Writing: Terry Kavagnagh and Howard Mackie
Art: David Perrin and Nick Gnazzo
What Went Down: Preacher, the precognitive mutant artist from last year’s annual, is in a secluded cabin painting and trying to understand what his paintings mean. Two of his paintings, one of Bishop and the other of his sister Shard, connect. This leads Preacher to believe that the shadowy future in the background is to be either caused or prevented by the two heroes. Preacher then lights the cabin on fire because he is being chased by government officials who want to use him to control the future.
Some soldiers break-in just in time to salvage some of the paintings. More shady government types discuss how they recently infiltrated X-Factor, and they decide to go after Shard and Preacher by releasing a Hound.
Meanwhile, Strom brings Bishop to Las Vegas to meet with his deceased sister Shard, or rather a hologram that contains all of her memories and personality traits. Wild Child from X-Factor is bringing Shard. Bishop recalls that he and Shard grew up together in Las Vegas in the future, raised by an old man named Hancock before joining the XSE.
Shard eagerly awaits the reunion with her brother, but Bishop remains unconvinced that she is anything more than an elaborate computer program. The government releases the Hound, a genetically engineered monster, while Storm and Wild Child go off for drinks to leave the siblings alone.
Shard retells the story of Bishop’s first use of his powers with flashbacks; it happened after their guardian Hancock was killed by some gang members, and it led to the two joining the XSE. Bishop still isn’t willing to care about a projection, but they are both interrupted by Preacher. Preacher recognizes Bishop, and shows them a tattoo of a horrible future with the hound chasing them in Vegas. As the mutants talk, the Hound attacks.
Bishop and Shard fight it for a couple of pages, but it manages to knock Bishop out and steal the projector that projects Shard. Storm and Wild Child wake him from a flashback of Shard’s original death. They all decide to rescue Shard, with help from a building drawing in the dirt left by Preacher. The drawing is of Area 51.
In an underground lab, Dr. L. Stephens runs tests on this new hologram/lifeform. Shard feels pain as scientists try to “depixilate” her in order to gain all her knowledge of the future. Storm, Bishop, and Wild Child bust in and fight the Hound. Shard vaporizes her own projector to prevent the bad guys from gaining any more information, and the X-Men continue to fight the Hound. Bishop sets the lab on autodestruct, and Storm flies everyone away before it blows. The Hound makes a final leap to pursue, but doesn’t quite make it and falls to its presumed destruction.
In the Blackbird everyone feels remorse over Shard’s destruction; even Bishop now believes that it truly was his sister, and that she sacrificed herself. As they talk, Shard shows up from the back of the plane. Apparently blowing up her projector somehow gave her a new photon-based solid body. She hugs Bishop and everybody celebrates.
Back in a new hideout, Preacher is busy painting new visions of the future. These particular paintings involve superheroes fighting Onslaught. In the end we learn that Preacher is still being pursued by Bastion and Operation Zero Tolerance.
How It Was: For starters, this one feels like more of a premise for an X-Factor Annual than an Uncanny Annual, but this is the nineties, where nothing makes sense. And because Uncanny had a bigger audience base, it does make sense to introduce this here in an attempt to gain more X-Factor readers. Lord knows there weren’t that many at this point.
The story really shines in its depiction of Shard as the synthetic being trying to come to terms with her identity. She knows she’s not real, she knows she’s supposed to be dead, but she can’t help that she has all of these thoughts, memories, and feelings. This may’ve been done multiple times before with characters like the Vision, but there is still enough here character-wise to make this stand out and work really well. Despite his reaction, Bishop also comes across as sympathetic due to the fact that we’ve seen him struggle to accept his sister’s death in the past, only to have this sentient hologram show up and reopen all his old wounds. Really interesting stuff here.
Ultimately, the rest of the annual just isn’t very gripping. We have a number of flashbacks from Bishop’s mini-series that are unnecessary, a generic villain that adapts to mutant powers—but uglier, and an ending that wraps everything up a little too nicely. Oh, and Preacher stops by from last annual to tell the protagonists that they’re going to be chased by a Hound about a second before the Hound begins its attack, so good for him.
I can see the necessity of getting Shard in a solid body so that she can be better utilized over in X-Factor, but in the end it is way too convenient that destroying her holographic projector happens to turn her solid. As for the Hound, well if it could jump high enough to almost reach Storm once, why would it be hampered in trying the same stunt a second time? Throw in a generic tease for the Onslaught story and this one is nothing to really write home about. Plus, to my knowledge, Shard doesn’t show up in the X-Men titles ever again, so this story only really matters to fans of X-Factor, of which this annual is not a part of.
C
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