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.

New Mutants #23-#25: Cloak and Dagger

I'm off to Thought Bubble in Leeds today, assuming I feel up to it. If you see me say hello. I'm the one with the geeky t-shirts and the dyed hair.

New Mutants #23 follows up from Selene in Uncanny #189 - she gets ratified as Black Queen. Also, Emmanuel de Costa is confirmed.

In Westchester, Bobby is moping in a saloon that he shouldn't even be in (possibly he's mad about Amara and Rachel going on a date), and reacts very badly at Peter trying to talk to him. Peter ends up in a coma. Elsewhere, Rahne has gone missing. Dani and Sam track her to a hotel room in the city, with no memory of how she got there.

What we have here is a crossover with Cloak and Dagger (who are "between series" right now, as they put it in the trade), and more specifically the aftermath of Marvel Team-Up #6, which I have failed to get hold of a copy of. Bobby and Rahne are acting weird from the after-effects of that. Various attempts fail, including an informal first try by Illyana to fix it, but after some planning, she is able to successfully exorcise the wrongness. The fairly unsubtle drugs-are-bad-mkay message is leavened with the notion that black magic can save you from them, which is fantastic trollery.

There's a short re-appearance of Karma's younger siblings, seen here for the first time in New Mutants, and still under the care of Father Bowen.

Meanwhile, in the Bermuda triangle, Lee takes Magneto to his old island base, our Proto-Utopia. They start to explore it. Lee doesn't think he's been seen since #150 (which marks against God Love Man Kills being in continuity, because he made a pretty noticeable appearance on live television at that point). Lee calls him on his ungratefulness, and after some consideration, he very nearly apologises. Meanwhile, Lee reckons the people who built the strange sunken city full of fish-people statutes and non-Euclidian geometric horrors might not be even human. On that, all I can say is that I'm certainly going to continue to enjoy Bill Sienkiewicz.

New Mutants #12: Back in Rio

They're back in Rio in New Mutants #12. Bobby has words with his father rather than taking his usual problem-solving approach of hitting things with fists. He's not one to remain calm, though, and goes off on one, burning all bridges. Emmanuel decides to join that Inner Circle after all.

Amara is also not remaining calm (she's come with the New Mutants to Rio, with the intent of signing up at Xavier's School - Bobby's mother remains in Nova Roma). Some unwelcome molestation on a beach leads her to run away without Dani, and things get worse after that, partly due to the heat (so, she's OK in Amazonas but finds the Rio heat unbearable? oh, whatever.) She proves unable to control her power, leading to numerous very small volcanoes throughout Rio, including one in the harbour that builds a new island.

No reported casualties, luckily, and eventually the rest of the gang are able to track her down and bring her to safety. She definitely needs to learn to control her powers.

New Mutants #8-#11: Moon and Earth

We've bypassed Manaus, and instead join our New Mutants in the Amazon rainforest in New Mutants #8. SpaceSquid covered this only two days ago, and quotes me calling it "profoundly offensive racist garbage", which I totes stand by.¹ By the way, the story does actually use the word "rainforest", which made me look up that on Google Ngram viewer, and yes, it seems that was just before it doubled in popularity in the late 1980s, so well done, Claremont, have a cookie.

Anyway, Rahne is not dealing well with the heat (and, if her skin is as much like mine as it seems, I hope she's wearing sunscreen). Soon enough, they encounter a girl named "Amara", seemingly from a local tribe, but with strange arrows. One is from the Hivoto, from the Peru portrayed in the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and another of Jivaro origin, who Nina identifies as being local but in reality are from Peru/Ecuador. Amara's knife, however, is of steel!

So, there's an incident with the boats, and the New Mutants end up captured by Romans, who are living in a city ("Nova Roma") in an isolated valley (once more, we find something you can't really do these days - if this existed you'd be able to see it on Google Maps), and our captive Amara is revealed to be one of these Romans. She'd been in blackface and a wig, and really is white and blonde - which sigh, if they had to do this, couldn't they just have drawn her as a southern Italian and spared us that disguise crap? And she speaks English after all (to Rahne's great embarrassment), and gives her full name as "Amara Juliana Olivia Aquilla", exile and daughter of the first senator, one Lucius Antonius Aquilla. The city is part-Roman (to those the republican aspects are ascribed), but also accepted some Incas centuries again, who brought with them some tendencies towards despotism (because Romans certainly never do that sort of thing). Sigh.

Now, this is profoundly offensive garbage, and it is simply not a defence to say that it was of its time, and they weren't to know better. A letter printed in #19 outlines, with perfect clarity, the problem with this story.

Dear Marvel,



THE NEW MUTANTS is a pretty good book, but the plotline starting in #8 is atrocious. As a black person myself, I'm sick and tired of these storylines that place lost Roman legions or other whites in the jungle whenver it starts to appear that the so-called "savage" tribes have any intelligence. You've turned the clock back decades with that old bull about how the Amazon tribeswoman turn out to be whites wearing some kind of dye because their knives show sophisticated workmanship. I hope in the future you at Marvel will avoid such cliche-ridden worn-out racist stories when the action takes place in a non-Western country or culture (the New Mutants story takes place in an area where Western civilization hasn't arrived yet.)



Quentin Sinclair

(no address)

Do they acknowledge it's a problem and apologise? Nope. They defend the storyline elements, and say they hadn't consciously meant to be racist, as if that makes it any better. They do at least concede that the hybrid nature of the culture was only marginally apparent in the finished story, and note they'll do better in the future. But the hybrid nature, with democratic Romans and despotic Incas is half the problem!

Because it's a Roman story made out of pure condensed trope, and the protagonists have become captives, the boys are taken to Gladiator Academy, while the girls are pampered and drugged prior to be sold off as slaves.

Just as the boys face defeat, Rahne breaks loose from her drugging, shapeshifts, and saves them. This is the cause of some comment - they reckon her lupine abilities come to her from the line of Romulus. Heh. So, having gone through the being-gladiators-and-slaved-tropes, one of their number gets hailed as a living god. They've been saved courtesy of Senator Gallio, who is Lucius's rival and covets the Emperorship. He's married to Selene, who turns out to be an ancient moon sorceress slash living vampire. She wants to recruit Dani and kill Amara.

Amara, having been tossed into a lava pool, is reborn in molten form, and then battles Selene. Lucky, really. I wonder whether she might be a more long-term version of Darwin. If she'd have been drowned, would she have become Hydro?

They all rally round, put a stop to Selene and Gallio's plans, rescue Bobby's mother, and generally huzzah!

I was originally slightly puzzled by Emmanuel's plan: he wants to exploit the mineral wealth of Amazonas, and so therefore is sabotaging his wife's archaeological expedition. Amazonas is, well, a big place, larger than say, Mongolia. Towards the end it's strongly implied that he knew about Nova Roma already, and that it specifically would be a good place for mining, so that clears that up partially.

Having a random Roman colony in Brazil is very weird, even by the standards of X-Men, but this is not given the appropriate level of remarkableness in-comic. How did these people get here? Doesn't this change everything we know about history? Why do they speak English? For that matter, why do they speak classical Latin, anyway, rather than some previously unknown Quechua-Italic contact language? These are questions that are not even asked, let alone answered, in the story. (The letters page for #19 provides a feeble excuse that they'd learned English from previous expeditions, without explaining why, or why not Portuguese.)

1. This of course means I've caught up! At least as far as New Mutants goes. For Uncanny it'll take until the end of the month. I'm cheating by not doing Alpha Flight and Dazzler, but I will be covering everything else I can get my hands on, including the Magik: Storm and Illyana miniseries (coming Saturday), Kitty Pryde & Wolverine (13th November), X-Men & Alpha Flight (19th November), and then eventually doing X-Factor (2nd December) in full when it launches. I cannot find the Nightcrawler limited series, sadly. I fail to care about Longshot but will possibly consider it if recommended. X-Men vs. Fanstatic Four is in Essential, but I need to get hold of X-Men vs. Avengers, which is possibly rare, or at least hard to Google for now, THANK YOU MARVEL. Oh, and I have a copy of Fallen Angels already. Anything else I am missing from my list?

From this you can perhaps tell that I have got a LITTLE BIT AHEAD in my reading and writing, such that I've already started in 2013 posts and have only got five left to complete in 2012. This is good.

New Mutants #7: "Flying Down to Rio"

At the start of New Mutants #7, Xi'an is missing from the explosion still. The X-Men have spent several days searching for her, with no joy, and Xavier decides its time to pursue other avenues. He himself can sense Xi'an still, but doesn't tell them that. My guess at this stage is that her uncle has claimed her for that year's service she'd promised to him in #6. He sends the New Mutants to Rio, with Bobby's mother, who turns up here, knowing all about Bobby being a mutant and accepting him. Which makes Bobby mixed-race! One of the first mixed-race characters in comics?

But it's difficult to see how Bobby's parents' marriage works, not because of their different backgrounds but their attitudes. His mother, Nina, who we meet here for the first time, is a professional archaeologist and amateur environmentalist. His father, Emmanuel (also spelt Emmanual and Emanuel) is a self-made business tycoon who now lives in the mansion in Ipanema that his mother worked as a maid at. He's a member of the Hellfire Club (as established in #1), but not yet its Inner Circle). Nina is planning an expedition to the "Madería - the headwaters of the Amazon", which Emmanuel is very unimpressed by - although he wants to send geologists there. Perhaps we can interpret the verbal sparring over the dinner table as him desparately trying to stop her trip, and imagine their usual interaction is more comfortable. How did they even meet?

Emmanuel wants Nina to change her mind, so he doesn't have to pull the trigger on the "get the Hellfire Club to scare her off preferably without hurting her" plan. Which fails, thanks to the kids. The issue ends with them preparing to fly to Manaus, and Emmanuel and Shaw plotting their next move: make sure they never arrive at their final destination.