With their teammate Axo abducted by Mister Sinister, the Chicago squad of X-Men takes their first real outing as superheroes in Exceptional X-Men #9. Eve L. Ewing, Carmen Carnero, Nolan Woodard, VC’s Travis Lanham, and Tom Brevoort form the creative team behind this issue. The series’ new mutants have bonded, trained, and been mentored by the likes of Emma Frost, Kate Pryde, and Iceman. Now it’s time to see if those lessons stuck.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Exceptional X-Men #9!
For a quick refresher, Axo, Melee, and Bronze found internships at the biotech startup Verate through an in from Kate’s roommate, Pritti. Twisting online health and wellness content into eugenics research, Verate just so happens to be the latest cover scheme for Mister Sinister’s continued experiments. Fascinated by the correlation between emotion and epigenetics, or how a person’s feelings can impact the expression of their biological traits, Sinister immediately targets Axo. Alex’s empathic abilities are the key to Sinister’s latest obsession, but it seems he only needs Axo as a live subject for a brief period of time. The lie that gives away this truth is the shoddy homunculus of a clone that Sinister produces to replace Axo. Built to last just enough time for Essex to harvest what he needs from Alex, the poorly constructed duplicate didn’t last more than a day. The dupe’s rapid deterioration starts the ticking clock for the other X-Men to save Axo before it’s too late.
Axo, Bronze, and Melee have each dealt with bigoted bullies throughout the series, and Bronze herself even managed to win a brief fight with an alien monster on her own. However, the conflict at the center of this issue is the young mutants’ first proper step into superheroics. The threshold that this opportunity represents pulls at one of the key themes of the book thus far. Kate Pryde knows that falling headfirst into being an X-Man at 13 was not necessarily the healthiest adolescence. She cares about these teens, and wants to use her hindsight to help Alex, Trista, and Thao to steer clear of the darker lessons she learned at Xavier’s. At the same time, to live openly as a mutant is to live at risk, risks that Emma Frost wants their young students prepared for. Even though the adult X-Men initially convince Bronze and Melee to hang back while they rescue Axo, they’ve reached a point where both Kate and Emma are right. These teenagers shouldn’t have to be ready to fight Mister Sinister at this point and yet here they are.
Ewing and Carnero already focused an issue around Bronze being able to apply the lessons she’s learned from her new mentors, and Axo spends the majority of the issue confined among Sinister’s devices. Therefore, Thao Tran, or Melee, becomes the vehicle through which the story shows growth among the new mutants. Showing much greater control over her invisibility, Melee manages to keep herself, Bronze, and the remains of the Axo impostor concealed until they meet up with Kate, Emma, and Bobby at HQ. Despite agreeing to stay behind for their own safety, Sinister lures Trista and Thao into the fight in his secret lab through some trickery with a duplicate Iceman. Similar to the rough draft of Axo that Sinister produced last issue, this clone of Bobby also doesn’t last long. But the frigid doppleganger does manage to get one good shot in before the real Iceman takes him down: he freezes Bronze and Melee where they stand! Thankfully, Thao hasn’t only improved her invisibility powers, as the young hero manages to safely phase both herself and Trista out of the solid wall of ice.
Marvel
This may not be a fight that these teens should have been thrown into, but they were, and thankfully the lessons they’ve learned were enough to keep them safe while the trio of adult X-Men focused on stopping Sinister and saving Axo. Still, Kate halts for a moment just as Melee and Bronze are frozen. Her exact fears seem to have been realized, and Ewing employs a fun nod to her use of fourth-wall breaking monologue earlier in the series by having Emma disrupt Kate’s spiraling. If she can’t trust her students to have internalized what she’s taught then she’s going to lose Alex by wasting time in panic mode. Thanks to some delicate work on Emma’s part, Kate is able to safely free Axo from Sinister’s machinery. Once that’s finished Ms. Frost is able to focus her full telepathic might against Sinister, and even links in Alex so that Axo can help deliver the psionic finishing combo. Sinister is left unconscious but mysteriously, so is Emma.
In comics, what the creators choose to show can carry as much weight as what they choose not to show. The majority of the issue adds the excitement of a superhero fight to the series’ trademark sense of fun and humor. However, there are moments in the heat of battle where the geography of the scene gets muddy. Does Emma have a hold on Sinister or doesn’t she? Why does he only employ psychic defenses at the end? Why lure Melee and Bronze back to the lab at all? Of course some of this may well be addressed next issue. The physical aspect of the fight is over, but the end page teases that the finale will be a one-on-one face-off between Emma and Essex on the Astral Plane. Sadly, this final page tease does take some of the drama out of Emma’s fainting. The conspicuous mention of R-LDS (resurrection-linked degenerative sickness) seemed to seed a fear around Emma’s faint that the final page immediately nulls. Granted, I still find R-LDS dubious, (Magneto is the only potential case we know of, and his final resurrection was not via The Five/on Krakoa) but it was an intriguing edge that the issue self sabotages.
Speaking once more of what is on the page, Carnero and Woodard continue to delight in the art of Exceptional. On the page above, Emma’s brief telepathic message to Kate is elevated from mere thought boxes to a brief homage to psychic signatures like those seen in Russell Dauterman’s work on Giant-Size X-Men: Jean Grey & Emma Frost. Also, Woodard smartly avoids undue confusion in the battle scenes through a specific color variation between Iceman and his Sinister-made impostor.
For fans who’ve been wondering when Emma Frost and Kate Pryde’s new class of students would get out there and earn the name “X-Men,” Exceptional X-Men #9 is that first taste of what’s to come. Sinister’s larger schemes at Verate haven’t been thwarted yet, but a little trust and teamwork gets these new X-Men safely through their first showdown with a genuine supervillain. Tune in for a fun fight, some decent developments, and a final twist that the climax of this arc is still to come!
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