X-Terminators #1-#4: Inferno

This is from page 4 of X-Terminators #1. They've misspelt his name a bit, but this is the grave of Fredric Wertham, the psychiatrist known primarily in the comics business for his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, which led to the Comics Code and the abolition of horror comics. He's been in the news quite recently, as someone had a look at his papers and discovered he had falsified much of his evidence.

This, of course, is a horror comic. And even better, one approved by the Code. There is a good chance of some rotary motion in that old fraud's grave.

Our horror elements here is the demons of Limbo, who we are familiar with from Magik. Here, they are collecting babies, with which they intend to create a portal so they can enter New York, or something. This is sounding very Ghostbusters II, except that it predates that by a year. Something was in the air, I guess.

So, X-Terminators is a four-issue miniseries by Louise Simonson and Jon Bogdanove. It focuses on the wards of X-Factor who have been sent away for the summer. Although the demons have been trying to abduct babies, they wrongly take Leech and Artie instead (bald, big eyes, they said), which is our first big coincidence.

They'd made a friend there: Taki, who we soon discover is also a mutant (later to be called "Wiz Kid"). He thinks he's a genius inventor, but in reality he just has the power to transmute stuff to useful technology. They get the gang back together: Skids ("Sally" now, is that new?), Boom-Boom, Rictor, and break Rusty out of military jail, where he'd surrendered himself rather than register. They have a message from Artie about where they might have been taken to, and travel.

They end up in New York (they do try to phone ahead, but the Manhattan exchange just cackles at them, which probably isn't a good sign). Wiz-Kid becomes separated from the others and is forced to work on a machine to help get that portal going faster. Oops. It opens. Demons pour out.

Within a few short moments there's another group of young mutants on the scene, though. Boom-Boom recognises one of them: Bobby from Fallen Angels. They've got their own guilt-stricken member - Illyana - who is apparently to blame for opening the portal (while Wiz Kid's machine keeps it open?) They team up, disrupt that pentagram by liberating some babies, and that's it: victory. Just a few bits of mopping up to do, really.

I quite liked this, which given what I'd heard about Inferno I wasn't expecting to. Nothing horrible here (well, except from the horror, obv). It's all a bit... frothy. There were bits that were genuinely funny, especially in the first couple of issues. The gang of four work well together: and it is about time they struck out on their own. Wiz Kid I will reserve judgement on.

X-Factor #21-#23: He Would Have Gotten Away With It, Too

X-Factor #21-#23 is a tight three-part story that finally pulls the trigger on the whole Cameron Hodge thing. Angel's will is read, and he has left all his money to X-Factor. Well, to a trust administered by Hodge. Bollocks. Hodge is not just misusing his position to undermine popular opinion of Mutants, but he's an actual black hat villain complete with a private exoskeleton-armor-wearing army.

It's bad. Trish Tilbit has managed to put some things together, but before the guys can blow the truth to her on camera, but Hodge triggers an immediate exosuit attack. Exosuit people also attack X-Factor HQ and abduct all the children. Bollocks.

A rescue attempt is eventually made, and is succesful (points to Boom-Boom who, returning from Fallen Angels, gets most of the way to liberating the kids herself). Hodge unconditionally hates mutants, has control of X-Factor, is responsible for driving Warren to suicide, was the man behind Rictor's capture and torture, and to cap it all, the Hodge they defeated was actually a Hodgebot. Bollocks bollocks.

Some minor continuity notes: Boom-Boom is 14, we are told; and Rusty gets a codename (bestowed by The Right). Rictor destroyed a city once. And in the background, the Fourth Horseman: Death, is prepared and declared ready by Apocalypse. Bollocks bollocks bollocks.

Fallen Angels #1-#8: the Original Misfits

Fallen Angels is an 8-issue 1987 miniseries created by Jo Duffy (writer) and Kerry Gammill (penciller, although not for the entire run). It's not got "X-Men" on the covers (well, not the original covers anyway), but treating it here, as we'll see, is a no-brainer.

Our main X-characters are Bobby (Sunspot) and Warlock, who you know; Theresa Rourke (Siryn), who we just caught up on, and James Madrox (Multiple Man), who we thought we knew. I'd had difficulty seeing Peter David's Madrox in the young James we'd seen before, and this is why: Duffy invents him here. Bobby has run away from the mansion after a tantrum/ostracism escalation, and Terry and Jamie are sent to locate him in the bustle of New York City. They are shown to have a strong pre-existing friendship, and are being written as older than the New Mutants but still teens, perhaps Karma's age. Madrox is still a noob (this is only his second trip to Manhattan), but he quickly becomes a far more confident man than the mouselike chap that Claremont had him. There is even a rogue dupe!

It also picks up Boom Boom and the Vanisher, from X-Factor. Throw in a few new characters: Chance, Gomi, Ariel (who vanished without trace until the X-Office brought her back for 2010's Second Comings), and even a dinosaur, and voilá. In this it serves as much a prototype for Runaways as anything (Bobby, Warlock and Terry have supervillainry in the family, you'll note), except that Vaughan's group have no Fagin.

To describe it as lacking a strong plot would be entirely true. One of its chief weaknesses is that it's just events happening, with no real overall through-line. And yes, at the end nothing has changed, if you look at it that way. Unless you count that little detail of Bobby's personal growth - the thing that led to the series in the first place. And for all the faults with its dialogue (which are numerous), it manages to portray a much more relevant street scene than Claremont and Simonson are doing with the Morlocks: these are actual people, even the ones who are aliens and technoörganic entities, whereas the Morlocks - even those who are seeing development, such as Masque and Callisto - are treated as the Other, their backgrounds and motivations left obscure. What is missing is the marriage of the two approaches: the working out of the political and social implications of a real mutant subculture: a genuine look at the question "what if there were mutants with special powers? how would society treat them" from the tradition of speculative fiction. I am afraid we're going to have to wait until X-Men #114 before we get it. If not later.

Right, entry done. Now I'm going to watch series 4 episode 8 of Misfits on E4. It's this funny show about a bunch of delinquent youths who got powers in a storm one day. One of them is a chap who makes duplicates of himself which have different personalities. Funny how these things work out.

X-Factor #12: Shake it Baby

X-Factor #12 comes right after the Mutant Massacre, and several plot elements are immediately picked up.

Firstly, Warren. He was hospitalised (it turns out money can overcome prejudice - who knew?), but his wings are in a bad way, and the doctors say they'll have to come off. The sheer weirdness of his anatomy is alluded to (they consult bird specialists), but not wholly developed. Think about it for a bit. Warren has six limbs: two legs, two arms, and two wings. How does that even work? He must have structures in his back that don't exist or have analogies in any living vertebrate. It's a miracle this sort of congenital abnormality has left him functional, but until this point, it's always been just something we're supposed to accept as part of the premise, but this, along with the mention of the "X-Factor" (which will later be identified as the "X-Gene") demonstrate a new attitude, which wants to look at the premise a bit more as science fiction. In fact, Angel is physically impossible: even if things as heavy as him can fly, his wingspan simply isn't large enough. Hollow bones only take you so far. So, either we ignore that, or we assume his mutation comes along with access to some wacky physics (like the way Wolverine violates the laws of thermodynamics.) Anyway, Warren would rather die than lose his wings, and so he prepares his will.

Next, there are still Morlock refugees at the X-Factor headquarters: Ape, Caliban, Dreamer, Erg (who is rather excellently cooking the toast with his eyelaser thing), Skids and Tar Baby. Skids has an MC Hammer power, and is having difficulty eating (but somehow manages to put on clothes? I suppose it's not the first instance of powers working weirdly with clothes... maybe clothes are made of a fundamentally different type of matter in the Marvel universe.) We're told it's getting busy at the HQ, which is odd because the building seems large from the outside. Maybe they lease out space?

A further plot is people phoning home, so you can tell Claremont isn't writing this. Jean and Scott watch the tellybox news and see that the relatives of a mutant have been firebombed; and Jean's sister, Sara, is on as a talking head, supporting mutants. Sara Grey had, by the way, been pitched by Claremont as a possible fifth member for X-Factor. Anyway, that gets Jean very worried about Sara's safety. But she hasn't contacted her family since she came back alive. Awkward. Scott, who had an epiphany in the Massacre that abandoning his wife and child was a really shitty thing to do, has meanwhile called Madelyne, finally, but there has been no answer. He's so self-absorbed that he reaches the conclusion that "Maddie's left [him]". No, mate. You left her.

Jean and Scott go visit Sara's house, and find it empty. There's a threatening message on the phone, the place explodes, crap. Well, at least Sara got out safely? Apparently, though, this is then basically dropped, and not followed up again until seven years from now, in X-Men #36! I'm hoping that she's at least mentioned in future issues - we'll see. This poses an obvious question regarding Maddie's safety, even to those of us who haven't been reading Uncanny, and Scott resolves to go up to Alaska to check on her himself (I don't know why he doesn't start by asking the local police to do a wellness check.)

What is ostensibly our A-plot is Boom Boom, who is a street urchin first seen in the Secret Wars II series. She has the power to create so-called "time bombs" which can detonate and do some damage; and she's fallen under the wing of the Vanisher (crikey, it's been ages since we saw him!), but is unhappy at the cut he is demanding from her thievery, so has reported him to X-Factor. She is eventually recruited for X-Factor, which might just be the quickest regret that Hank and Bobby (for it is they) have ever had.

Finally, in Cleveland, Ohio, Apocalypse recruits his second horseman: a young mutant named Autumn Rolfson, who has the unfortunate and surely completely useless in combat power of turning food to dust. Famine, then.