Uncanny X-Men #287/X-Men #8: Bishop's Gambit

These two issues are both plotted by Jim Lee, and scripted by Scott Lobdell.  Despite this they tie in quite well to each other, and are basically a two-issue story split across the titles.

The main focus is Bishop.  I still don't really see the point of Bishop - I suspect I never will.  We see a bit more of his backstory (or, forestory, I suppose I should say), both the immediate events leading up to the hot pursuit of Fitzroy across timezones.  His attempt to confront a group of remaining time criminals ends with him getting his mates Malcolm and Randall killed.  (Can I just say how lucky is it that the one of them left alive was called "Bishop", by the way, can you imagine the new X-Man being called "Malcolm"? Oh god, I wrote that sentence with the intent to mock it as a bit of a boring name, but then I realised... Malcolm X).  The X-Men turn up well after the nick of time.  Bishop still thinks something is wrong with them, largely on account of their "don't be evil" policy, what with him coming from a time in the far future, well after their IPO.

And after their fall.  Our flashbacks result in a future timeline like this:

• 1992: "now"
• the X-Men are betrayed and fall
• the emancipation
• 2060 : XSE formed, based on the X-Men ("thirty years of peace")
• 2090: Bishop's time (just short of a a century)

At this point it is still possible to reconcile Bishop's timeline with the future that Rachel Summers comes from.  We can read the Great Betrayal as the same incident depicted in Uncanny X-Men 188.

This moves into a more oblique fragment about the last man to see the X-Men alive: a wizened future bloke called "LeBeau", aka "The Witness".  In all my reading, oddly, this is possibly the first time I feel that a surprise has been properly spoiled by my basic foreknowledge.  I knew this was Gambit, you see.  Or at least, I knew there was a very good chance it was Gambit, because LeBeau is his surname - but this is a name that has not actually been attached to Gambit the character yet.  In Claremont's X-Men Forever, he ends up as Remy Picard, instead.

All a good bit of flashbacking, Bishop comes around in the X-Men's care, has a quick side-meeting with Xavier and is then introduced as the latest member of the X-Men, I guess because Xavier has got a reputation of dickery to maintain.  BELIEVE IT OR NOT, the other X-Men are not terribly impressed, a fact that is not changed when Bishop accuses Gambit of being the LeBeau (myth confirmed) and being a future traitor (myth unclear).   Everyone vouches for Gambit, which is funny because although he has yet to become the future traitor (and might not yet because of how prophecy works), he is secretly an actual traitor already, as he will later be retconned into organising the Mutant Massacre.  Bishop was right!

Now, this is the part I guess where it becomes obvious that Jim Lee is plotting this issue because it is literally right at that moment that Jean Grey suggests they all go for their picnic.  I've illustrated the picnic with a rare full-page quote, to the right here.  I do not need to explain what is wrong with this, do I?  Oh?  I might as well?  Well, it is the most gratuitously sexualised piece of art in X-Men thus far.  It explicitly presents the male gaze - Cyclops's eye movements are followed, and he's almost mesmerised by this woman appearing partly-clothed in his view.  And it doesn't even make sense in context - a promising everyone argument was interrupted to bring us this sequence.

Because it's not just this.  There's more, including Gambit creepily hitting on Rogue.  The way he is behaving here is appalling, he repeatedly violates boundaries that Rogue has tried to set about her not wanting to be touched.  This isn't just a "oh, I'm willing to take that risk" thing on Gambit's part.  Rogue has only recently got rid of the Carol Danvers within her - and the last thing she wants now is another resident in her cranium.  Touching her is dangerous for Gambit but also for her, and it is against her repeatedly expressed wishes.  But obviously this is not how we are supposed to read it.  Instead, it's supposed to be romantic.  Rogue defends him against Bishop (she had her own issues with being trusted, I guess), and spends lots of time preparing food for him at the picnic (4 hours cooking, she says, which is surely a bit try-hard!)   But honestly I just want her to be able to get rid of this creep.

And then Gambit's wife turns up.  Of which more later.

Uncanny X-Men #284-#286: There Lived a Certain Man in Russia Long Ago

Uncanny X-Men #284 is more literate than I was expecting.  It opens with a potted summary of the dispute between Japan and Russia over Sakhalin.  Some Russians, and then Sunfire, and then the X-Men all deal with this threat there, which turns out to be a kind of portal into a pocket universe occupied by human-looking aliens with boring factional disputes which turns out to be in danger of colliding into our world, destroying both (shades of Hickman's Avengers), and in which Colossus is heralded as a Messiah (shades of Whedon's Unstoppable).

This is all set-up for the real reveal, at the end of #285, where we meet Colossus's brother, Mikhail, who has been stuck in this dimension for some unspecified but long time.  He'd been mentioned in Uncanny #99, as having died in a space launch accident.  In #286 we find that was a cover-up, to conceal the fact that the Soviet government know that Mikhail was a mutant.  This is not really satisfactorily handled, and the only honest emotional beat that's comes near to the issue is Mikhail's surprise at having a sister, and Colossus's genuine inability to explain the horrors to which she has been subject.  There's all sorts of fridge logic that you can apply to this, but it's just the first issue of Mikhail's "return", and none of it is harsher than the point that surely we should have had some more significant mention of Mikhail in the last few issues if we're now expected to buy it as a big deal.  I imagine half the readership at this point didn't even know he was an existing (of sorts) character.

The B-plot is the adventures of Bishop.  Like it's done before, an X-Men title is here anticipating a successful live-action time travel series.  Unfortunately, rather than anticipating something like Terminator 2 again, here it brings us Time Trax, a couple of years early.  Oh well.

Uncanny X-Men #282-#283: Bishop

The best bit of Uncanny X-Men #282 is, without a doubt, the editorial note on Storm's explanation of #281.  It says "Not quite what you saw last issue, but take our word for it! It's what happened!"  The sheer cheek in contradicting in a footnote something that happened last issue, which had the same creative team.  Such retcon.  So editing.  Very together.   Wow.   This gives an indication of the chaos that we know was going on at the X-office at that time - compared to the sheer cheek of this footnote the mere fact that Tarot dies twice - once in #281 and then again #282 is hardly worth mentioning.

In other inconsistent mortality news, it turns out that Jean Grey is not really dead, she psychically transferred herself to Emma Frost.  This is fairly impressive - Emma Frost herself had needed a device to do a similar consciousness transfer back in Uncanny #151/#152.  It perhaps helps that Frost is dead as well, something else that obviously doesn't stick.  Xavier remarks on this in #283, possibly another piece of evidence of pantseat-fixups.  But at least that's better than pantseat-mess.  Er, perhaps I had better stop with the metaphors.

Anyway, into this very 1981 situation comes Trevor Fitzroy and Bishop.  Fitzroy is a criminal from the future that Time Cop Bishop is chasing.  Actually, that's not quite true.  It turns out Bishop isn't a Time Cop, he's just in hot pursuit to wherever Fitzroy has gone, and that happens to be the past.  What we know about him (and his little squad: he is accompanied by Malcolm and Randall) is limited, but we can see he is part of the Xavier School Enforcers, some kind of future paramilitary off-shoot of the X-Men; and he has an 'M' tattooed (?) around his right eye.   He thinks the X-Men are impostors of what he regards as almost mythical founding figures, citing discrepancies such as Archangel's status for his disbelief.  Curiously, the answers to these, and further development of Bishop's background is going to wait a long time.  It isn't until David's second X-Factor run, in the noughties, that we will see the Summers Rebellion.  Bishop ends up being used just as a big man with a gun, which is probably just as well because there's not enough basic narrative coherence here to do an intricate timeline-based plot.

Uncanny X-Men #281: Telepath Fight

Uncanny X-Men #281 is the first "core" post-Claremont book we're looking at.  In X-Force and X-Factor we have seen very different takes on what you can do in an X-book - grim mercenary fantasies and powered detectivey stuff.  This is the first time we see what someone else (in this case Whilce Portacio scripted by John Byrne and Jim Lee, apparently, although who knows what relation that bears to who did what) will do in Claremont's sandbox.

And it definitely his sandbox: rather than introduce anything new, it's business as usual, as we get the Hellfire Club, Sentinels, Emma Frost and the Hellions, the Reavers and Senator Kelly.  It's practically a roll-call, and as such very reassuring - the X-Men are back as they were in the early 1980s, complete with mutants conspiring to build and set giant robots on other mutants for no clearly defined reason.

The element that wasn't present there, of course, is Jean Grey, what with her dying in 1980, before Emma was anything more than a cardboard cutout.  That Jean/Emma dynamic starts to come alive here, for a moment.  Until Jean Grey gets killed off in the last few pages.  Well, that didn't last long, did it?  Ironic that Claremont wanted to keep her dead and then the moment he leaves the book, they kill her off again.

Special shout-out to the names of some of the Hellions to die in this issue.  "Beef" and "Bevatron".  You don't get names like those any more.  Thank god.  These characters were both introduced over in New Warriors, which apparently exists now but I'm not going to cover...

Uncanny X-Men #278-#280/X-Factor #69-#70: Muir Island Saga

Uncanny X-Men #278-#280 and X-Factor #69-#70 constitute the "Muir Island Saga", which is a mess in a completely different way than I was expecting.  I imagined it as overly long and tedious, with terrible gender politics.

TARDIS Eruditorum (an excellent Doctor Who blog, and one of the reasons I am writing this one) has a concept of "narrative collapse", a threat that falls outside the usual bounds of problemspace  and attacks the premise of the show.  It's not just your usual end of world scenario or possible death of the protagonist, it's stuff like the Daleks getting time travel, or an evil Doctor from the future putting the show on trial.

The threat in the Muir Island Saga is big - we have a culmination of a Claremont plot that has been in the offing since 1979.  The Shadow King, a kind of body-less super-Xavier, has been able to subvert the minds of the X-Men on Muir Island, and an initial raid by the main team had very marginal results.  And in a mirror of Second Genesis, the start of this era of X-Men, Xavier has to go back into the series's history to find the original X-Men and rescue his next batch from being captured on a perilous mission to an island.  But despite that this is all bit business as usual.

The narrative has collapsed, though, in another sense.  This story broke X-Men, and made it impossible to tell stories in the old model.  After 16 years on the title, Chris Claremont leaves.  His last sole writing credit is #278, and Fabian Nicieza is credited for bringing it to a conclusion in #280.

Well, I say conclusion.  The story, much to my surprise given that it was called a "saga", moves along at quite a place (in fact, I spent quite some time hunting for the other issues of it in comic shops, before I realised that there really were only 5).  Lots happens, and it doesn't stop.  In the last few pages of the fourth issue (Uncanny #280), I started wondering what was going on.  There was not much time and there was still a lot to go.   It felt an awfully lot like getting to the twenty-minutes-from-the-end mark of Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings.  And then it does the same thing, wrapping it up in no time at all, they just use Psylocke as a get-out-of-possession-free card with most of the action explained in captions or dialogue.

Still, there's issue #70 of X-Factor, written by Peter David, which is billed as an epilogue, but is much more integral to the narrative than that might imply.  He spends a lot of time on the main emotional storyline to be left dangling, whether Legion, who had been used as a tool by the Shadow King, can be saved and what Xavier is willing to do to save him.  This is a good bit.

The other main salvage operation he does regards Mystique, Val Cooper and Rogue.  This is a bit of a misfire.  The core reveal that Val Cooper could not kill Mystique, even when mind-controlled, is fine, and the revelation of the substitution of Mystique for Cooper also works (indeed, this blog had thought that was obvious already).  Where it goes wrong is the idea that Mystique would submit herself to a psychic procedure to make her truly believe that she was Cooper - and to leave the key to her identity in the hands of Nick Fury.  This is not Mystique, she's more tricksy than that.  Her reunion with Rogue also rings false, not so much in the affection involved but the specific dialogue.

Meanwhile, David sets up his run on X-Factor, by having Val Cooper mention that the government wanted a new iteration of Freedom Force, although not necessarily under that name.

Not only this is not the last we've seen of Chris Claremont.  In fact, due to some odd publishing history, it's not even the last of him we've seen this week.  Stay tuned!

Uncanny X-Men #274-#277: All Hail the Chiefs

Uncanny X-Men #274 is, I think, the first issue to be narrated by Magneto. Having rescued Rogue in #269, he's gone to the Savage Land with her for a team-up with Ka-Zar and a show-down with Zaladane, who is using her magnetic powers in a way that might threaten the Earth. He encounters the mess of a much earlier expedition of his to the area, in the form of the Savage Land Mutates. Zaladane has also come to the attention of Nick Fury and SHIELD. Unusually they team up, despite the reservation of Colonel Semyanov, whose son was killed when Magneto destroyed the Leningrad

Magneto is introspective and moody in a way we've never quite seen before. The flashback to the firing squad is particularly effective - and will form a centrepoint of Pak's Magneto: Testament miniseries 17 years from now. He disassociates himself from his earlier "insane" actions, comparing them to Zaladane's now, but also is unable to apologise or take responsibility for them - the Leningrad did nuke him, yes, but he was blackmailing the world with demands to be made dictator. Another new wrinkle is Rogue's claim that Magneto hates Russians for the death of his daughter Anya, which is compared to Semyanov's vendetta. It unfolds unsurprisingly, Semyanov sells Magneto out to Zaladane, and then Fury/Magneto/Rogue win anyway. What is Magneto like in victory, though? Not, it turns out, magnanimous. Indeed, he declares his period of reform over: he needs to protect mutants (but without being a cackler himself), and says that a "kindler, gentler Magneto" cannot save them. He vamooses, presumably to take up villainry once more.

This arc introduces the idea of Rogneto. In a fairly creepy way, it has to be said, Magneto is perving on a Rogue who is not her usual self and clearly lacking in judgement (why are they killing people she asks, aren't they supposed to be the good guys? Uh No.) Thankfully the matter is dropped and then never referenced again.
 
In our other plot, for some convoluted reason the X-Men (Storm, Wolverine, Banshee Jubilee, Forge and Gambit) were teleported away from Earth by Lila Cheney to the eternal Shi'ar civil war. Deathbird is empress right now, and the rebels the Starjammers (Corsair, who just happens to be Cyclops's dad) are fighting to reinstate her sister Lilandra to her rightful place on the throne. If I were them I'd be trying to undermine the entire system of Imperial rule, but perhaps they are expecting plum ministerial positions under the new regime... at least until she gets turfed out again.) The war is not going well for Deathbird, largely because Lilandra's consort is a highly powerful telepath: Charles Xavier, who also happens to be the founder of the X-Men! But Xavier is possibly secretly evil and doing a bit of genocide on the side. Except then it turns out he is a Skrull, and so are the rest of the Starjammers! And they've got the real Xavier kidnapped! And then they free the real Xavier! And then they defeat the Skrulls! And then Lilandra and Deathbird actually do the "our division caused us to be weak against our enemies, let's make up" dance.

At the end, Storm infodumps enough of the disasters to have happened to the X-Men since Xavier left, and he learns of the rise of the Shadow King. Xavier agrees to come back with them, setting the stage for our next arc, Claremont's penultimate hurrah.

I believe this is the first intrusion of the Skrulls into the X-verse; certainly it's the first time I've written about them on the blog (apart from a passing reference to John the Skrull). The Skrulls are a race of alien shape-shifters originally introduced as villains in Fantastic Four #2. In that very first story a small advance party are brainwashed into thinking themselves cows. They go on to be frequent antagonists in Marvel: a Super-Skrull, Kl'rt, who combines the powers of the Fantastic Four, is introduced in FF #18 (it's this job that Xavin out of Runaways is training for), and fight the Kree, another alien race, in the pages of Avengers; and their latest invasion of Earth was the topic of the Secret Invasion crossover.

All these alien races were made up independently: the Skrulls in those very early days of the Marvel Silver Age; the Kree a bit later, in FF #65, and then the Shi'ar in the 1970s in these very pages. These, then are the Big Three Marvel Alien Species. Rather than anyone having sat down and worked this out, this is worldbuilding through crossover, things in a shared universe being patched together to form a galactic quilt. But that's just a larger-scale version of a continuity that allows Doctor Strange and Iron Man to co-exist; throw everything at a particularly sticky wall and watch it not going anywhere. Because... indeed, it's not going anywhere. It's rare for cosmic dynastic stories to have a point: it's just The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on repeat. If I wanted that, I'd just read Foundation again.

Uncanny X-Men #273: Together Again for the First Time

The opening splash in Uncanny X-Men #273 is the happiest this project has made me.  The X-Men!  All in the same room!  As a team!  With captions!  We have here Storm, Cannonball, Banshee, Boom-Boom, Jubilee, Cable, Wolverine, Psylocke, Beast, Archangel, Rictor, Gambit, Iceman, Sunspot, Forge, Cyclops and Jean Grey.

Well, I say as a team.  In reality they are having a massive argument about what to do next, whether they should press on from their victory in Genosha to take out other threats.  Cable is keen on that, Cyclops and Storm (by the way did I mention she's an adult again now?) less so.

Cyclops and Storm discuss where to base the X-Men, since the security basement of the mansion is a bit cramped.  Storm agrees that moving to Australia was probably a mistake, but declines the offer of using X-Factor's Ship.  Jean decides to use Cerebro to track down other friendly mutants (Longshot, Dazzler, Rogue, for example), but no, she hasn't got her telepathy back, and she is owned by the Shadow King, whose storyline is looming.

Apart from the SRS BSNS, there's lots of fun bits of new characters interaction.  Wolverine and Gambit get some banter; while Iceman and Boom-Boom have a competition as to who is more immature (my vote is for Bobby).  And Psylocke gets one of the best lines ever, in response to being asked whether she had told her brother (Captain Britain) of recent events yet.  "And say what?  Hullo twin, guess who this is.  Back from the dead, just like you!  Remember last time we met and you couldn't believe I had purple hair.  Well, the hair's still purple."

Uncanny has stopped being a slog, if only for an issue or two.  Onwards! But not long now until the end...

X-Tinction Agenda

X-Tinction Agenda (Uncanny X-Men #270-#272/New Mutants #95-#97/X-Factor #60-#62) is the model X-Men crossover.  Several different teams come together to fight an existential threat towards the X-Men, something bigger than usual.  Mutant Massacre had kind of tried this but the interlinking was weak; Fall of the Mutants was basically only a thematic crossover, and Inferno had too much weird stuff going on.

X-Tinction Agenda has a nice simple premise, and then throws 9 issues at exploring it, giving ample time to its regular line-up of characters.  It has the "X-" pun, which would go on to become a vitally important part of X-Men storyline nomenclature, even to the point where it didn't make sense ("Avengers: X-Sanction").

So, what's this about?   The Genoshan government finally goes a little bit too far, by abducting some of the New Mutants (and Storm) from Westchester and forcing them to become slaves.  This allows the various teams of X-Men in existence (Cable and the nascent X-Force, the Gambit/Forge/Banshee X-Men, X-Factor, and the Wolverine/Psylocke/Jubilee group), to openly retaliate, with the backing of the US government, and endorsement from their superhero mates such as Reed Richards.

I was a bit sarcy about this on twitter. It seemed like the X-Men comics were finally taking the brave step of attacking apartheid in 1990, just as Nelson Mandela was released.  But then I kept reading, and discovered that the ending is not just that the X-Men are able to recover their friends, but that the Genoshan regime has actually been overthrown.  Change can happen.  Life is not stuck in the status quo.  It's worth pushing, as if you don't you're never going to make a difference.

There's changes to characters, too.   Warlock changes to dead, for example.  Wolfsbane and Storm were enslaved and brainwashed (I don't know that there's a word in English strong enough for what happened to them), and Havok, who had become a Magistrate on Genosha because of the Siege Perilous, is released, and stays behind to rebuild.

I'm sure it won't last, but for now the X-Tinction Agenda is the X-Men's greatest victory for mutants as a whole.  Everything they've done is firefighting of one sort or another.  They've defeated evil mutants from carrying out evil plans (Magneto and Mystique stand out), they've defended mutants from humans carrying out evil plans (sentinels), and they've protected the Earth in general from threats.  But this, despite the losses, is a victory to be proud of.

Uncanny X-Men #269: Rogue.split()

Uncanny X-Men #269 is Rogue's only appearance in a comic in 1990.  When we last saw her, in #247, she was fighting Bastion, sacrificing herself to save everyone.

Cut to: Rogue waking up in that town in the Australian outback that the X-Men briefly hid in, and learning about the assassination of Mystique and the death of Destiny from the tellybox.  I'm surprised at Rogue's naivity here: news involving Mystique should not be interpreted at face value, and although we as readers didn't see anything that contradicts the report, surely that's Mystique pretending to be Val Cooper...

This is another puzzling issue, featuring a fight with the original Ms. Marvel who seems to be being controlled by the Shadow King, guest appearance of the Muir Island X-Men, who appear to have gone bad, and, of all things, a cutaway to Lila Cheney, of the Shi'ar Imperium.  And finally Magneto arrives in time to save Rogue...  (What's he been up to, anyway?)

It also contains a good candidate for the X-Men's worst racefail yet.  Rogue has occasion to nick powers off Gateway (discussed previously).  As she does so, her skin colour changes. (No other aspect of her appearance, mind.)  The?  Please let this just have been a miscommunication with the colourist.

Uncanny X-Men #268: When Logan met Steve

Uncanny X-Men #268 is an important step in development of Wolverine into the Logan we know today.  It's The One Where It Turns Out He Knew Captain America from Back in the War.

The story itself is nothing remarkable - some fairly standard ninja fighting, but its use of two split timeframes - 1941 and 1990 - is rare. In 1941, Logan meets Cap in Madpripoor and they help Ivan Petrovich rescue a young Natasha Romanov from Nazis; in 1990 they (the three of them) fight the Hand. It's quite clever, and it's structuralist in a way that Claremont very rarely ever did. They all get on, obviously, although there's a nice bit at the end where Cap suggests that he and Wolverine make a nice team, and Wolverine is all "I don't have sidekicks". Burn.

Even though they've gone their separate ways, this story is part of a pattern of the X-Men become more well-integrated into the general superhero community - see the X-Men and Fantastic Four becoming besties in Days of Future Present for example. Their period of isolation is ending. The 1990s is beginning, the age of the crossover.

Uncanny X-Men #266-#267: Meet Gambit

Uncanny X-Men #266 continues the Storm plot so directly that I think I made a mistake not just making one post about the entire mini-arc. Oh well. Either this is much more coherent than the last issue, or I wasn't giving it enough credit for me taking a hiatus and losing track.

But anyway, let's say hello to Gambit, who makes his first appearance in the issue (presumably this is the reason I wasn't able to track down a physical copy at a decent price, had to buy a digital download!) Gambit is a thief, who has the power (presumably mutant) of kinetically charging stuff that he threw. He peppers his speech with French phrases, here and there.

In the first ish, Gambit is thieving the same house that Storm is; together they escape the Shadow King. In the second ish, they're on the run from the same; they then confront Nanny and Orphan-Maker.

Gambit is mostly the Gambit we know and love, but a few rougher edges; he's not drawn particularly pretty-boy (bit more angular and blocky - perhaps that's just the art style, though), and his humour is not quite there yet. Storm is,  thank god, returning to be the Storm we know and love and, even though that involves nightmares of her past, by the end of the issue remembers the X-Men.

Meanwhile, the Shadow King continues controlling Val Cooper, and Destiny left a warning to Mystique of her upcoming assassination attempt.  This is our first hint of the idea of Destiny's Diaries, something that will be a major driving point when we come to Claremont's return.

Uncanny X-Men #265: Lost in the Storm

Uncanny X-Men #265 is just weird.  By this stage Uncanny is madly experimental book.  It's not even trying to tell a story about the X-Men going through a difficult period, it seems to have abandoned the concept of an ongoing narrative entirely.  Exemplifying this, #265 promises Storm on the cover, but then opens with a four-page sequence about a new subject species of the Shi'ar.   Which is not followed up within the issue.

Cut to: Storm (she has been de-aged, thanks to the Siege Perilous, and has reappeared in Cairo, in Illinois with no memory and is doing a bit of commissioned thievery; comics, man).   Rather than have these two plot threads interact like a normal weird comic would do, we instead bring in one of Claremont's odder villains, Nanny, who is still mad at Storm escaping for reasons that, in turn, escape me.

And then even that's all of it.  Indeed, there's another cutaway, to Val Cooper being controlled by the Shadow King, who is mad at Storm for historic reasons related in #117 or something.  We end up with this set of interlocking vendettas against a Storm who isn't even really "our" Storm, which I fail to give a damn about at all.

The thing is, I like experimental things, as a rule.  I'm a bit pretentious, like that.  But sometimes experiments fail.  And this tail end of the Claremont era is one of those times.  Part of the usual story about his departure is that editorial wanted him to bring to the X-Men back together at the mansion, and he didn't want to do that, he wanted to do interesting new things instead rather than get stuck in the past.

But this is not interesting new things.  As we found out in Gillen's run, X-Men doesn't need the school, but it does benefit from some baseline.  It is fundamentally a story about mutants who are being oppressed, rather than about any specific characters.  And I don't get the sense that this is to fill the gap until the X-Men reunite properly on Muir Island or something (like, say the Death of Superman was), it just feels like it's wildly spinning out of control.

Uncanny X-Men #264: Alphabet Hunt

Uncanny X-Men #264 starts with a couple of New York cops witnessing a Genoshan state kidnap squad attacking Forge.  The elder partner is killed, natch, leaving the more junior partner, Officer Jones, alive.  Jones had previously appeared in X-Factor #51, not that I picked up on her importance then.  The Genoshan magistrates are there to abduct Jenny Ransome and Phil Moreau, our escapees, who are staying with X-Factor. (Jean, by the way, is now aware of the Muir Island X-Men, Excalibur, the New Mutants, and is feeling very interlinked, but still no mention of phone calls.)  The Genoshans are roundly defeated by a teamup and handed over to the authorities, who then in turn send them back to Genosha with some harsh words.

This apparent willingness to tolerate continued existence of paramilitary death squads on US soil is fairly out of character for the US government, but can be read as something like extraordinary rendition.  There must have been  high-level contacts between the US and Genosha about this sort of thing, even if nothing is written down.  How high, though.  To Cooper and Gyrich, sure, but this must be going to the the President, surely?  I wouldn't want to be a mutant in America in 1990.

Oppressed people form communities in enclaves, safety in numbers.  Back in the 1960s we saw the X-Men find a kind of sanctuary in Greenwich Village, associated with the counterculture.  In this issue we see the start of another: Forge is found in New York's "Alphabet City", which consists of Manhattan east of 1st and north of Houston.  This is the same place that will later become known as "District X"/"Mutant Town" in Morrison's New X-Men and Peter David's X-Factor.  But here Claremont has this already, as a place mutants hide.  From my sofa 3,500 miles and 23 years away, it appears that Alphabet City is exactly the right sort of place to have set a mutant enclave in 1990.  It's gentrified now, of course, but where isn't?

I wonder where the mutants live in London.  There's lots of them working in Camden Market, of course - there are any number of stalls selling mutant-made wares (or at least, so they say, although who can tell if that pot was really glazed with mutant fire or just gas power...?), and lots of the more visually distinctive mutants like hanging out in an environment where they don't stand out too much.  But apart from the ones who got in early and bought, it's got too expensive to live round there, so they've had to retreat towards the Holloway Road, if not beyond.  Finsbury Park is pretty good for flying practice and other training, I've heard.  The sapiens-passing ones with more economically-useful powers are scattered throughout, of course, and not necessarily always in contact with the greater mutant community.  Quite a lot in Highgate for some reason.  Mutants never really did discover Shoreditch and East London, I mean, why bother, when they had Camden?

Uncanny X-Men #262-#263: I Heard You Like Tentacles

I posted my "help wanted" ad for "Ukko" on Tuesday, and by Sunday night I had sketches of the first panel in my inbox, from a artist I'm thrilled to be working with. I've posted them to the Ukko twitter account if you want to check them out. So, that's one New Year's resolution ticked off.

Uncanny X-Men #262-#263 will always be known primarily as the story in which Jean Grey's arms are replaced with tentacles by Masque and she kinda likes it.

Let's review how we got here (for I have been disregarding subplots). Banshee and Forge have left Muir Island searching for the X-Men, having heard a rumour. They've been trying to keep things on the QT from Moira, because she has been wearing clothes that are frankly quite inappropriate in a work environment. They saw a news report about Dazzler being alive, so decided to go to North America, and seem to have stopped off at the X-Mansion, possibly to check what's going on with Callisto who hasn't reported back after being sent to make sure the security systems on the basement are fine. There they meet up with Jean Grey and get involved in an adventure with Morlocks.

So. Masque is our villain here. Masque does things that are a bit twisted, even for Masque: apart from the tentacles on Jean and the I-Have-No-Mouth routine on Banshee, there's recognising the amnesiac and powerless Colossus and altering his skin to look metallic even though it isn't really. This sets up a great scene later on when he breaks through into his steel form and this comes as a great surprise to the smashees. But the more disturbing action is the one that goes against his usual M.O. - restoring Callisto's beauty.

We don't know a massive amount of Callisto's backstory yet, but it's plain here that she had to do a lot of mental work to accept her physical appearance. This is also tied in to her status as a Morlock - because of that convention of Masque altering them all. Suddenly changing her appearance back again, and playing mind-games is a savage attack on her identity, and a deliberate rejection of her from the group, by someone who sees her as a race-traitor. This book just got political again.

Uncanny X-Men #261: Wolverdickery

Hello. It's been a while. I got ill, and then eventually the queue ran out. I have decided to start posting, but on a more leisurely schedule, as I promised before! In the the meantime I've been doing other writing: I put a collaborators wanted ad for Ukko, and am very excited about the replies, and am also working on The Apocalypse Bug.

So, where were, anyway? Oh, Uncanny X-Men #261. Let's remind ourselves of where we were (frankly, at this point I need to remind myself) with a quick recap:

As an official team the X-Men are no more. They faked their own deaths in the "Fall of the Mutants" crossover, soon moved to Australia and then were picked off one by one. Wolverine got back (from one of his frequent trips abroad to have solo adventures) to find the team missing (what's happened to them isn't important right now). He was briefly tortured by the Reavers and then rescued by new girl Jubilee, who then tags along with Wolverine. Wolverine and Jubilee then rescued Pyslocke from captivity in Hong Kong. She's a ninja now, by the way. And Japanese.

#261 starts with a mercenary group called "Hardcase and the Harriers" getting a commission to go after Wolverine and the girls. These guys are treated like a first-class villain team, with a box on the cover and a double-page spread introducing them with code names and earth names. There's a special credit for their creation: Claremont and Silvestri. The core: "'Axe" and "Shotgun" (these names, I swear, it really is the 90s, isn't it), came from Wolverine #5 - and want to take revenge on Wolverine (interesting that they know him by name: wasn't he going by the name Patch at that point?), but most (all) of the others have never been seen before or since. This issue is thus immediately marked as a failure by history. It is trying to establish a new antagonist team. We never see them again. It can't work, then.

But I'm cheating. I'm using hindsight. And get this: I'm wrong. Because it's a training scenario: Wolverine has hired the mercenaries to try out Psylocke and Jubilee in the field. I've fallen for the ostensible premise hook line and sinker, just as much as Braddock and Lee have. It's just a bit of silly throwaway action to mess with his charges. Xavier, clearly, has been a bad influence on Wolverine.

This wouldn't be a late-Claremont period X-Men comic without some random subplots. Banshee and Forge have arrived at the X-Mansion on a recce. They've been combing the world for X-Men and are worried about Moira MacTaggert's behaviour. Something's changed her: she's wearing much more risqué clothes than she used to, which obviously means she's evil now. And there's a bit of Jean, too, she's gone to the same place... Some paths are about to cross!

Uncanny X-Men #259-#260: Whatever Happened to the Children of the Atom?

Uncanny X-Men #259-#260 sets aside Wolverine and Jubilee, Storm and the Muir Island set to look mostly at a couple of other X-Men: Dazzler and Colossus. They are opposite sides of the North American mainland, in familiar surrounds (LA and NY respectively), but without their specific memories.

Both of them have enormous luck: Dazzler that she's ended up at Lila Cheney's LA house, where Guido (making his second appearance) is able to tell her basic informationa about who she is. And someone digs up footage for Dazzler: The Movie and releases it. Not showing up on cameras makes a publicity tour rather difficult, though. In New York, Peter Nicholas finds himself in a loft apartment with a bunch of friends, acting as handyman for the building.

Of course, both plots have some action: Eric Beale is trying to assassinate Dazzler; while Colossus's friends are mutant refugees from Genosha being persued by a Press Gang. That, of course, has some diplomatic implications that are more readily apparent when your illegal paramilitary group are operating in the urban United States than in the Australian outback.

Both our X-Men retain their essential qualities of selflessness and heroicity after passing through the Siege Perilous.

We have the briefest of scenes to do with the Muir Island gang: Legion is now trusted enough to be hooked up to a Cerebro. And Moira is definitely acting weird, it's just not the penciller: Banshee and Forge have gone on a Special Mission to avoid her and try and find the rest of the X-Men, as per Lorna's intel. This is I take it the first hint of the Muir Island Saga?

This is the last daily post in the current run. Posts will resume at a more measured rate (like I'd originally warned would be happening back in November!)

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.

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.