Writing: Whilce Portacio and John Byrne
Art: Whilce Portacio
What Went Down: Sunfire, the Japanese fire wielder, receives a new costume. He’s out with a team of Japanese and Russian scientists exploring a mysterious portal on the Sakhalin Islands. The team tells Sunfire to use his powers on it, at which point something in the void attacks Sunfire.
As for the Gold Team, they are still on the Blackbird returning from the previous story arc. Colossus has broken his nose, and everyone wants to know how Jean stuck her mind in Emma Frost’s body. Jean has no idea. Jean and the Professor attempt to scan the White Queen’s mind when Forge interrupts them with an emergency alert from Sunfire’s science team.
Back on the island, Sunfire’s new armor isn’t doing much, as the attackers are immune to his powers. Just as they are about to finish him off, the X-Men appear to save the day. Jean notes that the attackers’ minds are very alien, even though they are all speaking perfect English.
During the fight, Forge launches some missiles from the Blackbird; he claims that they are only concussion missiles and will only give the attackers a bad headache. The invaders fire on the missiles, which explode and appear to do a lot more damage than just a headache. One of the soldier’s costumes is damaged and causes a huge explosion, revealing the leader of the group is a young woman in armor.
The girl, named Primate because it is some sort of military rank, says that they were actually trying to protect the Earth from the void, not invade it. The explosion opens the void and sucks all of the X-Men, Sunfire, and Primate into it. Xavier and Forge notice that the vortex continues to expand, even after the X-Men disappear.
Over in North America somewhere, Bishop and his assistants, Malcolm and Randall, are busy tracking escaped criminals from the future. They find three who have butchered some local women, and the XSE officers proceed to kill the bad guys. After finding the dead women, Bishop vows to save humanity from these villains.
How It Was: Well this is the beginning of a pretty inconsequential, and kind of boring, three issue arc. Basically the X-Men get sent to a fantasy world that they will never see again, and it’s not a very dynamic or original one at that. Still, that doesn’t happen until next issue, so I can’t really judge this issue on those merits.
It’s nice to see Sunfire again, although his new costume is really generic looking and he contributes absolutely nothing to the overall plot. This issue he gets completely beaten and then he acts like a jerk to Colossus, and in the next two issues he acts like a jerk to Iceman, and that is all he does for the whole story. Why is he here? I couldn’t tell you.
Also, the X-Men spend a lot of time going over what happened in the last story. This isn’t a bad idea in principle, since there are a lot of unanswered questions about Bishop, Fitzroy, and Jean’s powers that need to be explored, but nothing new is learned after three pages of discussion. The X-Men just get sidetracked and never bring up this quirk with Jean’s powers again.
As for the unnamed bad guys, they do have a very cool design and look awesome, but they aren’t really that interesting. One of them is called Primate for crying out loud. And the reveal that they were actually trying to protect the people of Earth doesn’t really work since the narration before made it pretty clear that the bad guys killed all of the innocent scientists. The Bishop subplot is okay; it’s nice to see he wasn’t forgotten.
The art is par for Portacio; some great characters and action scenes with most panels lacking any background art. For some reason the island Sunfire and his team are on has a blue ground with blue mountains and green water in the background; it is a very odd choice. Plus, some of Storm’s facial expressions during the issue can only be described as awkward—just check out the bottom of page 17.
D
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