X-Men #45

X-Men #45
Writer: Fabian Nicieza
Art: Andy Kubert

What Went Down: The issue starts off with Rogue chucking a giant boulder at Iceman. She’s mad because Bobby keeps asking her where they are going, but it is obvious that something is wrong since she is overreacting quite a bit. Rogue can’t explain what’s wrong with her; she saw something in Gambit’s mind that she can’t remember. Iceman calms her down, and they continue their drive.

Gambit arrives in Seattle in one of the X-Men’s jets. Inside a bar near the University of Washington, Rogue flirts with all the patrons and asks for free drinks. She’s about to touch someone’s face when Iceman stops her, causing her to lash out and break the bar. Rogue flies away in a huff, leaving the crowd to realize that Iceman is a mutant and form an angry mob. Gambit shows up and frightens off the crowd with some exploding cards.

In an apartment, Graydon Creed is watching a news report on the hostages from the Gene Nation storyline in Uncanny #325. A man named Clay is asking Creed to run for president and tosses him a campaign button for Creed ’96.

Rogue ends up in an abandoned theatre that is somehow significant to Gambit’s history. Gambit and Iceman show up right after, and Gambit goes down to talk to her. Rogue is relieved to see that Gambit is okay. Gambit knows what is bothering Rogue, but he doesn’t want to tell her his secret and hopes she can get over it. Rogue freaks out and brings part of the ceiling down. Gambit keeps trying to frame their kiss as yet another obstacle, but Rogue gets mad and flies away.

Iceman chases after her and tells her that they both have issues that they need to settle. Gambit charges a rope and throws it at Rogue so that she doesn’t get away. Rogue tries to get Gambit to tell her what happened at this theater, but he insists that it’s buried. Gambit says Rogue has to free herself, but she doesn’t know if she can go without touching him again; Gambit says they can touch each other on the inside (figuratively, you perverts!) . Rogue decides to leave and be by herself for a while.

Iceman consoles Gambit, saying that he tried his best. Gambit tells Bobby to leave him alone for a while. While walking in an alley, Gambit encounters Sinister. He tells Gambit that he cannot pretend to be a follower of Xavier and hints that at one time Gambit needed Sinister’s help. He also hints that soon Gambit will have to play the hand Sinister dealt him before disappearing.

How It Was: I like the idea of containing this particular story to one issue. Unfortunately this issue is double-sized, and there doesn’t appear to be enough story to fill all those pages. So we get an issue of Rogue overreacting…a lot. Seriously, she gets angry and breaks or attacks something at least four times in one issue. Insert joke about mutants and that time of the month. There’s an entire segue way in a bar that goes absolutely nowhere and serves only to create some action to fill up a couple of pages.

But honestly, there is a lot of emotional mileage to be had here. The kiss between Rogue and Gambit has created a lot of drama. There’s the secret that Gambit’s afraid of, the way this affects Rogue’s trust and sanity, and the ongoing problem that they can’t touch each other. And if this had been a twenty-two page comic, I feel like it might’ve worked. Yes, some of the dialogue is really schmaltzy, like when Gambit talks about being able to kiss Rogue’s tears, but I always really liked the line at the end where Rogue tells Gambit that he was exactly what she expected. The real problem is that this secret has been teased out for months and months in the Rogue and Iceman scenes, and the end of the story doesn’t tell us what Gambit did, only that it involved Sinister.

Of course, looking back at 1995, this was pretty significant information. Learning that Sinister and Gambit worked together was a shock, and it did lend credence to Bishop’s theory about Gambit being the traitor. It just never felt significant enough for me. Maybe if the X-Office had followed up on it right away; Gambit’s secret gets jerked around for years, and by the time it is revealed, most readers had pretty much figured out what the X-office was going to do with it.

It should be noted that this is Fabian Nicieza’s last issue of X-Men. He continued to work for Marvel for a number of years, sometimes on the satellite X-books, but also on a number of other Marvel projects. He returns to the X-Men in 2001 to write the very excellent X-Men Forever mini-series, so there is that to look forward to in the far, far off future. On the whole, I’d say that his run was pretty remarkable; thirty two issues is nothing to shrug off, on top of all of the one-shots and annuals. For the most part he ended on a strong note with the Age of Apocalypse as well as the very good Avalon story in X-Men. While his final issue isn’t his strongest work, it does feature some good dialogue and an honest attempt to deconstruct the relationship of two of the characters that made his run so good. It’s unfortunate that it had to be so long and drawn out.

C

Uncanny X-Men #325

Uncanny X-Men #325
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