Juggernaut #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
JUGGERNAUT #1
“Picking Up the Pieces”
by Fabian Nicieza, Ron Garney & Matt Milla
Juggernaut. The Juggernaut is Cain Marko, Professor X’s evil stepbrother, who became “unstoppable” after getting powers from a magical crystal. “Unstoppable”, in practice, tends to mean “gets zapped by a telepath” or “gets buried under concrete”, or “falls down a well” or some such thing – but he does always come back in the end. He debuted in X-Men vol 1 #12 way back in 1965, and this is his first miniseries, though he has had some one-shots over the years.
Although the book was included on the X-books’ reading list and it does come from the X-office, it doesn’t have the normal Krakoa-era branding.
COVER / PAGE 1. Juggernaut smashes through a wall.
PAGE 2. Tribute to the late Joe Sinnott.
PAGE 3. A basic primer on where the Juggernaut stands going into this series. We’ll come back later to what he was actually doing in his last appearance, but this is a common thread in Juggernaut stories – he’s often a rather directionless character who has the power of an A-list villain but none of the direction and drive to really make use of it. He’s also been largely reformed for extended stretches in the past.
PAGES 4-6. Juggernaut works for Damage Control and comes upon a superpowered squatter.
Juggernaut is wearing a new version of his costume. From his comments to D-Cel later, it sounds as though we’ll get that explained in due course.
Damage Control is a company that does emergency rebuilding work after superhero battles, using unique hi-tech equipment. Originally they were played for comedy but they’re quite convenient to the Marvel Universe and wound up being used more widely. The two agents seen here are Maria Menklin and a guy called Prasad, both of whom seem to be new characters.
The Nine Realms are Asgard and its related realms. It doesn’t entirely make sense for Prasad to talk about energy from the Nine Realms, since one of them is Midgard, i.e. Earth. Let’s assume he means one of the other Eight.
The Crimson Cosmos Dimension is the home dimension of the demonic Cyttorak, from which Cain gets his powers (via the Crimson Gem of Cyttorak).
“Dark elves, trolls, alien invasions, robot uprisings… you super-types are always making a hell of a mess.” Maria is referring to War of the Realms, Empyre and Iron Man 2020, all recent events.
PAGES 7-8. Flashback. Cain finds himself in the Crimson Cosmos without his powers.
As the footnote explains, this picks up directly from Uncanny X-Men vol 5 #21, part of the Matthew Rosenberg run. At that point, Juggernaut was a member of the makeshift X-Men team who remained behind on Earth while everyone else was off appearing in Age of X-Man. In that story, General Callahan of O*N*E blocked Magik’s powers, which (for some reason) caused her demonic side to take control. The demonic Magik then stole the Crimson Gem of Cyttorak and teleported the de-powered Juggernaut away to who-knows-where. This, evidently, was “where”. Cain identifies it as Limbo, presumably meaning the demonic dimension Limbo that Magik rules – though it’s rather quiet for that.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the Juggernaut since Uncanny X-Men vol 5 #21 – he was in the recent Punisher Kill Krew miniseries. However, PKK takes place immediately after War of the Realms, and so it ought to come before Uncanny #21 in Juggernaut’s personal chronology. No problem there. He’s also currently appearing in Amazing Spider-Man: The Sins of Norman Osborn, which is a storyline in progress.
PAGES 9-16. Juggernaut encounters D-Cel.
D-Cel has deceleration powers, so she can’t stop Juggernaut, but she can slow him down an awful lot. She’s trying to be left in peace, but she’s massively outclassed by Juggernaut. For his part, he seems to mean well and to be trying to steer a potential mutant in the right direction. (D-Cel insists later that she isn’t a mutant, and instead has a good old fashioned science accident origin.)
PAGE 17. Juggernaut starts befriending D-Cel in the hospital.
“Damage Control couldn’t even spring for Mt Sinai?” Bellevue is a public safety-net hospital. Not sure what D-Cel has against Mount Sinai Hospital, which seems to have pretty decent rankings, but maybe this means more to New Yorkers.
PAGES 18-19. Flashback: Cain reaches the Crossroads and leaves his old armour there.
The Crossroads is a dimensional nexus introduced in Incredible Hulk circa issue #300, and the Signpost is an established feature of it. Heaven only knows how Cain found his way from Limbo to the Crossroads. This is not my area of continuity at all, but as far as I know, the idea that you need to make a sacrifice to the Signpost in order to get a direction is new.
PAGES 20-22. D-Cel persuades Juggernaut to take on the Hulk.
RoxTube is obviously meant to be a version of YouTube operated by Marvel’s all-purpose evil corporation, Roxxon. Immortal Hulk has already established that Roxxon has been moving into social media (though if you want to nitpick, that book called the service YouRoxx).
PAGE 23. Trailer. No mutants here, no Krakoan.
There really isn’t much to say about this, even though I have a soft spot for Juggernaut.
It feels like a 6 page back up strip extended into a full issue where very little happens.
Should we blame Jim Lee for all the superhero costume redesigns with superfluous lines?
Did I miss something? Where does D-Cel seem unhappy with Mt Sinai?
Yeah, I think Paul has that entirely back-to-front – D-Cel is grouching that she’s NOT in Mt Sinai.
Paul> The Nine Realms are Asgard and its related realms. It doesn’t entirely make sense for Prasad to talk about energy from the Nine Realms, since one of them is Midgard, i.e. Earth. Let’s assume he means one of the other Eight.
Since Original Sin, there’s been Ten Realms (the tenth being Heven, hone of Angela). I think this is just Prasad not being 100% clear on Asgardian cosmology, but if you prefer, you could read it as “the other nine realms”.
If I remember correctly, Angela destroyed Heven with the Naglfar at the end of the War of the Realms so we’re back to nine realms. (Though it happened in the ASGARDIANS OF THE GALAXY tie-in and not the main series so no one read it.)
> “Damage Control couldn’t even spring for Mt Sinai?” Bellevue is a public safety-net hospital. Not sure what D-Cel has against Mount Sinai Hospital, which seems to have pretty decent rankings, but maybe this means more to New Yorkers.
I’m pretty sure that what D-Cel is trying to say is that Mt. Sinai would be *better than* Bellevue, and is griping that Damage Control would not spend the money to put her up there in a better facility.
D-Cel says “Damage Control couldn’t *even* spring for Mt Sinai”. To my mind that implies that while Mt Sinai would have been a step up, it would still have been less than impressive.
I think it might be an English English to US English problem.
Did Heven actually get destroyed? It certainly got messed up, but I didn’t think it was actually like eradicated from existence.
> I think it might be an English English…
Paul is Scottish. Not sure about how he feels personally, but as a group we tend to be a little irritated at being called English :p
No offense intended!
I was referring to the language, not where Paul actually comes from.
I guess British style English would be more correct.
I believe in Scotland it’s often referred to as Scottish English.
Not to tear you up or make a big deal out of it. Just boasting about my knowledge.
Unless I’m mistaken. Then, pretend I didn’t type this.
To be fair, few if any of us will have much of a clue on those specifics.
Paul is of course a person of particular interest in this site, but it is not like any of our nationalities jumps from the posts.
Do you folks even know where I am from? I guess I just sort of assumed that Paul is British from some sporadic statements and most of you are North Americans.
Probably not an accurate perception, but not a critically important one either, I would think.
Are there any people that read the website who don’t listen to the podcast,and would be unfamiliar with the accents of Paul and Al?
Do we still refer to it as “the Queen’s English?”
I’m American, which is why I’m a monster.
@Mark Coale: I do not watch the podcast.
re: Ben
Ha! 🙂
I’m on a Helicarrier above Illinois, about an hour outside of Chicago.
For me (I can claim to be pretty bilingual here, having grown up in Ireland but lived for quite a while in the US), I’d detect the same possible implication of “even,” but it’s not 100% compulsory to take it that way.
Compare “That bastard couldn’t even treat me with normal courtesy.” “Even” in such expressions doesn’t have to signal that the point of comparison is disfavored – it can just signal that it represents the standard that one could naturally expect anyone to meet under the circumstances. A lot would depend on the context (haven’t read the comic).
It is, obviously, possible that, professionally, Mr. O’Brien is a bit more attuned to worrying about the exact implications of single words than most of us, leading him to concentrate on that “even.”
The “even” is unnecessary. A stickler editor would have probably edited out the “even” so the sentence would read, “They couldn’t spring for Mt. Sinai?”.
I can see how the line would easily slip through with a lot of editors, but it is certainly an unneeded word choice.
It seems easier to figure out, given the context that one knows about Mt. Sinai being considered a top rated hospital. Lacking that knowledge, it becomes much more difficult to figure out Juggernaut’s intent.
“Even” in such expressions doesn’t have to signal that the point of comparison is disfavored – it can just signal that it represents the standard that one could naturally expect anyone to meet under the circumstances.
Not to beat this horse further, but in terms of hospitals, that seems to jibe with Paul’s interpretation: Mt Sinai isn’t being heralded as a great hospital, just as a level of minimally decent hospital above Bellvue. I dunno.
@Daibhid Ceannaideach
That’s very dependent on context, and this sort of statement is not primarily about the point of comparison, it’s about what the speaker deserves from the person they’re complaining about.
E.g. (a bit 1950s) “After thirty years of service to this company, they couldn’t even give me a gold watch.”. That doesn’t mean that getting a gold watch is a bad thing, or that gold watches are not valuable objects, or that under *other* circumstances if someone gave you a gold watch that might not be an extraordinarily generous thing to do.
So what the character could be saying would be equivalent to, “The bare minimum that I deserved was a *nice* hospital after what I did for Damage Control, who can damn well afford it.” No idea whether that makes sense in context, but it’s a tenable meaning in a context in which D-Cel felt that they were owed good treatment, and would imply no general criticism of the hospital in “objective” terms.
Somehow I think this speaks to how interesting Juggernaut is as a character in 2020, or at least how interesting anyone finds him in this comic.
I didn’t have any interest in buying it.
An interesting direction would be how Juggernaut sees the world with his brother the ruler of major superpower Krakoa.
Maybe that does come across in the story, but it seems removed from anything with X-Men based on the review.
@Voord 99. Yeah, got it now. And I haven’t read it either, so…
Chris: It also says a lot that we’re debating semantics rather than anything about the actual story.
Apologies to Paul but I didn’t realize that he had a Scottish accent for quite a while; it just sounded generically British. Maybe Shreck, Scotty, and Groundskeeper Willy have trained me to expect something more exaggerated.
@Chris to be fair, if Paul started writing this in Scots, it would be largely incomprehensible to most people! So it’s not inaccurate to call what he (and I) are using “English English”. Hiberno-English isn’t as different as Scots.