X-Factor #77-#78: Life is Lead Weights

X-Factor #77-#78 does that thing that X-Factor is doing a lot in this run, of not being as good as it ought to be, as it could be.  It brings in two new important ideas, but it fumbles at making a worthwhile story out of them.

Specifically, a scientist makes a deeply important discovery: locating the X-Gene.  It turns from a notional thing thing that theoretically exists because we can observe that mutanthood is hereditary, and we know heredity happens through genes (although, in the real world in the 2010s, it looks like epigenetics plays a much larger part in development than we expected back then).  Instead, we know where and what it is.  And because you can see it, you can test for it.  It then immediately raises the possibility on using this on foetuses.  It doesn't mention the a-word exactly, but it does mention the rather less medically feasible but more palatable to its audience prospect of in-utero alteration to remove the X-Gene.

This isn't coming out of a vacuum, and it's not even being particularly anticipatory.  This was published about the same time that the idea of a "gay gene" was first in the news, and the X-Gene in this story is barely even a metaphor.  23 years later, it has become apparent there is not a "gay gene" in that sense.   There is no particular allele which causes homosexuality: the strongest factor in sexual orientation in men seems to be birth order.  But there are plenty of other spheres where a minority community is facing an externally imposed "cure", i.e. what is basically eugenics.  Your basic applicability remains.

Unfortunately, having all that potential resonance, the actual story that it hangs off this just isn't very good.  It's a straightforward runaround where X-Factor have to defend the objectionable but perfectly law-abiding scientist, Doctor Tucker, from the Mutant Liberation Front.  They fail, which is unusual, and presents a little grey, but it's all too convenient an escape route.  Rahne makes sure the computer is destroyed, in the fight, leading to the only satisfying character moment in the entire story, but even that is underexplored.  While we're supposed to imagine this will set back the research significantly, I'm not buying that.  Even if Tucker hasn't published, someone else will do soon.  The 1990s is Gene Finding time, and people will be finding genes.

Hulk #391/X-Factor #76/Hulk #392: What's Green and Clever?

There are several types of comics crossovers, and Incredible Hulk crossing into X-Factor here is a Type C: books written by same person.  Peter David isn't much one for Type A or B crossovers, it appears, but he'll do a Type C every so often.  In Incredible Hulk, well, when was the last time we checked in on that?  A shocking 20 years ago.  A lot has changed in Hulk since then, by any normal standards, but this is an X-Men review blog, and Hulk here now being the "Doc", who combines Bruce's personality and intelligence with Hulk's physicality, is nothing.  In case we've missed it, this is all happily exposited to us (and X-Factor) by Zack Galvin and Val Cooper.

Hulk and X-Factor clash on opposing sides in a civil conflict in Trans-Sabal, a morally dubious US ally, with Hulk on the side of the rebel Pantheon and X-Factor being brought in by the American government.  This a great premise for an X-Men story, but there hadn't been an opportunity to do it between the end of that early situation in the first few issues, where it seemed the X-Men were working for the government, and thr establishment of Val Cooper's X-Factor team.

Incredible Hulk 391 builds towards and ends with a confrontation between Havok and Hulk, which ends badly for both parties.  While this is ostensibly a three part story with the X-Factor issue forming the middle chapter, neither Havok nor Hulk appear, them having been blown clean away.  Instead, this middle chapter has more general team vs team fight, and a strand where Wolfsbane is captured by brother-and-sister supporters of Farnoq Dahn.  This can be omitted if you are just reading Hulk, but probably suffers when read in isolation.  Hulk 392 dispenses with any pretence at moral ambiguity, and avoids the need for X-Factor to turn against the government by having Dahn become a moustache-twirling villain who has literally strapped children to missiles and drugged American advisors into compliance.

He's also strapped Havok to a missile, planning to use his explosive force, which I take with some level of humour, reading this issue in the same day of the Pope's supposed claims that trans people (my default metaphor for the x-men, obviously) are as contrary to the natural order of things as nuclear weapons.  Would you believe it, he gets foiled?   This would be better if it had the guts to be as incendiary as that missile, but it's going in the right direction.

X-Factor #74-#75: Geecee Deecee

X-Factor #74-#75 continues lacklustre, which by the standards of X-titles in early 1992 is pretty good.  We've one ongoing plot to resolve: the question of Who Is The Real Madrox Anyway?  This is answered, somewhat unsatisfactorily, by the assumption that the Madrox who had had Fallen Angels happen to him was the real one.  This, though is the "wrong" Madrox, the evil one, who is in some kind of complicated conspiracy with Mr. Sinister to discredit mutant-hater or something.  Yes, for it's 75th issue, X-Factor has got as overcomplicated as it was when it began!  Possibly coming to this contextless after a year was a mistake.   ANYWAY.  Short post, I know.  There'll be another one sooner than a week, I expect.

I liked the bit where the Washington Memorial gets destroyed, though.  I wonder if I should start a list of all the buildings to have been destroyed in the Marvel universe.

X-Factor #72-#73: Multiple Man, Multiple Man, Exploring the Possibilities that a Multiple Man Presents

X-Factor #72-#73 is a bit more like it. It's a twist on a murder mystery with the main question not being the identity of the killer, but the victim. Madrox was shot dead at the end of the last issue, but then... turns up alive. It was a dupe, you see. Coming at this from 2014 and with my background my immediate question is "is there even an original?" This is the first dupe that has died, apparently. The surviving Madrox was expecting to be able to reabsorb it, but finds he is unable to. The patch-and-merge problem is not possible to solve with a corpse, and so he finds an entire set of memories gone. Including the identity of the murderer, presumably.

But then another Madrox turns up, also claiming to be the original. He says he pre-dates the events of the Muir Island Saga. This one is at least partly co-original, if more unofficial; they can (to the X-Factor Madrox's surprise) both create dupes. We never get quite to the point that they realise there isn't a difference between them, other than the path they take, I am sure that will come.

#73 touches on a social issue that hasn't really been covered by X-Men comics before: the issue of preferred nomenclature. We've had a few terms thrown around as abuse before, such as "mutie" and "genejoke", but "mutant" itself has been treated as a neutral term. But such terms tend towards the abusive. "Mutant", like "homosexual", has a more than a whiff of clinicalism around it, too. You would expect mutants as a group to come up with some term of their own, that they'd try to promote.

This is not what happens in #73. Guido is a bit annoyed with his television interviewer, and so makes up out of whole cloth the idea that "mutant" is considered deprecated by mutants and that the term "genetically challenged" is considered better. One problem is: he really did pull that term right out of his ass. Other mutants are puzzled and push back against him. The other problem is that, although this is modelled on "physically challenged", the majority of new coinages of the form "[something]ly challenged" terms are either gags or imagined usages. Folically challenged, vertically challenged, the list goes on. It is hard to read this as anything other than a joke against people campaigning for a right to their own identity.

X-Factor #71: or, a gonzo con report

Sadly there weren't any Oubliette
cosplayers for me to fold my arms at.

As I write this, I'm still vaguely recovering from London Super Comic Con, the weekend of the 14/15 March. Con-going is a very different experience now I have comics mates.  On the Saturday a bunch of us cosplayed as the Young Avengers and ran around accosting others for pictures.  It was a lovely experience, and some of the results are here. I highly recommend it, especially as a group.

I don't know if I'll ever write about Young Avengers for the blog.  I feel it's the sort of thing I should cover (I'm planning to broaden out in the 2000s and cover lots of general Avengers stuff - particularly the crossovers - because of interlinking - I mean how on earth can I write about Decimation without having done House of M, and how can I do Utopia without Dark Reign and Secret Invasion?), but it'll be a long way down the line if I ever do, and I doubt I'll have anything to add beyond what Hazel will say in her highly-anticipated mega-post (she was playing the role of my stupid space boyfriend on Saturday, being Noh-Varr to my Kate Bishop; the other of us is Clara, doing a highly-excellent Wiccan.)

*like*

I had to skip out early on the Saturday evening to get to my friend Steve's 40th birthday party, which was kind of a shame because I was enjoying the pub, but it was a fun enough day, apart from the bit where a small child misgendered me and I froze and had to sit down and have a little cry.  It was pointed out there were plenty of people being perfectly pleasant at us and me, and the Other Kate even asked me specifically for a solo photo.  In other words, the play was fine.

After the con closed on the Sunday there was further pubbage and then karaoke.  It went a bit wrong, as karaoke tends to.  I was left with a strong conviction that the food was nice, that several songs I had previously thought were OK were problematic (this is what happens when you get several socially aware creator-types in a room together), and that I had paid my share of the bill.  After the karaoke we went back to the pub, and then back to Al Ewing's hotel, where the bar was still open.  I didn't get home until Monday afternoon, after having spent the night (well, the brief couple of hours before it got light again) on Kieron Gillen's sofa.  That's the real reason I can't write about Young Avengers right now, of course.  It's too close. Not that that's an ethical judgement, it's just that saying the things I need to say about it would feel too close to exposing myself.  Maybe I'll do that down the line.  For now, I'm glad I'm in 1991.

Peter David totally signed my comic!

Usually I systematically do the rounds at cons but it was a lot more haphazard, especially on the Saturday (apparently the last Seb and James saw of us was the three of us shouting "THERE'S A WICCAN!" and vanishing at high speed in high heels, which sounds about right.)  The Sunday was a bit calmer and I managed to hit some tables and catch up with an artist and chat about Secret Project 10.  And I got this comic I am not writing about now (X-Factor #71) signed by its writer, Peter David.  As I have written before, I have been a fan of Peter David's work for oh just a couple of decades, and it was properly terrifying going up to him, even though I had been assured he was nice.  And I've  really looking forward to reading this particular issue of this comic throughout the latter stages of the Claremont era.  Much as I was dreading X-Force, Peter David's X-Factor, that was going to make it worthwhile.

I've been writing this post for an hour now, and I still haven't read the issue.  It's sitting in my scanner.  This is new.  I've never been too nervous to read a comic before.  What if it sucks?  There's nothing for it.  There's only so many cups of tea I can make.  There's only so many games of 2048 I can play. (That bit's not true, I expect I could do that FOREVER.)  I'm going to have to sit down and get cracking.  You know what, I'll liveblog this, page by page.

---

Page 1: One big panel of Guido saying "excuse me, you got any grey poupon?" to an unspecified person. I'm not quite sure what grey poupon is.  Googling tells me that it is a brand of mustard known in the United States.  But what sort of brand?  High-end, low-end?  This is important.  It's owned by Kraft, so I'm guessing not exactly gourmet.

The credits box reminds me that I don't talk about artists enough.  This issue is pencilled by Larry Stroman and inked by Al Milgrom.  Now that I've started to draw faces a bit I am starting to actually look at the strokes in comic art properly in a technical sense rather than just the overall aesthetic, a mental breakthrough like that week in 2004 when I suddenly started hearing individual parts in music.

Guido's face here is drawn very stylised, with a radiator grill for a mouth, his pink face and hand amid a sea of purple that represents his shirt but extends far beyond the area that is plausibly cloth.  Is that the background?  What's going on here.  We'll see on...

Page 2:

But before I get to page 2 I am interrupted by a twitter notification.  Charlotte, who is another of our little Young Avengers collective, is replying about my suggestion that she use a MUD client for talking to MicroMUSE.  I try and log into the MUD myself, with my own client, just to check that it can work.  It does.  I muse (see what I did there) for a bit about the energy I was feeling when I wrote that versus the energy I have for comics now.  It's similar, but I'm in a better, more driven and more capable place, now.  MUDs and comics are at once almost opposite ends of the cultural spectrum, but they share commonalities.  MUDs are basically the ultimate in indie games - back in the 1990s everyone was making their own MUDs, and only a few ever were commercialised.  Everyone can make their own comics and even the biggest event book at Marvel or DC still has a bit of an artisan feel to it, because it's predominantly the work of a handful of people.

MUD writing was fun, but I was never able to achieve the intellectual conversation I wanted out of them, and I drifted away from them in around 2003/2004, about the time I got into Wikipedia.  I am still proud of the body of work I produced for the Cryosphere, and it pains me that it is so inaccessible.  And one day the worldbuilding (my spin on a mashup of 2300 AD and Warren Ellis's Ministry of Space, something that I never got around to reading until 2005) is going to emerge in a comic, probably the one about the stupid space captain.  I try to persuade Charlotte to log in to the Cryosphere, but she is resistant.  Fair enough, one MUD at a time.

The first panel of page 2 answers my question about Guido.  He is being drawn huge and that colour fill really was supposed to be his shirt.  He's with Lorna Dane and another chap, and they are having a bit of a back and forth in a style that is instantly familiar, because David is still writing those characters just like that.

Lorna is worried about the guy they are bringing in to head this new X-Factor.  This would be the new incarnation of Freedom Force that #70 trailed, then, but that link is implied, so far.

Page 3:

Four-panel page, the most we've had so far, with only a tiny bit of dialogue on each page really, compared to say, Claremont.  You can tell who says each line even without the attribution of the speech bubbles.  The second and fourth panels are head-shots of Lorna Dane (Polaris) from unusual angles - one showing her chin and jaw, and the other a profile from below.

Lorna is worried about Alex Summers (Havok) being the team leader.  Not because he's her ex, but because she doesn't know what she is, they've been mind-controlled and that so much, what's even is the state of affairs of their relationship?

Page 4:

Guido hits on Lorna in that way he does.  Eew.

Page 5:

And the other person at the table is named as Madrox (in case you couldn't tell before from the knocking and duplicating).  Jamie Madrox is the main character in the 00s David's X-Factor.  Will he arrive as well-constructed as Guido has?

Something is going on with the jars. Particularly the mayo.

Page 6:

And now Val Cooper is in Genosha, recruiting Havok.  He'd ended up rebuilding Genosha after the X-Tinction Agenda crossover.  In having Cooper the linkage with the new Freedom Force is made explicit.   Alex is a hard sell.  Cooper probably isn't helping by denigrating something he really believes in rather than trying to

Page 7-8:

Wolfsbane (Rahne Sinclair) saves Havok from a falling girder.  Our first action scene.  Val uses it as a mind-game.  Did she set it up?

Page 9-10

Change of scene, and we're with Quicksilver.  Quicksilver who has of course, deep Young Avengers connections, being the template for Speed (Tommy).  He's looking for the X-Factor HQ in Washington (not New York!), and being impatient.

Page 11/13

Alex's brother Scott Summers arrives, with Professor Charles Xavier, to persuade Alex personally.  Alex is a very reluctant leader here.  More recently, he is reluctantly persuaded to lead the Uncanny Avengers team, in the wake of Xavier's death and Cyclops's rebellion; they argue that he would be a good example for human/mutant relations, something that apparently will stick with him.

Page 14-15

Back at the HQ.  Pietro has arrived and is in a bit of a state.  Lorna is surprised to see him not on the West Coast with the Avengers; has she not heard of his power?

Page 15 (right) is odd.  It is out of place.  It is perhaps funny if you know the context, but what is essentially a launch of a comic it is a terrible mis-step.  I suspect I only understand it because it came up in a CBR column.  What appears to be going on here is they're trying to shut down the "Lockjaw is a sentient being and an Inhuman who was just really quite badly mutated by the Terrigen mists" concept.  That I probably need to explain what Lockjaw and Terrigen is, because they've never really come up before, demonstrates the lack of relevancy to this issue.

But in context, it's Quicksilver in a bit of an addled state, so it manages to get away with it very slightly.  His power, in case you are wondering from the page, is killing him.

Page 16

Alex and Rahne on the plane to the US.  Looking forward to the future and considering their team-mates.

Page 17-19

Pietro clarifies exactly what he means. Using his power is ageing him.  He is being blackmailed, of sorts (well, taunted anonymously by postcard with no specific demands, but eh.)  This smells a bit.

We get the punchline on the mayo jar (not the mustard jar, oddly... I'd have made it the mustard).  They've all used their powers to try and open it, and in the end Val Cooper manages it by "rap[ping] it a few times."

Page 20-22

EXCEPT it turns out that Madrox made a fake jar with remote control lock as a practical joke.  This is not the 2005 Madrox, is it?  The animosity between Multiple Man and Quicksilver starts as... a series of practical jokes???  I did not see that coming.

And then someone shoots him.  Who?  We just don't know.

---

Steve links the portals. Don't ask.

I can't quite call this a disappointment. I am going to keep reading, for sure. We can see the pieces, even though it's in fragments. But it's not a story, nor even really the start of one. And there's no sign of David being about to provide us with a fresh new look at mutants, at what that can be a metaphor for. Can he do that? Absolutely, we can tell that from his work on the Hulk. Is he going to? We shall see...

Now, it's getting on for 3.30pm and I've been writing about this comic for several hours. I didn't really have lunch because it would have felt like procrastinating. I'm heading into town for... comics, and then to Steve's house to ninja-decorate everywhere with tiny cakes for his birthday.

---

Did I mention I'd started drawing? I did the pencils
in about half an hour, then inked and shaded it while
Clara and Hazel discussed Sarah Ditton's recent article,
which now, god help me, I am reading.
Let me assure you, I am not doing it for the boys.

I'm back in the house at about 9.30pm and am now frying lamb and potatoes.  I was unexpectedly diverted via the pub, which Hazel summoned a few of us to at short notice, and which I'm now not able to go back to before they leave.  I hope, with all my heart, that we cheered her up a bit.

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!

X-Factor #65-#68: The End is Nigh

X-Factor #65-#68 is a postscript to an era. All the X-Men reunited as One Big Team after the X-Tinction Agenda saga, but the titles are proving resistant to actually doing anything with this yet. While the X-Men proper are in Uncanny dealing with the Xavier situation, the remaining five original mutants remain in New York, having one last adventure as X-Factor.

X-Factor - this iteration of it anyway - had to end like this. The original premise was the five of them reunited again to fight mutant problems in New York City. Along the way they lost their original shtick of being fake mutant hunters and in its place acquired a fuck-off massive spaceship in the city.

Now that the X-Men are gathering again, now that the construction crews in Westchester are readying their pencils and inks, we have no place for Ship. Fortunately Ship came with its own kill switch. It came by way of Apocalypse, and X-Factor have never satisfactorily understood it. It is this vulnerable to a large storyline involving him. But it has to be a big story - perhaps his biggest - if we are to have such a big status quo change as a result. The way it sort of manages that is by throwing crossovers at the page. First Avengers (briefly) and then, more substantially, the Inhumans.

Ah, the Inhumans. Again, a major part of the Marvel cosmogony that we are only talking about as we get to the 1990s. If they have crossed over with the X-Men before it had been in other pages. Our exposition on them comes courtesy of Beast, who would have worked with them before (perhaps fought them) during his time on the Avengers. Beast's time on the Avengers has been somewhat of an ignored point as far as this series goes - but then, X-Factor has always been a contradiction. A team of renegade outlaws funded by a well-connected millionaire, and staffed by said millionaire, a respected former member of the most important superhero team, an accountant, and a woman who had been brought back from the dead by the collective efforts of not just the Avengers and the Fantastic Four. They've had their losses - Angel in particular, but this is a team of winners who have been befallen by circumstances, not the bunch of misfits that X-Men wants to be.

The Inhumans are what the X-Men tend towards. Whereas Cyclops acts like the king of the mutants (with Jean his Red Queen), the Inhumans are explicitly led by their monarch, Black Bolt or, to give him his full name, Blackagar Boltagon (that never gets old). Like the mutants the Inhumans are humans plus: in the case of the mutants this arises spontaneously (or so we think). For the Inhumans it is a combination of long-ago genetic manipulation by the Kree, combined with activation by the terrigen mist. There are other differences. The Inhumans are a race, a distinct group, as opposed to the distributed minority that the mutants form. The Inhumans have a royal family formed by blood, whereas the X-Men are the ultimate in found family.

In this story, the X-Men are trying to make a transition to blood family. This is in the form of Baby X, Nathan Christopher, the son son of Cyclops (in truth) and Marvel Girl (in spirit if not in literal truth). If he is raised to adulthood without major trauma they have succeeded. But also at that point the X-Men is if not over them certainly then this generation of characters are no longer usable in the same way. This is something the X-books are still not ready to do, even in 2014, although they are perhaps the closest of all of Marvel's line to allowing it.

Scott's eventual assumption of the role he had pretended to take in the X-Terminators is many years down the line, but we can see the seed of it here, as Baby X, who had been terminally infected by Apocalypse, is taken into the future to survive. Coming to it over twenty years later, we know he'll become Cable, and he'll raise another child in the future in turn, who will return as a messiah. None of this is planned yet (well, perhaps Cable=Baby X), but the story is very forward-looking. The last dialogue spoken in #68 (other than by the Watcher), is by Scott, to Charlotte Jones:

You're wrong, sergeant. It hurts. It always will. More than I could put words to. But the dream that bound us all together - X-Factor and before us the X-Men - was based on hope.

(their emphasis) Hope is coming.

X-Factor #63-#64: Drake out of Hell

X-Factor #63-#64 is a massive tonal shift from the doom-soaked epic of the X-Tinction agenda.  Instead we have a happy light story about the abduction of Opal,  Bobby's lover, by her blood grandfather, who turns out to be the head of a major Japanese crime syndicate. 

They the the snatch right there while Bobby is watching, but he can't do a thing to stop them (well, no successful thing anyway).  Although he is all "this is something I have to [do myself]", he is persuaded to allow the rest of X-Factor to come along for the first half, and also relies upon the help of Mariko, Wolverine's former flame and head of a rival Japanese crime syndicate.  It helps to have the right friends. (X-Men, man!)

When this was a Wolverine story, it was stained in blood and angst. Because it's Iceman, there's a limit to that: Opal's kidnapper is being explicitly generous with the terms of her abduction, and she even gets to pick which one of the five technically-enhanced goons (called - get this - "cyberpunks") he will force her to marry.  Isn't that charming, it's almost like a romantic comedy - especially with Hiro, the most well-sketched of them.  He didn't always want to be a cyberpunk,  you know, he has a poet's soul.

Opal gets some good bits, although they are scarce.  She is openly defiant initially, but then realises playing along might help, bidding her time until she can execute her plan.  A plan, which sadly, turns out to not involve any ass-kicking by her - just screaming for help at the right moment and hoping.  But at great personal risk.  It's agency, of a kind.

Bobby is not the wisest of the X-Men (hardly, it must be admitted, a high bar), and ends up in a a solo fight with this Hiro, having both agreed not to useI should hate this comic.  I wonder why I don't. their powers.  Love can make you do all sorts of things you might not have when you're sober, it turns out.  Bobby takes a pummelling  and Hiro somehow realises that he's not really deactivated his powers, they were built in.  For a minion of a major gangster, he's not a bad sort, so he lets the crazy kids go.  And only hours after he had been scaring her into marrying him.  Isn't that sweet?  

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.

X-Factor #56-#59: Archangel vs Ravens

X-Factor #56-#58 reminds me why I started reading the X-Men.

Archangel is still suffering the mental ill-effects from being poisoned by actually, I don't remember, but never mind that. He's a one-man vigilante squad who makes Batman look like a toddler with dimples and a cute hat. This results in an awed but not entirely positive attitude from local press. The comic asks some serious questions like: to what extent do Archangel's fellow mutants have a special responsibility to clean up, or to stop him, and about the ethics of press coverage.

This is all played out in the background of a tightly-plotted Archangel plot: he is is targetted by a new villain group known as the Ravens (introduced before but I seem to have skipped that issue, oops). These are a kind of vampiristic circle - Crimson sets up one of their number to be killed by Archangel, which leaves an opening to bring him in. Given how bad a run of it Archangel has had lately, the danger is palpable, and that he escapes, and is even released from the effects of the poison, is a happy moment indeed. Like many of us, Warren might never be properly right, but he's healing, and that's important.

X-Factor #55: Vera

X-Factor #55 is the first issue to be written by Peter David! But other than that it is not a forward-looking issue in any sense: it features another couple of blasts from the pasts in the persons of Mesmero and Vera. Mesmero hasn't been seen in an X-book since he made all the X-Men work at a carnival, although he has made other appearances, most recently in Alpha Flight #43, and Vera Cantor was last seen in X-Factor #8.

Unsurprisingly given that Mesmero and Vera are in this, the plot is that Mesmero has brainwashed Vera, to mess with Hank. This was apparently commissioned by Infectia, for reasons which I am sure are to be made clear in a couple of issues' time. It's a fairly light story, and is presumably a fill-in.

According to the Chronology Project, Vera Cantor hasn't been seen since this issue, which is a shocking oversight. Because of this I was half-expecting her to be killed in this issue (just as Candy was gotten rid of as a plot point), but no, she survives and returns to her life as a school teacher. That was a bit surprising. But in fact, it shouldn't be: the X-Men's original non-mutant supporting cast has been gradually phased out over the years: Candy is dead, Zelda has already made her last appearance, Stevie Hunter made no appearances between early 1987 and late 1990.

This is a general ongoing heroification or dropping of non-superhero characters on superhero books (as James Hunt pointed out). This is perhaps clearest in what has happened to the Hulk supporting cast over the years: the Rosses are now Hulks too, and Rick Jones is A-Bomb. But it's also a bit political: by 2013 X-Men is no longer interested with non-mutant allies: it's about mutants doing it for themselves. It would have been incongruous to have Vera pop up during, say, the latter part of Gillen's run. But now, an opportunity has presented itself: Bendis's All New X-Men seems the perfect opportunity to revisit Vera (and Zelda, for that matter - who inexplicably failed to appear in a storyline about All Iceman's Exes in Astonishing recently). What say you, Bendis?

X-Factor #51-#53: Blasts from the Past

X-Factor #51-#53 is a welcome return to street level for a series that has spent quite a lot of time in space lately. The Ship has landed them right back in New York, on their old plot, which I welcome, even if the burghers of New York do not. After having a press conference about their zoning violation, Scott and Jean and Hank and Trish go on a double-date at a fancy restaurant where they are attacked by a plague of insects launched by The Locust, of all people, one of the Thomas/Roth run's more memorable but less successful villains. It appears that Hank and Trish are an Item, so I'll mark them on the chart as from #52. It seems, by the way, that X-Factor's identities are completely public knowledge now. Scott uses his real name in a restaurant and people recognise them in civvies. The place gets trashed, but it's fine, there's talk of "superhero insurance", and it's just part of the hazards of being in New York: like you accept the possibility of a quake if you live in California. Locust's attack ties in to their celebrity, too: he got agitated by recognising X-Factor on the tellybox. Following this, Scott proposes to Jean, and she turns him down. Which is fair enough. He did abandon his last wife, after all.

Another plotline features Mole, the Morlock from Uncanny #211, who is on the run from Sabretooth (here defeated by Archangel). He hides in a record shop, where he is discovered by Opal, who shows him kindness and allows him to continue hiding under the staircase. Bobby happens by the store subsequently, and hits on her, and even gets a date out of it, making this Bobby's first love interest since, well, possibly the Champions or New Defenders, but if not, then Zelda! Mole tries to cockblock, but ends up being Sabretooth fodder. And Caliban and Sabretooth fight Archangel!

The letters page of #53 provides a nugget of information about how language changes. X-Factor #47 was a flashback fill-in which is the subject of general praise. Daryl Edelman apologises for the "out-of-continuity" story, by which she means that it is set out of continuous order; rather than the modern understanding of that term which would be that it the events cannot or should not be reconciled with the main series: that it is "non-canon". But that's another rant entirely.

Baby Christopher is talking now. His first word was "ba[ll]", and he's also learned "da". He's being drawn as if he's about 1, I would say.

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.

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.

X-Factor #40: Nanny

They've just had Madelyne Pryor's second funeral in X-Factor #40. We get a touching scene of life and rebirth and suchforth. And then we get this:

"You know, since his mother was a genetic duplicate of our daughter, he really is our grandchild"

- actual dialogue from this comic

Jean's parents are concerned about Sara's children, of course (they don't know that they prioritised rescuing baby Christopher over them). Post-Inferno there are other children to distribute back to their parents (you'd think this would come before the funeral, but eh). Jean and Christopher's relationship is confusing, but she has memories from Phoenix and the Madelyne now, and feels some level of maternal responsibility towards him.

Nanny and Orphan-Maker attack! Nanny is given a nonsensical origin story which makes her a mutant turned into a cyborg by The Right. X-Factor best them in combat, find Joey and Galen hidden in a wall cavity, and bring them back home to their grandparents. Aww, isn't that nice? And to tie it off with a bow, Rusty gets a stay!

Hang on, did we get an issue of X-Men where a bunch of happy things happened? That can't be right...

Uncanny X-Men #243/X-Factor #39: Postferno

But! There's two issues of Inferno left to cover. Uncanny X-Men #243 and X-Factor #39.

The X-Men and X-Factor met up during the crossover and formed a single team. That's worth talking about, right? The way Wolverine and Jean interact, I've got to be able to wring a few words out of that. The stuff that goes on between Polaris/Malice and Havok, where she claims to have merged into one being, and Havok is wondering what on Earth is wrong with him and why do women he is into keep turning evil.

And then there's Mr Sinister, and his raid on the school (making it, what, the second complete destruction of the school? I'm surprised it's so few, surely I'm forgetting some.) I could talk about how Sinister turns out to be responsible for Scott's "coma", and that's why Scott has never learnt to control his power, because it would involve accepting Sinister. He's been manipulated by Sinister for just as long as Jean! And yet, Sinister's dialogue here really does point toward him being a child (he calls Summers a "sissy"), as apparently was originally planned (Sinister is a child's idea of what a supervillain might look like... the art here in #39 makes it look like an actual face, with frown lines, rather than the mask it previously seemed like).

And certainly I could extract a few sentences about the final few pages, where Scott Summers lets rip with full intensity, reducing Sinister to a skeleton in a page mostly coloured in red, one of the best single panels lately. And then how on that last page the teams unceremoniously split again without exchanging contact details or discussing what they should do now they know everyone is alive and cool; because that would undermine the logic of both series.

But I've got people coming round to play Bridge at 1pm and I'm still not dressed. So, you'll forgive me, this once.

Uncanny X-Men #239-242/X-Factor #36-#39: Inferno

I am, for a change, lost for words. Here are some other people's, instead:

So you've gone for the obvious. Turn Maddie into a synthetic villain to get Scott off the hook and back with Jean. Shame on you!

Morag G. Kerr (letter, Uncanny #248, 1989)

CYCLOPS: So we just defeated her like any other supervillain, and she committed suicide. Things sorted themselves right out after that!

Doctor Disaster (tumblr, 2012)

(I like looking up the names of people whose letters I quote. I believe this is the same Morag G. Kerr who is a veterinarian, and was at the time Chief Scientist at VetLab Services. If you are reading this, Morag, hello. You were the first to call it. And you were right.)

Uncanny X-Men #238/X-Factor #35: Before Combustion

Uncanny X-Men #239 and X-Factor #35 are both issues on the periphery of Inferno. Let's start with Uncanny #239 first: in New York, weird happenings occur: the chief and most noticeable of these being the growth of the Empire State Building.

Meanwhile, in Australia, the X-Men are going about their business. Danger room, singing, etc. Storm is fiddling around with the Reavers' computers, doing a vanity search, and finds reference to X-Factor coming out as mutants and sees a woman who looks awfully like Jean Grey. She grabs Wolverine, who sheepishly admits that he knew all along. Or at least, he'd caught her scent a couple of times. Is this the reason why this bunch of X-Men was put in Australia, as much to sequester them from the X-Factor news, as to avoid word leaking out about their survival? And, Maddy and Alex are added to the Chart after the end of page 26.

Sinister still thinks the X-Men are dead, and is eulogising them one-by-one, not dissimilar to his obituary for the team in #544. We learn a little about Sinister. He says that he knew Havok had "potential", "from the first", "in those longago days before you ever heard the word 'mutant'". And he calls Madelyne is his "pride [and] joy". And he is interested in Baby X: which he here calls "Nathan Christopher Charles Summers". A screen shows he's in a tube somewhere. Since Rachel already knew that he was called Nathan, I think it's fair to assume that this is in fact the name of the baby as registered, rather than Sinister's invention.

We learn a bit more about Maddy's plans, too. She wants the baby back, has made a deal with N'Astirh, where she'll be told the location of the Marauders so she can find Baby X and take revenge.

Meanwhile, over in X-Factor #35, Scott and Jean have gone to Scott's old orphanage in Nebraska, which Destiny's clue interpreted by Ship has pointed at. Some hints are dropped here: expansions of what we know about Scott's backstory. A mysterious kid called Nathan is mentioned, who Scott had always saw as a simple bully, but we can see he knows Scott will get his optic blasts (he might have seen an accidental use of them when Scott was first brought in), and is trying to goad him into using them.

Downstairs they find a collection of babies. Young Baby X, (Christopher), is among them. Jean and Scott resolve to save them all. Unfortunately, demons have been sent, looking for children (see tomorrow's X-Terminators post), and another new villain, Nanny is seeking to take custody of them, too. The demons get Christopher, Nanny gets the others: including Sara Grey's children who are also here. Well, that's two steps forwards, three steps back...

X-Factor #32-34: Hodge Podge

X-Factor #32 is essentially a throwaway. Against a backdrop of mutant registration being implemented, the kids protest about the idea they will be sent to summer school; and X-Factor are attacked by a bunch of random aliens pretending to be the Avengers for no readily apparent reason. I accuse it of being a fill-in.

#33 sees things progress. The Alliance of Evil break out of jail to prove the point that mutant registration is, regardless of whether or not it is a good idea, effectively unimplementable.

I think I've put my finger on what my colleague SpaceSquid calls the Kelly problem. The problem is: mutants as presented in the Marvel universe really are dangerous. Terrifyingly so. Yes, there are plenty of harmless ones, and many mean well, but, to repurpose a phrase from elsewhere, intent is not magic. If we just look at the kids in X-Factor: Rusty almost burned a woman to death accidentally; Boom-Boom is ridiculously irresponsible and it's a miracle she hasn't killed anyone yet; and Rictor destroyed a whole city when he first manifested! No wonder people are scared.

The Registration Acts aren't just based out of prejudice, but out of a legitimate concern for the welfare of humans, and a worry about excess power in hands of people who might not be trustworthy. But any challenge to this order of things is held by those who have that power to be in contravention of their natural rights.

In other words, this is a metaphor for gun control. Mixed in with the other political stuff has been a pro-second amendment tone bubbling away there, for years now. And it's one that us Britishers are probably not going to be sympthetic towards. Kelly, Gyrich and Cooper have been using pro-gun control arguments - perfectly sensible ones in my view - that the books have been failing to deconstruct properly because they are simply taking the NRA party line - a massive defensiveness of the status quo, regardless of how much sense that makes. They do not engage in self-examination. Of course the Kelly-Gyrich-Cooper's program is nonsense, too: but that's because it's a strawman. Xavier could have gone to them at any point with a proposal to meet their legitimate concerns. He chose not to.

Anyway. Other things. X-Factor #3 regressed Beast to his 1960s form, you'll remember. Recent issues of X-Factor have taken him back even further, to before X-Men #3, when he was a dumb brute. Both of these things are reversed here, as we reach the classical form of Hank McCoy: smart and blue and furry. Both these things are an essential part of his character now, and one can't have the brain without the beast (and anyway, they're out now so it doesn't matter so much). Or, to put it another way: having Hank McCoy not be blue is stupid.

Our restored Beast signs the Registration Form, under protest, under his birth name (the series here tacitly admitting that he's been out since he was in the Avengers, at least). Cyclops, Marvel Girl and Iceman fill in the forms, but use only their mutant names. Rusty Collins, who's still wanted, refuses, but agrees to hand himself in to the Navy to stand trial. The rest of the kids are too young to register (making somewhat of a mockery of the entire rationale for the system, but there you go).

Issue #34 concentrates on Warren's quest to find Candy Southern, who has been kidnapped by Cameron Hodge. The Warren/Cameron confrontation has been long-awaited, but I don't think it gets the weight it deserved. Candy ends up dead, which is a shame. She deserved better than just being fridged, she'd barely appeared in the series since she dumped Warren, and she was entirely in the right on that occasion.

X-Factor #29-#31: Codename Infectia. Seems Legit

X-Factor #29-#31 introduces another new villain: Infectia. She can kiss people and turn them into short-lived slaves. She wants to get close to X-Factor, apparently to steal that Ship or something, and has a particular obsession with Bobby. Hank is suspicious, but in his dumbed-out state can't quite put his finger on it. There is a hilarious sequence in #31 where X-Factor's wards interrupt them as they are about to kiss, several times. Has X-Men actually had a femme fatale before? I can't think of one. Infectia isn't the deepest villain ever, but we need a bit of light in between all this grimdark, and she's, if nothing else, fun.

Meanwhile, Scott and Jean have gone to Dallas to ask questions of Freedom Force regarding Madelyne, Alex, and Baby X. This is rather fruitless: they don't know anything. They just tried to arrest them. Destiny isn't much use, either, but then again she never is: and the couple are with nothing to show for their excursion. Next stop: Omaha, apparently.