Friday, February 7, 2020 by Paul in Annotations Posted onby Paul in

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. And yes, I will be reviewing the first six issues (which make up the first trade) when time allows.

COVER / PAGE 1. Callisto, in her White Bishop outfit, faces off against Bishop and Pyro.

PAGES 2-3. Recap and credits. The story is “From Emma, With Love” by Gerry Duggan, Stefano Caselli and Edgar Delgado. Does it need saying that the reference is to the James Bond story “From Russia, With Love”? Probably not.

PAGE 4. Data page. An unknown person in Washington DC tries to text Kate a warning about Homines Verendi’s plan to sell poisoned Krakoan drugs.

Obviously, the implication is that this is the person on the X-desk whose memos we’ve been seeing throughout the series. He says here that he and Kate met briefly once in Washington, though not in any circumstances that were likely to stick in her mind. House of X #1 had a montage of various X-Men planting Krakoan seeds in various places, and Kitty was indeed shown in Washington DC. Of course, that might just be coincidence, since she’s been to Washington plenty of times before.

PAGES 5-10. Callisto agrees to be Emma’s White Knight, at least for a trial period.

This is presented as a flashback, but since Emma knows that Kitty is heading to Island M, it must be roughly contemporary with the closing pages of the previous issue.

Callisto. Callisto is the former leader of the Morlocks, the mutant outcasts who lived in the tunnels beneath New York. We saw her arrive on Krakoa along with a large group of villains in House of X #5, but this is the first time she’s done anything significant in the Hickman era. Callisto is an unusually low-powered mutant – principally, she has enhanced senses. When we last saw her (prior to her arrival), she was in jail in X-Men: Gold #24, but presumably she was released as part of the amnesty that the Krakoans insisted upon. Emma proposes her as an “ambassador to the mutants who don’t trust this world” (not merely Krakoa), which has basically always been her role.

Jumbo Carnation. The mutant fashion designer has been mentioned before as working with Emma, but this is the first time we’ve really seen him properly. He’s wearing the same clothes he had in his only pre-Hickman appearance, New X-Men #134 (where he lasted two pages before dropping dead from a drug overdose). Emma is presumably referring to him when she says she’s “using my sway to return our most important mutants first”. She may be playing up to her persona, but there are also plausible enough reasons for resurrecting Jumbo; as Magneto pointed out in House of X, this is about nation-building, and if they want to build their own culture, they’re going to need some mutant artists.

“I saw you the season you walked in New York and Paris.” Callisto’s back story has always been obscure, but we’ve been told that she used to be beautiful until she got the scar and lost her right eye. However, Jumbo is probably referring to the period between Uncanny X-Men #264 and #291 where Masque had made her beautiful again, and she was living in the surface world again.

White Knight. Although the Hellfire Club have always had a chess theme, I think this is the first time we’ve actually seen a Knight. Maybe that’s because Marvel already has a very prominent Black Knight character.

PAGES 11-13. The Marauders and Christian Frost arrive at Island M and learn that Kate is missing.

Bobby is still chasing Christian to choose a “proper name”, ie a mutant one. It’s interesting that he keeps pushing this angle in a book that stars both Kate Pryde and Emma Frost, who – like Christian – have titles but not codenames. It reinforces the idea that these characters are slightly on the fringe of Krakoan culture. (Bishop’s codename is just his surname, too.)

Callisto and Storm have a long-standing rivalry stemming from when Storm defeated Callisto to become notional leader of the Morlocks (a post she promptly abandoned, leaving Callisto to do all the work in her absence).

PAGES 14-15. Homines Verendi sell their spy footage of Krakoa to the Russian ambassador.

As before in this series, Kade and the other kids are basically acting like adults.

PAGES 16-19. Bishop goes to Madripoor, beats up Manuel Enduque, and poses as a HV guard to get their boat to set sail.

Security on this HV boat is really, really bad if you can get it to sail just by showing up in a uniform and saying Manuel told you to set sail. Oh well.

Manuel references the Krakoan “kill no man” law – it’s actually “murder no man”, which is subtly different – and Bishop seems surprised that he’s aware of it. Apparently the Krakoans aren’t publicising their legal system very well – though if you only had three laws, would you?

PAGES 20-21. On the golf course, Callisto and Masque discuss Krakoa.

Masque. Masque is a long-established Morlock with the power to alter other people’s faces bodies. Since the mid 80s, he’s most been portrayed as a sadistic maniac – and in particular he’s tortured Callisto – so it’s a little surprising to see them on good terms here, and Masque practising his golf. That said, he still seems a little bitter about the X-Men getting to live in utopia, while the remaining Morlocks have apparently chosen to live here, in Rio Verde, Arizona (“The Morlocks picked this place”, says Callisto, “and the White Queen is picking up the tab”). Even though the Morlocks’ circumstances are vastly improved, they still seem to consider themselves outcasts from the X-Men’s community – despite the fact that, at least officially, nothing is stopping them from coming to Krakoa.

Rio Verde, Arizona. This is a real place. It’s basically a golf-focussed community for people of 55 and over, and had a population of around 1,800 at the last census. It’s not exactly an inconspicuous place for the Morlocks to set up shop, nor is it somewhere they’d expect to be welcome.

“If you don’t like it, you can always go back to the tunnels or schlep back to Chernaya again.” The tunnels are the Morlock tunnels. Chernaya is one of the Marvel Universe’s generic stand-in eastern European states – it has appeared in the X-books before, in the “X-Men Disassembled” arc, where the X-Men dropped off the remaining Morlocks there. Masque wasn’t seen in that story, but clearly the idea is that he was among the Morlocks who lived there for a time.

“You don’t take offence to Kitty calling herself a Marauder?” The original Marauders – Mr Sinister’s henchmen – murdered most of the Morlocks in the 1980s “Mutant Massacre” crossover. (Note also that Masque still calls her Kitty, while Callisto accepts the change to Kate.)

“She blurted the [name] that hurt her bad.” Kitty was badly injured in the Mutant Massacre, leaving her stuck in intangible form for a while. That’s how she was written out of the X-Men and wound up in Excalibur.

PAGE 22. Data page. Another memo from the poor, ignored man on the X-Desk. Basically he’s picked up on the fact that marked bills that were used to buy Krakoan drugs have started circulating in Rio Verde, so the people there must have some connection to Krakoa. (Quite why Emma is giving the Morlocks cash…) It’s also pretty clear that the locals are confused and disconcerted by the Morlocks’ arrival.

PAGES 23-24. The Quiet Council has a deadlocked vote.

We’re not told what they were voting on. Since the Quiet Council has 12 members to start with, Kate’s absence ought to make a deadlock less likely, but for whatever reason, Sinister abstains on this. Emma seems to be covering for Kate’s absence and well aware of Sebastian’s involvement.

PAGE 25. Lockheed is fished out of the sea near Madripoor.

The fishermen “think he’s dead”, which in comics usually means he’s just sleeping.

PAGE 26. Trailer. The Krakoan reads NEXT: DEAD BODY.