Everything You Knew Was Wrong In Inferno #3

Schemes within plans within machinations all come to fruition in Inferno #3 by Jonathan Hickman, R.B. Silva, Stefano Caselli, Valerio Schiti, Adriano Di Benedetto, David Curiel and Joe Sabino.

Chris Eddleman: Well, this was the one that did me in. Two days ago I was ruminating on how I was kind of tired of comics, superhero comics in particular, X-Men comics in specific. But gosh darnit, RB Silva’s arrival into this miniseries coupled with the most plot and action packed into one issue shot me back in. And here I was ready to retire, but instead we’re going to discuss this meaty issue of comicked books—packed with twists and secrets revealed. Let’s start the second half of this mini with a triumphant bang.

Nola Pfau: That’s been a cycle for us, hasn’t it? I think we talked about feeling that way at the start of this series, too. It’s been real hard to stay invested in the wider line, when it seems like most of them either aren’t choosing or aren’t allowed to really push boundaries. I think everyone expects a little bit of wheel-spinning now and then, but when you’ve got a dozen books or so, it becomes especially apparent.

Doug’s Feeling Funny

Inferno #3 | Marvel | Silva, Di Benedetto, Curiel

Chris: I feel like the most unexpected twist of this issue happens pretty much right off the bat, as we find out that back in Powers of X, when Doug was brought to the island, he absolutely didn’t trust Professor X in the slightest. His optimism however, wasn’t a lie. He was just being cautious with a man that absolutely has let him down before. I honestly like that concept- Doug is big on trust but verify. And verify he does by seeding the entire island with his pal Warlock, first as food but later for knowledge. Warlock is everywhere on the island and can see EVERYTHING, including Moira’s No-Place. That revelation is effectively as far as it goes plotwise, but it’s definitely setting up for the finale.

This is what astute readers have been waiting for, especially after being disappointed by a seemingly anticlimactic Warlock reveal earlier in a random issue. How do you feel about a slightly more calculating Doug, Nola?

Nola: My boy. MY BOY. I am on the record in that Doug Ramsey is a character whose potential has never been adequately tapped. That’s become more and more apparent in the rise of the digital age, and yet instead we got weird things like his internet addiction thing during The Hunt For Wolverine. Doug is a character who could single-handedly take out any corporation he liked by walking in the front door, and so the understanding that he came to Krakoa, built a language and seeded the entire island with a living information network of a best friend is the first move that has felt like it really lives up to his potential. It’s also the first overt confirmation of Warlock being merged with Krakoa—I think there was oblique reference to techno-organic material back in HoX/PoX, but nothing on this level, and I still maintain that’s the reason Kate Pryde can’t use the gates.

Chris: I’m feeling slightly silly, as I thought that initial seeding of Krakoa with techno-organic stuff was just a trick of the art and everyone was maybe reading a little bit too much into it. Wow was I wrong. I love that while Doug does not trust Xavier, he starts to trust Krakoa right away, being kind of the harbinger of mutantkind. I wonder if it’s simply the language that Krakoa conveys, or if Doug sees a kindred spirit in Krakoa much like he sees one in the similarly nonhuman Warlock.

I’m also feeling slightly silly because I immediately expected another 10 pages of re-used art in the way Hickman likes to do (and we’ve talked about previously). I liked the almost immediate departure from that, I think it showed some restraint and gave us more story to chew on as a result. In fact, this might be my favorite bit of “retelling” that we’ve gotten from the Krakoa era, unless something better is escaping me. Usually these sort of schemes are things that we get from villains or former villains. I like this quiet conspiracy of buds, or the true architects of the mutant homeland. They’re not in it for their own power, they simply want this to work out and are sick of the hubris of those who “think they know best.”

Nola: Yeah. Doug’s focus here is information for the people, although we have yet to see how he’ll actually use it. It does create the idea that the questions asked in those Inferno promo adds might be questions that Doug asks of the Krakoan populace as a whole, which I don’t think is necessarily true, just interesting. It’s wild to me that he knows about Moira! It’s that age-old concept of a secret no longer being one if more than one person knows it. We now have multiple distinct entities who have the Moira bombshell and are doing different things with it. Absolutely fascinating. Speaking of folks sharing secrets, how about that Orchis?

Omega & Orchis

Chris: Orchis, much like Doug, absolutely isn’t what we thought it was, except that it kind of is? The central conflict of Hickman’s X-Men tenure is mutantkind vs humanity, or in most cases posthumanity. It’s natural evolution vs guided improvements, often with the assistance of machines. However, it seems as though we’re getting that conflict turned slightly on its head? I’ll elaborate.

At the Orchis Forge, Nimrod discovers that the Omega Sentinel is not as she seems. While she is Karima Shapandar, she is a version from years in the future, a time she calls mutant hell. In this future, the Children of the Vault are defeated by the combined forces of human and mutantkind, and eventually mutants rule the solar system and hunt down the machine god Dominions using the combined powers of life and death (referenced in House of X/Powers of X as the Phoenix and Galactus respectively). A trickster Titan that hid from the conflict sent the Omega Sentinel’s consiousness through time and back into the Karima of the current time’s body. She in fact, used Dr. Killian Devo to create Orchis, and be her “human whisperer”

So now we have two Moira X lives- XA and XB. Nola, this is big stuff. Devo is merely a pawn in a game of machines. [Ed. note: A Snoke if you will.]

So this revelation shows that Moira is not the only one manipulating time as it were, but also to me says something interesting about humanity/posthumanity. Our blue friend from the future in Powers of X stated that humanity was inevitable, and that machines were only a stop-gap in the war against mutantkind. But this seems to indicate to me that this statement was made slightly out of hubris, especially as they “worshipped” gods of machines living in singularities.

What are your take-aways from this big news?

Nola: Devo’s not who we thought? Well doesn’t that just whip it.

The two things I picked up here that strike me as big are, first, Omega Sentinel’s statement that the mutants always win. It’s a direct inversion of “we always lose” from HoXPoX, and I think that’s significant first in this being HIckman’s final act, so to speak, and second in the way it reminds me of Grant Morrison’s “Batman and Robin will never die!” page. There’s a statement here on the nature of the work and the endurance of the X-Men’s ideals, and also one within the scope of the story’s own narrative that Moira’s grand plan actually worked. All the lives, all the redos, they worked. The mutants always win.

The other big thing is the idea that this is the Karima of a past life injected into ‘our’ Karima. Typically when we see comics that do things like this with AI, there’s always a moment where the original programming or whatever asserts itself, and I’m very interested in whether Hickman is going to play that concept straight or whether he’s going to mess with it. Either way, it does finally answer the question of why we’re seeing Karima act this way, even if it does unfortunately mean yet another story where she’s had her agency taken from her.

Chris: Yeah, it’s funny, right? I think early on a lot of House of X operated on what we assumed to be a “just go with it it’s a new status quo” framing. But in fact, a lot of the unexplained matters even as we started to believe it didn’t. As someone who wrote a lot of speculation and deduction of HoXPoX, it’s both vindicating and frustrating to see that things that I thought mattered actually mattering, after I gave up my thoughts on theorizing. I’ve been duped yet again. Hopefully we see some more of Karima other than being taken over by a robot though.

We’re also still seeing the consequences of Nimrod being activated early, in that Orchis is still ascending. It’s kind of a throwaway line but, yet another Mother Mold is being activated as we speak, reinforcing that as mutants squabble, humans and machines are making dear friends. And speaking of mutant squabbles…

Kings, Queens & The Games That They Play

Nola: Everyone’s making moves! Emma kind of solidifies her stance from the last two issues in a scene with Destiny and Mystique, which is neat, and kind of feels like an enforcement of old status quos? It feels like Emma’s declaring Hellfire an island unto itself, apart from the power struggles of Charles and Erik. By the same token though, Charles and Erik are on the same side these days, whereas Kate is on Emma’s side, and Destiny and Mystique are in their classic roles of chaos agents. It’s the kind of complicated push-and-pull that some of the best X-Men stories are built on, and I love that this is Hickman’s mic drop of sorts on his way out. He’s leaving threads to be followed up on, and it’ll be interesting to see where they lead down the line.

The revelations here were pretty huge, too—first there’s Destiny just meticulously deflating the Cuckoos’ egos with some pretty portentous prophecy, and then there’s Emma’s revelation to Destiny of just why Moira hates her so much. The connections there are really, really something, all the more so because in this life, Muir Island was the place Irene died. There’s an intertwining of fates with the two that I really want to see explored in depth. What was your take?

Chris: I think I expected Destiny to have put slightly more together? For some reason I often forget that her clairvoyance isn’t exactly telepathy, and where Moira is concerned she’s honestly kind of lost. Destiny seeming one step behind, or I suppose simply having incomplete information, feels strange with her, but it increased the tension of their plans. Emma also assumes Moira has as many lives as necessary to accomplish her goals and that she’ll simply end existence whenever she feels like it. I love how each character has a distinct lack of information and we’re seeing how that ignorance interacts. I feel like the scene with Emma is absolutely crushed by RB Silva, who makes talking scenes engaging with his dynamic angles and page layout changes. I liked the shift from what normally seems like nine-panel grids to this less formal layout scheme.

As for Charles and Erik, they’re little meeting seemed to show that at their core, they still have their general philosophies. Magneto assumes that mutantkind is still in for a fight, while Charles feels like they’ll be able to impose a kind of peace by dominance. Charles is ready to show mercy once mutantkind is ascendant, but Magneto seems to think this is unlikely if not impossible. Given what we know about the alternate future that Omega Sentinel explained, who do you think is correct?

Nola: Look, there are better educated minds than mine to wax philosophical about evolutionary ascendancy. I think I’m generally inclined to believe in a version that doesn’t quite line up with Charles’, but favors peace. I don’t know that I know the shape of what that looks like, but I do know that Charles always seems like he’s more put together as a figurehead than he actually is. Doug’s suspicious, and so am I. Plus, we’re talking about future shenanigans, and while they might win this one, it’s only so long before it becomes another alternate future of many. I might be betraying some of my cynicism with the nature of serialized, never-ending comics there.

As to the point about Destiny, it’s funny! I was just tweeting this week about how rarely characters are simply flat out wrong about a fact, and here comes Destiny making assumptions and being wrong about them. I was kind of delighted to see that, to be honest. I feel like too many comics fall into a rut of good guys saying truthful things and bad guys telling lies, but the interconnected nature of these characters really makes their individual lacks of information highlighted as they bump heads. I love that, it’s probably one of the reasons this entire mini has been such a fun ride.

Chris: Absolutely. I’m with you that I tend to like my fiction filled with people making terrible mistakes all the time and having misunderstandings and mess. I think as we close this issue, with Moira at Destiny and Mystique’s mercy and Charles and Erik facing certain death, I’m enjoying the foibles of our not quite superheroes. Can’t wait to wrap up.

X-Traneous Thoughts

Krakoan reads: Mystique
The Cuckoos back to not being individuals? What a dunk on the 2010s.
RB Silva should always draw terrifying machine gods.
Poor Moira got her arm lopped off just because some dumb men put a tracker in it.
Are Erik and Charles gonna die here? The first scene of Inferno #1 is Emma resurrecting them.