Writing: Scott Lobdell and Mark Waid
Art: Adam Kubert and Pascual Ferry
What Went Down: Our prologue begins with a shocking revelation; the video of Jean from Bishop’s timeline, the one that started the whole X-Traitor storyline, is in reference to Professor X turning into Onslaught. Here we get the whole version with the missing sections.
Cutting back to earlier, the story begins with Xavier sitting in his den and throwing a picture of himself and Magneto into a fire. He laments about the failure of his dream before summoning the X-Men to the study. Jean Grey is the only one who knows that Xavier is really Onslaught, but she hasn’t had an opportunity to tell anyone. Dark Beast is still worrying about his infiltration being discovered. Jean recaps all the X-Men’s encounters with Onslaught while Xavier announces that his dream was a mistake.
Jean continues to worry as Charles talks, and she discovers the Cyttorak Gem on his desk; unknown to her, the Juggernaut has been trapped in the gem by Onslaught. Jean continues to probe the Professor’s mind, but Xavier covers her head with a “psychic muzzle.” While the X-Men rush to Jean’s side, Xavier transforms into Onslaught.
Onslaught offers the X-Men an opportunity to join him. When Cyclops brings up the similarities in his tone to Magneto’s, the villain demonstrates his psychic powers on some of the X-Men. Cyclops blasts him, but Onslaught uses his powers to freeze the X-Men in place before disappearing. Gambit frees the X-Men by charging the floor with energy, and Jean fills the team in on what she has learned. Gambit brings up how Bishop has been looking for a traitor in the X-Men, surprising him. The team splits up with one unit going after Cerebro, even though it’s still supposed to be broken, while the other team goes to the ready room.
At the Baxter Building, Franklin—the son of Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman, is talking to his imaginary friend Charley—who is really Onslaught, while the Fantastic Four eat breakfast. Charley gets mad at Franklin and shatters a glass. The FF think Franklin is responsible, and Mr. Fantastic asks his son to go down to the lab with him.
In the Ready Room, the X-Men discover that Xavier has been researching Franklin Richards as well as Nate Grey. Onslaught mentally controls Cannonball and attacks the rest of the team. At the Avengers Mansion, Nate Grey is trying to convince the Avengers that Xavier has turned evil. They are skeptical, but they agree to check out his claims. Onslaught taunts Bishop for failing to discover that he was the traitor before going off to Cerebro.
In the Cerebro Room, Cyclops is busy disconnecting the computer when Iceman detects Onslaught by measuring the body temperatures in the room. Onslaught turns Cyclops’ powers on Jean, Iceman, and himself. Then he reveals that he has known about the Dark Beast’s presence the entire time and has been helping to hide him from the other telepaths. Dark Beast agrees to join Onslaught; the villain has to siphon some of McCoy’s thoughts to maintain his control of Xavier for some reason.
Later, Onslaught has neutralized Jean’s powers and is attempting to steal the secret to the template of the Phoenix Force from her mind. He takes a break to tell Dark Beast to dispose of the X-Men’s bodies, and Jean takes the opportunity to run away. She escapes to a communications room where she records the message from the prologue.
During the part at the end of the message, the part where it looked like Jean died, it turns out that the flash of light was just the other X-Men coming to the rescue. All the X-Men attack together, seemingly killing Onslaught. Of course, it turns out that the body they killed was really an illusion. Onslaught prepares an energy blast to kill all the X-Men, but Bishop manages to intercept and absorb it. Onslaught and Dark Beast teleport away, leaving the X-Men to ponder what they are going to do. At a secret location, Onslaught manages to activate an army of Sentinels.
How It Was: Another year, another X-crossover. As we all know from the success of Age of Apocalypse, every good crossover needs a double-sized one-shot with no ads to start it off. And not only is this a crossover across the X-books, we’re going full-on Marvel Universe wide inter-company crossover with this one. As the first issue of the story, this is probably the most that’s going to happen plot-wise until the Onslaught: Marvel Universe one-shot that ends it. I’ll get more into why this whole crossover is a bit of a mess, but let’s look at this issue a little closer.
Well Onslaught finally shows off how powerful he is, and it’s a wonder why he didn’t attack sooner to get it over with. Flashbacks to X-Men #50 and Uncanny #322 and #333 try to make this feel like a resolution to a grander, cohesive story, but really this just starts out of nowhere. The “hints” earlier don’t really point to a particular plan, and as you’ll see later, Onslaught’s agenda is never addressed beyond wanting to destroy the world…because he’s evil. The issue does succeed in giving us the broad, general ideas: Onslaught is Xavier, he’s really powerful, he’s interested in Nate Grey and Franklin Richards because…some reason, and he’s somehow connected to Magneto. That’s not bad for a first issue, except that this is pretty much what every other writer goes off of for his next two issues without really adding all that much to the plot until the end.
This is about what you’d expect from a hero like Professor X turned evil story. Waid and Lobdell take their time going through the beats: the X-Men can’t believe it, Onslaught shows signs that he’s not totally in control, the X-Men come to terms with the fact that they might have to kill him. Nothing is exactly subtle—from the villain’s reaction to Magneto’s name to the way Gambit brings up the X-traitor plot thread that has been rehashed over the last couple of months to the X-Men’s discovery that Onslaught could kill them but chooses not to. Of course later in the story, Xavier and Magneto turn out to play absolutely no part in the resolution of the story, so you could call this a misdirect, but it feels more like improper story planning. With so many at Marvel wanting to recapture the Age of Apocalypse, but on a larger scale, this issue tries to create some structure that really hasn’t been built up to as well as it was in the previous event.
Because Onslaught spawns from Xavier’s mind, he has the power to manipulate his students’ minds, and this leads to some interesting results, like having Cannonball freak out or Cyclops turn his powers on his friends. However, Onslaught develops so many other powers including super strength, energy blasts, EMP blasts, etc. that it starts to make him feel less unique. The X-staff is going for a cosmic-level bad guy ala Dark Phoenix or Thanos, but Onslaught never feels thought out enough to resonate as much with the readers.
It’s good to see the Dark Beast finally get something to do other than complain about life with the X-Men in his head. The X-Men’s confusion is well handled, but this thread leads to one of the other problems with this crossover. In order to have just about every Marvel title “tie in” to the story, sometimes events happened in the completely wrong books. So the Dark Beast/Beast storyline that has been running for months in the X-Men titles gets resolved in X-Factor, the origin of Onslaught happens in Wolverine, and Magneto/Joseph—who has been set up as a future X-Man already in the X-Men titles—gets discovered in Avengers. Again, none of these stories ever really contribute to the overall main plot (which should be combating Onslaught) whatsoever.
Still, I can’t help but notice that most of my criticisms, while originating with this issue, have more to do with the overall structure of the story than the issue itself. I actually quite like this one. The video from Bishop’s future is a nice touch, and a lot of the action is really good. All the X-Men’s reactions feel well done, although Xavier/Onslaught tends to talk a little too much and Jean’s inner ranting about Onslaught goes on for far too long. And of course, I can’t really understand the plan in the middle of the issue to split up when they’re facing the supposedly most powerful enemy they’ve ever faced. The ending struggles a little to involve Bishop, since he really had nothing to do with the resolution of the Traitor storyline. It feels tacked on to make Bishop the hero of the issue since he also won’t do a lot in the fight against Onslaught.
While this issue feels significant to a point, it’s a shame that most of the storylines either shift to unrelated books or disappear completely from the story. Out of the dozens of issues that are going to crossover, only two or three are going to deal directly with fighting Onslaught, so he never really gets developed as a character. There’s an interesting idea here about him being a manifestation of Xavier’s repressed feelings and emotions, but it gets bogged down in connections with Magneto and plot devices that serve no purpose. The traitor thread does get resolved, but this also feels shoe horned in. This is an exciting enough issue that is a little too long for its own good; it does a good job of setting up the main ideas, but the story never really develops any themes or developments beyond these general ideas.
B
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