Mutants in love. Romance among the X-Men never ends with happily ever after. Wolverine/Laura and Angel/Young Warren share a romance novel cover and reunion in All-New X-Men #12.
Writer Dennis Hopeless gave fans of the two lovers a big moment and delivered a love letter to fans of old school villains not seen in years.
The Apocalypse Wars arc focused on Evan and young Hank McCoy back in time with the original En Sabah Nur.
The new arc picks up the romance of Laura and Warren which isn’t going smooth. Rich Warren wants to woo Laura but she wants to cut loose.
Thanks to young Cyclops playing with Beast’s “threat tracker” Laura gets a ton of dangerous solo missions in which she unleash the claws.
Two villains turn up, Angel shares a secret and Hopeless gives us a hell of a cliffhanger. We mean a literal hell…you could even say infernal.
Before we break down the events and what it could mean for the X-teams here’s a SPOILER ALERT!
If you have not read All-New X-Men #12 stop reading now.
Seriously.
OK.
Here it comes.
Someone keeps beating Laura to the punch. After two missions go bust leaving only dead guys and everyone wondering who did it, we see an old enemy from the original X-Factor days.
Cameron Hodge and The Right are back. The fanatics having a tanker vacuuming up the Terrigen Mist with plans to weaponize M-Pox to kill mutants. (If you’re just going us, it was revealed the Mists that create new Inhumans is attacking mutant DNA. The Terrigen Mists are killing and sterilizing mutants are they slowly move across the planet.
Cameron Hodge was a confident of Warren Worthington when he was still Angel. In the original X-Factor book the original five X-Men reunited posing as a group hunting mutants but were actually rescuing them. Hodge was secretly part of The Right, an army of mutant hunting fanatics and betrayed Worrington by stealing his fortune and ruining his company. Losing his family legacy and his wings during the Mutant Massacre led Warren to accept Apocalypse’s offer to become his Archangel of Death.
Archangel got his revenge on Hodge but the fanatic would later become a cyborg and work for Genosha (the nation that enslaved mutants) in the classic X-Tinction Agenda storyline.
Laura bamfed (thanks to Pickles, the teleporting mini-Nightcrawler) into a demon horde answering to a “Queen” when Angel joins the action.
Turns out Warren is the one beating Laura to take out these new threats.
During the battle with demons Warren reveals his new powers are a curse. (During The Black Vortex epic, Warren was “cosmically enhanced” by the ancient artifact and now has flaming energy wings.)
In a tense confession, Warren reveals the Black Vortex is burning him up, it’s hot all the time and the flames are mssing with his head and he’s worried that it will do to him.
Laura and Warren share a passionate kiss as demons and their master watch.
Is it the Goblin Queen, Madelyne Pryor? (She was a clone of Jean Grey created by Mister Sinister, the ex-wife of Cyclops and mother of Cable.)
This doesn’t appear to be the Goblin Queen/Madeline of the main Marvel Universe in the classic X-Men epic Inferno.
This looks like the alternate reality verison of Pryor from the Secret Wars series Inferno, one of the realms of Battleworld. This Queen has the same look and has her pet, a mutated Nightcrawler.
To be honest, my impression was she was Darkchyle, the evil persona of Illyanna Rasputin/Magik. Both demonic women made the X-Men’s lives hell in the Inferno arcs.
How did Madeline survive Battleworld’s destruction? Will she be an ongoing threat to all the X-Men?
Secret Wars Inferno and All-New X-Men are both written by Hopeless so it may be part of a longer game.
All-New X-Men #13 arrives September 14th then Death of X and Inhumans vs X-Men over the rest of the year.
By Editor