Professor Charles Xavier has escaped from Graymalkin Prison to save his daughter from an attack out in space — and he has a plan to aid her. The problem is, his former students are none too happy to see him. Is there anyone left willing to help him out? Find out in NYX #9, written by Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly, drawn by Francesco Mortarino, colored by Raúl Angulo and lettered by Joe Sabino.
Armaan Babu: Stephanie, while it’s great to see you, and be writing with you again, I come under less than fortunate circumstances. One of the world’s most dangerous mutants has escaped, and I have taken it upon myself to track him down. I come to you from the pages of Uncanny X-Men, where we have already seen the damage he can do unchecked … I think. Some things are a little unclear. Hopefully, we can clear a few things up together.
Stephanie Burt: I’m no mind reader, but we can give it a shot.
Go Away, Xavier
Armaan: Someone is talking to Charles Xavier. Someone who wants him to accept responsibility for the way the world is, for the added hatred and fear mutants are receiving, somehow even worse than what they’ve had to live with before. Someone believes Xavier no longer cares — that he’s abandoned the dream and will sacrifice as many mutants as it takes for him to get what he wants for himself.
Someone may be right.
The captions feel personal, and we’ll get to the reveal of who’s behind them later, but they do feel a little bit like those old Claremontian captions that would sometimes get out of hand and guilt-trip whoever they were focusing on, don’t they?
Stephanie: In an extremely intended way. They’re the best kind of Easter egg/allusion/reference: one that delights the readers who get it without disturbing or repelling the readers who don’t. If you’re one of the readers who don’t, though, you might want to know that the Angry Claremontian Narrator originates in 1970s Iron Fist books, which Claremont wrote for a while but did not invent: It’s an excitable second-person voice who often critiques, berates or even mocks our hero for making bad choices and getting himself, herself, etc. in hot water. Later reuses — like the one we get here — tell us who’s talking, within the story, who’s been trying to control the narrative. 10/10 for this reuse. No notes. Especially since the figure who’s talking loves talking, and loves controlling whatever story he wants to use to entrap the characters. And no, it’s not Arcade.
Armaan: We join our team over in the NYX clubhouse, where our favorite New York mutants are enjoying a little time off between traumatic adventures. Kamala Khan is playing a game where the apparent lesson is not to give up (pft, like Kamala needs a lesson in that), Sophie Cuckoo may have an online romantic interest, someone’s cooking lunch in the background … it’s a cozy, comfortable feel. I like their headquarters, and even more than that, I like the non-costume outfits everyone’s in. Mortarino’s designs give everyone grounded but delightful vibes. Everyone’s outfit is unique and even seems to say a little about them. It’s a refreshing change from characters being either in costume or in something generic. There’s very expressive body language going on here, too. It makes dwelling in this setting a very enjoyable experience, even when things go sour.
And they do, because who could turn up but the target of our hunt himself, Charles Xavier.
Stephanie: I love the NYX clubhouse. I wish I could go hang out there and make new friends. That’s kind of the point. I love how the NYX kids do not wear the kind of coordinated superhero costumes that suggest a paramilitary force or an emergency response team or a conventional set of adult superheroes ready to rush into battle, but they can wear clothes that set them apart from normies and establish that they belong in a superhero universe. Like a tight-fitting Captain Marvel jersey. It’s like Flamecon.
I don’t love Chuck. Does anyone? And, of course, David Alleyne — I like him more every time he makes an appearance — calls him out over a difference of educational philosophies. Chuck has historically wanted to train child soldiers while claiming he’s getting them ready for the real world: When he can’t send them into combat action (as with the first generation of New Mutants), he f*cks right off into space and lets someone else teach them. David, who lived through Academy X, wants to give them a space to be teens and find themselves. Though of course, combat finds them.
Armaan: There’s no love for Xavier here. While I do believe people’s mistrust of him is deserved — while I do see him as someone who’s essentially gone all the way over into villainy even with that Infinite Comic that essentially retconned the worst of his deeds — there is something of a frustration here.
The X-Men have never been more divided, both on the page and as a line. Storylines don’t quite line up. Characters seem wildly inconsistent with their previous appearances, and with their appearances in other books. People who should be allied and helping each other out are instead (both reasonably in some cases and inexplicably in others) at odds with each other. Every home the X-Men have has not only been taken away from them but grossly reappropriated by their enemies — Krakoa’s been destroyed, the mansion is now a prison, the treehouse has been taken over by Doctor Doom — and now a new Krakoan seed has been found, in the hands of their enemies.
A lot of blame is being thrown Charles’ way here, but there seems to be little blame thrown toward the human (and, let’s be honest, largely American) population that worked so hard to destroy Krakoa in the first place. As if prejudice and hatred is the result of mutants not being good enough, as if mutantkind is somehow responsible for their own oppression.
Charles Xavier is a terrible man, but he’s not the one who destroyed Krakoa. That said, it’s perhaps a good idea that no one wants to team up with him right now. Well, aside from arguably the two most idealistic members of NYX, Kamala and Anole. They don’t quite trust Xavier either, but their need to protect their friends is greater than that mistrust.
Stephanie: All of the above. I have less than no interest in defending the entire X-line right now. It doesn’t seem, to me, especially tonally or narratively coherent, though yes, I’ll keep reading it. I do think that NYX and Exceptional X-Men fit together well enough — those are the ones I’m proud to support — and I think that David Alleyne as a character makes some extremely valid points: You can’t spend your whole life, much less risk your life, throwing yourself at a succession of wolves. You can if you like, but no one can make you.
On the other hand, you can’t just let the wolves eat your friends.
How much should you risk your own safety, and the rest of your life plans, and your friends or your family, to stand up for strangers against a mob? Or a government? Or a set of bad actors with guns, when you’ve got a play-sword? Those are NYX questions. They’re also real-world questions, especially now. Should I, personally, drive to the nearest U.S. military air base and throw myself in front of the runway to prevent the latest round of kidnappings taking migrants to Guantanamo? (Prodigy would say no. Kamala might say yes, or do it herself. But she has powers.)
How much should I, or anyone else in a position of privilege, risk when the state, and the voting public, behaves like it hates and fears me, and might even want to kill me? They’re familiar X-questions. The more we think of the modern world as the failure of Xavier’s dream, the more we need to ask what’s next. Which, I think, the X-line, for all its incoherences, wants to do.
Attack on the Treehouse of DOOM
Armaan: This same plotline could have happened with pretty much any other villain with a lair getting their own Krakoan seed, and been no different, but I like this casual tie-in to the whole One World Under Doom event that’s happening right now. Little things that make the Marvel world feel lived in, without completely pulling away from the story — plus, it doesn’t matter how many times it happens, it’s always fun seeing Doombots get destroyed.
Stephanie: It is! Extra points for Kelly and Lanzing for pulling off a stunt that anyone writing long term for Marvel must master: They’ve integrated an editorially mandated crossover without completely derailing the plots, the characters or the ideas at the center of their own book. In this case, Professor X gets Anole and Kamala to accompany him to [LAIR] because he wants [TO KEEP THE CROSSOVER PLOT GOING], which allows Kelly and Lanzing to get the Krakoan seed into Mojo’s hands,where it needs to end up for the next NYX plot to start. Or, as the Daily Variety once put it, NYX fix X mix.
Armaan: Charles, as it turns out, was not looking for the Krakoan seed at all. He abandons Kamala and Anole to Mojo’s attack to sneak away and steal his real prize: a somewhat tarnished Cerebro helmet, though we’re not told why he wanted it.
Something of note when it comes to Charles in this story: When we last saw him, in the first part of this crossover, he was not in control of himself. A mutant tumor in his brain — something that’s only been mentioned so far in Uncanny — was affecting his actions, making him hallucinate, making him attack the X-Men who might have helped him.
Here, however, he seems completely in control of himself, with little tie-in to the events of Uncanny aside from minor mentions that he’s rescuing his daughter and that he escaped his prison. As a crossover, “X-Manhunt” is a strange one. Xavier feels like a drop-in character in people’s books, rather than this being a full crossover with a coherent plot of its own. We’ve both read Storm, the third part of this crossover, which shows a completely different Xavier — and none of it follows up on the Cerebro helmet that he retrieves this issue.
Aside from the gimmick hopefully drawing new readers in to comics they might not have been reading, I can’t see why this crossover is happening. It adds little to the stories they’ve been a part of, and given how inconsistently Xavier is written, it does little for his own story. This line is a disconnected mess, and this crossover just isn’t working so far.
Stephanie: You’re right! Also I don’t care. This issue of NYX works very well on its own, not so much despite as because it has to handle an awkward Chuck-centered crossover. Life is full of little interruptions. Also, is Anole dead? Did Mojo kill him?
Now Entering Mojo City
Armaan: So the true villain behind this turns out not to be Doom, nor Xavier, but the fourth-wall bending, multiversal producer Mojo, who has his own plans for the Krakoan seed. He looks utterly horrific here, and he’s swift, he’s brutal — stabbing Anole right through the chest, forcing Kamala to melt herself just to escape his grasp. It’s all pretty gruesome. The gruesomeness that follows immediately after Xavier abandons Kamala and Anole really highlights his betrayal and Mojo’s viciousness. Both work to make each other seem that much worse.
Stephanie: Yes. This version of Xavier has a demented moral code: Anything’s worth doing, anything’s justified (for him) if it lets you save your own child. Has he ever seen Xandra in that way before? Can anyone get David Haller on the phone? It’s not the moral code Xavier’s used in the past, but nobody ever accused him of consistency. Also he’s apparently got a brain tumor. (Real-life brain tumors can change your morality, too.)
That said, I’d rather read a story where NYX fight Mojo. The megalomaniacal, logorrheic entertainment mogul makes sense, maybe more than any other X-villain, as a baddie for our bad times, and I love how Mojo both loathes everyone and wants to explain, and justify, everything to the audience he imagines or (since he’s got all those screens in his lair) literally sees. He’s a surveillance villain who wants to know everything, he’s a control freak who also wants to make money, he has less than no sense of right and wrong (unlike the very lawful evil Doom), he pretends to honor an interdimensional legal system that keeps “actors” under “contract,” but really he knows no honor at all. Everything’s transactional, short term, designed to get and hold our attention so he can steal from under our noses and feel the network-wide applause he craves. It’s like he’s read Chris Hayes!
“Relentlessly competitive bidding for eyeballs”; that’s how Hayes describes modern media and the modern internet, and it’s what Mojo and his assistants have done since Spiral replaced one of Psylocke’s eyes. Kelly and Lanzing picked the right villain here. (They also picked a narrator they haven’t used before. Did you notice how every issue of NYX has a new narrator?)
Armaan: Mojo steals the spotlight right as the issue closes. It turns out that it’s him who has been monologuing to Xavier through the caption boxes we’ve seen through the issue. I’m not sure how I feel about this mild shift from Mojo being less of a TV producer and more of a story manipulator, vaguely aware of narrative conveniences, story themes and the like. It’s written well, yes, and I like the insights he has into Xavier’s character, and Xavier’s new place in the world, but the poetic prose doesn’t sit entirely well with the manic crazy energy he brings everywhere else. Do you feel the same?
Stephanie: I do not! I think Mojo’s acted this way since Ann Nocenti first co-created him. The biggest changes in the character since the 1980s appear to be 1) He’s got a new Major-Domo — horribly and sadly it’s the child mutant Fauna! 2) He works through obvious avatars and fake people whom he manipulates like marionettes, instead of just hiring flunkies and mercenaries. 3) He’s a big dumpy dude with enormous muscles — more an endomorphic physical menace than a fatphobic adipose caricature. The single worst thing about the X-books’ Claremont-era inheritance, for my money — the thing that modern writers need to fix or expunge, rather than trying to transform — is the fatphobia. Mortarino’s doing what he can.
Armaan: Next in “X-Manhunt,” Xavier seeks the assistance of Storm! Follow the story — and our ComicsXF coverage — with Jude Jones in Storm #6.
X-traneous Thoughts
- One of the poor mutants down on his luck we glimpse at the beginning of this issue is Mimic. I have a lot of fondness for the character; I hope things pick up for him.
- Xavier seems to be reading Doom’s Doombot passcodes straight from his mind here. Would a world-conquering leader and Sorcerer Supreme not have better mental defenses? Or, for that matter, any?
- Counterpoint: Doom himself surely knows how to protect his brain from Chuck, but a midlevel Doombot? Maybe not. Psychic defenses take a lot of work (“concentration,” in DnD terms), and I’m not sure an electronic replica of the Latverian dictator could keep up the mental strength of the original.
- More people in comics need to call out when “narrative convenience is off the charts!”
Buy NYX #9 here. (Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate, ComicsXF may earn from qualifying purchases.)
Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. Her podcast about superhero role playing games is Team-Up Moves, with Fiona Hopkins; her latest book of poems is We Are Mermaids. Her nose still hurts from that thing with the gate.
Armaan is obsessed with the way stories are told. From video games to theater, TTRPGs to comics, he has written for, and about, them all. He will not stop, actually; believe us, we've tried.
