Thursday, December 5, 2019 by Paul in Annotations Posted onby Paul in

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

COVER / PAGE 1. Professor X, Iceman, Storm and Bishop stand ready to fight an unrecognisable, just-resurrected mutant as he emerges from his egg. But isn’t Professor X dead? Don’t get too excited – it doesn’t happen like this in the issue, plus it’s a flashback.

PAGES 1-3. Sebastian Shaw leaves his home on Krakoa, to attend the resurrection of his son.

This is a flashback to “several weeks ago”, though it’s rather confusingly done, since the captions read at first like Shaw’s internal monologue as he walks through the streets – actually, he’s narrating it from the present day.

Hellfire Bay. It’s been mentioned before, but this is our first sight of Hellfire Bay and its three keeps – black, white and red. The Red Keep seems to be more plant-like, but Emma’s White Palace is diamond and Shaw’s Blackstone appears to be basalt columns in the vein of the Giant’s Causeway. All three are vastly more elaborate homes than anyone else has had been shown to have on Krakoa – and this is for people who don’t spend much time on the island. In fairness, we know there are going to be other members of the black, red and white factions in due course.

“Three separate strongholds that are one.” A seemingly intentional echo of the “two series that are one” tag line for House of X and Powers of X, though I’m not sure why.

“We ask much of Krakoa, and in return Krakoa asks much of us.” Does it? What does Krakoa ask of the mutants? X-Men #3 mentions for the first time that it feeds off their psychic energy – is that all he means?

PAGES 5-6. Credits and recap page. It’s Gerry Duggan writing, Michele Bandini and Elisabetta D’Amico on art, Federico Blee on colours and Cory Petit lettering.

The title is “The Bishop in Black” – this issue is mostly about reintroducing the new Black Bishop, and the Marauders themselves are fairly marginal to the issue.

“The first mutant society.” We’re all going to pretend Genosha didn’t happen, then.

PAGES 7-13. Continuing the flashback, Shaw attends Shinobi Shaw’s resurrection and gives him a tour of Genosha (with a lot of spin).

Shinobi Shaw. Shinobi is Sebastian Shaw’s illegitimate son; his mother has been shown on panel, but never named. He has phasing powers, which makes him an obvious opposite number for Kate Pryde (even though Sebastian doesn’t know that yet). Sebastian seems to have largely ignored Shinobi when he was growing up. He first appeared in X-Factor vol 1 #67 (1991), when he showed up out of nowhere, and then seemingly murdered Sebastian and usurped his position in the Hellfire Club. That was the start of the Upstarts storyline. (Sebastian survived, of course.)

As this issue acknowledges, Shinobi and Sebastian have never been on good terms, and during their published history they’ve been basically murderous. Shinobi had a moderately successful run as an early 90s villain before drifting off the radar. He was supposed to have been killed in a revenge attack by Sebastian – and he showed up as one of the techno-organic zombies in the Necrosha-X storyline (2009) – but somehow or other turned up alive and well in Uncanny X-Men #20 (2019) reunited with the Upstarts, along with several other members of the Upstarts. In that very strange issue, Shinobi told the X-Men (on being swiftly defeated) that mutants were doomed, and that he was trying to protect the remaining mutants from Emma Frost and subvert her attempts to manipulate everyone. Then he committed suicide by phasing his hand through his own head (and, presumably, turning it solid). The whole thing took about five pages.

The flashback of Shinobi’s skull is presumably a symbolic panel, since (a) we didn’t see his hand distorting his head in Uncanny #20, and (b) there’s no reason why he’d be a skeleton. Also, Sebastian apparently visualises dead Shinobi in red, echoing his plan to make Shinobi the Red King (and suggesting it might not be such a great result).

Arbor Magna. The place where the Five and Professor X resurrect mutants by cloning their new bodies, and restoring their minds from back-up. Shinobi has been brought back ahead of schedule as an indulgence to Sebastian (and why not, given how recently he died?).

“Logan’s stash”. If that’s the whisky that Kitty brought to the island in issue #1, then this must be between issues #1-2. That doesn’t really fit with the way Marauders itself presents things, but X-Force #1 already requires a return trip to Krakoa to be shoehorned between Marauders #1-2, so why not?

“And my son won’t remember what happened?” This plays as concern about trauma at first, but as we’ll see later, Shaw really wants to make sure that Shinobi can be manipulated. That said, his body language really does seem to alternate between putting on a show of strength and apparently genuine concern for Shinobi.

“How do we know it is you?” A truncated version of the ceremony from House of X where newly resurrected mutants say something characteristic in order to “prove” their genuineness – at least to the point where everyone’s willing to run with it.

The background mutants are mostly nobodies. But the guy on page 11 to Sebastian’s right, the one who looks like a tiger, is an unnamed student who can be seen playing mutant tennis in New X-Men #123 (2002).

“You might raise an eyebrow at the colour.” No version of the Hellfire Club that Shinobi was involved in wore red. Obviously, the idea is that Shinobi was Sebastian’s planned Red King – Emma’s assumption last issue that he wanted to give the role to his mistress was simply wrong. Sebastian’s briefing to Shinobi on the Hellfire Club’s role in Krakoa is basically accurate, though it significantly emphasises his own role and ignores Emma’s. This is as likely to be his self-centred nature as any sort of deliberate plan.

PAGES 14-17. The Shaws visit first New York and then Tokyo.

The Central Park gate is now surrounded by a barbed wire fence and a military checkpoint, though the soldiers insist that they’re not impeding mutants, merely guarding the gate against “gawkers”. The soldier seems to be trying to establish some sort of customs procedure – not unreasonable, but entirely futile. And in fairness, the Shaws do seem to just swan through without resistance, so maybe the soldiers are right about their remit.

Cults. In a very offhand way, Sebastian tells us that several new pro and anti mutant cults have sprung up among the humans of late (which seems to be confirmed by the people hanging around the gate). This all plays into the idea of mutants as the new gods, which has come up in the dialogue of both Magneto and Kid Omega; Sebastian, who views all mutants politics as basically a means to a personal end, sees it as mildly irritating.

The White Queen. Shaw’s account of how he became involved in the Hellfire Club (Krakoan version) is wildly inaccurate compared to what we saw in House of X and tries to present himself as bailing Emma out of trouble. This isn’t true, but it is true (even if he doesn’t know it) that Shaw and Magneto wanted him there.

“A bottle of Chichibu.” It’s a Japanese whisky.

“We can step off Earth and onto Martian soil.” We’ve seen the Martian gate in House of X, but we still don’t really know what it’s for. Sebastian seems to have been there. Maybe, like the Savage Land in this week’s X-Men, it’s just an out-of-the-way place to grow stuff.

Shinobi’s creditor. The guy Shinobi goes to see in Tokyo is clearly someone he owes money to. The creditor isn’t named but Shinobi calls him “oyassan” and gets called “kodomo” in return, which implies that this is the yakuza. Somewhat worryingly, Shinobi’s first promise is to “be of service” and be “a friend on Krakoa”.

PAGES 18-19. Data page – another US intelligence memo. This is from “the X-Desk” in “Langley” (so the CIA). This is apparently not the same as the Naval intelligence writer last issue – but he too is complaining that they’re not being kept properly informed by other departments.

“Island M”. Magneto’s old raised-from-the-sea base, as seen in House of X and getting another periodic mention here. It’s not clear if this is the Atlantic sister island of Krakoa, which we’ve seen shown on maps before.

The author refers to Kate as “Shadowcat”, a codename hse hasn’t used in years.

The Red Bishop. In a series of intercepted text messages, Bishop emphatically rejects the role of Red Bishop, wanting nothing to do with the Hellfire Club.

PAGES 20-25. Sebastian and Shinobi continue their talk.

We’ve now caught up with the present day time frame (just in time for the end of the story). Shinobi remains extremely sceptical about working with Sebastian, so he’s not that gullible.

“I have recently come from a meeting in London with the White Queen…” Which we saw in issue #2. Shaw discovered that Emma had (somehow or other) already appointed Kate as the Red Queen, but he’s glossing over that here. He’s going to make Shinobi his Black Bishop instead – but also tells him to hang on to the red suits…

The White Bishop. We see his submarine (at least, if Sebastian Shaw is identifying it honestly), but this is the second issue running that Christian Frost has been mentioned without being seen. Odd, that.

“It’s time to cash out from the human race.” Shaw apparently thinks the human race is done for, and that Krakoa presents a great opportunity to expand into interstellar commerce and leave them all behind after one last raid on everyone. It’s a very Marvel Universe response to the question “don’t the ultra-rich care about the collapse of civilisation?” Not if they’re confident of buying safe passage to the Shi’ar Empire, no.

“The aging top 1% of their population owns 90% of the wealth.” They don’t, at least in our world. Estimates vary, but it’s more like 45%. For some reason Sebastian also seems to think that this is a temporary situation which will end in a few years when the very elderly top 1% die. This doesn’t really make sense – who does he think they’re going to leave their money to? Besides, the truly ultra-rich are a tiny fraction even of the top 1% (which is still 77 million people, after all).

“The White and Red Queens conspired to murder you.” A complete lie, taking advantage of the fact that Shinobi, restored from back-up, naturally doesn’t know how he died. The obvious problem with this lie is that it doesn’t work in timeline terms – Kate didn’t become the Red Queen until later, and she wasn’t even on Earth when Shinobi died (since she was tied up in the Age of X-Man storyline). So it’s a lie with the potential to fall apart rather spectacularly.

PAGES 26-27. The trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: INTERNATIONAL.