Children of the Vault #1: "Tomorrow's Children"

[alliterator]

"Bishop and Cable are such rich characters, and so there's a lot to draw from. I'm drawing from the 90s Cable and I'm drawing from the 2000s Cable and I'm drawing from what Al Ewing has done with the character. I'm drawing from the original Bishop stuff, and District X, and the recent War College run.

"But dealing with them both together, the elephant in the room is everything what Swierczynski & Olivetti did with them in the post-Messiah Complex Cable series. For those who don't know, Bishop hunted Cable and his daughter Hope across time and space in an effort to kill baby Hope to prevent the mutant holocaust he was born into. They spent years running and chasing and fighting, and Bishop went to terrible lengths.

"So you could say there is some tension there."
-- Deniz Camp

Comments

[shakalooloo]

Wasn't it kid Cable that ORCHIS captured?

[alliterator]

They actually captured both. The beginning of this book explains that Old Cable was captured by Orchis on his ship prior to the Gala.

[mastermahan]

I suspect the artist drew the wrong Cable getting captured. Both captured by Orchis, both got their arm ripped off, etc. Old Nate is suddenly in Kid Nate's status quo.

[alliterator]

No, I don't think that's right. Young Cable was explicitly captured by Orchis when he attempted to break into an Orchis base. This Cable states he was captured on his ship when Orchis surprised him.

Both Cables were captured. I suspect the "Young Cable was captured" plot will be a part of Duggan's X-Men, since he started that plot and he wrote Young Cable's book. Meanwhile, Old Cable and Bishop are in this book fighting the Children of the Vault.

[blues32]

Is Cable "cured" again? He usually can't read minds or anything due to using his powers to contain the techno-organic virus.

[alliterator]

The techno-organic virus inhibits a lot of his powers, but he still can access his telepathy and telekinesis. They just aren't as strong as they would be without the virus.

[cainofdreaming]

Seems like they've treated his t/o-infection as just a cybernetic arm for most of the Krakoa era. He's even changed it once or twice. And here it doesn't seem to occupy half of his chest.

[alliterator]

The end of the Cable series shows that he chooses to be resurrected with the virus, so he still has it but maybe not at the same dose?



He also uses the telekinesis alongside the virus in X-Men Red.

[shadowpsykie]

can anyone tell me what the fascination is with children of the vault?

[donnblake]

I'm guessing entirely here, but I think they got brought in because their time dilation bit built made it possible to tell a story where death and resurrection had serious emotional stakes, and then once you had a rival 'next step in human evolution' group in play that had some obvious tie-ins with some of the other Krakoa era themes.

[mastermahan]

In theory they serve as a dark parallel to mutantkind as the evolutionary future while illustrating the Hickman conception that mutantkind's ultimate enemy is being out-competed by posthumanity.

In practice they're mostly one of those Claremont villain groups where seven guys gets names, powers, and one personality trait they all have to share, but I get the theory.

[lbd_nytetrayn]

That second page?

That, uh, feels kinda messed up.

[apachefirecat]

It does, until you read about everything Bishop found -- and consider that these are both men with a tendency to be very violent and not very forgiving. I honestly cannot blame them at all, after reading that.

[lbd_nytetrayn]

I don't know. I mean, it's ultimately hypothetical as to what this kind of thing would entail, since it's not real, but this is kind of my take on it:

The person they were before? Screw 'em.

But under mind control, where they think they're mutants fighting for Krakoa and willing to die for the cause, and doing just that? Isn't that kind of like making them a different person(ality?), perhaps a better person... and letting that person die instead, without any regard for them?

It's the better person who existed for five minutes and died without anyone knowing or caring about them that I'm concerned with in this situation.

[cainofdreaming]

Better person? That kinda depends, doesn't it? If Cable just convinced them they were mutant double-agents and left them otherwise unchanged then they still were hateful bigots, willing to participate in genocide and torture, only to the other direction.

And I doubt he had the time to do much more than that.

[lbd_nytetrayn]

Okay, I guess that's fair...

[mastermahan]

They're really going grimdark on this direction. It makes it hard to care when mutants are just in an endless cycle of getting fucked.

[lbd_nytetrayn]

Please see my reply to ApacheFireCat above for more of what I'm getting at: https://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/10220281.html?thread=230279161#cmt230279161

[mastermahan]

Nah, I'd disagree that they've become better people, precisely because it was brainwashing. They've swapped to fighting for the good guys - and things have become very black-and-white on who that is - but not because they made any sort of moral decision. They're not responsible for their actions, so it says nothing about them as a person. Someone mind controlled into committing evil isn't more evil for doing it, therefore someone mind controlled into doing good doesn't make them better.

But no, my Too Dark, Stopped Caring comes from stuff like the Bishop War Journal with its mutant torture dungeons and evil daycares. It's mutantkind's darkest hour, they're being hunted to extinction, etc, etc, just like all the other darkest hours where they were on the verge of extinction. The future is a boot stamping on a mutant face, forever.

[alliterator]

I think the difference between Fall of X and all of the other times mutantkind has been on the edge of extinction for me is: 1) it feels like they fell further this time, having been riding high on Krakoa, but also it feels like their enemies used their own flaws against them, 2) it feels a lot more comparable to the way real life bigotry and attempted genocides work, such as the propaganda aspect and the deportation of mutants, and 3) we know it's only going to last around five months.

The last one is the biggest -- those other eras tended to last a while or never really had an "ending" per se, but Fall of X explicitly IS going to end and they will move on to the next phase, while will presumably be more hopeful.

[mastermahan]

"Works for me."

You don't need to tell him that, Bishop. Cable knows very well you don't have any sort of morality or conscience.