The X-Axis – w/c 15 May 2023
A nice quiet week, for once.
X-MEN vol 6 #22. (Annotations here.) This is evidently meant to be the Orchis spotlight issue – only half of the X-Men appear, and it’s mostly focussing on the plans of Orchis. Thing is, I’m not sure that Duggan’s take on Orchis really has enough depth to it to sustain this. They feel like they’re all basically the same character doing the same thing. That wasn’t quite the case under Hickman, when a big part of Orchis’s role was to be a mirror of Krakoa. We seem to have abandoned that angle, and I’m not really convinced that anything much has come in to replace it. As a plot angle, “the Krakoan drug supply is contaminated, ruining the mutants’ reputation and their economic leverage” is fine – but the Orchis characters aren’t very interesting at this point.
X-FORCE vol 6 #40. (Annotations here.) It still feels like a weird choice to spend years building up Beast’s scheming in X-Force and then pay it off in Wolverine. This issue sees Sage’s new team dragged off to the future by Kid Omega to deal with assorted Beast variants planted throughout the timeline by… well, apparently by another future variant Beast. I suppose this is kind of sort of their showdown with Beast, but it feels far too much like busy work designed to occupy the characters instead of having their storyline actually pay off in their own series. It feels terribly placeholder to me.
X-MEN UNLIMITED INFINITY COMIC #79. By Steve Orlando, Emilio Laiso & Rachelle Rosenberg. So that leaves this as the best X-book of the week, as Eye Boy tries to talk some sense into Nature Girl, and get precisely nowhere with it. We’re clearly going here with the idea that X-Men Green’s eco-terrorism is such an extreme overreaction that it has to be attributed to Curse’s influence – which is the back door that makes Lin Li redeemable – but leaving open the possibility that maybe she has just snapped. She’s certainly an outright villain at this point, but bringing in Eye Boy as a likeable voice of reason to put that point beyond doubt is an effective choice.
Can someone explain why Synch needed to copy Gamesmaster’s powers to try to find Nature Girl if Jean is an Omega? I mean before Krakoa, the answer was “Gamesmaster can read more minds simultaneously than Jean”. But Hickman revealed that as an Omega, Jean has no limits to her telepathy., so that should no longer apply. It’s the same issue we had with Hope a few weeks earlier- there’s supposedly no limit to her powers to manipulate other mutants but other mutants can defeat her by staying out of range, which implies a range limit. This whole “an Omega has no limits” concept just creates plot holes.
Nah, the best “X-book” this week is John Allison’s Kitty and Wolverine story.
It was never that omegas didn’t have a limit, just that it was undefined. In HoX/PoX, Jean clearly had a range limit on her telepathy, requiring Monet as a booster to reach earth from the Forge.
I also saw the Omega mutant concept as being mutants with the highest degree of power demonstrable or maybe highest possible. They have limits, otherwise Magneto could do anything with any and all metal everywhere at once and Iceman could cease all molecular motion in the universe. That said, the concept isn’t exactly set in stone. I’m still waiting for the Omega mutant who makes the best sandwiches conceivable or can blink a million times a second.
It’s definitely been defined as having no upper limit, particularly in Iceman stories. The brake on their powers being that the more power they use, the more likely they are to go Dark Phoenix and lose control, because they still have little human brains that can only direct so much.
So maybe Jean could read every mind at once, or send her thoughts across the solar system, but to do so wouldn’t be worth the risk.
Ok, after a few minutes of research, I keep encountering the phrase “an undefinable upper limit” for powers. I know I’m splitting hairs, but I consider “undefinable” as meaning the upper limit can’t be quantified. Omega mutants aren’t necessarily all-powerful. Again, I point to the example of Iceman causing the temperature of everything in the universe to fall to absolute zero- his upper limit isn’t defined, but he’s not powerful enough to do that (and if he is, that’s stupid).
It seems to me that the idea of Omega mutants is simply not very clear nor coherent, probably by design or even simple neglect.
I have pointed out often that Iceman, for instance, does not seem to be a biological entity anymore. Going by what is on panel, he must be even less human than, say, early Alan Moore Swamp Thing. His nature must now be either mystical (making him an water elemental of some sort) or psionic (making him a mental entity that needs or prefers to manifest through watery and pseudo-human bodies). He may be limited by his mental and psychological nature, but he has discarded and rebuilt his own brain and whole body far too often since the aughts for me to believe that he has purely biological limits at this point.
Then again, that may be true of other so-called mutants as well. Rahne has been able to split into a handful of bodies since her X-Men: Blue appearances and I don’t know if that has even been explained at all.
I imagine that it’s less a case of “Jean can’t do it” and that it’s more “Synch is going through every available option in order to deal with an oncoming terrorist threat, and Gamesmaster’s powers might allow for him to find her”
From a plot and editorial perspective, it is just prudent to have Synch tap into Gamemaster’s powers instead of Jean’s.
Jean and/or Synch’s duplicate of her powers will factor into many more stories than Gamemaster. And having Gamemaster’s powers available makes it hard to have any tension about finding mutants.
Would an Omega mutant of super-hearing not be considered omega just because they can’t hear sounds whose sound waves literally can’t reach them (like, say, across the void of space)? I imagine the talk about ‘no upper limits’ is about the limits of the character’s power level, not the limits of physics.
Hope not being to pick up Exodus’ power isn’t about her not being powerful enough or having a limit, it’s about the signal of his DNA signature or whatever literally not being able to travel that far. No matter how powerful your radio receiver, you’re still bound by how far radio waves can actually go.
Which is to say, omega mutants are still going to have limits because physics has limits. Though, granted, in a superhero comic said physics limits are whatever the writer says they are.
I haven’t read the story yet, so this may be an obviously wrong notion, but…
Maybe Jean was busy, and Gamesmaster wasn’t?
Hm, not sure I explained myself clearly, so try number 2:
The whole omega mutant concept still allows writers to apply whatever arbitrary limitations they feel like because they can always argue the limitations isn’t the character’s power level but the world around them.
“It’s not that Hope isn’t powerful enough to pick up Exodus’ power signature, it’s that a power signature only travels so far before dissipating.”
“It’s not that Jean isn’t powerful enough to pick up those psychic signatures. It’s that fictional alloy #33 is completely opaque to psychic energy so blocks it out completely.”
And so on.
Ah, I see that Jean was actively searching at the same time. Perhaos Symch thought that duplicating her power would be redundant, since she was already searching that way herself.
Can someone help me out here?
So for some reason, I was under the impression that Steve Orlando is a perfectly capable comic writer. I don’t know why this was. I can’t recall reading anything he’s written. But last month I picked up his Midnight run, because I’m a big fan of artist ACO, and whooboy, the writing is abysmal. Was I mistaken and Orlando has always been like this?
I mean, I just flatly disagree, I quite like his Midnighter run. His writing is a bit variable quality wise (Marauders was probably my least favorite thing I’ve read by him) and his dialogue can be a bit awkward but he has enough strengths that I don’t think he’s an outright bad writer.
Have they ever done a story where Bobby has some kind of ties to the Frost Giants?
@Mark Coale There was an X-men First Class story called “The Littlest Frost Giant” I think that speculated a connection between the two. Loki also uses his powers to regrow the shrunken Frost Giants in Simonson’s Thor run.
And that led to Bobby’s powers going out of control for a while until he used an inhibitor belt made by The Right to get them back to normal levels.
Steve Orlando’s Midnighter is practically unreadable. It reads like he’s trying to crib Morrison and Tom King, but it just reads like someone banging letters on a keyboard.
Re: Synch: I still think the simplest explanation is that recalling previously synced abilities from memory also accelerates his aging and decreases his lifespan, so it just makes sense for him to just copy someone else who is actually in his immediate proximity.
@Josie: I haven’t read Midnighter, but I’m quite enjoying Orlando’s run on Scarlet Witch.
There’s a memorable bit in one of the King in Black issues of Savage Avengers where Conan tells Bobby that he’s “living a lie”: “you are no man at all–but you behave as though you are one. You are a frost giant.”