X-Men Unlimited #11

X-Men Unlimited #11

Writing: Scott Lobdell and Terry Kavagh

Art: Steve Epting and Mark Millar??

This takes place after X-Men #53.  Go back to Uncanny #334.

What Went Down:  Melody Watkins (Rogue’s landlady from X-Men #52) is at the local Humanity’s Last Stand headquarters to report Rogue as a potential threat to her son.  Unbeknownst to her, Rogue is enjoying her life as a Hollywood Café waitress, free of the frustrations of superheroing.  On her drive home from work, she notices a construction crew that has been working for four nights and hasn’t gotten a lot of work done. 

Once home, Melody confronts Rogue to confess that she turned Rogue into Humanity’s Last Stand, saying she was worried about her son and the Legacy Virus.  This leads to an attack by soldiers in power armor who try to capture Rogue.  Rogue beats them all, but she stops when she sees Bastion holding Melody’s son Stevie as a hostage.  Rogue takes a laser blast to save Melody.

At Humanity’s Last Stand’s compound, a shadowy figure named Mr. Trask tells Bastion that Rogue can’t stay.  Bastion explains his plot to Rogue: he is going to burn down the compound, murder her and all the occupants, then blame the deaths of all the humans on Rogue.  This will then stir up anti-mutant hysteria.

Before the soldiers can carry out Bastion’s plan, one of them starts using super powers to defeat the others and free Rogue.  Bastion runs off while Joseph introduces himself to Rogue.  He explains that after the page in X-Men #53, he joined Humanity’s Last Stand to go undercover and hopefully run into the X-Men.  Rogue, thinking this is regular Magneto, attacks Joseph.  Joseph manages to convince Rogue of his sincerity, and the two team up to save all the compound dwellers from being murdered by soldiers.  Rogue and Joseph defeat the soldiers, but the civilians train weapons on them, telling them to leave.  Joseph demonstrates that he could kill the people if he wanted to before lecturing them on prejudice and flying off. 

After flying for a while, Joseph asks Rogue about his past as Magneto.  Rogue tells him she’d rather wait until they’re around the other X-Men, and Joseph explains how Sister Maria told him about the X-Men.  Their conversation is interrupted by an attack helicopter with Trask on board.  Joseph uses his powers to catch two missiles, but instead of killing the humans, he just detonates the missiles and uses the explosion to cover their retreat.  Rogue and Joseph return to her apartment to get her car.  Melody apologizes, and Rogue and Stevie say goodbye. 

How It Was:  Some stories like to surprise you with plot turns and revelations that make a reader stand up and take notice.  While there is one pretty big surprise in the plot, this story still reads like a predictable, by the numbers story; you pretty much know how it’s going to end five pages in.  And that’s not necessarily a bad thing—having one of the X-Men become fed up with the lifestyle after the previous months of hardship is a legitimately interesting direction to go.  Like most of these Unlimited stories, it’s just unfortunate that Rogue’s taste of everyday living is all but forgotten as soon as she returns to the X-books.  Lobdell sets up and explores a simple, if tragic, idea that the X-Man who can’t touch would crave a normal life more than others by way of the fact that she can never really have one. 

What really works in this story is that Rogue actually succeeds at her normal life, and it’s prejudice and persecution, i.e. other people’s issues with her, that destroy what she’s built.  Lobdell wisely avoids bringing up Gambit too much, choosing instead to deal with Rogue’s personality—she is outgoing and desires to be around people, but she can never get too close.  He also tries to make Rogue’s landlady Melody come off as sympathetic, constantly bringing up her concerns for her son, but really she just comes off as stupid and unlikable; she’s going to report her friend to this group, and they’re going to “take care of her” somehow—frankly I’m glad when her house gets destroyed.

While Humanity’s Last Stand is the same generic bigoted human group the X-Men always come across (this one situated as a survivalist militia), I must admit that I do love the designs for their power armor.  And the fight with Rogue is well done.  The one twist of the story (ruined by the cover) is that Joseph has actually joined the racist organization that persecutes mutants.  His idea to infiltrate the group to learn about the X-Men seems farfetched, but if you can ignore the huge coincidence, it’s an efficient enough means of getting them to meet. 

What really feels odd is that once Rogue and Joseph fight each other, stop the soldiers from killing everyone, and have the civilians turn on them; it feels like the story is over.  Unfortunately, due to the format of the book, the story has to keep going, so we see Rogue refuse to tell Joseph anything and an anticlimactic show down between the Master of Magnetism and a metal helicopter.  The end does have a nice moment with Melody’s son and Rogue, but it feels like it would’ve meant more right after they were turned away by the humans they helped saved.  This issue works for Rogue fans, and it goes through all the beats Joseph needed to after his previous appearance to line him up to join the X-Men. 

X-Fans Only

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-

Uncanny X-Men '95 Annual

Uncanny X-Men ‘95
Writing: Terry Kavanagh
Art: Bryan Hitch

What Went Down: Cannonball stops by the Massachusetts Academy, interrupting a game of basketball between the members of Generation X. There’s some tension between Sam and Emma since she used to lead the New Mutants’ old enemies, the Hellions. Sam’s sister Husk tackles him, but it’s just for fun. Sam warns Paige about Emma, and then says that they have family business to take care of.

Sam and Paige’s sister Joelle is staying with mutant named Preacher, although nobody knows he’s a mutant. His power causes him to paint scenes of different events and the future, so lately he has been painting scenes from the Age of Apocalypse. We learn that Joelle and Preacher are members of Humanity’s Last Stand, a survivalist compound dedicated to preserving humanity.

Bishop, Storm, and Wolverine go with the Guthries for their visit home. Because they live in Kentucky, Sam’s mother has about seven or eight children. The oldest of the kids at home, Josh, is rather abrupt with X-Men, and Mrs. Guthrie blames herself for all her kids feeling trapped. She tells the X-Men about the pro-human cult, but Cannonball insists that he can take care of it himself.

Cannonball and Husk go to a Last Stand rally, which basically blames mutants for being an abomination in God’s eyes. Preacher is brought up to explain his visions as a cautionary tale of the dangerous future that mutants might bring. A mystery person sends a group of armored robots to stop Cannonball and Husk.

Sam and Paige find Joelle and learn that she is essentially acting out for attention. Paige follows the leader of the group, while Cannonball is attacked by the armored figures. He gets beat up, but manages to fly away. At the same time, Paige learns that the HLS is run by a member of the Trask family, and that he has manipulated the truth about Preacher’s visions to fit his needs.

Cannonball crashes in front of the Guthrie farm and asks for help from the other X-Men. A member of the Stand named Garibaldi ambushes Husk, and she is captured. Cannonball remembers hearing the Trask name while he was down, so the X-Men set off to rescue his sisters. Meanwhile Preacher tells Joelle that they need to escape after he sees members beating up Paige. Cannonball rescues her, but they are ambushed by more armored soldiers. Bishop finds Joelle and Preacher, but even more soldiers attack him.

Wolverine and Storm assist the Guthrie siblings, and Wolverine lets us know that they are fighting Nimrod technology. Since they’re only robots, Bishop creates a cave-in that traps the robots right as his friends escape. Girabaldi tells the X-Men to leave because they don’t have a legal right to be there, but they are content with knowing that they have uncovered the truth.

The X-Men say goodbye and Bishop asks about the boy Joelle was with. We then see a panel of Preacher painting a portrait of Joelle somewhere else.

How It Was: Wow, out of the last twelve reviews, half of them have been double-sized; my brain can’t take much more of this. Anywho, this is another of Marvel’s 1995 annuals, this one written by Terry Kavanagh. One of the first things to stand out is that this writer knows how to write Cannonball. He’s confident, competent, and not afraid to confront any of the “senior” X-Men. He has no trouble standing up to Emma Frost or telling Storm and Wolverine that he doesn’t want their help. This, my friends, is the Sam Guthrie we all know and love.

It’s unfortunate that Marvel feels the need to portray people who live in rural areas as bumpkins that spit out umpteen amounts of children, but that precedent was established well before Kavanagh got here. And while Humanity’s Last Stand is based on many real world survivalist movements, it’s disappointing to see that the members are so easily tricked into following the organization. Joelle and Preacher come off as slightly less sympathetic since they were both dumb enough to get involved with this group in the first place. And while Hitch’s art is very good, the designs for the nimrods are completely wrong, and they should be more difficult to defeat.

This is a pretty standard set up for a one-off X-Men story: rescuing someone from some form of supremacist group. This particular one seems to focus on hatred through religion, but without any of the articulate spiritual or political views that past antagonists like William Stryker or Robert Kelly have presented in the past. Plus, to my knowledge, we never actually meet the mystery Trask member who is in charge of the organization. This is competent, but nothing outstanding, along with some awesome Bryan Hitch art.

C