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.

Fall of the Uncanny X-Men (#225-#227)

DALLAS, TEXAS -- The mutant militant group known as the "X-Men" perished tonight after a pitched battle.

Around 3am CDT a "crack" appeared in the sky above Dallas, showing daylight. The downtown area of the city was soon attacked by people and creatures from elsewhere, and Freedom Force, who had been sent to arrest the X-Men, were forced to intervene.

Speaking after the battle, Mystique, of the government-sponsored Freedom Force paid tribute to the X-Men, declaring that although they were fugitives under the recently-passed Mutant Special Powers Registration Act, they had given their lives - even their souls - for Dallas, and possibly the world.

Confirmed deaths were the X-Men Wolverine, Storm, Havok, Colossus, Rogue, Dazzler, Psylocke, and Longshot, along with a non-powered woman using the alias Madelyne Pryor. It is thought that other members of the X-Men may still be at large.

The X-Men were founded around 8 years ago, and were originally mostly sighted in the New York metropolitan area. Government mutant expert Henry Gyrich said "We believe they have schismed into two factions. The old guard have stayed in New York, taken the name 'X-Terminators', and campaign against X-Factor, Warren Worthington's mutant self-help organisation. Another set have moved to San Francisco. This group recently fled to Dallas after a mutant gang war with 'Marauders', that destroyed much of the area around Emperor Norton Memorial Hospital. We cannot continue tolerating these special rights for mutants, and frankly I find making tributes to them - even in death - highly distasteful."

This is the first incident of its kind to take place in Dallas this year. It is hoped by local authorities that this does not presage a larger "mutant creep", and that most near-apocalyptic superhuman activity can be safely confined to New York, home of the popular groups the Avengers and Fantastic Four.

They got better, obviously. And Gyrich's statement became rapidly outdated, as we'll see in the next post.

Uncanny X-Men #199: The Writing on the Wall

Mystique can see the writing on the wall: it reads "MUTIES". She's gone to Val Cooper and given herself and her Brotherhood up. See, I'd read a summary of Uncanny X-Men #199, but summaries are only good at saying what happened. They're no good at pointing out what doesn't happen.

In this issue, what doesn't happen is that Mystique blows her cover identity - Raven Darkholme, assisant to Val Cooper. The incident is therefore much easier to read as Mystique being typically tricksy, and much less a shocking moment for her character than I had thought it would be. Having said that, the idea of Mystique-as-betrayer doesn't really exist yet, does it? She's just a perfectly ordinary evil shapeshifter, not a perfidious one.

Val Cooper agrees for an amnesty for Mystique's team - to be renamed "Freedom Force" - if they are able to bring in the Mutant Enemy No. 1: Joss Whedon. Er, no, I mean, Magneto.

Magneto, Lee Forrester and Kitty Pryde are at a holocaust event in New York. Kitty's great-aunt died in it, and Magneto himself, as we've discussed, is a survivor. Kitty wonders aloud about her great-aunt, and it just so happens that another set of Holocaust survivors attending had heard of her. Someone also recognises Magneto, and therefore presumably know his real name, or at least the one he was using in the 1940s, but at no point refer to him by it. Coincidence is just how superhero comics work, but I think it's worth a special mention here: this is woeful plotting for something which is trying to make a point out of how large in scale the Holocaust was.

So, while they're there, who should arrive on the scene but Freedom Force! Or rather, Lee Forrester reveals herself to be Mystique really. It's not entirely obvious when the switch was made: but it seems likely Mystique has been delaying the confrontation specifically to do it in the Holocaust museum, so that she can score some extra points.

There's a little bit of fighting (during which Pyro calls someone "cobber" - so he's Australian now, or possibly just Claremont doesn't clearly distinguish different types of Commonwealth slang), and ultimately Magneto realises he can't win and more to the point, shouldn't. He gracefully gives himself up for trial.

While this is all happening, Rachel Summers is visiting the Greys in Annandale-on-Hudson (well, creepily trespassing in their house, anyway). She finds the memory crystal thing that had been left there in #136, and laments the fact that she'll never exist in this universe. Scott is about to has a child, certainly, but with Madelyne Pryor, and not her mother.

Oh, and she declares herself to be Phoenix, and makes herself a new costume. This will be awkward to explain to Scott, who still isn't aware of her connection with the Greys, and with him. There's something about Scott Summers and people not wanting to admit to his face about being his relative.

Uncanny X-Men #185: Powerless

Uncanny X-Men #185 continues our thread with Mystique/Gyrich/Cooper thread. Somehow, Gyrich has got hold of the neutralizer gun, and plans to test it... on Rogue!

Mystique, for all that she's estranged from Rogue, is horrified by this, and very nearly breaks her cover by vehemently demanding that no such thing be done. Back with Destiny, in their secret base (which they've had the cheek to build under the Pentagon... she'd good!), they discuss what to do.

Meanwhile, Rogue has picked the worst possible time to take an unplanned holiday - to the fictional Caldecott County in Mississippi. They'd thought she was doing better, and then #182 happened. Storm catches up with her (Mystique tells her where to find her off-panel, or rather in Marvel Fanfare - so Gyrich's accusation that the X-Men and Brotherhood are working together isn't far from the truth), has a civilised conversation in which she explains her origin story for the first time (she'd kissed Cody Robbins, which put him in a coma, oops). Storm has repented from her judgemental stance as of #171, and offers herself willingly to Rogue.

Just at that moment, the government attack. After some confusion, Storm ends up taking a full-strength shot meant for Rogue, and is depowered. Forge is as aghast at this as Mystique was earlier. Storm has bottomed out.

Rachel phones Cyclops. I like the panel layouts here - the separation between the panels with Cyclops on the left and Rachel on the right, make the curled coil of a telephone cable. He answers, but she doesn't say anything, even though he's her daddy (dramatic noise! even though it's obvs Wolverine.)

Uncanny X-Men #184: Little Lost Rachel

Uncanny X-Men #184 starts with Cooper and Mystique (under cover identity still) visiting Forge. He's a mutant who is inventing stuff for the government, unaware how it might be unethically used. He's made two things of interest to them today: a scanner for mutants, and a gun that depowers anyone. He doesn't know how they work - he's just duplicated them from technology obtained from Rom the Spaceknight. Forge, by the way, is our fourth Native American mutant character from the U.S. (after Thunderbird I & II, Psyche). Which is all well and good - even if the powers for the other ones are a bit stereotyped. But there's something funny going on when we've had these 4 (of a demographic that makes up 1% of the US) and not a single African-American (12%).

The tale of Rom the Spaceknight is slightly sad, in that because Marvel were licensing an existing toyline, they didn't own the IP. So, no Essential Rom today. (Note to Marvel and Parker Brothers: see if you can't work out your differences and sort that out! You don't want the 1960s Batman series to be released first, do you?

That done with, we go to Rachel, who is watching the X-Men on a TV covering the events of #181. She wonders whether she's not in her past, but some other past - Kelly is alive, Illyana is older than she should be, and Storm has gone punk. After a brief alteraction on the street with Selene, she flees to a nightclub, where the kindly boss, Nick Damiano, offers to put her up. Since she's a teep, she can see he has no ulteriority.

For his trouble, he is killed by Selene, who is still chasing after Rachel. She's saved by our first Professor X Machina in a while, followed shortly by the X-Men. Confronted with the reality of them - and seeing Xavier standing - she breaks down. She has made a huge mistake.

Uncanny X-Men #177-#178: Get Rogue

The cover of Uncanny X-Men #177 must have been quite shocking at the time. It portrays Wolverine standing over the prone body of Kitty Pryde, claws besnikt. Wolverine, although I think I've shown he was never as much a monster as he was later supposed to have been, was still a dangerous man. Has he finally flipped?

The answer to that is provided by the first word in the first panel of the first page. "MYSTIQUE:". She's only the second named character to narrate Uncanny, and a villain, at that! Still, it gets it out of the way quickly, and Kitty Pryde is lying on the floor, bleeding with a fake-Wolverine standing over her on the third page. The other X-Men attack, one by one (Colossus, Cyclops, Storm, Rogue and Nightcrawler), and Mystique is defeated. She then wakes up in her apartment, as another rug is pulled from under us: all of that was a fake-out, a Murderworld simulation. Mystique wants to get Rogue, who she basically considers her daughter, back. And she's pulling her blows against Nightcrawler, for some reason. At this point Mystique's narration abruptly stops, because of the point-of-view shift to the X-Men.

'Crawler is concerned about his relationship to her, on account of both being blue and him being a foundling. Ask Margali Szardos (his adoptive mother), she said. [Did this actually happen in a comic - I suppose Days of Future Past or the one in the Pentagon?] Mystique and the Brotherhood set an ambush for a few of the X-Men, who are attending a ballet.

The ambush - of Kitty and Peter and Kurt and Amanda is a bit of a disaster for everyone involved, and Kitty gets word out to Xavier, who sends Storm and Wolverine, but leaves Rogue on the bench. Peter is taken out of action by supercooling. Reed Richards might be able to help but is out, so she just goes and breaks into (or rather, phases through) the Baxter Building, and nicks a bit of equipment to restore Colossus back to normal. The X-Men quickly take down Pyro, Avalanche, Blob and... oh that's it. Crap.

Meanwhile, back at the mansion, Mystique shoots Professor Xavier, and tries to talk Rogue into coming back with her. She's convinced that she only left because of Xavier's mindcontrol - which is half-right - it was Mastermind. This relationship with Mystique, who took in a young Rogue before she became a mutant, is at the heart of the issue, and it can more than withstand the weight.

Mystique offers a truce, and an exchange of prisoners, which has never happened before and suggests an interesting new course, never really taken, of her Brotherhood and the X-Men having a more ambiguous relationship. But in all this confusion, Kitty Pryde has been lost, and is found having fallen from a building, with the technogadget smashed to bits.

Uncanny X-Men #158: The Battle of Arlington

Uncanny X-Men #158 starts again with our mutants on their island base - it doesn't seem to have got a name in the comics ever - so I'll call it Proto-Utopia. (It's either that or "Island M".)

Harking back to the inital run, the X-Men suddenly remember that the government has a lot of computer information on them. That Robert Kelly is on the telly - on Panorama, in fact - scaremongering about them (the interviewer's name is Mr. Cheever. In a strange coincidence, the only famous Cheever died in the cover month). And the X-Men have suddenly somehow become "outlaws" (that happened as early as #154, according to a caption there - before the property damage of the Shi'ar arc). They decide to infiltrate the Pentagon, and introduce a computer virus to erase what exists. A caption repeats the urban myth that the Pentagon was originally designed as a hospital.

So, Colonel Carol Danvers (who's found that some of her advanced physiology as Ms. Marvel is still present), Captain ??? (I wonder what name Logan was using on his ID here - there's no reason at this point to suspect that it isn't something like John Logan or Logan Smith), and their civilian colleague Ororo, bluff their way through the security at probably the world's most heavily guarded government installation. Making their way to the target, they embarrassingly bump into Mystique and Rogue, of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, who are also infiltrating the Pentagon. Mystique is using a cover identity of "Raven Darkhölme", which is surely not her real name, and she shifts back to the blue-with-white-clothes form when she's knocked unconscious, which is a bit unfortunate. Rogue has got her canonical set of power-stealing powers, on contact with flesh, and has recently acquired the powers of Ms. Marvel (in Avengers Annual #10), which is the very thing that Carol has been recovering from...

Rather than sort out some sort of awkward compromise ("why are you here?" "no, why are you here?"), they start having a superhero fight in the Pentagon. Storm and Wolverine somehow find the time to change into their costumes, which is not just one of those "where did they get the time?" moments, but is literally a terrible idea - as a "mutants infiltrate Pentagon" story becomes an "X-Men infiltrate Pentagon", aided by the guards overhearing them use the word "X-Man". If there were ever a job for X-Force, this was it. Mystique is captured (but she'll get out - she's that good), Rogue is subdued, the X-Men flee, and Danvers wipes those files. Not that it'll do them any good.

This would have been a perfectly good explanation as to how the X-Men became outlaws, but it's frankly incomprehensible as their reaction to it. In the end Kurt complains in a thought bubble

The X-Men will probably end up portrayed as the villains of the piece.
If Senator Kelly is any indication, the government is already paranoid about mutants. This will only make matters worse.

And since the X-Men have no official sanction, like the Avengers, they've no way of telling their side of things.

Yes, I'm quite sure that explaining how you were merely planning on illegally entering the government installation to remove the records on yourself would clear things up nicely.

While all this is happening, Corsair and Cyclops visit Havok and Polaris, and introductions are made. No mention is made of any other relatives - of either their mother or father - and neither of them were John Does - so presumably any grandparents are dead?

X-Men #141-#142: "It's 2013. Do you know what your children are?"

It's the distant future. The year 2013.¹ Yes, time has nearly caught up with Days of Future Past, the story that occupies X-Men #141 and Uncanny X-Men #142 (the series changed its formal title between issues, although we've had "Uncanny" on the covers for a good long while now).

2013 is a horrible dystopia in which Sentinels - giant robots with funny hats - have overthrown the U.S. government, and killed or put in camps all mutants and other superhumans, and spread through the rest of North America. In doing so, they've wrecked the place, - I love here the "express train" that Pryde takes, being a bus pulled by animals. Other nations aren't looking too kindly on the proposed sentinel invasion of the rest of the world, and a nuclear apocalypse is about to start.

Many of the heroes are dead or captured (as we see on the now-iconic cover: expect to see that as a movie poster in 2014), and only a few holdouts remain: Wolverine, Kate Pryde (who would be 46 by now), her husband Peter Rasputin (well, they moved quickly on hinting at that, didn't they, although this is the future and so no, I'm not putting it in the chart), Ororo (who is surely in her 60s, if we're still supposed to think she was orphaned by Suez), Franklin Richards, Rachel (surname carefully left unspecified), and Magneto (called Magnus - the first time we've got a "real" name for him). Together they have decided to do something about it, by sending Kate Pryde's consciousness back in time to 1980, to avert the assassination of Senator Kelly. The only problem is, they're not quite sure how time travel works in the Marvel universe (which is fair enough, neither do the writers). Will it change their timeline and they vanish, or just create a new one and they get to experience a fiery nuclear death anyhow? That giant robots are in charge and are treating even baseline humans badly undermines the "It Can't Happen Here" undertones a bit, but nonetheless the future it presents is quite stark.

Kelly was is going to be assassinated by Mystique, and her Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Mystique makes her first full appearance in X-Men here, having debuted as a character in Claremont's Ms. Marvel #17, 4 years ago. She's put together a team that consists of herself, her um-friend the blind precog Destiny, Pyro (described as a "Limey", which has got to hurt, considering we'll eventually learn he's supposed to be Australian) and Avalanche, all being introduced here for the first time. The Blob - who was given the name Fred J. Dukes in his prison-break scene in #140 - joins them.

Kate-as-Kitty quickly gets believed, and is sent to Washington to talk with Professor X. Now, this suffers from the a common problem with time travel stories, that Ryan North identifies in Back to the Future, in that why on Earth have they sent her back with so little time to spare? It's almost as if she's arrived close to the events in question as an artificial thing to induce drama... Oh.

So, there is a FIGHT and the X-MEN save SENATOR KELLY'S LIFE and they ALL LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER. Apart from the future-X-Men who die. Oh, and Kitty becomes herself again...

This, along with the Dark Phoenix Sage, is often pointed at as one of the highpoints of the Claremont/Byrne run, in a "you, go read that" sense. In this case, I agree. It's quick and mostly self-contained, and it has a point to it that still resonates today - this trope is by now well-worn but is usually used as disaster porn rather than politically. But apart from that, it's also a major turning point in Claremont's run of X-Men, and marks a decisive shift to a world where the X-Men are actively feared and hated.

Non-American readers may not know that the title (used as a campaign slogan by whoever won the '84 election here) is a play on the quite creepy It's 10pm. Do you know where your children are? public service announcements to be found on U.S. television. American readers may not know that the rest of world does not have such televised messages, and find them rather bizarre and unsettling. So I thought I'd mention that here.

So, this scenario, of people going back in time to stop a post-apocalyptic future where robots are hunting down and killing people? Remind you of anything? It anticipates the later Terminator films, without really appearing to be inspired by Ellison's work "Soldier [from Tomorrow]". Is it basically just "Day of the Daleks"? Well, I've not seen that, but from reading summaries, not really as similar as it is made out to be. Claremont Byrne does plenty of outright lifting from film and television, but they repay the favour from time to time, it seems. Of course, now that they're adapting this into a film (see my earlier post about is - shooting right now!), then they're going to have to be very careful to avoid comparisons to Terminator and for that matter to Transformers.

1. When I originally wrote this post I had dropped to a weekly schedule and this was going to post in 2013. But now I've boosted it to daily for September as well, so you'll just have to imagine it's 2013 and laugh.