Writing: Joe Kelly
Art: German Garcia
What Went Down:
We open on a quick flashforward of Storm buried alive with the corpses
of her teammates. That’s a solid
attention grabber. The book then flashes
back to Storm explaining the set up to the story. A village elder named Ainet helped Storm in
her past escape her life of thievery and develop her powers to help
people. She’s also a village priestess
with magic powers, hence the talking sand statue from last issue. Storm insists that this is her problem, but
the other X-Men decide they want to help her.
Psylocke shows up randomly, along with her recently acquired
plot convenient teleportation powers; Marrow also gets pulled along by
Wolverine. Psylocke allows the X-Men to
travel to Africa. When they come out the
other side of the portal, Psylocke and Wolverine have been separated from the
others, and they are being attacked by tribesman made out of sand with web
patterns on their bodies. Wolverine
vanishes in the middle of the fight.
The rest of the X-Men discover Storm’s village. Cannonball gets sucked in the ground, while
the rest find that the villagers are all in catatonic trances. Ainet appears, but she is under the influence
of Anansi, the spider/trickster god.
Meanwhile, Cannonball has found himself in a mine from his
childhood in Kentucky. Sam also finds
the zombified corpse of his father waiting to kill him. Back in the real world, Storm and the new
recruits face Anansi. Anansi knocks
Maggott, Cecilia, and marrow into comas, causing Storm to attack him. In another dream world, the group is shocked
to find Marrow without any bones coming out of her. Anansi appears to offer them their desires;
he also shows that Wolverine has been devolved into a dog.
Psylocke catches up with Storm and attacks Anansi. She tells Storm that Anansi is a high level
telepath, and he is using his powers to control Ainet, and in turn the sand
that she controls. Anansi taunts
Psylocke for her nature as second stringer and a haunted, broken
character. Betsy takes Storm to the
astral plane to do battle with Anansi.
As Psylocke and Anansi battle, Ainet warns Storm that Anansi is not what
he seems. Storm starts to realize the
plan and warn Psylocke, but Anansi banishes Storm as well. Taunting Psylocke for her continual failures,
Psylocke loses it and lashes out.
At the last moment, Anansi disappears and is replaced by a
cage. For some reason, this act sets off
a huge psychic backlash that destroys Psylocke’s astral form. We are also told through exposition that the
feedback of this chain reaction is unlike any other ever experienced, and it
affects telepaths and intuitives all across the world. The final page reveals that Anansi is
actually the Shadow King, and this has all been part of his master plan.
How It Was:
This is part one of an “event” called Psi-War that is meant to
shake the foundations of the X-Men.
Right away I like it a heck of a lot more than most modern events
because it’s only two issues long. So it
doesn’t drag out and it goes at a pretty decent pace. Plus it’s got a relatively small cast, so it
doesn’t feel too crowded.
That said, the mechanics of this story are a little
wonky. I think it’s pretty ambitious to
create an event that effectively dampens telepaths. After all when you think about it, telepaths
are super powerful and can pretty much take out any hero or villain by thinking
at them. The problem comes in that I
can’t really tell you how Shadow King brings about this psychic event that
leaves him the uncontested ruler of the astral plane; it just sort of happens. There is some vague explaining about Shadow
King arranging synapses to focus and amplify power, but really the plot doesn’t
make sense. Shadow King gets Psylocke to
stab something, and all psychics lose their powers while Shadow King can now
control everyone’s mind.
Even more strange, Psylocke shows up for this story out of
nowhere, and unlike Archangel, nobody is accusing her of ignoring the team and
abandoning her responsibilities. She
just shows up like nothing is wrong and uses her plot-convenient powers to
forward the story. What’s really strange
is that Shadow King’s plan has focused on Storm for the last couple of issues
as the package has traveled to the mansion.
All of a sudden the plot shifts to focus on Psylocke, which couldn’t
have been the initial plan since Psylocke isn’t even around that much. This story has been promoted as a Storm
story, but it’s really a Psylocke story that comes out of nowhere. It just doesn’t seem like the plan makes a
lot of sense.
All right, let’s push the plot nitpicking aside. This book has some great visuals; the design
for Anansi is superb, as is the scene with Storm buried alive. And while it’s clear that nobody but Storm
and Psylocke has a purpose in this story, there are one or two nice moments for
the other characters, like Marrow’s reaction to life without her bones.
This is a great idea for how to use continuity; having
stories affect the Marvel Universe as a whole, without reader understanding
being dependent on knowledge of the set up stories. And while I like a lot of the visuals here,
you can’t escape the fact that this is a Storm story that Psylocke has been
shoe horned into, with absolutely no purpose for the rest of the X-Men. It’s nice to see more classic villains
wheeled out, but it’s just really odd to see so much emphasis on Psylocke after
she’s been gone or in the background for so long.
B-
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