X-Men #25 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN vol 6 #25
“From the Shadows”
Writer: Gerry Duggan
Artist: Stefano Caselli
Colour artist: Marte Gracia
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. Kate Pryde, back in ninja mode, kills an Orchis footsoldier by phasing X-shaped swords through his head. The swords are drawn here with different hilts – one of which seems more pirate-like, per her Krakoa design – but that’s not actually reflected in the interior art.
The X-Men logo is now distressed, to fit the Fall of X theming.
PAGE 2. Opening data page: a quote from Kate Pryde, now on a battered version of the traditional layout. This is the only data page in this issue, unless you count the Orchis poster right at the end, but Astonishing Iceman confirms that they’re still a part of the format. The quote is from the flashback towards the end of the issue where she’s killing Orchis soldiers and telling them that the X-Men no longer exist, so that these rules no longer apply.
PAGES 3-5. Flashback: Kitty Pryde talks to her rabbi about Krakoa.
This flashback takes place shortly after the flashback that opens Marauders vol 1 #1, where Kitty discovers that she can’t use the gates and breaks her nose (hence the bandage here).
I’m fairly sure the rabbi is an original character. Back in Marauders #1, Kitty was resentful of the whole Krakoan project, and Susan’s advice to her here is basically to have faith in God’s plan. This doesn’t seem to have given her much consolation when we first see her in Marauders #1, and she’s less than convincing here in telling Susan that she even believes in God at all. At any rate, we’ve come full circle since this flashback, with Kate embracing Krakoa, seeing it destroyed, and then getting the ability to access the gates after all.
“I heard your teacher’s voice in my head.” Professor X’s announcement of the founding of Krakoa in House of X. We’re in the days immediately after that.
PAGES 6-7. Flashback: Kate retrieves her swords from the X-Men Mansion.
According to the narrator, this is “hours” after Orchis attacked Krakoa in X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023 – hence, Kate is still in her Gala outfit. This must follow soon after the flashback at the end of the issue, which explains what happened to her immediately after that issue.
The X-Men Mansion is in ruins. During the Krakoa era it was largely abandoned, but still overgrown with Krakoan growth. Presumably the attack on Krakoa has caused some of the Krakoan vegetation to die out, though it’s not clear when all this graffiti happened – if it’s immediately post-Krakoa, they’ve been awfully quick about it.
Kate retrieves two swords and a note from Ogun. In the 1984-5 Kitty Pryde & Wolverine miniseries, Ogun trains her in ninja skills and generally attempts to brainwash her in an attempt to turn her into a new host body for him. Obviously, Wolverine saves her. This is where the codename Shadowcat originally comes from – Kitty coins it in narration in issue #5, at which point she’s mostly free of Ogun’s influence and going after the bad guys herself. However, the original story is consistent with it being a name that Ogun used for her earlier. On the other hand, there’s no obvious place in the original story for Kitty two receive (and keep) two whole swords from Ogun, so presumably this is a note he sends her at some later point. In the context of the original plot, it seems to be a threat reminding her that she will never be fully free of his influence; the suggestion may be that she’s finally embracing that in these dark times.
PAGES 8-10. Dr Stasis holds a press conference.
We’re now in the present day time frame, and “weeks” have passed since X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023. The newspaper cover date for that story fits its publication date, so evidently we’re meant to have jumped forward. Of course, the X-books will catch with “a few weeks” by next issue, so fair enough.
Dr Stasis give the same cover story about the Hellfire Gala that we were told to expect in the one-shot. We’re told that the gates have been left up for their propaganda value, no doubt anticipating the obvious plot objection of why Orchis have kept them around to be so useful to Kate. Presumably Orchis are also using them for transport purposes – why not?
Plastered over the gates are copies of the “Magneto can no longer use this gate – Thanks, Orchis!” poster seen at the end of the issue.
Firestar is not, of course, a genuine traitor; she’s infiltrating Orchis at the request of the dying Jean Grey, who also altered the memories of senior Orchis personnel to make them think she had been with them all along.
“In the vacuum left behind by S.H.I.E.L.D.’s fall, Orchis has risen to the challenge of defending mankind.” Orchis have positioned themselves as the replacement S.H.I.E.L.D. rather more emphatically over in Invincible Iron Man than in the regular X-books, though we’ve seen them take credit for the defeat of the Progenitor in Judgment Day.
Ben Urich is in the foreground of page 9 panel 5 as one of the reporters at Orchis’ press conference. He’s not identified and doesn’t get any dialogue, but he was prominent in earlier issues of this run as a sympathetic reporter who Cyclops gave crucial stories to.
Woofer is the guy that the X-Men rescued from an Orchis pop-up clinic in issue #22 (much like the one seen in page 10 panel 2). They brought him back to the Treehouse with them, but presumably he stayed out there in the wider world.
An obvious question, to put it mildly, is what the hell Woofer and the Hollywood mutant seen in the next panel are doing on Earth at all, given that the central premise of Hellfire Gala 2023 is that Professor X is forced to send all of mutantkind through the gates, and that only a handful of mutants who can resist him are able to stay behind. We’re already backsliding on that, and it’s a point that really should have been addressed more clearly. The idea may simply be that a small minority of mutants inevitably didn’t get to the gates in time because they were too far away from a gate, or physically unable to get to one, or whatever – and Orchis figure a few stragglers are acceptable because it looks a bit dodgy if mutantkind disappears entirely overnight, or because they need some target for propaganda. But I can’t see any good reason not to just spell this out directly – if Woofer’s not immune to psychic powers then surely he ought to remember Xavier trying to send him through the gates.
Woofer is being dumped on Arakko, which is currently in a civil war as per X-Men Red. However, the very fact that Orchis actually have taken him to Arakko suggests that Professor X was wrong in Hellfire Gala 2023 to think that Orchis had redirected the gates – it seems possible that Orchis really did think they were sending all the mutants to Arakko.
Captain Krakoa is an Orchis impostor who stole Cyclops’ old costume and murdered some politicians in Avengers / X-Men: Free Comic Book Day 2023. We haven’t seen his “Brotherhood” yet.
PAGE 11. Feilong meets the US President.
The War Machines seem to be new, but they’re basically just giant War Machine armour as Sentinels, the same as the Stark Sentinels with Iron Man.
Note that Feilong is now justifying their activities by talking about the inevitable invasion by Arakko. An obvious question here is what the motivations of most of the Orchis members actually are here, given that thus far their anti-mutant agenda has appeared to be basically sincere. Stasis probably does have an ulterior motive – he’s more interested in becoming a Dominion – and Feilong may be interested in personal power, but how does Orchis actually hold together once the mutant threat is defeated?
PAGES 12-15. Dr Stasis confronts Cyclops.
The Henry Gyrich Center for Behavioral Studies is named after the late Henry Peter Gyrich, who was a member of Orchis, and who was killed by Abigail Brand at the end of S.W.O.R.D..
Cyclops has survived his fall in Avengers / X-Men: Free Comic Book Day 2023 while fighting Captain Krakoa, but he’s paralysed and, because this is a grimdark storyline, they’ve sewed his eyes shut. Stasis tries persuading Cyclops to get the remaining mutants to go quietly, and unsurprising Cyclops isn’t going for it. It’s not obvious that Stasis can have any ulterior motive here, unless of course he’s planning to send the mutants somewhere else (though if so, why is Woofer on Arakko?).
Cyclops is “Prisoner Ten” – not Prisoner X, note.
PAGES 16-19. Shadowkat and Synch in the X-Men’s safehouse.
The X-Men – in the sense of whoever’s left from the group that escaped the Gala – have set up a safe house in the Morlock tunnels. As well as Shadowkat and Synch, Emma, Rasputin, Talon and Ms Marvel are all involved. Synch and Talon are still acting as team leaders, the role that they were set up for with the abortive X-Men team from Hellfire Gala.
Synch is at pains to stress that Kate is, for some reason, uniquely able to use the gates after Orchis’ interference – he can’t do it by copying her powers, and nor can Rasputin (who has Kitty’s phasing powers too), so apparently it’s not just a powers thing.
Kate’s room has a poster on the wall with the Marauders poster.
“I did her thing once. Go back and fix the failings of the previous generation.” In “Days of Future Past” – though that was an alt-future Kate Pryde returning to the present, rather than “our” Kitty going back into the past.
“I don’t even know where Lockheed is.” Interesting question. The dragon wasn’t at the Hellfire Gala and presumably he’s still on Earth somewhere.
“I survived living with a Wolverine longer than anyone.” Synch is referring to the long time he and Talon (as Wolverine) spent in the Vault with its time dilation effect during the Hickman run.
PAGES 20-23. Shadowkat visits Arakko and meets Woofer.
The mutants from Earth that we see here are presumably a handful of people who have been dumped here by Orchis in the same way as Woofer, or who happened to be on Arakko anyway when the war broke out.
Presumably Kate wants Woofer to take a census of the Earth mutants on Arakko, not the entire planetary population – but if so, it’s interesting that she implicitly doesn’t regard the Arakkii as proper mutants.
“Didn’t you testify before Congress?” She did, in X-Men Gold #9, of all places.
“I was hoping to find some of my friends – Sunfire, Polaris and Forge.” Shadowkat must surely have figured out before now that the mutants who got marched through the gates did not arrive on Arakko – it’s been weeks. Maybe it’s meant to be a “hope against hope” beat. We’ll see Forge later in the issue and find out where he went. Polaris is presumably with all the other mutants. Sunfire went to Otherworld in issue #24 and got stuck there; we’ll apparently see his story in upcoming issues of X-Men Unlimited.
PAGE 24. Flashback: Forge on a distant world.
This is evidently where Forge winds up after being marched through the gates in Hellfire Gala 2023. A few points are worth noting here. First, this is not Mars, but neither is it the “meat grinder” that Professor X feared in Gala, nor does it even seem particularly dangerous. Second, Forge appears to be alone – where’s everyone else? And third, the very fact that there’s a gate here means that somebody has been here before to plant it.
Forge concludes that the gate is not working because Krakoa has been “incapacitated” – the idea that it’s been hacked doesn’t seem to occur to him. As we saw in issue #15, Forge trapped the Children of the Vault within a time bubble to distract them from taking over the world. But, as he pointed out, this would only work as long as Krakoa remained alive to support it. So Orchis have inadvertently released the Children of the Vault, and we’ll pick up on their story in their miniseries.
The three characters shown emerging from the pods appear to be Perro, Serafina and Fuego. However, Serafina wasn’t in one of those pods when Forge encountered her in issues #16-17, which suggests that she’s either an art error or an attempt to use her character design as the starting point for a generic Child of the Vault.
PAGES 25-27. Flashback: Emma Frost takes Kamala Khan home.
We last saw Emma in Invincible Iron Man #8, when she was spirited away to safety by Iron Man in the aftermath of the Gala. This obviously comes after the resolution of that story.
The idea that Emma can erase everyone’s memories of Kamala being dead is supposed to build on her role as a fixer for the Kingpin as shown in flashbacks in Devil’s Reign: X-Men, but it really does stretch credibility far too far in this instance. Kamala didn’t just die publicly, there was an entire memorial service which got its own one-shot. How many people is Emma altering the memories of?
Since she’s clearly joining the X-books’ cast, and her family don’t get named here, her parents are Yusuf and Muneeba and her brother is Aamir.
PAGE 28. The X-Men meet with the Uncanny Avengers.
This is the team who’ll be appearing in the upcoming Uncanny Avengers miniseries – apparently Captain America’s way of supporting the mutants is to put together an Avengers team which is basically an X-Men squad in plain sight. Although Iron Man is here for the meeting, according to the solicitations the actual team members are Captain America, Rogue, Deadpool, Quicksilver, Psylocke and M.
PAGE 29. Emma asks Kate what happened at the end of the Gala one-shot.
PAGES 30-41. Flashback: Kate slaughters Orchis soldiers.
The rationale here is that her ability to use the gates is such important information that she has to kill everyone to keep the secret – but it’s also a repudiation of the “Murder No Man” law now that Krakoa no longer exists to have laws.
Again, Kate brings up Ogun as her teacher, and implies that she’s patterning herself more on him than on Xavier now. She’s not in the best of moods, understandably.
Although Jerusalem happened to be the setting of a key scene in House of X #1, the bookending with the rabbi in the opening scene and the narrator’s reference to reclaiming a homeland and a people pushed to the brink of extinction suggest that Duggan is drawing a rather more direct parallel with Kitty’s Jewish identity.
“When I was up on the Bloom, I was sucked out into space, and they saved me!” Issue #18, though if we saw this specific soldier in that issue, he was just a generic masked guy.
PAGE 42. Kitty announces that she’s going to kill Firestar.
On the one hand, this is an obvious problem with Jean’s plan for Firestar. On the other, is Firestar really a top target here…?
PAGE 43. Recap and credits. The “recap” is simply “The Fall of X has begun” – Astonishing Iceman has a conventional recap in the same space. The small print still reads “mutants of the world” as before, but the general design is distressed – the wonky Krakoan text reads “FALL OF X”.
PAGE 44. Another chance to enjoy the Magneto poster.
PAGE 45. Trailers, again with the design battered. The header still reads “Krakoa is for all Mutants” followed by NEXT in Krakoan, but it’s messed up. The Krakoan text that follows reads UNHOLY MATRIMONY.
I decided to look at the marvel wiki to see which Presidents had entries.
Won’t spoil all of them, but George Washington was captured by British troops during the war because he saw an image of Willie Lumkin and The FF had to rescue him to keep history from being changed. (GS FF 2)
Jimmy Carter was also seen in Marvel Team-Up in a storyline involving Nick Fury, Shang Chi, Black Widow against Viper and Silver Samurai.
I’m fairly certain that Gerald Ford appeared briefly in a Hulk history once. Hulk stories also had a somewhat longer appearance of Jimmy Carter alongside Clay Quartermain. In later Reagan was shown as well – or rather, his jar of jellybeans, his silhouette and his speech balloons were shown.
IIRC Bill Clinton and particularly his daughter Chelsea made appearances in Malibu’s Prime (which is technically a Marvel property now, or could be if it decided to pay the proper creator rights).
Though they’d probably have to pay Gerard Jones for Prime, which seems less of a good idea.
“Why are the Avengers the only group of superheroes to show some trust and willingness to help?”
In less… confused times, the Fantastic Four would have probably been on board because of Franklin.
But Franklin is now Schroedinger’s Mutant, and since Civil War, I’m surprised Reed isn’t actually a member of Orchis.
“Jimmy Carter was also seen in Marvel Team-Up in a storyline involving Nick Fury, Shang Chi, Black Widow against Viper and Silver Samurai.”
I already said that and it is really the Nancy Rushman Story.
Gerald Ford gets a very specific reference in the original KILLRAVEN WARRIOR OF THE WORLDS story in AMAZING ADVENTURES
Peter Parker met President Obama around his first inauguration although, with the sliding timescale, now Peter would have been barely a teenager.
President Bush junior met Captain America in the first Ultimates series.
It was interesting to see a hero for once get pushed to their limit and abandon their ‘no killing’ principle, it works from the generally harder direction Kate has travelled in the Krakoa era and hopefully it isn’t just to inflate the stakes of her going after Firestar.
So we’re doing Dark Reign but with Orchis in place of Norman Osbourne and HAMMER. I’m interested to see whether anything interesting happens with Kingpin allying himself with the mutants or whether he just stands in the background as though this was a Bendis event.
I do wonder if someone in the Marvel offices was worried that, with the sort of things the mutants have been saying since they got their own state, that Orchis suddenly had to become privately villainous so fans didn’t feel conflicted about who the good guys were?
The thing that does annoy me was that in the lead up all the individual books spent the last few months fraying all the links between the individual characters, Storm and Xavier, Scott and Jean, Destiny and Mystique, Colossus being made to vote for “lets tell everyone we took them over and killed them in an alternate timeline”. ‘Fall of the Mutants’ looked like it was going to be everyone falling apart for a bit and instead this looks like it’ll bring them all together again.
Tom Galloway said: Nixon was shown in the story around FF 102-104, in which oddly enough the villain was Magneto. And both FDR and Eisenhower were shown as Presidents in later stories set in their terms’ time periods.
I’d say there’s a general “historical time period” rule; if the story is set in a real-world, past year, writers will happily use the then-current President as part of the period piece.
Mike Loughlin, that’s an amazingly comprehensive list! I hope I can add a little bit to it here and there.
Bill Clinton also showed up in the first arc of Priest’s Black Panther, where he chased Everett K. Ross with a hockey stick after one of Ross’s screw-ups. (Someone already mentioned W. Bush/Bush 43 showing up late in the run.)
Dubya Bush also showed up, in shadows and unnamed, in a very unflattering way in the Garth Ennis-Steve Dillon ongoing series of Punisher. It was as unsubtle as you’d expect, and rather ineffective as a result.
Gerald Ford was also seen — well, a fake image of him, anyway — as part of the Jester’s effort to use computer-generated phone news broadcasts to sow public confusion in Daredevil (1964 series) #135-137. Marv Wolfman anticipated deepfakes decades in advance, it seems. (If the plot seems fmailiar, it’s because Mark Waid and Chris Samnee did a sequel in their Daredevil run.)
Ford also showed up in a mid-1970s Fantastic Four story, the one where the three regular members of the original Frightful Four take over the Baxter Building, capture the FF, and hold auditions for a fourth member. As I recall, it was done as a spoof of Ford refusing to bail out New York City during the financial crisis of the 70s.
Relatedly, this was also one of few 1970s Marvel comics wrote in Abe Beame, the mayor of NYC during that aforesaid financial crisis, usually to make jokes about the city’s near-bankruptcy. In addition to that FF story, Beame turned up — unnamed — in Amazing Spider-Man (1963 series) #152 and again in Spectacular Spider-Man (1976 series) #1. Both of those stories also incorporated some comments on the city’s financial crisis.
A few UK PMs have also shown up, too. Gordon Brown was mocked in some quarters of the UK tabloid press after Paul Cornell wrote him into an issue of Captain Britain and MI-13, where he was seen effectively coordinating British superheroes during Secret Invasion.
I don’t know whether Sadiq Khan or any other Mayors of London have shown up in any Marvel stories. Maybe there’s an untold tale somewhere in which Captain Midlands visits the City and meets Ken Livingstone.
Reagan appeared in a Roger Stern’s Avenger issue where Plantman tried to take over the White House. He spent most of it asleep, but did increase SHIELD’s funding to fix their security hole.
The best appearance of the Reagans would have to be that infamous Captain America storyline where the President and First Lady are turned into violent snake creatures in a plot by Viper to contaminate the water supply. Cap defended himself, but the story took great pains not to show him, y’know, beating the crap out of them or anything. In fact, Pres. Reagan pops up a few times in the first half of the Gruenwald Cap run, usually depicted wearing a cowboy hat and/or saying something deeply out of touch and just generally looking buffoonish.
Anyway, subtle it was not. Mark Gruenwald’s penchant for B-movie trash storytelling (with an emphasis on bizarre transformations) did not originate with “Cap-Wolf” (nor even the “Superia Stratagem”).
It’s only tangentially Marvel, but Reagan appeared in the first Marvel UK Transformers annual. At first he was pro-Autobot, but then due to a miscommunication he turns against them.
Reagan also appeared in X-factor during Fall of the Mutants.
“The best appearance of the Reagans would have to be that infamous Captain America storyline where the President and First Lady are turned into violent snake creatures in a plot by Viper to contaminate the water supply”
That sounds awesome and I need to find that story asap.
Captain America #342-344 from 1988 (primarily the double-sized #344). This is during the “Captain America No More” era where Steve is in his black costume as “The Captain,” so it has the added gravitas of him feeling a little pissy about being back in Washington after Reagan’s commission tried to press him into government service earlier in the run. He told them to go screw, surrendered his suit and shield, and they let him walk. So you also have John Walker running around as the “official” Captain America in these issues.
Anyway, the city of serpents plot is completely bonkers (an unhinged Viper really shines throughout) and I don’t know why it doesn’t get talked about more. I guess Gru’s ’90s biweekly camp-fests just had more visibility due to their timing.
“At first he was pro-Autobot, but then due to a miscommunication he turns against them.”
It was not a miscommunication. Reagan waited for Optimus Prime to explain the events and OP incompetently, deliberately let the President assume the worst out of an assumption that an explanation was not worth the effort
Well if we’re including the UK, there was the time Excalibur met alternate versions of Charles and Diana in issue #13. That might be the only time they ever appeared.
Charles also appeared in Incredible Hulk 409.
In the Captain America run, Reagan did reverse the commission when he found out about it.
@Ceries
It’s not so much “openly hateful” as acknowledging that China is a dictatorship that’s trying to become the dominant superpower, threatening its neighbors, and committing genocide against the Uighurs.