X-Men -1

X-Men –1
Writing: Scott Lobdell
Art: Carlos Pacheco

What Went Down: We are greeted initially by the last page of the preceding issue, followed by some exposition from Stan Lee in an exaggerated fantasy Marvel office.  He discusses how the X-Men have continuously multiplied from the original five, and points out Xavier as the foundation to it all. 

We find Xavier, prior to starting his school, floating in his pool and contemplating his place in the world.  His reverie is interrupted by Amelia Voght: the nurse who helped him after he was paralyzed and became his girlfriend.  Amelia joins him in the pool and tries to get him to see how futile his goal is.  Charles cannot stand to live in his mansion comfortably while knowing there are threats to humanity, both human and mutant. 

Up in space, Magneto is busy constructing his space station Asteroid M.  Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, founding members of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants before both turned hero, observe him from inside the base.  Wanda is amazed that Magneto can hold the base together with the strength of his will.  Quicksilver dismisses him as mad, but Scarlet Witch worries if he is reacting in a sane manner to an insane world.  Magneto tells the twins to prepare to travel to Earth.  Pietro does not appreciate being ordered around, and Magneto essentially tells him that under his house, it is his rules. 

Xavier and Amelia wait for Magneto in the ruins of a Nazi concentration camp.  Magneto and the twins show up.  He and Xavier debate over whether humanity can be trusted and over the necessity of subjugating them.  Both men agree they should kill the other to ensure their goals, but neither one can.  Magneto reveals that he knows Amelia’s name and that he and Charles have been watching potential mutants for a long time.  Amelia tries to make Magneto realize how similar the two men are and how they should be working together. 

Outside Asteroid M, Magneto struggles with the decisions he will have to make.  Stan Lee ends the issue, talking over a sleeping Carlos Pacheco on a drawing table.

How It Was:  Poor Scott Lobdell had to do a bunch of these flashback issues: this one, one for Uncanny, and I think one for Generation X.  Since most of the X-Men are just normal kids before the school is opened, Lobdell makes the wise choice to focus on Xavier and Magneto and the forming of their dreams.  This also gives Lobdell a chance to fill in some info on his retcon of creating the character of Amelia Voght and tying her to Xavier personally after the loss of his legs; previously we had only really seen it in the Uncanny #309 flashback.  Their dynamic works well; Lobdell makes the characters playful, but only as a means of diffusing the tensions looming over them, and all the while Xavier’s passion can’t help but surface.  Magneto and the Brotherhood’s scenes are okay; mostly they just “foreshadow” events that happen later in continuity.  While Quicksilver is, as usual, a one-dimensional hot-head, I like Wanda’s sympathy for Magneto as she successfully figures out what drives him.

Since this whole issue is devoid of any action, its success rests on the debate the two characters have.  Surprisingly, Lobdell manages to pull it off, even though it is a discussion we’ve seen these two characters have dozens and dozens of times.  Yes the setting of a concentration camp is a bit of an emotional grab, but it doesn’t come off as too indelicate because both characters are able to use it to support their sides; Magneto for the inevitability of man’s fall and Xavier for the need to proactively go after such ignorance before it breeds this type of hate.  Somehow Lobdell manages to make it feel like the first time these characters have had this talk, post-Israel anyways. 

Honestly, Pacheco’s art here looks like his art in a normal issue, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  The colorist’s use of brighter colors does sell the throwback illusion a little, but nobody would ever mistake this for coming from the sixties.  What really matters in an issue like this is the expressions of the characters and the way they conduct themselves, since there is absolutely no action; Pacheco succeeds on that front.  Overall, this is a great issue that doesn’t really do anything new, but works because the characters’ voices are so thoughtful and true to the characters.

A

Uncanny X-Men -1

Uncanny X-Men –1
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-

Flashback Month—Welcome to the Past!

Welcome to Flashback Month—an editorial gimmick where every Marvel ongoing series issue for the month of July featured a one-shot story taking place prior to the Fantastic Four getting their powers in Fantastic Four #1.  To commemorate the event, and screw with the order of everyone’s collections, Marvel numbered all the issues for this month –1; the 90s were a weird time for comic numbering gimmicks: number one issues were still being advertised as collector’s items, and many publishers started putting out things like issue zeroes and number one half issues.  So there you have it, an entire month of issues that were supposed to be viewed as collector’s items.

Of course, as you can tell from these two books, one of the main problems was that all of the issues interrupted regular stories in books, no matter what stage they were at.  Another significant problem was that most writers were severely limited by events and characters as they existed prior to the majority of continuity.  What ended up happening was a lot of sub-par issues.  A lot of them took place during either WWII or explored the childhoods of main characters; there were tons of Nick Fury, Wolverine, and pre-pubescent Peter Parker cameos.  At the same time artists were instructed to draw in a less detailed throwback style to give the issues the 1960’s comic era look, and they were even told to keep the panel layouts simpler.

The main problem with Flashback month as a whole is that it tried to establish the look and continuity of pre-Fantastic Four Marvel, but not the tone.  The Silver Age of comics was continuity-lite; each issue was about a new outlandish villain or hero that stretched the boundaries of absurdity and imagination.  Yes these issues were mostly self-contained stories, and most of the villains were based off a random idea or concept the writer had read or heard about, but they were always about a villain wiping the floor with the heroes until the very end where they rallied and won the day, with Marvel setting itself apart for including characterization and drama with the characters’ personal lives.  Stories about Havok, Warpath, or Spider-Man as little boys foiling established villains probably wouldn’t have flown in the era they are meant to reflect.  While the art, especially the covers, is pretty neat to look at, none of these stories felt exciting enough or absurd enough to belong to the Silver Age of comics, and that was its downfall.

X-Men #65

X-Men #65

Writing: Scott Lobdell

Art: Carlos Pacheco

What Went Down:  Jean Grey wakes up to find herself confronted by the Heroes Reborn version of Iron Man.  Since Iron Man died during Onslaught, and the X-Men don’t exist in the Heroes Reborn universe, they both assume that the other person is an enemy and fight for two pages before Jean disappears.  In the mountains we see a couple backpacking for their honeymoon when they are passed overhead by the X-Men’s plane—pursued by Bastion’s forces.

Jean wakes up, but she doesn’t have time to share her experience with Iron Man because a hole has been blown in the plane.  Cannonball decides to jump out and cover the X-Men’s escape.

At a bar in Canton, Ohio, a group of civilians watch on the news as Henry Peter Gyrich announces that the X-Men are known terrorists, and the government has enacted Operation Zero Tolerance—a program to arrest all mutants and stop the potential threat they represent.  Most of the patrons cheer, except for an elderly Japanese couple that remembers the Japanese internment camps in America during World War II. 

In the air above Colorado, Cannonball is attacked by a new kind of Sentinel.  These are Prime Sentinels, and since they are newer, by comic book logic they are also deadlier.  At the Xavier Institute police surround the school while Bastion’s forces invade it.  Cyclops gets knocked out of the plane by a blast from the Sentinels, and he is captured. 

At a hospital in the Bronx, a group of doctors and nurses watch the news coverage of Operation Zero Tolerance.  When Doctor, and secret mutant, Cecilia Reyes is asked her opinion, she unenthusiastically replies that it is about time.

Meanwhile Cannonball and Storm are captured, leaving Jean and Wolverine alone in the plane that is crashing.  The plane crashes, but we don’t see if they survive.  At his father’s home, Iceman watches these events with his dad, and tells him that he needs to help his friends.  Bastion projects a holographic message to Xavier, showing him that OZT has invaded the mansion and found Cerebro.  Even though the files are encrypted, it is only a matter of time before files will be opened. 

How It Was:  Operation Zero Tolerance jumps out the gate with a huge development for our heroes—all mutants are now outlaws.  The X-Men get taken in within one issue, while their home is invaded, making things seem pretty bleak.  It’s hard to express just how well this issue reads compared to the previous year’s worth of stories; it’s like comparing Watchman to anything by Rob Liefeld.  There is finally an actual threat, and the X-Men are caught offguard, and challenged in this story.  These may sound like simple narrative tenants to follow, but it’s been many, many issues since we’ve seen anything resembling a decent obstacle to the X-Men’s safety.  The outlaw status for all mutants is an exciting angle, and it’s a shame it’s potential isn’t explored more.

The fight with the Sentinels is adequately done, although it’s a shame parts of it are delivered solely through exposition so everything can be fit in one issue.  It’s unnecessary to be skipping parts of the fight when the first five pages are so superfluous; we get three pages of Jean meeting Heroes Reborn Iron Man for God knows what reason, followed by two pages of background characters observing the fight from the ground.  An odd use of space to say the least, but Pacheco’s art is really great.  Normally I really hate the “newsfeed as exposition” in comics, but it is a small price to pay to get everything set up in one issue.

What really makes this issue worth the read is the end with Bastion storming the mansion. Seeing the defeat and helplessness in Xavier’s face says more than any army of Sentinels ever could, and the fact that Bastion could possibly use his files plus Cerebro really raises the stakes.

There are some hints that this story hasn’t been completely thought out.  Henry Gyrich shows up on the news to deliver all the exposition about the government plan, but it’s unclear what his role is.  He seems adamant about Zero Tolerance in this book, but later we see him plotting with Senator Kelly to foil Bastion.

There’s not a lot of room for character, but Jean and Logan get some nice moments.  This issue does its duty of setting up the event and making it look like an epic.  The odds are finally against them and that’s usually when the X-Men are at their best.  While the cliffhangers elicits the right amount of dread, we’ll have to wait a bit to it resolved, due to the next month being Flashback month!  Still a promising, and maybe misleading, start.

B+

Triumphant Return

Apologies for the time off.  Hopefully I've gotten my life in order enough that I'll be able to return to weekly posts.