Uncanny X-Men #246-#247: Bastion of Insanity

Uncanny X-Men #246-#247 features two pairs of interlinked minds. Rogue and Carol, and Master Mold and Nimrod. We touched on this a bit in the Genosha entry, but it appears now that Carol Danvers is a persona within Rogue's head that she can switch to at-will and is quite functional as. This is sudden enough that I went to the trouble of looking up her chronology to see whether there was some story I missed where that had this as a consequence - no. It's just shifted gears.

Another thing I looked up on the Chronology Project was Sebastian Shaw's timeline. Yes, he appears here in the Hellfire Club after he was purged from the Inner Circle in #75 by the new Grey King, Magneto. He was all "you do realise this means war" in that, but they didn't even bar him from the building or anything. Huh. Shaw is proposing a new Sentinel project (the reason he became unfeasable as an ally of the X-Men), and plans a new more adaptable Sentinel that can might be able to deal with more complex threats like two different mutants at once.

By an amazing coincidence, Senator Kelly encounters a confluence of two Sentinels on his way home. Nimrod and Master Mold kind of merge. Kelly's wife is fridged, which provides him the motivation needed to overcome his reservations about authorisiation precisely the sort of next-generation sentinel that has resulted in the death of his wife...1 Rogue/Carol isn't able to prevent this, but the rest of the X-Men soon 'porting in from 'Straya, fighting the merged Sentinel, and then sending it through the Siege Perilous, to re-appear seven years later. It was babbling about The Twelve, says Rogue/Rogue, whoever they are.

Meanwhile, back at the X-Men's headquarters, Jubilee is growing bored and sneaks in and takes a look at their stuff. Jubes youth and innocence is emphasised by her not having heard of the X-Men or Dazzler, and considering Lila Cheney to be "old fogies" music, strictly for the over-20s.

This is evidently supposed to amp up the threat level, but I don't see the need for that given that the consequences of mutant registration have hardly been looked at, the X-Men are still trying to keep rumours of their death from being understated, which provides constraints enough. Still, I'll keep reading, obv.

1. these guys can't cure cancer, so he's gonna fund research into new forms of cancer, is what he seems to be saying.

X-Factor #14: Crushed Dreams

X-Factor #14 sees Cyclops fight that Sentinel.

He's been arrested by the Anchorage Police Department, for smashing his house up, which he rationalises by saying he didn't want the person who stole it from him to get the benefit of it, rather than the truth which was his hallucinations. Which are continuing: he sees Professor X, who is Not Impressed with Scott.

Our Sentinel (well, Master Mold) is insane, as Sentinels often are, and it has sadly noticed that all humans are mutants, and has added them to its list of things to exterminate. It's also concerned with The Twelve, or The Strong, something which has come from Lang's influence. Scott is one of these, and therefore belongs particularly dead. According to the caption, this group constitutes "Twelve Mutants who will lead... around whom the others will gather. Lang discovered them. Master Mold will destroy them." Who are they? Well, a panel on page 2 gives a clue: some faces, which we can make out as Cyclops, Apocalypse, Punk Storm, Jean Grey (or at least someone who looks like her - this issue notes that Jean and Maddie are indistinguishable to third parties in photographs), and Franklin Richards, along with a number of unidentifiable silhouettes. This is going to be one of the slowest-burning plot arcs that X-Men has ever had.

Cyclops rescues the cop from the Sentinel, and in reward is let go. But they've got some bad news for him about a dead redhead.

Scott's self-mythologisation (that he left Alaska to lead X-Factor) has reached the point where even the students at X-Factor believe it. Boom-Boom, Rusty and Skids sit around and chat about the love lives of the X-Men, while watching the adult team deal with matters.

Angel is still refusing amputation, and may be investigated for fraud (so, foolishly, he used Worthington Enterprises money rather than his own personal money for bankrolling X-Factor?). Trish Tilbit doorsteps him in his own hospital room, and mentions a "court order". Jean just shoos her out rather than ask "what court order?", which is a shame because it's to declare him incompetent. At whose instigation, I wonder? We are told he has no living relatives (his father was killed in the Siegel story in Kazar #2-#3 and Marvel Tales #30 which I have not covered due to expense; but his mother survived that. Byrne kills her off in The Hidden Years, I see. Hodge, then, perhaps? I never trusted that guy.

New Mutants #1-#2: Read My Lips: No New X-Men

The New Mutants graphic novel apparently proved a success and so we get an ongoing series! This is the real start of the X-franchise, notwithstanding the Wolverine and Dazzler solo titles.

But first, a comic.

The first three issues of New Mutants lead up to the events of Uncanny X-Men #167, which is a bit odd because they were released several months after it, so we already know that Xavier is infected by the Brood and has brought the children there to infect too. How plausible that is we'll cover in a post's time, but for now I'll note this robs the end panel of #1 (where we see someone setting off the Danger Room, apparently trying to kill Dani - not enough to make a positive ID, but his sleeve matches the type that Xavier was wearing earlier in the issue) of its mystery.

This arc is the first serious look at the ethics of power use - and by that I don't mean the obligation to use them to help others, but whether some means are just tainted entirely, no matter the ends. Two of our new mutants have mind-based powers: Dani, who can make people see their fears; and Karma, who can mind-control people. Karma is upset when Dani (by accident, it seems), shows the group her trauma: her escape from Vietnam, her mother's death, and her attempt to protect her younger siblings (who are curiously absent - I wonder where they are living?). Dani is of course mortified, and spends much of the story running away, and then trying to prove herself.

Meanwhile, the other four (with Stevie - Moira and Illyana are in London, finding out that Xavier has an autistic, powered, son, by the Israeli ambassador, one Gabrielle Heller - which can go on the Chart now) go to the local mall. This is a ground-level view of the X-Men's small-town neighbours that we've never really seen before, and has something of the Broxton about it. They're being followed, by agents of Hank Gyrich (introduced a few years ago as a bureaucratic obstructionist character in Avengers), who is conspiring with Sebastian Shaw, mutant member of the Hellfire Club's Inner Circle. So, the attempt to wipe the information in #158 was a failure.

Shaw is using Gyrich. He doesn't want to see the New Mutants arrested or dead. He's willing to see them use giant mutant-killing robots - which he used before in the Ororo/Emma bodyswap story - to try and convince young mutants that it's a dangerous world and to sign up with him. For all that Magneto was evil, he's never staged a false flag operation, so far as we know. And although the guys (with Michael Rossi's help) take down the Sentinels and turn the day. Our issue of ethics comes up again, as Karma forces one of the goons to make a confession. It's all true, says, Rossi, but what's really going to happen here? The moment Karma breaks the control, he wakes up not knowing why he's been handcuffed. His masters will be able to spin this as an "evil mutants" thing quite easily and whisk him away from the local police department. The effect of this all has to be counted as a victory for Shaw, as he manages to sow mistrust on all sides.

The new holographic Danger Room is introduced in this issue. How it came to be holographic is not made clear, but certainly the mansion was rebuilt with the help of Shi'ar tech, so making it be of that origin is a natural fit. Oddly, the mansion has been rebuilt with the X-Men's rooms as they were (complete with mess!) and Storm's roof garden, where the plants are starting to get thirsty after several weeks of separation from their tender). That's some construction robots for you.

We get some ages of the team in #2. Rahne and Dani are 14. Bobby is 13. Xi'an is 19 (and is therefore older or a contemporary of Peter!). And Sam, as we already know from the graphic novel, is 16. And, they all get codenames: Dani is "Psyche", Rahne is "Wolfsbane", Sam is "Cannonball" (a word that had been used to describe him in the graphic novel), and Bobby is "Sunspot". Xi'an is already known as Karma. Where these names came from - whether they were self-endowed, or like previous codenames bestowed by Xavier - is left unstated.

Uncanny X-Men #151-#152: Loss of Pryde

Uncanny X-Men #151-#152 is another momentous little story arc, setting up the Hellfire Club, Emma Frost and Sebastian Shaw as recurring villains.

Emma's evil plan is: persuade Kitty's parents to withdraw her from the Xavier School and send her to the Massachusetts Academy instead, and then hope that Storm drives her there. This works, and she body-swaps with Storm, drives back to the X-Men, finds that Shaw is already attacking them with Sentinel-derived technology, defeats them. Storm manages to escape from her cell, persuades Kitty of her identity, drives back, liberates the X-Men, and leads them to victory against the Hellfire Club.

Where this body-swapping gun came from is never explained. Such a technology would be very scary: Whedon's Dollhouse begins to explore the possibilities. X-Men again picks up an idea, uses it, and then discards it just as easily without considering the deeper implications.

It came as a surprise to Storm that Frost is still alive, which implies that the X-Men have not been watching the Hellfire Club too closely. Xavier ought surely to have known, if he'd been monitoring them. And the plot only works because he's had a sudden case of ethics - the old Professor X would have short-circuited this by just changing Kitty's parents' minds.

X-Men #141-#142: "It's 2013. Do you know what your children are?"

It's the distant future. The year 2013.¹ Yes, time has nearly caught up with Days of Future Past, the story that occupies X-Men #141 and Uncanny X-Men #142 (the series changed its formal title between issues, although we've had "Uncanny" on the covers for a good long while now).

2013 is a horrible dystopia in which Sentinels - giant robots with funny hats - have overthrown the U.S. government, and killed or put in camps all mutants and other superhumans, and spread through the rest of North America. In doing so, they've wrecked the place, - I love here the "express train" that Pryde takes, being a bus pulled by animals. Other nations aren't looking too kindly on the proposed sentinel invasion of the rest of the world, and a nuclear apocalypse is about to start.

Many of the heroes are dead or captured (as we see on the now-iconic cover: expect to see that as a movie poster in 2014), and only a few holdouts remain: Wolverine, Kate Pryde (who would be 46 by now), her husband Peter Rasputin (well, they moved quickly on hinting at that, didn't they, although this is the future and so no, I'm not putting it in the chart), Ororo (who is surely in her 60s, if we're still supposed to think she was orphaned by Suez), Franklin Richards, Rachel (surname carefully left unspecified), and Magneto (called Magnus - the first time we've got a "real" name for him). Together they have decided to do something about it, by sending Kate Pryde's consciousness back in time to 1980, to avert the assassination of Senator Kelly. The only problem is, they're not quite sure how time travel works in the Marvel universe (which is fair enough, neither do the writers). Will it change their timeline and they vanish, or just create a new one and they get to experience a fiery nuclear death anyhow? That giant robots are in charge and are treating even baseline humans badly undermines the "It Can't Happen Here" undertones a bit, but nonetheless the future it presents is quite stark.

Kelly was is going to be assassinated by Mystique, and her Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Mystique makes her first full appearance in X-Men here, having debuted as a character in Claremont's Ms. Marvel #17, 4 years ago. She's put together a team that consists of herself, her um-friend the blind precog Destiny, Pyro (described as a "Limey", which has got to hurt, considering we'll eventually learn he's supposed to be Australian) and Avalanche, all being introduced here for the first time. The Blob - who was given the name Fred J. Dukes in his prison-break scene in #140 - joins them.

Kate-as-Kitty quickly gets believed, and is sent to Washington to talk with Professor X. Now, this suffers from the a common problem with time travel stories, that Ryan North identifies in Back to the Future, in that why on Earth have they sent her back with so little time to spare? It's almost as if she's arrived close to the events in question as an artificial thing to induce drama... Oh.

So, there is a FIGHT and the X-MEN save SENATOR KELLY'S LIFE and they ALL LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER. Apart from the future-X-Men who die. Oh, and Kitty becomes herself again...

This, along with the Dark Phoenix Sage, is often pointed at as one of the highpoints of the Claremont/Byrne run, in a "you, go read that" sense. In this case, I agree. It's quick and mostly self-contained, and it has a point to it that still resonates today - this trope is by now well-worn but is usually used as disaster porn rather than politically. But apart from that, it's also a major turning point in Claremont's run of X-Men, and marks a decisive shift to a world where the X-Men are actively feared and hated.

Non-American readers may not know that the title (used as a campaign slogan by whoever won the '84 election here) is a play on the quite creepy It's 10pm. Do you know where your children are? public service announcements to be found on U.S. television. American readers may not know that the rest of world does not have such televised messages, and find them rather bizarre and unsettling. So I thought I'd mention that here.

So, this scenario, of people going back in time to stop a post-apocalyptic future where robots are hunting down and killing people? Remind you of anything? It anticipates the later Terminator films, without really appearing to be inspired by Ellison's work "Soldier [from Tomorrow]". Is it basically just "Day of the Daleks"? Well, I've not seen that, but from reading summaries, not really as similar as it is made out to be. Claremont Byrne does plenty of outright lifting from film and television, but they repay the favour from time to time, it seems. Of course, now that they're adapting this into a film (see my earlier post about is - shooting right now!), then they're going to have to be very careful to avoid comparisons to Terminator and for that matter to Transformers.

1. When I originally wrote this post I had dropped to a weekly schedule and this was going to post in 2013. But now I've boosted it to daily for September as well, so you'll just have to imagine it's 2013 and laugh.

X-Men #57-#59: Larry Trask and the Sentinels

I started covering X-Men #57 last post, but it segues away from the Living Pharaoh and into a Sentinels storyline mid-issue, and they warrant being different posts.

The United States federal government has set up an anti-mutant agency called the "Federal Council of Mutant Activities", led by Judge Chalmers, with special assistant Larry Trask. Larry's father, Bolivar Trask, built giant robots called Sentinels to destroy all mutants. Larry has now vowed to carry on the mission, and has built improved Sentinels (this time with adaptive anti-power technology). These are then unleashed, and capture as many mutants as they can. They already have taken Alex and Lorna, but quickly add Bobby, then gradually the Living Monolith, Warren (who has managed to fly over the Atlantic to arrive at the same time as Scott, Jean and Hank on an airliner), Mesmero, Magneto (who turns out to have been a robot in #49-#52, unbeknownst to Mesmero), Banshee, Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch, Toad, Unus, Mastermind, and Blob...

It seems hard to see Trask's activities as a rogue completely unauthorised by the US government, but certainly he goes beyond the bounds that Chalmers is comfortable with, and when the Judge tells him to shut the operation down he defies him and openly accuses him of being a mutant-lover and possibly a mutant himself. But this is rather misplaced, as it turns out that Larry himself is the secret mutant, whose precognitive powers have been suppressed by a medallion he was given by his father when he was very little.

The concept here implied - of a parent of a mutant trying to destroy all other mutants but seeking to protect their child - will be re-used in Claremont's 1982 graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills, and would make its way into the second X-Men movie.

Taking the medallion off immediately allows the Sentinels to detect Larry as a mutant. They then carry on their standing order and detain him in preparation for an execution. They have nobody to take orders from any more, and reject Chalmer's authority.

The three free X-Men get inside the base, and find Pietro, Wanda and Toad being brought in for processing. They swap costumes, which confuses the Sentinels anti-powers technology enough for them to get a jump on them. Really, this ought to be the moment where the new kids, Lorna and especially Alex, get a chance to shine and blow stuff up. That opportunity is missed, and instead the Sentinels are defeated in a Kirk-like display of tricking the computer with logic. The Sentinels are persuaded by Scott that the real problem is the source of mutation: solar radiation, and they are best deployed trying to defeat the sun. Huh.

We're left with Alex pretty injured, and a cliffhanger for the next issue, where it appears they are about to take him to a Doctor Lykos, who is holding someone captive...

X-Men #14-#16: The Mutant Menace

So, we've now finished the original Lee/Kirby run on X-Men, and although Kirby will continue doing layouts for a little longer (and thus contributing towards the storytelling, under the Marvel method), he has been replaced as penciller by Werner Roth (as Jay Gavin). In this run the X-Men have been introduced and mostly got their personalities, Scott has become field leader, we've met some villains, and the characters are starting to interact with the larger Marvel universe. We're even getting a bit of queer subtext peeking through. We're missing something, though. What this comic needs is a really long story about giant robots!

X-Men #14, #15 and #16 happily oblige, with the new character of Bolivar Task predicting the extinction of mankind at the hands of the mutants, just as the X-Men go on their first vacation. Xavier turns out to have a civilian identity as, if you will believe it, "one of the greatest authorities in the field of education", and goes on the tellybox to debate Trask. After a brief back-and-forth, Trask unveils his giant robots, the Sentinels, who then of course immediately malfunction and turn on him. Xavier telepathically summons the X-Men, interrupting their holiday. They intervene but the Sentinels take Trask away to their base, and plot to defeat all of humanity. At least until the X-Men save them, aided by the belated heroic self-sacrifice of Trask.

Trask casts a shadow to the present day, not only for his creation of the Sentinels (who play an important part in X-Men history right up to Schism and beyond), but his real legacy is his fearmongering about mutants. Before, the X-Men were just another superhero team, held in suspicion by the general populace just like Spider-Man or the Avengers, but now, mutants are seen as a global menace, and the tragedy of the X-Men is finally expressed by Xavier: that they risk their lives for the same human race which hates and fears them. We are shown that Daily Globe newspaper article that will go on to become so important to Grant Morrison's run, complete with the Mutant overlord costume that will be worn provacatively by Quentin Quire.

After Professor X's history was revealed last time, it's almost as if a dam has burst open, and we get a partial backstory for Warren (his wings started growing when he was at military school, which he then quit to avoid a physical at), and then the Beast goes in to quite some detail about his background. His father was a worker at an atomic project, and he believes this is the source of the mutation. Something from Children of the Atom is definitely leaking through now. His body was always shaped as it was, but he realised his agility one day when he was being bullied - later a newspaper article calling attention to his sporting prowess tipped Xavier off to his existence. These backstories, showing that our original team of six had to hide their true selves as children, provides a context for Trask's rhetoric to exist in. This is the first true X-Men comic - the first book really to live up to the name Essential X-Men.

Continuity notes

Introduction of Warren and Beast's parents. Warren has a Mustang, possibly the first hint at his wealth. Coffee-A-Go-Go in Greenwich Village is given a name. Also, my first sighting of the phrase "optic-blast".

There's a little nod at Superman's supposed habit of changing in phone booths, as Beast says "I somehow feel unfaithful to the super hero code when I change in an alley. A phone booth seems to be the accepted place."