X-Men #32

X-Men #32
Writing: Fabian Nicieza
Art: Andy Kubert

What Went Down: Spiral tells Warren and Betsy that she wants to help Psylocke seek the truth. Because this is a comic book, and they’re enemies, of course they have to have a fight. Nothing Spiral says is particularly helpful, and then the rest of the blue team randomly shows up to finish her off. Spiral teleports away, and Betsy shows the torn out bionic eyes to the rest of the X-Men.

Hours later, Banshee and Beast are doing things to the eyes with tools. They are able to find recordings from right after Psylocke disappeared into the Siege Perilous. Basically the actual story goes that Matsuo and Mandarin wanted to just switch the two girls’ bodies, but because Spiral is twisted and bitter, she manipulated their minds so that they turned out mixed up. If you were wondering why Revanche thought she was the real Betsy, it turns out that she was not used to telepathic powers, and her emotions confused herself, Psylocke, and the rest of the X-Men, hence the initial story.

Outside Gambit asks Professor X to talk about the problems he’s been having with Rogue. Also, if you care, Beast has outlawed smoking in the mansion. As for Psylocke, she once again journeys to Nyorin’s estate in Japan, this time alone. However, Nyorin is dead, killed by Matsuo. Matsuo’s reasoning is that Nyorin created a fake diary to keep them apart because Nyorin was also in love with Kwannon.

Using a kiss, Matsuo gives Psylocke the stored memories Kwannon had of Betsy Braddock’s; he also removes all of Kwannon’s stored personality traits. Despite this, Betsy is still able to utilize her ninja skills. After this, Matsuo wants to kill himself, but Psylocke convinces him not to in order to preserve Kwannon’s memory. Both characters bury Kwannon, and when Betsy returns she throws the bionic eyes into the water. Archangel shows up, and the two comment about how they’ve both been manipulated by evil forces and come out stronger for it.

How It Was: Well just like this cover and the last one alluded to, Psylocke fights Spiral…for all of five pages. Then the X-Men show up and beat her soundly in another three. This makes for a rather unfulfilling action sequence, on top of the fact that Spiral doesn’t really explain her reasoning for messing with Psylocke and Revanche. The explanation seems to be “because I’m crazy” but I’m sure most people were hoping for a little more.

After that, the sequence with Matsuo and Psylocke turns out to be pretty good. Again, we’re talking about a relationship that Nicieza never built up, and basically jammed into the plot so the story would work. But all in all, the idea of Psylocke convincing Matsuo to overcome his grief to honor Kwannon’s memory is a pretty nice idea. Having Psylocke’s memories returned to her via a plot convenient power transfer kiss is not. And with that contrived kiss, all memory of Revanche is essentially wiped away from the X-Men titles.

Andy Kubert does a great job with the art. The snowy backgrounds look really nice and everyone has a nice sense of action and movement. Plus, Psylocke actually wears clothes in the winter weather, a nice departure from the adventures in X-Men #17-19. While not a very exciting story, Nicieza does manage to get a little dramatic and emotional mileage out of a concept that most thought was completely dead in the water.

C+

X-Men #31

X-Men #31
Writing: Fabian Nicieza
Art: Andy Kubert

What Went Down: Ahh, the final Revanche story. It just rolls right off the tongue. The sooner we get started, the sooner we can be done talking about this horrible character. X-Men #31 opens on a flashback of Kwannon jumping around the rooftops of a flashy city, presumably Tokyo. Matsuo Tsuryaba catches her and we find out that the two were lovers and that his nickname for her was Butterfly. At the bottom of the flashback panels, we see the silhouette of Spiral commenting about them. She switches to a live feed of the eye cameras that were placed in the original Betsy Braddock to find that Revanche is standing over a sleeping Professor X with a sword. Then the feed cuts out.

When Professor X wakes up, he finds a note and Revanche’s sword, and gives them to Psylocke. Psylocke worries about how she will resolve her identity issues without Revanche. After Xavier leaves, Psylocke pulls out her parting gift from Revanche…the original Betsy Braddock’s bionic eyes.

Matsuo reflects on a flashback of Kwannon and himself; he took a picture of her and she became angry with him. We learn that Kwannon worked for Lord Nyorin and Matsuo worked for the Hand, and it looks like both sides were about to come into conflict. Matsuo (in the flashback) suggests they should kill each other, as opposed to being forced to fight each other later. Of course they can’t, because it wouldn’t be honorable. Spiral sneaks up on Matsuo in the present and eats an apple while they discuss how Spiral repaired Kwannon’s body.

At the mansion, Psylocke partakes in a lethal Danger Room sequence. Archangel programs a hologram of his Angel form to surprise her. Warren offers to go out to eat with her and discuss her problems. In the study, Xavier asks Beast to take over leadership of the blue team as well as the daily tasks of maintaining the institute. We also find out that Emma Frost has deeded her Massachusetts Academy to Xavier. Beast acquiesces. Gambit and Rogue’s relationship is showing tension since the Gambit mini-series. I’ve only read the first issue, but it appears that somehow Rogue absorbed the memories of Gambit’s wife Bella Donna, because she keeps saying things that Gambit remembers his ex-wife saying.

Next we get the flashback of Matsuo and Kwannon being forced to fight each other. Matsuo ends up throwing Kwannon off of a cliff, where she “dies.” After retrieving her body, Matsuo takes her to the Hand, but they can’t heal her because she suffered brain damage from being underwater. In the middle of the flashback, present day Revanche attacks Matsuo.

In Salem Center, Betsy shows Warren the eyes that Revanche pulled out of her own sockets. Back in Japan, Matsuo can’t help viewing Revanche as Kwannon with his “mind’s eye,” whatever that means. Matsuo admits his part in getting the Mandarin and Spiral to preserve her body, since Kwannon’s mind was gone. Revanche points out the irony because the body that was supposed to save her is now infected with the Legacy Virus.

Revanche asks Matsuo to kill her so she won’t have to die from the Legacy Virus. He does, and back in America Psylocke feels the shockwave, causing her to crash the car. The final page leaves us with Spiral popping in, saying that she wants to help Psylocke discover the answers to her questions about her identity.

How It Was: Surprisingly this story turned out more enjoyable than I thought it would. It’s far from perfect, but the sheer fact that it’s the conclusion to the go-nowhere Revanche storyline, and it keeps my interest, says a lot about it. As you can probably tell by my synopsis above, this book is dense with information. There is an incredible amount of exposition, which is needed to tie up the incredible amount of loose ends that span from Mojoworld to the Hand. Plus there is the problem that to make this story work, Nicieza has to retcon his previous story by saying that all of the information Nyorin gave them previously was a lie. While this somewhat negates the impact of the first story, it does leave Nicieza open to write a satisfactory, if melodramatic, tragic romance for Kwannon and Matsuo.

Since it is her death issue, Revanche gets the majority of the focus of this issue, and hence gets to do all of the interesting things. Between ripping out her own eyes and asking Matsuo to take her life, Revanche actually develops a pretty compelling personality. Of course it is all based around that wacky comics’ portrayal of honor, but it’s still a lot better than what came before. Psylocke surprisingly doesn’t do much of anything except for a generic Danger Room exercise and a continuing of her burgeoning relationship with Archangel, meaning her scenes are rather dull.

Really, the main problem is that you can almost hear the plot struggling to contain all of the various retcons. No, Kwannon wasn’t in love with Nyorin, it was Matsuo; really, all of the X-Men knew Betsy was the real Psylocke, it was just Revanche’s emotions affecting her powers, to the point where she fooled Professor X and Jean Grey; Kwannon’s brain was actually damaged, so not a lot of her made it into the pair. It all just reeks of plot convenience, but if you can overlook it all, there is a fairly decent resolution here to a rather awful ongoing sub plot.

C+

X-Factor Annual #7

X-Factor Annual #7
Writing: Fabian Nicieza and Peter David
Art: Joe Quesada, Derrick Roberson, and Joe Madurieira

Update: Click Here for Part 4 of Shattershot.

What Went Down: The first six pages are dedicated to Mojo angrily recapping the story thus far and taking out his anger on his second in command, Major Domo. Note that the art is backwards, depicting the events of Uncanny when describing the X-Men issue and vice versa. It appears that even though the Death Sponsors failed in their task last issue, everyone assumed it was Mojo, so he has continued to lose favor with the people. He decides to contact Spiral and have her deal with Arize.

Since X-Factor doesn’t have a Danger Room, they don’t start the issue in the middle of a training session. Instead, we are given an overwrought scene where the team is preparing lunch, and none of the characters can open a jar of mayonnaise, including Strong Guy, who should have super strength, shouldn’t he? Anyway, the whole scene devolves into the team making a mess, and it’s all meant to be very funny, but it isn’t really. Val Cooper pops in to tell the team that they have a mission: they are going to hunt down Spiral because she has been spotted making trouble. Val feels responsible because Spiral was a member of Freedom Force, a government sponsored group of villains that Cooper was in charge of prior to the nationalization of X-Factor.

In case you were wondering what Arize was up to, he has been working out a plan to broadcast all of Earth’s television to the inhabitants of Mojoworld as an alternative to Mojo’s rule. At the same time, Spiral is threatening a group of villagers in order to discover Arize’s location. By the time X-Factor arrives, Spiral has set fire to the whole town.

Spiral teleports to Arize’s cabin and cuts the connection he was using. The whole time she blames him for some unspeakable evil. She attacks Arize, but Val interrupts and tries to talk Spiral down; she ends up shooting at Spiral. The rest of X-Factor joins the fight. After injuring Polaris, Havok flips out and blasts Spiral with a heck of an energy blast. Spiral is then given the chance to explain herself, so she tells her origin.

Spiral was once an Earth stuntwoman named Ricochet Rita. She fell in love with Longshot, followed him to his world, and learned that Longshot was known as the Fallen Messiah—meaning he was destined to perpetually fail over and over again. Mojo had Arize turn her into Spiral (in Arize’s future, but Spiral’s past), and then had her travel through time to push her past self towards Longshot, perpetuating the cycle, and driving Spiral insane. Arize expresses remorse and offers to help her finally put an end to Mojo’s rule. The future savior of that dimension is said to be Shatterstar, so Spiral and Arize travel to the future of Mojoworld together. X-Factor wonders if they should do anything, but decide that there is nothing they can do. Havok feels sorry that his former teammate is destined to always fail at his goal, but Val thinks that everybody can learn from his or her mistakes.

What Else Went Down: Val Cooper is overrun with paperwork, but she decides to put it off until the next day because she has tickets to a Salute to Motown concert. However she decides to stay and do her work after Multiple Man calls Val and impersonates President Bush. Val reluctantly gives the tickets to him and Wolfsbane and goes through all of the papers. After she finishes, a dragon made of papers attacks her. It chases her all over the office until she manages to get it into a paper shredder. Unfortunately, after she shreds it, the shreddings make up another monster that attacks her.

Jamie wakes up Val and tells her that he feels guilty about tricking her, revealing that Val was dreaming about the paper monsters. Val rewards his honesty by chasing him with scissors and a letter opener.

What Else Also Went Down: A young boy named Cal, who is obviously modeled after Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes, is being bullied at school. He decides to go to Strong Guy’s house and hire him to be his bodyguard. After telling him his story, Cal convinces Guido to go intimidate the bullies for him. After giving the kids a good scare, Guido leaves.

A couple of weeks later, Strong Guy decides to check in on Cal, but he is shocked to discover that Cal is now the bully, threatening to sick Guido on anybody that doesn’t listen to him. Guido shakes him down and tells Cal that he doesn’t want to ever see him bullying again.

How It Was: Well… it’s something. I’ll start with the good. Joe Quesada’s art is very good; all of the panels have a nice sense of motion and action, so it’s a solid effort from Marvel’s future editor-in-chief. Also, the origin of Spiral is surprisingly gripping. At first it seems that she’s just out for revenge because Arize helped turn her into a freak of nature, but the fact that she is forced to relive her own downfall over and over again is actually a really interesting take on a character that controls time and space.

Now for the bad. As I stated before, the first two opening sequences are absolutely pointless and contribute very little to the overall story. But the major fault of this story is the boring fight that takes up most of the issue. I know before I complained about villains being one dimensional, and Spiral definitely isn’t. The main problem is that Spiral is outnumbered by six, and the fight is completely one sided. There’s just not a lot she can do against characters like Strong Guy, Quicksilver, and Havok. Furthermore, Arize’s plan to free people of Mojo’s signal seemed pretty dumb since Earth TV is just as monotonous and insubstantial as anything that Mojo could show.

Unlike the other issues, the back-up strips are actually better than the main story. Peter David’s humor is always what made X-Factor work, whether it’s with Madrox impersonating George Bush or Cal’s great line at the end of his story, David has a lot of fun with these quick, silly tales. They are by no means his greatest work, but they are a lot better to read than any part of Shattershot or any of the other mini stories thus far.

C-

X-Men Annual #1

X-Men Annual # 1
Writer: Fabian Nicieza and Dan Slott
Art: Way Too Many to List and Karl Altstaetter

Sorry it has been so long, real life and all that. Let's try this again. It’s a retroactive review since I didn’t have these issues at the time. I’ll be putting them in the appropriate order later down the line. The Shattershot story takes place before Uncanny #289 because Forge is still around, but after X-Men #9 because Bishop is around and an established member of the team. Also, each issue is 64 pages long, so these are gonna be some loooong posts.

What Went Down: This story takes place before the Mojo story in X-Men #10-11.
The story starts off in Mojoworld where a rebellion of bipeds has formed to fight Mojo’s tyranny. Most of them get slaughtered and the rebel leader Quark, a goat man with an eye patch…seriously, gets captured for brainwashing. Also getting captured is Arize, the star of this crossover, but he manages to teleport to earth. Mojo mentions that without the time dancer Spiral, Arize will surely be driven insane.

In the Danger Room, Psylocke and Beast are competing with Gambit and Rogue to reach a button. Psylocke wins, and is rewarded by having Wolverine try to gut her. Cyclops explains that the mission isn’t over until everyone gets home. Fortunately Professor X interrupts the rest of his lecture.

Forge and the Professor explain that Cerebro has picked up a non-human signature in Afghanistan. So the blue team goes off to investigate.

Mojo and his lackey Major Domo discuss plans to retrieve Arize. After once again establishing that Spiral is necessary to teleport people between dimensions, Mojo decides to televise the hunt, as if the reader couldn’t have called that twist from a million miles away.

As the X-Men approach the Afghani camp, they are attacked by the militants there. Because this is the 90’s, and pre-9/11, the X-Men actually take a sympathetic stance towards the rebels; if you know your world history of the time, Afghanistan had helped fight the Soviets and were actually able to keep a Soviet dictatorship out of their country, due to the U.S. backing them with weapons and supplies, but afterwards it left a power vacuum where the rightful government and infrastructure of the country should be. Regardless, the X-Men beat up the soldiers until Beast explains their true purpose to the leader of the camp; apparently the Beast speaks fluent Pushti.

Arize is discovered under the care of the Afghani people with no memory of who he is or where he came from. At the same time, Mojo’s soldiers arrive on Earth, notably without Spiral. Semi-important characters include the brainwashed Quark, who we met at the beginning of the issue, and the father/son team of Gog and Magog, who believe it or not do appear in later X-Men stories. Psylocke scans Arize’s mind and discovers some vague hints about the rebellion and a fallen messiah who is not named, but is obviously Longshot. Suddenly she senses another presence, which happens to be the bad guys.

The X-Men fight off the bad guys. During the battle, the bad guys express the fact that they have no choice but to obey Mojo, otherwise their lives and families would be forfeit; the X-Men are completely unsympathetic and explain that everybody has free choice. The bad guys mention Longshot before escaping through a portal—please note that once again, they are without Spiral. Cyclops prevents Wolverine and Rogue from following, even though Longshot was their friend and teammate back in the late 80s.

Back in Mojoworld, we learn that the ratings for the battle with the X-Men were huge, but they were detrimental to Mojo because they made him appear incompetent. A mysterious individual oversees Mojo on a monitor. This shadowed character turns out to be Mojo II from X-Men #10-11.

What Else Went Down: In the back up story, Jubilee decides to prove herself by programming all of the X-Men’s greatest enemies into the Danger Room. Wolverine stops her, and then as a quick educational experience, goes through the top ten X-Men villains. In order from ten to one they are: Mojo, the Reavers, Sentinels, the Brood, the Upstarts, Omega Red, Apocalypse, Mr. Sinister, Magneto, and the number one enemy is…hatred and intolerance. Nitpicks of note: Wolverine is wearing his brown costume even though this story has to take place after the introduction of Omega Red, where he started wearing his yellow outfit again. Also, most of the Upstarts are completely wrong except for Fitzroy and Cortez, but Cortez is supposed to be a secret at this point.

How It Was: Shattershot is a pretty weak story all together. It deals a lot with Mojoworld, which has never been too central to the X-Men, and it deals with a lot of really awful villains, except for Spiral. While there are some attempts to expand on the origin of Longshot, you can pretty much guess that Arize is his creator from the start.

This issue starts the mediocrity off. A lot of space is padded with exposition, such as the discussion about the necessity of having Spiral, even though she never shows up in this issue. And the Danger Room sequence at the beginning could also be labeled as completely unnecessary. Plus Arize isn’t really interesting at all; he’s mainly a plot device to be passed from X-team to X-team to continue the story. His arc consists of going from amnesiac to guilt ridden, tortured genius to crusader working towards redemption. It’s not bad; it’s just that none of it is particularly compelling or stands out in any way; the bad guys in this issue don’t help as you’re never convinced that they have a chance of defeating the X-Men.

I will admit that considering the number of artists on this issue (seven pencilers and six inkers) it doesn’t really look too bad. Also, there is a really funny speech from Beast when he tries to describe the differences between all of the X-groups. But all told this issue, and the story in general, is for completists only, and you can easily ignore it and not miss out on too much, unless you’re a huge Longshot or Mojo fan for some reason.

As for the back up strip, it isn’t anything to write home about. It is early Dan Slott, who recently finished up a really great arc on Mighty Avengers, so there is that. But outside of that, it isn’t even really a story, and the ending is so cheesy your eyes just might roll so hard as to get stuck.

D+