by Josh Powell, Editor-at-Large

Official Synopsis:
TO SAVE THE FUTURE! The Children of the Vault are back, and they are determined to be humanity’s salvation! But not everything is as it seems, and every utopia has its costs. What is the motivation behind these highly evolved beings gifting the world with their advanced technology? And how do Bishop and a now-Orchis-captured Cable figure into their plans? Find out in rising stars Deniz Camp and Luca Maresca’s miniseries!

When last you saw Children of the Vault, they had evolved their collective way into Final Forms so powerful that they made Mutants look downright mundane and then rampaged across the earth. Beating down heroes and villains alike, in their own magazines no less, with extreme (actual) prejudice, and such ruthless abandon that they had quickly remade the entire MU into their own freaky image(s)… or so they thought. Despite appearances, they were actually psychically thrown into the Yeah-Okay-You-Won-iverse so they could savor the richness of victory forever and get out of everyone’s face for a while.

When last you saw Cable, his vast psychic powers, cyborg arm, glowing-eye, almost as cool scarred other eye, and various other assets were not enough to stop him from being killed by techno-organic Moira MacTaggert. Though he was able to shrug that off only to get jumped, jacked, and disassembled by evil human-supremacist terror group Orchis, who have since been taking him apart for info.

When last you saw Bishop, he was the Captain Commander of Krakoa. Using his own rad powers and even more coolly-scarred eye to protect and advance the mutant cause and make that island nation, now a sort of Israel for Mutants, safe from the Hellfire Gala, the smash social gathering of the superhuman year.  It didn’t work out well. Orchis attacked, basically all mutants had to leave the Earth (destinations unknown), Krakoa fell, and the crazy impressive techno-organic cocoons keeping the Children in la-la-land began to break down with no one around to keep them working with their own crazy powers.  Uh-oh.

As this new chapter of mutant madness kicks off, Cable is being mind-probed and tortured by Orchis, which situation he is dealing with by being philosophical.  It’s been a month and he needs a few more days to break out and kill them all himself, but that timeline is moved up by the arrival of some outside assistance.  Bishop had been keeping himself busy and working off his mad-on by methodically going around and blowing up all 1,743 Orchis facilities he knows of, at the so-far brisk rate of eight per month, until they are all destroyed and everyone associated with them are either dead or compulsively polite to mutants.  Realizing that at current rates this will take him 1743/8 per month divided by 12 mos/yr = just over 18 years, he decides to get some help and makes hit #9 the facility where Cable has been practicing radical acceptance.  Of course, they basically hate each other due to long-standing beefs, many of which haven’t even occurred yet (time travelers) but X-times are always desperate times, and that calls for desperate measures.  Together, they make short work of that branch office and Bishop lets Cable psychically bring himself up to speed without a lot of tedious exposition, so one hopes the reader already knows what’s going on.  They then motorcycle off with a fireball blooming behind them to find a new robot arm for Cable, and, ideally, a pair of pants.

Meanwhile, the CotV have been disgorged from their decaying dream-machine on now-abandoned Krakoa and it takes them about .004 microseconds to check the head web and figure out what happened (wifi is never a problem when you’re a technopath).  Boy are they PO’d, but, at the same time, they realize that, in a way, they actually kind of won while they were on ice and decide a less aggressive approach might be called for their next campaign, and rebrand as the Children of Tomorrow, being cool to everyone and spreading cool techno-goodies far and wide.  That’s not all they’re spreading as Bishop realizes, because he kinda trusts them, and that by itself is suspicious as hell precisely because he trusts NOBODY.

Now that he has a powerful telepath with a fresh new arm (and pants) in the fold, he asks him to give him the ol’ psychic once-over for signs of tampering and wouldn’t you know, something pops up which Cable can’t identify, so he asks the Miss Minutes-type being that lives in his arm to help him out, and it comes back with the troubling intelligence that it is basically a Trojan Horse designed to make the host think (for starters) that the Children are cool. Their gifts and goodies are fine, and there’s nothing to worry about.  Move along…  Bishop idly inquires how many people besides him have been turned into vectors and now that Cable knows what to look for, he psychically glances around Manhattan and sees it is much more a question of who doesn’t have it.

Tune in again next issue to see whether this motley duo of bickering beefcakes can refrain from killing each other long enough to possibly prevail against a sextet of hyper-advanced meta-mutates who have basically already won in a world that thinks B&C are the enemies, and where there are essentially no other X-types around to rely on for, (let’s see, avg. Earth Mars distance…) about 140 million miles.

Rating:
ComicsOnline gives 4 out of 5 glowing blue thumbprints of psychic meme-implantation blossoming in the heads of everyone you know, even… YOU(!) for Deniz Camp and Luca Maresca’s X-Men: Children of the Vault #1: Tomorrow’s Children.

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