HoX PoX ToX: Annotating Powers Of X #1

Powers Of X #1 shows four different timelines, starting with a young Professor Xavier. Each timeline is a factor of 10 from the first (1 year, 10 years, 100 years, 1000 years). We see this after Xavier reads Moria’s mind. The 10 year mark (X¹), continues the story from House Of X #1. The 100 year mark (X²), tells of a group of mutants fighting against Nimrod and the Man-Machine Supremacy. The 1000 year mark (X³) shows a librarian cataloging human kind and over watching a human zoo.

You’ve forgotten that machines have no soul, and that humans lost theirs a long time ago.

Rasputin

Chris Eddleman: Powers of X [Ed. note: (read: ten)] really expands our world and we gotta get down to the nitty gritty. Before we start though, one thing I want to mention that I neglected to last week: HoXPoX in and of itself could be an odd little code. Hox genes are those that kind of “tell” the organism developmentally where to grow certain body parts. So it’s involved with development. Meanwhile, a pox, or a Poxviridae, is a family of viruses, the most famous of which being smallpox. The theme of mutants as a disease is not unheard of in X-Men, so while this probably means nothing, it could be of note. Anyway, let’s get in here Rob.

Oh, one more thing: I’m contractually obligated to say: “A PoX on both your Houses”

Robert Secundus: Yowie wowie, though we’ve got a lot less to cover, it FEELS SO MASSIVE. I can’t wait to dive into this issue, and if it goes this hard in #1, I can’t wait to see how it develops over the coming months!

Page 2:

Here’s the thing Charles, it’s not a dream if it’s real. 

Moira

CE: We finally find out that Moira MacTaggert says this oft repeated line from House of X and marketing. It was heavily hinted at in promo art that Moira was going to be a big deal [Ed. note: she has a hat now], and this issue is going to cement that.

RS: It’s interesting to me that PoX is retaining the framing device of HoX; same graphics, same Krakoa-labeled computer code. One of the first things you said to me when sat down to read this was how surprisingly, directly continuous this was from HoX #1, and we see that right at the start with this paratext. And we had sleeping/dreaming imagery from the opening quote last time too.

CE: This gets explored further later in our annotations but, M_X_theta is listed at the bottom. Magneto and Xavier? Moira X? Tough to tell.

Page 3: 

CE: Powers of X was said in interviews to be inspired by a cool educational short film from the 70s, that I happened to watch a ton of times because I think it rules. Here it is for your viewing pleasure. Seriously, watch it, and then come back.

It looks as though instead of units of distance, we’re going to go into units of TIME.

RS: That was one of my favorites too. It really, really captures just how massive exponential growth [Ed. note: bigger than before] is in a way you’d never get from just looking at the numbers.

CE: So we have pre-X-Men Xavier up top, new Xavier at Year Ten, Nimrod at Year One Hundred, and this mysterious blue person at Year One Thousand. Nimrod hasn’t been in X-comics for a bit, except in the form of Bastion (a fusion of Nimrod and Master Mold), who was last seen in X-Men Blue. Considering the original Nimrod is from Earth-811, also known as the Days of Future Past Universe, I don’t know if this one is him.

RS: The interesting thing about this page is that it makes equal and opposite suggestions. It forces the reader to make an interpretive choice. I don’t know if it has a name in comics, but in film the Kuleshov effect is the name for the fact that when we cut between two shots, the viewer naturally finds relationships or identity between those shots. Here, we have four faces in the same position. We know that panel 1 is Charles Xavier. We’ve been told that panel 2 is Prof X. This makes panel 3 shocking– the natural assumption, if this is cutting from Xavier to Xavier, is that panel 3 shows some kind of nightmarish future Xavier. But later in the issue, as you said, Chris, we learn that this figure is Nimrod. So now the page forces us to ask– if 1 and 3 are different people, then is it still safe to assume 2 is the same as 1? And then we get to panel 4, which features a figure that is bald like Xavier and later in the issue dons an X-helmet. This figure, however, acts and talks in ways that would align him with machine, not mutant. So Panel 4 gives us no help. Really, this page is the entire issue in a nutshell: it seems to give us information, but so much is dependent on unknowns that we’re left not with a natural conclusion, a necessary conclusion, but a choice. We establish our own thesis by the end of this page, and future issues will confirm or invalidate that thesis.

CE: Also of note, I guess the X-Men have only been operating for ten years currently. 

RS: That is… extremely wild if that’s the case. I could swallow even Giant Sized X-Men #1 to present as ten years, but that means, what, Bobby’s been out of accounting school for two years?  [Ed. note: Time is an illusion, comics time doubly so]

Page 4: 

CE: Hard to tell where this fair is taking place but, I’m guessing maybe Scotland, since that is where Moira is from. 

RS: Lotta gingers, for what evidence that’s worth. Could also be their time studying at Oxford?

Page 5:

CE: Moira wearing definitely older than 10 years ago fashion.

RS: Like when the Original Five X-men came back from, I guess, the year 2009, but were surprised by bottled water. [Ed. note: Again, illusion]

Page 6:

CE: This Moira seems a bit more cryptic and mysterious than the one we’re familiar with. 

RS: I’d also like to know where Xavier is at this point in his life. He seems weary. Did he just break up with Magneto and almost get murdered by his time travelling son? Did he just erase his favorite student’s memories of his brother? Or are all those adventure still ahead of him?

Page 7:

CE: I am very much not familiar with tarot but, these cards are foreshadowing Year X². Rob maybe you got this?

RS: So, take everything I say here with a grain of salt because it’s entirely possible that the specific cards here don’t matter, that Tarot is being used at all just to suggest that we should be keeping in mind flashforwards/visions of the future– suggesting that the reader, after the title page, is not following along an advancing present, but witnessing what Charles sees in Moira X’s mind. The Magician might have been chosen just because Rasputin has Ilyana DNA, the tower because there’s a literal tower, and the devil because Cardinal looks like a devil.

That said, I asked my tarot guy  [Ed. note: his name is Paul, he doesn’t “do” the internet] about the game generally and these cards in particular. Let’s begin with just a note on what actually tarot is. In the books my parents gave me as a kid, tarot (along with everything from Pokemon to Ouija boards) [Ed. note: I once threw a hardcover copy of Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban in the trash so that I didn’t go to hell. Ended up dodging a different bullet there tbh] was always portrayed as part of an ancient conspiracy; it was an occult ritual intended to get the ignorant to consort with demons, open your soul to possession by Satan, and send you on your way to eternal damnation. When the cards appear today, we often assume that they were created specifically for fortune-telling. In truth they began as just another variation of playing cards and, like all modern playing cards, first began to appear in the very early Renaissance. Divination-via-playing-card became more popular over the centuries– but usually what we think of as a “standard” deck was used. It was only relatively recently– the late 1700s and early 1800s– that tarot decks specifically began to be used for fortune telling (and that people began to invent ancient, occult histories for the relatively novel cards). If I had the space and time I’d like to rant here about the fact that a HUGE portion of our superstitions, occult traditions, etc, descend not from “The Dark Ages” but from around this time and the century prior– but I’ll restrain myself. Nowadays tarot is still used for fortune telling, but also at times for games of narrative.

The Magician typically signifies an individual, a person who is “exerting their will on the world in some way.” My contact warned me that “most things in tarot are pretty broad,” so though the card often points to a magical/ supernatural exertion of will, that’s not necessarily the case– the card’s often associated with other ways of asserting dominance over the world, including science and technology. The Tower signifies “when things have gone to [redacted] [Ed. note: hell? Rob you say hell like, one line down. That’s a PG cuss, we allow those here.]. When you’re going to encounter the worst possible fate. Hell on earth. Worse than death.” etc. etc. The Devil is “the literal devil, sometimes, or a representation of evil, or a more abstract representation of dark deals/ sacrifices for power.” Think of the way devils work in Magic the Gathering [Ed. note: Devils have only really been part of the game since Innistrad which was only… 8… years… ago… ] (another card game which will send children on their way to Satan, surely).

Of those three, The Magician is the least interesting; we see Rasputin as the active one actually trying to accomplish change in this issue, contrasted with Cardinal, who is genetically pacifist. But remember the Devil going forward: it lends a far more sinister aura to Cardinal than his appearance did before. And look carefully at the design of the Tower as we turn to the next few pages.

Page 8: 

CE: Now we get the quote from the beginning in context! Also, despite not having met Charles, she knows his name. Is this..Moira? [Ed. note: duh, she has a hat]

RS: It’s a real curious case, this one.

Page 9: 

CE: This page was touted in the previews as “The Most Important Scene in X-Men History.” So something Charles sees here is very important. Does he see, the rest of the comic?

RS: The interesting thing are the immediately following pages, which directly succeed HoX #1. If this issue is in flashforward– is all of HoX also in flashfoward? Is Dawn of X going to begin before House of X #1???? [Ed. note: probably not?]

Page 10: 

CE: A lot of prelude before the title page. A long one. These Krakoan characters read “Powers of X”

RS: The code describes “The world” [BREAK] “of Xavier” [BREAK] “and the” /“woman”/“Named”/“Moira”. The implication here is either (or maybe both) that what follows is caused by Xavier and Moira or the world in their heads as Xavier reads her mind. Two details: the separation of “The World” is interesting. We won’t dive into the nature and history of the world unless it becomes more explicitly relevant, but you might want to read the Xavier Files page on Fantomex; some very smart folks have speculated that it may come into play in these series, and that might be teased here. NB also that this could have been called “the world of Xavier and Moira.” Emphasizing that “This is a person who happens to be named Moira” suggests that Moira X might not be the Moira Mactaggert that we know.

Before we move on, let’s also unpack the title of this issue. HoX #1 was “The House that Jack Built,” named after a recursive 18th century rhyme. This is “The Last Dream of Professor X”, named (I’m conjecturing, but it seems likely, given the content) for a Hans Christian Anderson fable, “The Last Dream of Old Oak Tree.” The story is in roughly two parts. In the first, the oak tree compares his eon-spanning life with those of the flies who visit it in summers, who live and die in a day. In the second, in Winter, when the tree lies dreaming, its life flashes before his eyes; scenes across centuries flicker before it, and it glimpses heaven, a place beyond time, before lightning kills it. Just as before, the title seems to parallel the story’s structure. I suggest reading the whole thing, but if I were to keep just one line in mind, it would be this, the reply of the fly to the tree:  “we have the same time to live; only we reckon differently.”

Page 11: 

CE: Alright so this is a direct continuation of the House of X, in that the former Brotherhood returns from doing some thievery. I really didn’t expect these to cross over this much. House of X and Powers of X really seem like one title.

RS: I really love Mystique and Toad here, like she’s a busy mom relieved to finally be able to drop her kid off. “Go play, Toad.”

CE: Also, as far as I know, none of the background mutants are ones we’ve seen before.

Page 12:

CE: As your expert annotator Chris suspected due to it being super obvious, the House of M is the abode of Magneto. Also Magneto is the one who sent Mystique et al to steal the goober [Ed. note: flash drive] here. Seems villainy is hard to shake. The House of M Tower looks very familiar if you’ve finished the issue.

RS: We are going to see a tower twice more. Both of those later Towers seem like the same place. And so, like the opening page, we’re led to ask: are these four things the same? Are they the same Tower? Or if they’re not literally the same, are they functionally– is this where the Horrible Fate for the mutants begins? And if there’s four towers– the card, the house of M, the towers of the future times– are there four Magicians and Devils? Or is this all, as divination always is, an example of us imposing patterns we want to see onto something with none?

Page 13: 

CE: This page has the really cool reveal of Charles also being in cahoots here. It’s interesting to see the former rivals united in…some shady stuff.

RS: His creepiness is heightened by his surroundings. He almost looks like he’s emerging from the floral control panel. Behind him the computer screens are hexagonal, like honeycomb, or insect eyes. 

Page 14: 

CE: We harken back to Krakoa being part computer. Also, I really like how Charles turns the old “The world owes you nothing” line into “You owe the world.” That’s some solid writing. I had to (again) make sure I wasn’t missing a quote.

RS: It’s powerful, but also a bit haunting. Thinking of the infographic concerning Omega Mutants last time, I’m starting to hear the chanting of “The Greater Good” [Ed. note: The greater good] whenever anyone in these comics talks about The State. Also– is Charles using telekinesis here? Which is not in his power? He’s the one doing the gesturing, it looks like it’s him, and my understanding of computer stuff is limited, but I think it would be a bad idea for Magneto to handle a hard drive with his powers, right?

CE: I’m sure he’s gotten very good at it.

Page 16:

Note: Up top is a typo in the print edition. X¹ should say X². This is confirmed by X-Men senior editor Jordan D. White

There was a dream. Our dreams are the same. While you slept, the world changed.

Percival

CE: This harkens back to both this concept of “the dream” that is referenced a ton in X-Men but also specifically in the prelude. Also the last sentence is verbatim from last issue- Charles Xavier’s telepathic message to the world. The sentence also seems to be the mnemonic trigger that wipes a mutant’s memory when they begin to die. Very bleak.

RS: Later we find out that this mutant is named Percival. Percival’s the main character of the original Grail legends, before Galahad gets retconned in. I’ll only go into more detail about Percival himself if he comes again in later issues; for now, a couple of details about the Holy Grail that might be pertinent to this story about future X-Men questing for some kind of object/information. 1. The Grail legend typically involves The Fisher King, a man whose wounds impede not only his own body but the fertility of his land; he is healed when the quest is won. 2. The Grail quest, and Percival’s encounter with the Fisher King, rely on the knight being able to ask the right questions of mysterious signs before him at the proper time. [Ed. note: like the airspeed velocity of an unlaiden swallow]

CB: I wanted to also point out how this three headed robot (possibly a Sentinel) looks very inspired by EVA-01 from Neon Genesis Evangelion. I like this design from RB Silva. It screams future to me.

RS: It is EXTREMELY EVA. The design of the hunter is also extremely anime. The mask is very reminiscent of Zero’s in Code Geass. When we get a better picture of it later, the jawlines are reminiscent of Iron Man armors. 

Page 17:

CE: This is some great sci fi jargon. Cylobel here is a black brain telepath that is also a genetically created natural Judas. I really dug, but “black brain telepath” is a completely new concept. Also, we find out more about these Judas’s later.

RS: As distinguished from the Black Halo in the Jeff Loveness/Jakub Rebelka series Judas which you all should read. [Ed. note: it’s very good]

CE: Can’t wait to hear the Gospel of Natural Judas. Another note, the humans in armor here look a ton like Hellfire Club goons from back in the Dark Phoenix Saga.

RS: The Blackbrain’s name is “Cylobel.” L’Obel, following Gregor Mendel of last issue, is another botanist. He’s had plants named for him. Cy as a prefix doesn’t really exist in English, but as a suffix it’s used to form abstract nouns. Alternatively, uh, Cy sounds like Psy, and Lobel sounds like Lobe, like those things in your brain, so her name could mean Brainy McBrainerton. [Ed. note: probably that one…]

CE: This whole scene to me mirrors the heist that the Brotherhood perform in the last issue, including someone getting captured. However, this is much much darker.

Page 18: 

CE: We are introduced here to Rasputin and Cardinal. Early speculation had Rasputin as possible the daughter of Colossus but, she is in fact much more complicated as we see below. Still a bit interesting to have her wielding the soul sword, which is definitely not a mutant power, and originated with Ilyana Rasputin. Cardinal was thought to be some Nightcrawler descendent, but no. Cardinal here plants the black seed of Krakoa, which is meant to open a gateway. Correct me if I’m wrong, Rob, but aren’t the black seeds are ones that make “No-Place”s?

RS: At the very least, Black Flowers make them. [Ed. note: The flowers look like you could sac them for 3 mana of any color]

I think we need to at least mention that while Rasputin seems to be named for Ilyana and Piotr Rasputin, they are in turn named after the historical wizard-who-would-not die Rasputin. We’ll dig further into that historical figure (and his role in X-Men continuity) [Ed. note: he’s related to Illyana] as/if it becomes relevant. Cardinal (both the character and the bird) are named after the position in the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Cardinals wear red (priests black, bishops purple, popes white). Presently, they’re, essentially, Bishop+ [Ed. note: not that Bishop]. They’re bishops (and thus, necessarily, priests) who’ve been given, in addition to the rule over a diocese and the fancy chair that bishops get, a special place of honor and some special authority. Since 1059, they’re the ones who elect new popes.

I don’t know what to make of the fact that Rasputin calls Cardinal “Priest”; it’s not another name of his, as we find out that the Cardinals all reject personal names. It might be that he is a priest in the Cardinal religion (though, as he’s not Nightcrawler, I must finally admit, alas, that Nightcrawler will, regardless of my canonical discoveries, not be saying a Red Mass on Mars). It could just be a mocking or playful nickname for him given his spirituality. I do hope we see more of the Cardinals, their society/ religion, their obsession with creation myths, etc, in future issues!

Page 19: 

RS: It’s such a simple line it’s hard to say if the reference is intentional, but Cardinal’s line in panel 1 echoes 1 Timothy 2: 1, “Therefore I exhort first of all that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men” (here quoted, though it pains me, from the KJV). 

CE: Sometimes you need the poetry, Rob.

Page 21: 

CE: I noticed on this page that Cardinal carries a sword, which he definitely doesn’t use. 

RS: That is an extremely interesting detail. I wonder if it has any non-martial utility, or if he just has it because Nightcrawler carried a sword, if this is a kind of devotional object.

Page 22: 

CE: Gotta love the resilience of the classic Sentinel, even with the appearance of the super advanced three-headed one. I kind of wonder if this is human aligned, with the advanced robot being with the machines. Tough to tell.

RS: I think the best that we can glean from everything (the dialogue between hunter and 3-Face, the interactions between Nimrod and the hunters, the names of the wars) is that all machines are human-aligned, but that the distinction between the two is growing fainter. I’m also getting Iron Man vibes from him– the face is extremely Ultimate Iron Man to me in its shape.

Page 24: 

CE: The Sinister Line, with the little graphic in brackets at the top is very much all about our old friend Mister Sinister. We last saw him in the preceding Uncanny run, where a bunch of him merged together into a giant Sinister. But anyway, we see what he gets up to in the PoX world. The reference to the “Lost Years” is interesting, plus we find out that Mars is pretty important after all.

RS: “Sinister,” “Mars,” “Gen 1,” “Gen 4,” and, most intriguingly, “Bleed” enter the computer code. The question is, is “Sinister” just one more entry in this computer system– or is it all a SINISTER SYSTEM?

RS: I’m taking all of this second hand, centuries later remembrance of THE BETRAYAL and everything that lead up to it with a huge grain of salt– in large part because I find it hard to swallow that anyone trusted Sinister before the loss of leadership, and this infographic seems to indicate that he’d been hanging around– unless [Ed. note: unless…]– they didn’t know that they were trusting sinister– unless there were diamonds on a lot of covered foreheads wandering around Mutant Eden…

RS: Actually, even with that “Unless…”, it’s still hard to swallow, because I can’t see Sinister just getting executed and going away. He’s not a man. He’s a system– with redundancies. 

CE: This isn’t the first mention in X-Men of breeding pits. In the Age of Apocalypse timeline, Mister Sinister had also set up breeding pens (okay not pits) as a prison/genetic laboratory to do his favorite kind of experiments. Unless we don’t have all the information, the ones in this future seem to differ in that it was generally accepted as necessary instead of just horrifying. That doesn’t mean these breeding pits weren’t horrifying though, given what we know about Sinister.

Page 25:

CE: Alright time to talk genetics. In the real world, chimera or genetic chimerism refers to an organism who has several different genotypes in a type of cell. You see someone with a brown eye and a blue eye? (heterochromia) [Ed. note: a very groovy mutation] This is chimerism. In this case, it seems to refer to several different derivatives of the X-gene being placed into one organism. 

So the diagram with genes on it is that of a chromosome. Also, it seems as though these Generation III Sinister mutants likely underwent some form of genetic engineering via some form of CRISPR-Cas9 or some equivalent space magic. CRISPR technology is a way that genes can be inactivated, or additional genes added into the genome of a cell. It’s a relatively new technology, with its own challenges and ethics concerns. However, it could explain the failure of the other Generation III mutants. While rare, CRISPR can exhibit non-specific binding, meaning whatever sequence of DNA is placed into the wrong spot. In real life, this can be very scary, and possibly carcinogenic, but in X-Men this could make for an interesting hand-wave.

However, it’s also Mr. Sinister- so he probably did it on purpose.

We see the chromosome from our new friend Rasputin, who is composed of X-genes (and powers) from Quentin Quire (telepathy), Piotr Rasputin (metallic skin), Unus (forcefields), Kitty Pryde (intangibility), and Laura Kinney (healing factor).

The numbers at the bottom might indicate the strength of the power, and since the strongest is the Rasputin power, might explain her name? I might be reaching.

Finally, that fourth generation seems ominous. I bet it’s going to come up again.

Oh, and a pet peeve. Hickman nailed that gene abbreviations are between 3-8 characters but they should really be italicized. Otherwise they look like protein names.

Page 26:

CE: Genetic outlier seems a bit like a buzzword but, it would just mean individuals outside the norm of the genetics of a certain population. Weirdly, they seem to use this term a lot in dog breeding. I particularly liked how the Cardinals were created. Pacifists, obsessed with creation myths. This sounds like tons of my friends.

RS: We get a name for the opponents of Mutantkind: the Man-Machine Supremacy. I don’t think there’s any antecedent for that name in the Marvel Universe.

There’s a quote about Sinister here that includes no attribution. I can’t place it. I can say that the notion that “There can be no salvation for the devil himself” was established at the Second Council of Constantinople in 533, a council recognized by both the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Churches, when the council condemned Origen’s Universalism (the idea that all, including The Devil, will one day be saved). Universalism is however, to my understanding, still held by some members of the latter; David Bentley Hart’s book on the topic will be released in 8 weeks and I’m very excited for it.

Page 27:

RS: This is the Tower of Nimrod The Lesser, which seems to be the tower depicted in the tarot card. We meet Nimrod the Greater in the next timeline; it’s unclear if these are two separate contemporary characters, or if the narration boxes are set in a later time, if in retrospect history treats this as a lesser version of a Nimrod who would change. Now, Nimrod’s got an extremely complicated history. If you think “Nimrod” is an insult, and a weird name for an all powerful sentinel, that’s because Bugs Bunny changed the meaning of the term forever when he sarcastically applied it to Elmer Fudd.  He’s actually named for a Biblical figure, who was so good at hunting that “Nimrod” came to mean “awesome hunter” (see Genesis 10: 9). Chris mentioned the important stuff in Nimrod’s hisory earlier.

Here we also see Omega, presumably the Omega Sentinel Karima Shapandar seen in House of X #1. She’s orange now.

CE: Oh see I took this one step further. I think that Omega Sentinel is now Omega RED. Her skin looked more red to me than orange. Also a bit more about the Hound Program for those not familiar- this was the brainwashing of mutants by an individual named Ahab from Earth-811 to hunt their fellow mutants. The most famous of these is the alternate future daughter of Jean Grey- Rachel Grey.

Page 28:

RS: Nimrod’s address to the human hunters is interesting: “We are allies– equals of a kind.” Again, Humans and Machines have not yet fully merged, and the latter sees the former with, it seems, some level of disdain. The Khennils are mentioned again– specifically, the SalCen Khennil– and at the moment I don’t think there’s anything here other than the time honored tradition of spelling fantasy/ future of common words (in this case, kennel) weirdly. Nexus is also an interesting word here; in Marvel it’s most commonly associated with the Man-Thing, the Nexus of All Realities, but here, given the fall of Krakoa, it likely refers to the central isle of Krakoa that we see in House of X, the hub of all the Krakoan gateways. 

CE: Ohhh, I didn’t catch that. So this tower- first the House of M, is the result of the Machine-Man Supremacy completely taking over Krakoa. 

RS: I don’t think we can say that conclusively yet, but I think it’s strongly suggested by what we see in this issue.

Page 29:

CE: Nimrod is creepily emotive in this entire scene. He claps and kind of beams. I really hate it. 

If it takes a thousand years, I swear, we will endure and erase you from existence

Cylobel

CE: Foreshadowing!

RS: I feel validated that you had the same reaction to that scene. It was like nails on a chalkboard. I mean, not that that’s a bad thing, it’s Good Heel Heat. 

Page 30:

CE: With Nimrod’s somewhat deference to Omega here, it makes me wonder if he’s the Lesser for this reason. Also, the fact that the “bath” could take up to centuries makes me think of brute forcing complex passwords- a feat that could take millennia. 

Page 31:

CE: This bit with Omega and Nimrod is such physical comedy. It definitely seeks to humanize these characters and it’s absolutely terrifying considering what they’re about to do.

RS: This is why I love comedy and horror when it’s mixed well– all it needs is a little push and slapstick suddenly becomes something just monstrous, something grotesque. Another interesting thing about that attempted humanization here is that something really similar went down in Nimrod’s earliest appearances. He masked himself as a human, took on mundane jobs, got to know his coworkers, even acted like a superhero sometimes– all while he was preparing to commit once more to genocide. 

Page 32:

CE: Nimrod here uses the term “femtofluid” to describe the awful stuff in the vat that they’re going to put poor Cylobel in. Femto is a prefix that refers in metric to 10⁻¹⁵. For lack of a better term, this is incredibly small. Femtotechnology is hypothetical tech that deals with changing matter on the subatomic level. So it seems as though Cylobel is being slowly dissolved at the electron, neutron, and proton level? Yikes. However, this mostly seems like a fun buzzword.

Page 33:

Though causes have long seemed to be fatal for…you people.

Nimrod

CE: Throwing out “you people” and then insulting mutants for dying for the cause is a pretty cutting line in case we needed a reminder that Omega is awful.

Page 34:

CE: We find out that “black brain” means immune to telepathic scan. A pretty useful trait in a natural Judas. Also the twist of a being bred for betrayal ultimately betraying those that made it is pretty great. SalCen here stands for Salem Center, which is where the Xavier Mansion was located when it was in Westchester County.

Page 35:

CE: The No-Place hub seems like an in-between spot of these tumor gateways, as dark as the flowers and seeds are. It’s honestly strange to me that they have to use these. Has Krakoa’s network been compromised? Also it’s literally upside-down, which makes for a great Stranger Things reference.

Page 36:

CE: This shows us all but 2 of the surviving mutants in the Sol System. We have:

Old Magneto: But with Polaris-colored uniform (this probably isn’t actually Magneto. I vote a Gen 1 or 2 Sinister Mutant)

Old Wolverine: This MIGHT actually be Wolverine. But he could also be one of these Sinister Mutants.

Zorn: This person looks a lot to me like the Ultimate Universe Zorn, who we talked a little bit about last issue. This could be him. I think Xorns are basically immortal given their star heads.

Groot(?): This just looks a lot like old Groot, who is not a mutant. I mean, I guess he might be a mutant who just happens to look like Groot but holy heck. 

Something to remember: In the Avengers run by Hickman, Franklin Richards (in the far future) also hung out on an asteroid with a tree. That tree was Groot. Wild.

RS: Well, since we know he’s showing up in Dawn of X– my guess was Black Tom Cassidy was the tree? 

CE: This is a really good theory. I mean, he is actually a mutant. 

Page 37:

RS: New code: Extinction, Ani, MX Files, and Apoc Build (presumably apocalypse?). The shift from X to MX makes me wonder if that Old Magneto is a Gen 2 Magneto/ Xavier hybrid? The [X] logo has now added another bar, become [X]|. Unclear what that signifies (unless that’s just to mark exponents).

CE: I think it means Moira X but, can’t explain why that would be, honestly.

RS: Other things to point out on this page: the Brood and the Shi’Ar have both survived and, from all indications here, remained essentially similar to the empires we know of in the present day 616. (For those unfamiliar, the Brood are what Chris Claremont wrote after seeing Alien, and they’re just Alien, the Shi’Ar are, to quote the Archivists Jay and Miles, “Space Bird Jerks.” Xavier’s on-again-off-again lover is their sometimes-Empress Lilandra, Scott Summers’ secret brother Vulcan hung out with them for a while. [Ed. note: if you consider a fascist dictatorship hanging out, then sure]

CE: Rob we can’t forget to the reference to Empress Xandra, a character introduced incredibly recently in X-Men continuity. She is the young daughter of Lilandra and Charles Xavier, and first appeared in Mr. and Mrs X. She’s done really well for herself in 100 years.

Page 38:

RS: The thing that struck me here was the logo for Asteroid K. It really made me think of Avengers Vol 5 #32:

CE: Yeah, second time we’ve gotten that vibe this issue. Of note, the K is definitely for Krakoa. So the remnants of our poor island are floating through space.

RS: The big mystery on this page is who the Eighth Mutant on the asteroid is.

CE: Yeah, we still have two mutants to see, and one of them we don’t even get a name or title! [Ed. note: isn’t Krakoa a mutants]

CE: Percival (the recently deceased mutant) is called a “ghost” which we get no other context for. I’m sure we’ll find out what this means later.

Page 39:

RS: And now we enter X³, and glimpse our Final Tower: The Archive of Nimrod The Greater, the Mutant Library. So again, this is either a different Nimrod, or something changed in Nimrod sufficient to require a namechange. Note too the dual meanings of Mutant Library: either a library about mutants, or a library which has mutated. The former is what we’re supposed to think of the scene, given the immediate connection in the first panels to X² , but let’s keep in mind the second as we go forward.

Two more things I want to call attention to here. The most obvious: The Librarian has a Cerebro Helmet ala the Prof X of X¹. The other is a remark of his that echoes something Rasputin said earlier: “there’s too much machinery floating around inside there– and not enough soul to save, let alone copy.” It might be that “Soul” is being used loosely here by the psychic– after all, when we talk about someone’s mind, their “psyche,” we’re using the Greek word for soul, Ψυχη. It is worth noting, however, that recent Marvel events have witnessed cloning technology advance to the point where the tech is able to capture/ clone not just the physical body but the metaphysical soul (see Amazing Spider-Man: Clone Conspiracy, which I have not in fact read and so don’t really know the details of)

CE: It’s kind of handwavey in Clone Conspiracy but that was kind of half reanimation/half cloning. It also equates memories with a soul so there’s that. Anyway, this Cylobel is likely being torn apart and converted into data at the subatomic level, it seems like the Librarian would need to defeat Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to bring her back. Unless that’s not even what’s going on. It seems as though mutantkind has possibly been reduced solely to data? 

CE: My last note is super dorky but, this tiny floating Nimrod reminds me of Ghosts from the game series Destiny. A cool homage.

Page 40:

CE: After hearing this monologue from the Librarian, I wonder- are they human, mutant, or machine? Or combinations?

Page 41:

RS: For a brief moment it seems as though humanity has been rendered extinct– until we see The Preserve.

CE: People in Zoos is a very popular trope in science fiction. You got your Star Trek pilots, your The Twilight Zone episodes, your Slaughterhouse-Five. Anyway, I have to admit I’m a little tired of the trope of “persecuted people become what they hate- the persecutor, ” but this is likely more complicated than that. Who knows if mutants were even the one to put humans in the zoo?

RS: We haven’t talked about it much, but a lot of these first two issues is clearly diving into the Transhuman Fiction tradition, as we see organics link with machines, eventually merge with them, and, here, become (almost) extinct as a concept. In that scifi subgenres specifically, that trope, that Posthumans would keep around their predecessors, isn’t unusual either; see Matt Sheean and Malachi Ward’s The Ancestor (serialized in The Island) or, from a slightly different angle, Ted Chiang’s “The Evolution of Human Science” aka “Catching Crumbs from the Table,” available in Story of Your Life and Others. 

CE: The Forever War. Anyway, I completely agree. We see several instances of parallelism in these issues that just reinforce the narrative even more. 

Page 42:

RS: Genesis 1:28 (again, to my neverending dismay, via the KJV): “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” So we have yet another Eden. This one doesn’t just recall the biblical Eden; the honeycomb pattern recalls that which we saw in Prof X’s Eden, in the House of M, at the start of the issue, and the people we glimpse appear like those created in House of X #1. 

RS: I really love the use of Eden here too. We aren’t just seeing images repeat throughout the series; they change, evolve every time we see them. The librarian notes that “It’s important to keep a record of the great sins of history.” We ordinarily use Eden imagery to signify paradise, perfection, immortality, the glory of a prelapsarian universe, and in HoX #1, that’s clearly what we’re supposed to be thinking of, in the first few pages, as we see a new Eden– but this Eden, even though it looks just like that of HoX #1 from above, or looks like it could have been cut out of a children’s bible, is there to signify something entirely different. The Fall. Original Sin. Which makes us turn back to what came before…

Page 43:

RS: New computer code, which is EXTREMELY exciting? HEAVEN paralleled with MARS. And here I think is a good place to check in with a theme established last time– weird parallels with Evangelical Christian Eschatology. Now, here we’re in X³, 1000 years/a millennium into the future, and we see references to the war having ended, to the creation of a New Eden, and here, it seems, to some kind of ascension. The millennium is important to the aforementioned sects of Christianity. Essentially, the timeline goes like this: human history as we know it begins with the era between the expulsion from the garden and Christ’s ministry (roughly corresponding to The Old Testament), then comes the time between Christ’s ministry and the Rapture (that is, the time that the Church is on Earth until it is assumed into heaven), then, after the Rapture, comes the Great Tribulation, when those who were not raptured suffer war, famine, disease, tyranny, etc, at the mercy of the false Antichrist and the various Beasts/Dragons/Living Statues of Beasts, and finally, after the antichrist is overthrown comes the Millennium, a thousand years of peace, during which either Christ reigns on Earth or the survivors of the Great Tribulation convert to Christianity. None of these map cleanly on the timeline we see here– but we do have a Great Tribulation and an era of peace, and that era of peace is associated with a new millennium. 

At the bottom of the page, a new symbol [=]. And that equals sign is directly above the words “KRAKOA” and “SINISTER.” So. That’s uhh. SUGGESTIVE.

CE: Yeah I wonder if this is just an equals or something more. 

Page 45:

RS: An interesting change in the code: HousES of X.

CE: The Krakoan here reads: “Next: The Curious Case of Moira X.” No surprise here- the title of House of X #2 as said last issue.

Page 46:

RS: Across the pages is something interesting: XX ORBI and OS ORBI. “Orbi” is Latin for “World”– Ex Orbi would mean From the World. “Os” is Latin for “bone”; but it also commonly stands for “Operating System.”

CE: This is an incredible catch. Also, the Krakoan here reads: Then: “Hello Old Friend.” A Xavier and Magneto line if I’ve ever seen one.

RS: Something else to keep an eye on going forward. Friend of the Conversation Nir_Revel pointed us towards the symbol , which is the Phoenician letter that would become the Greek  θ and the Hebrew ט. Before you say, “ok Toxers, this is stretching things too far,” remember that Hickman transliterated a large amount of ancient Akkadian throughout this Avengers run. Now, I’m just going to reference Proclus here (taken from an appendix to Aaron Johnson’s Religion and Identity in Porphyry of Tyre: The Limits of Hellenism in Late Antiquity): “among the Egyptians there is a character bearing the symbol of the cosmic Soul (the character was a circle surrounding an X); it probably signified the duality of procession (in the X) and the singularity of Life and the intelligible (in the circle)” (329). 

CE: Yeah, this maybe seems like a bingo. We’re seeing theta stated in the text, plus this very on the nose Phoenician. Theta symbolism seems to have a lot to do with death and rebirth as well, which is completely spot-on for X-Men.

FINAL THOUGHTS: 

CE: Rob I loved this issue. I never thought I could read about another mutant future again but this one feels really big and different. One thing I’m seeing from both the issues we’ve covered so far is the scale of the story. I thought the world-changing effects of the last issue were big, and now we get a tale that is a thousand years long. It digs into fun, and occasionally creepy science fiction in a way that really gets to me, and makes a few new protagonists that I’m already in love with. It didn’t answer tons of questions but, the vagueness of the nonlinear narrative is really making me hungry for the next installment. We’ll see you all next week.

RS: Agreed with all of the above, Chris. I think what’s most striking to me about this is how tight it all feels. Even though it’s a sprawling story across a thousand years, it feels more focused than most comics, it feels like every panel and every detail is here for a reason. That might just be us falling under the HoXus PoXus spell– or it might be the natural result when a company finds a writer with real clarity of vision and then gives them the time and resources to carefully plan and execute that vision. In that way, I keep thinking about Age of X-Man too, while I read these, which also to me felt like a story with no moving part that could be removed without damaging the whole. 

Chris Eddleman is a biologist and co-host of Chrises On Infinite Earths

Robert Secundas is a Private X-Investigator and amateur-angelologist-for-hire