Out Of The Vault

“Out of the Vault”
X-Men #19
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Mahmud Asrar
Color art by Sunny Gho

• In all the time I was wondering how Jonathan Hickman would depict thousands of years passing in a single issue the obvious thing – the thing he chose to do – never occurred to me: A timeline similar to the way he mapped out the lives of Moira MacTaggert in House of X. It’s very effective in condensing the story while offering some intriguing details, and in keeping the focus of the issue on Synch’s experience in The Vault and the close emotional bond he forms with X-23 along the way. The balance of emotional weight, hard sci-fi, and narrative density is Hickman at his finest, and X-Men #19 is one of his best issues of this volume so far, probably second only to the Mystique-centric story “Oracle” from X-Men #6. 

• Back at the start of this storyline in X-Men #5 when we’re introduced to Synch, we’re reminded in the text pages that his resurrection has put him in an awkward situation as all of his friends from the Generation X comic have moved on with their lives while he’s re-entering life a few years behind them. On the other side of his mission in the Vault he’s in an even stranger situation, having lived far beyond one life entirely removed from everyone but X-23 and Darwin, and now he’s the only one who remembers their time together. It’s a strange sort of tragedy, but because Synch is a fairly optimistic character, the issue ends on a hopeful rather than maudlin note that directly echoes his cautious optimism going into the Vault with X-23. 

Hickman has clearly made it a mission to spotlight characters from Generation X out of personal affection for them, but what he does for Synch in this story goes beyond merely giving an old character from prime airtime. Synch, a character who has been absent from publication for 20 years, is both refined and redefined in this story – the essential Good Dude Romantic Lead elements of his personality are unchanged, but the circumstances of his experience are now unique and fascinating. From here on out he’s an old man in a young man’s body, a seasoned veteran who is now the mutant nation’s living repository of information about what could be their greatest existential threat. He’s now a narrative mirror of Moira MacTaggert, embarking on his third life and carrying the full knowledge of past lives like precious cargo. (Also, like Moira in Powers of X, he owed the extension of his life to borrowing the powers of a Wolverine.) 

• We learn quite a bit about the Children of the Vault in this issue, and get a sense of how a deliberate technological approach to evolutionary development differs from the natural processes that result in mutantdom. It’s all quite advanced and there’s every indication that the existence of the Children and the Vault is part of some larger plan, but we are totally in the dark on whose plan it is. This issue makes it clear that Orchis is not responsible for the Vault, though they are aware of it and have captured and dissected Children. (Serafina of the Children was rescued along with several mutants from Orchis custody in X-Men #1.) 

It seems probable that Orchis may co-opt the Children at some point in the story, but for now it’s a whole other situation. I suspect the mystery of who created Homo Novissima may be equivalent to the mystery of Rabum Alal that runs through Hickman’s Avengers run and culminated in one of the best reveals in that story. 

• Aside from a brief cameo from Cyclops and Charles Xavier at the end of this issue, this two-part story is notable for being entirely focused on post-Chris Claremont cast and ideas. Synch was introduced in 1994, everything else in the Vault story was created in the 21st century. It’s fun to imagine what an X-Men reader in the ‘80s might make of this story if you could somehow send these two issues back in time. The most recognizable element would be a female version of Wolverine! 

• Synch looks great with a bald head and beard, by the way. Mahmud Asrar did a fabulous job in aging him up along with X-23 and Darwin. Asrar did a typically fantastic job on this issue, it’s too bad this is apparently his last issue of the series for the foreseeable future. 

• We don’t really have conclusive evidence that X-23 and Darwin died in the Vault, so it’s quite possible those versions of the characters are still in the custody of the Children and their powers of survival and infinite adaptation will be integrated into future generations of Children. Bleak! 

Inside The Vault

“Inside the Vault”
X-Men #18
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by Mahmud Asrar
Color art by Sunny Gho

 • This is the issue I’ve been waiting for – a return to the Vault plot after many issues of detours into Shi’ar space, alien invasions, and the whole X of Swords affair. I will admit that this issue is a little disappointing to me in the sense that I was expecting it to show how X-23, Synch, and Darwin survived in the Vault for thousands of years of artificial time, but it’s now apparent that’s what we’re going to see next month. The story for this issue reintroduces the premise and lead characters – only fair since it’s been 12 issues since we left off and this story will be collected in separate volumes – and gives some space to reacquainting us with the Children of the Vault, characters who haven’t appeared since their co-creator Mike Carey last wrote them in X-Men Legacy just over a decade ago. 

• If you’re feeling totally lost: The Children of the Vault are a group of characters introduced in Carey and Chris Bachalo’s “Supernovas” arc from 2006. The Vault is an environment with artificially accelerated time, and the Children are the super-evolved humans created as a result of existing in this space. They are not mutants, but they are also not human – they are effectively post-human, like the homo novissima introduced by Jonathan Hickman and R.B. Silva in Powers of X #6. X-23, Synch, and Darwin were dispatched by Charles Xavier and Cyclops to the Vault in X-Men #5 to gather information on the Children and their society, which is congregated in a place called The City within the Vault. 

• We went into this issue knowing very little about The City, and come away from this with some breadcrumbs of information – though The City is vast, it is sparsely populated as a result of a  population control mandate. We see that the Children answer to a central artificial intelligence, and that artificial intelligence engages with them in very scientific terms of analysis and objective goals. We see that the central artificial intelligence is developing the Children to be capable of “occupation/subjugation” of the outside world, and they must be further upgraded in order to compete with the rising mutant population. It is not clear who this artificial intelligence serves, and it’s never been revealed who created the Vault in the first place. 

• The issue ends on a text page in which Charles Xavier authorizes this trio of X-Men to kill, rationalizing that since the denizens of the Vault are not technically human, it does not break the Krakoan law against killing humans. This is reasonable, particularly given the circumstances they’re being thrown into, but it highlights a recurring theme of Xavier being so spooked by what he knows of homo novissima via Moira McTaggert in Powers of X that he seems quite gung ho about full-on genocide of any and all post-humans that emerge regardless of whether they’ve actively threatened mutants. This is understandable, as we the readers are aware that Xavier isn’t wrong when he says post-humans “represent the single greatest existential threat to mutants,” but it’s a strong suggestion that it’s only a matter of time before Xavier and the Quiet Council deliberately perpetrate some horrific large-scale crime, whether it’s wiping out the Vault or something else. 

• Though I admit I prefer R.B. Silva’s depiction of the interior of the Vault from #5 as it suggested a more nebulous sort of non-space, I appreciate the way Mahmud Asrar draws The City as this super-developed nowhere zone sorta like the under-occupied “ghost cities” in China. It’s ominous in a different way, all these empty buildings and infrastructure representing the threat of a population boom that hasn’t yet been authorized. 

As usual, Asrar is very good at rendering physicality and expression. He’s particularly good at drawing X-23 in Wolverine mode – there’s a particularly well-executed sequence in which she leaps down to eviscerate Serafina, and another panel I like a lot later on in which she’s leaning forward with her arms down in a very animalistic stance. Like a lot of artists he’s a little awkward in translating Chris Bachalo’s designs into his own style, but I think he does pretty well with Fuego, the Child with the flaming skull head. 

• The next issue, in which these X-Men escape the Vault, can’t come quickly enough. I’ve been excited about seeing how Hickman depicts thousands of years of elapsed artificial time for quite a while now. 

Into The Storm

“Into the Storm” / “The World” / “Disintegration” 
Giant Size X-Men: Jean Grey & Emma Frost, Giant Size X-Men: Fantomex, and Giant Size X-Men: Storm
Written by Jonathan Hickman with Russell Dauterman (Jean/Emma)
Art by Russell Dauterman (Jean/Emma, Storm) and Rod Reis (Fantomex)
Color art by Matthew Wilson (Jean/Emma, Storm) 

The Giant Size X-Men specials were initially sold as stand-alone one-shots, but as it turns out three of the five issues are, in fact, a coherent story arc that appears to advance the slow-burning Children of the Vault subplot. These three issues amount to 90 pages of story, but the plot isn’t particularly dense: Storm gets sick following getting zapped in her attack on the Vault in X-Men #5, Jean Grey and Emma Frost discover that she’s got a “machine virus” and will die within a month, Monet figures out that she can be saved in The World, and Fantomex brings Storm, Monet, and Cypher to The World to eventually extract the virus from Storm’s body. 

The first issue of this arc is essentially a tribute/cover version of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s famous “quiet issue” of New X-Men in which Jean and Emma perform a similar “psychic rescue” with Charles Xavier, and as such it’s more of a showcase for Russell Dauterman’s considerable skills as an artist. The Fantomex issue is also a blatant Grant Morrison tribute, with several scenes involving Fantomex quoted directly from New X-Men issues. This is all very nice and well-executed, but feels a little odd in the context of Jonathan Hickman’s larger project on the X-Men, which before this point had excised the “hey, remember this?” nostalgic references that had piled up quite a bit in recent years and fully metastasized in Mark Guggenheim’s vile X-Men Gold run. And true, those nostalgic nods were almost always to Chris Claremont comics, but the spirit is still the same. Also, the “hey, I’ve already read this” feeling makes these issues seem more slight than they actually are. 

The Fantomex issue illustrated by Rod Reis is quite good. The plot depicts scenes from Fantomex’s life in which he brings different groups of people into The World, the artificial environment with accelerated time where he was created and raised. There’s an implication of unreliable narrative, that there’s only so much we should believe about what we’re seeing from the perspective of a man who is a living lie from a fake world – a “living contrivance, a product… a hall of mirrors with no end” as Psylocke puts it in Rick Remender’s Uncanny X-Force. But as much as the truth of it all is ambiguous, we see how Fantomex’s awareness of this weighs on his actual soul. 

The big reveal of this issue is that Fantomex and Ultimaton – both products of A.I.M. and Weapon Plus’ project of developing mutant-hunting super soldiers in The World – are essentially identical twins raised with as much variance as possible. Fantomex was discarded as a baby, and the other gradually evolved into the Ultimaton we see in Morrison and Chris Bachalo’s “Assault On Weapon Plus” story. Each time Fantomex returns to The World he encounters Ultimaton at different stages of his development, always asking him if he would like to leave with him. Ultimaton always declines, and as time goes on sees Fantomex as an abstraction – “some primal direction of man, some primal direction of me.” The issue leaves off with Fantomex bringing Storm, Monet, and Cypher to The World, and the plot thread concludes in the Storm issue with Fantomex deciding to remain in The World with his ersatz brother. To be continued, of course, but there’s a nice emotional charge to this beat – Fantomex embracing the only sort of family he has, and giving up something of himself to help or guide this warped reflection of himself. 

The Storm issue covers interesting ground. It’s a story about Storm fighting for her life, though in the first few pages Emma Frost points out how “overly dramatic” this is given that they have the means to immediately resurrect her. The point of the story is that Storm is a person who would fight for survival regardless – she refuses to surrender to anything, she will always try to find a way to overcome obstacles. Storm is also quite dramatic. It’s part of her charm. 

The mechanics of the plot of this issue are driven largely by Monet and Cypher, who are clearly two of Hickman’s favorite characters. The story serves as a reminder that part of Monet’s impressive set of powers is advanced intelligence, and her genius is ultimately what saves Storm. Monet largely serves a plot function here, but her presence in this story, as well as in House of X and Empyre: X-Men amount to Hickman making a case for her as an essential X-Men heavy hitter from here on out after years of the character being sidelined as a result of relative obscurity. 

Cypher is more of an observer and interpreter in the plot, just as he was in the Nightcrawler special. At the end of the issue we see the machine virus entirely removed from Storm’s body and held in a containment field to prevent it from rapidly evolving in the artificially accelerated time of The World. In the epilogue we see that Cypher recognizes that the machine virus is sentient and conscious. This is left as a ticking time bomb, as the possibility of an artificial intelligence developed in the artificial time of The Vault attaining “evolutionary critical mass” in the slightly different artificial time of The World can become an existential threat to mutants down the line. 

We’ll be returning to this machine virus thing at some point, but it’s hard to say which ongoing plot this beat connects to – is this going to remain a part of the Vault thread? Or maybe, since there’s a direct tie from A.I.M. to Orchis, this is part of how their Sentinels evolve to a Nimrod state? It could just as well be part of the Phalanx subplot. Just as with the mysterious tower built for Emma Frost in the Magneto special, it feels like it could be quite a while before we find out the actual significance of this issue to the macro plot. 

These specials were designed as showcases for artists, and as can be expected, these issues give a lot of room for Russell Dauterman and Rod Reis to flex. They’re both quite good but I prefer the loose, gestural qualities of Reis’ art to the extremely tight and slick lines of Dauterman. The latter’s work is beautiful and dynamic but a bit too stiff at times, and while he can draw very nuanced facial expressions, there are many panels where the faces seem oddly blank and vacant. Dauterman is called on to draw abstract environments in both of his issues, and while they work well on his terms, they seem rather cold and static compared to Reis’ more surreal and dreamlike drawings within The World. It’s an intriguing contrast of styles, with Reis more connected to cartooning while Dauterman’s aesthetics are more rooted in animation. 

Into The Vault

“Into the Vault”
X-Men #5
Written by Jonathan Hickman
Art by RB Silva
Color art by Marte Gracia 

It’s such a pleasure to have RB Silva back with Jonathan Hickman. It hasn’t been all that long since they worked together on Powers of X – and they did make a small Mister Sinister story interlude in the recent Incoming special – but enough time has passed and enough artists have worked in the new X-Men world that Silva and Pepe Larraz designed for it to feel a bit like… coming home… for Silva to show up on this issue. Leinil Yu is still the regular artist for the known future, and while he’s been doing some of the best work of his career on the past four issues of X-Men, the chemistry of Hickman and Silva is so strong that it’s hard to come away from this issue without hoping he cycles into the regular artist slot before too long. 

It’s pretty obvious why Silva was assigned this particular issue. Powers of X proved him as a brilliant designer for sci-fi concepts and particularly good at interpreting and building on visual ideas established by Chris Bachalo. In this story we revisit the Children of the Vault, created by Mike Carey and Bachalo for the “Supernovas” arc in the mid-2000s, and get a look inside The Vault, a construct with accelerated artificial time that pushes human evolution forward. Charles Xavier, with the knowledge of Moira McTaggert’s experience in the distant future of Powers of X with the homo novissima, has identified this machine creating post-human beings, as the top existential threat to humanity. But the X-Men know almost nothing about the Children or The Vault, and need to send a group of uniquely qualified mutants – X-23, Synch, and Darwin – for a reconnaissance mission. 

Silva’s depiction of the inside of The Vault is brilliant – it’s like nothing and everything, a vast digital nowhere with elements that indicate technology and nod towards old depictions of virtual reality spaces, but mostly just comes across like an unknowable dark void. It’s instantly memorable, and the decision to make sure all pages within The Vault are laid out side by side in the print edition has the great effect of emphasizing the enormity of it.  The use of data text page elements merged into the design is also quite brilliant in both conveying information and advancing the distinct visual aesthetic of the line. Given that this issue ends on a cliffhanger with the team stranded within The Vault, it’s pretty clear that establishing this vibe was crucial, and Silva nailed it. 

This issue continues a pattern of every issue by Hickman setting up further story, and is particularly effective in making you desperate to know where the plot is going. It hadn’t occurred to me at all that he’d be pursuing the homo novissima thread from Powers of X so soon or that he’d explicitly tie it to the Children of the Vault in the present day, but it’s quite obvious and works very well. Unless I’m forgetting something marginal, Hickman is the first writer to dive into the Children since Carey left, and as he did with handling the Phalanx in Powers of X, he’s done a very good job of fitting them into his tech narrative and elevating the stakes accordingly.

When Carey and Bachalo introduced this concept it was in some ways a workaround the “No More Mutants” status quo, but posed the question of what would happen if the X-Men had to face a species that was a step beyond them, reversing the usual humans vs mutants dynamic. It’s hard to imagine this story moving forward without the mutants having to confront some incredibly dark notions – like, they can’t possibly consider genocide, right? But then you look at the membership of the Quiet Council and realize if put to a vote, the more ethical and noble members of that body  – Xavier, Jean Grey, Storm, Nightcrawler, Kate Pryde – are in the minority. Yikes.

Some Notes:

• It’s nice to see Hickman continue to show love for Scott Lobdell and Chris Bachalo’s characters from Generation X. Synch, a character who has been out of circulation for about 20 years or so, makes his return in this issue via the resurrection protocols. He’s very charming in his scenes, but the text page of his medical file indicates that he’s very rattled by the experience of coming back to life years after his death to find all his former classmates have moved on with their lives. I suppose this explains a bit of why he’d agree to a mission that could go on for hundreds of years. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to him and his fragile emotional state after being trapped in The Vault.

• I’ve never been particularly fond of X-23 – I have a pretty harsh bias against “legacy characters” – but I think having her lead this mission into the unknown is a brilliant use of her that puts her at the center of a major narrative thread while also clearing her off the board for a little while. 

• I wonder if it’s just a coincidence that Hickman keeps showing Storm a bit overworked and rattled, or if this strain and her refusal to take it easy is setting up something for her down the line. 

Supernovas

“Supernovas”
X-Men #188-193 (2007)
Written by Mike Carey
Pencils by Chris Bachalo (188-190, 192-193) and Clayton Henry (191)
Inks by Tim Townshend et al (188-190, 192-193) and Mark Morales (191)

Mike Carey is one of the most prolific X-Men writers, having written 72 issues of X-Men and the original graphic novel X-Men: No More Humans. In that span of time he was a primary author of two major crossovers, “Messiah Complex” and “Second Coming,” and the sole author of the “Age of X” event. His tenure is easily overlooked, mainly because he’s never at any point the main writer on the franchise. His run begins as a relaunch alongside Ed Brubaker’s Uncanny X-Men while Joss Whedon and John Cassaday slowly published the second half of their best-selling Astonishing X-Men series. After “Messiah Complex,” his book – long the co-flagship of the line – is retitled X-Men: Legacy and becomes a Charles Xavier solo title. Once that story runs its course, it shifts into a Rogue solo series. These periods have their moments, but it’s mostly a lot of inconsequential stories that are often mired in a lot of continuity baggage. Carey not having a set team of characters to work with freed him to follow his muse and go deep on Xavier, Rogue, and Magneto, but also damned his book to seem very much like an extra X-Men title published for die-hard completists rather than an essential series. 

Carey started very strong though. “Supernovas,” his opening arc, is a showcase for his focus on thoughtful character beats, hard science fiction, and deep-cut X-lore. The story follows Rogue as she’s tasked by Cyclops with creating her own team to specialize in responding to crises while a lot of the other X-Men are either focused on running the school or off in outer space. Rogue is a deeply strange character to be given a leadership role, and that’s a lot of the point here. She’s a veteran, sure, but she tends to be a reckless loose cannon. Cyclops chooses to see her chaotic tactics as “inspired improvisation” in Carey’s first issue, and the remainder of his initial run up through “Messiah Complex” is essentially a referendum on the pros and cons of Rogue’s approach to leading a team. 

Generally speaking, it does not go well for her, pretty much from the start. Rogue’s team is a ragtag assortment of characters, some of whom are close friends – Cannonball, Iceman – but the rest are mostly antagonists she needs to keep on a tight leash – Mystique, Sabretooth, Lady Mastermind – or random people who just happen to be on hand, like Cable and Omega Sentinel. It’s more of a cast than a team, but Rogue tries to hold them together as much as she can despite half the characters actively working against her goals. 

Carey’s selection of characters set up a lot of good drama, but also highlight his intriguing approach to the very concept of a “team book.” He’s essentially making lemonade out of lemons – he didn’t have the option to have a more standard X-Men team, so he instead assembled an unlikely group of characters who are set up to fail. Most superhero team stories are built on a fantasy of people working together in harmony, but Carey is curious about what happens when that’s not an option.

The story also plays on one of the central themes of Rogue’s overall character arc – she is a reformed villain who became an X-Man after a brief stint in her foster mother Mystique’s Brotherhood as a teenager. She’s invested a lot in the idea of redemption, but is aware that it’s a bit too much to expect of a sociopath like Mystique and a full-on psychopath like Sabretooth. Over the course of this run, Carey asks the reader to be as optimistic as Rogue is trying to be about all this, but in the end he’s quite honest about the nature of the characters he’s working with. Rogue’s haphazard team-building only leads to betrayal and failure, and while that’s not entirely her fault, it very much is a story about how not everyone is cut out for leadership. 

“Supernovas” is mostly illustrated by Chris Bachalo at one of his creative peaks. Bachalo’s work is highly distinctive but also constantly mutating, and this story comes at an intriguing point in his evolution where he’s increasingly drawing with color in mind and sometimes coloring his own pages. (The remainder is colored by Christina Strain and Antonio Fabela, who turn in some lovely work.) Bachalo has gone through some phases of strange, cluttered page designs but at this point he’s loosened up quite a bit and allows for a lot more negative space to be filled by ambient colors. One of his best narrative tricks for big dramatic moments here is to drop out backgrounds entirely in favor of large expanses of white space on the page, such as the aftermath of one of Rogue’s risky moves in the first issue, or a particularly creepy page in which a brainwashed Northstar appears before his suicidal twin sister Aurora in the second issue. 

Bachalo did not draw the fourth issue of this storyline, likely due to scheduling problems. This is to be expected with monthly superhero comics, but this is a case where having a fill-in artist totally wrecks the specific atmosphere and aesthetic of the primary storytellers. Clayton Henry isn’t a bad artist but his bland traditionalism is jarring and breaks the spell of Bachalo’s designs. The switch to his pages is roughly equivalent to watching a Star Wars movie in which all of the cast is inexplicably replaced by soap opera actors and all of the production values drop to student film level for 20 minutes before going back to normal for the last 40 minutes of the picture.

Henry’s art disrupts the mood and drama, and his drab and unimaginative style actively undermines Bachalo’s designs for the story’s antagonists, the Children of the Vault. This group of characters, who were created by Bachalo and Carey, are not mutants but instead the result of the standard human genome being artificially evolved over a period of 6,000 years in a temporal accelerator. Carey was exploring the evolutionary biology concept for genetic drift and Bachalo was having fun with a set of characters who are meant to seem even more eerie and inhuman than the mutants. Henry’s interpretation follows Bachalo’s designs but makes them all look rather…literal. In context, it all just looks like bad homemade costumes, with all the visual poetry of Bachalo’s art removed. This problem of translating Bachalo’s work to other artistic styles probably explains a lot of why these characters have rarely been seen again outside of a follow-up storyline by Carey late in his tenure.