X-Men #30 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN vol 6 #30
“Who Says Romance is Dead?”
Writer: Gerry Duggan
Artist: Phil Noto
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. Synch and Talon fight the High Evolutionary and his creations.
PAGES 2-4. Scott dreams about Jean.
This somewhat mirrors the dream scene that opens Fall of the House of X #1, in which Scott dreams about being hanged in the American west, and is apparently saved by Jean. Jean, of course, is still off in the White Hot Room, where we left her in Immortal X-Men. But the clear implication is that she’s regained contact with him in some way.
The fire imagery suggests Jean’s renewed connection with the Phoenix Force.
PAGE 5. Cyclops talks to psychiatrist Dr Goldsmith
Dr Goldsmith has been sent to certify Cyclops as fit for trial. That means we’re before Fall of the House of X #1, which opens with Cyclops arriving at court.
“I suppose after Ben Urich’s exposé on Orchis, you had to move my sham trial out of America.” Urich’s exposé was published in Uncanny Avengers, and involves Wilson Fisk’s account of what happened at the Hellfire Gala, and the exposure of Captain Krakoa as an Orchis impostor. Quite why that’s supposed to have any less impact in Paris is beyond me.
“I assume I’m in my first uniform because your masters have decided it’s the most recognizable one for their propaganda purposes?” This is indeed the costume he was wearing in Fall of the House of X #1 for the trial. It’s not his first uniform – that, obviously, would be the black and yellow Silver Age X-Men costume – but it is his first costume that’s unique to him. Presumably somebody trustworthy told him what he was wearing, because he can’t see it. For all he knows it could be bright pink.
PAGE 6. Dr Goldsmith talks to Dr Stasis.
Could they really not find a psychiatrist who was willing to say what they wanted without being pressurised? And I’ve pointed out before that there’s no such thing as a death penalty, let alone standards for it, in France.
Anyway, Cyclops does indeed refuse to participate in the trial in Fall of the House of X #1.
PAGE 7. Recap and credits.
PAGE 8. A symbolic page of a “Lovers” tarot card, showing Synch and Talon with Jean as Phoenix in the background. (There are no data pages in this issue, unless you count the credits.) Talon is shown connected to various tubes and so forth, possible in reference to the way she looked when Forge found her in the Vault in issue #16.
PAGE 9. Flashback: Synch and Talon fall in love in the Vault.
This is just a straight recap of the time that they spent in the time-dilation Vault together, as covered mainly in Jonathan Hickman’s X-Men #19 (2021).
PAGES 10-11. The X-Men and their allies discuss how to distribute their cure to Orchis “kill switch”.
Issue #29 ends with Wolverine (Logan), Ms Marvel and Shadowkat arriving back at the X-Men’s underground base to find it in ruins and blood everywhere. The caption reads “Next: Fall of the House of X #1! Then – find out where Synch and Talon went in X-Men #30!” Well, this is X-Men #30 and it has no apparent connection whatsoever to last issue’s cliffhanger.
Let’s all take a moment to sigh deeply and then move on.
Orchis doctored the Krakoan drugs starting with the 2022 Hellfire Gala and made that fact public at this year’s gala. By “hostages”, Talon apparently means the people who still have the kill switch inside them, and thus could be killed by Orchis to make good their threat to kill 10 humans for any mutant found on Earth… or returning to Earth or… it’s never been entirely clear, or even clear whether Orchis actually took the threat seriously themselves. At any rate, the idea seems to be that the X-Men want this threat off the table before beginning their invasion.
The whole subplot of a cure being found has taken place off panel – as far as I know, there’s no Spider-Man tie-in story dealing with this. Gold Goblin, if you’re not following Amazing Spider-Man, is Norman Osborn with his evil and insane aspects magically removed. Spider-Man’s crack about his newfound concern for ethics is actually about a year or so late given their relationship in their home title.
“Sauron wants to turn everyone into dinosaurs.” Referencing the meme panel from Spider-Man & The X-Men #2. (“But I don’t want to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs.”)
“G.E.D.” “General Educational Development” test. Apparently it’s equivalent to a high school diploma (which isn’t really a meaningful concept to British readers either).
“The X-Men faced the High Evolutionary, and he wanted to give us a gift – a bioweapon that would sterilize all of humanity.” In issue #3. The High Evolutionary’s argument was that humanity was destroying itself anyway, and sterilising them would at least get it over with relatively painlessly, leaving the way clear for mutants and a few posthumans. According to that issue, this device is called “a nihility sphere”.
As Synch says, the story ends with him providing a drop of blood in exchange for the Evolutionary going away. (Thus, as the Evolutionary says later in the issue, his offer is no longer open.)
“I was with your… younger self on the X-Men.” The Laura in this flashback is the one who was resurrected, apparently in error, while the “real” Talon was still in the Vault.
PAGE 12. Iron Man meets Firestar.
Phil Noto seems to be under the impression that she’s the Human Torch. Oh well.
“I can see the water displacement from your boot jets.” This limitation of Iron Man’s stealth technology was previously mentioned in Invincible Iron Man #11.
“The A.I. contingent of Orchis threatened me.” Issue #28.
“My landing force.” This week’s Invincible Iron Man #14 confirms that it’s an army from Arakko travelling in ships made from mysterium, and shows Forge and Ironheart building the ships.
PAGE 13. Synch and Talon arrive on Counter-Earth.
Counter-Earth is a duplicate Earth on the other side of the Sun, where the High Evolutionary has been experimenting with his evolved animal scientists for ages.
“The High Evolutionary had committed genocide many times over on his planet.” This is the plot of Uncanny Avengers vol 2.
Teslelephant is one of the “Evolutionary Guard” who accompanied the High Evolutionary in issue #3.
PAGES 14-17. Synch and Talon confront the High Evolutionary.
Luminous, the Evolutionary’s “daughter”, is a hybrid of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. She also appeared in issue #3, and met Synch then.
Karma‘s power is supposed to be simple mind control, but for some reason Synch seems to be using it to make Luminous remember the Evolutionary experimenting on her.
PAGE 18. Firestar tells Feilong that the invasion force will land in the Australian outback.
As Iron Man asked her to. Because he’s a sucker, Feilong directs that all the Sentinels head for this obvious trap. Another version of this scene, in which Firestar relays the same information to the rest of the Orchis inner circle, appears in Invincible Iron Man #14. The main takeaway from that scene is that Feilong (unlike Dr Stasis) is oblivious to the fact that the A.I. contingent aren’t his allies, and massively overconfident. The A.I. contingent are starting to see him as a liability who’s been keeping Iron Man around to toy with him, and decide to have Iron Man killed.
PAGES 19-22. Synch reveals that Talon died fighting the Evolutionary.
Synch has used his powers to pull her mind into his body and keep her alive. The obvious resolution here is that she ends up merged with the younger Laura in a single body at some point.
PAGE 23. Trailers. The Krakoan reads THE PASSENGER.
I can see it now “Oui sentence Le Cyclope to be taken to ze guillotine in ze Paree town square at dawn. Ze case she is closed!” *Judge in traditional British wig and gown slams down his gavel*
Plus, it’s Batroc and Le Peregrine handling the trial, as they are the only recurring French Marvel characters.
When he mentions Karma, seems like he maybe means Mirage/Dani, who’d make a lot more sense
When Spider-Man says “This one is personal for me”, it’s because Aunt Anna, MJ’s aunt and Aunt May’s best friend, was poisoned by the Krakoan drugs in Amazing Spider-Man Annual 1. The really weird thing is that Aunt Anna was forgotten about until now. even though Peter promised to look for a cure for her in the Annual. The story in the Annual was written by Celeste Bronfman, who was supposed to write a limited series starring MJ as Jackpot but it wound up turning into a one-shot tying into Gang War. My guess is that the Aunt Anna was supposed to be part of the limited series but it got lost when the limited series turned into a one-shot and it fell to Duggan to resolve the Aunt Anna plot.
The weird thing about Norman’s appearance is that at the end of Amazing Spider-Man 35, it was implied Norman’s sins were returned to him and in issue 37, we saw him yelling at Peter. In other words. it’s supposed to be ambiguous whether Norman is retrurning to villainy but there’s no evidence of that in Duggan’s script.
I was confused about when this issue takes place relative to issues 28-29. In issue 28., Talon and Synch send Kamala off to Latveria with Kate and when she returns the headquarters is trashed. Maybe this issue takes place directly before Talon’s appearance in issue 28- she doesn’t speak to anyone except Synch in issue 28.And the cliffhanger will be dealt with next issue.
@Si From what I’ve read by Paul on this site, your portrayal of France in that comment is more authentic than Tini Howard’s portrayal of the UK.
Notice how much older Synch looks after his return. It’s been established that his powers are aging him, something we also see when Professor Synch sacrificed sacrificed himself in Rise.
It’s not reassuring that this issue gets both Firestar and Karma wrong with the depiction/interpretation of their powers. It’s not like either are terribly obscure or haven’t been used lately…
So much for Old!Laura, I guess. Because I doubt she’ll survive whatever cosmic reset switch brings back everyone else who’s died since the Fall of Krakoa started.
(I kind of hope that whatever happens, it goes ahead and brings back literally every dead mutant. Ever. No matter when they died. Yesterday, ten years ago, 1 million B.C.E… everyone. And plonks them all them on Krakoa or Arakkoa or Genosha or Staten Island…)
Oy. This here looks like textbook flying by the seat of one’s pants. If somebody told me the x-slack got together to do a round robin with this issue, I’d believe them.
The solution to the drug sabotage appearing out of nowhere is especially galling. Sure, Norman Osborn can be the saviour of mutantkind, but could we… could we see that part of the story?
We are not that far from Duggan writing an issue of, I don’t know, Unus the Untouchable holding off Surtur and putting a caption with ‘meanwhile, Orchis was defeated’ at the end of that.
I am enjoying most of Fall of X, but the parts Duggan is responsible for are… thin, poorly thought out, lazily executed, just overall not good. Except Iron Man, that one is surprisingly fine. Like his Marauders before that.
I assume that Old Woman Laura will be merged with Current Young Adult Laura, probably with the standard ‘the memories are faded, but you’re a nice guy, Synch’ outcome.
Which is what I’ve been assuming ever since I realized Duggan isn’t going to immediately kill off Old Woman Laura (which was my first guess).
Especially since… Well, I’m not sure if anybody cares about that after the serial deaths and resurrections of Krakoa, but if we go by character continuity, Old Woman Laura is the ‘real’ Laura and Proper Age for The Present Time Laura is the accidental duplicate.
Except, of course, Krakoan resurrection is a ‘true resurrection’, so they’re both real and it’s more of a Star Trek transporter malfunction…
I do like that Duggan brought back ‘Talon’ as her codename. I don’t even remember who teased it first (either Kyle and Yost in New X-Men or Claremont in X-Men: The End, not sure what came out first), and Marvel probably can’t publish a book with that name (since there was a ‘Talon’ book at DC), and yes, I know, wolverines don’t have talons… but still, I appreciate the callback.
“Talon” is probably a natural enough name for any Wolverine-adjacent character in sudden need of a name even since 1979 or so when Wolverine fought Fang of the Shiar Imperial Guard and took his costume for a while. Apparently it is also the codename that Laura used when first joining a X-Men team back in “New X-Men #31” (2006), much as Kate used to go by “Ariel” and “Sprite”.
I don’t know why people are assuming that Talon will survive in any way, shape or form. Merging her with X-23 (I don’t call her “Wolverine”; I just do not) would be yet another violation of their senses of identity – for both of them, no less. Keeping her psi-phantom inside Synch’s head is not much better, nor sustainable – it ought to be aging Synch as well as harming his own psyche. The only way this plot ends is with the painful acceptance that Talon is indeed dead. From a writer’s perspective that is probably unavoidable as well; extremely experienced characters are a nightmare to write.
Laura didn’t use that codename in New X-Men, but she was identified as Talon by a killer robot from the future.
I’m sorry but this is horrid.
How exactly Scott and Jean’s little horny dream connects with the current White Hot Room situation of being entirely isolated and wounded? Why are important plot beats being resolved off-screen by characters Duggan clearly doesn’t have a basic hang of? What’s with these awfully basic continuity errors? And Talon not having other function than being Synch’s neverending source of angst?
Look. I understand a bunch of people here are not as enthusiastic about Ewing and Gillen as me. I also understand sometimes writers don’t play their best game due to editorial limitations and what not.
But Duggan is simply not good at this. Like some mistakes here are way too fucking basic. And even before we got into this fall of X rush his X-Men couldn’t deliver more than some very basic superhero action with bland characterization and an inability at delivering good plot payoffs. Of course his flaws are going to be even more glaring during this awfully inorganic – because it’s clear editorial simply wants to move away from Krakoa before Brevoort enters – end of Krakoa setup.
Do tell. Reading Duggan’s X-Men stymied my willingness to at some point read his Guardians of the Galaxy books something fierce.
His characterization is… “daring and innovative” might be a nice way of putting it. “Uninterested in the characters” might be a more accurate one. And his plotting has a knack for presenting impressive concepts and making them somehow mundane and solvable by the most underwhelming events conceivable.
Shades of Zack Snyder, really. Lots of flash, merged with an actually remarkable talent to avoid what would seem to be unavoidable substance.
Miyamoris said: Of course his flaws are going to be even more glaring during this awfully inorganic – because it’s clear editorial simply wants to move away from Krakoa before Brevoort enters – end of Krakoa setup.
I get the sense that the Brevoort era will be hurt by the mess of the end of the initially popular Krakoa/HoX/PoX setup.
And that most of the retrospective interest in the Krakoa era itself will come in the form of years of postmortems trying to piece together the behind-the-scenes issues beyond what we currently know.
The easy narrative would be that editorial hamstrung Hickman, so he moved on to his other Marvel project ideas. But I also wonder about how Hickman saw the X-books themsleves, given the oddities around his own X-Men run, the attempt to center things on Tini Howard’s work, and the various Arakko/Amenth/Otherworld elements that seemed an awkward fit with everything else.
To clarify, I think fan reception of the upcoming Brevoort era will be affected by this mess.
I concur. Hickman knew how to create an exciting and innovative status quo, but we must acknowledge that he had plenty of opportunity to use it in equally exciting ways and he just… did not.
Nor do I think that he could or would, regardless of any editorial interference. The Titans/Dominions matter is inherently a quagmire, for instance. I doubt that the decision to park Moira instead of following up on her plot came from editorial either; her powers are also inherently problematic once we recover from the initial surprise; and if anyone knows what X of Swords was all about, I would like to know. Maybe it was just meant to bring a lot of exotic new characters and environments to X-Men lore. If so, then it sort of succeeded, but just sort of.
I like his work in G.O.D.S., but he is very much better at setting up situations than in resolving them convincingly.
Will we have to wait until 2040 before we get Krakoa nostalgia?
I think this is one of those things where, before the Krakoan era even ends, people will be preemptively nostalgic for what they imagine might have been.
I don’t know — I think Hickman is good at beginning stories and ending them. It’s just the middle parts he has trouble with. His Avengers –> Secret Wars run for example, started out strong, meandered for a long time (Starbrand, anyone?), and then ended with a bang.
I get the sense that he imagines a set-up and knows where he wants to end up, but all the parts in between where you would develop ideas and characters is a big blank.
For instance, he could have shown us the actual development of Krakoa in HoXPoX instead of just plunking us into it wholesale. But that would have required slow, painstaking work, and I don’t think he’s good at that. His style is more If This, Then That: a proposition and its inevitable consequence.
But he wants to collect everything he can about a property into his work, so…Phoenix, Apocalypse, Sinister, Otherworld, Scott/Jean/Logan/Emma, the Shi’ar, the Brood, Krakoa, the Savage Land, Moira as a link to the entire X-Men timeline, crossovers, death and resurrection, etc.
So I guess his style is actually If This, [everything], Then That. But the [everything] doesn’t necessarily relate to the beginning or the end. It’s just there for fun.
Obviously, I’m postulating here since we don’t have his actual X-ending. His tenure on the X-books seems pretty typical to me, though, so I think he had something spectacular in mind.
I do know that some of Hickman’s initial plans for the Krakoa-era were affected by the Covid pandemic.
“X of Swords” was mainly Tini Howard’s idea and it was a way to kill time due to the Covid pandemic changing Marvel’s schedule. Most of the ongoing X-books at the time were supposed to come to an end at that point, instead we got a crossover event and an extension of the titles which were supposed to end.
As far as Moira, that was Marvel editorial’s fault. Hickman had got the go ahead for a Moira X series, rumoured to be written by either Mike Carey or Al Ewing. For whatever reason, Marvel cancelled the book. That left a big gap in the story. I guess Hickman should have worked details about Moira into his plots after he found out Marvel wasn’t going to do the Moira book, but it may have depended on how far ahead Hickman was told that the Moira book was canceled.
I wonder how much of X of Swords was Howard’s. Sure, Excalibur’s only purpose was to lead into XoS. But Amenth, Arakko, First Horsemen – all that was set up in Hickman’s issues. Summoner – possibly the blandest of the black-and-white ciphers he likes so much – takes up a considerable amount of his run (only to be basically irrelevant in XoS proper and die at some point at the hand of… somebody).
@Miyamoris: I don’t think Gillen and Ewing have anything to do with it, it’s just that there’s a sense of resignation we tend to get when Marvel gives control of the X-line to a writer who simply isn’t up to the task. Duggan’s hardly the first to fail in this way, we just have to put up with it until the next relaunch and hope someone better comes along.
@Chris V: Not to absolve Hickman of his missteps during the Dawn of X period, but from what I heard it wasn’t that Marvel cancelled the Moira X book, it’s that both Carey and Ewing turned it down.
@Chris V and @Diana: Here’s the relevant quote from Jordan White at https://aiptcomics.com/2022/05/02/x-men-monday-154-jordan-d-white/ :
“So how far back does her heel turn go? Quite a ways. Did it go back to the beginning? The answer is no — it did not go back all the way to House of X and Powers of X. It was a thing he came up with later, but it wasn’t that much later. Everything about Jonathan and everything about his stories is complicated. […]
Without going into too much detail, it was at the same time as the Moira series died is when that happened. X-Men Monday fans remember that we at one point were talking about a Moira series. We had talked to Al Ewing about it. He had a pitch for it. Like, it was good, but then Jonathan’s plans shifted pretty radically and it became, “Oh, actually, instead of doing that, I’m going to do this. Sorry, Al, let’s get you another book.” And the direction that Moira was going in shifted in a big way.”
So: Marvel did not cancel the Moira X book, and Ewing did not turn it down!
This was an epic ( but pretty) mess !
Douglas-Thanks. I had read that Marvel randomly canceled the book. That’s odd on Hickman’s part, considering that a Moira X series would have been a perfect way to set up the reveal that Moira was going to turn on the mutants. Well, so much for my idea that “Inferno” read as so rushed due to the Moira X series getting pulled out from under Hickman.
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What a waste of Phil Noto’s art. If Duggan’s going to turn in dreck, just give it to Greg Land to hack out in 3 days, and assign Noto for something better.
I’d think most of Duggan’s continuity goofs would be caught by basic editorial work. Have Polaris puppet unconscious Laura by her claws instead of her bones. Name the right New Mutant. Don’t draw Rasputin IV flying. This is doable stuff.
Honestly, the only one that bothers me is Rasputin flying, because that was just a significant plot point.
Just end Duggan and give the x-men head writer gig to Ewing Gillen or Simone or someone.