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?

a comic

You may remember that having attended Thought Bubble last year, I said I would be posting a bit less, and spending more time making comics.

Clearly, it has dropped a little bit more than I intended (although overall the rate for the year will end up being what I was going for!), but I have not been idle on the second front.  The first project, a 1-pager for the Thought Bubble Comic Art Competition, is now available for your viewing pleasure.  Some other things are in the pipeline.

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?

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!

Days of Future Past

Bryan Singer continues in his quest to prove me utterly and completely wrong.

Here's to the next 50 years http://t.co/2jzcF8fShl pic.twitter.com/jYFvmVsnSN

— Bryan Singer (@BryanSinger) August 1, 2013