At the end of the Orchis War, Charles Xavier surrendered himself to the authorities and allowed himself to be imprisoned in his old house. But now, something has spurred him into action, into escaping his incarceration and embarking on a mad scramble across the nation. What has caused Professor X to go on the run? And will his assorted pupils move to protect him, recapture him or kill him? The answer, of course, is all of the above. Uncanny X-Men #11 is written by Gail Simone, drawn by Javier Garron, colored by Matt Wilson and lettered by Clayton Cowles.
Adam Reck: We’re finally here! I wasn’t too thrilled about “Raid on Graymalkin,” but when I heard the From the Ashes line was doing The Fugitive starring NATE GREY THE X-MAN?!
Austin Gorton: Um, Adam?
Adam Reck: What’s up, Moonbeam?
Austin: X-Man isn’t in “X-Manhunt,” it’s Professor Xavier who’s on the run.
Adam: Dagnabbit! OK, I guess we have to cover this then, which sounds much less fun. How are you doing this week, Austin? Excited for the hunt to begin?
Austin: You know it, Ground Bear! It sure will be a story!
Adam: Joining us this week is our CXF colleague and guest “hunter,” Armaan Babu! Armaan, what are you doing here when you could be doing literally anything else?
Armaan Babu: I’m here for one thing, and one thing only: to join the hunt for Charles Xavier. Hopping from X-comic to X-comic, picking up leads, sifting through clues and doing whatever it takes to either bring him down or (more likely) watch other X-Men do the same. If you guys could kindly bring me up to speed, though — what’s been happening in the world of the Uncanny X-Men? What do I need to know?
Adam: Previously in Uncanny X-Men, Sarah Gaunt tried to convince Xavier her child was his. It wasn’t! Now the child is dead and Sarah Gaunt is a monster. Professor X is jailed inside Podcaster Ellis’ Graymalkin Prison, but he’s not the mysterious Inmate X and chose to remain incarcerated after two teams of X-Men raided Graymalkin to get their teammates back and argued about whether to free Xavier. More recently, Ellis and Larry Trask’s Sentinel dogs, the Wolfpack, attacked the Outliers, the Louisiana X-Men’s young trainees, at the mall. With the help of the N’awlins X-team, they defeated said doggos and returned home.
Papa Don’t Preach, I’m in Trouble Deep
Adam: I’ll give it to them, of all the potential motivations to have Xavier escape, I was not expecting the return of his daughter Xandra Neramani, who is having your run-of-the-mill Marvel cosmic coup attempt alongside her Aunt Deathbird.
Austin: I am frankly impressed that writer Gail Simone and/or editor Tom Brevoort are aware of/willing to reference events that happened past the ’90s or during that time everyone was mad at Cyclops.
Armaan: It does make a weird kind of sense. Aside from NYX, this line has shown a real aversion to exploring anything to do with the Krakoan era. You have to discount some major chunks of Charles’ story to get to something that hasn’t been touched by Krakoa, and Xandra was barely seen during that run.
That said, Simone does seem comfortable ignoring a lot of canon and just using what she thinks works best for her vision of the story.
Adam: Xandra has been shown to have powerful telepathy and telekinesis. Could she really not have stopped some Shi’ar goons with guns (He says, knowing she was killed as recently as 2022)? Also, who is leading this coup?
Austin: 🤷🏻♂️
On the one hand, Shi’ar politics are always volatile (because they’re a useful storytelling engine) and this is the beginning of a story, so presumably we’ll learn more about the origins of this coup and who is behind it as the story progresses.
On the other hand, this means we now have two X-books telling concurrent stories in which the political order of the Shi’ar Empire is being upended, between this coup here and the events of Phoenix (where Thanos has taken control of the Galactic Council — on which Gladiator sits — and the entire galaxy with it in exchange for taking out Phoenix), and it’s really starting to feel like maybe Marvel should come up with a staff position which would be responsible for coordinating these kinds of plot points across books in a shared line to make sure they sync up and aren’t overly repetitive or uncoordinated.
Armaan: I’m a little confused, isn’t the staff position you’re talking about what Brevoort ought to be doing?
Austin: 😏
Is it possible that somewhere along the line, this crossover will circle back and connect this coup to the events of Phoenix? Or offer more information about the coup instead of just using it as shorthand to prompt Xavier’s escape? Sure.
Am I confident it will? No.
Armaan: A lot of people here at ComicsXF, yourselves included, have talked about how frustratingly disconnected the current X-line is. I get the appeal of disconnected stories, of wanting your book to do unique things without being burdened by continuity.
That said, if that’s the approach you’re taking — it is an absolutely terrible time to be doing a crossover, even a light one like this, where Xavier seems to be more of a B-plot to the main series, a loose thread barely holding these books together.
Austin: You simply can’t have your cake and eat it, too. They want each book to exist in its own narrative vacuum, but also they want them to cross over with each other once a quarter to goose sales. You can’t (successfully) do both.
Lincoln Log Park
Adam: Back at the N’awlins camp, the X-Men are training the Outliers in their makeshift Lincoln Log Danger Room. And despite the new kids just having escaped death (and one of them getting really, really close to dying), the X-Men aren’t pulling any punches. They’re letting these goldbricks have it! But why?
Austin: It’s deeply confusing. If Rogue and company want to be sad because they’ve failed to keep these young mutants out of the crosshairs of anti-mutant violence, sure, fine, be sad about that. But the “drama” of this sequence comes from the degree to which the X-Men themselves are willing to push the kids while training them, with Rogue getting shade thrown at her by Jubilee when she goes too far. But … they just got attacked by robo Sentinel dogs! They almost died! Why are we concerned about pulling punches NOW? It feels very forced, or like Simone wrote this sequence BEFORE writing the mall attack, but then ended up using it here, after the attack, for some reason.
Armaan: Charles Xavier’s main legacy is that he created a culture where a mutant’s only real value lies in how well their powers can be used in combat. Sure, yes, it’s an overall comics problem — think about how much fans disliked Cypher when he was introduced — but within the story itself, it’s Xavier’s main thing. When he is not sending them to fight against his most dangerous foes who have no compunctions about killing children, Xavier threatens them directly with mortal harm with his own defense systems. Honestly, if he spent as much time figuring out how to harm his enemies as he does how to hurt the children who work for him, “Hope you survive the X-perience!” wouldn’t be the X-Men’s catchphrase!
So it makes sense that we take a look at that legacy here. How full-grown adults feel like they have to go all out in their training, bringing real harm to children, in the name of “protecting” them. Or, at least it would, if the pages supported that perspective. There’s little mention of this legacy that Charles has left, how it directly contributed to what we see here. It’s a real missed opportunity to highlight the damage Charles has done to his “children,” even as he puts them all in danger to rescue another one.
Adam: Gosh, Armaan, I wish I could ascribe even a lick of what you’re describing to what happened in this issue. Yes, Xavier’s legacy of training child soldiers casts a long shadow, but Rogue’s motivations have gone hot and cold on protect/train with these kids so many times in less than a dozen issues that I have zero idea why she’s doing anything, let alone telling Gambit to blow them up.
Also real quick — aside from the “blamed goldbricks,” it’s starting to feel like the whole cast is turning into Foghorn Leghorn. Rogue: “An’ I don’t like neither one of us none too much” (Is that a triple negative?) Gambit: “You mighta done saved her life.” Even Jubilee’s “coulda been” starts to feel out of whack with lines like this flying like charged cards.
Austin: We haven’t even gotten into the whole “don’t forget your ruby quartz visor!” “insult” Jubilee throws at Rogue after she asks Gambit to up the stakes of the training mission and he blows up Jitter. On the one hand, this inexplicable “let’s act like we’re deep in the ‘Schism’ era” anger toward Cyclops is hardly new to this book. On the other hand, it’s still just as annoyingly out of character. Why does everyone hate Cyclops so much when the last major thing he did was take the fall for mutants and be a prisoner of Orchis before breaking out and helping turn the tide? Do Simone & Brevoort just really love Wolverine & the X-Men?
Adam: These are great questions, Austin. Much like everything in this book, I have no idea how to answer this, but I did get a kick out of Jubilee acting like a drill sergeant. Let’s get to the main event — Xavier breaking out of Graymalkin!
Get Out of Jail Free Card
Adam: Welcome to dumb question corner, with me, your host Ground Bear. Let’s start with Rogue and Ellis. We’d seen Podcaster Ellis speed dial Rogue previously. But this is the second time she’s called for a lifeline. They seem to be awfully chummy given Ellis just imprisoned Jubilee and Ember, almost beat Beast to death, has multiple other X-Men/mutants either incarcerated or brainwashed, and literally tried to kill the X-Men twice in the last two arcs.
Austin: We’re not just dealing with books in a narrative vacuum with other books, but in a vacuum with their own previous issues, apparently. It sure seemed like the last crossover was meant to mark an escalation/alteration of their relationship, with the “frenemy” phone calls ceasing after the events of “Raid on Graymalkin.” Yet just like the training sequence and the previous two issues, here we are, with Rogue and Ellis acting like that never happened and they’re still reluctant allies.
I get that, from Ellis’ perspective, Xavier getting out is bad, and that she’s self-aware enough to know she’ll need some X-Men to get him back. And I get (assuming we’re heading for a “Xavier’s mutant tumor thing makes him a threat to all life” reveal) that Rogue would agree to hold her nose and help Ellis get him back. But you can’t just leave all that for readers to infer/assume. There needs to be some acknowledgement of past events which inform their relationship. Rogue should at least seem more reluctant to get involved (she doesn’t even know about the mutant tumor thing/the threat Xavier represents until AFTER the X-Men get to Graymalkin).
Armaan: I do recall Rogue making a deal with Ellis when she handed Sarah Gaunt over, but you’d think that kind of deal would be off the table, given that in their most recent interaction she was trying to break Charles out of prison.
Who Ellis is, why she suddenly has a right to the mansion, why mutants everywhere aren’t just teaming up to kick her out of it and why she can just hold them indefinitely are the bigger questions that bother me. Simone has a talent for writing especially cruel and hateful characters — and with Ellis, she is hitting those marks well. But why Ellis has as much power as she does, as much authority, as much unchallenged freedom — that’s still a big blank. While there are some cases where I appreciate a good slow burn, this isn’t one of them. It only gets more frustrating with each issue.
Adam: Stupid question #2: I still don’t understand why Sarah Gaunt tried tricking Xavier into thinking her child was his, but now it turns out they can speak to each other like they’re kids after bedtime in bunk beds (shouldn’t Xavier have his power restrained?) and all it takes for Gaunt to free Xavier is a single mention of Xandra? The use of fridged children in this book continues to be weird.
Austin: Indeed. I believe the idea is supposed to be that Xavier’s powers aren’t restrained because he’s there voluntarily, which is why they sedate him when he’s about to have a heart attack (I guess because he’s communicating telepathically with Xandra across light years and that causes a physical strain). And even sedated, he’s still conscious enough to reach out to Sarah and use her … weakness(?) for helping kids … to convince her to help him.
Armaan: There’s a lot about this book that speaks to inconsistency. It’s not just established continuity that’s freely ignored, it’s the kinds of things you brought up that don’t even work within the story that’s being established in this very book. Charles has one power — a very dangerous power — and it seems highly unlikely that someone like Ellis would trust him to simply not use it.
This book consistently fails to sell us on plot points. In all this mess, you can see glimpses of what might be a story that is at least OK, but issue after issue, there is so much that makes it so frustrating to read that it gets in the way of anything else that might be working for it.
Adam: Xavier appears to suddenly be insane, envisioning the X-Men as the O5. Are we to believe this is the work of the tumor — ahem — MUTANT tumor in his brain? Or is it the virus spreading through Graymalkin making guards kill their entire families with automatic weapons at the dinner table? (Yeesh!) If he can’t even understand what’s in front of him, how the heck is he going to save Xandra?
Austin: If I had to guess, I would say Xavier’s hallucinations are the result of the mutant tumor (or maybe Sarah Gaunt?), and whatever is affecting that guard (some kind of virus/thing masquerading as a virus, apparently) is different. That said, you’re forgiven for wondering if they’re connected, given the issue is constructed in a way that suggests as much. If the two separate scenes of characters picturing people as something they’re not does turn out to have two distinct and different causes, then we can ding this issue again for poor storytelling, because you absolutely shouldn’t put those things in sequence if they’re not meant to be connected. Which, again, seems like something an editor should have caught.
Armaan: The guard taking a gun to his own family is confusing. The scene feels like it’s Xavier who’s influenced him to do this, and there’s little that suggests otherwise, for the moment. While that would otherwise be a compelling mystery — surely Xavier wouldn’t command a guard to kill! Surely something else is going on! — for now, there’s so little trust in this team that a messy plot point seems completely plausible. Maybe the tumor made him do it, maybe it’s something else, I have a hard time being invested in the mystery instead of just being annoyed with it.
Adam: I think we do need to remember what got Xavier into his cell to begin with: killing the crew aboard the U.S. space frigate Agnew. Now, this was sloppily retconned so that Xavier killed clones on the Agnew, but guess what — that’s still murder!
Armaan: Whatever the case, though, Xavier’s clearly dangerous. And I’m going to follow what he’s up to, joining the esteemed Stephanie Burt in the pages of NYX to see what dastardly deeds he is up to next.
Adam: Thank you for hunting with us, Armaan! That’s another month of befuddlement behind us, but having read ahead, I can tell you — it gets waaay more befuddling!
X-traneous Thoughts
- Javier Garron does a great job with the art on this issue. Even if he draws Wolverine with arms big enough to be their own Wolverines.
- Indeed, the shot of Gambit drawing, charging and hurling a card all in one image is fantastic. Even with David Marquez taking breathers because of the punishing publishing schedule, the art remains the saving grace of this book.
- It’s worth pointing out that Xandra has only met her father once, when she was resurrected in the pages of Marauders Vol. 2 #5. And yes, that is because ever since she hatched, everyone seems to want to kill her.
- Last time we saw Xandra, she was offering mutants asylum in the Shi’ar Empire in Alpha Flight #5 (the last issue of the “Fall of X” tie-in miniseries). Could that action tie into the motivations of the attack on her here? Sure! But given the way the current X-office does its best to ignore Krakoa stuff as much as possible, it probably won’t.
- Popularized during World War I, “goldbrick” is a term for one who avoids work or shirks their duties. Seems pretty unfair to call the Outliers this since they just survived being murdered by robo-dogs at the mall.
- Absolutely savage to leave Nightcrawler frozen mid-bamf like that. I don’t necessarily think it works if you think too hard about it, but it’s nasty.
- Is calling Xavier’s tumor a “mutant” redundant? Tumors are by definition mutated masses of cancer cells. What exactly is a mutant tumor supposed to be?
Buy Uncanny X-Men #11 here. (Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate, ComicsXF may earn from qualifying purchases.)
Adam Reck is the cartoonist behind Bish & Jubez as well as the co-host of Battle Of The Atom. Follow him @adamreck.bsky.social.
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 @austingorton.bsky.social.
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.
