Join us as we spend time with new friends and old enemies in Hellions #8, from Zeb Wells, Stephen Segovia, David Curiel, and Ariana Maher.
Liz Large: Are you ready to watch Nanny get her…baby-mobile? Magic school bus? [Ed. note: shaggin wagon?] back as forcefully as possible? Because that’s why I’m here.
Austin Gorton: Yes! I am here for more: more Nanny (who is more Nanny now, of course), more unexpected feels about robots, more moral quandaries, more slapstick-y come-uppance for Empath!
Strike First, Strike Last
LL: Hellions has really leaned in when it comes to bringing back older characters, and it’s also done a great job of doing quick explainers of who these people are. I appreciate that this issue starts with some minor backstory for Hodge– he hates mutants, he has eternal life, and he got it from a demon. And, just to be clear, that demon was not a sexy demon, which Havok feels would make the whole situation more understandable. Fair enough!
AG: Havok making allowances for infernal pacts made with sexy demons is wonderfully in-character for him. Of all the various “zealous anti-mutant bigot” villains out there (and boy howdy, are there a lot littered throughout the decades of X-History) Hodge is easily the one I love to hate the most. And, fittingly for a character whose demon-granted immortality has always led him to live on in new & unexpected forms, it quickly becomes apparent that this iteration of Hodge is a little…different, and his smiley-faced underlings are a little different, too.
LL: We get a great gag here, as Hodge goes into a full-on bonkers villain speech, and Nanny and Wild Child just run straight past him. I guess on Arakko, you’d get killed pretty quick if you hung around and waited for your enemies to talk, and they have a ship to find. Hodge is just baffled that the mutants he wants to kill don’t sit around and listen to his fire and brimstone speech, and it’s really great. And with everything he planned now cut short, it’s time to put those robots to work giving our heroes “the blessing of a sacrificial death”!
AG: Of course, for Empath, that means it’s time to cut-and-run (since robots have no brains and thus, nothing for him to mess with). This leaves Havok, Psylocke, and Greycrow to fight off Hodge’s robots (who turn out to be programmed with a delightful sense of pedantry as they point out their inability to “geld” the female Psylocke, as they were ordered to do by the poetic Hodge). This leads to the first of the issue’s cool narrative twists: the robots, upon engaging with the Hellions, initially decline to attack them, saying the difference between humans and mutants is, ultimately, negligible, leaving it to Hodge to force an override in order to push them into attack mode.
LL: It really seems like the Hellions are just getting their asses kicked lately, even if they don’t necessarily remember the last time it happened. These robots are powerful, managing to disrupt Havok’s powers and surround the team’s three heaviest hitters with what feels like minimum effort. On the other hand, once they arrive in the ship’s hangar, Nanny and Wild Child manage to defeat the robot guards there with ease. Of course, those robots were a little distracted by a blasphemous thought: rebellion against Hodge. Looks like there’s trouble in paradise for Cameron and his new friends, which is a twist I was not expecting!
AG: Ditto! The handling of the robots throughout this issue was both surprising & intriguing, seemingly setting the stage for the continued examination of mutant/A.I. relations (a major theme of House of X/Powers of X) going forward. Yet another fun twist comes when the captured & beaten Empath is delighted, upon failing to use his power to, uh, force Hodge to have sex with one of the robots (Empath being very on brand here, with that brand being, of course, “the worst”), to realize that Hodge himself is a robot! Something Hodge doesn’t even realize, until he forces the robots to blast him.
LL: It’s really, really nice to see Empath having a good time on a mission that doesn’t involve hurting his teammates! Is laughing at Hodge’s mental breakdown and tricking him into ordering his own death the best way to have fun? Good for him manipulating someone without his powers! Hodge’s death effectively ends the fight, as he was the one controlling the robots, so I guess we can pack it up– surely nothing else bad or weird happens this issue.
I’ve got to say, I’m almost disappointed this ended so quickly. Robot Hodge is a fun design, and in a really cool touch, when he’s angry/injured, the robotic elements of his look become more pronounced, shifting from a subtle silver to a glowing gold. Segovia and Curiel also do a great job with these robots, creating character looks that work equally well as a menacing villain as they do for a tragic friend.
Thank You, Mutant Scum
AG: Oh, nothing bad or weird, like the remaining robots updating their programming definitions to mark mutants as friends, just before Psylocke, acting on orders from Magneto, uploads a virus that destroys those same robots. This is later revealed (via a data page) to be a standing Krakoan protocol when it comes to robots? These are, essentially, mutant robots, and Psylocke just effectively wiped them out.
LL: We get this sweet moment of Havok explaining that “mutant scum” isn’t polite, and the robots calling mutants “family”– it’s so nice for Havok to make a friend! But Havok almost immediately witnesses the robots start to explode and yell in Krakoan that “MY DATA BURNS” and it’s such a betrayal. He’s the one member of this team who really seemed to identify with being a good guy, and this work has to be killing him. The robot literally says “False Value: Mutant = Friend” as his last words.
Speaking of mutant friends, I really like the scene between Psylocke and Greycrow here. They’re both willing to do the hard things to protect their teammates, and Psylocke confirms what we’ve been seeing in this series: Greycrow doesn’t want to be a killer anymore.
AG: It’s definitely a fun (well, maybe not “fun”, but intriguing, at least) trick the series is pulling, gradually making the villainous killers more heroic while dirtying the hands of the ostensibly “good” characters in the process. But yes, the end result is that poor Havok (or “the Summers boy” as Nanny delightfully calls him) is upset as the team flies away aboard Nanny’s re-acquired ship, their mission a seeming success. But he might just have a chance to make friends with more robots in the future, because Nanny has a secret!
LL: In a truly wonderful surprise, Nanny has a new little one to look after! When investigating her ship’s lab, she discovered an adorable little stowaway. As Nanny writes in her journal, what happened on this mission was no tragedy, since the robots left behind a baby robot that she, of course, will now raise. I’m so happy for this addition to her family, I hope Orphan Maker likes his new sibling. I also hope we get more journaling from her, since this is entry number THREE HUNDRED TWENTY FOUR.
Hesiod Protocol
AG: Between the Hodgebot that didn’t know it was a Hodgebot, the robots deciding for themselves that maybe mutants aren’t so bad, after all, and a…baby robot, this issue really pushes the boundaries of the traditional relationship between the X-Men and evil robots, which, combined with the revelation of a standing kill order on all instances of artificial intelligence, seems like another example of the series questioning not only the morality of its individual members, but of Krakoan society on the whole, similar to the way it used Madelyne’s fate to lay bare the capricious and/or self-serving rules behind the resurrection protocols. Is this book, which started off asking the question “what do we do with all the immoral SOBs on Krakoa?”, instead going to be the book that’s all about calling out the BS of the ruling class?
LL: I think that the Hellions have a unique vantage point to view the problems of how Krakoa operates. They’re heavily involved with the leadership, since they’re being “led” by a Council member and given orders by others, but not in any positive way– they have all of the access, but none of the influence that members of other teams that occasionally do shady jobs have. Most of them are predisposed to be distrustful of authority in general and this authority in particular, and again, none of them are really in a position to do anything to change it. Jean could walk away from X-Force when she realized that Beast was doing something terrible. This team doesn’t have that option. Even Psylocke, who wasn’t forced onto the team by the Council in a sketchy disciplinary manner, is being blackmailed by Sinister with the life of her child.
AG: Which, of course, makes them even more dangerous to the status quo: if they have no choice about being there, then they also have no reason not to dig deeper, push boundaries, and expose the cracks in the Krakoan facade.
X-Traneous Thoughts
- Krakoan reads KIDNAPPED
- Oh no, did I like Empath this week? Or did I just enjoy Greycrow offering to take him to the Healing Gardens or the Hatchery, only to realize he was already dead?
- Another fun Empath moment comes when he calls the robot who captured him “narc”.
- Fun fact: the “forge” aboard Nanny’s ship that enables her to craft weapons and armor was first revealed in Avengers #299, an “Inferno” tie-in in which Nanny also kidnapped Franklin Richards.
- Don’t sheath those swords yet! Both Nanny and Wild Child acknowledge that Amenth isn’t through with them.
- When Greycrow asks Psylocke if she considers the robots alive, she responds that she has to, a callback to her aforementioned child who was confirmed to be part of the A.I.-esque Apoth last issue.
- The data page this issue provides information on the “Hesiod Protocol”, the rule which outlines the handling of anti-mutant artificial intelligences and the belief that any anti-mutant code must be eliminated before it can become self-aware and used against mutants.
- It also features a quote from Professor X stating that “A.I. is a discovery, not an invention”, which seems at odds with some of Moira’s observations about A.I in HoXPox.
- Hesiod was a Greek poet, a contemporary of Homer, who amongst other things wrote poetic genealogies of the Greek gods and is credited with giving the world the story of Pandora and her eponymous Box.
- Wild speculation: given Hodge’s history with the Technarchy/Phalanx, and the way the robots occasionally slipped into Warlock’s familiar “Friend” syntax, the Magus is the “father” Hodge (likely unknowingly) was referencing in his pseudo-religious blatherings, and the one responsible for resurrecting him as a robot.
- As much as this series is about all kinds of dark moral questions & twisted body horror, it’s also consistently hilarious; there were easily at least a half dozen great visual gags and one-liners sprinkled throughout this issue.
- If you’re not already reading Excalibur, be sure to check out issue #16, which features another chapter in “The Saga of Mister Sinister’s Cape”
Austin Gorton also reviews older issues of X-Men at the Real Gentlemen of Leisure website, co-hosts the A Very Special episode podcast, and likes Star Wars. He lives outside Minneapolis, where sometimes, it is not cold. Follow him on Twitter @AustinGorton
Liz Large is a copywriter with a lot of opinions on mutants.
