Writing: Scott Lobdell
Art: Bryan Hitch
What Went Down: After a quick recap of the cliffhanger from last issue, Stan “the Man” Lee walks through a hall of Marvel hero statues, and explains the various changes the X-Men have gone through over the decades. Then he sets up the story ahead as a secret origin to the X-Men.
We begin in the home of an eleven-year-old Jean Grey, who is
telling her father how she was thanking God for Professor X. Her father and her witness a shooting star
out the window before Jean goes to sleep.
Mr. Grey thinks about how fortunate he was for Xavier’s help.
Inside a seemingly abandoned barn, the shooting star lands,
and it turns out to be Rachel Summers from the future. Rachel discovers that the barn contains a
Master Mold, the large Sentinel that produces smaller Sentinels. In another room, Lawrence Trask is having
premonitions about the Days of the Future Past storyline. His father, Bolivar, knows that Larry is a
mutant who can see the future, and he uses a medallion with technology of his
own design to block Larry’s powers, which cause him agony.
Trask is concerned about the visions of super powered humans
that could bring doom to the world. He
also takes the time to remember his daughter Tanya, who disappeared. Lawrence never remembers his visions, but he
is just as committed to his father’s plans to protect humanity.
Outside, Rachel watches the boy walk by, and contemplates
killing him to prevent the Sentinels from taking over the future. She decides not, so to not mess with the
timestream, and she is attacked by Sanctity, who turns out to be a grown-up
Tanya Trask. Rachel defeats Tanya, but
it turns out it was only a psychic illusion meant to distract her.
Tanya confronts her father and tells him how her powers
caused her to fade into the timestream until she reached the future; there, she
found people to help her control her powers.
Tanya wants her father and brother to abandon their Sentinel project,
but Rachel interrupts. She freezes
Bolivar and tells Tanya that he will not remember anything. Tanya says she knew it was a mistake, but she
had to try.
Meanwhile, Lawrence has discovered the wrecked countryside
from Rachel and Tanya’s battle. He comes
to the conclusion that mutants were after his father. Tanya asks for leave to say goodbye to her
father, even though he won’t remember.
Rachel transports both of them back to the future, and Lawrence finds
his father unconscious on the floor.
Lawrence takes this as proof of the unseen threat, further cementing his
belief. On a computer screen in the
background, we see that Master Mold has been programmed with the names of The
Twelve—a group of twelve mutants meant to be crucial to the future of all
mutantkind that were first mentioned by Master Mold in an issue of X-Factor in
the eighties.
How It Was: While Lobdell’s story for X-Men was a
no-brainer, this story comes as something of a shock. It features only one actual X-Man for two
pages as a little girl, who in no way affects the plot, and two villains who
have both been dead for decades in the Marvel Universe. It’s not the obvious choice, but you can see
what Lobdell was going for, trying to set up a future story that might finally
tie up a decades-lingering plot thread.
The story turns out to be pretty decent. All of the characters are somewhat
sympathetic, although Lawrence is a little whiney, and it does set up some new
directions to explore with the Trasks and the Sentinels. I question the wisdom of using Rachel Summers
in this issue, since few fans are familiar with her, and fewer are familiar
with her convoluted past. I’ve never
been a big fan myself. Both Rachel and
Tanya are characters with vague cosmic energy and telepathy powers that let
them do whatever the plot needs; these plot mechanics just don’t make a lot of
sense (Rachel can travel through time because…something with the Phoenix??),
but Tanya’s motives are interesting, or at least seem like they could be,
setting up a decent mystery.
The real problem with this story has nothing to do with the
writing or the art. It’s just that once
the Twelve story was actually written in 1999, none of these elements were ever
incorporated. Interestingly, one of
Sanctity’s lines about the Twelve coming too late and not being worth the wait
actually works surprisingly well with what came to pass, but Tanya’s reason for
leaving the list of the Twelve in Master Mold remains a mystery, as does any
connection with Sentinels.
If things had gone another way, this issue could’ve been
really significant. As it stands, it’s
an okay story with characters and events that aren’t really important to the
characters we really want to see in an issue of X-Men. If Lobdell was planning on bringing back
Larry Trask (hopefully without the horrible seventies medallion) I can see
where he was going, or maybe even as a loose tie-in to the Sentnels in
Operation Zero Tolerance. But I can’t
really recommend this to anybody but completists. While it doesn’t overtly contradict the
Twelve storyline that came much later, it sadly doesn’t contribute a single
thing to it either.
B-
No comments:
Post a Comment