Enigmas & Variations Abound In Immortal X-Men #1

Destiny of X Begins! A day in the life of Mister Sinister results in events that are hard to predict. Written by Kieron Gillen, drawn by Lucas Werneck with colors by David Curiel and letters by Clayton Cowles.

Mark Turetsky: ComicsXF X-Men coverage! The website on the hill! Oh brave new world that has such people in’t! Well, ‘tis new to me.

Austin Gorton: The Inferno has burned itself out, Wolverine has lived and died (X times), and now a new era begins! But the more things change, the more they stay the same, and for all the revelations this issue lays on us, there’s a few comforting familiarities: Mister Sinister still loves drama, and capes, and isn’t always as smart as he thinks he is. Cue the orchestra; it’s time for Destiny of X!

Statement of the Theme

Mark: Let’s start out in Paris, 1919. The Great War is over, and Nathaniel Essex sits on a park bench whistling a little tune. So once again, we start an era with a park bench. But it’s a different bench, a different man, approached by a different woman.

Austin: I love how “characters on a park bench” has become a recurring X-Men motif on par with Wolverine threatening to pop the middle claw or characters emerging from a sewer ready to kick butt. In this case, the woman in question turns out to be Destiny, and the duo engage in a discussion about music. 

Mark: First off, I’d like to discuss the piece of music that Sinister whistles here. Kieron Gillen writing music into a comic tends to be a pretty pointed thing. Elgar’s Enigma Variations is a layered piece of music in its meanings and format. You might know Elgar for his most popular compositions, the Pomp and Circumstance marches (you know, the graduation music, the music Donald Duck worked to when God commanded him to build an ark and rescue two of every animal). Enigma Variations is, as the title suggests, a series of variations on a single theme. The theme is the four notes Sinister here hums as “Dum-dumm-dumm-derr!” These four notes have the same rhythm and cadence as saying “Edward Elgar.” 

The second thing to note is that the variations are written about 14 of his friends. Elgar takes the theme and varies it to recall events and interactions with his friends. Maybe they’re moments with his friend, or they’re based on the friend’s personality or what have you. But I believe Gillen is making a statement about the series as a whole here. He’s stated in promotional interviews that each issue, at least at first, will focus on a different member of the Quiet Council. These are the variations. 

The ninth variation, Nimrod, well, I don’t need to say anything aside from the obvious connection to a certain mutant-killing robot, but the piece itself is one of those well-trodden old tunes. It got played at the London Olympics opening ceremonies, it was played during the Honk Kong handover, it’s played at memorials and funerals. It’s not elegiac in itself. It commemorates a low point in Elgar’s life when he was considering giving up music, and was encouraged by his friend Augustuis Jaeger to continue. The German word Jäger means hunter, and of course Nimrod is a mighty hunter in the Bible, hence the name.

The final thing I’d like to point out about Enigma Variations, as this is quickly turning into a late nineteenth century orchestral music lecture, is that there’s a hidden musical theme in it. It’s encoded into the music. Nobody knows precisely what form it takes or what the hidden theme is, because Elgar went to his grave with his enigma unsolved. 

Austin: I would just like to point out that Gillen is laying all this out within the first two pages of the issue. We haven’t even gotten to the credits yet.  

Reinforcing what he’s suggesting with the musical reference, the sequence that follows that discussion is obviously meant to mimic House of X #2, with Destiny whispering a secret to Essex which leads to him crying black goo before dying, his mind (seemingly literally) blown, just as Moira upended Xavier’s entire worldview with the revelation of her multiple lives of failure and mutant failure. 

Mark: Narratively, it’s also like that same moment as it appears in Powers of X #1, where we see the moment, but we don’t know what message is being conveyed to the recipient, and so we’re missing a key piece of information. We might not have it for a while yet. What would be the Mister Sinister equivalent of learning that Mutants always lose? And the phrase that he repeats as he dies, “You’re a ghost” (I really enjoyed Cowles’ lettering on this as his life fades away). What could it mean?

Austin: I have no idea, but I am confident in thinking we’re not supposed to know quite yet. Also, given that this opening is set over 100 years in the past…how was Destiny even alive, back in her pre-death and pre-resurrection days, when she was fighting with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants/Freedom Force, etc.? At the time, she was just old, but now, as the timeline has slid ever forward, it seems odd that she could be young-ish here and still hanging around doing stuff decades later, even before she came back as a younger woman. 

Mark: And don’t forget she was old enough to attend a concert in 1899! My Neil Gaiman answer to Destiny’s immortality is this: she existed like any other fictional character until 1980, when the first story she ever appeared in, “A Scandal in Bohemia” by Arthur Conan Doyle, moved into the public domain. [Ed. note: Destiny is Irene Adler from Sherlock Holmes stories, Mystique is the detective himself ]

At that moment, she moved into what I like to call The Everstory, and isn’t that a kind of immortality in itself? I’ll throw in that I think maybe Sinister’s “You’re a ghost”  is repeating back what she told him. And I have no idea what that would mean. I guess it’s just… an enigma.

First Variation: A Red-Letter Day

Mark: After the title page, we find ourselves in modern day Krakoa. I just want to note something in Sinister’s scene-setting narration. He says, “Oh, brave new world. Utopia: the fresh summer remix.” So, we get a double literary allusion here. First, the phrase “Oh brave new world” is from The Tempest. You know, that play about the island where there are monsters, fairies, young horny people and ruled over by a tyrannically controlling old wizard? (I was discussing the play with my spouse the other day and she said that Prospero is “up to some real Professor X shit”). It’s also a reference to the novel Brave New World. You know, that hierarchical society powered by drugs? The fact that he follows it up with the word “Utopia,” when Brave New World is classically a dystopia… All I’m saying is that this should be a signal to the reader to not entirely trust what Sinister tells us. But maybe we shouldn’t be handling this issue caption by caption.

Austin: The Tempest is also from where we get the name “Caliban” (has he shown up yet on Krakoa?) [Ed. note: he was in X-Force #1]. And I appreciate Sinister’s acknowledgement of the Marvel Universe Utopia, the last time the X-Men tried the whole “we are a nation living on an island” approach to human/mutant relations. 

Speaking more broadly of the captions, Gillen’s use of Sinister as the POV character for the series’ inaugural issue is interesting in two ways. For one, modern day Sinister (or, at least, Sinister as he’s been presented in the Krakoa Era) is very much a Kieron Gillen creation, as he introduced the snarky, “sassy b” take on the character during his earlier Uncanny X-Men run. So it’s not surprising he’s drawn to him in order to kick off his character POV rotation for the series. 

The other thing is that Sinister is famously untrustworthy (something we’re specifically shown in this issue), trafficking in double-speak and secrets. Meaning, Gillen may well be deliberately misleading readers from the start, or at the very least, reminding us to take everything that is being presented with a grain of salt, given who our narrator is. 

Mark: And, as is shown several times in this issue, he’s not as cunning as he thinks he is. Even setting aside how badly his plan goes awry, he slips up a few times. First, he self-corrects from “the” mutants to “us” mutants. Second, he refers to Arakko as “Mars,” which is generally frowned upon, especially in the highest echelon of Krakoan politics. He doesn’t say it aloud, but he also doesn’t catch himself. It’s entirely possible Gillen left it in as a salve to readers who haven’t been keeping up with the X-line (the issue is full of those), letting them know that Arakko is Mars, but it’s interesting that it’s in there.

Austin: That’s a good point. In general, Gillen does an effective job of looping in potential new readers who may not be intimately familiar with the new status quo (this is a #1 issue after all) without dumbing things down for those of us neck deep in this stuff. The sequence in which Sinister offers his thoughts on the council members is a great vehicle for introducing the cast of the book (including Sinister himself) while still being entertaining (because Sinister is doing the introductions in his voice instead of Gillen using a dry, objective third-person narrator voice). 

Mark: And it brings up another example of Sinister’s not being as smart as he thinks. Of Nightcrawler, he says, “his eye isn’t on the game.” No, your eye should be on the ball, your head in the game.

And artist Lucas Werneck does a really cool thing during this sequence: he shows every member of the council from Sinister’s point of view. For a comic that promises to have a major setting being twelve people sitting in a circle, this gives me hope for the visual dynamics of council scenes in this series. So, for instance, Sinister doesn’t have a very good view of Kate Pryde, because Exodus’ big purple glove is in the way. It’s a way that the art subtly grounds the reader so directly in Sinister’s POV. 

Austin: Similarly, there’s a few places in this issue in which Werneck uses the panel layout to generate humor – pages featuring a grid of small panels in a repeated visual pattern that reinforces the narrative pattern being established before the final panel in the sequence upends the narrative pattern while maintaining the visual one. 

Mark: I also love Sinister’s “WHAT?!?!” at the end of that sequence. As a general rule, lettering should guide the reader’s eye through the art to tell the story and not draw attention to itself. Here, his “WHAT” takes up nearly a quarter of the panel, breaking out of the word balloon that was meant to contain it; it’s in all caps with a graded yellow color. It stands out in a way that breaks that rule, and with good reason: it’s too big, it’s too stagey, as Sinister admits after the moment, it’s too much.

Second Variation: Day of the Centipede

Austin: Plot-wise, there’s a couple significant happenings in this issue. The majority of it is centered on a reconfiguration of the Quiet Council, prompted by Magneto’s decision to remove himself from the body (and the subsequent vote to make his departure effective immediately and not allow him a say in his replacement). This kicks off a series of recruitments and machinations, with the decision quickly settling on two options: the immortal sorceress Selene or the mutant “messiah” and member of the Five, Hope Summers (Exodus and – secretly – Sinister’s preferred choice). 

Mark: Yes, Krakoa has now set up the precedent of not giving power to lame ducks (unlike certain countries I could name). We’ll see if that comes back to haunt any of the council members who voted in favor of cutting Magneto out. I think we need to talk about the scene between Exodus and the star of one of Gillen’s previous X-series: Hope.

Austin: So the easy read here is “Kieron Gillen said Jesus was a mutant!” The idea being, Exodus – a zealot from the Middle Ages who fought in the crusades with a personal deference towards being an acolyte – is going around referring to Hope as a messiah (a title she carried earlier in her existence when she was considered the person who would revive the decimated mutant race). His argument to Hope is that if the Nazarene mutant (i.e. Jesus) could inspire an entire religion via just a few resurrections [Ed. note: Lazarus, himself and the righteous dead at the crucifixion], surely she is worthy of the same adoration for all the resurrections she has participated in as part of the Five. 

Obviously, this idea might not sit well with some readers (for various reasons), but returning to the matter of POV, it’s important to keep in mind that this info is delivered via Exodus – not an omniscient third person narrative voice. It might be Gillen cheekily throwing out the idea that Jesus was a mutant in the Marvel Universe (similar to how Santa Claus is an established mutant). It might also just be Gillen illustrating Exodus’ characterization as a pro-mutant zealot, a crusader who, in his past, fought in Jesus’ name and is someone with a proclivity for messianism by revealing that Exodus believes Jesus was a mutant.

Mark: This is exactly how I read it. Exodus doesn’t have special knowledge of anyone involved. He was born over a thousand years after Jesus was around, so his information isn’t any better than anyone else’s.

We get a whole slew of different mutants applying for the vacant seat, but none get spotlighted like Selene. She offers her services on a few fronts: she’s a master of magic, she’s been in the immortality business for a long time, points of view that the council lost when they lost Apocalypse. And while Beast had a PowerPoint (with an “in this PowerPoint I will…” joke), Selene uses the circled X at the center of the council chamber as a magic circle for the sake of her presentation. It’s flashy, but effective. On the other hand, Hope comes in with no flash, no big words, just a simple truth: The Five should have their interests represented. And it wouldn’t be a popular decision to keep them out.

Austin: This prompts the other great “Sinister isn’t as smart as he is” moment of the issue, after he has to hastily amend his “for show” no vote to a yes when, notably, Destiny votes no as well, endangering Hope’s candidacy. It also prompts the issue’s more action-oriented cliffhanger, as a pissed off Selene greets the news that she lost by turning the External Gate into a big bug monster thing that attacks the council. Which is when Sinister beats a hasty retreat to his lab, setting up the issue’s biggest revelation. 

Mark: Yes! We find out that what we saw after the title page was a misdirect. When we see him talking about activating the X-gene, and talk of being the 26th clone, we think he’s talking about himself. Turns out: not true! He’s tricked us! 

In his essay, “First Thing Second Thing” in PanelXPanel #34, Gillen describes a storytelling convention he uses in first issues: First Thing and Second Thing. “First Thing” is the thing the comic is about, what draws readers to the comic. “Second Thing” is the thing you hold back. It could be small, it could be big, but it’s there to get the reader intrigued so that they’ll come back for issue #2. Well, First Thing here is that this is the first issue of a new status quo in the biggest line wide shakeup since HoXPoX. Second Thing is… well…

I know you were a bit disappointed last week in the seeming resolution to the many lives of Moira X in X Lives/Deaths of Wolverine. But, here we are, a week later, and it seems that plot thread has not really been resolved. It’s now a major concern, and in a clever new way. Mister. Sinister has set up multiple Moira clones. We see five clones of various ages, but there could be more.To use a videogame analogy: these clones are save points. We see him activating a new clone at the beginning of this issue, learning that he is living through the 26th instance of this particular clone’s life. He takes advantage of the fact that Moira’s memories transfer over from life to life by uploading his own memories into a clone before he kills it, then he downloads the memories after he “resets” the clone. We don’t know how many times he’s reset the other clones, or how long those clones have been alive. He could have save points going back weeks, months, probably not years, because there are some events in Hellions he’d probably like to have a do-over for. And, gaming things out, he probably has a kill switch: in case he dies, the latest clone gets killed by the cloning tank and *poof* he’s alive again and can avoid his death! Who even needs Krakoan resurrection when you can make your own Moiras!

And, going back to Enigma Variations, these clones’ lives are like those variations. The theme, the status quo of their lives are the same, but how Sinister choses to act in each reset allows him to live a variation on those lives. 

But as Destiny tells him, “there is no destiny.” Like in Moira’s many lives, the presence of Destiny throws off his plans. He can’t depend on things working out exactly how he plans where Destiny (and magic!) are involved. 

Austin: Gillen does seem to be centering Destiny as the foil to all the best laid plans (be they Moira’s or informed-by-Moira-clones Sinister’s), which both builds the mystique of the character (no pun intended) and provides a bit of a narrative throughline to the era. 

You’re right though, this continuation of Moira’s story is more in line with what we were led to expect from “X Lives/X Deaths”. That’s a rant for another place; for now, I’ll just appreciate it as one heck of an exclamation point on the end of a fun and engaging introduction to this series, and to “Destiny of X”! 

X-Traneous Thoughts

• No Krakoan, just “Reap what you sow” in English.
• For any readers who are mostly familiar with Kieron Gillen through his X-work, the opening is very reminiscent of his Image series with Jamie McKelvie, The Wicked + The Divine, which had several occasions where immortal characters interact in the past with huge consequences on the present in the story.
• Sinister calling it a “red-letter day” calls to mind the red highlighted issues they used to do in the reading lists at the back of issues back in the HoXPoX/DoX era.
• How long until we get a 26 timeline chart of Sinister’s Lives of Moira?
• Hope says, “I’ve been a good soldier for over a year now.” So it’s been over a year since HoXPoX in this sliding timeline (which vaguely tracks with the upcoming second Hellfire Gala/X-Men election). [Ed. note: My brothers in the Nazarene mutant, this is maidenless behavior, it leads only to madness]

Mark Turetsky

Mark Turetsky is an audiobook narrator and voice actor who sometimes writes about comic books. Originally from Montreal, Canada, he now lives in Northern Louisiana.

Austin Gorton

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