Exceptional X-Men #7 annotations
EXCEPTIONAL X-MEN #7
Writer: Eve L Ewing
Artist: Carmen Carnero
Colour artist: Nolan Woodard
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Tom Brevoort
This isssue is bannered as an “X-Manhunt” tie in, with the tag “Collateral Damage” instead of a part number. On his Substack, Tom Brevoort described it as a “red skies” crossover and he wasn’t kidding – the “crossover” consists of a two page scene in which the cast learn that “X-Manhunt” is happening, exchange some thoughts on it, and then get back to the plot. That’s literally it.
THE CORE CAST
Emma Frost. The issue opens with a five page monologue by Emma accompanied by a montage of images from her life. The general thrust is that she’s been through a cycle of building safe havens for mutants, trying to escape the human world, and seeing them collapse – hence, she’s experimenting with “something else”. Presumably, by that she means training the mutants within the human world instead of withdrawing from it. (The Massachusetts Academy had mostly human students, but it was still an elite boarding school and so outside the normal world in other ways.) This is more something that Kate insisted upon, but she seems to be coming round to it.
X-Force #9 annotations
X-FORCE vol 7 #9
“X-Manhunt, part 6: The Shapley Value”
Writer: Geoffrey Thorne
Artist: Marcus To
Colour artist: Erick Arciniega
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Mark Basso
X-FORCE
This is the penultimate chapter of the “X-Manhunt” crossover. It’s also the penultimate issue of the series, so X-Force can’t break off in mid-storyline to participate; hence, the crossover A-plot actually consists of Sage (not technically on the team right now) helping out Professor X, while X-Force spend the whole issue continuing the fight that started last issue. Forge, Askani, Captain Britain and Tank get to contribute to this vital exercise.
SUPPORTING CAST
Sage. Her real name is Terisia Karišik, as used at the end of the previous issue, which would imply that she’s Bosnian. (She’s been presented as Balkan in the past, but this is more specific.) She claims that she deleted her telepathy in “my last system update”, along with her alcoholism and “some other traits”. This presumably explains her mental recovery between the flashback and main story in issue #1. Professor X doesn’t seem particularly surprised by this notion, and it may be intended to explain the inconsistent portrayal of her psychic powers over the years.
Daredevil Villains #48: Bullseye
DAREDEVIL #131-132 (March & April 1976)
“Watch Out for Bullseye, He Never Misses!” / “Bullseye Rules Supreme”
Writer, editor: Marv Wolfman
Penciller: Bob Brown
Inker: Klaus Janson
Colourist: Michele Wolfman
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Well, it took us 48 goes and over a decade of comics, but we’ve finally reached one of the really big names. We’ve had enduring second-tier villains like the Gladiator, the Jester and the Owl. We’ve had some villains who were big deal for a short time, like the Masked Marauder and the Death-Stalker. And we’ve had a whole bunch of one-off villains. But truly A-list villains? There’s the Purple Man, perhaps, but his claim to that status rests largely on stories published long after he stopped appearing in Daredevil.
Bullseye is in a different position. He still appears in Daredevil today. He’ll get his own minis. He’s a recognisable figure around the Marvel Universe. He’ll even make it to the Dark Avengers. But it’ll take him a little time. He made it into the first Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe but didn’t make the cut for the Deluxe Edition – which means he was ranked below the likes of the Death-Throws, a team of evil jugglers. He didn’t get back in until Update ’89. So why didn’t he click immediately?
Charts – 14 March 2025
Is the theme of 2025 going to be “records that were overlooked several years ago”, then?
1. Chappell Roan – “Pink Pony Club”
Two weeks. It has a lead of more than 15% over the number 2 single, but she does have a new single out – the first actually new single she’s released since breaking through last year – so we’ll see what the first week audience is for that.
4. Doechii – “Anxiety”
The X-Axis – w/c 10 March 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #13. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. I guess we’re doing alternating story arcs here. After the diversion to Black Tom and the Juggernaut, we’re back to the first arc, with Banshee and Husk hanging around at Cassidy Keep and not actually doing a whole lot to advance the plot beyond reminding us of the grass-roots anti-mutant Flatscanners movement. Meanwhile, the latest aggrieved human is a construction worker who’s out of work because the mutant crews are so much more efficient. I don’t actually mind that as an idea – if you had mutants trying to live in the real world, it makes sense that you’d get people complaining about them having an unfair advantage – but there’s something a bit odd about the idea that there are apparently tons of everyday mutants in America again after the fall of Krakoa. That’s not how the plot went – the entire population of Krakoa were marched into the White Hot Room and we were told that the vast majority of them stayed to build a new life there. I guess you can rationalise this by claiming that a lot more mutants came back in X-Men #35 than the issue suggested, but that undercuts the earlier story, which I’m not keen on at all. It was a get out clause to allow particular mutants to be used in future, not a reset button for the entire population of Krakoa. It’s not like there weren’t plenty of civilian mutants still in the US anyway, since Orchis apparently found tons of them during “Fall of X”. None of which is really a point about this particular issue, but there’s a degree of goalpost-moving that feels a little too obvious to me.
X-MEN #13. (Annotations here.) Well, back to “X-Manhunt”. Fortunately, this week’s issues are rather more coherent than last week’s, since everyone now seems to be on the same page about what the problem is with Professor X’s powers, and NYX seems to have been the outlier. Beyond that… it’s basically a fight scene. The memorable set piece is Kid Omega taking on Professor X telepathically, and beating him not through power or through skill but by pre-planning. That confrontation works, and I like the shift of art style to pencils in the astral battle, complete with subdued colours and Professor X’s complacent lecturing turning out to be misplaced. Psylocke’s exchange with Storm kind of works too, at least in as much as it has Psylocke rising to the occasion when Cyclops is out of commission, but it feels like Storm has to be forced into the plot in order to make it work.
Hellverine #4 annotations
HELLVERINE vol 2 #4
“The Drowning Man”
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Raffaele Ienco
Colour artist: Bryan Valenza
Letterer: Travis Lanham
Editor: Mark Basso
HELLVERINE
Even as Hellverine, he doesn’t want to fight either the Mother or her children. But he has another option: from reading the Book of Lamentation, he’s learned some “hell magic” which “conjures horror” and “makes others see me as their worst nightmare”. It even works against the Mother’s enchanted children, who were perfectly willing to attack a burning skeletal Wolverine. That might suggest that it’s also cutting through their enchantment, although it clearly doesn’t free them entirely, since the art still shows them all with yellow eyes.
When Hellverine uses this power, a burning symbol appears on his chest. From the dialogue, I think the idea is that he has to carve the symbol into his chest using his claws in order to activate the spell, but the art struggles to get that idea across. Seems a very specific sort of spell, but I suppose maybe any old knife would do.
I hadn’t noticed this before, but Hellverine’s hands – which are only partially gloved – still have flesh on them even in demonic form. It’s weird.
Phoenix #9 annotations
PHOENIX #9
Writer: Stephanie Phillips
Artist: Alessandro Miracolo
Colour artist: David Curiel
Letterer: Ariana Maher
Editor: Annalise Bissa
PHOENIX
This version of Phoenix has embraced her cosmic role and describes herself as “the guardian of cosmic balance”. All this somewhat ties back to issue #5, where Eternity gave her a speech about not letting her human side hold her back, and becoming a true cosmic entity. At that point, Jean’s main concern was that she wanted to hold on to her humanity, but in this story her narration is dismissing that sort of concern as compromise and weakness.
While her immediate aims are completely sensible – she wants to stop Adani from using her fraction of the Phoenix power to damage reality – she also casually brushes aside Rocket and Nova’s offer of help. Her plan to defeat the Shadow Realm is to create a “vast” fracture in reality, which doesn’t sound good, and indeed seems to have the sky shattering on random planets. And her narration is talking about how her fear of her own powers has been selfish and help her back from doing everything that she’s capable of. That said, she does get a lot more human when she’s talking to Adani, whom she still seems to regard as a kindred spirit.
X-Factor #8 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers and page numbers…
Well, I was going to go with the page numbers in Kindle, but for some reason Kindle is absolutely insistent now that comics start on page 2, which is the cover. So hell, let’s go with the story pages.
X-FACTOR vol 5 #8
“X-Manhunt, part 5: The Summers of Days Past”
Writer: Mark Russell
Artist: Bob Quinn
Colour Artist: Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Joe Caramagna
Editor: Darren Shan
In legacy numbering, this is issue #300 – not that the various books called X-Factor have a great deal in common. For the anniversary, we get a larger legacy number on the front cover, and a cover gallery at the end of the issue. Exciting!
X-FACTOR
Angel. He seems to have no problem at all with opposing the X-Men on behalf of the US government and returning Professor X to Graymalkin, despite the X-Men protesting that it’s a “mutant-hating death-trap”. (As mentioned at the end of the last chapter, the X-Men agreed with Storm that Professor X should at least go to a less inhumane prison.) It’s odd behaviour, but to be honest, none of the remaining team seem to have any particular problem with carrying out this mission. Even so, the team’s performance is predictably dismal – the only members to manage any meaningful offence at all are Angel himself and, of all people, ForgetMeNot.
While he was in hospital after issue #1, Angel had “elective procedures” carried out to restore his Archangel powers. This whole thread is a bit odd: he lost that power off panel somewhere between Heir of Apocalypse and X-Factor #1 in what appears to have been a continuity error, and certainly wasn’t explained. The new Archangel also has metal cloaws on his hands and feet (which look like they might be glove-like contraptions) and carries a sword. He also has a weird new move where he folds his metal wings around himself into a sort of buzzsaw.
X-Men #13 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN vol 7 #13
“X-Manhunt, part 4: Gods and Monsters”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Netho Diaz
Inker: Sean Parsons
Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort
THE X-MEN
Cyclops. He spends most of the issue unconscious. Despite the recap claiming that Storm “badly injur[ed]” him in the last chapter, the ice on his face doesn’t seem to do any lasting damage.
Psylocke. She takes command when Cyclops is unconscious. She has a grudge against Professor X for possessing her in issue #9 (during “Raid on Graymalkin”), but she’s more aggrieved by Storm for sheltering him. In part, that’s because Professor X is a danger to those around him, something that Storm doesn’t know (more on that below), and she’s brought him into a populated area – but mainly she views Storm as someone who’s bought into her goddess schtick and “can’t imagine being wrong”. This is a dubious reading of Storm’s character, but it’s a plausible view for Psylocke to hold of her.
At any rate, Psylocke certainly isn’t intimidated by Storm’s persona or reputation, and feels entirely comfortable lecturing her. Admittedly, even in taking the moral high ground, she threatens to kill Maggott , and claims that “we are just monsters”; the lecture gets Storm back to her senses, but doesn’t exactly her convince her of Psylocke’s moral standing.
Charts – 7 March 2025
We have a new number one, depending on how you define “new”. Plus! For the commenter last week who asked “what the f___ is that ketamine fuelled muppet orgy”, I explain who Zig and Zag were.
1. Chappell Roan – “Pink Pony Club”
Yes, it’s a quiet week and that’s part of it. But this did actually grow in sales/streams this week, and it was over 20% of “Not Like Us” at number 2. Despite 2024 being a breakout year for her, this is her first UK number 1. In fact, her Wikipedia discography only lists one previous number one anywhere in the world – “Good Luck Babe” was a number 1 in Ireland.
