Marauders #25 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
MARAUDERS #25
“Night of the Comet”
by Gerry Duggan, Phil Noto & Cory Petit
This will be very short. They show off their powers and then there’s a fight. It’s not an issue that cries out for annotation.
COVER / PAGE 1. Emma Frost with knuckledusters. Which seems a bit unnecessary when you can turn to diamond, but okay. The “Hell Fire” on the knuckledusters echoes Kate’s “Kill Shaw” tattoos.
PAGE 2. Opening quote. I think it’s original, but it presumably comes from the period when Ogun was training / brainwashing Kitty as a ninja in the Kitty Pryde & Wolverine miniseries.
PAGE 3. Recap and credits. “Night of the Comet” was a cult sci-fi/horror film from 1984, with female leads.
PAGES 4-12. The Marauders combine powers to save themselves.
Iceman isn’t bothered by cold or lack of oxygen, since he doesn’t breathe when his body is turned to ice, but traditionally he does need a source of water with which to make ice. Let’s assume that’s changed, or at least that he can draw on a much wider range of materials. After all, he seems to transform his own body.
The rest of this is a fairly straightforward “they combine their powers to save the day” scene, though it’s worth noting that Sebastian Shaw is played here as a team member like any other. Of course, the immediate problem is to stop them all getting killed, and he’s got every reason to join forces with them for that purpose – but still, the story treats him part of the group who are working together.
PAGES 13-22. Kate boards the Mercury and defeats Rixho.
“Kate Pryde had been taking deep breaths and doing the impossible since she first met the White Queen.” Kate “first met the White Queen” in her debut appearance. The bit about “taking deep breaths” is because she can’t breathe while phased into an object – so holding her breath has always been important for her.
Despite his relatively sympathetic portrayal in the previous scene, the art on page 13 really foregrounds those “Kill Shaw” tattoos.
Rixho is still enjoying the Krakoan whisky that he picked up last issue.
“Plot a course for Oblitus…” Oblitus is a renegade space station from Duggan’s 2014 run on Nova. It’s constructed from the ruins of other space stations, and basically a criminal hideaway.
“I’m starting a war college…” Bishop apparently isn’t joking about this, since this idea resurfaces on the data page at the end of the issue.
PAGE 23. Rixlo is dumped on Arakko.
This doesn’t seem like a terribly good idea, considering he tried to murder them all, but evidently Emma thinks she’s made her point. Also, do aliens count for the law against murder?
PAGE 24. Data page. A memo from Bishop to the other War Captains essentially proposing that people need to stop hanging around in a permanent beach party and brace themselves for a bit of national service. Bishop was appointed as Captain Commander in Inferno #1, but it’s not clear whether this comes before or after.
The Quarry, which he mentions in passing, is a gladiatorial sparring arena run by the Silver Samurai. It originated in Duggan’s Cable run.
PAGE 25. Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: SEA DRAGON.
Well, here, finally, is an issue that utilises the core cast. I kinda wish it was for something more relevant to the various subplots instead of just staying alive and defeating one loser space scoundrel… Who should now count among the X-Men’s most dangerous foes, considering he came much closer to killing them than most.
But combining powers is always fun, and it works here, as well. It’s a nice bit of fluff, and considering Duggan’s pretty much done with this book, that’s probably all we’re going to get in his remaining issues. Issue?
I’ve really enjoyed this book, and I am less bothered by the flexible cast than most seem to be. Still it was nice to finally see a bit more team cohesion. I almost thought this was Duggan’s last issue. Seems like he’s starting to wrap things up at least
Between this issue’s space adventure and the black hole thing in X-Men, Duggan really needs to take some refresher science classes.
I know I know, super powers don’t make any sense but still this was pretty egregious.
They might as well be casting magic spells at this point.
Yeah – it undercuts the “mutant circuit” thing to highlight the extent to which superpowers are pretty much always whatever is convenient to the plot.
I really don’t like everyone being crazy powerful now.
One of the things I like about the X-Men us that they have powers but with limits and drawbacks.
Cyclops has laser eyes and nothing else. Wolverine might be impossible to kill but you can hurt him a lot. Rogue can’t touch anyone. Angel is either kinda lame or a a death monster. Etc etc.
Didn’t Iceman create the oceans on Mars? That particular comic was a mess of pictures, but I thought that’s what he was doing. So I don’t think he needs water any more, he actually creates ice from nothing. Which is both weirdly specific and impossibly broad a power. I don’t understand him at all any more.
Bobby’s already been able to create way more ice than is explainable by ambient water vapor. Maybe he just needs a bit to spark things like Pyro, or maybe it’s a psychosomatic hangup.
Or maybe they’re just all wizards. I’m stumped on how Bobby managed to capture most of a roomful of atmosphere in an ice ball, or how Bishop and Shaw were managing to break conservation of energy.
*always, not already
You basically need an extra-dimensional power/source for almost all super-powers so maybe that Cyclops handbook writer was onto something.
My memory may be wrong because it came very close to the time I dropped all the books but didn’t the Blue Team/Gold Team era have a lot about Iceman ‘discovering the range of his powers’ which, in order to do, had the writers quietly forget about all that ‘manipulating the moisture in the air’ stuff and instead go for more of a ‘he generates snow and ice out of nowhere’ angle? Emma Frost had him dissolve his body in one place and rebuild it somewhere else, then in the Bendis era we had snow golems and such like.
The story is all full of junk science anyway, I’m pretty sure none of them do anything that should stop them exploding due to no external pressure but it was still a fun comic for all that. Marauders has been pretty consistently my favourite title.
Junk science is fine. I don’t need the powers to make sense, I just need to know what they are. It’s all so ill-defined lately.
My headcannon is that his true power is pretty much being an ice wizard, and his earlier limitations are psychosomatic and/or due to inexperience. As he’s ever so slowly grown to accept himself on all all levels, he’s finally reaching his potential as that ice wizard.
Just my way of working with the character inconsistencies that come up over many decades of being passed from writer to writer.
Si- yeah same.
How are Bishop and Shaw gaining energy by just swapping it back and forth?
And doesn’t Shaw absorb kinetic energy (getting hit) and turn it into strength? And Bishop absorbs energy and then shoots energy? What were they even doing to each other?
And Iceman’s “I’ll spin this and make some gravity” was bad and dumb in several ways, too.
I could be wrong, but the first time I saw Iceman’s “ice golems” was Uncanny X-Force, with the traitorous Age of Apocalypse Iceman. However, they were above a river in a snowy region if I remember correctly, so he had a lot of material to draw from.
All this Iceman talk and not one mention of the time during the Austin run where a captive Havok and Jubilee had a serious debate about whether or not to allow a decapitated Iceman reconstitute his body using their urine. Shame.
I think we all choose to forget.
What happens in Austen, stays in Austen.
I wish people would stop using Azazel in books so we could just ignore that whole dumb thing.
How can Kitty use electrolysis to produce only oxygen and not flammable hydrogen?
Science!
The weird thing about this book is that it had a ton of momentum, right up until the Kill Shaw arc. Since then, it’s been spinning its wheels. Still pretty enjoyable, but why aren’t some of the central mysteries being addressed in these last several issues? Kate still can’t use the gates, Bobby still doesn’t know that Christian cooperated with Shaw when he killed Kate. Instead we’re addressing the origin of the Mercury (sort of). It’s just odd.
I think they just marked Kate not being able to use the gates as a byproduct of her mutant powers. There’s no longer any wider mystery.
I’m pretty sure it was supposed to have a revelation at one point, but that got dumped by the wayside a long time ago.
I think the “Kitty isn’t really a mutant” storyline was killed.
Which… good.
@Chris V-
I dunno about that. We found out why she couldn’t resurrect at first, but that was never linked to the gate issue- at least textually. Since it’s never once been explained in a comic (or in an interview or on Twitter for that matter), I’d say it remains a dangling plotline.
I do think it’s possible that the Sinister Secret about someone who’s not a mutant was about her, and maybe they did change their minds. On the other hand, maybe Duggan decided, in light of his leaving the book, to leave it to his successor- guess we’ll find out.