Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Comic Books >

New X-Men #154

Page: 1 ... 12 13 14 15 16(17)18

14:03 / 08.04.04

Or that maybe there are several Fantomex's.

What if he WAS just a human host for the E.V.A. module? What if she grows them? A bit like Spartan from Wildcats? Who knows? I'd read a Fantomex series if GM wrote it, but he'll probably be dead come next wave of BIG BADDIES.

Matthew Fluxington

14:10 / 08.04.04

So then what about E.V.A. going "Faannnttoommexxxx?" when she sees Appolyon take off his mask & suit? Doesn't that fall under the category 'obvious storytelling'? (I'm not being snide to you, Matthew, just wondering at this seeming inconsistency by Marvel.)

Oh no, I was pretty convinced that Appolyon = Fantomex, but this is the word from on high, and it's fair to assume that it is what Grant intended. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt, since a) it's really a lot more simple for Appolyon to be the last U-Men and nothing more and b) it was never clear why Fantomex became a U-Men or why that wouldn't be explained. I'm fine with it either way. But if we're dealing with strict continuity, Appolyon is not Fantomex.

Is it possible that Marvel is misreading what GM wrote? After all, they seem to have screwed up the Ernst=Cassie thing pretty well.

In the very same letter column they indicate that Cassandra is Ernst. There is nothing in Austen's comic that explicitly states that Cassandra is not Ernst, only that Henry and Scott are unaware of what happened to Cassandra after #126. (Which makes little sense, but hey.)

advancedplastics

14:34 / 08.04.04

chad said:
Let go of the time loops.

NEVER! heh, seriously tho, yr right. theres no evidence of Sublime Beast sending anything back into the past. the feeder scene was just an extrapolation of NXM themes and a bit of sci-fi fun...

There's no "proof" that Cassie was engineered by Weapon Plus. It's all inferred and you gotta fill in the blanks yourself.

thanks for the post, chad! yr msg had lots of good stuff. its all xrystallizing now.

15:04 / 08.04.04

The feeder scenes were development meant to nail the Phoenix to the floor. Obviously, the Phoenix is dependant on telekinetic/telepathic thought to manifest. By engineering a monster that supresses and crashes independant thought into a globular "eat your brains" zombie-mess, the Phoenix can't manifest in anything other than what the Sublime Beast wanted it to: Jean.

Jean obviously rebelled, but if one off those telepaths at the Institute manifested Phoenix in order to stop the Beast's crawl across the planet, he would've been shit outta luck. So he loaded Feeder traits into a Beastcrawler, sent it to the Institute and infected the lot of them. Rather than become part of that globular mess, the Cuckoos detonated their heads.

advancedplastics

16:20 / 08.04.04

ahhhh, i get it. i really need to read through them all again. theres so much that i didnt pay close attention to.
thanks for helping sort it out!
i read through the first hardcover a couple weeks ago and noticed that: 0) its a lot more readable when reading the issues in immediate succesion; 1) that it all makes more sense having already read all the issues (not to mention barbelith threads) and accumulating signs,symbols,etc; 2) that the art is a lot easier to understand.

17:51 / 08.04.04

@ jephyork

Where is it stated that Quentin was born on the same day that the Sentinels emerged?

18:10 / 08.04.04

Quentin had that newpaper article from the day he was born. It has the picture of some mutant with a whip. I don't remember them mentioning the sentinels when they discussed it though.

I'm Rick Jones, bitch

19:01 / 08.04.04

The Daily Bugle was shown in the first comic appearence of the Sentinels, in the 60s.

I'm serious about the bannermen. They're in Grant's Marvel Cannon, in the thrawl of the military industrial complex, and have the supersoldierness of weapons 0/I, the adamantium lacing of weapon X, with Hulk gamma powers, Weapon Plus style combat programs.

More importantly, they're hella marketable.

The Weapon Plus team was going to be the government's crazy pop-art genocide team, righ? Fantomex/Eva making like Batman with a sexy T-1000 style batmobile as Weapon XIII, The Stepford Cuckoos as the Olsen Quintuplets providing psychic backup as Weapon XIV (as well as a teen rolemodel etc, plus I bet they're tasty enough at hand to hand), Ultimaton as the kirby style powerhouse, and Huntsman hidden under a hessian sack so as not to give kids nightmares (they'd have probably dressed him up like the silver age Brainiac and made him the brains of the team, he was naked when we saw him). Who's going to fit in better? Captain America MKIII versions 01/02/03 or a scary old witch with uncontrolable powers?

So Weapon XI= The Bannermen. I'm serious as hell here. Cassie isn't Weapon Plus' style, she has powers far in excess of even XV himself. The Bannermen are a more logical progression.

Look, Chad, Cassie is Charlie's evil twin, perhaps working for Sublime in the first arc (she could have been infected by the algae in the sewer, perhaps), but not under the branch of Weapon Plus, which is a branch of the US Army. She isn't Weapon XI just because she fits into your pretty little starchart (which you've no doubt decorated with glitter). She has a clearly stated origin in the comics. It has never been contradicted. If it was this important, it would be in the fucking comics. Period. It's fanwank, and I'd like it to be clearly marked as such in the anotations. True, I have only the flimsiest of reasons to point to the bannermen, but when I mention them in the wiki I'd label it so.

There's a reason Weapon XI isn't shown: the comics of the paris arc were solicited as WHAT IS WEAPON X II (as in, what is weapon ecks 2), and they didn't want to give the Weapon + twist away.

So yeah, my two cents.

I'm suprised that nobody has pointed to the creatures in the tubes in the last issue of the asault arc as weapons 02-08, or weapons 16 on...

19:42 / 08.04.04

hahaha... When Morrison talks to whoever annotates and interviews, I'll be right and you'll be wrong. In the meantime, read a book. I hate glitter and I know what I'm talking about.

Everybody, you've heard the arguments. Decide for yourself.

19:54 / 08.04.04

for me the biggest things to indicate that Cassie is indeed Weapon XI, which are not superseded by the admittedly nifty Bannermen theory, are:

- she has a healing factor. if she's got the same DNA as Chuck, where the hell did that come from?

- she has really strong connections with, access to, and information about Weapon Plus technology, namely the wild Sentinels and the nano-Sentinels. since Genosha was basically the debut of these technologies outside the World and other Weapon Plus facilities, where did she get this stuff?

- she emerges out of nowhere and essentially takes radical action to incite genetic war, and also starts in motion the events that lead to Xorneto and his plans for retaliation, as they're preparing to move Fantomex and the other Super-Sentinels into position for the third phase retaliation against Mags. i've made what i think is a pretty compelling argument before that this really only makes sense if her opening move is part of the larger Weapon Plus grand scheme.

I'm Rick Jones, bitch

21:29 / 08.04.04

Ah, see that's her power! In the Morrison Manifesto it states she has access to the full spectrum of mutant powers that can be manifested by the x-gene. So she's a walking swiss army knife- come to think of it, you could see her as the X-Universe's answer to Crazy Jane or The Quiz from Doom Patrol.

Also, the manifesto states she has a hidden co-conspirator whose name is too terrifying to mention- I would guess she was working with Sublime. Fuck- that could be how the X-Men of the future know so much about Sublime, as Cassie remembers more and more (due to her being "educated" enough to access her memories safely) she could remember whatever she plotted with him- sentinels, kick, etc etc.

Reading behind the lines is required in this run, which makes it so much fun.

22:58 / 08.04.04

Well, I'd go for Cassie being Weapon 11 as opposed to the bannermen for one obvious reason...she was in the freakin' book and they weren't.

Morrison obviously had a pattern to his weapons. He had to have something that made 15 an improvement on 14. Fantomex says each weapon is better (more advanced) than its predecessor. Chad's theory is sound.

Besides, let's look at the proposed Super Sentinel team. Why would you have the Stepford Cuckoos AND the Bannermen, both identical to the public eye, on the same team? That's ludicrous. The Super Sentinels already had their a) set of triplets, quintuplets, whatever; the Bannermen would have been redundant as another set of Xeroxed heroes; and b) big powerhouses (weapon XV). The only thing they didn't have is the kindly old woman. How could SHE be evil. She's your friggin grandmother. I mean, timid Donald Trask trusted her.

Chad theories are so Morrison, they might as well be a parody! Much better than "they sould have a Capt. American type guy on the team." THAT is fanboy wank.

23:32 / 08.04.04

Since we're talking about the marketability of the Super-Sentinels, here's another reason why Xorneto can't be XVI. People HATE him. He stood for all the mutant terrorists, as sort of a figurehead. People identify him with ant-human terrorism. His "sell-a-tivity" as Bizarro Einstein would have put it, is nearly at zero.

I'm Rick Jones, bitch

23:40 / 08.04.04

Chad's theories rely on fanfiction, they have no grounding in what happens in the book itself and I'll stand by that. Cassie is a manifested birth trauma who at one point served sublime. Cassie is more powerful than any weapon we see- she's not a natural progression. He origin is explicitly detailed in volume one. Connections to Sublime are totally implied, I agree - Sublime had lots of cards up his sleeve, not just Weapon Plus. Cassie is chaos/spirit/nature, Weapon Plus subjects are order/machine/science (although the reconstituted cuckoos might appear paganish as the three in one, they still hang around with a supercomputer). She's not tonaly consistent with Weapon Plus.

Cassie's origin is clearly stated in the book. It is not contradicted at any point. Someone got called an idiot for doubting Cassie = Ernst earlier in this thread, but they didn't cling to it the way everyone is jumping on this raft of shite.

advancedplastics

03:19 / 09.04.04

chad said (a while ago):

WEAPON XI Cassandra Nova
The Third Level — CP-Red vMEME Code that awakens individual senses of the impulsive self while generating powerful images of aggressiveness, conquest, predator/prey relationships, and pontifications from on high perches — high horses, kings of the hill, and queens of the valley, or vice versa. The age of fiefdoms. The new Basic Structure arrives on the scene big time! For the first time, the Self becomes aware of its new self, and announces its presence very clearly for all to hear. Red is the emergence of the Gross self (which we have chosen to call Ego). Express self impulsively at any cost without shame or fear. "I need to be the best, or be a victim."

i was scanning thru the threads and thought of something: Weapon XI might be Hypercortisone-D, Kick. What do you think?

(it would explain a number of things)

04:26 / 09.04.04

Quimper:

Yeah, that "insane pop art masterpiece" was the picture from the front page of both the Daily Globe AND the Daily Bugle, the day Quentin was born. The accompanying Globe caption read "Artist's Interpretation of Fate of Mankind If Mutants Are Not Driven Out -- As Predicted by Dr. Bolivar Trask!"

Technically, according to Uncanny X-Men #14, this was the paper from the day BEFORE the Sentinels made their first public appearance -- upon seeing the article, Prof. X arranged a live televised debate with Trask the following night, and Trask trotted out the Sentinels. Of course they immediately ran amok, attacked Trask, and kidnapped the Professor, leading to many years of "X-Men fight purple robots" stories.

But my point is -- what's Morrison's angle in nailing Quentin's birth to the events surrounding the Sentinels' debut? And how does it tie in to the weirdness he spouts on his deathbed about his true parents? There's got to be SOMEthing there...

-Jeph!

12:20 / 09.04.04

I recind the comments that imply that Xorneto was a "Weapon Plus operative". He absolutely was NOT a Weapon Plus operative. He WAS manipulatd by Sublime, and set up to instigate genetic war.

While Xorn, the parapersona/fictionsuit, was appropriately analogous to the holistic an integrated Turquoise vmeme, Magneto was not. Magneto WAS a terrorist.

Sublime is actually the Subtle Ego, similar, but not exactly the same as Cssie, the Gross Ego. The difference is that while Cassie enacts her own goals through her won mind and body, Sublime acts through subtely pushing people over the edge, satisfying his own goals through other's minds and bodies. That's Coral vmeme territory.

15:06 / 09.04.04

Did we ever clear up the confusion over the number of Cuckoos? There's the bit in #134 where Herman says something about there being four of them and gets corrected by Quentin, but I've also just noticed a similar thing happening in #125.

Angel's just found Beak and takes him outside to where Emma and the Cuckoos are. He looks at them and says something about how Angel told him they had an army, but "there's only the five of you." Now, he's not talking about the five cuckoos here, but Angel and four Cuckoos, because they have to correct him in exactly the same way Quentin does Herman nine issues later - "Six actually. Seven if you count Miss Frost."

Did anybody come up with an answer as to why certain characters only seem to notice four girls in the group? I've got to admit I gave up on the NXM threads here when people decided that they knew precisely where Morrison was taking the story and that anybody coming up with alternate theories was plain wrong (shining example of Barbelith at its very best, that was), so apologies if it's already been covered somewhere.

15:24 / 09.04.04

Hmmm. no I don't think this was ever examined specifically.

I read the Glob Herman Kid Omega comments as foreshadowing for the death of Sophie.

The Beak coments earlier could've been referring ONLY to the Cuckoos, and excluding Angel. Five of them, five new players to be introduced to. The Cuckoos themselves then speak up to include Angel and then Emma. I can see how you read it though... That IS interesting if they've got some weird field that alters the ability to see all of them though... I wonder if that will ever be addressed in future episodes.

Keith, like a scientist

16:14 / 09.04.04

maybe the one with no name is not real, but a projection of their collective mind.

16:25 / 09.04.04

You know, I was just thinkng that too... Seeing as how the "SPICE" theory leaves the "I" still waiting, then maybe the last Cuckoo is a thought projection... tulpa?

Nah... too much.

17:49 / 09.04.04

Apollyon and Fantomex:
Apollyon is not Fantomex, but what's there stopping him having some of Fanto's body parts. Vocal chords f'rinstance?
Right, having cleared that up, I now want to posit that Tom Skylark is Fantomex. Arf. Just kidding.

17:57 / 09.04.04

OOh, no, just remembered. The panel on the first page after the centre spread 152, Cassie says "I've had dreams you know, with you in them." She's looking at me, right? Who does she have either side of her? The kick-ass male fantasy of handsome indestructibility (Wolvie) and the equally kick-ass female fantasy of the Cuckoos.
There's something going on there. What?

18:19 / 09.04.04

I think the point about the confusion over the number of Cuckoo's was only ever because they were all identical so it's hard to keep count.

Beak's "confusion" isn't confusion at all. He says there's only five of you. Five Cuckoo's. Emma's incapacitated and Angel isn't being counted because he's not adressing her, he's addressing the Cuckoo's. Angel then says six (including her) and seven including Miss Frost.

Herman's hiccup is symbolic of the imminent death of a Cuckoo.

Are there any others?

19:27 / 09.04.04

Thing is, it's not Angel who puts Beak right, but the Cuckoos. If it were the other way around it'd make sense, 'cause Angel's not going to take that sort of putdown, but the Cuckoos correcting Beak in order to include Angel in their number doesn't ring true - they've not shown any great like for her before, why should they want to count her as an equal now? That's why it looks to me like Beak's only noticed the four of them - otherwise, they'd just remind him that Emma's also there and leave it at that. It also seems to be an utterly pointless bit of dialogue if Beak's just not including Angel.

Unless it's just scrappy writing, which isn't out of the question.

I like the idea that the fifth Cuckoo's a manifestation of their collective consciousness - that's the way I decided to read it when this was last brought up. It'd explain why Quentin can see her, but Herman (and maayyyybe Beak) can't. It also explains why she's got no name and fits in fairly well with their model numbers. When they're revealed as Weapon XIV, there's also the caption that says Stepford Cuckoos//Version01/03/04. If the main feature of Weapon XIV is their/her ability to work as a collective consciousness - and after all, that is what marks the girls out from everybody else - then it makes sense for that collective consiousness to be Version01, with its component parts being 02 through 05, yeah? It's their/her ultimate selling point, so it's naturally going to take first place in the ranking scheme.

I don't necessarily believe any of the stuff in this post, but I like it anyway.

01:22 / 10.04.04

Oh no, I was pretty convinced that Appolyon = Fantomex, but this is the word from on high, and it's fair to assume that it is what Grant intended. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt, since a) it's really a lot more simple for Appolyon to be the last U-Men and nothing more and b) it was never clear why Fantomex became a U-Men or why that wouldn't be explained. I'm fine with it either way. But if we're dealing with strict continuity, Appolyon is not Fantomex.

So I just finished the re-read and it's suddenly pretty bleeding obvious that they're right - Apollyon isn't Fantomex. I retract the statement I made at the top of this thread.

First there's #151 and E.V.A. introducing herself to Tom with the words "I ran into Apollyon the Destroyer or I'd have made the rendezvous in time." If Apollyon *is* supposed to be Fantomex, then how come she doesn't recognise him in this encounter or any of the previous ones she's obviously had?

Second up is #152 and Apollyon's speech just before the Proud People get wiped out - "Homo Perfectus has come! Herald of the Beast almighty!" He's a U-Man. If he was a Super Sentinel, there's a pretty good chance that Sublime would correct him when he says that he's the last U-Man. Hell, he even dies when he rips the mask off his suit, believing that he's been made perfect.

All the confusion about this is the result of one astonishingly muddled set of panels when Beast, Apollyon, E.V.A., Tom and Logan all die in quick succession, made even more confusing by the way that Silvestri cocks up the last two Logan panels.

E.V.A.'s comments about hearing Fantomex? I'm presuming she's hearing echoes of him in the white hot room just before she enters it herself.

03:11 / 10.04.04

So the remaining mysteries are?

1. The last Cuckoo's name.

2. Who is Weapon 11?

3. ???

advancedplastics

06:01 / 10.04.04

chad: i think that your view of Cassie as Weapon XI works, at the very least, from a chronological perspective (which takes each weapon as part of the spiral dialectic).

assume Cassie is weapon XI, whom they deal with for issues 114-126. then issue 128 starts the conflict w/ weapon XII (huntsman), then introduces weapon XIII (eva + fantomex). later, during the Riot and Murder story arcs, weapon XIV, the cuckoos, makes its moves. immediately afterwards, we have Assault, which shows us weapon XV...

so i think that supports the view of weapon XI as Cassie (if there is a weapon XI, that is; might just be a little safety space written in). its basically what you've said before, but i was underlining the chronology and including the cuckoos as a conflict that was faced.

btw, if the cuckoos were gonna be part of the super-sentinel team, where would they sit? it didnt look like their little JLA meeting table was big enough for all them cuckoos... of course there were less of them in the end (btbtw: do you think they were programmed to prune themselves? time-constrained evolution of the collective?)

advancedplastics

06:06 / 10.04.04

i dont think anyones posted this, but the cuckoo names that we do have: Sophie, Esme, Phoebe and Celeste, are all Greek, and mean (respectively): Wise, Beloved, Brilliant, and Heavenly.

how do these fit together? whats the last piece?

08:37 / 10.04.04

Oh I'm so glad a certain someone has come round to the idea that Appollyon ISN'T Fantomex after so sarcastically claiming it was bleenin' obvious he was a few pages back...

11:21 / 10.04.04

A) If that's aimed at me then I'd just like to point out that the only first post of mine to even mention Fantomex on Barbelith is up at the top of this page.

B) Can everybody drop all this "Aha! See, I was right all along and you were wrong, fucko" and "No, you're completely wrong about that because I say so" bullshit, regardless of who it's aimed it or who's saying it? It's exactly why I haven't bothered joining in these threads properly since the silent issue dropped - sucks every last ounce of enjoyment out of them.

Chad> Do we even have to have a Weapon Eleven in Morrison's run? I don't understand why everybody's so hung up on this - there are a lot of other things left open for future writers to take up (E.V.A.'s comments about Fantomex and "what happened to him," in Here Comes Tomorrow, for example) and Weapon XI would seem to me to be one of them.

08:05 / 11.04.04

No it's aimed at Flux - and his 'I'm right - it's obvious' slap downs. Anway, is someone going to start an annotated NXM thread?

The Natural Way

10:06 / 11.04.04

Being a U-Man's a philosophy, Randy. Anyone, with the exception of mutants, can claim to be a U-Man. TBH, it still seems to me that Grant intended Polly to be Fantomex - otherwise, why all the cryptic "after what happened to Fantomex..." stuff AND EVA's apparent recognition of him at the end? Don't give a toss about no stupid letter colum.

12:23 / 11.04.04

Good point. Y'know, I've been determined throughout that I was going to read Morrison's run as a completely self-contained story - it's why I hated those issues that dragged in characters from the larger X universe, the whole "Jeannie! It's Asteroid M!" rubbish and the suggestions that the Big Bad was going to end up being revealed as Apocotits or whoever - and yet when it comes to the end I'm letting post-Morrison X continuity influence that story. Gah.

13:01 / 11.04.04

What characters from the larger Marvel Universe? Like the X-Corp operatives and the Shi-Ar Imperial Guard? They both seem to me like broad X-characters, and it's not like they were featured more prominently than even the police officer from Riot and Planet X.

Were there others? Sabra? Quicksilver?

Page: 1 ... 12 13 14 15 16(17)18