Uncanny X-Men #217-#218: The B-Team

Uncanny X-Men #217 follows the adventure of the X-Men on Muir Island: Rogue, Dazzler, Longshot and Psylocke. Rogue is their leader more by default than anything else: all the others have only been here five minutes, and compared to them she's practically an old hand. They train, under the supervision of Banshee, who is a bit more experienced but not able to take an active part himself.

Dazzler is feeling particularly unwelcome at the island, and after fraught exchanges with Rogue (who was Dazzler's arch-enemy for a while, in the Dazzler solo-series) and a well-characterised clash with Callisto (yes, they really wouldn't get on, would they), she pays a quick visit to Ullapool. Here she encounters some céilidh (spelled "kaylie"), and does some Dazzling.

After all this, she spots Cain Marko, a.k.a. the Juggernaut. I suppose she'd been briefed, a recent innovation that the X-Men have introduced, although it seems that the briefing did not include the circumstances of their last meeting: when they ended up picking on him for no reason and doing a lot of property and public relations damage. Dazzler is left (presumed dead?) by Juggernaut, but is rescued by the X-Men.

They soon find out that Juggernaut is rampaging in Edinburgh. They rally, go there, and stop him in a decent action sequence that shows Claremont's familiarity with the geography of Scottish capital. Marc Silvestri clearly has some decent reference material to work with, too, even if the locomotive on the "Inverness Flyer", looks like no British train I've ever seen. Our focus here - apart from the city - is on this group's ability to work as a team, which they eventually manage.

Of course, the Juggernaut's frenzy was merely a distraction. Black Tom has been robbing the Bank of Scotland. Oops. This has the air of something that doesn't quite make sense - what was Juggy doing in Ullapool to begin with? - but we're left in enough darkness that it doesn't seem blatantly silly.

X-Factor #16: Masque

X-Factor #16 shines a spotlight on the Morlocks, something they are not accustomed to. Back in their early appearances they were villainous and untrustworthy: they shunned the surface world and abducted children; and their leadership was determined by a fight to the death. The best of them were neutral. Since then, the portrayal of them has softened a bit, and not just because of sympathy engendered by the Massacre: Callisto has become Storm's loyal second-in-command, and Caliban is becoming a hero. And the thoroughly reasonable Erg is the leader of a friendly faction, who stayed with X-Factor a bit before then going back to the tunnels.

The main remaining "evil Morlock" is Masque, who has the power of reshaping faces. Like the baby-stealing, this is a very primal horror. That a hard-line separatist like Masque has it - and is willing to use it so pettily - confirms our worst fears about such isolationism. We don't know Masque's story, of course. The Morlocks didn't just come from nowhere - they all had mothers and names, but keeping this obscure makes it hard to understand Masque as a victim of the system, and he becomes the most horrific X-Men villain so far.

But think about it a bit and we can infer a back-story. Masque's power is amazing. We see it used here to restore the woman that Rusty had accidentally burned the face off. He can use it at will, and well, to put it crudely, money > bigotry. Not always, not often enough. But enough that he'd have a fair chance setting up a practice on Harley Street (or whatever the New York equivalent of that is) and getting enormously rich. He's not an idiot, and he's bitterly against integrationism. So, he's tried that, and it backfired spectacularly. Maybe more than once.

In the end, no permanent changes are made, to faces at least. Emma (Rusty's victim from #1) refuses having hers back when she learns it comes at the cost of Rusty's, and she instead plans to teach the Morlocks about the Lord. I hope this fails: the addition of evangelism to the already fractious Morlock society could explode it. During all the action, Skids learns to drop her forcefield in a moment of need. And a rather abrupt last page to the issue indicates her and Rusty want adding to the Chart.

X-Factor #15: Clipped Wings

X-Factor #15 is the one where Warren appears to commit suicide (see below). Unless you are a particularly inattentive reader you wouldn't buy for a second this would be permanent, but nevertheless it is a clear message that things have changed, that things can change. Something that the series has been doing repeatedly since Simonson came on board, but never clearer now.

But that's not the main point of the issue, not really. Instead, it's about our Scott again. He's in Anchorage, identifying his wife's body, and making wild presumptions that his son (who still hasn't got a name, so we're just gonna keep calling him Baby X) is dead too. He calls home! He ended up with one dead body in Alaska because someone he was close to needed him and he wasn't there. Does he want to make it a second? He races back. Too late. Warren's dead. Scott, you suck.

Businessman, superhero, mutant and socialiate.

Warren Worthington III, who has died at the age of 25, was born into wealth as son of Warren Worthington II, the CEO and majority-owner of Worthington Industries. But it was as the superhero and member of the X-Men the "Avenging Angel" (later "The Angel") that he became known to the public. Worthington was one of the first mutants to "come out", while attending UCLA, where he joined the superhero team The Champions. Worthington's parents died relatively young, and perhaps exemplifying the principle that wealth does not survive the third generation, he had little interest in management of his companies; instead being content to flit as his attention was attracted, while leaving most of the day-to-day supervision to his fiancee Candice Southern.

Worthington recently was embroiled in controversy when non-family shareholders in Worthington Industries discovered that he had been financing the mutant troubleshooting agency X-Factor with company money, and was facing possible criminal charges of fraud. According to Worthington's close friend and co-worker at X-Factor, Cameron Hodge, this, combined with the amputation of his wings after severe injuries, may have pushed him over the edge, although according to the local authorities no note has been found and mechanical error has not yet been ruled out.

Warren Worthington III was 25 and has no surviving relatives.

Classic X-Men #8: Jean and Phoenix

Classic X-Men #8 presents Chris Claremont his first opportunity to say what really happened with the Jean Grey/Phoenix thing, in a backup story set during 100 and 101, comics he wrote eleven years ago, with no idea of what controversy might later erupt.

His version, as you might expect from what he's done to rehabilitate the Phoenix force by having it manifest in Rachel, emphasises the continuity between Jean and the Phoenix. His Phoenix is the real deal, but the old Jean is left as a kind of backup version. And his Jean consents to having her body and mind taken by the Phoenix, rather than having them ripped away, like the original version in Avengers/Fantastic Four implied.

Classic X-Men #7: Shaw and Frost

It's not always obvious what Classic X-Men's back-up strips are trying to do. Some of them provide characer moments that fill in gaps (we've had the lovely Scott/Jean silent backup in #6, and Thunderbird's funeral in #3). This one seems to be more for the continuity wonks, as it provides some backstory for how Sebastian Shaw and Emma Frost took charge of the Hellfire Club; and how Michael Rossi came to be alive to turn up in New Mutants.

But that's not all that's going on. In the main books being published in 1987, the X-Men are on the verge of an alliance with the Hellfire Club, and therefore Shaw and Frost's reputations need to be repaired. This story shows therefore how they were taken for mugs by the original Black King Ned Buckman, who is the real evil mastermind behind using the Sentinels to kill all mutants. Shaw and Frost had merely wanted the Sentinels to give them a good going over, or something, in some odd scheme to identify the X-Factor.

Shaw and Frost are betrayed by Buckman, and use that as the excuse they need to assassinate him and his cronies, and install themselves as the new Lords Cardinal.

I'm not sure this ultimately works. They're still too closely associated with the Sentinel program after this is supposed to be set for it to be blamed entirely on Buckman. But at least it's going in the right direction.

Uncanny X-Men #215-#216: Aftermath

Annuals are strange beasts. They do not form part of the regular publication pattern of a comic, instead being off to one side. Which is fitting, as their stories often do not form part of the continuous narrative, either.

Look at X-Men Annual #10, for example. The Chronology Project puts it between Uncanny #210 and #211, despite there being no actual gap for it to fit into, merely because it is the least worst position. There is no true ordering of events, because this is fiction: #215 is a sequel to both the Massacre and this Annual, without caring that they are contradictory. Also, it has Mojo in it, and I've not really been covering the annuals unless they are absolutely essential to the plot or thematically interesting. So, let's skip that, simply noting that Longshot is a regular in Uncanny now, and he along with Rogue, Dazzler and Psylocke are sent to Muir Island with the wounded. We'll pick up their story later.

While Scott is dealing with the disappearance and apparent death of his wife Madelyne Pryor over in X-Factor, those of us who have been reading Uncanny X-Men have known since #206 that she's actually alive, if not well, in San Francisco.

What we still don't know is how we came to be there. Back in #206 itself it looked like an attack on idea of X-Factor. Now, with the Simonsons taking over that series, it can be dealt with collaboratively. Pryor wakes, identifies herself to the hospital staff, and we get enough flashbacks that I think we're supposed to believe she's nothing more complicated the first victim of the Marauders.

#215 picks up another plot thread introduced by X-Factor: the attack on Sara Grey's home (also Maurauders? They presumably also did Karma). Storm and Wolverine visit the place, after Sara doesn't answer any calls. You might think that the firebombing of a mutant rights activist might end up on the tellybox and they'd know already, but it's apparent that the X-Men don't watch any New York market television (otherwise X-Factor wouldn't have been such a surprise to them).

They're not the first mutants to have visited the place, of course: Wolverine can smell Scott and... Jean. Jean?

With our subplots dealt with, we get to the villains of the arc: Storm is captured by a trio of powered people: Super Sabre, Crimson Commando, and Stonewall (all appearing here for the first time). Stonewall is a funny name to give this one, I note. They have a career structures that could have come straight out of Watchmen, and a litany of complaints about modern America's supposed moral decay ¹ that closely mirrors Rorschach's. They don't even know about her mutant history: they found her at an arson site, and that's good enough for them to go all Running Man on her. Some fighting later, and unlike Rorschach or the Punisher, they are persuaded of their own hypocrisy: if what's illegal is wrong, and taking the law into your own hands is illegal, what they are doing is wrong. Well, I say persuaded. There's some level of threat involved, it must be admitted.

1. i.e. it starting to live up to the high standards that the framers accidentally expressed in the document they wrote.

New Mutants #48-#50: With Jetpacks

We've seen the future before in Uncanny X-Men, but it's New Mutants, with its themes of youth and forward-looking, that starts using it as a regular setting.

This initial post-Mutant Massacre arc sees two future dystopias. The first, in New Mutants #48, is your Days of Future Past timeline (apparently different enough that it's reckoned to be a different version, but I don't see that myself), and the origin of that is explained. But the grimness of that future as Uncanny had it cannot withstand the optimism and wish-fulfilment of New Mutants and we soon discover that in addition to the few surviving New Mutants (Dani and Sam), Lila Cheney is alive and has helped them set up a colony on her Dyson Sphere.

In #49's future dystopia, what was left of the X-Men, led by Magneto, have allied with the Hellfire Club to take over the world. New York has become a dystopia in part modelled on 2000AD's Judge Dredd: complete with Arbitrators (not Judges) with eye-obscuring visors. The more sinister part is their resemblance to the New Mutants uniforms, and the revelation of Bobby and Amara's leadership role in this regime. Our kids are helped by an elderly Kate Power, who clings to the ideals of the past.

Both groups are rescued by Magik, who brings ideal help for dealing with the future in the form of their mentor: Professor Xavier. He's been worried about what Magneto might be getting up to in his absence (having nightmares about the Holocaust and joining the Lords Cardinal of the Hellfire Club would seem to be the order of the day), and he's happy to, with Binary, join Illyana in a rescue mission.

Another father figure is part of the story, of course: Magus, who they had gone into Limbo to escape. Thanks to the power of teamwork (and Xavier and Binary, and willing self-sacrifice from Cypher and Warlock), the Magus is regressed to a state of infancy. Will he grow up better this time? Or will someone pretending to be Eric the Red age him back to distract them, as when the same trick was played on a character with one more 'n'. At the end it looks a lot like Xavier is going to return to Earth and stay... I'd wondered how long that would last: this is shorter than I was expecting.