The creative team of Cullen Buun, Edgar Salazar, Ed Tadeo and Nolan Woodard team up to bring this one-shot tie-in issue to The inhumans Versus X-Men story, in which Jean Grey and the Stepford Cuckoos attempt to keep Karnak in a psychic prison while Fantomex utilizes the situation to fulfill his ulterior motives.
As detailed in the first issue of IvX, The X-Men’s grander plan is to neutralize the stronger, more dangerous Inhumans long enough to ascertain a means of destroying the Terrigen Cloud: the lifeblood of continued Inhuman culture, that is additionally deadly poisonous to all Mutant life. Jean Grey’s part of this plan was to take out Karnak, potentially the most dangerous inhuman of them all. To achieve this, Jean has recruited the aid of Irma, Celeste, and Phoebe Cuckoo, three clones of Emma Frost each of whom possess the same incredible psychic powers.
Working in concert, Jean and The Cuckoos have maintained Karnak in a psychic prison, roaming a dreamscape. Although it doesn’t take long for Karnak to realize this astra realm is not real and begin the presses of rooting out its flaw and engineering a means of escape.
As a further precaution for keeping Karnak imprisoned, the whole operation has been moved to the ‘The World,’ a futuristic, super-sentinel manufacturing facility situated within an artificial reality.
The World first appeared in the ‘Assault on Weapon Plus’ storyline from Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men. It’s a bizarre, patchwork reality where all manner of androids, cyborgs and synthesized organic super beings are constructed and tested. It is the birthplace of Fantomex as well as where the Stepford sisters were originally cloned and harvested.
Fantomex had offered the use of The World as a staging ground for the psychics’ efforts to keep Karnak subdued under the pretense that, were he to escape their mental sway, he would then have to contend with Ultimatum and all of the other cyborg creepy crawlies The World has to offer. As it turns out, however, Fantomex’s offer is not as magnanimous as it initially seemed (the guy’s is all about misdirection after all).
Instead, Fantomex has entered into a pact with Esme Cuckoo to tap into and utilize Karnak’s fault-finding skills as part of an effort to battle through The World’s various defenses and take over the facility’s central operating system. Achieving this affords Fantomex complete and total control over the various death machines and robotic monsters of The World. This is what Fantomex was truly interested in and, having attained his goal, he exists stage right. The battle between Mutant and Inhuman is of little concern to him. He’ll wait to see how it plays while engaging his own plans and schemes… a plot-line surely to be picked up in a future X-Men story.
Karnak, meanwhile, has finally ascertained the flaw in his psychic prison and his freeing himself seems imminent… how this will play out, however, will wait to be seen in that the issue ends with Fantomex’s ominous proclamation of making himself a god with The World and the looming threat to the real world this likely entail.
A fun romp of a story, but also a bit of a let down. I had really looked forward to getting to see Karnak taking on four of the most powerful telepaths on the planet and, while we got to see some of that, the issue was mostly coopted by Fantomex and his side scheme.
Fantomex was created by Grant Morrison in the his aforementioned New X-Men run. He was made as an intentionally paper-thin character, a bio-sentinel modeled after the cliché of the charming thief and rogue. He’s an overt homage to the 1960’s Italian pulp comic hero, Diabolik, created by Angela and Luciana Giussani.
Fantomex an interesting character, but interesting by way of his lack of depth… his accent is fake and noticeably so; his over-the-top similarity to Diabolik is intentional. This is all very neat, but the efforts to make him into a more three dimensional character and ongoing participants in the X-Men mythos is an odd choice that sort of defies the essence of what he is all about. He’s a burning kite: neat to watch as it soars aflame, yet trying to make it fly again is a silly, fruitless endeavor.
In short, when you get a chance to write a cool Jean Grey/Karnak story, it seems a waste to have the tale focused on a character like Fantomex.
Fortunately, this disappointment is tempered by the rich illustrations provided by Edgar Salazar and Ed Tadeo; with a very neat color pallet provided by Nolan Woodard. Fantomex’s ‘tapping into Karnak’s fault-finding abilities’ so to battle The World’s many adversaries is depicted in illusion form as Karnak taking on the entirety of The X-Men.
And it is pretty neat seeing Karnak cut through the many foes with ease and grace. I’m not sure this is how such a battle would occur were it to actually take place… but it very well might be; which is why it has been so important to The X-Men that Karnak be removed from the game board.
There’s a few interesting bits that may play an important role in the ongoing IvX narrative. The first takes place while Karnak is under the illusion that he is fighting off Mutants alongside his queen. Medusa states that they need to stop The X-Men from destroying the Terrigen Cloud and Karnak momentarily suggests that perhaps they shouldn’t.
Karnak has never himself gone through Terrigenesis; his parents opted against the process after seeing how it had so negatively effected his older brother, Triton. Karnak prefers it this way and has chosen to evade the Terrigen Cloud, yet his inclination not to defend the cloud from the X-Men may not be simply a matter of helping him avoid his own Terrigenesis. The Terrine Cloud was never meant to be harmful to Mutants; there is something wrong with it. It has a fault and a fault Karnak can surely see. If this fault is significant enough to risk Inhumans in the same fashion that it risks Mutants then it is quite possible that The X-Men may find an ally in Karnak… someone who will aid them in their effort to destroy the cloud.
The other interesting bit comes from Jean Grey and her optimistic comment about wanting to mend fences with The Inhumans follow the resolution of this conflict. While it seems clear that Emma Frost will not rest until the Cloud is destroyed and the Inhuman Monarchy made to pay a dear price, Jean seems much less bloodthirsty in this regard, hopeful that a peace between Mutant and Inhuman may ultimately be obtained. The Stepford sisters goad her for her naiveté… her guileless hope that somehow this whole ordeal might resolve in a peaceful fashion. The X-Men are in the right… they are justified to do what they must to save their people. Yet there’s no avoiding the fact that saving their own race means dooming another.
Cullen Bunn does a particularly good job capturing Jean’s vice and her rapport with the Stepford sisters. Bunn is set to write Jean as the lead in the upcoming X-Men: Blue and it seems he’s already got a good foothold on her character and voice, the not so harmonious balance between her innocence and near unlimited power.
Bunn is a writer whose work I’ve really come to enjoy. Which is one of the reasons why I felt a bit disappointed that Karnak was not given especially good dialogue. The reborn Karnak that Warren Ellis has crafted in the solo series has been just endlessly entertaining – a curmudgeonly snark who is just as deft with existential put-downs as he is with his kung fu prowess.
Both Al Ewing and Charles Soule have picked up on what Ellis established with Karnak and it’s made him my current favorite Inhuman to read about. Sadly, Bunn chooses not to give the matter a shot and opts instead for straight forward banter from Karnak, leaving the clever one-liners to Fantomex.
Ah well, a missed opportunity if you ask me, but this is an X-Men book after all and while it serves as a tie-in to IvX, Bunn also uses it to establish plot points for a future story down the line.
Fun but not essential; Two and a half out of Five Lockjaws