The dog ate my new mutants in Uncanny X-Men #9

The Outliers, still finding their place in the mutant world, are hunted by a lethal new set of foes: a bloodthirsty, relentless and unstoppable pack of stealth Sentinels. Cut off from their mentors and allies, with no knowledge of who built or aimed these deadly drones, four untrained mutants are on the run and completely unprepared for the violent hunters making them their prey. Uncanny X-Men #9 is written by Gail Simone, drawn by Andrei Bressan, colored by Matt Wilson and lettered by Clayton Cowles.

Previously on ComicsXF’s coverage of Uncanny X-Men Vol. 6, our stalwart reviewers Jake Murray and Dr. Anna Peppard just couldn’t take it and decided they weren’t going to review this dang book anymore.

Who among our ranks could possibly step up and bravely take their place? To bear this yoke, the courageous pair of Adam Reck and Austin Gorton are here to give it their best shot. 

Adam Reck: I for one hope that many years of talking and writing about X-Men comics has toughened my hide into a thick armor capable of shielding my heart from the slings and arrows of this baffling book. How are you feeling about this daunting task, Austin? 

Austin Gorton: Well, Moonbeam, one of the benefits of being in this game for as long as I have is that I’ve seen some *stuff*. And one of the truisms I’ve come to use as a shield is that this stuff is cyclical. Every high is inevitably followed by a low, but every low will, eventually, give way to another high. The key is riding out those lows, finding the diamonds in the rough, and then enjoying the eventual highs for as long as they last.

“Baffling” is a good way to describe this series thus far. I’ve certainly read worse — definitely blander — X-Men comics before. But I’m not sure I’ve ever read one as unintentionally befuddling as this one. In its own way, it makes it a fascinating book. Or at least, that’s the shield I’m clinging to as we dive into this coverage. 

Adam: For potentially new readers, let’s dig in to what this X-Men book has been up to for its first eight issues.

A Brief Recap

Previously, in Uncanny X-Men Vol. 6, a terminally ill boy named Harvey X was fridged and the X-Men (Rogue, Gambit, Wolverine and Nightcrawler) were super sad, so they moved in with strangers and took in four stray mutants known as The Outliers (Calico, Deathdream, Jitter and Ransom), one of whom might be “The Endling,” a mutant who will live to be the last mutant. Wolverine has — gasp! — PTSD because he got a bottle of wine from a dying friend. Gambit stole an Eye of Agamotto from a big snake. Rogue is annoyed at Cyclops because he doesn’t return phone calls and also she took elocution lessons at some point for some reason. Nightcrawler is definitely not a priest. Jubilee is supposedly in this book.  

This team is largely trying to mind their own damn business but has to defeat the super-uber-powered-by-grief Sarah Gaunt, who tricked Professor X into thinking he was her child’s father for no real reason, before getting two of their own abducted by the evil podcaster Warden Ellis, who has set up a mutant prison inside a perfectly rebuilt and refurbished X-mansion. There they clashed with Cyclops’ X-team and disagreed over whether to let Professor X out since I guess only Cyclops remembered Xavier sucks. Xavier learned from a guy named Scurvy that he’s one of “the five” “Avians” and that he’s dying of brain cancer, but decides to stay in podcaster Ellis’ prison even though he’s definitely not “INMATE X.” Cyclops was against child soldiers (huh?). Rogue was against Magneto (Say what?!). And they all went home after the evil podcaster not named Warren Ellis threatened to blow up their hometowns with loud music. 

A Ground Bear is not a thing. All bears live on the ground. 

David Marquez does beautiful art and has done nothing wrong. 

Now that you’re caught up, let’s find out what’s in store for our X-Nawlins team this ish: 

Hungry Like the Wolf

Adam: Hope you’ve been reading Sentinels (I have) and know that Podcaster Warden Ellis not only runs her own private prison in the X-mansion, but also employs Larry Trask to use (spoilers for Sentinels #4) the nanotech-infested body of Juston Seyfert to make new human-Sentinel hybrids to hunt mutants, as well as Sentinel-dogs AKA THE WOLFPACK. We first saw these canine killers in a Rogue/Harvey X vision of the future wherein the Wolfpack looked like they’d killed Colossus, then again flanking Ellis’ mind-controlled mutant prisoners in the “Raid on Graymalkin” crossover as well as in the pages of Sentinels. This issue starts with a demo of these Sentinel-dogs that doesn’t go well … or does it? 

Austin: It’s not entirely clear what the point of all this “the dog Sentinels aren’t ready/are TOO vicious” business is. I get the idea that, even for a morally evil organization like this, they don’t want their Sentinels maiming their interns. And Warden Ellis makes a point later about how they wanted to do a whole big marketing push, essentially, about these new Sentinels that has been scuttled by the mall attack. I’m just not sure what the added wrinkle of “we didn’t mean to unleash those Sentinels … yet” is meant to add to things. Seems unnecessarily complicated.

Also, it seems like a wasted opportunity (in terms of both marketing and narrative sense) to not add a footnote along the lines of “What’s this Trask guy’s deal? Check out Sentinels, on sale now!” If you haven’t been reading Sentinels, all this Trask/hybrid Sentinel stuff is coming out of nowhere.

Adam: Agreed, if you’ve only been reading Uncanny, this should feel disorienting. Also odd that despite selling this batch of wayward abused dogs to a powerful unnamed man with a sash (not to be confused with Terra Verde’s President Lopez, who does not wear a sash), the anonymous buyer is not the individual who will use them later in the issue. 

Another thing I was confused by, and this might be because of Andrei Bressan filling in, is that past iterations of the Sentinel dogs looked more like the Decepticon cassette Ravage. The Wolfpack look more like dogs wearing armor, stressing the fact that these are indeed actual dogs and not robots. Were the other Sentinels we saw also dogs? 

Austin: At this point, we can probably chalk this up to artistic license. Or maybe we’re meant to assume the form has evolved? That the first ones were pure robots, and now, post-Sentinels, they are dog/robot hybrids?

Anyways, thoughts on Bressan’s art overall here? Seems a little grittier than Marquez’s work, but he did a good job of making the kids look like kids. 

Adam: I enjoyed Bressan’s artwork. Given this is connecting dots to Sentinels, Bressan’s style feels appropriately less refined than Marquez’s and closer to the rough lines of Justin Mason. He also sells the brutal nature of the killer dogs and the more intimate moments between characters. 

Who Rescued Whom?

Adam: You know what I love to do, Austin? I love to overhear one sentence of a conversation from afar and make life decisions based on what I heard. I recognize this is a time-honored trope in storytelling, but it was very funny that Ransom tunes into the X-Men’s campfire convo long enough to hear Logan out of context and decides to bolt. 

Austin: Kind of like the convolutions with the Wolfpack, this all feels a bit overwritten and underwritten at the same time. Nothing we’ve seen from Ransom suggests he’s the type to rush off in a huff, something Wolverine more or less acknowledges when he chases him down and tells him he’s already the most superhero-y of the Outliers. The conversation between him and Wolverine that ensues is nice, but it seems like some unnecessary work to get there.

Adam: This issue continues to back up my conviction that Simone is less interested in writing the actual X-Men than she is exploring The Outliers. I sometimes wonder what this book would be like if it didn’t have any existing X-Men in it at all. I might like it more. 

Case in point, there’s a nice moment between Jitter and Calico as Calico wants to practice dancing in the barn but doesn’t have a partner. I guess Ember doesn’t know how. So Jitter uses her mutant power of learning a skill for one minute to dance with Calico. This is beautifully rendered by Bressan, especially the last three panels in which Jitter’s minute is up but the characters stay entwined. The final panel is Calico’s one foot turning 180 degrees and going up on pointe while Jitter stays in place. Seems to suggest this romantic moment ends in a kiss? 

Austin: It’s a really great sequence — probably the best in the issue — and I definitely got romance vibes out of it, too. Yet at the same time, it felt disheartening, because given the current editorial climate of this era — don’t rock the boat, keep everything as mass-media-friendly as possible — if it IS meant to read as romantic, this is probably the furthest it will ever go. Hopefully, I’m wrong about that. 

Adam: On the other hand, these are new characters, so hopefully they’re being given the space to grow and evolve. Will this development fall to the wayside like Rogue’s elocution lessons or Logan’s PTSD? Only time will tell! 

Who Let the Dogs Out?

Adam: I did have to go back and reread to make sure I understood who did let the dogs out, and the answer is a rando in Trask’s research lab named Jerry Greentree. And let them out he does, in a shopping mall scene clearly meant to evoke New Mutants #2 and/or that great deleted mall scene from the atrocious X-Men: Apocalypse. 

Austin: The (relatively subtle) reveal that Ransom is Sunspot’s cousin sure pegs this as an intentional New Mutants #2 homage. 

Adam: I hated that so much. Not every Luke needs a Darth Vader for a dad. And surely not every new Black X-man needs to be related to another existing Black X-man. We’ve already done this with Bishop and Gateway, and Bishop and Storm even! I am also deeply confused why the Outliers were on the lam if Sunspot was a phone call away with a ride and a place to stay. (Readers curious how Sunspot got from Arakko back to Earth should check out X-Men Unlimited Infinity Comic #128-130, “Red Winter Sun.”) 

Austin: I bumped against the Sunspot thing, too. And I’m willing to give Simone the benefit of the doubt; I don’t know which came first — Ransom’s connection to Sunspot or the idea of using a New Mutants #2 homage to spotlight her cast of new mutants — but I’m sure she simply hit on the idea and rolled with it, without thinking through the full implications, both in terms of the wider X-Men narrative and within the context of her own story — of what Ransom being related to Sunspot meant. This really seems like a case where an editor should have stepped in and asked, “Do we really want to make another connection between two of our few minority characters?” and “If so, how does that connection work within the previously established context of these characters?” 

Adam: I want to get into a larger convo about some of the not-so-thought-out ideas of race and diversity later, but had to jump in here. Back to shopping malls. 

Austin: The old man in me also wondered about the reality of the New Mutants homage; would teens in the year 2025 even know what a mall is (based on the sliding timeline, would Jubilee?!?)? Are there even malls as robustly populated (with people and stores) as is shown in the issue outside of touristy ones like the Mall of America? All the “regular” malls around me are desiccated retail wastelands desperately clinging to life by converting department store anchors into fitness clubs and go-kart tracks. Seems like in reality, Rogue should have given the kids the password to her Amazon account and set them loose. 

Or maybe I’m just a jaded millennial lamenting the ongoing death of my childhood.

Adam: As a dad of a teen who lives in proximity to a large shopping mall, I can tell you that depending on where you live, malls still exist and kids still like to mallrat in them and get a delicious cinnamon pretzel. And I like the basic idea of Jubilee wanting to take them to a place she once felt comfortable as a kid. It’s the most in-character thing she’s done so far in this book and a world away from her quoting the Bible on Free Comic Book Day.

Austin: Honestly, this warms teenage me’s heart. There’s hope for us yet.

Adam: Let’s get into the Wolfpack attack. On a surface level, this is the book’s action sequence. The dogs attack, are said to be harder to punch than Wolverine, and appear to kill Deathdream. Normal comic book stuff. 

But a conversation we continue having among our CXF colleagues is about the ongoing trend in the From the Ashes books of featuring characters of color as anti-mutant racists and villains. What we keep coming to as a group is that while there is nothing wrong with giving characters of color the ability to be evil or villainous, the characters’ actions in this book in particular do not seem to take their Blackness into consideration. 

To distill this further, this book features a Black podcaster whose motivations as prison warden/mutant hater have simply not been explained, and this issue goes another step in featuring a Black lab scientist sic dogs on children, three out of four of whom are also characters of color. Since siccing dogs onto Black people is part of the savage history of racism in the United States, the combination of these puzzle pieces presents a scenario that one might assume the author intends to tell a more substantial story with or to use these powerful symbols to try to say something. 

Instead, these characters and the imagery are used flippantly without any particular reason other than “they’re the bad guys and they want to attack the good guys.” There is little depth or thoughtfulness to these choices. And while this kind of carelessness is less strident when it’s a random line that seems bizarre or out of line with our canonical understanding of the characters, it becomes problematic when no one, author or editor, wondered whether these choices had larger meaning or context. I want to be hopeful that this book will become more thoughtful or insightful, but I don’t think we’ve been provided with anything so far to indicate it will. 

X-traneous Thoughts 

• Not sure why it’s dramatic for Deathdream to die, as I believe one of his powers is to repeatedly return from the dead.  
• Note that the Wolfpack here has absolutely nothing to do with Larry Hama and Ron Wilson’s teen gang who debuted in Marvel Graphic Novel #31 and went on to their own solo title. Surely Slippery Sam and Wheels Wolinski will sue for copyright infringement. 
• Isn’t Calico’s horse just a horse (and/or possibly the actual mutant in their pairing)? How did it suddenly appear at the mall for her to ride into battle?
• How does Jubilee have $1,600 to just hand out to the kids? Do the X-Men have side gigs we don’t know about? 
• Why does Rogue taking charge make Wolverine respond with admiration and tell her Cyclops and Professor X would be proud? Logan’s been telling Rogue she’d make a good leader since all the way back in “The Fall of the Mutants,” she’s led teams of X-Men before, and Storm is the X-Men leader Wolverine respects the most, not Scott or Chuck. 
• The letters page shows that while we’re being fairly critical of this book, there are readers out there falling over themselves to express their love. Glad it’s working for them. 
• Man, I really want an Auntie Anne’s pretzel now. 
• Next issue’s solicit promises “Bone-Chilling BLOODHOUNDS!” We’ll be back to see if Bloodhounds are different than the Wolfpack or if anyone even mentions it. See you then!
• Remember that Monet appearance Gail teased a while back? Was it actually her getting carted off to Graymalkin Prison? Because that’s what we got! Cool. Cool cool cool. Cool.

Buy Uncanny X-Men #9 here. (Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate, ComicsXF may earn from qualifying purchases.)

Adam Reck

Adam Reck is the cartoonist behind Bish & Jubez as well as the co-host of Battle Of The Atom.

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