Professor Xavier is in a reflective mood in the wake of Sinister’s attack on the Quiet Council, as he and the X-Men recover and strike back in Immortal X-Men #10, written by Kieron Gillen, drawn by Lucas Werneck, colored by David Curiel and lettered by Clayton Cowles.
Mark Turetsky: Austin, we’ve reached it. The end. The final issue of Immortal X-Men. And things will never be the same, will they?
Austin Gorton: It was a short-lived series, but a fun one, and it sure went out with one heck of a bang, didn’t it? But all things must come to an end, even these so-called “Immortal” X-Men.
Mark: We kid, we kid, it’s only briefly relaunching as Immoral [see what they did there?] X-Men for three issues, and then coming back with issue #11!
Assault on Sinister City
Mark: As far as plot, there really isn’t much to this issue. Synch manages to fill in for Hope, the dead council members get resurrected, everyone joins together to attack Sinister’s secret re-creation of London under Alaska. He tries to escape, he fails and he gets thrown in the pit. Easy enough, right?
Austin: This is what we have X-Men for, after all! On the surface, it is a fairly straightforward plot, especially compared to the somewhat twisty, constantly restarting events of the previous issue. But there’s some interesting things happening under the surface. For one, this issue really underscores just how crucial The Five are to resurrection (with both Sinister’s genetic database and Cerebro’s repository of mutant memories more easily able to be backed up and/or re-created), and just how crucial Hope is to The Five.
Ultimately, Synch is able to take Hope’s place long enough to bring her back, but it doesn’t seem a certain — or easy — thing to do. Which begs the question of why Hope was allowed to be on the council, or fight in AXE, or do much of anything other than resurrect mutants or hide away in a No Place somewhere. It really seems like the nation of Krakoa either needs to be more protective of Hope, or come up with a better backup plan than “Synch, maybe?”
Mark: That’s the argument Xavier made at the beginning of this series. You’ve even got people like Hank treating The Five as their own personal servants, telling Hope, “whether you like or dislike anything I ask of you is, frankly, irrelevant.” Ultimately, it was more important for The Five to have a voice in the government. The argument came down to Xavier’s proclivity for treating people as tools. And besides, is the Quiet Council chamber any less safe than Arbor Magna?
The thing that really strikes me about the opening pages of this issue is how relatable it is: We have mass killings in the U.S. We also have violent attacks against our government, both here and more recently in Brazil. And seeing first responders in the form of X-Force arriving, unable to do much more than load corpses into body bags. It’s not quite “ripped from the headlines,” but it certainly trades on imagery that’s in the zeitgeist.
Austin: Indeed. And we all know Gillen loves a continuity callback, and this issue is rife with them. One I particularly appreciated was that Cable is the one who delivers Hope’s body to Arbor Magna, something the text doesn’t remark upon but is still there. I also liked how of the two mutants suggested as possible Hope fill-ins/replacement, Synch steps up after Mimic quickly peaces out because of the pressure, which is very consistent with what little character Mimic has.
(Less effective continuity comes from the fact that Beast is among the X-Force first responders at a time when he’s proving to be as bad or worse than Sinister himself over in X-Force, but I digress.)
Mark: Not to mention the anonymous mutant’s announcement that “Hope’s alive!” is extremely on the nose. Also, Cable is there at Hope’s resurrection, likely because he’s Hope’s adoptive father. But maybe he’s also there because the process is being overseen by Doctor Nemesis. Maybe it’s also because the Stepford Cuckoos have, on occasion, gone bad. It’s a moment of trauma and rebirth, it’s about four of the leaders of their society being reborn, but let’s not ignore that this is all being watched over by the most thoroughly armed mutant there is. And we need to take note that in this time of war, they’ve got the guy with all the guns (and pouches) in the delivery room. The presence of guns is an inherent threat. You can dress it up as “security,” but there’s always the implication that they can and will be used against you. It’s kind of chilling when you view it that way.
Austin: Absolutely.
Ultimately, Synch and the rest of The Five (along with the Cuckoos, filling in for Xavier/Emma) are able to revive Hope and the rest of the council. Once everyone’s eggs have cracked, the council leads the X-Men to Sinister’s secret underground recreation of London in Alaska, which is another continuity callback (to Gillen’s own), with Cyclops mentioning how they’d thought the city destroyed when he was leading the Phoenix Five (a reference to 2012’s Avengers vs. X-Men crossover, which isn’t something that gets name dropped very often these days). And of course, Sinister’s principal line of defense, his mutant mashup chimeras, are their own kind of continuity callbacks, as he smashes together, say, Cyclops and Eye-Boy to create a mass of optic-blast shooting eyes.
Mark: We also get a callback to Immortal X-Men #3’s vision of The Expanse, with Sinister’s Shaw-meat powered spaceship. In this timeline, though, Sinister doesn’t escape, but is instead brought down by Exodus and Hope, before summarily being tossed in The Pit.
But ultimately, all this plot stuff is not the real meat of the issue, as pretty as Werneck’s art is. The real meat of the issue is Gillen’s narration from the private thoughts of Professor Xavier.
What Was Xavier Thinking?
Mark: Gillen has been upfront about using the formula of “Where did this character start? What’s a well known thing with this character? And what’s the most recent thing?” when approaching focus characters. In Xavier’s case, it’s really the entire history of X-Men comics (except for that window of time when he was dead). So we get to see his point of view on why he chose those particular teens to be “his” X-Men, why he chose who he chose to replace them (the All-New, All-Different, Giant-Size team), and his private, personal thoughts about populating the highest levels of Krakoan government with literal supervillains. In so doing, this whole issue takes on the literary form of an Apology. It’s a form where the writer justifies their ideas, their actions and their point of view. The biggest revelation is a metatextual one: Xavier knows what we think of him. He’s fully aware of how he comes across. He knows that in the fandom, he’s the creepy old man who trains kids to be his personal paramilitary force. He’s something of a monster. But you need to understand, this is him holding back.
Austin: Xavier’s narration is absolutely the meat of the issue — the plot over which it unfolds is largely superfluous, in the end (in more ways than one). But it’s a fascinating bit of writing on Gillen’s part. Like you said, it’s impressive in its scope, effectively recontextualizing the entire sweep of X-Men history up to this point. It renders an Xavier who is neither fully the warm-hearted dreamer nor the cold jerk, but someone in between, someone remarkably practical. He scoffs at the notion of his dream for the way unattainability is built into its very expression (it’s not “Xavier’s Five Year Plan”), yet still argues that the fight for it is an important bulwark against something worse.
And that’s really where Gillen knocks it out of the park. “Professor Xavier is a jerk!” is a well-known concept to X-fans. It’s more or less a meme, and writers have spent decades revealing the dark secrets of Xavier’s past or his hidden motivations, taking the shine off the lauded idealist to say, “Xavier is actually kind of a jerk, everyone.” But Gillen neither refutes nor furthers this characterization. Xavier in this issue basically says, “Yeah, I am a jerk. I leave the ugly Morlocks in the tunnels because I can’t use them, I put the dude with wings on my team of soldier mutants because he might inherit money someday, I’m not a good guy. But you know what? I could be so, so much more of a jerk. You have no idea how much more of a jerk I could be.”
Mark: I almost wonder how well the issue would work without dialogue, if it were just Xavier’s narration. It’s almost there already. And that’s the thing: Even while he’s being forthright with us, there are still things he leaves out. When he’s summing up the O5, about Cyclops he simply says, “a mutant who had already been carved into what a team so badly needs …” but he never finishes the sentence! What does a team need? A strong leader? Or maybe an emotionally fragile young man that Xavier can manipulate because he’s got giant-sized abandonment issues? Xavier leaves it to us to fill in how we feel about Scott, and how charitable we’re feeling toward Xavier.
And back to the metatext, he openly discusses the limitations of the mutant metaphor. As he puts it, mutants share traits with other persecuted groups, but they’re different in the key factor that mutants are extraordinarily dangerous, and not in a “Well, what do I tell my kids if they ask about mutants?” sort of reactionary bigoted idea of danger. It’s a very real and present imminent danger. It’s the counterargument against comparing mutants too closely to any one group that we hear spouted by the likes of a Reverend Stryker or a Henry Gyrich or a Senator Kelly, but here it’s Xavier absolutely conceding the point.
Austin: Gillen-through-Xavier is also setting up what’s coming next — I assume, given the ending, and you know, what’s coming next — by reiterating how powerful he is. He could wipe out humanity with his mind (but he hasn’t, because he’s not that much of a jerk), and if Magneto at his worst had Xavier’s powers, things would have turned out even worse for humanity. This both underscores the characterization of, “Hey, maybe recruiting a child soldier army isn’t so bad after all, huh?” and reminds us all that Xavier is very powerful.
Mark: The fact that he’s figured out how, precisely, he would wipe out humanity if he put his mind to it should not put anyone remotely at ease. The first step on the road to actually doing a thing is planning out how you would do it. He also lets us in on the secret that, in the Marvel Universe at least, “there will never be a nuclear war.” It’s a stunning statement, and positioned for absolute emphasis as the only narration in the final panel of the page where it appears. He goes on to explain that it’s because he’s put a psychic block in place in anyone who might have access to the launch mechanism. And he tells us we should be terrified of his power.
If I was given one wish, and I wished that there would never be a nuclear war, that’d be a pretty good thing. But the terrifying thing here is that Xavier’s power, at its most basic, is a power over the one place where we are at our most private, our most vulnerable, the place where nobody else can tell us what to do: our minds. He can read your deepest secrets, he can subvert your will to his own. It’s why he sleeps with a handgun in New X-Men #115: “My brain is a lethal weapon. If some enemy were to hijack it, I have to be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice.”
Austin: Well … it turns out someone has hijacked his mind.
Behind the Mask
Austin: With Sinister caught and thrown in the pit, and Xavier declaring it’s time at last to start building a better Krakoa free of the influences of someone like Sinister, the narration builds to a crescendo as we reach the final page. Xavier removes his Cerebro helmet, he looks in the mirror … and we see a Sinister diamond embedded in his forehead.
So, this prompts a couple of questions. First, do you think it’s been Sinister-Xavier narrating the whole time, or actual Xavier, with the narration just laid over the actions of Sinister-Xavier?
Mark: I think it’s almost certainly regular Xavier doing the narration, otherwise it kinda starts to make no sense, right? If he’s saying, “You know, I’d only need to be slightly worse than I am to be absolutely awful,” then it’s a bit incoherent if it’s Sinister-Xavier telling you this, right?
Austin: 100% agree. Which prompts the second question: How long do you think Xavier has been Sinister?
Mark: I absolutely don’t think that we’re supposed to take away from this that Xavier has been under Sinister’s control for any period of time longer than from his resurrection in this issue. It’s why they make sure to show us Xavier’s corpse’s bare face, sans diamond, in the opening pages.
Austin: There’s also a moment where we see him emerging from the egg post-resurrection, and the egg goop (yolk?) is obscuring the center of his forehead. But it’s also semi-translucent, so that may not indicate anything.
Mark: It’s also why we’re told in the opening data page that they’re still dependent on Sinister’s DNA database for resurrection. That’s the key right there: Sinister corrupted Xavier’s DNA before he started his attack on the council.
As to what Sinister’s plan was, it’s not entirely clear, but I think it goes something like this: He was careful to make sure he took out all of the telepaths on the council: Xavier, Emma, Hope and Exodus. That was necessary to disrupt two key parts of resurrection: Hope and whoever uses Cerebro. He needs Hope out of the picture because she might notice something wrong with Xavier, whereas Synch won’t. Same with the Cuckoos: They might miss something that Xavier, Emma or Hope won’t (I don’t know how things would have shaken out if Jean had used Cerebro, but crucially, she’s not as strong at telepathy as she is at telekinesis). He also can’t risk any of the telepaths figuring out his plan and telling others. And once Red Diamond Xavier is in play, Sinister getting thrown into the Pit isn’t so terrible, because he can corrupt all of Krakoa and the world through Xavier. In fact, here’s a scary thought: What mental triggers will be implanted into those terminally sick kids that Jean is helping?
Austin: Yikes, I hadn’t considered that! Needless to say, Sinister in control of Xavier’s brain is a frightening thing, and we know this because running over the top of all the action in this issue is Xavier telling us exactly why someone like Sinister being in control of his brain would be a frightening thing! Both beats are important — Xavier is very powerful but largely holds himself back, Xavier is under Sinister’s control — but they gain so much from being played in tandem with each other.
Needless to say, I agree with your assessments that the narration is pure Xavier, and that Sinister didn’t exert control until at least the resurrection in this issue at the earliest, if for no other reason than the story doesn’t work if either of those things aren’t true.
Mark: But even in Xavier’s prognosticating about how if he turned bad, it would be very, very bad, there’s an undercurrent, however tiny, of hope: He plainly says toward the end of the issue, “I make people suspicious of me, so they are watching me, in case I turn to even more shadowed paths. I hope I have succeeded.” The question becomes, has he done enough to make people doubt him? Are they watching him closely enough that they’ll catch that something is wrong? Well, I’m betting there will be a thousand years of this stuff coming up, so I’d say it’s a likely “no.”
X-Traneous Thoughts
- If Xavier can put a failsafe in the minds of all the relevant people to prevent nuclear war, couldn’t he just, you know, turn off their bigotry toward mutants, too? Maybe it’s a matter of scale (easier to say “don’t ever push that button” than “stop hating what is different”).
- Love that when Xavier is ruminating on why he chose certain mutants to be X-Men, Storm, Wolverine and Nightcrawler all get called out, but not their fellow “All New, All Different” alum Colossus, even though he’s right there on the page fighting Sinister.
- Gillen also hangs a lampshade on it by pointing out that Kate Pryde was never a typical “girl next door.”
- He hangs another lampshade on the fact that both Xavier and Cyclops have a shared history of being messed with in their youth by Sinister (a reference to the “Black Womb” story from Mike Carey’s X-Men Legacy and, uh, all of Cyclops’ history) but never talk about it, because indeed, very few writers bring up the “Black Womb” stuff.
- Xavier’s narration refers to Magneto’s daughter who was killed by an angry mob as “Anna” when in fact her name was Anya. 🙂
- The bit of scripture Exodus translates on one of the data pages is Mark 14:21, “Woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! Good were it for that man if he had never been born.” (KJV)
- Destiny & Mystique peace out at Xavier’s suggestion of a kinder, gentler Krakoa, but in the context of the reveal, it’s probably because Destiny knows what’s coming even if she doesn’t know that Sinister has corrupted Xavier.
- Sinister’s creating a “save point” in the opening pages of this issue is likely the most important plot point in this and in the coming Sins of Sinister event. I think we might safely say that everything after that page will be undone.
- How hard did they have to hold Gillen back from ending the issue’s narration with, “What if, instead, I was … Immoral?”
Mark Turetsky
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
