Writing: Scott Lobdell
Art: Joe Madureira
What Went Down: The X-Men are spending the day playing baseball with the cast of Generation X. Bishop steals a base, and it ends with a bunch of mutants tangled up in Skin’s skin while everyone else laughs. Wolverine shows up to mention how nice it is to see Storm smile. A portal appears on the baseball diamond, and Colossus comes through it, holding an unconscious Callisto, asking for help.
In New York, members of Gene Nation have stopped a subway full of people to use as hostages. Back at the mansion, Colossus fills in the rest of the X-Men. For some reason, Callisto passed out after she told Peter what needed to be done. A bunch of renegade Morlocks calling themselves Gene Nation are preparing to kill a lot of humans for the anniversary of the Morlock Massacre. Callisto accuses Storm of not taking her role as Morlock leader seriously enough, even though last time we saw her, Callisto had renounced her leadership so she could be pretty and have a normal life on the surface world.
Callisto uses a hologram to show the X-Men Gene Nation and explains that the Morlocks were taken to an alternate dimension where time was accelerated after Mikhail seemingly killed them all. Marrow and some others felt that the old Morlocks were weak and came back to Earth to reclaim their home and punish the humans.
Meanwhile, Gambit receives a phone call from Rogue. She tells him that they’re going to Seattle, where Gambit apparently did something really awful. Gambit tries to stop her, but she leaves the phone off the hook. Cyclops, Beast, Jean, Archangel, and Psylocke load up into the Blackbird. They’re acting as back up to the main team, but they don’t do anything else important in this issue. Archangel discusses the loss of his wings with Betsy.
At Sinister’s secret base, his assistant Threnody alerts Sinister that Gambit is on his way to Seattle just as she was ordered to do if that ever transpired. Sinister says some vague and cryptic mutterings about this being according to plan.
Wolverine, Callisto, Colossus, and Storm are the only four that Callisto’s teleporter could carry, so they are the ones searching the sewers. Callisto blames Storm for all of this, but the group is interrupted by a mangled body in front of a message for the X-Men. A new Gene Nation member named Reverb is tracking the X-Men, and Marrow is anxious to begin the fight. The X-Men are attacked by a big, strong mutant named Hemingway, who Callisto notes as having mutated recently. Vessel also shows up for the fight. While Colossus and Wolverine hold them off, Storm and Callisto continue towards the hostages.
The two Morlock leaders find the hostages escaping. One stops to fill them in, but then shoots Callisto with a gun, revealing himself to be Sack; Storm subdues him. Marrow appears and tells Storm that she was a young girl when Storm became leader of the Morlocks. Storm offered hope but never followed through on any of it, angering Marrow, who was once called Sarah. She reveals a number of hostages with bombs attached to them. The trigger has been strapped to Marrow’s heart, so Storm has to remove it before the timer reaches zero. They agree to a one-on-one duel using Marrow’s bone fragments as knives.
The mutant Reverb tries to affect the fight by attacking Storm, but Storm kills him by throwing her knives at him. Unarmed, Storm is still able to overpower Marrow, stab her, and cut out her heart to save the day.
The X-Men free the hostages and Callisto asks Colossus if he wants to go with her, but he declines. After a good-bye kiss she teleports away. Colossus decides his place is no longer with the X-Men either, so he walks away after saying good-bye to Storm. Storm agonizes over her choice, and Wolverine comforts her as they walk away.
How It Was: This issue is double-sized with a foldout cardboard cover to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Giant-Sized X-Men #1, the issue where Wolverine, Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler, and Banshee joined the X-Men. Thunderbird did as well, but he died after three issues, so he hardly counts. The bad news is that this month had two, two, two double-sized issues for me to review and this is the first. And of course, both issues have covers that neglect to have the titles of the comic books or their numbers on the front, so that’s real helpful to collectors and potential new fans.
As for the comic, there is a lot of space filled by baseball and later by exposition. The baseball game has some fun comments from Beast, but other than that the rest of the scene is silly, and not in a good way. The inclusion of Generation X is perplexing since they don’t do anything else for the rest of the issue even though they’ve also been fighting members of Gene Nation in their own title. At the very least they should have let Banshee go with the field team since the rest of the members are all mutants from Giant-Sized X-Men #1.
This book seems to be full of errors. Callisto’s unconscious appearance is most likely a last minute mistake that was covered with dialogue. Callisto has to note that Hemingway has mutated recently, which probably means that his design was different in Generation X. And Callisto blames Storm for neglecting the Morlocks when she did the very same thing back in her last appearance in Uncanny X-Men. None of these break the story, but it is frustrating to see so much inconsistency.
The tone suddenly shifts from light and silly in the beginning to very, very dark. All of a sudden we go from laughing at people crashing into each other on home plate to mangled bodies left as messages for the X-Men. And while the battle with Gene Nation is what you would expect, the fight between Storm and Marrow is surprisingly violent. We get the two slicing at each other with bone knives, Storm licking Marrow’s blood off of a knife (???), and Marrow getting her heart ripped out. It’s a pretty big “what the?” moment, at least until you start to think about how stupid and contrived it is to strap a bomb detonator to her heart in the first place. Most of these final scenes feel out of character for Storm, from the taunting with licking blood to the part when she tells Marrow to “get over it.” The scenes at the end showing Storm’s guilt make it clear that she was putting on a strong face, but it still reads really strangely.
While the Gene Nation members are still completely one-dimensional, Marrow does have some good moments. When she’s not being “strap a bomb to your heart” crazy, she actually comes off as a fairly sympathetic character who put her faith in Storm and was ultimately disappointed when she let the Morlocks “die.” And for all my insisting that Callisto is a big hypocrite, she does have a good point about the X-Men having forgotten about the Morlocks; after all, they’re playing a game of baseball on the anniversary of the Morlock Massacre.
It’s also nice to see Colossus back as an X-Man, even though I feel like there were still stories left to explore with him as a villain. He doesn’t do a lot except flirt with Callisto and take accusations from Wolverine, but he’s still back where he is meant to be. And speaking of Wolverine, he gets some classic lines in while fighting with Gene Nation, and he’s finally wearing his mask again.
There are some pretty good moments in this book, but you have to wade through a lot of filler to get to them. Plus Gene Nation’s origins are quite convoluted, involving interdimensional portals and different rates of time. It’s nice to have Storm in the spotlight, and it gets rid of the Morlocks for the time being, although they always come back.
C
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