This week Luke and Cameron DeOrdio are back for Marvel Noir Month and talking about the mysterious take on Marvel’s Merry Mutants that is X-men Noir! Someone is killing sociopaths, there is talk of eugenics, and both of the hosts are a little uncomfortable about everything. Comics!

Universes and Comics Covered:

• Earth-90214 – X-men Noir #1-4
• Earth-? – X-men Noir #1-4

Cameron can be found here on Twitter!

Check out the image gallery and notes after the jump!

Earth-90214

X-men Noir #1-4

Writer – Fred Van Lente, Art – Dennis Calero, Letters – Nate Piekos

New York City

 

Peter Magnus is a former track star and a detective in New York City, his father is Eric Magnus, chief of detectives. Peter and his partner Fred Dukes are called in when a woman is found dead with three blade marks.

The corpse has an X tattoo meaning she was a member of the X-men, a group of criminals led by Charles Xavier who is in Rikers who was supposed to reform them and taught them to crime better instead. The dead woman was Jean Grey and she’s written off of an expected victim, a product of her genetics.

Meanwhile at the Creole Club, Tommy Holloway, reporter for the Daily Bugle, is looking for Jean Grey as well. He ended up talking to Remy LeBeau who is owed money by them.  As he returns to his car, he sees Bishop – Remy’s muscle attacking a woman and saves her – the woman being Wanda Magnus.

He heads to Riker’s after to meet with Xavier and is caught reading a scifi pulp by Bolivar Trask about eugenics and future sentinels which are printed at the end of each issue.

And then we get to two pages of repeated panels and long, awful word balloons and it is bad comics.

They have a talk about sociopathy and Jean turning up dead. He asks if he knows what the students are doing and where he can find them and is forced to leave, but not before being told to look for Marie Rankin on a note – which is neat since Calvin Rankin was Mimic and Anna Marie Raven was Rogue.

Peter and Fred go to a police bar and Peter sees his father and his men beating the tar out of Blackie  Cassidy (a variant of Black Tom Cassidy) who is a Irish organizer. His father welcomes him to the Brotherhood and Peter runs, shocked by the corruption.

Tommy meanwhile breaks into the X-mens base and is attacked by them.

We get flashbacks during the story of Tommy Holloway being taught by various criminals, but back in the present he’s facing down Cyclops Iceman and the Beast who know Magnus killed Jean, just like he killed Warren – trying to frame them and so he offers an alliance.

Meanwhile Sebastian Shaw is angry that the X-men have robbed from him which is a major problem, along with the Unuscione problem. Shaw is trying to develop the city, Unuscione or Unus the Untouchable can’t be touched though and Shaw calls Magnus out for being an immigrant.

Wanda comes home to find Peter waiting for her and he points out their father is corrupt which she’s known for a while and revels in.

Back with the X-men Tommy tries to suss out what is going on when Jean was killed – which was when they robbed the Hellfire Club. When they returned she was gone.

Tommy has the notes, along with the notes on Anne-Marie Rankin who was trained by Xavier and who learned to imitate the people she interacted with. Tommy believes Xavier wanted them to find her and that she is likely tangled with someone else.

Magnus goes to visit Xavier and he wants Marie to get close to him and kill him and threatens the students.

Tommy goes to Anne-Marie’s apartment as the NYPD also close in on her for fraud so Tommy moves in to attack, and we get a flash of him getting fighting training from Cain “Juggernaut” Marko which is weird since he’s a bigger figure in the second story. Mortimer Toynbee aka the Toad chases after them and Tommy refuses to kill him when he is on the ropes.

They head over Pryor Airlines to to talk – Anne-Marie had pretended to be a cousin of Warren when he died, and Jean had a connection to a fence in Chinatown.

Meanwhile Remy had attacked Wanda for the money she owed and Peter found out.

And Cyclops headed to Chinatown where he finds a man with a three bladed weapon like in the evidence photos – Captain Logan. Tommy intercedes in the fight because he believes Logan is innocent and was set up.

Peter meanwhile goes in, shoots Remy in the head and while he is there , Tommy is also there?

Magnus goes to visit his son in jail, smacks him around, and we get the origin where we find out Halloway ran the prison previous, Sean Cassidy controlled the drug trade through the prison and normally used pigeons as an early warning system – but Tommy killed them for some reason and Magnus killed Sean which allowed him to get his promotion and we find out that the warden, Tommy’s father – had two sons.

But Magnus doesn’t realize these facts and it’s nothing explicit which is nice. Magnus says he can get Pete out but he’ll need to do something for Shaw – kill Unus and leave the country and there is a plan setup, while one of the X-men – Iceman I think, is secretly listening in – so the X-men and Tommy should be able to get to the FBI Director to stop the plan and take down Magnus, and then he and Anne-Marie bang.

We briefly see someone visiting the potter’s field at night.

As Magnus and Dukes watch Unus go in, Blob brings up the fact that the Daily Bugle never hired a Thomas Halloway and Magnus puts it together. Meanwhile Beast moves in to save Unus. At the airfield on top of the Empire State Building  someone starts shooting, disrupting things and Tommy comes in to stop Peter Magnus and the blimp they are in explodes. Tommy gets into a building and Peter falls down to the streets dead, in front of his father. Beast and Iceman get caught in a fire fight with the police while Cyclops is able to smuggle out Unus so Magnus heads to the Hellfire Club and opens fire killing Shaw and orders his men to burn it down, cutting off the loose ends.

Logan meanwhile gets informed that he owes Halloway a favor for saving his life.

Halloway and Cyclops have Unus and Unus explains how they’ve been moving gangs into areas the city council wants to redevelop to mess with prices allowing Shaw to buy it up.

Magnus and his men come to Tommy’s house and find Anne-Marie there and Magnus explains how Halloway bought Sean Cassidy’s old house which had a secret tunnel from the prison on it which was used in dealing drugs and he has her show it. Inside the prison they attack, Unus is killed along with Iceman, Toynbee offers Halloway a chance to escape but Cyclops kills him. Magnus meanwhile forces Anne-Marie up to the roof and attacks Magnus and finds Tommy there and he saw everything and she tries to claim she absorbed Magnus’ murderous tendencies but he knows it is a lie because he found her grave and it turns out the Jean who died was Anne-Marie and this Anne-Marie is actually Jean Grey which was why she sent him to Logan and wanted to avoid the living X-men.

She used her skills to fool her lawyer to get Anne-Marie’s trust fund, and she killed Anne-Marie and she’s just evil and she even killed Warren Worthington, not Magneto. She’s a sociopath with no empathy – but it turns out she’s not talking to Tommy who has feelings for her, but Robert his twin brother. She fires and the two of them fall off the roof and they die.

Tommy and Scott find them – Tommy was adopted by a well off family, Robert wasn’t and they pretended to be one person. Logan appears and they all head off to Madripoor.

 

Backup story

The Sentinels by Bolivar Trask

Sentinels are bred by the Breeders Council to fight mutants. Nimrod’s partner Rachel is abducted so he goes after her in New York City which was devastated by the Phoenix Bomb. He forces the Muties to bring him to Rachel but she refuses and Callisto the queen promises to show him the truth. Only the muties still have emotions and Steven Lang who created the Sentinels and was believed to be killed by them, protested the removal of emotions because it would lead to the removal of humanity. That’s when Bastion and his Sentinels bust in killing Dr Lang and Rachel. Nimrod and Callisto steal a Phoenix Bomb, he detonates it destroying Bastion and the remainders of civilization and so Nimrod and Callisto are the only ones left to repopulate the world.