Cyclops assembles a crack team of Darwin, Synch, and Wolverine (not to be confused with Logan, the boy Wolverine). To track down Serifina and enter The Vault. In the same way, this issue assembles a crack team of Jonathan Hickman, RB Silva, and Marte Gracia to deliver a tragic, and engaging tale.

Chris Eddleman: Rob everyone else has lapped us by an issue and I’m starting to feel a little left out. We barely get to talk these days, bud! We used to do this every week, and like three times as long. Well anyway, the X-Men are bringing the thunder this week, as we have the combination of art by Silva and Gracia, and the promise of an awesome squad in the form of Synch, Darwin, and the one true Wolverine—Laura Kinney.

Robert Secundus: It’s about time.

The Vault Is For Children

RS: Last issue returned to the global, economic, and political narrative of the series. This issue is devoted to picking up a plotline from X-Men #1, so I think this series is finally done putting pieces on the board and has begun to focus on moving those pieces forward, which is exciting. Chris, do you have much experience with the Children of the Vault?

CE: Well Rob, I knew we would be covering these delightful tykes sooner rather than later, so last weekend I started up on Supernovas, the storyline where they first appear in Mike Carey’s X-Men run. I absolutely love them as villains. They represent a nontraditional threat to the X-Men in the form of a third species, neither human nor mutant. It’s almost as if they inspired this whole posthuman thing that Powers of X gave us. Hmmm.

RS: I definitely think they were the inspiration for PoX’s Homo novissima. Hickman’s noted that he really enjoyed Carey’s run, at the very least. Their introductory story is pretty wild. They infiltrate the mansion, they stomp Rogue’s Supernova team, Serafina married Cannonball for a hot minute/40 years. It’s pretty wild. But Carey never really followed up on the promise of the Children. They moved into Cassandra Nova’s old Master Mold, they popped out once for an altercation with the X-Men in X-Men: Legacy, and then… nothing. Which is a shame, because they’re a set of gorgeously Bachalo-designed characters with a ton of promise. A couple of other things to note about them here: they seem to have some kind of Worldmind-like AI in the City (at least, they have something drawn like a classic Marvel Worldmind would be), and they have Krakoesque resurrection technology. The Vault itself seems to be established here as a kind of anti-Krakoa.

[Ed. note: I love my writers but neither of them read Hickman and Esad Ribic’s Ultimate Comics: Ultimates so I need to butt in here. That story involves, The Maker, also known as evil Ultimate Reed Richards, taking over a good chunk of Western Europe using The Children Of Tomorrow, . The Children were hyper-evolved post-humans who came from The Dome, which was essentially the Ultimate Universe version of The World run by an AI called City. In The Dome, The Children Of Tomorrow evolved 900 years in 5 minutes. The AI that seems to run The Vault in this issue, looks exactly like City from Ultimate Comics: Ultimates. So maybe I need to give Rob and Chris some homework…]

CE: This run has definitely seem to have set up a Rogue’s Gallery in a way that a lot of modern comics runs don’t even approach due to their very finite nature. It’s not secret that, barring something wild, X-Men is set to be a huge run of comics, and I’m feeling like the Children are definitely the equal and opposite enemy to the mutants. They’re almost a perfect foil to the evolutionary nature of mutantcy, as they have an innate time advantage. The Children exist in a bubble where time passes more quickly than outside of it, which allows them to have infinitely more time to plan, adapt, and outfox our heroes. While you and I covered Powers of X, wherein the ultimate bad guys (Homo novissima) were 1000-ish years old, the Children have over 6,000 years of time on the X-Men, at least according to Carey’s run. They might present as the precursor to posthumans, but really posthumanity is already here.

RS: So, I just realized that the Vault isn’t just an anti-Krakoa: it’s also a foil for Moira. The Children have a comparable experience of time and space– they’re unmoored from this world in a way like Moira– and they have a similar amount of experience. And actually, let’s break down for a second the big bads of DoX so far, because I think they’re all foils, and I think they indicate just how huge the story of the X-Men has quickly become.

We’ve got the secret intelligence collective of the Man With The Peacock Tattoo, the global corporations of Humanes Verendi, the super-scientists of the Hordeculture who have mastery over biology, the tech-god Apoth, and several nations, including the Vault. We’re dealing with supervillains, sure, some of whom we’ve seen before, and supervillains have always had global aspirations– but something about this set just feels so weighty. It feels like these characters are working at a scope we don’t often see in superhero comics.

CE: But so far it’s kind of blossoming in a way that’s manageable for the very earthbound concerns that face the X-Men. Obviously we have space stuff happening, but the universe is not at stake. We’re still just trying to see our heroes simply survive, which I find kind of refreshing. The stakes are big but not unmanageable or difficult for the reader to quantify.

RS: Which is funny, because this issue does, in its data pages, begin to quantify the level of the threat our away team is facing.

CE: We find out that Serafina and her deceased (oops, until midway through this issue) were Level 2 Children, and that we have not even seen their final form. The Vault has a small prose section where it declares the Vault cannot challenge the threat of Homo superior until they have achieved a Level 3 Child (which seems similar, perhaps, to an Omega Level Mutant). Plus we get to see that the Children are divided into pods by function, and that we’re only seen the one pod.

RS: Those are data pages I imagine that we’re going to just pore over in the coming days. The detail that most calls out to me? ENVOY. It seems unlike the others, and the text overall doesn’t seem to indicate that they’re going to be entering into any kind of diplomatic relations with Earth. So, if not Earth, who is this envoy to?

Okay, So Here’s The Plan

RS: EMPIRE, JUDGE, BUILDER, SWORD: all threats within the city that might be faced soon by our away team. We’re not sure if that team is going to survive this time, or if they’ll be able to survive in any form we recognize. The X-Men have mostly beaten death, but they plan to infiltrate the Vault itself, which is shielded from Cerebro, where they will face completely unknown, alien, ultra-advanced hostile forces, and where just a second will pass as years. Cyclops has a plan that seems sound at first: if the Resurrection Protocols can’t work, then send in three functionally unkillable X-Men, three that should be able to survive without them.

CE: After the narrow escape of Serafina into the Vault, which contains A CITY, the X-Men recruit Synch, Darwin, and the greatest Wolverine Laura Kinney. Darwin is a no-brainer. He is unkillable (looking at you, X-Men: First Class) and adaptable to any situation. Kind of a perfect foil to the technologically evolved Children. Wolverine is perfect in every way, a delight, a fantastic character, and…okay well. She has fantastic survival skills, as well as that everpresent healing factor. Synch can have either of these powers, so he’s a done deal as well. Rob, this digresses slightly but, what did you think of the good banter we got from this group? I really liked the talking scene here.



RS: A lot of people are going to feel vindicated by that banter. Yes, Laura is Wolverine, her All-New Wolverine is a modern classic, and it’s extremely odd that the past year has been seemingly devoted to walking that back. But also, that banter (especially when combined with the somber datapages from the notes of Dr. Reyes) makes the opening and closing of the issue land that much harder. I don’t believe I’ve ever read a comic before with Darwin, and I’ve read crushingly few comics with Synch [Ed. note: Collect Generation X, you cowards!] but that was enough to make me deeply care about the fate of the poor man who needs two pillows and his weirdo bud with a cushiony skull.

CE: A lot was done with a little dialogue to make me love these boys again. I haven’t had a chance to read much Synch either, other than his first appearance, but he is a really great character who didn’t get to be particularly realized back in the 90s. In his first appearance, he is accosted by the police after fighting off the Phalanx, leading to a fairly powerful moment of him cooly facing down guns drawn at him (granted these were also by disguised Phalanx). His small amount of banter with Darwin was perfect, and also the knowledge that his best friend Skin was brought back to life early so poor Synch would not have to deal with the pain of culture shock. It’s nice that mental health is being considered in Krakoa.

RS: I’d forgotten that Synch debuted in Phalanx Covenant! Interesting that this story which seems to be closely tied to PoX features a Phalanx-experienced character. INTERESTING, I say.

RS: So, Cyclops ends this issue crushed. And we should talk about why: these three characters have been gone for hundreds of years. They may be alive, but it seems Cyclops didn’t fully comprehend what such a survival would mean: a seeming eternity in an alien reality governed by a mind programmed to want them dead. We can’t know for sure, but it seems they have been damned to something close to Hell. All that said, I don’t think Cyclops was wrong. I think what makes this moment so powerful is what makes so many Cyclops moments powerful: the man thought extremely carefully about how to accomplish the best outcome, the man made the best possible choice given the circumstances, and yet that thoughtfulness lead to some unanticipated horror. Chris, what do you think of how this issue concludes?

CE: Hickman is no stranger to ending on a cliffhanger, having done it in several of these issues already. I was pretty worried for our heroes at the close of this installment, and that coupled with the cunning plan, the tantalizing clues about the Children, and the action of the infiltration—I have to admit this was a satisfying conclusion. I hope we get a resolution soon but, this team is no stranger to slow burns.

Silva Medal Winner

CE: So for this installment, we wanted to reserve some space to talk about the fine work of RB Silva and Marte Gracia, the Powers of X team who are reunited for this issue. It’s no secret that the two of us are incredibly large fans of this art team, and I think they really brought it for this issue.

RS: I really, really missed them. I think it’s fantastic that we’ve got the PoX artist back as this series focuses on stories related to that title, but I also just, in general, find his work so much fun to read. One thing I noticed this issue? The pacing. I don’t have the artistic vocabulary to explain it, but his layouts feel so thoughtful, and his action just flows.

CE: I have repeatedly complained about the static nature of the art throughout this series. Silva’s action scenes, coupled with Gracia’s dynamic and varied palette, made for some incredible panels in the infiltration scene. But not just that—I like his talking heads too. A frequent complaint of talking in comics is how it’s usually portrayed in a pretty boring way but, he draws every character gesticulating and with an incredible range of facial features. It was almost hard to turn each page because I wanted to linger on all of the detailed faces we got.

RS: That’s why the banter scene works so well, and that’s why that aforementioned vindicating panel is going to spread across Twitter like wildfire. It’s not just what Logan says to the Wolverine, but his smirk as he says it. And Cyclops! We’ve got a Karl-Urban-as-Judge-Dredd situation, where pretty much all you’ve got to communicate a character’s inner life is a chin, and yet with that final grimace you feel just how much weight is crushing this poor man’s shoulders.

CE: I really enjoyed the green and purple motifs we got from the inside of the Vault. It really set an alien tone in contrast to the very bright primaries of our heroic X-Men. It was a simple but clever storytelling trick, and I hope those motifs are here to stay.

RS: I feel excited. We were really hoping in the last couple issues that things would start moving forward, and it’s clear that they are. We’re getting old continuity tied to new ideas with characters that haven’t necessarily gotten the spotlight they deserve. In the background noise of my broken brain, that upcoming image of shattered Nightcrawler stained glass continues to stress me out, but, well, most things do these days. Currently, the X-Citement outweighs the anXiety.

CE: This brought me back to those HoXPoX highs for sure. Hickman got to flex his knowledge and appreciation for all eras of the X-Men, and make a gestalt entity of a great story along the way. Even though we’re still getting first shots towards an overall narrative, I think this issue got the kick of forward momentum that readers were looking for. Couple that with panel-perfect shots from Silva and Gracia, and I’m a pretty satisfied reader. Next issue, we get Mystique, which is another thread from HoXPoX that I’m excited to explore. Bring it on, please.

X-Trenuous Thoughts

If you’re a child of this apparently Soulsborne Vault you lose all experience upon death. Only way to level up is to make it to a checkpoint. (of the named Children, only Serafina seems worthy of an UPGRADE)

Xavier: they are the children of– and I cannot stress this enough– the Vault

The data pages continue to surprise; the way the data pages blur into diegetic pages when characters enter The City? RAD AS HELL, FOLKS.

Synch and Darwin are back just to disappear again. But not for good, I suspect.

Laura in her real actual clothes—my heart.

Glad Cyclops is back to having some regrets. I mean, he can’t be happy all the time.

Armor drawn by RB Silva and Marte Gracia? Fantastic.

Krakoan Reads: SOMETHING OWED.

Chris Eddleman is a biologist and co-host of Chrises On Infinite Earths.

Robert Secundus is an amateur-angelologist-for-hire.