Writing: Terry Kavanagh
Art: Bryan Hitch
What Went Down: Cannonball stops by the Massachusetts Academy, interrupting a game of basketball between the members of Generation X. There’s some tension between Sam and Emma since she used to lead the New Mutants’ old enemies, the Hellions. Sam’s sister Husk tackles him, but it’s just for fun. Sam warns Paige about Emma, and then says that they have family business to take care of.
Sam and Paige’s sister Joelle is staying with mutant named Preacher, although nobody knows he’s a mutant. His power causes him to paint scenes of different events and the future, so lately he has been painting scenes from the Age of Apocalypse. We learn that Joelle and Preacher are members of Humanity’s Last Stand, a survivalist compound dedicated to preserving humanity.
Bishop, Storm, and Wolverine go with the Guthries for their visit home. Because they live in Kentucky, Sam’s mother has about seven or eight children. The oldest of the kids at home, Josh, is rather abrupt with X-Men, and Mrs. Guthrie blames herself for all her kids feeling trapped. She tells the X-Men about the pro-human cult, but Cannonball insists that he can take care of it himself.
Cannonball and Husk go to a Last Stand rally, which basically blames mutants for being an abomination in God’s eyes. Preacher is brought up to explain his visions as a cautionary tale of the dangerous future that mutants might bring. A mystery person sends a group of armored robots to stop Cannonball and Husk.
Sam and Paige find Joelle and learn that she is essentially acting out for attention. Paige follows the leader of the group, while Cannonball is attacked by the armored figures. He gets beat up, but manages to fly away. At the same time, Paige learns that the HLS is run by a member of the Trask family, and that he has manipulated the truth about Preacher’s visions to fit his needs.
Cannonball crashes in front of the Guthrie farm and asks for help from the other X-Men. A member of the Stand named Garibaldi ambushes Husk, and she is captured. Cannonball remembers hearing the Trask name while he was down, so the X-Men set off to rescue his sisters. Meanwhile Preacher tells Joelle that they need to escape after he sees members beating up Paige. Cannonball rescues her, but they are ambushed by more armored soldiers. Bishop finds Joelle and Preacher, but even more soldiers attack him.
Wolverine and Storm assist the Guthrie siblings, and Wolverine lets us know that they are fighting Nimrod technology. Since they’re only robots, Bishop creates a cave-in that traps the robots right as his friends escape. Girabaldi tells the X-Men to leave because they don’t have a legal right to be there, but they are content with knowing that they have uncovered the truth.
The X-Men say goodbye and Bishop asks about the boy Joelle was with. We then see a panel of Preacher painting a portrait of Joelle somewhere else.
How It Was: Wow, out of the last twelve reviews, half of them have been double-sized; my brain can’t take much more of this. Anywho, this is another of Marvel’s 1995 annuals, this one written by Terry Kavanagh. One of the first things to stand out is that this writer knows how to write Cannonball. He’s confident, competent, and not afraid to confront any of the “senior” X-Men. He has no trouble standing up to Emma Frost or telling Storm and Wolverine that he doesn’t want their help. This, my friends, is the Sam Guthrie we all know and love.
It’s unfortunate that Marvel feels the need to portray people who live in rural areas as bumpkins that spit out umpteen amounts of children, but that precedent was established well before Kavanagh got here. And while Humanity’s Last Stand is based on many real world survivalist movements, it’s disappointing to see that the members are so easily tricked into following the organization. Joelle and Preacher come off as slightly less sympathetic since they were both dumb enough to get involved with this group in the first place. And while Hitch’s art is very good, the designs for the nimrods are completely wrong, and they should be more difficult to defeat.
This is a pretty standard set up for a one-off X-Men story: rescuing someone from some form of supremacist group. This particular one seems to focus on hatred through religion, but without any of the articulate spiritual or political views that past antagonists like William Stryker or Robert Kelly have presented in the past. Plus, to my knowledge, we never actually meet the mystery Trask member who is in charge of the organization. This is competent, but nothing outstanding, along with some awesome Bryan Hitch art.
C
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