not X-kids (the comic’s
title notwithstanding). It might be overdone a touch, but I’m sure most real world teens wouldn’t know who Professor Charles Xavier is, so these lot also have no idea. It makes no sense in a continuity regard, but it does ground them in the mundane, which is what the current story requires.
I’m sure the Uncanny kids could tell you Unus the Untouchable’s middle name.
“the Uncanny kids could tell you Unus the Untouchable’s middle name.”
Yes, it’s “the”.
I’m not sure it’s that unreasonable that the kids don’t know who Xavier is. (Melee notwithstanding, she should absolutely know… unless we’re meant to take from this that her vocal interest in mutant politics is very shallow).
Even given the sliding timeline, Cassandra outing Xavier must have been years ago, well before any of these three manifested powers. And almost immediately after the Morrison run Xavier is depowered, in hiding, in space, dethroned as the mutant mover and shaker by Cyclops and Emma in the Utopian era, and then dead.
And he didn’t introduce himself in the ‘while you slept the world changed’ speech, did he? (I honestly don’t remember).
Also, I didn’t get it before now, but TarnishedMoodRing is probably an Elden Ring reference? I didn’t play it, but Tarnished is something important in the lore of that game.
So Brevoort really acknowledged this was just a “Red Skies” issue publicly? I gotta give a little respect there, you don’t usually hear that kind of candor from the folks responsible for selling these things.
Xavier was the co-leader of the Krakoan nation, which was considered the most important country in the world for a short time. Xavier, Magneto, and Apocalypse met with the United Nations. It’d be like real-world teens not knowing Biden, Trump, or Putin. They’d discuss it in class. “So, there’s a new nation and they are saying that they are our new gods. They’re going to be giving us strange yet helpful drugs that we have to all take.”
Also, if a bald-headed guy representing mutants appears psychically to all the world, I think that’s going to be a huge news story. Certainly every teen would be doing an internet search, it’d be a major discussion point on all social media. Someone would figure out who the guy who just told them the entire world had changed.
The sheer number of TikToks that would be made with a “while you slept, the world changed” would mean that Xavier would have more recognition among young people than before.
Here, I’ll get the fictional youths started: open with a picture of a regular Cool Ranch Doritos bag. Play “while you slept…” and fade to black. Then, play “… the world changed” and show a picture of Flaming Hot Cool Ranch Doritos.
Anyway, I liked the rest of the issue, even if not knowing who Prof. X is seems implausible. Emma’s sadness and Axo’s situation were standout scenes.
I think Professor X and Krakoa being very well known in-universe would conflict with the “world outside your window” pretense that Marvel tries to stick with.
So back in the closet they go.
It does, but it’s definitely not the way Krakoa was written from 2019 to 2024. They are trying to shove it under the rug now, it seems.
I always thought that the “unforgivable act” Xavier made at the end of the Krakoan era should have been wiping knowledge of Krakoa from all of baseline humanity’s minds. I thought that would work a lot better than Xavier pretending to align with the Machines. The majority of mutants would hate Xavier either for not appreciating what Krakoa meant to mutantkind or simply for tampering with billions of minds. Especially if Brevoort wants to ignore most aspects of Krakoa. Xavier could be on the run, similar to this X-Manhunt thing, with mutants not trusting him, and they could just have jettisoned this Greymalkin stuff, which is so very uninteresting.
I’m a professor teaching media, politics, and public opinion, and kids who think they’re activists not knowing basic recent historical things is not at all unusual (though I do find it jarring that Kitty et al. wouldn’t think it weird). You have to pitch Xavier a bit differently than he was during Krakoa – something like MLK crossed with Zelenskyy, shifting back now to maybe like Jesse Jackson – but I think it’s only a mild stretch.
As much as I find myself liking parts of this, other parts are maddening. The asides to the “camera” are terrible storytelling! Especially if you’re only doing it at most once per issue, the art has to sell it hard. This time the art doesn’t break from the structure of the Axo/Xenos conversation at all – it took me a few looks to figure out it was meant to be narration.
No-Prize: Marvel Earth-616 , especially New York City, faces literal apocalyptic crisis practically every week, so attention spans are really just that short , and after all , it’s only these 2 girls who are shown to not immediately recognize who “Xavier” is. Also , maybe the onset of x-gene mutant powers at puberty affects memory , since it’s canon a lot of mutants had / have migraines at first when their mutations activate. Finally , maybe Charles did something psionic or whatever (even magical like Dr.Strange’s global customized amnesia spell as requested by Spider-Man) to the minds of emerging mutants worldwide since it’s been a canon point of contention for a while now that even he considers himself as having become more or less obsolete as a leader (see the finale to Planet X) to the upcoming generations of Earth mutant youth
@Michael: Sheldon Xenos’s initials are S.X.- in other words, ESSEX. The kind of pun Sinister enjoys. That suggests it’s a fake identity.
On the other hand, this is the Marvel Universe, where sometimes puns like that just happen out of sheer coincidence.
@Daibhid C- Good point. There was a Viper story where she used the name Leona Hiss and the dialogue implied that she stole the name from a real person. Although you have to wonder- did Viper have her minions spend hours looking for a snake-sounding name?
[…] X-MEN #7. (Annotations here.) Not a core part of “X-Manhunt”, but it gets the banner anyway on the strength of a […]
@Ryan T. (and everyone, really): I don’t think we can underestimate how keen Brevoor is in deemphasizing Krakoa, and steadily pushing onwards in whatever direction, really.
Yes, it’s very present in NYX (cancelled at this point) and this book (which is still in a slightly odd position in relation to the two actually core X-Men titles).
But it feels very, very obvious that no serious collective effort was put into charting how different characters and factions would feel post-Krakoa, and that has obvious effects across the board.
I agree “real world” is a setting that’s missing a lot from X-Men titles, especially in terms of recurrent human characters or even setting’s (Harry’s Hideaway, anyone?). And I think this book amd Uncanny make sound efforts in chanfing that situation.
But the entire editorial design seems to default to moving beyond visionary bombast and deep shakes to the Marvel Universe.
In that context, it makes full sense that not a lot of this is being properly thought through (there’s no real thought of global narrative architecture, or of where the lign will be in five tears time).
And while I empathize a lot with what you’re saying, no ammount of talent or pedigree as a radical thinker means anything in a Breevort-mandated X-Line, I reckon.
This was the person that made it a point to state that there was no instory siggestion of a throuple dynamic between Cyclops, Wolverine, and Jean, no?
Conservative politics chart well with conservative attittudes towards protecting company assets.
It does make for shitter art and media, though – and a lot of missed opportunities.
Yes, that’s Lourdes Chantel, dead, in Emma Frost’s arms.
I was surprised by the photo of Emma’s wedding to Tony. How can there be such a photo, when Emma married Tony as Hazel Kendal…?
As for the kids not knowing who Xavier is, I actually don’t find that to be that far-fetched. Part of me is saying that as a teacher. Part of me is saying that after seeing Clarkson’s Farm and knowing that Kaleb didn’t know who Clarkson was when he met him, didn’t know who David Cameron was, and thought Rishi Sunak was the president.
I’ve had the same problem with both Ewing’s kids here and Simone’s Outliers – even with the understanding that the FtA-era writers don’t necessarily want to engage with Krakoa any more than they have to, it absolutely does strain credulity to the breaking point for both groups of new mutants to be so completely ignorant of *everything* mutant-related. They don’t know the X-Men, they don’t know Orchis, they don’t know Krakoa, they don’t know Xavier…
I almost wish all the new kids could come from the White Hot Room/Resurrected Genosha generation, and be among those who chose to leave Krakoa during its last visit. At least being born in a paradise would explain why they’re both ignorant of and seemingly untouched by anything that’s happened on Earth in the past few years.
@Diana- In the Outliers’ case, Ransom is hiding that he’s Sunspot’s cousin, so he seems to being playing dumb. And Callco was raised by an abusive parent who isolated her from the world. Plus, the Outliers clearly knew who the X-Men were and the Brotherhood were in their introductory scene. The Exceptional kids, on the other hand, have been raised in a normal environment but have no clue who Xavier, Iceman, Kitty Pryde and Emma Frost are.
@Michael: That doesn’t address the problem of them essentially being untouched by the past few events. Wouldn’t they have been judged by the AXE Celestial? Wouldn’t they have been forced through a gate during the last Gala, or at the very least feel Xavier’s compulsion to do so? Were they not targeted by Orchis efforts across the US?
I’m not saying these kids need to be talking about or even referring to those events specifically; but the fact that they happened makes Ewing’s and Simone’s suggestions that these are tabula rasa characters a *lot* harder to swallow.
Nobody ever mentions that time (in comics) when the USA turned into a fascist state for several weeks nor that the mutants were running a quisling puppet state in California which was given to them by evil Steve Rogers.
Beast, at least, has the excuse of being cloned from the 70s. Emma was running that country.
Honestly, it stems from the sliding timeline. It makes all those world-shattering events follow so closely after one another, they have to be memory-holed almost immediately after they happen, otherwise nobody in the Marvel universe could experience anything outside those crises. Crisises. Crisii.
It’s not about presenting the world outside your window, it’s about presenting anybody as having anything resembling a remotely human life experience.