The Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix #2

Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix #2

Writing: Scott Lobdell

Art: Gene Ha

What Went Down: Jean and Scott, now going by the aliases Redd and Slym Dayspring, have taken the now five-year-old Nathan to the settlement of Coastcrest.  According to Apocalypse’s law, all non-mutants must return to their home for scanning, and this is the location given on their forged papers.  Redd and Slym have spent the last years travelling from town to town, trying to keep Nathan protected.  Scott and Jean are overheard by another traveler speaking Old English, and we learn that Scott’s knee was injured in his fall last issue.  Crestcoast also happens to be home to the remnants of the Askani clan.

Over at the House of Apocalypse, we catch up with Ch’Vayre, finding himself in the midst of a party while condemning his fellow mutants for becoming lazy, weak, and decadent.   Caught up with notions of pageantry and status, Ch’Vayre feels that the ruling mutant race has lost sight of Apocalypse’s philosophy of the survival of the fittest.  Also all of the partygoers are intimidated by him. 

While contemplating his failure to end the Askani Clan years ago in issue one, Ch’Vayre walks into a young Stryfe incinerating one of his instructors.  The soldier tries to explain to the boy how he shouldn’t use his powers on people, but he is interrupted by an elderly Apocalypse, who embraces the boy and greets him.  Once Stryfe leaves, Ch’Vayre expresses distress at the decision to enhance the boy’s powers at his age, but Apocalypse is desperate since each body he takes wears out sooner and sooner. 

Back at the gates of Crestcoast, Jean instructs Nathan how he can hold back his techno organic virus with the power of his mind.  Scott and Jean give a lecture about hard work, and how one day he’ll be accepted for who he is.  At the gates, the guards destroy the group’s transit papers and rough up Scott, thinking the group only human.  The traveler that overheard them speaking Old English has ratted them out for a reward.  Scott takes the beating, hoping to alleviate suspicion, but Nathan decides to attack and bite one of the guards. 

Scott is about to engage the guards when a man named Turrin shows up and recommends the guards back off.  Turrin is mostly machine, having been presumed dead at a raid years ago, but apparently he’s been living in Coastcrest, and the guards use him as a means of obtaining “amenities.”  The snitch argues that Turrin is a criminal, so the guards kill the rat as the group departs.  Turrin takes the group to an Askani stronghold, where they lay eyes on the suffering humans.

How It Was:  Right from the beginning of the issue the creators have over-embraced the idea of Nathan as a messiah.  We see Scott and Jean crossing a desert, with donkey, while Jean holds the young Nathan.  It’s obvious that they’re going for a biblical motif—Jean even has a blue veil on similar to the Virgin Mary.  It’s an interesting motif to go for, and while the script doesn’t do a lot with the Nathan as messiah idea, the art sure makes the most of it.  The cities even look like the sets from a biblical story.  Although the future world is never fully defined, it definitely has a grand scope to it.

Where things get complex is when dealing with the language of this world.  Scott and Jean at times speak in subtitled dialog, which I assumed was the native language of this world.  They are approached by the traveler speaking unsubtitled English, and the traveler accuses them of speaking Old English then, but in English without the brackets that indicate a different language.  While the way our heroes are caught is functional enough, it doesn’t come across clearly in a written medium. 

Also Ch’Vayre is getting a little more interesting.  He’s definitely more likable as a noble warrior in a room full of spoiled and pampered debutantes, but he brings up an interesting question that is never fully addressed.  Apocalypse’s defining attribute as a villain was this idea of honing all life into the fittest survivors: the ones worthy of life.  But this world of privilege and excess for mutants flies in the face of that.  We get some half-hearted excuse that Apocalypse can’t really be bothered because he just needs a new body, but that’s pretty unsatisfying.  The main villain has been diluted into this parasitic body snatcher, which really isn’t that interesting.  We get none of the ruthlessness or cunning seen in Age of Apocalypse, nor the stoic acceptance of fate—the willingness to fight and prove himself worthy, as we did in The X-Cutioner’s Song.  Also, Ch’Vayre seems weirdly fixated on how Stryfe is being brought up when it is obvious with Apocalypse’s dialogue that the boy is just being used as another body.

This is actually a pretty quiet issue.  There’s no real action to speak of, other than Scott being hit a few times and Nathan biting a guard.  Instead we get some of the quiet character moments that Lobdell is known for.  Nothing really stands out though, and it’s all a little slow.  There is a scene showing Jean instructing Nate in his powers, but we get a similar scene next issue so this one is redundant.  Nothing outstanding really happens—the plot just continues to chug along.

Ha’s art is just great; the alien look of Turrin almost makes up for how little we learn about him.  The landscapes and backgrounds as the family travels to the gates are beautiful.  I’ve read reviewers comment about how ugly some of the designs are, but that is sort of the point—seeing the horrifying amalgamation of machine and man that is Turrin is supposed to be…well, horrifying and grotesque.  It’s just too bad this character (or any of the others) never really gets fleshed out or defined.  And although the end isn’t really a cliffhanger, it works because of the pained expressions on the people and the elaborate complexity of walls, pipes, and debris in the room.  You don’t learn much about the organization, but you can feel the desperation and despair in the splash page at the end.

Honestly this isn’t anything groundbreaking.  There are a couple of tidbits for fans—we learn how Nathan got his surname of Dayspring, and see some of his training in his burgeoning powers.  Plus Gene Ha draws such intricate designs for the parts of Nathan enveloped in the virus, as opposed to the standard shiny, metal arm.  The plot’s slowed down after the spectacle of issue one, and what we discover about our main villain is underwhelming.  Still, the art is some of the best you’ll see.

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