New Mutants #21 Summary

[Ambaryerno]

I have no opinion about how/why Gabby has the scars because I'm unaware but the results of resurrections aren't nonsensical. Elixir is literally editing the DNA they have on file to their specifications. With the case of Gabby, clearly they recreated the scars.

...

Scars aren't genetic. There is literally no DNA that says "Place scar here."

Gabby and Laura have the exact same DNA.

Well, Gabby has SOME difference in her genetic material since she only has one claw in each hand and none in her feet. But that's probably a result of corruption of the X-Gene during the cloning process, which led the other Sisters to not develop a her mutation at all, and why Bellona is an albino.

[Harpsikord]

Gabby and Laura have the exact same DNA.

... Yes. And Elixir edited the scars on to Gabby. I'm confused as to why you felt like you needed to specify this.

...

Scars aren't genetic. There is literally no DNA that says "Place scar here."

So? Josh is literally just adding a scar to her skin. Or Proteus is doing it. Whoopdie-doo.

Y'all are MASSIVELY overthinking comic book logic.

[cranger]

...

Scars aren't genetic. There is literally no DNA that says "Place scar here."



Well, Gabby has SOME difference in her genetic material since she only has one claw in each hand and none in her feet. But that's probably a result of corruption of the X-Gene during the cloning process, which led the other Sisters to not develop a her mutation at all, and why Bellona is an albino.

Ugh... I am not familiar enough with Gabby but I should have taken that into consideration, the whole clone thing can be as nonsensical as the resurrection thing. I would have had a hard time believing the no dupes rule should have even been applied, other than I know the whole point of the rule is just to provide drama to stories.

[Ambaryerno]

Ugh... I am not familiar enough with Gabby but I should have taken that into consideration, the whole clone thing can be as nonsensical as the resurrection thing. I would have had a hard time believing the no dupes rule should have even been applied, other than I know the whole point of the rule is just to provide drama to stories.

The question is, did they rez her with her nanites, too?

[pkingdom]

They didn't even need to clone her or grow her a new body. Elixer is RIGHT THERE. Its always baffled me that they ignore that the has literally raised the dead single handily before, with huge groups of people to boot. They have her mostly intact body too!

this is definitely an improvement on prior issues, but it still has a couple problems. New students still feel like wallpaper, and a lot of the resolutions feel like cop-outs of the big moral issues they've raised. I'm glad Gabby is not a corpse at least.

[Thundershot]

Much better than previous issues. I like that the clone thing is finally being addressed. Hope this means Maddie, Evan, and Stryfe can all return! I hope that we do get a distinction between Shadow King and Farouk…. but somehow I doubt that’ll happen. I hope we get more with Broo’s little problem sooner rather than later.

Off topic, but can people please stop being pronoun police? Not everyone’s beliefs include non-binary pronouns and it just disrupts these threads when people keep correcting them. Isn’t it best to continue the flow of the discussion instead of calling people out constantly? Thanks.

[rcaguy]

As I understand it the situation with Maddie isn't that she didn't have a soul while other clones do, but that she was literally a fragment of Jean's soul. That's a huge difference from clones like Gabby, Evan, and even Laura. That's why Maddie didn't qualify for a resurrection: It's not that she's genetically identical but has her own soul, but that she's genetically identical AND made from fragments of Jean's own psyche.

Load of nonsense. Maddie isn't Jean and Jean isn't Maddie. Simple as that. Doubt it? Look at the choices each (Jean and Maddie) of them have made.

[TheMutantTheorist]

Much better than previous issues. I like that the clone thing is finally being addressed. Hope this means Maddie, Evan, and Stryfe can all return! I hope that we do get a distinction between Shadow King and Farouk…. but somehow I doubt that’ll happen. I hope we get more with Broo’s little problem sooner rather than later.

Off topic, but can people please stop being pronoun police? Not everyone’s beliefs include non-binary pronouns and it just disrupts these threads when people keep correcting them. Isn’t it best to continue the flow of the discussion instead of calling people out constantly? Thanks.

Dude, your comment trynna silence Non Binary voices was uncalled for. These threads are a safe space and a persons pronouns should be respected whether you believe them or not. Not sure why you're pressed abt people standing up for Vita.

[pkingdom]

The entire nonsense of Maddie just being some kind of runaway part of Jean was just there to try to make Scott look not terrible for abandoning her and making it OK to kill her off. Maddie has consistently declared herself her own person and her actions show that.

[cranger]

Load of nonsense. Maddie isn't Jean and Jean isn't Maddie. Simple as that. Doubt it? Look at the choices each (Jean and Maddie) of them have made.

People making different choices if only one event had changed in their life is a common enough story that I don't think this is enough of an argument. By the way, I am on Team Maddie, give her a new body soul or no soul.

[Havok83]

Hope using Cerebro to bring back Gabby was BS bc she has no TP and there was no one there for her to mimic

ETA: I missed Martha, so I guess she used her powers and boosted them

I could see Evan, maybe, since he's Apocalypse's clone but is his own individual, but however divergent their personalities I thought it was pretty much established that Maddie (at least the one we've seen) was literally part of Jean's soul?

She is. The one that died in Hellions wasnt the original though. She was a psychic ghost created by X-man, that stole a body manipulated to look like Jean

If Madeyln is "merely" a rogue fragment of Jean's soul or psyche, doesn't this raises the question why it doesn't seem to have come back to Jean when she died on the Orchis base and was brought back via the Cerebro + clone body mechanic?

After all the implication we got across the titles is that Cerebro doesn't just transfer the memories of those who died, but actively seems to pull their soul back from the afterlife and puts it into the cloned body together with the old memories stored on Cerebro (another reason why Gabby might have remembered that Rhane was partialy responcible for her death).
Unless that is a natural process when memories are transfered into another body, but that would be a whole other headache to contemplate looking at memory transfer across the Marvel comics.

No to forget the memories still in the brains of dead bodies, if they are restored via certain means like magic, reality warping or techno-organic restoration (necrosha).

However in either case, Madelyn's part of Jean's soul should have come back to her, if it was still defacto a part of her. However given that Madelyn's fragment of Jean's soul has evidently not returned to Jean and fused with her again when she was brought back with Cerebro or previously via things like the phoenix force, would indicate that it's no longer part of Jean but has become it's own indepdent part.

And as mentioned above, any clone develops their own soul the longer they exist by themself, meaning a fragment of a soul taking a life on it's own has the chance to become a full blown individual soul too.

The fact that Jean does not seem to suffer from having once lost part of her soul, but instead seems to have "healed" it away, just further indicates that Madeyln is not that universaly tied to Jean anymore either.

Even if we go by a more pseudo-scientific "psyche" we can come to the same conclusion.

This again points towards towards the posibility that the "no clone" rule as enforced in Hellions after the team had an encounter with Maddie, is not necessary because of the practical and sensible reasons i mentioned before, but merely politics since her return would be awkward to at least two council members at the time (with the more against member still being on it and heavily required).

The same reason could have applied to Evan during Apocalyps's stay on the council.

It's another ticking time bomb overall.

On a side note. 2 issues for Gabby to come back regardless of the rule. I was right on that, but believed they would bypass the 5 by using a different method of reviving her body instead. Did they show what they did to the old one? That one has never been answers from what i could see (unless Prodigy's body farm is now the defacto graveyard?).



In Laura's case it doesn't count because her DNA was significantly altered from Wolverine's when they fixed the damage in the DNA sample they used to create her. That makes her closer to an artifical daughter or fraternal twin sister of him.

She merely counts as clone because she was made from a cell sample of him, but she is not genetical identical therefor doesn't count for the rule.

Jean got the portion of her soul that gave Maddie life way back in Inferno. The Phoenix returned it to her and they merged

[Rift]

The scars bug me, but that's small pittance compared to Karma coming back without her leg, or Martha still being a brain. So I'm like whatever at this point.

Also, one of Vita's OCs is a telekinetic? Why even bother making an OC instead of using one of the many telekinetics we already have? I know it doesn't matter, since it's a relatively small role and Leo will probably never be seen again. But at this point you might as well just use an established character. Or at least making a character with a more innovative and unique power. Half the fun with making a new character is getting to think of their powers.

[Grunty]

They didn't even need to clone her or grow her a new body. Elixer is RIGHT THERE. Its always baffled me that they ignore that the has literally raised the dead single handily before, with huge groups of people to boot. They have her mostly intact body too!

It's quite jarring how despite having all these wonderfull powers and technologies at their disposale, now that allmost all mutants are sitting around the same small island seemingly allied with another, to the point where they can make a big deal out of terraforming Mars, they can't seem to fathom anymore that they have more ways to "fix" someone and even bring them back from the dead beyond their "clone and download memory" machinery.

Remember how Kid Cable could bring Cyclops back from the dead by taking his body from his grave and restoring it with some future tech? How come they can't do that with everyone else now that they are supposed to be super awesome, can form "mutant circuits" and have a techno-organic wonder island at their disposale?

Krakoa actualy seems to have copied it's techno-organic qualities from being touched by Warlock, the same techno-organic substance that was years ago used to mass revive dead Genoshans, some of who actualy stuck around afterwards perfectly normal once freed of Selene's controll. Why can't they use Krakoa's copy of that substance to restore bodies?

And yes, there is Exilir with all his healing powers, who is also now constantly working together with a reality warper who can to turn golden balls, produced from a guy's chest, into biological incubation chambers for DNA samples to produce physical replicas of people.

So it makes no sense why they would need to produce an entirely new body, instead of just restoring her old body to perfect health.

The whole system of the Five makes sense to revive people who's body is lost (like the mission to the Orchis base) or destroyed beyond restoration. But it seems both the in universe characters and the writers have somehow latched onto it, as a sort of "only this can solve anything" solution.

The same can be said about the method of restoring depowered mutants. There is no absolute reason why they need to go into a gladitorial arena to get themself killed, just so they can be copied into a body which has powers again.

If they can produce a powered clone body, they should just as easily if not more be able to restore the original body to full power too.

The Crucible only seems to exist to be macabre and wrong and reinforce the notion that the whole place needs to burn down and be restarted from scratch again with a less insane mentality.

She is. The one that died in Hellions wasnt the original though. She was a psychic ghost created by X-man, that stole a body manipulated to look like Jean

Jean got the portion of her soul that gave Maddie life way back in Inferno. The Phoenix returned it to her and they merged

So Maddie recombined with Jean, meaning nothing of her own existence remained?

Well thanks for clearing that up.

However wouldn't that mean that the "No-Clone" rule never should have applied to her anyway?

Come to think of it. If two mutants would permanently fuse into a singular person, would that mean both individual previous memory copies in Cerebro would need to be officialy deleted, because of no longer representing the people they became?

Just some musing about the arbitrary rules of this whole thing.

[Havok83]

So Maddie recombined with Jean, meaning nothing of her own existence remained?

Well thanks for clearing that up.

However wouldn't that mean that the "No-Clone" rule never should have applied to her anyway?

Come to think of it. If two mutants would permanently fuse into a singular person, would that mean both individual previous memory copies in Cerebro would need to be officialy deleted, because of no longer representing the people they became?

Just some musing about the arbitrary rules of this whole thing.

Maddie was actively trying to destroy Krakoa. She was planning on raising a demon army so she could burn it to the ground and murder everyone. Im pretty sure that weighed heavily into the QC's decision which we never actually saw

After Jean and Maddie merged, Jean adopted her memories. The backup for who Maddie was prior to Inferno should be intertwined within Jean's backup

[Rift]

Remember how Kid Cable could bring Cyclops back from the dead by taking his body from his grave and restoring it with some future tech? How come they can't do that with everyone else now that they are supposed to be super awesome, can form "mutant circuits" and have a techno-organic wonder island at their disposale?

In that instance, Cable also used the Phoenix's energy. They probably don't have that lying around. But yeah, they should have other ways of reviving others, and improving the Cerebro system - Shaw mentioned that time travel was on the table for Lourdes, and time travel would really help with the Thunderbird problem. (Which shouldn't be an issue since he was revived during Necrosha, I think? I don't remember.)