Uncanny X-Men #182: Rogue Rogue

Uncanny X-Men #182 is set in that week gap between Magik and Dani escaping for Limbo in New Mutants #16, and arriving back again in #17. Rogue has been sent as a scout to see how the New Mutants are faring (they do not think to telephone ahead, as per usual).

She arrives at the mansion, to find it empty, but several messages awaiting. Rather than following up the one from the New Mutants, clearly stating where they've gone and that if they're not back yet there's a problem, she instead goes after Colonel Rossi, who's been captured by SHIELD (we don't know why, and SHIELD don't know who he is - a dangling plot thread that'll presumably be picked up on in a few issues) and she's worried about. It's quite subtle at this, and it only gradually becomes apparent that Rossi and Rogue have never met - that Rogue is remembering Carol Danvers' life instead. A short snatch of dialogue adds to Wolverine's backstory - he and Rossi once broke Danvers out of Lubyanka, when she'd been captured by the KGB. The conversation here works - we are on Rogue's side but we can see she's become quite dangerous, and we can also see that Rossi is justly very skeptical.

And that is why Nick Fury put out an APB on Rogue, an active member of the X-Men.

Uncanny X-Men #164-#166: Breaking Brood

Uncanny X-Men #164 adds another to our little cover gallery of women exhibiting primal forces surrounded by worried onlookers. This time, it's Carol Danvers, formerly known as Ms. Marvel (until Rogue stole her powers in Avengers Annual #10), who is accompanying the X-Men on their random space excursion.

They've escaped from the Brood's ship, onto the Empress Lilandra's yacht, but Hunt-Master T'Crilee͞'s fighter is ordered to disable and capture them. (wow, I never thought I'd get to legitimately use that Unicode character - COMBINING DOUBLE MACRON ABOVE, in case you're wondering, which you probably aren't).

This does not work out so well for the Brood. They'd been experimenting on Carol in #163, and they triggered something within her. She becomes Binary! An enormous power, fiery and bright, taking the shape of a bird, which would seem to be such a brazen Phoenix knockoff that I'd call it plagiarism if it weren't for the fact that the name "Claremont" is on these pages and the ones 40 issues ago.

It also doesn't work out very well for Storm, as she accidentally breaks her vow never to take a life. She only meant to use her space lightning powers to stun them, see. And then she senses a life developing within her. At which point Wolverine comes clean about the eggs.

Our X-Men are left in a desperate situation with a bunch of character-defining stresses. Storm doesn't want to take any life, even parasitical life developing within her (the word "embryo" is used repeatedly, as if to nail the point home). Cyclops is prepared to put aside his "don't kill" policy at the great danger. Nightcrawler prays, and Wolverine is a materialist. As Cyclops gets ragier fighting (due to the development of the Brood), he swaps roles with Wolverine, an irony which is pointed out by Logan and foreshadows their eventual reversal thirty years hence.

Warbird and the Acanti fix everything. We are left with a dangling point: one egg is left, which must be Xavier. Oh dear.

Uncanny X-Men #158: The Battle of Arlington

Uncanny X-Men #158 starts again with our mutants on their island base - it doesn't seem to have got a name in the comics ever - so I'll call it Proto-Utopia. (It's either that or "Island M".)

Harking back to the inital run, the X-Men suddenly remember that the government has a lot of computer information on them. That Robert Kelly is on the telly - on Panorama, in fact - scaremongering about them (the interviewer's name is Mr. Cheever. In a strange coincidence, the only famous Cheever died in the cover month). And the X-Men have suddenly somehow become "outlaws" (that happened as early as #154, according to a caption there - before the property damage of the Shi'ar arc). They decide to infiltrate the Pentagon, and introduce a computer virus to erase what exists. A caption repeats the urban myth that the Pentagon was originally designed as a hospital.

So, Colonel Carol Danvers (who's found that some of her advanced physiology as Ms. Marvel is still present), Captain ??? (I wonder what name Logan was using on his ID here - there's no reason at this point to suspect that it isn't something like John Logan or Logan Smith), and their civilian colleague Ororo, bluff their way through the security at probably the world's most heavily guarded government installation. Making their way to the target, they embarrassingly bump into Mystique and Rogue, of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, who are also infiltrating the Pentagon. Mystique is using a cover identity of "Raven Darkhölme", which is surely not her real name, and she shifts back to the blue-with-white-clothes form when she's knocked unconscious, which is a bit unfortunate. Rogue has got her canonical set of power-stealing powers, on contact with flesh, and has recently acquired the powers of Ms. Marvel (in Avengers Annual #10), which is the very thing that Carol has been recovering from...

Rather than sort out some sort of awkward compromise ("why are you here?" "no, why are you here?"), they start having a superhero fight in the Pentagon. Storm and Wolverine somehow find the time to change into their costumes, which is not just one of those "where did they get the time?" moments, but is literally a terrible idea - as a "mutants infiltrate Pentagon" story becomes an "X-Men infiltrate Pentagon", aided by the guards overhearing them use the word "X-Man". If there were ever a job for X-Force, this was it. Mystique is captured (but she'll get out - she's that good), Rogue is subdued, the X-Men flee, and Danvers wipes those files. Not that it'll do them any good.

This would have been a perfectly good explanation as to how the X-Men became outlaws, but it's frankly incomprehensible as their reaction to it. In the end Kurt complains in a thought bubble

The X-Men will probably end up portrayed as the villains of the piece.
If Senator Kelly is any indication, the government is already paranoid about mutants. This will only make matters worse.

And since the X-Men have no official sanction, like the Avengers, they've no way of telling their side of things.

Yes, I'm quite sure that explaining how you were merely planning on illegally entering the government installation to remove the records on yourself would clear things up nicely.

While all this is happening, Corsair and Cyclops visit Havok and Polaris, and introductions are made. No mention is made of any other relatives - of either their mother or father - and neither of them were John Does - so presumably any grandparents are dead?

Avengers Annual #10: DARKHÖLME, Anna Marie

There's a reason this blog is covering Avengers Annual #10, and why it's included in Essential X-Men - it's the first appearance of Rogue, and sets up her situation of having stolen Ms. Marvel's powers (and in the process depriving Carol Danvers of them).

But I'm finding it difficult to find much to say about that. Maybe this is because I'm coming at it out of order - I've written many of the surrounding entries weeks ago and now I'm coming in and filling in a hole. But it's more that the elements I was expecting to see first hand have already happened. That Rogue-Ms. Marvel grudge has always been backstory, never news.

Spider-Woman (Jessica Drew) finds Carol Danvers (Ms. Marvel and former Avenger) being dumped into the San Francisco Bay on the first page, figures out who she is and what's happened to her with Xavier's help, and contacts the Avengers. During this, we get a bunch of flashbacks that rewrite another story (Avengers #200). It then moves to a large fight between the Avengers and Mystique's Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (with the line-up from Days of Future Past), but now with Rogue. The Avengers defeat them, they run away, yadda yadda.

In the final segment of the annual ("chapter 5"), the Avengers visit Carol, who is recuperating at the X-Mansion. And she really gives them what for, for abandoning her in her time of need in #200. Which is completely fair - having briefly read Avengers #200, I can agree with the general consensus that what was done to her in that was abominable. What I wasn't expecting was that this is being treated here as a far more life-destroying incident than the mere wiping of her identity by Rogue, because it was a betrayal. For all that Rogue has broken Carol, it's the Avengers simply letting Marcus do what he wants with her, without considering the possibility of mind control, that matters. And this is absolutely not a problem inserted into an originally innocent story. It's there in any reading of #200. It's no wonder that Bendis has Carol champion Jessica Jones's cause after her similar ordeal at the hands of the Purple Man. I can see Carol reconciling with Rogue eventually, even at this point. It's more of a wonder that Carol ever signs up with the Avengers again.

Why Marvel is stuck in the 1960s (or How did there come to be no female ongoings, anyway?)

So, Carol Danvers (a.k.a. Ms. Marvel a.k. Warbird, a.k.a. Binary), who we'll meet a few months down the line, is getting a haircut, and a new solo series, as Captain Marvel. This means Marvel will have an ongoing female solo again, after X-23 and Ghost Rider were cancelled. X-Marathon approves of the new look and will be putting the book on its pull list.

As was noted a couple of months back, it's been a long time since Marvel didn't have an ongoing female solo - by my reckoning since October 1998 and the launch of Spider-Girl. Why is this? Well, poor sales, we're told. But essentially that's a tautology. The series did not succeed commercially because of poor sales. Well, yes. But why the poor sales? Is this because comics readers are inherently sexist? Because Marvel aren't doing enough promotion? Or just maybe it's a bit more complicated than that.

In the last ten years, there have been solo titles based around various female heroes - Spider-Girl, She-Hulk, Ms. Marvel, Mystique, Rogue, Black Widow, Spider-Woman. Of these the longest-running were the alternative-universe Spider-Girl (with 100 issues in its original volume), and then the 616 She-Hulk and Ms. Marvel, notching up 50 issues each in their mid-2000s series.

What these runs have in common is a single writer. Tom DeFalco wrote every single issue of Spider-Girl, Brian Reed wrote the entire run of Ms. Marvel, and She-Hulk didn't survive much more than a year after Dan Slott's run ended. She-Hulk is in fact Marvel's only recent attempt to hand over a female solo title between writers. Let's look at a chart.



Huh. Not great, eh. It had found pretty consistent level of about 27,000 under Slott, but after some initial interest it started falling under Peter David, and wasn't arrested by a crossover with his X-Factor title for Secret Invasion. Given this, I can see why they might not have wanted to find a successor to Reed for Ms. Marvel a year later. But perhaps they should have tried anyway.

What's going on here is that there are about six or eight "core" Marvel characters that can permanently support an ongoing, and Marvel will try to find a creative team to take the character if it becomes vacant - the big three of Spider-Man, Hulk and Wolverine - the Avengers trio of Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor, and the more marginal cases of Daredevil and Punisher. These are the books with the huge issue numbers (they've all either been recently renumbered upwards, or relaunched at a new #1). The A-list consists of Marvel's solo characters from the 1960s with only Punisher and Wolverine having been successfully added subsequently.

Other characters with solo series rarely last more than a couple of years. In the past five years there have been solo series for the B-list male solo heroes of Ant-Man, Black Panther, Blade, Cable, Daken, Ghost Rider, Hawkeye, Hercules, Iron First, Moon Knight, and War Machine. None of them are being published today (bar Moon Knight, which is ending in a couple of issues). There's a few ones recently launched (Scarlet Spider, Venom and Winter Soldier), but I would be honestly surprised if these went on to long runs. The success of all these niche ongoings seems to be directly related to the creative team, and they often fail when that's changed, or sometimes they simply don't look for a replacement. In that context, Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk were very successful runs. As Marvel retreats into so-called "family branding", with most books called X-Men, Avengers, or associated with one of the Big Eight Marvel Characters in Pop Culture, the casualty is less scope for female solo ongoings. There's a bit of a random walk going on with the other titles, and that the number ended up being 0 for a few months rather than scraping in at 1 or 2, as it had managed essentially by chance since Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk were cancelled, was bound to happen sooner or later.

So, what's going on at the Distinguished Competition? They have five female solo titles in the New 52 - Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Batgirl, Batwoman, and Catwoman. Of these, Wonder Woman is that much more an important character to DC not because of modern decisions by the publisher, but by simple good fortune of her being a Golden Age character with continuous publication. She is not a "legacy" character or a member of a supporting cast given a spin-off book. Unlike the other four - three of which are Bat-family books. So I'd argue that it's not that DC's present management is necessarily any better at this, but they've been dealt a better historical situation.

What can be done? Well, launching a new Carol Danvers title is definitely a good start. She's the closest thing Marvel have to a female A-lister. Steering creative teams towards revamping female characters is a positive thing - if a relaunch can everyone very excited about Iron Fist, surely this can be done with anyone... And perhaps part of the answer is also events and the contents of the team books. Ms. Marvel had prominent roles in Civil War and Secret Invasion, as Iron Man's second-in-command. Siege and especially Fear Itself were more boys' clubs. Story points and premises for new runs often come out of these - Reed's Ms. Marvel itself launched from House of M. If in Fear Itself, it was She-Hulk who become the hammer-wielding worldbreaker of Nul instead of Hulk, would we be seeing a Jason Aaron-penned series about her redemptive quest now? And why are we seeing a Winter Soldier ongoing launch rather than a Black Widow? Because of Ed Brubaker, because of the story choices that were made ages back, when Bucky was picked as substitute Captain America rather than another member of the supporting cast, such as Sharon Carter (Agent 13).

The upcoming Avengers vs. X-Men series at least features Hope and Wanda prominently. They've cancelled Generation Hope - a semi-solo title - I suppose a Scarlet Witch ongoing launching out of that is too much to ask for, eh? But I suspect the sad fact is that this is all managed decline, and that there's simply never going to be another breakout character - nobody will ever join those six or eight characters that Marvel feels obliged to keep going no matter what. But there's certainly room, with a good push, for a midlist Captain Marvel title that will last a number of years.