Children of the Vault #1 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
CHILDREN OF THE VAULT #1
“Tomorrow’s Children”
Writer: Deniz Camp
Artist: Luca Maresca
Colourist: Carlos Lopez
Letterer: Cory Petit
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Sarah Brunstad
COVER / PAGE 1. The Children of the Vault – specifically, Serafina, Perro and Fuego – stand triumphant over Cable and Bishop.
PAGES 2-4. The Children of the Vault emerge from suspended animation.
This sequence pretty much assumes that you’ve been reading X-Men and know what’s going on. For anyone who doesn’t:
The Children of the Vault debuted in X-Men #188 (2006), by Mike Carey and Chris Bachalo. The basic idea is that they were an attempt to create vastly evolved humans by having them develop in a bubble society within a time distortion vault, so that centuries of development pass for them without any significant time passing on Earth. They’re not mutants, they’re technologically enhanced posthumans. Traditionally, the Children of the Vault believe that they’re the destined inheritors of the world. During Jonathan Hickman’s run, we established that they tend to create endless iterations of the same characters, supposedly always working towards improvement.
In X-Men #15-17, Forge trapped the Vault inside a collective dream created by Krakoan technology, to keep them out of everyone’s way. As he flagged at the time, this depended on Krakoa itself continuing to function. In X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023, Krakoa stopped functioning, and Forge’s systems failed. We saw Forge himself realising that in X-Men #25, but there’s not much he can do about it right now. In the dream world he had created for them, they conquered the world.
The Children seen here are:
- Serafina, the chrome one. Her established power is indeed control of machines. Note that there’s a wrinkle here: in X-Men #16-17, Forge encountered a Serafina while inside the City, and that was supposedly after the Children were put into suspended animation. So did she somehow end up here after he left, or is this a different Serafina from a later iteration?
- Aguja, the blonde in green.
- Martillo, the big guy with the enormous hammer.
- Sangre, the one covered in circles.
- Cadena, the one in the big helmet.
- Perro, the blue guy.
- Fuego, the one whose head is on fire.
The Vault itself has been housed in the former Wild Sentinel facility in Ecuador since X-Men #193 (2006); the Sentinel itself has no particular significance to the story beyond that.
PAGE 5. Recap and credits.
PAGES 6-8. Rodrigo Muñoz drinks poisoned water.
These are lithium evaporation ponds, used to extract lithium from brine. Read more about them (and see what looks suspiciously like the photo reference) here.
Tierra Desnuda is not (as far as I can tell) a real place in Chile. It means “the Bare Earth”.
PAGES 9-10. Cable resists Orchis’s mind probe.
Cable – or this version of him, at least – was last seen in X-Men Red #10. According to the narrator, Orchis ambushed him and captured him at some point after that. It’s not mentioned in this issue, but we saw the younger Cable get captured by Orchis too, while trying to attack their base in X-Men #24.
“What is, is” was the Askani mantra endlessly repeated in Cable stories of the 1990s.
Dr Faustus is a Captain America villain dating back to the late 60s. He’s basically a neo-Nazi psychiatrist.
PAGES 11-16. Bishop rescues Cable.
Bishop was among the mutants who escaped with Emma Frost’s group at the end of Hellfire Gala 2023, but apparently he’s gone off on his own in the intervening weeks.
“Cable and Bishop have a long, bloody history together in the far future.” This is … putting it mildly. In the 2008-2010 Cable series, Bishop pursues Cable and Hope through time, attempting to kill Hope because he believes that she’s destined to be a historical disaster. On the shaky pretext that he’s going to wind up cancelling out the entire timeline anyway, Bishop then starts committing literally genocidal levels of destruction simply in an attempt to narrow Hope’s location down. The story was widely viewed at the time as destroying the character beyond redemption; the only reason it didn’t was that later writers just started ignoring it at the earliest opportunity and basically pretended that it had never happened. This issue is kind of trying to have it both ways, alluding to a long history of antagonism without actually saying outright what it involved.
Despite often being portrayed as having advance knowledge due to his time travel, Cable apparently didn’t know that the Fall of X was about to happen. Of course, time is fluid.
PAGE 17. Data page. This consists of brief summaries of three missions that Bishop has been on since the Gala, leading up to him learning about Cable’s location.
“If You Give A Mutant a Cookie” is a reference to If You Give a Mouse a Cookie (1985) by Laura Numeroff & Felicia Bond, which is a “slippery slope” story.
PAGES 18-19. The “Children of Tomorrow” make their debut.
Rather than just going on the usual campaign of conquest, the Children of the Vault are presenting themselves as a new superhero team, the Children of Tomorrow, who are going to make the world better Authority-style. Left to right, the group seen here are:
- Capitán, the Superman-type guy on the left.
- Prisa, the girl with the purple hair.
- Serafina, billing herself as “the Voice of the City” – meaning the A.I. of the Vault City.
- Ferro, apparently a cross between Perro and Fuego.
- Átomo, in the cape and with the weird left arm.
- Luz, the blonde.
Luz is from one of Mike Carey’s Children arc, and debuted in X-Men: Legacy #238 (2010). Capitán, Prisa and Átomo are all new characters.
We see a range of people around the world hearing Serafina’s message and reacting to it, in what seems like a callback to Professor X declaring the founding of Krakoa in House of X. Conspicuously, everyone reacting is fro countries that don’t normally get much page time in Marvel – no North Americans or Europeans, nobody from China or Japan or Korea. (We do see the Australian authorities reacting on page 23, to be fair.)
PAGES 20-23. The Children of Tomorrow do good deeds and people react.
The Dadaab Refugee Camp is one of the largest refugee camps in the world, run by the UNHCR.
Rocinha is the largest favela in Rio de Janiero – the art really shows a wider area than just Rocinha itself.
Al-Jaraib is indeed a town in Yemen, but I’m not sure if there’s any particular significance to it.
Nurdağı is a district in Turkey rather than a city. It was hit by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake in February, killing 2,500 people, which is presumably why it’s been selected here.
Orchis are represented here by Director Killian Devo and Omega Sentinel Karima Shapandar.
PAGES 24-26. Cable takes Bishop back to his base.
You’d have thought they’d have found some clothes before they made it to Hell’s Kitchen on foot. And if mutants are meant to be lying low to avoid provoking Orchis, this is a funny way of going about it.
Cable had a base in Hell’s Kitchen back in the James Robinson/Joe Casey runs on his solo title in the late 1990s.
PAGE 27. Flashback: Bishop’s attacks on Orchis.
This is a bit of a weird flashback, dropped into the middle of a scene without much warning and really just repeating what we were already told in a data page.
PAGES 28-29. Cable identifies the Children’s viral idea in Bishop’s mind.
As Cable explains, this is not telepathy as such; the idea of liking and trusting the Children is itself contagious.
The “Nurse Hetty” AI persona on Cable’s arm is obviously based on Betty Boop.
PAGE 30. Data page, in which we’re reminded that there are precedents for this sort of thing.
Weapon XVI, the so-called “Allgod”, was indeed a weaponised religious belief that attacked religious people (but was ineffective against atheists). Its only appearance was in Dark Reign – The List: Wolverine (2009).
Hawkspox seems to be new.
Hexus the Living Corporation was the villain from Marvel Boy #2-3 (2000) by Grant Morrison and JG Jones. It’s basically a hive mind crossed with a conceptual villain.
The techno organic virus is a slightly weird inclusion here, since it isn’t conceptual in the slightest; we get a basically accurate description of its established role in current continuity. Presumably it’s here simply because it’s a virus villain. Cable’s variant is the version given to him by Apocalypse to keep him under control. The “Storm/World Variant” is the version that Storm was infected with in Giant-Size X-Men: Storm.
PAGES 31-34. Bishop and Cable go on the streets.
And the Children’s idea has become pervasive.
PAGE 35. Trailers. The Krakoan text reads: LAY YOUR HAMMER DOWN.
I thought this was great. It wasn’t too far from what I was hoping to see from this comic (the only “Fall of X” book which I was interested). We’ll see where it goes from here.
Now, this comic adds even more questions about Orchis. If the Children of the Vault are post-human, shouldn’t they represent what Orchis is hoping to achieve. Are the Children of the Vault potential enemies because they aspire to Ascension, as in Moira’s Life Six?
It seems to me that there are factions in Orchis. Stasis and Moira want to avoid victory by the machines, but both are also interested in the rise of post-humanity. Nimrod and Omega Sentinel want a post-human future ruled by the machines as shown in Moira’s Life Nine. Most other members of Orchis (all other than Devo?) apparently have no knowledge of the futures seen by Moira or Omega Sentinel, so they would see either post-human future as acceptable.
Orchis, and/or Moira, wanting to save/preserve baseline humanity and prevent the need for the rise of post-humanity would make the most sense, but again…“Orchis will kill the humans”. The purpose and agenda of Orchis is made more opaque with this story.
I’m not sure if Hawkspox is a reference to House of X/Powers of X (HoXPoX – say it aloud), how insanely convoluted Hawkman continuity is at DC, or both. Probably both.
Given that “Hawkspox” was created by someone whose name is not DRASTICALLY different from “Jonathan Hickman” (especially if you use the first name Joe), and HoX/PoX was in 2019… I suspect the former.
@Chris V: Not quite – Moira, Nimrod and Karima are all interested in machine supremacy, it’s explicitly why Omega Sentinel went back in time to begin with. Stasis is the one meant to be pursuing posthumanity, presumably with Feilong as well.
The whiplash of going back and forth from Bishop and Cable doing yet another mutant genocide plot to the Children of the Vault interacting with real problems of the sort that normally tend to be abstracted away into the mutant metaphor is fascinatingly jarring. I don’t know that it’s a good idea to pit the mutant metaphor against reality like this, but if anyone can pull it off I think Deniz Camp has a shot here.
I laughed at “Hawkspox.”
Good first issue! Putting two people who hate each other on the run against a greater force generates a good amount of tension.
Making Bishop the villain of the Cable series was such a mistake. Ignoring the events of that comic hasn’t stopped fans from asking why everyone let him off the hook. I hope this series finds an out for the character.
Where did it say that Moira was interested in machine supremacy? I haven’t been following all the comics post-Inferno, so I don’t know how writers after Hickman may have misused Moira.
Moira was trying to prevent the creation of Nimrod. It seems to me that Moira and Stasis are both interested in bringing about the rise of post-humanity and preventing machine supremacy.
It was Moira’s Life Six when the Librarian confronted Moira. He asked her what she alternative she had to offer to him compared to Ascension and machine supremacy. Moira had no answer for the Librarian. It seems that Hickman’s intent was that Moira was trying to find a way to stop both mutants and machines so that post-humanity could win.
Odd that Hexus is listed as coming from a far off galaxy, since in Marvel Boy it comes from Earth-N. I guess it’s just the local variant.
It’s weird that Orchis captured both Kid Cable and Old Cable by tearing off their arms. I wonder if the artist drew the wrong Cable in X-Men 24, and the captions about Old Cable’s capture are an attempt to cover for it. Or maybe Kid Cable will be used as a hostage against Scott and/or Maddie- we were explicitly told in Dark Web that Jean gave Maddie memories of Kid Cable.
Can someone please explain to me why on Earth the group of mutants at the Hellfire Club split up? They realized they couldn’t stay at the Hellfire Club. But we’ve seen that the Limbo Embassy is still open. The Hellfire Club and the Limbo Embassy are within walking distance of each other. So why didn’t they just all go to the Limbo Embassy until they could come up with a better plan? But instead they split up for some reason. We saw this issue that Bishop split off from the main group and the preview for Uncanny Avengers suggests that Kwannon and Monet did too. And the captions make it clear Bishop had no money. When Duggan was showing the immediate aftermath of the Gala in X-Men 25, he should have shown why they split up.
It’s nice that Camp remembers that Cable hates Apocalypse, despite attempts to retcon Apocalypse into merely misunderstood.
Some people felt that Cable mind controlling the Orchis goon into thinking he was a mutant with the result that he killed himself later trying to fly was a bit excessive. Especially since Cable could have probably done a telepathic zap that wore off after a couple of hours.
Why does everyone think Scott is dead? All they know is Scott left the Gala Shouldn’t they wonder if Captian Krakoa is a brainwashed Scott or somethin? But Bishop seems to think that everyone Cable loved is dead and in the preview for Dark X-Men, Alex says everyone he loved except Maddie died the night of the Hellfire Gala. It seems like a contrivance to prevent Cable and Alex from going to rescue Scott.
Also, if Bishop broke off from the group, then why does he think everyone who went through the gates are dead? At the end of the Hellfire Gala, everyone except Rogue and Xavier thought the mutants who went through the gates were on Mars.
“Despite often being portrayed as having advance knowledge due to his time travel, Cable apparently didn’t know that the Fall of X was about to happen. Of course, time is fluid.”
I have a vague recollection of Kid Cable mentioning an impending catastrophe that would end one age of Krakoa, also suggesting that a refounding would occur, which tracks with Destiny’s future chart we saw as a data page (in Immortal?). Probably in the Cable solo book, but I can’t find it at the moment. Anyone else?
Also lol’d at Hawkspox.
I liked this issue. Good character voices, intriguing premise, good pacing and writing.
Is this the first work by Deniz Camp at Marvel?
Luis-Yes. Camp wrote 20th Century Men for Image Comics. I highly recommend that series.
@Joseph S- The weird thing is Kid Cable seemed to know about Orchis’s attacking the Hellfire Gala In X-Men 24 but Old Cable apparently didn’t. Maybe Kid Cable gets his memories wiped at some point?
I liked this one a lot. It’s the first time since the “Cable and X-Force”/”Uncanny X-Force” crossover that we’ve acknowledged that Bishop did some really bad stuff (they hinted that they were going to explore it in the Bishop War College series, but then veered off into a variety of other plots you author liked more).
I’m hoping we continue to see tension between Cable and Bishop over the series, and maybe even end it with them still hating each other, in subversion of the trope.
@Chris V: She’s a robot herself now, so she’s fully on board with the machines. If that seems incongruous with the whole premise of HoXPoX… well, yes, it is.
@Mike Loughlin
They tried to very vaguely explain it away in Uncanny X-Force with there being something psychically wrong with him that Psylocke and Storm had to fix (against his will). I always thought the implication was meant to be that Cassandra Nova had done something to him (as she’s the villain of that series) and the story had some time travel elements that could explain his behavior, but it was never clarified.
I still think the other Seraphina will eventually be revealed to be Talon on a long con where she genuinely develops feelings for Synch, like the psychic relationship she had with Bobby in that one issue… I don’t think they would have two Lauras without an exit plan (Gabby doesn’t count)
@NS: thanks for the info, I had no idea an explanation for Bishop’s behavior had been offered, even semi-obliquely.
I’ll take “Cassandra Nova did it” or “it was all a mental simulation” or “that wasn’t the real Bishop,” I don’t care too much about the specifics. Any way the writers can undo the character assassination is fine with me.
Speaking of, I’m intrigued with the idea of Cassandra Nova being in an upcoming movie.
@NS: There was something that happened to Bishop after he had committed genocide. I think he was possessed by the Demon Bear. While inside his mind, Storm couldn’t stand Bishop’s memories so she erased them to bring back the old Bishop.
@Gary: That was Sam Guthrie, and she made it clear she was just curious and had no real feelings for him.
I didn’t care much for this one. The Children of the Vault getting loose was established in the past as a cataclysmic disaster, so this seemed primed to be an “unexpected consequences” story for Orchis taking out Krakoa.
And while it’s fine to defy expectations, this swerved into… yet another “super-powers used to make the world a better place, but in a way that has to be undone eventually because things have to stay roughly the same for the larger comic book universe”, which Krakoa was already doing in a much larger way. It’s less The Fall of X than The Rise of Something Similar to X, That is Also Going to Fall.
And it feels like it’s happening in a vacuum. A month passes, and Orchis does nothing? The Avengers do nothing? Cable and Bishop don’t even change clothes, and no one’s after them? An entire war was poised to happen with Genesis, but it doesn’t affect anything here? Fall of X feels like it has no momentum at all right now.
I liked this issue because I wanted to see the Children of the Vault offer humans their own flawed utopia, similar to what Krakoa represented to mutants.
What I most wanted to see from “Fall of X” was the rise of post-humanity while the mutants were indisposed. The mutants would return to a very different world. We could have seen the inverse of Xavier’s message to the world from House/Powers. “While mutants were sleeping on an island, the world changed.” Post-humanity could then go about persecuting mutants and non-uplifted humanity.
Of course, it’s limited how far this type of story could go in a shared universe…
Orchis does nothing because Orchis has no goals outside of getting rid of mutants.
I feel the Orchis conversation went, “What about this guys? Should we do something?”
“Let’s wait. Maybe they want to kill all the humans too.”
“Wait. Aren’t we supposed to be representing humanity?”
“I feel our modus operandi now is basically doing anything evil.”
I remember reading the original Children of the Vault storyline by Mike Carey but damned if I can really remember anything about it. Do we know what the plans of the Children are for humanity and mutants? Is there any possibility for non-violent coexistence?
No. They are post-humans, similar to Homo Novissima from Moira’s Life Six. The Children were artificially evolved from Homo Sapiens Sapiens to become the “new race of man”, beyond mutants. Due to genetic drift, they are, for all intents abs purposes, a different species as far removed from from modern man as they are from mutants. They consider themselves superior to both baseline humans and mutants. During Carey’s run their goal was the extermination of both so they can inherit the planet.
In the alternate Life Ten timeline from Hickman’s “Inferno”, the Children of the Vault awakening led to humans and mutants forming an alliance against a common enemy. That doesn’t seem like a possibility in the current day.
@ChrisV: Oh yeah, you could get some good echos of Krakoa out of Orchis then. Also compare the Quiet Council to Orchis’ leadership now that they’ve mostly won. Everyone has their own competing interests and visions for the future that start to pull different ways. Even the grunts start to argue since they were from different organizations and now old rivalries reassume.
The Children of Tomorrow was also the name of Ultimate Reed Richards’ hyperevolved followers from an enclosed city.
Although my first thought will always be the Fraggle Rock song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__z5RbtmP8M
Part of me would like to see mankind tap into the Destiny Force from the Kree-Skrull War and Avengers Forever. It would put the lie to how stupid the Mutant-Huaman-Post Human divide is and allow all three to forge a future together. I know, I know, wishful thinking. And it would destroy the narrative tension.
I really dislike the common theme in comics and adaptations of comics media that every group that is trying to enact positive change in the world beyond the status quo has to either be villains or anti-heroes.