Realm of X #3 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
REALM OF X #3
“First Blood Spilled”
Writer: Torunn Grønbekk
Artist: Bruno Oliveira
Colour artist: Rain Beredo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Lauren Amaro
COVER / PAGE 1. Um…, well, that seems to be Mirage crying out on the Bifrost, with images of Thor and Sif overhead.
The original solicitation for this story reads: “No gods, only mutants! The date of the prophecy looms ahead, and despite their best efforts, the Vanir and their mutant protectors are ill-equipped to meet their destiny. Meanwhile, their enemy grows ever stronger, sinking their claws deeper into the misguided Curse. Lost and at the end of her rope, Dani beseeches her former friends in Asgard for help – but will reinforcements arrive in time to turn the tide, or have they truly been abandoned to their fate?”
Most of that solicitation is in the issue, but the closest it gets to Dani beseeching the Asgardians is four panels on page 13 where she stands under a tree and yells to the gods. Presumably it was planned to be a much more prominent plot thread when the cover was designed.
Diógenes Neves, who drew issues #1-2, was solicited to draw this issue as well, but instead we get Bruno Oliveira. It’s been a long while since I’ve seen Marvel plug a fill-in artist with a style so comprehensively unlike the regular artist into the middle of an arc. Actually, I quite like the art, aside from the bafflingly high number of vigorously cross-eyed characters throughout the story. But boy, it’s going to read strangely in the trade.
PAGE 2-5. Saturnyne summons her soldiers.
The previous issue ended with Saturnyne ignoring Joana’s warnings that she needed to sacrifice something in order to change her fate, and deciding that she was going to kill the approaching mutants (presumably, before they got to Curse and removed her from Saturnyne’s influence). She also said she was going to “summon some help”, which is evidently what she’s doing here. Unlike the locals, who can’t reach the rest of the Ten Realms, Saturnyne can open a portal, but struggles to keep it open.
The ship she manages to get through is occupied by alien-looking soldiers who seem to regard themselves as having a deal with Saturnyne, rather than working for her. We don’t know at this stage who these guys are.
PAGE 6. Recap and credits.
PAGES 7-9. The mutants fight the aliens.
Straight action sequence. The heroes finally learn that they’re fighting Saturnyne.
PAGES 10-11. Trabin dies.
A “Verus” was mentioned last issue – it’s basically a ceremony where Vanir precognitives predict the future of children.
PAGE 12. Data page. Librarian Frider Frostborn annotates another prophecy about the upcoming battle (as she did last issue). In a sense, this literally annotates itself. Obviously, “fire” is Typhoid, “sand” is Dust, “fear” is Mirage and “bone” is Marrow, simply tracking their powers. Frider dismisses the bit about “stars embrace their light” as “poetic drivel”, which probably means it’ll turn out to be the plot of issue #4. It has to be said that the standard of poetry on this particular prophecy is not top notch. (“This threat we can’t dismiss”?)
The “fifth stranger” is clearly Curse, but on the face of it, Magik doesn’t feature in the prophecy at all. Of course, story convention tells us that she’s probably the unspecified person who makes the “choice” in the final two stanzas.
PAGE 13. Mirage calls out to Sif.
Dani mentioned last issue that she had been trying to contact Asgard (though she didn’t really specify how), and we saw that Trabin was writing increasingly frustrated letters to the Asgardians too. The obvious implication was that the messages were being blocked somehow.
PAGE 14. Data page. The dying Trabin entrusts his role to Vonos. It doesn’t come up in this issue, but Vonos was flirting very obviously with Typhoid in issue #2 (and the prophecy on page 12 is all about “passion” and “love” where Typhoid is concerned).
PAGE 15. Saturnyne and Joana.
Last issue, Joana was berating Saturnyne for thinking that she could alter her destiny without making a sacrifice. Saturnyne insists that she has successfully averted the prophecy – the Vanir might attack, but there isn’t going to be a pitched battle as advertised. Joana has obviously heard this sort of thing many times before and has confidence that her prophesies always come true in the end.
PAGES 16-18. Magik enters Saturnyne’s citadel alongside the refugees.
When we left Magik last issue, she had been left behind by the others, and she’d wandered off on her own. Her advantage, at the moment, is that nobody is paying attention to her.
PAGES 19-21. Magik and Curse.
The narration tries to tell us that Curse is a teenager, but she’s drawn to look like a child (which is normal). We saw in previous issues that Saturnyne has told Curse that the mutants abandoned her. Curse is initially pleased to see Magik and kind of brushes her off, but we’ll see in the next scene that she does take Magik’s protests somewhat seriously.
Saturnyne justifies the damage that she’s doing to Vanaheim on the grounds that “sacrifices must be made.” This seems to call back to Joana lecturing Saturnyne last issue about the need for her to sacrifice something in order to alter her fate. But Saturnyne is trying to get someone else to make the sacrifice for her.
PAGES 22-23. Saturnyne and Curse.
Curse figures out, a little too late, that Saturnyne has indeed been lying to her. Saturnyne doesn’t seem to have much of a plan B for the eventuality of Curse seeing through her.
PAGE 24. Magik plummets from the tower.
And has a flashback to being a trainee of a bored-looking Belasco, as a child growing up in Limbo. Apparently, this is some sort of breakthrough which helps her reconnect to her magic.
PAGE 25. Trailers. The Krakoan reads TAKE FATE INTO YOUR OWN HANDS.
This series consistently fails to engage me. Paul spells out all the ways characters figure into the prophecy in the notes above, and they underscore why I don’t like prophecy as a storytelling device- either prophecy is fulfilled or there’s a swerve in which unimportant/unnamed characters/settings/items become the key. Its role in Vanir society is more interesting, but that’s not enough to sustain the story.
Also, anytime a character dismisses torture and brutality I find myself unable to root for them. The character I found most compelling was Curse, but now I don’t want to read about her.
The art wasn’t to my taste, either. The cross-eyed characters were distracting, and Marrow didn’t look right at all. If this were an ongoing, I would have dropped it at issue 2. I’ll read Realm of X to the end (I hate having incomplete miniseries), and I hope the next issue is much better.
You’re the only person on the internet who seems to have liked the art, Paul.
The point of the scene at the end is that Magik is remembering how Belasco taught her to draw power from the misery in the world. I’m sure that if this helps them stop Saturnyne, nothing bad will come of it. 🙂
(Note that Destiny had a vision of Ilyana killing the X-Men.)
I like how Saturnyne’s plan depends on Curse not realizing she’s evil, so she decides to toss someone off a building in front of Curse.
Supposedly, Marrow was supposed to appear in Dark X-Men but Torunn fought hard for her to appear in this book instead. I can’t see why Torunn fought so hard- she’s done practically nothing this entire series and Dark X-Men would have been a much more natural fit for her.
We know that Mary, at least, will make it home next issue. She’s going to be appearing in the Spider-Man Gang War crossover.
@Mike Loughlin- I never saw Curse as sympathetic and neither did a lot of people. Remember, her curse is responsible for Nature Girl becoming evil (she wished for a friend, knowing the way her power works is that her wishes must cause suffering, and Nature Girl became her friend but turned evil.) How is it fair that she gets a second chance and Nature Girl doesn’t?
It’s probably worth mentioning that at this point, Sif has taken over the “all-seeing guardian of the Rainbow Bridge” role traditionally filled by Heimdall, hence why Dani is calling out to her in particular.
Also, Curse breaking Saturnyne’s barrier may help with Magik recovering her… magic before falling to her death.
@Michael: “Remember, her curse is responsible for Nature Girl becoming evil…”
I did not remember that because this is the first story I’ve read featuring Curse. I saw her as a somewhat unlikable but sympathetic figure. Now, the sympathy is gone.At least her callousness is consistent with her past actions.
This are was jarring and didn’t suit the story at all.
And I am thorough disengaged by the story.
The more I see of Grønbekk‘s work, the less satisfied with it. I feel like this era of X-Men writers really will go down as populated by epic misfires amongst a few shining gems.
@The Other Michael- Gronbekk definitely has issues with her writing. But I think that a large part of this problem is the nature of this series.
The problem seems to have been that Typhoid Mary needed to be separated from Kingpin to justify Kingpin’s alliance with the X-Men and iron Man against Orchis. But the Spider-Man office needed Typhoid Mary back in time for the Gang War crossover, which starts on November 29th. So Mary couldn’t just be sent off with Hope’s and Exodus’s group. So this series was created to justify Mary going away and then returning.
Is Oliveira from an artistic tradition where cross-eyed is *not* seen as looking silly? ‘Cause for me, it badly undercut nearly all the dramatic scenes this issue.
I would argue that the editor should have demanded this be fixed — but the fact of a last-minute change of artists suggests that there may have been some earlier production screwup, leaving no time for such fixes. It should be possible to fix it for the trade, but I’m dubious about anyone with money-authority caring enough 🙁
I also found the art half-baked and distracting. Maybe this style could be put to better use on a different title, or even this title, but the clash in tone from previous issues was too much.
I would point out that Neves’ name is still on the cover, so I wonder if this wasn’t a rush job of some sort. The pencils certainly feel rushed and the colors are not particularly detailed either.
As for other commenters theories on Marrow and Mary, I’m convinced by that. Gronbekk Must just have really wanted Marrow, hopefully she has more plans for the character than we’ve seen.
I’ve enjoyed Gronbekk’s work on various Jane Foster books, which were pretty decent fun (she started by co-writing with Aaron, I think?). This, on the other hand, is not quite working and the art change this issue basically derails the whole thing.
I don’t know. Maybe there’s something coming in the final issues that will make me think differently about the whole thing, but at the moment it’s a cast of characters I usually enjoy a lot not doing anything interesting and also behaving not quite as I’d expected them to.
Basically, a miss.
[…] OF X #3. Annotations here. Bruno Oliveira is not the solicited artist for this story, and his angular cartooning bears no […]
I’ve found Gronbekk’s stuff to be difficult to read but I’m having trouble pinpointing why. It just never feels like I can deduce what the point is, why the plot is happening the way it is, why characters are behaving the way they are. I mean, you could plug a bunch of other characters into the hero and villain roles here (except maybe Curse) and it would read effectively the same. Saturnyne’s role is painfully generic and doesn’t feel connected to her Krakoa-era history at all.