It’s time to dox DOX in New Mutants #12! Story by Ed Brisson, art by Marco Failla, color by Carlos Lopez, lettering by Travis Lanham, and cover by Mike Del Mundo.
Liz Large: A great week to discuss New Mutants! I haven’t seen the movie, but…well, at least this isn’t that. [Ed. note: Going to the movies during a global pandemic is a bad idea.]
Allison Senecal: Yes, but did the movie have Nova Roma? Maybe the ONLY point in its favor is that it didn’t. I assume.
LL: An excellent point. We’ll probably never know.
You’re (Not) Doin’ Fine, Nova Roma!
LL: We have a change in the art team this week— Failla replacing Flaviano. I think it’s a good fit— not a drastic change that throws off the flow of the issues.
Let’s get this part out of the way: Nova Roma is back. As a quick refresher if you’ve forgotten issue 8, a variety of creatures were attacking civilians in NR. The New Mutants helped out by killing them. This issue, we see the woman who created the monsters, and like any pet owner, she’s mad about what happened.
AS: I think we did see her briefly back in #8 but I was silently hoping the whole sub-plot had just been scrapped and forgotten so I was genuinely surprised to see her return here. She reminds me too much of the Summoner and the weird demonic creatures we saw in X-Men #2, so I think it’s just a little fatigue with these running at the same time (and so close to X of Swords). That said! Uh, her scene with Senator Aquilla did ping some of my horror brain bits. Not to mention the Cotati and then also the plant city in X-Force. Phew.
LL: Yes, slug-like creatures that go inside people always makes me think of Yerks and will never not terrify me. [Ed. note: I don’t understand this reference, but let’s go with it.] I think there could be interesting things here comparing her creation of these creatures—by science or magic or some other way—to the GMO aspects of Krakoan plant tech. Like you said, there’s a lot of threads here that could link up, but instead of seeming like a cool connected world it just seems repetitive to me.
AS: And maybe they are connected! I don’t give the current X-office enough credit, but nothing happens without a plan here. This could simply be another move in my favorite Hickman-verse game of “is this pale woman related to this pale man or are they parts of two entirely separate plots”. You make a great point about her creation of these creatures too. Do we know definitively she isn’t a mutant? How is she doing it? I’m being a bum about it, but it’s a lot more intriguing now than it was 6 months ago.
LL: It would be wild if this was an excuse to get rid of Nova Roma entirely, since they’re all (except for Amara’s dad) dead. Maybe we’ll never have to go back! Maybe it could be a cool monster nature preserve, or Jurassic Park type place. Just saying. [Ed. note: We have grown past the need for Nova Roma. We never needed it.]
Fair is Fair
AS: I loved the little opener with Magik and Trinary. Pretty overtly a wink wink at those people who are always annoyingly asking why the eagles didn’t simply fly the Hobbits to Mordor in the first Lord of the Rings movie. Trinary could solve the entire Dox problem for the New Mutants, take down the site, cyberbully them, reverse dox them, etc, in about two minutes. But, friends and enemies, the comic needs a plot and some action. See also: why characters never honestly communicate with each other in romcoms, because then how can you ever have drama?
LL: I get it, and honestly, even if we didn’t need to fill an issue, I can’t see Illyana not going in person. She wants an excuse to fight these people, not that she really needs one. There’s no way doing this virtually would have been satisfying to her. I will say that the first Dox page makes it clear what the threat is (and being able to tell the Cuckoos apart is a level of observation that a lot of X-fans don’t have). [Ed. note: THEY ARE IDENTICAL!]
AS: Very good point about Yana. She’s been on Dox’s ass for the last few issues, albeit off to the side, so she’s too personally invested to let someone else handle it. That first data page is pretty damn chilling. We’ve known since the Pilger Incident just how awful Dox is, but the scale of it is alarming. I give this book a lot of crap, but I think Dox are the most genuinely terrifying of the villains that mutants have been up against since Orchis in the olden days of 2019. I’ve appreciated them much more as a unifying narrative thread than the disparate pieces of Pilger and [insert slavic country].
LL: I appreciated that the slideshow of victims of anti-mutant violence isn’t what convinced the staff of Dox. They don’t view mutants as people, and they have no reason to care at all if they get hurt—that’s their unstated goal. The only way to put a stop to this without making them martyrs was to put it in terms they could understand: a risk to their own safety to match the risk that they put mutants in. It’s very realistic. The people who act this way in real life care about the effects on other people either, and they’ll go so far as to defend a murderer if he’s only killing people they don’t like.
AS: It’s pretty much point-for-point akin to conservative news channels and sites in the real world. Anything from Fox News to Breitbart to those other smaller scummier outlets. I wonder if the choice to show only white mutants was deliberate. I’m not the right person to most effectively delve into this, but good chances all Dox employees are not only human, but also white. If it is deliberate, Dani is basically showing them who they might consider “model mutants”. No one with visible mutations. No one who isn’t white and Respectable Looking to Dox. “Family people”. And still, the only thing that worked was, as you said, some tit for tat. That doesn’t even work in real life, so yay comics.
LL: Honestly after everything, I was wondering if next issue would be the New Mutants breaking Illyana out of The Pit after she kills this guy. Sure, it’s against one of the Krakoan laws, but is it “wrong”? Debatable.
AS: Sigh. Hopefully Trinary at least logs on to cyberbully him for like fifteen minutes a day.
Globular Healing
AS: Liz, I will graciously let you start us off about your boy, Glob. I know you quite like him.
LL: I like him a lot. He’s shaped like a friend, and in everything I’ve read he’s doing his best (I will not read Morrison’s run and you can’t make me). I think that this speech is going to be a little hit or miss— but for me it hit really close to home. A lot of people realize later in life that things they experienced as kids were messed up, and actively undoing that later in life can make you feel angry and horrible all over again. I like Glob presenting all of this as him actually making an effort to be better and not as something that comes naturally.
AS: I joke about not liking Glob (I’m more just indifferent), but I was pretty pleased that he was the surprise threatener here. It ties into the earlier thing about visible mutants, too. He can never get away from human scrutiny. He doesn’t have that luxury. And even the mutants with that end up dead or seriously injured, so what’s the point. Like he says, he’s tried to avoid humans and they come after him and his friends anyway (a larger through-line in Dawn of X, generally, as well). I too appreciated how he notes things weren’t instantly better as soon as he got to Xavier’s. He genuinely had layers and layers of $#&% to work through. [Ed. note: He took a couple drugs, participatied in a small retribution killing, and did a tiny riot. Who amongst us hasn’t?]
Failla does a great job of really selling Glob’s anger and misery in this, too. He has a weird design but if you can sell me everything via his eyes (and uh optic nerves??) then phew!
LL: Growing up, I knew I wasn’t straight, and I knew that everyone around me thought that was monstrous. I spent a lot of time terrified that someone would find out what I was, and it made me cruel and angry to everyone. I’m in a very different place right now, but sometimes I get angry or afraid and I’m right back to 11 years old. It’s hard work not to be terrible sometimes. Is it weird to relate this much to an alive gummy bear?
AS: *Hug* Not even a little. The mutant metaphor isn’t perfect, it isn’t specific, but it does speak to a lot of us for a lot of really legitimate reasons because of that. I was absolutely a bully in junior high school because I was bullied in elementary school for having a visible disability. Self-hatred really is something you work through for years (and that something some of us never stop working through), but there are reasons I look back on high school much more fondly than junior high, and it’s because I had largely worked through the bulk of that by then. Glob feels, in this economy??
LL: Whew. Overall, this issue felt pretty uneven. Is this just my distaste for Nova Roma stories? Perhaps! It did a good job of wrapping up the Dox threads before we get going on the crossover, and while I don’t think we need to, the Nova Roma plot is ready for when we get back.
AS: I was so hoping that would somehow wrap up too. Alas. But, yeah, it does leave us in a balanced spot heading into X of Swords. Next time we meet, we’ll be yelling about Douglas.
X-Traneous Thoughts
- Krakoan reads X OF SWORDS, so get pumped for that
- I totally TOTALLY forgot that Meggan’s codename, as of Captain Britain and MI13 (READ IT), is Gloriana which super duper rocks. And also is Betsy’s middle name, so a little gay.
- As the number one (AS: only) Peter Winston Wisdom fan, I was happy to see that he’s in England where he belongs. I love him, he should never be on Krakoa. [Ed. note: This is Xavier Files Editor Dan Grote erasure]
- I liked getting to see a little bit of Anole as a bartender, even if it was on the morning shift. Although I guess if nobody has a traditional job, there’s no issue with a breakfast drink.
Liz Large is a copywriter with a lot of opinions on mutants.
