As Empyre rages on, another fire burns deep inside Gabriel Summers. Vulcan greets his new neighbors and reflects on that which is growing inside him. Jonathan Hickman, Leinil Francis Yu, and Sunny Gho bring us X-Men #10.
Chris Eddleman: Ahhhhh! After ten thousand years [Ed. note: 4 months] we’re free! It’s time to talk Krakoa! Frankly it seems like ages ago when last we spoke about Vulcan, the other Summers Brothers, and the King Egg? Y’all remember the King Egg? Our buddy Broo ate it? Anyway, this is ostensibly an Empyre tie-in but, it seems as though Johnny Hix is an expert at doing whatever he wants with a big event as a background (see: Empyre: X-Men). I’m ready to dive in. This cover promises everybody’s favorite mutants, at least. Right?
Robert Secundus: oh boy I can’t wait to see Cyclops, Wolverine, and Jean Grey confirmed canonically as a throuple on page! How exciting to have an issue devoted in part to following them! If the cover is accurate, at least. I mean, it wouldn’t just lie, would it? Just sit there and lie? Do comics covers do that? We aren’t actually going to read a comic entirely devoted to characters from Deadly Genesis, are we?
That Science Fiction Bull$#!*
CE: Well Rob we start off with a call-back to two comics. First off, this exact scene was shown in X-Men #8 from back when I could still eat at Indian buffets. Also though, Vulcan floating through space harkens back to Hickman’s own FF #7 back in 2011, in which Black Bolt was floating through the same space. Literally the same space in fact, as these two kings battled it out in the very aptly named War of Kings event at that time.
RS: Wow, FF Inhumans plotlines! What a blast from the past. Remember when it was revealed that long ago a group of scientists, you know, smart, or I guess, Wise Men came to a ruler and gave him data that prophesied he would be overthrown, so he ordered a massacre of innocents, but some escaped, and so a Chosen One rose to power and forever changed the universe in a moment of self-sacrifice? And then, unlike Jesus, instead of getting an Apostle to poke around in His side, Blackbolt, uh, did the poking around in… an Inhuman horse queen? Among others? Anyway in FF #7 Black Bolt yells at the Vore Daddy we see here so hard that he explodes.
CE: Hickman goes real weird when they let him, doesn’t he? And there was a time in 2011, many many years (centuries?) when he certainly got to go hard. I kind of rolled my eyes at the fact that Hickman referenced HIMSELF but it’s really less of a reference and more of a framing technique. While Black Bolt said some mean words and blew up the Vore Creature From Beyond, Vulcan had no such luck and was dragged into the pit. To maintain some HoXPoXToX energy from last week, I’m calling that these are the Black Hole Aliens, the Dominions. They seem to be trying to send Vulcan as a Celestial Avatar (for them? Who knows?) back to the universe for nefarious purposes. This sequence was rather delightful for me, because Hickman knows how to seed intrigue and mystery, while also doing a little character work.
RS: I wonder… They don’t read as mechanical to me, and so far any Tech-Aligned critter has had some kind of visual signifier. But they do demonstrate a godlike power on the page, a control over reality so intensely beyond us that at some point the art seems, to me, to transition into purely figurative depictions of their actions. But they might be a Dominion still, or something like it, even if they aren’t technological. We began to speculate last time, aeons ago, about the true nature of the Brood, how they seemed to precede this universe, how they seemed to spill out of a similar rip… could these beings be some form of biological Dominion? Or perhaps a third type of being beyond our dichotomies?
CE: I like how regardless of how we described these awesome extrauniversal beings, they’re still mostly green people with a bunch of eyes. So for that alone, I’m hoping I’m wrong. Remember the design for the Phalanx? It was incredible. The Cancerverse was also associated with The Fault, as this tear is called, so maybe it’s those folks as well. Anytime I think this era of X-Men is wrapping up or alluding to something already suggested, it’s often a completely new idea instead. So why not this too?
RS: Before we move on: they’ve got crowns with three spikes that look like they could be driven into their own skulls; they have different designs, each of which evokes some strange distortion of a human face; they are reality-warpingly powerful, they are sick and twisted, they enjoy flaying the human soul and experimenting with subjects to see what will happen; if Dominions are gods, maybe these are their demonic counterparts. Specifically, I’m thinking of them now as the Cosmic Cenobites, but that just might be because of the media I’ve been consuming recently.
CE: Oh boy!
Blast Off, It’s Party Time. And We All Live in a Mutant Nation.
CE: So this issue proper reminds us that the Deadly Genesis crew seems to be dealing with suddenly being alive again but absolutely non-stop partying in the Summers House on the moon. Frankly, their entire existence in the canon of X-Men comics has been misery so, I can’t be too upset that they’re using mutant agency to make a ton of margaritas. Sway and Petra have been slightly reduced to quippy party girls in this issue, granted they didn’t have a ton of characterization before this.
RS: Listen: I have never read Deadly Genesis. If I live long enough, I will read Deadly Genesis. But I don’t expect to for a while. I know nothing about these people. All I know is that I love these extremely relatable day-drinking lesbians and their desire to just, like, catch a break and be able to relax again. And I love the end of the issue, where “Hey… I can make us a drink. What do you say?” really means “hey, we’re still your friends, and we’re here for you, and we know things aren’t ok, but we really want to help make it as ok as possible if we can.”
CE: They speak the language of party, a language I have some decent fluency in. But to put on my critic hat a bit, these characters mostly exist to be around Vulcan, and give him sort of a safe distraction (and call him Emperor condescendingly) while he deals with the crushing reality of his situation with the extradimensional aliens. I think their dialogue is pretty fun, especially Sway offering to literally slow time to make time for margaritas, but they do get a nice chance to be sweet and supportive as you mention above.
RS: Yeah, there is enough space here to give unfamiliar readers some idea of who they are or why they matter beyond the party-rocking, but that space is instead devoted in its entirety to making us care about one man:
About A Burning Fire
RS: Chris, my entire history with Vulcan has been in this series, and thus far, he’s been a fun gag. I was unprepared to have: feelings.
CE: Vulcan, while being an Omega level mutant and former cosmic despot, has moved from “character whose reinvention seems silly at best” to “representation of men who have worked to improve themselves with regards to political/social progressive thought but fear the way they used to be” and it’s hard not to love the work done in those regards. Vulcan was told by cosmic beings that they would make him seem like a nice reformed being but still place evil inside him, and he is trying his absolute best to prove them wrong. It’s Catholic guilt-esque.
RS: I think that’s right, but I don’t know if it’s specifically Catholic guilt; it feels to me like Luther: sometimes a light snowfall is enough to cover up a rotting hill of scheiße. It’s the certainty that you are excrement, you will continue to be excrement, and you are currently not driving all passerby away in disgust at your fetid essence only because something false has covered it up. And that thing might at any moment blow away. But that’s all a lie; that lets Vulcan off the hook. It lets real people who have lived toxic lives off the hook. It allows people to wallow in an image of themself as beyond salvage or salvation. But the Cosmic Cenobites tell vulcan that the thing “which cannot be fixed” is the good in him. It’s “small, microscopic,” but that iota of goodness is enough that he could change; that goodness could grow. When they say he’s inherently broken, they mean that he is inherently capable of growth as a person.
CE: This definitely makes them seem EVIL, and not just calculating, and it makes him seem more tragic. While we haven’t touched much on Vulcan completely wrecking the Cotati, atomizing them, that seems like a result of his toxic image of himself. I’d prefer to focus on the letter that his brother Cyclops writes him, in which Scott is trying to convince him to join them more often. In cycles, simply being able to break the cycle is often what can get us out of a dreadful recursion and towards healing. The letter offers an alternative to the partying that Vulcan uses as a band-aid on his feelings and behavior, but as of now Garbriel isn’t ready to make the leap. You talked about how unprepared you were to have feelings about Vulcan, and after considering the tragedy of him, and how much it relates to real trauma and real people, and I’m having quite a few of my own.
RS: A lot happened in this issue; we got a Vore God. We got Scottie In A Speedo. We got a war with invading plant people. But I think what I’m going to remember above all else is that letter; I’m going to be thinking about cycles, and trauma, and guilt, and relapses, and environments, and surrounding yourself with people who might provide solace, or flood you with memories of the monster you were, or offer you hope for the person you want to become.
CE: This was a really important issue for me, as someone who grapples with past guilt (whether justified or not), past feelings of being lonely and stuck, and not feeling like a way is out. You’re right Rob, that letter is what a person needs, at least in metaphor. Community, a good one, a helpful one, is the way out of these toxic feelings. The issue of course, is letting them in. Krakoa is formed as a community from the very beginning of our new X-Men paradigm, but what a community means, how a community helps, is just as important as the bylaws and ceremonies and religions. So while Vulcan isn’t out of the woods yet, and another thread is woven in the Dawn of X tapestry, we know a hand is outstretched for Gabriel.
X-Traneous Thoughts
- I like how Sway and Petra clown on Vulcan, and also how they want to pick up hot mutants with promises of Summers House hangs.
- The Summers’ family vacation was exactly what we needed.
- Yu must be up on his trends because there’s a whole lotta cake in this issue.
- Krakoan at the End reads War Games.
Chris Eddleman is a biologist and co-host of Chrises On Infinite Earths.
Robert Secundus is an amateur-angelologist-for-hire.
