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.

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.

X-Men #4-#7: Omega Red

X-Men's second arc, from #4 to #7 is a story immediately following up the business of Team X introduced in Wolverine #48-#50.  After a first issue with some characterisation of the team (including an attempt by Gambit to kiss Rogue... Oh, god, that's gone beyond creepy into assaulty please stop), we get some fighting with a Mysterious Enemy from Wolverine's Past story.

But it turns out that the Weapon X and Team X stuff has given some emotional weight to this.  Not very much, admittedly, but it's there.  There's a connection, not just to some braggart's past of the sort that featured in his solo, but to something that actually mattered to his life, that time when he teamed up with his archenemy and his dead lover.

They fought Omega Red back in the day, we're told, and he's back.  Omega Red is a post-Cold War creation, one of the first to be retroactively created as a legacy of that.  We've had a rather more prominent example of that lately - the Winter Soldier.  While the Cold War was active, Marvel Comics seem to have steered away from telling straight red vs blue spy stories, instead choosing to dress them up in allegory.  But now, with it over, it's free to tell to the types of stories it thinks ought to have existed, while blatantly foregrounding the fact that it is a relic (a line about "United Germany" here.  The contemporaneous story in Uncanny X-Men also deals with a retconned Cold War legacy hero of sorts, Mikhail Rasputin, who has a line about how strange American/Russian/Japanese cooperation is.)  Curiously, it asserts that Omega Red "was to be the world's first super soldier", despite his cold war (and thus post-Captain America) origins.  For that matter, isn't Wolverine himself a prior example?  Eh.

Omega Red kidnaps Wolverine, to extract from him the location of something called a "carbonadium synthesizer", which makes a sort of Waitrose Essentials adamantium without with Omega Red will die, and so plots to torture the world's most torture-proof man until he gives it up.  That works out about as well as you might expect.  (Most of the arc is much as you might expect.)  We get a fairly entertaining action sequence right at the end with Logan and Besty kicking ass, which is only mildly less objectifying of Psylocke than the gratuitous swimsuit panels in #4 ("I was in the pool", my arse).

I stopped here for a while.  I can see why.  It is only grim determination that has made me resume.

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.

Wolverine #48-#50: Shiva Scenario

Wolverine #48-#50 is a direct and immediate sequel to the Weapon X storyline in Marvel Comics Presents.  It is predominantly set, real or imagined, in two Canadian locations: the Albertan facility that Weapon X was shown to operate in.  He arrives at this in #4, more or less as we were expecting, along with keys left in his Lotus.  He gets flashbacks, both to the actual events of the miniseries and to a strange buddy cop movie about him and Sabretooth, but doesn't investigate too far into the complex.  The flashbacks continue into #49.  Some of them are to a strange buddy cop movie starring him and Sabretooth.

I'm not even really kidding about it being a movie.  In a warehouse in Detroit he finds the sets.  For the buddy cop movie, for the incident with Silver Fox in #10, and for a variety of other locations.   Logan's memories are contradictory.  He remembers Sabretooth killing Silver Fox, he remembers the cabin they had; but he also remembers fighting her many decades later.

We know less about Wolverine at the end of this arc than we did at the beginning.  We can't trust what we thought we did know.  Neither can Logan.  His few fragments have been shattered.  He hopes the cabin was real - his first love was real, but if the evidence is simply not finding the set where it had been faked, ouch.

There's fighting.  In his stealth-free recon Wolverine alerted Hines and the Professor to activate the "Shiva Project", which turns out to be a giant robot pretending to be Shiva the Destroyer.  Not quite sure why that is, but hey.  Shiva has a list of targets to elimate in order: Wolverine, Sabretooth, Fox, Kestrel, Vole, Mastodon and Wildcat.  While that is happening, Silver Fox, who is leader of HYDRA, goes after Hines and the Professor, as revenge for the same thing happening to her.  Eventually Fox kills the Professor, who sets the robot on the next target, Sabretooth.

This is all very puzzling.  Silver Fox really did survive #10, which cheapens it and the Wolverine/Sabretooth feud.  And if all these are false memories of Wolverine, why doesn't he remember them?  What happened to make him break that conditioning in the first place?  To make him leave that "Team X" (name still not yet given) and end up in Canadia working for Department H?  Is there any larger sense to be made here or what?

A Comic by me and Pippa

I've been quite ill for the last week and a half (improving now), so forgot to link to the comic me and Pippa Ashton did for Geeked Magazine.  It didn't quite make it into the magazine itself, which is well worth reading, being about intersectionalinity, innit.  We hope to do more in the future.

Marvel Comics Presents #72-#84: Weapon X

By 1991, Marvel Comics Presents had been headlined by Wolverine Team-Up stories for ages.  The story that starts in #72, by Barry Windsor-Smith (I think he's the first person to auter the X-Men) is a rather different take.  It is the story of How The Wolverine Got His Claws, finally.

Although this is a highly-serialised story (twelve parts), the trade paperback collection I am reading does not indicate the gaps.  Structurally these group into four bits.  There is a prologue, with Logan having been sacked from the Canadian army; he then gets used as a prop in a story in an unethical medical experiment.  About half-way through, Logan escapes.  Rather than the story following him, it becomes a slasher, instead, as our characters (Hines, the Professor, and Doctor Cornelius) are hunted down and killed; Logan then escapes.  And finally, it's revealed that some of that was a simulation.  Logan was loosed rather than escaping, and the trio are alive.

The beats were familiar, but some of the details of this story were surprising to me.  We know that at this stage Wolverine's claws have no bone substrate, but the idea that they just sort of happened because of excess adamantium, and the housings designed to stop him hurting himself (or rather to stop him healing after them popping) is a bit silly.  Given the lack of artifice in creating them, having them be coatings of bone claws make more sense!  Further, the idea that the staff of Weapon X didn't know that Logan was a mutant also is a bit odd. But... presumably the shadowy figure that the Professor reports to does know that?

Much of this story is lies, of course.  Apart from the bits it itself admits to (the escape), we know from later material that very little of this will stand. But that doesn't matter a bit.  It's moody, it's tense, it's pacy, it's violent, it sets the stage for more Wolverine material and a thousand other inferior 1990s imitators.

This is not really Wolverine's origin story.  It's not even pretending to be.  What his birth name is, and what his childhood like isn't Wolverine's origin story, either.  What led him to the state where he doesn't know if he has a mother, that matters.  Why Sabretooth has a grudge against him, that matters.  It'll be a while yet before we get to those, it's telling that those were left till last - it's not because they were least interesting, but because you could tell other stories revealing apparently quite profound bits of Logan's life while still retaining the Man of Mystery element.

But, as I say, that's later.  Much later.  If I ever get to it.  For now, I want to know, what effect is this going to have on the Wolverine of 1991?