Excalibur: Cross-Dressing Caper

Excalibur now engages in the Cross-Time Caper, where Claremont and Davies invent Sliders 6 years ahead of schedule. Like that show, it uses its settings principally as sources of comedy, rather than seriously as a tool to examine history; and any drama that arises comes mostly from the characters and their reaction to being stranded. Unlike that show it features a massive BDSM subtext.

I'll skip most of the immensely tedious details of the various alternate timelines (although the gay ogres, the royal marriage of Prince William and Catherine are worth a mention, as is the the world which is a a horrifying preview of what comics will be like in the 1990s. Captain America is a cyborg. Galactus comes in at the end to arresteat everyone for being too silly.)

Instead on Earth-616, Nigel Frobisher continues his long-running plotline. You remember what I wrote about body mod fic in the Lady Mandarin entry. Well, that's not the only fetish stuff that appears in late 1980s X-Men. Nanny would just about slip under the radar if we weren't looking for it (as has pretty much everything involving heroes being tied up), but now we're primed to see what we can find, there's adult baby and ageplay, well before the mass media coverage that that attracted in the early 1990s. The Frobisher plotline has feminization, where Frobisher is briefly transformed - against his will but in line with his innermost desire - to the form of Courtney Ross. It's immediately brushed off as a joke, but those few panels are no more an accidental invocation of this than I am a steeplejack.

Phoenix's costume is kind of a bit, too, and I don't just mean the spikes, when suspended upside down; Kitty is able to wriggle out from her boots (amateur work tying them up). But Ray admits that her boots go up to her neck. This sort of garment exists but is very specialist; typically catsuits are worn with separate boots, even in the fetish community. Even by comic book costuming standards, this is impractical. Catwoman doesn't wear one: the cover of the recent Catwoman #1 shows this quite clearly. And there would have to be a zip or other fastener, something Ray's costume does not appear to have. We know that Ray can shift atoms around to make clothes: is that how the Phoenix costume works? Did she magic it up around herself? She's three openings in her costume away from being Fetishman. Of course, this all ignores the fact that the costume was forced on her, back when she was a hound in the future, which isn't fetishy at all, no. In #16, she dresses up in a different costume entirely, to enter a tournament. This one is a bit more ponygirl.

This stuff, put together, makes the Hellfire Club and Emma Frost look vanilla.

Uncanny X-Men #256-#258: Lady Yellowface

Going by the cover dates Uncanny X-Men #256-#258 contains the first issue of the 1990s. And as if they already know what the decade is going to be like, the first thing they do is make one of their characters into a bloody ninja.

So.

The Mandarin. He's primarily an Iron Man villain, and he's going to be played by Ben Kingsley in this film that's coming out later this month. Do I need to go into his name? Mandarin is a word in English that originally referred to Chinese imperial bureaucrats. In this sense it has a bit of a perjorative usage. Because of this, it also the name used in English for the standard spoken Chinese used by the Chinese government, and also that of the northern varieties of Chinese spoken in the north. In both senses it is an exonym: a word applied to a group by others. Do you imagine Stan Lee knew any of this in 1964 when he invented the character? Of course not. Why then do I bring it up now? Because hey, it is the 1990s, and people really ought to be thinking.

So.

The Mandarin. Hong Kong. They tried to book Madripoor, but it was in use by a Wolverine storyline. OK, so can we get Wolverine? Psylocke. Mojo. Ninja brainwashing. Obviously ninjas have to be East Asian. Skin colour. Epicanthic folds, installed on a face hidden behind a mask. Psylocke becomes "Lady Mandarin", Mandarin's chief enforcer. Wolverine and Jubilee arrive on a boat; Wolverine disguises himself as "Patch", which worries Mandarin, and Psylocke is sent to deal with him. When the mask is revealed Wolverine recognises her. It's her face, just changed a bit for the 1990s. Psylocke takes a rare look inside Wolverine's head (and sees the Nick Fury and Carol Danvers inside there), a sight so shocking it breaks the conditioning.

The body transformation thing is just dropped in there as a minor detail. Well, beyond the Mojo-y dream sequence thing which reads awfully like bad transformation fic. I find it hard to believe this got published in a Code comic as far ago as 1989, before comics had really given up on the teenage market; but there it is, in front of me, in four (or more) colours. The colourist is told to draw her skin one shade darker. Betty doesn't even really acknowledge what happened to her physically, the real problem is the brainwashing. Lots of things will go back at look at the corporeal aspects. For now, the Japanification is just there as a fetish element.

And that's why it's - without question - problematic. If you had the exact same story elements used differently in a story that was actually about race, then could one make a case that it was worthwhile. That's not happened. It's a gimmick.

Still, we've not had much post-Lady Mandarin Psylocke to deal with yet; perhaps there will be some thoughtful consideration of identity (you'll note that in addition to having her appearance taken from her, she remains in the swimsuit with ribbons that she was assigned in this storyline - her codename had come from Mojo, too, back in the day) And she can compare notes with Sharon and Tom, who had a similar experience. But this story isn't it.

Uncanny X-Men #255: She Did, In Fact, See It Coming

Uncanny X-Men #255 forms one continuous story with #254, but for a change I've split this into a post per issue, as two kinda momentous things happen, one in each. The last issue we celebrated the speed of X (a new X-Men team forms immediately on dissolution of the last one, like monarchy travels instantly and makes the new heir King or Queen). This time around, we have a very significant death which will haunt the series well into the 2000s: Destiny.

Irene knows what is to come, but is keeping Raven from it, because it's the only way to keep Raven alive. Both of them would sacrifice themselves for the other. This Destiny/Mystique thing is quite blatantly being portrayed as a relationship now, especially in the bits where Irene gives the future Raven/Forge thing her blessing. (So, welcome to the chart, you two. I'm sorry it didn't work out better for you in the end.) Raven (we're told here that's a self-picked name, by the way, but any idea that it was a cover identity has been forgotten) ought to have seen this coming. Destiny's quite old at this point.¹ One day she was going to die. And Destiny would inevitably win at the sacrificial game. There's no way she'd allow Mystique to beat her to it, and no way Mystique could prevent it.

Mystique doesn't quite see it that way, of course. She already blames Forge for the end of Fall of the Mutants, where she believes Rogue died, and considers this another black mark against him. I can see another long-running plot arc starting there.

Uncanny X-Men #254: New New New X-Men

The X-Men are dead. Long live the X-Men. Uncanny X-Men proclaims what's going to happen with the costumed team on the cover.

Our New New New X-Men (counting the O5, the All-New, and then the post-Massacre team as our first three teams) assembles at Muir Isle, as was inevitable. They don't form with a plan, but because of an attack by the Reavers (who have presumably got sick of waiting for Wolverine to arrive back from his solo adventure... now Uncanny is twice a month that might be quite a while...)

The ad-hoc team here created consists of Banshee (who has healed), Lorna Dane (now), Amanda Sefton (who seems a more powerful sorceress than Magik ever let herself be), Sandy (who can wield a gun), Sunder (who dies), Moira (who keeps looking more glam than usual, huh, but still knows how to use a machine gun), Sharon and Tom, and kinda sorta Legion. (Callisto is back in the States, on a special mission involving the mansion, but is sidetracked into a subplot involving Masque, some kind of unhappy family reunion.)

They all don the training uniforms, after a brief incident in which Sefton inadvertently clothes them with a different set of X-Men uniforms, ones with just the blue X straps, forgetting any of the yellow bits. I can't get why people say that Claremont likes to use bondage as a story element all. There is FIGHTING, and the Reavers are definitely on top. With a bit of training in how to work together, they might do fine, but they haven't had that luxury. Things are not great. But Val Cooper has a plan! She's decided to sent Freedom Force and Forge to intervene. Keeps the British government, and W.H.O. on-side, I suppose.

Marvel Comics Presents #38-#50

Marvel Comics Presents ran a Wolverine feature from issues #38 to #47, named "Black Shadow, White Shadow". This was written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by John Buscema. It offers a fairly simple story about monochromatic monsters that turn out to be manifestations of some guy's mind, and emphasises the idea of Wolverine as a someone who is by temperament a family man, but has been prevented from such from fate and his own decisions. I like how Logan starts wearing the Wolverine costume half-way through, and people call him "Patch" (with scare quotes, in dialogue).

#48-#50 runs another story, "Life's End", by Erik Larsen. This is one of the first Wolverine/Spider-Man team-up stories (the first was I believe Marvel Team-Up #117 from 1982). It's a combination that will later form (with Luke Cage) the core of the New Avengers, and I kind of like their chemistry here. The comedy aspect might be a bit too much for some, though: the story is a fairly simple team up to defeat a villain, but with added fourth-wall breaking. In particular: Spider-Man has become aware of how amazingly improbable his life is, and how all his supervillains turn out to be people that Peter Parker happens to know, even though so far as he knows his secret ID is solid. What gives? Having set this up, it then delivers a payoff by having one of the minions of Critical Mass be... Peter Parker's... dentist. Hah. Well-played, Mr. Larsen. Well-played.

Uncanny X-Men #253: It Never Rains

Uncanny X-Men #253 gives us a clear direction as to how the band will get back together again. The Reavers predict Wolverine's next moves and rule out Madripoor and Japan. Instead, he'll take sanctuary at Muir Island, just as Lorna Dane is attempting to. Moira's there, as is Banshee, who is just about recovered from his long-running injuries. Magneto is visiting, to resign as teacher of the school. Rather oddly, Moira berates him for giving up his responsibility rather than saying "about time too", which would be my reaction.

Wonder who else might be found on Muir Island? I think Jamie and Terry are still with the Fallen Angels. There's Legion, of course. Tom and Sharon, presumably.

We check-in with other X-men characters over the world. Forge is ruminating. Amanda Sefton visits the Excalibur lighthouse (implied by a caption to be in northern England, by the way), only to find that Kurt and Kitty are missing. She's met by Alysande (like, how confusing must it have been in the Stuart household growing up? Sibling names should be clearly phonetically distinct, I feel.)

In Cairo, IL (not to be confused with Cairo), a young Storm is in a hospital bed. We know she's Storm because she has that multinational face (I think this is the first time that gets mentioned in text?) and more importantly she fails to show up on electronic equipment. Which is a bit of a bummer. You can't even fax her fingerprints. Not unreasonably, they conclude that she is a mutant and this is her mutant power.

And that's about it, apart from a brief check-up on Forge, who is still ruminating. The X-Men are dead. Long live the X-Men.

Uncanny X-Men #251-#252: Needlessly Messianic

Uncanny X-Men #251-#252 sees the X-Men reduced even further: to Wolverine and Jubilee.

Wolverine was out when the Reavers originally came, and they've since watched a variety of supervillain attacks on the X-Men do some severe damage. They'd better move soon, before it's too late.

Wolverine arrives back to find the team gone through the Siege Perilous. He is tortured by the Reavers, and nailed to a cross (a saltire, of course). They make the very basic mistake of leaving him for dead, something you should never do to people you are crucifying, and certainly not to Wolverine. Wolverine and Jubilee (finally revealing herself, and proving herself to be a regular Valley Girl in her dialogue) team up and escape.

So Uncanny X-Men lasted as a team title for 26 years, from 1963 to 1989, when, after a series of disastrous reorganisations it ended. Odd coincidence of timing, that. Circumstances are different, though: Uncanny is doing a provocative move at the height of its popularity. And other books are busy doing the X-Men team thing better than Uncanny has been for a while: it'll be good to see what this series is like removed from the shackles of the team structure.

Uncanny X-Men #249-250: Polaris

Uncanny X-Men #249 asks us to believe that Storm genuinely is dead. The Reavers still are holding off, due to lack of Wolverine. There's another mutant lurking in the abandoned town, Jubilee, but she's not yet made her presence known, although did helpfully take a message from Lorna, who claims to be devoid of the influence of Malice and has been calling Alex (how the hell did she get the phone number?)

They backtrace the call to Chile, visit, and get involved in a plot regarding the Savage Land Mutates and Zaladane, a villain first introduced in Astonishing Tales #3. She claims, on the basis of her name, that she is the sister of Lorna Dane.

#250 uses the word "katabatic". That's a good word. I like it. Shame about the rest of the issue, which consists of an old-school team-up between the X-Men and Kazar to kick Zaladane's ass and save Lorna. This series has completely lost its way now, which is possibly meant as a kind of metaphor because so have the X-Men, but still.

On the Tellybox: Pryde of the X-Men

There have been various screen and film adaptations of X-Men. The first of these was Pryde of the X-Men, made as a pilot in 1989. Mercifully, it was never picked up, meaning that I only had to watch 25 minutes of it. The kindest thing I have to say about it is that the animation is great.

X-Men generally somehow avoids the needs for endless recapitulations of an origin story. I guess this is partly because the X-Men didn't have have an origin story: they've just always existed. Way back, when I looked at #1, I noted

there's already a school with X-Men in training

Later in the 1960s we get backups showing how the various guys were recruited, but it is not until the 1990s and the introduction of Amelia Voight that Xavier's decision to found the school is examined.

So, without an iconic opening story to adapt, Pryde of the X-Men replicates the situation more-or-less at the time that Kitty Pryde was originally introduced, but have her turn up invited instead of being involved in Events. The X-Men are an adult team (Professor X, Cyclops, Storm, Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Colossus, only with Dazzler instead of Phoenix). Having arrived and had a demo of the team's powers in the Danger Room, she then gets involved in a supervillain attack. The antagonists are a mixed bunch of people from various Brotherhood line-ups (with added Juggernaut and Emma Frost). Except, there being one child hanging around a team of professionals was silly in the comics already - that situation didn't last more than a few years - and it certainly doesn't make sense as Xavier's actual plan, rather than a happenstance. This is where the isolation of the pilot possibly hurts it: maybe with time it would have become more like New Mutants. (And maybe if it had gone to series they'd have redubbed Wolverine to be Canadian.) But this is all we have.

X-Factor #43-#50: Judgment War

X-Factor #43-#50 is a quite long plot arc that takes place away from Earth-616. For some reason all the team books apart from Uncanny did that in summer 1989: Excalibur has started its Cross-Time Caper, and the New Mutants are in Asgard. I assume they just want to keep the other teams off-planet to make the plottings of Uncanny X-Men work.

X-Factor accomplishes this quite directly, by having the Ship take off into space, where they meet Celestials ("space gods") and get involved in all sorts of hijinks, before returning home in time for Acts of Vengeance. I have barely anything to say about it, so short post. Scott is still keeping little baby Christopher with him at all times, at least until Jean makes a telekinetic bubble for him to live in. I suppose he's overcorrecting. Really they ought to sort out a nanny, but Steve Ditko's finest creation has yet to come.

Excalibur #11: At Least We've Still Got The Omniverse

Excalibur is based on the Marvel UK stuff, of which I know little beyond which I have read on Wikipedia. As I understand it, a key element of it, introduced by Alan Moore, is the omniverse and the responsibility of the "Captain Britain Corps", consisting of multiple alternate versions of Captain Britain, for maintaining it. One of my favourite little examples is Captain Airstrip One, who is from a world similar to that of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four ¹. Yes, he might be a participant in one of the most brutal regimes in fiction, but he's still your colleague. So you can see that Excalibur semi-cooperating in a swap of Lightning Force for Moira and Callisto back isn't quite so terrible. Excalibur, bless them, find this appalling, especially when it comes to Evil!Nightcrawler.

Invariant across timelines.

In Britain, of course, the authorities have had a long tradition of dealing with general weird crap, and we have this all be managed by our first predecessor to MI-13: the Weird Happenings Organisation. It's led by Brigadier Alysande Stuart (no relation to the Lethbridge-Stewart appearing in Uncanny #218, I take it), and her brother Alistaire, their scientific advisor. They have a headquarters under the Tower of London, which Doctor Who will borrow back as an idea in 2005's Christmas Invasion (and again in 2012's Power of Three, which featured a Kate Stewart, chief scientific advisor to UNIT.)

Incidentally, I have failed to post about the Nazi train so far. It swapped with a real train in a tunnel under freak circumstances involving Widget, which is why Moira and Callisto are stranded. This Nazi train is from "Reichsrail Englande", which is terrible German (they want Reischsbahn, and that's ignoring the extra 'e' which also makes its unwelcome appearance in "Hauptman Englande"). But that's not even the funny part - the Nazi British Rail has somehow managed to also devise the British Rail double-arrow logo, which was created in our timeline in 1965. And why not. It's a design classic, after all, much better than those Dutch or Polish or Swiss rip-offs, and I'm glad it remains part of our signage even though British Rail is now but a distant memory.² Slightly disappointed they didn't try and swastika-ise it, though.

The swap is made, but Widget freaks out and there is an explosion and all the player characters vanish. Oh noes! I have a feeling we're about to get the prototype for Exiles.

BritWatch

"Thames River". I don't care that it's the editorial voice reflecting U.S. usage. The name of the thing is "River Thames". If you call it "Thames River" you are wrong. Just as wrong as I would be if I started calling those watercourses either side of Manhattan the "River Hudson" or (even better) the "River East".

1. When other kids were reading comics, I was reading George Orwell. And by that I don't just mean Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. Sure, I enjoyed those. In fact, I liked them so much that I decided to read all his other books. The school library had Down and Out in Paris and London, Keep The Aspidistra Flying and The Road To Wigan Pier, which a 12-year-old me somehow managed to get through (when she wasn't reading Peter David's Star Trek novels, or Tolkien's History of Middle-Earth). It's a shame they didn't have Homage to Catalonia, I didn't read that until much later. In 33-year-old me, well, I recognise a certain pattern of intensity in reading projects.

2. Bet you didn't expect to read about the privatisation of British Rail on a blog about the X-Men, did you?

Uncanny X-Men #248: They Keep Losing X-Men

Uncanny X-Men #248 sets up the Reavers as an alliance consisting of people who have a grudge against the X-Men and Wolverine: that is original reavers plus Donald Pierce, Lady Deathstrike and those three guys who had originally been Hellfire Club minions.

Headcount: Wolverine is off on a solo series. Rogue went through the Siege Perilous in #247 and hasn't been seen since (she'll make only two more appearances until 1991). Longshot leaves in this issue, and won't appear again until Chris Claremont leaves. The X-Men are down to a mere five: Storm, Colossus, Dazzler, Psylocke and Havok: the smallest that team has been since the 1960s.

So, since the Reavers wish to attack Wolverine, and he's not around at the moment, they wait and watch as as Nanny and the Orphan-Maker attack the X-Men. This results in some transient de-aging, and a dead Storm, which I am going to be enormously cynical about and will therefore predict will not last very long. Four X-Men! X-Factor outnumber them! All in all, this Australian trip is proving to be a bit of a disaster. No wonder they don't like to talk about it much.

New Mutants #79-#80,#82-#85: Return to Asgard

Have you ever had one of those days when all you've tried to do is get some medical attention for your colleague who is a young mutant originally with the power of manifesting illusions, which lately have been actually solid, you end up in a fight with a government-sponsored mutant strike team where you have to defend another teammate from being taken away back to the naval prison you broke him out of, before you are then teleported, without warning by a surgeon-cum-sorceror, to Asgard? Yeah, me neither.

This story (New Mutants #79-#85, except that #81 is an unrelated fill-in issue) seems to go on far too long, though, and I'll have to confess that I kind of skimmed most of it. In what I flicked through there's a nice dynamic between the ex-X-Terminators and the original New Mutants. I imagine that's why they did the Return to Asgard story now, because it provides a background for the New Mutants to show off their otherworldliness to the X-Terminators.

Wolverine #10: What Day Is Today? It's Logan's Birthday!

Wolverine #10 is a rather important issue, and kicks off what I will call the second phase of his development. In the first phase, he grew as a character, but his backstory remained mostly a blank book, other than that he seems to know everyone and everywhere. (Clearly Wolverine is a networker as well as a multitasker.)

Now we start to look at that history through the gloom of hazily-remembered flashbacks, as we find out that Wolverine isn't just some generic man of mystery, but actually cannot remember his past (if you know your Logan you'll be able to take a good guess where I'm going to declare the third phase of Wolverine to start). In this issue, Wolverine is in Madripoor, still going by the name of Patch (natch). He is attacked by some people on his birthday, and as he defends himself and his friends from them, he is surprised to find them turning up dead. He knows why when he gets back to base, to find a letter proclaiming that nobody kills him (especially not today), apart from the writer, Sabretooth.

This Wolverine/Sabretooth rivalry occupied a few pages of Uncanny's Mutant Massacre issues. As I wrote there:

In those two pages (issue #212 13-14), everything we need to know about their pre-existing relationship is lain in front of us. They're rivals, but Sabretooth thinks Wolverine is beneath him.

I stand by that. Those pages were a manifesto for the Wolverine/Sabretooth dynamic, which sprang unusually clearly right from that first appearance. If it were anyone other than Claremont I'd say it was surprising that it took so long to explore it. But... it's Claremont. He still hasn't explained the Mystique/Nightcrawler connection and that's been seven years. So by that standard, this is quite hasty.

Many years ago, we are shown in flashback, Sabretooth killed Wolverine's lover, Silver Fox. No particular motive is shown to us other than sadism, we don't even have the context of knowing when this took place (we know it's before he's been implanted with adamantium bones, and he doesn't have any claws), or anything about Silver Fox. In one way, she's just one of the many people Wolverine has known who has ended up dead (this time before we even met Wolverine).

But she's more than that: she's his first lover. Wolverine has always been - and make sure you're not drinking when you read this as I will not take responsibility for drowned keyboards - a figure with a touch of asexuality about him. And I don't mean that he reproduces asexually. He makes a show of lusting after Jean (Inferno has emphasised this), but back around 1980 he was more a soppy romantic - he picked up flowers for Jean in #101. His admiration for Mariko has been a little self-denying. And yes, I link him and Yukio on the roof; but let's remember the context here - Yukio was lusting after him and he was sating her so as to keep her onside. The man, to put in in a nutshell, fucks. Animalistically. But he has fuck-buddies, not lovers.

So for us to finally hear of an old lover of Wolverine. Someone he had given his heart to, only for it to be ripped out. Well, that makes sense of his gingerness around Jean and Mariko, then. As to Sabretooth? Well, we don't know much more about him and Logan than we did already. But I will note that his repeated use of "runt" implies a familial relationship, to me at least.

The Uncanny X-Men: A Crap Game

Brood killing the X-Men, yesterday.

I was going to try to review The Uncanny X-Men in the style of Your Sinclair for this entry, natch.¹ But (but! But!) my heart's not quite in it. I can't do a full review, just a denunciation, 'cos it's a crap game, if I ever I saw one. I got about ten minutes in. If I'd had a cartridge for it I might have thrown it across the room in frustration, an activity that I gather the kiddies today call "rage quitting".

Part of the problem is that this is a shallow reskinning of another game (probably). It features 6 characters - Wolverine, Cyclops, Nightcrawler, Iceman, Colossus, and Storm, which you can choose from. Note the ordering there. Yes, they've moved Storm (the leader) to the end. These are really just two characters with different sprites: a Cyclops/Iceman/Storm type, with a ranged attack, and a Wolverine/Nightcrawler/Colossus sort, who needs to go right up close to things to hit them.

It is certainly not any fun to play. Erm, what else? It made me wonder what my tastes were like when I was 10. I didn't have a NES (the first games console I bought was a Wii, in 2009), and wasn't in to X-Men, and this probably wasn't even released in the UK, so it's not exactly likely I'd have played it; but were the games I played and enjoyed this terrible?

And I remember what other retrogaming I have done lately, and I know the answer.

No.

The Uncanny X-Men - or X-Men or whatever you want to call it - is a crap game.

But I've read enough of Project NES (Phil Sandifer's impossible blog project before he started TARDIS Eruditorum) to know that it is of a type of crap game that is not that uncommon on this format: that Nintendo's vaunted licensing didn't imply a whit of QA. So it's not even exceptionally crap.

There seem to be a lot of X-Men games out there. I'm going to try the 1992 Gauntlet clone in due course, if I can figure out how to get a four or six player version of that going. This may depend upon how tolerant my friends are.

1. I spent a lot of my childhood reading YS. It is my default form for games journalism. And there's a tenuous but important X-Men link.

Uncanny X-Men #246-#247: Bastion of Insanity

Uncanny X-Men #246-#247 features two pairs of interlinked minds. Rogue and Carol, and Master Mold and Nimrod. We touched on this a bit in the Genosha entry, but it appears now that Carol Danvers is a persona within Rogue's head that she can switch to at-will and is quite functional as. This is sudden enough that I went to the trouble of looking up her chronology to see whether there was some story I missed where that had this as a consequence - no. It's just shifted gears.

Another thing I looked up on the Chronology Project was Sebastian Shaw's timeline. Yes, he appears here in the Hellfire Club after he was purged from the Inner Circle in #75 by the new Grey King, Magneto. He was all "you do realise this means war" in that, but they didn't even bar him from the building or anything. Huh. Shaw is proposing a new Sentinel project (the reason he became unfeasable as an ally of the X-Men), and plans a new more adaptable Sentinel that can might be able to deal with more complex threats like two different mutants at once.

By an amazing coincidence, Senator Kelly encounters a confluence of two Sentinels on his way home. Nimrod and Master Mold kind of merge. Kelly's wife is fridged, which provides him the motivation needed to overcome his reservations about authorisiation precisely the sort of next-generation sentinel that has resulted in the death of his wife...1 Rogue/Carol isn't able to prevent this, but the rest of the X-Men soon 'porting in from 'Straya, fighting the merged Sentinel, and then sending it through the Siege Perilous, to re-appear seven years later. It was babbling about The Twelve, says Rogue/Rogue, whoever they are.

Meanwhile, back at the X-Men's headquarters, Jubilee is growing bored and sneaks in and takes a look at their stuff. Jubes youth and innocence is emphasised by her not having heard of the X-Men or Dazzler, and considering Lila Cheney to be "old fogies" music, strictly for the over-20s.

This is evidently supposed to amp up the threat level, but I don't see the need for that given that the consequences of mutant registration have hardly been looked at, the X-Men are still trying to keep rumours of their death from being understated, which provides constraints enough. Still, I'll keep reading, obv.

1. these guys can't cure cancer, so he's gonna fund research into new forms of cancer, is what he seems to be saying.

Wolverine #9: Iraq

Wolverine #9 is by Peter David and Gene Colan. This makes David the first person other than Claremont to script solo Wolverine. It's a pared back story, told mostly in flashback, about a Logan (in blue-and-yellow costume) who took revenge on some mercenaries for driving a nun to despair during a hostage crisis.

This is minimal enough that it is difficult to even call it a character study, but it certainly considers how Wolverine has changed over the years: he himself doesn't think he'd do that sort of thing today. And it's true, he has undergone an enormous transformation from his introduction in #181 as a Hulk antagonist who didn't play well with with others, to his appearance in #7-#8 as a man who is an essential part of the X-Men, has his own supporting cast, and can manipulate a Hulk into doing good.

That was the first phase of Wolverine development: 1974-1989. Now it's time for the second act.

X-Factor #41-#42: Don't Feed The Trolls

X-Factor #41-#42 features the long-awaited Mutant Registration Act competition winner: Alchemy, aka Thomas Jones, a young boy who has the power of transmuting elements, natch. This attracts the attention of a passing troll, who abducts him.

Back in New York, X-Factor are wondering what to do with the kids. It's that age-old question, do you treat them as children and teach them lessons and try and provide a nurturing environment and stuff, or do you train them to be a paramilitary squad ready for combat actions? This is interrupted by news of the above. The adults go troll-hunting, with babe-in-arms, which is beautiful. There is fighting! X-Factor vs. a lot of trolls. The trolls have a crazy plan involving sabotaging the British economy by dumping large quantities of gold on it, forcing British people to emigrate leaving the country for various endangered magical creatures. Goldbug trolls. What. They'll be telling me they support Ron Paul supports gay rights next. Mind, comics are not known for their grasp of economics, and dispensing with the snark, it's nice to see a different supervillain scheme for a change.

There is fighting! The resolution is peril monkey stopping being a peril monkey, by turning the trolls into solid metal. Tommy declines an offer to join X-Factor, instead deciding to go to university to study chemistry.

BritWatch

Simonson's Britain really does make one appreciate the attempts Claremont is making, at least. Young Tommy Jones lives with his mother, Ophelia Jones, at a "boarding house" which is straight out of the 1930s.

It's sort of implied to be within eyeshot of the Palace of Westminster. Other tourist attractions that are part of the comic include the White Tower in the Tower of London (which is good! you should visit!), and Buckingham Palace (which seems awfully dreary and overpriced), and Hyde Park (which is just a park, innit). Those are all justified by the plot, at least.

The most ridiculous part of the portrayal of London is the idea that they would be building an underground railway during Thatcher's premiership. Of course, with the sliding timeline, where you end up with Korea becoming Vietnam and Vietnam becoming Afghanistan, it's presumably Jubilee Line Extension, or possibly HS1.

Excalibur #9-#10: Deutsch verwendet mehrere Buchstaben in Earth-597

Excalibur has quickly defined its mission: X-Men in Britain, but funnier and quirkier. Which is why before its first year is out it is also the first X-book to do a "Nazis Win" AU. Nazis Win AUs have a long tradition in comic comics, to the extent that Misfits did one in 2011, in its course of working through comic book tropes in a Thameside council estate setting (the episode that I have named "The One Where Kelly Kicks the Shit Out of Hitler", or series 3 episode 4, if you must insist). It wasn't quite as well-worn in 1989, though - Claremont beat Fatherland by three years. But it came from somewhere and as he often does, he acknowledges his source explicitly in the text, which would be the 1964 film It Happened Here, one of those films I've been meaning to watch for years.

But that isn't what's going on here (or anything like Dick's 1962, The Man in the High Castle). Instead, this more closely resembles another tradition, which includes "Mirror, Mirror" from Star Trek, and the Crime Syndicate of America (both 1960s again). In these, rather than a serious attempt at doing a what-if, you make history a mirror image in order to justify an evil version of the team, which each member having a malicious analogue. In "Mirror, Mirror", there was an Evil Captain Kirk, an Evil Spock, and suchforth. In the Crime Syndicate, a bunch of folks with the same powers and names were all villains instead, and decided to band together. Never mind what a remarkable coincidence it is that the ISS Enterprise happened to be at the Halkan homeworld at the same time as the USS Enterprise - that's completely besides the point, and is a misunderstanding of the genre of story being told here.

In this case we want an Evil version of Excalibur. Excalibur is very much a British team, and Britain's defining national identity myth - in the absence of any independence struggle - is the Second World War. By default the Evil version of any British superhero team will be a Nazi version. And that's what happens here. Hauptman England is fair enough: Captain Britain with a swastika. He's an English aristo, so frankly that's a natural fit (I like how the Internet hasn't quite realised that Hauptman England is very likely just an alt-Braddock). Reichsminister Moira MacTaggert makes sense, too. And Nightcrawler is German already! So he makes an excellent political officer. And who doesn't enjoy an evil Nightcrawler, eh? Evil Meggan is a bit difficult given her background, but the real problem is Kitty. Kitty Pryde is Jewish. Very Jewish. So, Earth-597 has an evil tortured ghost Kitty, bald and with a star of David tattooed on her forehead where the others have swastikas on their costumes. Worst. Idea. Ever.

Curiously, there's no Phoenix. Like the lack of Doctor in Inferno (Doctor Who, known for its genre-hopping, did this the first season it got a stable home base), perhaps this is because Rachel Summers is a time traveller, not bound by the laws of mirror universes. Can you imagine a Days of Future Past future for the Lightning Storm universe? I wouldn't know who to root for: the Sentinels or the Nazis.

Classic X-Men #34: "Power Games"

Classic X-Men #34's backup is a short interlude with Emma Frost and a n00b servant at the Hellfire Club, where Emma explains why she is not a sexist character. She may as well be talking directly at the reader.

I tend to agree with the case for the defence. Frost is a fantastic, complex, well-drawn character. How she chooses to dress and behave, and the contradiction between the tools she has learned to use and her sincere desire to teach is a vital part of that. That's the point of her, after all.

Which is not to say that what Frost says here isn't bullshit. Again, that's fine: it's exactly the sort of nonsense a character like that would say.

"There's no such thing as sexism, unless you give them power."

Look, it works for you, Miss Frost, that's fine. But you are a upper-class white woman with mind control powers. Check. Your. Privilege. If you can use sexuality as a weapon, to get ahead in a sexist world, fine. But it has its limits, as Rocket finds out in Sucker Punch (another thing that people who weren't paying attention wrongly think is sexist). I think that's a good examination of the sort of attitude spouted here by Frost. Valtyr writes of it very well:

Babydoll is dancing to distract men, and the other women are stealing items from men undercover of it, and this is terribly fucking dangerous. Sexuality is the only weapon that has been left to them, and it's a dangerous weapon to use because the second the men realise it's being used, it's over. When the music fails and the dance stops, the man notices what's happening; it's over. The music starts again, but it's too late. A woman dies. Again, later, a man is surrounded by all these beautiful women in scanty clothes; their sexuality can't save them, it's a weapon they're allowed. Women die. Babydoll can dance; Blue's got a gun.

The unnamed new hire realises this too. She knows the only way for someone like her to survive the Hellfire Club is to quit. So she will. While Emma continues living in the spaces that men allow her, even though she could do so much more.