ALF #31: "The Ungrateful Dead!"

(The one who got away.)

Comments

LOLgrim, as we used to say in Durham. This is no skip through the summer meadows.

A major recurring theme of the blog is going to be how we ended up in the blood-slicked nightmare of Marvel's output in the early and mid-nineties. One of my central assumptions on that is that much of the problem can be traced to Frank Miller's two seminal series, The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One. As the Bronze Age reached its end cape writers began to cast about for ideas and approaches that could sustain a genre that risked becoming lamentably quaint at best and actually extinct at worst.  Seeing the tremendous success of Miller's one-two punch must have - ironically - seemed like a beacon in the darkness, lighting the way towards continued relevancy for a genre struggling to grow up.  The problem came with all this though is that whilst Miller's contemporaries were easily capable of aping the dark, violent set-dressing of his masterworks, they were utterly unable to grasp the structural and thematic considerations that put that nastiness into context. 

Alpha Flight #31 seems very much a case in point. Just look at how the story opens; a callous murder (for the sake of stealing clothes, no less) in the middle of a red light district at night. The setting, the utterly unnecessary violence, this could all have been lifted straight out of Batman: Year One.

Note also the face in shadow, an ubiquitous '90s motif

The only problem here is that Year One is still months away at this point.

So something else is going on, some more general trend that Miller will perfect, rather than create from whole cloth. The obvious culprit here is the grime-streaked, cynical output of Hollywood during this period, where it was almost impossible to watch a movie for adults which didn't feature absurdly gratuitous nudity and/or a scene in a strip club.  For now I can't offer this more as a gut feeling, but that's my suspicion.

Once we move away from this early auguring of the coming darkness we settle into a done-in-one struggle against a supervillain that distinguishes itself from the herd in two ways: the bonkers nature of Deadly Earnest, and the spectacularly grim manner in which he is ultimately dispatched.

A quick review for those who don't remember my spluttering disbelief: "Deadly" Earnest St Ives fought on the battlefields of the First World War, and became immortal after Death came to claim him and he refused to go. Which, and I'm no expert, doesn't seem to be the way it works, unless we want to assume that literally every other human being who died in the Marvel Universe saw Death rock up and figured they could do with the vacation. That's not really Mantlo's fault, of course, but then I assume no-one was holding a gun to his head insisting he brought back so ludicrous a villain, so it's not like our new writer gets out of this with his hands clean.

Anyway, we learn here that Earnest's indefinite reprieve from death comes with some rather harsh small print; he makes it home to his ecstatic wife and daughter only to kill the former during his welcome-home hug. As a result, his traumatised daughter dedicates herself to being the antithesis of everything her father has become - in other words, taking the equivalent path to Shaman's daughter Elizabeth. Which is a nice parallel, though rather over-signified since this issue decides to offer us a potted history of Michael Twoyoungmen so as to drive the point home. Subtlety is for other genres. I guess, or at least other decades.

So St Ives Jr, dedicates herself to the pursuit of revenge, picking up a codename (Nemesis), costume (ridiculous) and mono-molecular sword (inexplicable) along the way. The latter is ultimately lent to Puck so he can save Heather Hudson from Earnest's lethal clutches, and it's here that we return to the grimness angle, as Eugene borrows Nemesis' vorpal sword to lay down the snicker-snack on Earnest (not something you expect from two characters named Earnest and Eugene). The villain has kidnapped Heather Hudson, Puck's secret love, and this our dude will most certainly not abide.

Ultimately this leads to probably the most horrific scene this project has covered to date, as Puck first chops off half of St Ives' arm, and then chops his head off, resulting in both the severed limb and the decapitated torso still crawling towards our heroes as Earnest's head screams with rage. This, obviously, is awesome.

Not everything about the finale goes off without a hitch, though. Much is made here of Puck having sworn to never again take a human life, which I don't remember having been mentioned before. Certainly it hasn't been prominent. What this means in practice is that Puck only really mentions this tremendously important vow a few pages before he decides to break it.  This is bad idea, partially because it's unearned drama - "I will NEVER kill agai- oh wait I've killed again FROWNYFACE" - but mainly because it feeds into a much larger problem, namely the self-congratulatory myth we tell ourselves that killing is an absolute moral wrong except for those occasions when we regretfully have no other choice,  It's a nice fiction, but the inevitable result is that rather than deciding to kill only when we have no other choice, we can persuade ourselves that we must have had no choice whenever the urge to kill comes over us.  What should be a bright moral line becomes instead a panacea, and worse, a panacea legitimising real and terrible damage. Yes, Earnest St Ives us the kind of character it's hard to care about receiving an extra-judicial execution - he's a multiple murder who killed three of Puck's friends in front of him, requiring some existential hand-waving from Nemesis to save Box and the Beaubier twins - but that's the benefit of fiction; it can generate the villains that would make our choices simple.

Fiction should explore reality, It shouldn't legitimise it. In this sense, St Ives' (latest) death may have caused more trouble for our world than his life did for that of our heroes.

And speaking of causing trouble...

(Meanwhile, in subplot corner, Shaman finds himself back in his old shack and chatting with his grandfather's skull, both of which should be hundreds of miles away, and Snowbird finds herself suffering from unexplained attacks, which I presume is her godly masters once again refusing to send her memos like normal people.)

Clues

This story kicks off very soon after the last one ended; we have to assume Deadly Earnest couldn't have been wandering naked through Montreal for all that long. We'll therefore set this issue on the evening of the same day St Ives was reassembled.

Date

Tuesday 24^th July 1984.

X-Date

X+6Y+145.

Contemporary Events

Frankie Goes To Hollywood enjoy the first and second spot in the UK charts. Which is well deserved, obviously.

Standout Line

The Stormy Present

Days Of Future Past offered Bryan Singer both a nightmare brief and the easiest task imaginable. The latter was almost absurdly simple: spend two hundred million dollars telling people X-Men: The Last Stand never happened. In this he was entirely successful, but does raise the question of whether it would have been cheaper to send a leaflet to everyone who had to sit through that film assuring them it was all a dream.

So what else do we have here? Well, that's where the nightmare brief kicks in. DoFP features at least fifteen actors who have had what could fairly be called major roles in previous X-Men films, and then adds in Bolivar Trask, Quicksilver, Blink, Bishop, Warpath and Sunspot (the last of those not even having time to be identified the film). That's a simply ungodly amount of people running around the place, and as a result almost every cast member from before First Class and many from the aforementioned are pretty badly served. I'd be amazed if Halle Berry's lines in the film hit double figures, Anna Paquin gets remarkably high billing for a silent cameo, and several characters from First Class are unceremoniously shuffled off-screen with barely a mention.

Of course, in all this ruthless streamlining the script can hardly be accused of deviating from its source material. I once read a comment on the internet - I really wish I could remember where it was and who wrote it - that essentially said the X-Men were like a company in which management never retires, leaving no room for those that follow to ever advance. One might argue that's an overstatement, but if so, it's not much of one. Ever since the X-plosion in the late '80s, it's become steadily more and more self-evidently impossible to juggle every character fans have become attached to in a way that can satisfy them all. Even the movie's cheapest stunt, declaring Angel, Emma Frost and - *choke* - Banshee died off-screen in what sound like horrific circumstances, is simply part and parcel of standard X-Men policy.  Hell, I've seen characters who were well-loved major players in comics that ran for years brutally murdered off-panel a decade later by writers who didn't even get all the victims' names right. And whilst I'm entirely aware that "Chuck Austen did it as well" doesn't constitute the most impressive of defences, his is just an extreme case of common comic practice.

(Poor Maggott.)

But whilst the script reflects the comics in many ways. it also outstrips it in one important regard. In the original "Days of Future Past" storyline, the nightmare future witnessed by Shadowcat (who travelled back herself in the comics, rather than sending Wolverine back by... actually I've now idea how she did that) was decades ahead of anything we'd seen in previous stories; one possible future brought about by many years of change.  Watching characters we loved getting massacred wasn't exactly fun, but there was a distance there - seeing their ends decades on from the time we knew them in meant their deaths could be processed at something of a remove. No such distance exists here. It might have been eight years earlier that we last saw our heroes (Wolverine aside) in Last Stand - though actually I've never seen it - but they are still recognisably the people we saw back then. In part this is the smaller time difference, and in part the advantage an actor has over a drawing. In "Days of Future Past" we learn one day a middle-aged man calling himself Colossus will die. In Days of Future Past we watch a woman who was a mainstay of the early series get stabbed to death. That is not a small difference.

Which brings me on to the future-variant Sentinels, which are just fucking horrifying, one part T-1000 to two parts the Fury, the superhero-killer from Alan Moore's Captain Britain run. I assume the link must be deliberate, and it's a damn smart choice. The brief scenes in which the Fury slaughters its way through the capes of the alternate universe whence it came still give me the shudders. This, if anything, by involving characters I know and actors I can watch emote, is even worse. The final scenes of the X-Men's actual last stand are almost certainly the most horrific and upsetting the Marvel cinematic universe has manage, going some way to making up for the fact that the original cast's role here is essentially to exposit, look sad, and die. It also allows for a smart use of a double finale, which is useful when you consider that the end moments of the '70s story - does Magneto use the weapons he's stolen from those who would kill mutants to kill those same people - which is rather reminiscent of the ending of First Class, albeit with some absolutely gorgeous Sentinels and Peter Dinklage, both of which are welcome additions.

Indeed, that's very much what the '70s scenes in the film end up feeling like, a fairly minor reshuffling of the previous film with some additional flourishes. Which in fairness, given the additional complexities of the time-travel hijinks and the second timeline, might have been a reasonable choice. Certainly the slightly reheated feel wasn't obvious to me whilst I was watching the movie, which is about all you can hope for from a blockbuster like this.

NMU #36: "Subway To Salvation!"

("Why is it during the hard times there are only one set of footprints in the sand?"
 "Those are the times I was flying over New York in a magic subway car.")

Comments

Finding God can do strange things to a person. Having God find you apparently makes things stranger still.

First, let's dispense with the obvious: the degree to which Sunspot is shaken here by meeting the Beyonder doesn't particularly make sense considering how that encounter actually played out in SW2 #8. Basically the Beyonder doesn't even engage the New Mutants there, busy as he is with other things. "Lucky escape" is the phrase, rather than "All existence has been rendered meaningless by this encounter".  I don't see this as a failing of this particular issue, though. If there's a decent story to be wrung out of how the New Mutants deal with meeting someone who, if not technically a god, is clearly more powerful than the actual gods our heroes hung out with just a few weeks earlier, there's little sense in ignoring that fact because the awful mini you're tying into has dropped the ball.

Whether there is such a story lurking beneath the surface, of course, is a different matter.  And the early indications are pretty good. It appears that a close encounter with the Beyonder has knocked all the fight out of Sunspot, leading to him seeming distracted in training sessions and loudly announcing he didn't join the New Mutants to become a superhero, but just to learn how to live with being a mutant. Which might have been true initially, but even the most cursory glance at Sunspot's attitude over the last 36 issues and assorted specials - most especially his time in Asgard - makes it pretty hard to swallow the idea that his goal is a low profile and a quiet life. It's not as though it's tough to understand why the concept of the Beyonder could shake Roberto up, obviously, but the timing is interesting. After all, young master DaCosta has only just emerged apparently unscathed from the adventure which saw his mind invaded by a seemingly unstoppable tyrant who forced him to slaughter innocents, and seemed poised to use him and his closest friends as murderous flesh-puppets for the rest of their lives.

So why the sudden change of heart now? Why is Roberto suddenly once more consumed with regret and sadness over the death of his girlfriend Juliana, gunned down before his first meeting with Professor Xavier?  Well, I'm rather giving the game away phrasing it like that, so I'll come out with it. Before Xavier, Roberto's authority figure - one he didn't choose - was an egomaniac with a thirst for power and very little interest in how chasing after that power would affect those in the way. With Charles gone, Roberto's new authority figure - whom he didn't choose - is an egomaniac with a reputation for thirsting for power and having very little interest in how chasing after that power will affect those in the way. This isn't about the Beyonder, it's about daddy issues. Or rather, to the extent that this is about the Beyonder, it's because the Beyonder is yet another solipsistic berk on a power trip. He just happens to have all the power already.

All of which is pretty interesting, and another smart riff on the crossover Claremont found himself lumbered with. Alas, the rest of the issue can't really deliver on this opening. Again, it's not clear whether this is Claremon't fault - the problem here is the need to include the Beyonder, much as it has been for this whole miserable crossover, and I don't want to lay that at Claremont's door either. But an understandable problem is still a problem, and watching the Beyonder stick his omnipotent mullet-framed fizzog into the proceedings is as frustrating and disappointing as always.

Still, whilst there's nothing in the rest of the issue to match the inspired conflation of religious crisis and daddy issues, there is more on the subject of sudden shifts in faith, as Sam and Illyana both declare themselves Team Beyonder. In the latter's case, this is at least partially because the Beyonder removes her Darkchilde persona and attendant responsibilities, transferring them to Shadowcat without either girl's consent or knowledge (Claremont declines to explore the obvious mile-in-her-shoes opportunity this presents, probably due to lack of space). Sam's conversion, in contrast, comes about because he's brought to visit Illyana's new flying subway car of evangelism. Yes, this is a thing. No, I've no idea why. Forget it Jack, it's Claremont town.  You'd rather hope that neither of these events would cause so vast a sea change as signing up for the Big B newsletter, but that seems to be what's happened. I'll bet mind control is involved there somewhere. There always is. Forget it Jack, and review my previous comments.

Either way, there's something rather familiar in Illyana's conversion. Towards the end of the issue Kitty finds herself captured by some of the rampaging demons currently tearing through New York - why? No-one seems bothered enough to ask - and about to be sacrificed, and all Illyana can do is insist her mission for the Beyonder is too vital to interrupt for anything so trivial as her best friend's imminent death. And yes, she changes her mind in the end. Of course she does; this is a Claremont joint, and this is more or less exactly the same ending as he wrote for UXM in the same month. But before she returns her mind to earthly concerns, she acts as an admittedly hyperbolic example of a certain subset of the born-again religious. You might well know the type; the ones who have lived their lives in the eye of a hurricane of their own selfishness, and so can't help but make their new faith all about themselves too. When all you can do is talk about how important your relationship is with God, you're not fooling anyone about where your obsession lies, any more than those parents who can't shut up about how well their kids are doing.

Which is interesting. Well, I thought it was interesting, anyway. It does at least tie in with Sunspot's concerns at the start of the issue, giving us a bridging theme to help us get over the weak monster-runaround in the middle (and did we really need another instalment of "Who can Warlock kill for sustenance guilt-free?). I might not be inclined to thank God for that, but I can't deny that it's something.

Clues

This story takes place over a single afternoon.

Bobby is mentioned as still being thirteen in this issue.  This is flatly ridiculous, as an absolute bare minimum of twenty-one months have passed since his debut, at which point he was already a teenager.

The afternoon this story takes place on is referred to being an Indian summer, which would place this story somewhere in Autumn. This gives us some real headaches, however, since we know Madelyne had to have given birth to Christopher both around Christmas and only days before Magneto took over the X-Men. With that latter event still clearly something which our protagonists are having to adjust to, there's no way to sensibly push this story forward eight months, especially since Claremont wants us to believe this is taking place less than a year after the graphic novel which preceded NMU #1.

Date

Tuesday 12^th March, 1985

X-Date

X+7Y+11

Contemporary Events

Stromae is born. Twenty-five years later he takes Europe by storm with this, which I'd never heard of before, despite it reaching number one in a pretty impressive nineteen different countries.


(Clip officiel!)

Standout Line

"And with that, the subway car -- as beautiful and pure a machine as Illyana has become a person... takes to the sky... as if this is what it was born to do!"

I just... I got nothing.

UXM #202: "X-Men... I've Gone To Kill -- The Beyonder!"

(Unclear Non-present Danger)

Comments

So here's an accolade no-one was ever holding their breath over: best Secret Wars II tie-in ever.  But that's what we have here, and there's other positives too. This is an issue that is Saying Something.

At first glance the plot here might seem slight, its lashings of Claremontian melodrama notwithstanding. Essentially Rachel Summers concludes the Beyonder is simply too threatening to live, and dashes off to kill him. This is of little concern to the Beyonder, of course, but he takes the opportunity to force her to choose between attacking him and saving the lives of her teammates from future-model Sentinels he's whipped up to kill them. The fact that Rachel chooses the latter option is a solid 24-carat nugget of purest non-surprise, obviously, but then the fact she chooses to abandon her quest isn't what's interesting here.  It's that she embarked on it in the first place.

Objectively speaking, two things seem almost undeniable. Firstly, whatever risks the Beyonder might pose to the planet going forwards, as of his initial arrival he's not done anything that the Marvel universe of the time would suggest he deserves death for.  I mean, if you spend any time at all thinking through what the Beyonder has been up to since his first introduction he's almost certainly a serial rapist and a genocidal murderer, but that's clearly not the way we're supposed to be thinking, which we know because none of that has been so much as nodded at since it happened.  In the morality structure of these stories as written, Rachel's actions here are a pre-emptive strike rather than an application of justice. Further, they're clearly being portrayed as a massive overreaction. Heroes Do Not Kill, not here and not now, and although this rule seems to get bent an awful lot when non-human intelligences are involved, the Beyonder looks sufficiently human that having him murdered whilst minding his own business by one of the X-Men would cause an awful lot of problems. And all of this is without noting that Ororo has an excellent point on page 3: if you're worried you're only alive because of a godlike being's sufferance, resolving to attack said being it utterly deranged. As the old saying goes, if you come at God, you'd better not miss the entirety of existence that he might wipe out in response to teach you a lesson.

It's not, though, that Claremont hasn't thought any of this through.  The idea here is very clearly that Rachel is on a hair-trigger, because she's the only person in the narrative for which the future is literally something she has seen happen already.  What does it even mean to describe something as a pre-emptive strike when it's designed to mitigate a crisis you have already lived through?

Even just all that provides us with interestings question to chew on.  But we can go still further. Because there's every chance Claremont is offering up an analogy here. With the "Days Of Future Past" future so clearly having borrowed from the horrors of the Holocaust, with Magneto's backstory being rewritten four years previously to tie him in to that same period, and with the book's very last issue having taken place at America's (at that point still fictional) National Holocaust Memorial, it's not hard to see a through-line in this point in the title's history. Anti-Semitism might not be the only kind of bigotry Claremont is reflecting in his stories, but it's certainly a major ingredient. And just as he liked to do with Kitty and her favourite N-word, Claremont isn't just interested in how bigotry expresses itself, but how it is responded to.  Which brings us back to Rachel. Eventually, that is.

In late 1985, the time when this issue was presumably written, the Israelis finally finished withdrawing from the areas of Lebanon - other than the South Lebanon "security belt" - they had taken during the war which began in 1982 after the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador to the UK.  During that war over 600 Israelis died, as did almost 20 000 other people - including civilian casualties that couldn't have been lower than 5 000 people and might actually have been over 10 000 - as the Lebanese fought a civil war whilst Israel clashed with the PLO and the Syrian army. I'm not a historian, so I'm not going to stick my neck out too far here, but the general opinion seems to be that a) Israel didn't do too well out of this exchange, and b) invading a country over a failed assassination attempt was at best a massive over-reaction and at worst an example of what Naomi Klein might call "disaster foreign policy".  Either way, when the IRA came within a hair of blowing up Margaret Thatcher (And killed two high-ranking members of her party), we didn't respond by taking Dublin, and I've a hard time understanding an argument that says we made a mistake in that.

Ah, but Israel, the line goes, is different. Unique.  The IRA might have hated us, but they didn't surround us. We were fighting over the size our country should be, not whether that country should be swept into the sea. Most important of all, the English and Irish had been at war with each other on and off for at least eight centuries when the Grand Hotel exploded and killed five people, and England never came close to actually losing, you know, the English. We weren't just getting back on our feet after a brush with extinction.

Much has been said from many perspectives about the argument that non-Jews cannot criticise Israel because they can't conceive of the existential horror brought about by Hitler's Final Solution. This isn't the place for me to go into detail about what I think of that, but it's relevant for considering this UXM issue, because it's an argument that reflects Rachel Summer's position here. If someone believes that anti-Jewish atrocities will simply keep happening in an endless cycle of blood that can only be delayed and never broken, that person could well reach the same conclusion as Phoenix: that their future will simply be their past, unless they act quickly and decisively enough. Whether any piece of that thinking lay behind Israel's pre-emptive strike in June 1967, or whether the decision to attack before they could be attacked was grounded in impeccable military logic, I'm not qualified to comment upon. But clearly the instinct is there.

(Another interesting parallel: Phoenix's initial attack against the Beyonder takes the shape of a nuclear mushroom cloud. With a bird's head, admittedly, but still. Israel's long-suspected nuclear arsenal was finally revealed to exist eight months after this issue's cover date.)

And, just as it was with Phoenix, that instinct doesn't always work out. Not every problem can be solved by the lavish application of massive military force. Some, indeed, can only be exacerbated by that approach. What did the first Lebanon War gain Israel except for hundreds of dead soldiers and thousands of new enemies? Countries, like gods, do not become less troublesome after you've attacked them. An exchange where you remove a government's capacity to hurt you for a year and guarantee their desire to hurt you for a lifetime isn't difficult to see as problematic. Even back in the '80s, before the rise of portable media made it so much easier to track how Israel responds to provocation, it must have been clear that the country's frequently maximalist approach to defence and security was locking in its own form of vicious circle. Simply put, to many observers Israel's attempts to render the kind of hatred that fuelled the Holocaust impotent was simply helping that hatred to spread. The people of Israel were being put at risk by the very people who wanted to protect them.

Claremont is not interested in being subtle in pointing out this risk of counter-productivity.  As soon as Phoenix refuses to back down despite her first attack achieving precisely nothing, the Beyonder summons her fellow X-Men to threaten them with death. Worse, his chosen method of execution is the exact same model of Sentinel that slaughtered so many of Rachel's friends when she was younger. I don't think the Beyonder could make his point any clearer, but then I guess having the powers of a god does rather help when driving your metaphors home.

All of which, as I say, makes the fact that Rachel does indeed to save her friends more or less irrelevant. What matters is what forcing her to make the choice has demonstrated. Rachel is none too pleased about receiving this rather perilous lecture, naturally, and I'm inclined to sympathise. It's one thing to object to the dreadful cost Israeli policy has upon the Palestinian population, It's quite another to presume to lecture survivors of terrible tragedy how they can best prevent it from happening again. But then it's not as though Rachel's counter is all that great either. She complains bitterly about the Beyonder trying to force her to achieve enlightenment before she was ready to process things herself.  Which might be an entirely reasonable suggestion if no-one else was involved.  Demanding she be left alone so that she can decide on her own timetable when to stop trying to murder people is not a particularly good look, just as it isn't when Israeli officials demand no-one has the right to lecture them about how many Palestinians they decide need killing in any given month.

Basically, then, no-one on either side of this ends up looking particularly good. Which makes it one more example in a very long list of commentary about Israel that nobody is going to find satisfactory. There are worse things your narrative can do. And it's always smart to remember that disliking answers does not necessarily mean it's not worth being made to face the questions.

(Two quick notes about artwork here. First of all, I love how Romita Jr. draws the Blackbird in panels that are both orientated in the direction of flight and elongated to match the jet's speed.  That's a lovely little idea.

Falling without power here, hence the wider panel

I also dig the visual link between the flowers the Beyonder is spending his time his considering and Rachel when she's curled up, the wisps of her power curling like petals (the colours make this harder to see, admittedly).  It's a subtle but rather grim reminder of how little the Beyonder distinguishes between people and flora.

Great stuff.)

Clues

This story takes place in approximately real time.

Date

Wednesday 13^th March, 1985.

X-Date

X+7Y+12.

Compression Constant

1 Marvel year = 3.19 standard years.

(At the time of this post, Beast is 34 years old)

Contemporary Events

American painter Mabel Alvarez dies, aged 93.

Standout Line

"You have seen everyone you care for slaughtered. In a sense, you are the sole survivor of your world, of your race. Small wonder, now that you have a second chance... you are determined to defend them at any coast. Shamed by what was... terrified of what may yet be..." - the Beyonder.

NGT #3: "To Bamf Or Not To Bamf!"

("We're all stories in the end")

Comments

Oh dear.

I've not, I realise, been particularly complimentary to this mini up until now, but it turns out that there is, after all, always more down.  At least before I could understand what the title thought it was offering: a defiantly simple sword & sorcery epic built on Cockrum's flair for design and slightly offbeat sense of humour. The former tended towards the uncoordinated and the latter was distinctly hit and miss,and it all seemed a fairly thin reed to hang four issues on in any case, but I least I grasped the fundamentals.

Here, though, I'm at a loss.  After two issues of exploring the skylands of the Boggies and of Princess Sabree, Kurt finds himself back on terra firma surrounded by Bamfs, the tiny Kurt-clones Kitty invented for her fairy story back in UXM #153.

It might take a moment for it to sink in just how strange a choice this is. After two issues hanging out with miniature teleporting Kurtelgangers, we've moved on to... different miniature teleporting Kurtelgangers?

This is not the sort of development that reassures you you're in safe hands. Especially since Shagreen resurfaces from being plummeted-presumed-dead status to once again attempt to steal Nightcrawler's powers. Basically, Cockrum is telling the same twice over four issues, making the point of all this opaque than ever.

Even stranger, the second iteration is a clear step backwards from the first, as we go from a desperately slight tale relying almost entirely on Cockrum's new designs to a desperately slight tale relying almost entirely on Cockrum's old designs.  The only genuine USP this miniseries was offering has been removed in favour of traipsing through a two-year old Uncanny X-Men issue.  Yes, I mentioned Cockrum's sense of humour being in play here, but with the best will in the world I can't claim his yuks are anything special, and anyway in this instance he's mainly focusing on making the Bamfs as borderline-rapey as is possible, which isn't exactly my preferred route to maximum lols.

On top of everything else, I'm really not a fan of this kind of "stories are real" conceit. Which probably sounds utterly ridiculous from someone who just yesterday wouldn't shut up about how awesome Longshot #5's "stories are real" subtext is. But there's a vast yawning canyon between the position that a story's effects on the world can be as profound as any "true" event, and the position that you don't have to bother constructing a coherent structure to your fictional world when you can just squeal "Everything's real" and start seeding your pages with sex-pest diminutive demons.

So no. Not impressed.

Clues

Despite the Narnia-like time distortion of whatever universe Nightcrawler is now inhabiting, the calendar of Earth has ticked on by a few days at this point. By my timeline that makes this Christmas Day, which Kitty's Jewishness notwithstanding must have made it pretty tough for the girls to sneak off and do some Kurt-hunting. Though since the timeline has Christmas Day being when Legion is finally set on the road to recovery and Sunspot and Magma are kidnapped, there's probably bigger issues in the X-Mansion in any case.

Date

Tuesday 25^th December, 1984

X-Date

X+6Y+298.

Contemporary Events

Two OB/GYN buildings and an abortion clinic are bombed in Pensacola, Florida.  Because domestic terrorism TAKES NO HOLIDAYS"

Standout Line

"Oh, we Bamfs don't need names. We know who we are."

LGS #5: "Deadly Lies"

("We're all stories in the end")

Comments

With only two issues left (even if the last one is grotesquely swollen), time is running out for our dimensionally-displaced hero. Nothing for it, then, but for Nocenti to raise her game.

I'll admit that when I first read this installment, I was a bit disappointed. After four issues which each used a fairly simplistic superhero tale as a springboard for some good-natured meta-sniping at the genre as a whole, LGS #5 intially felt a bit of a mess. It wasn't that I thought it didn't have a good idea; it actually had two good ideas. But neither of them really got time to breathe because of having to rub against each other as well as make room for the final showdown between Longshot and Pup.  Ultimately though the truth sank in: there aren't two ideas here jostling for space, but one idea approached from two very different directions. So let's start off by sketching out Past Me's witless confusion, the better to explain what I came to realise was the truth.

We begin this issue where we ended the last: Longshot and his accompanying gaggle of children face off against a fully-charged and murder-minded Pup, who is finally ready to take his revenge against our hero. Well, first he has to punch the kid with the revolver so last issue's subtext can be paid off, but once that's out of the way, it's on to the battle royale.

Except that Longshot's hearts don't really seem to be in it. And one can see his problem.  If indeed he is responsible for lumbering Earth with Pup (now calling himself Gog N'Magog which sets up all kinds of potentially interesting Biblical parallels I won't actually go into here), and if his former companion's transformation into a drooling demon is in fact entirely on him, then does he have any business seeing himself as the hero of the piece? And if he does destroy the creature that until sixty seconds ago made up precisely 50% of his friends, who will be left to actually tell him who he is?

As we might surmise from Nocenti's previous scripts in this mini, the solutions to both these problems lie in narrative convention. What does Longshot actually need to know to function in a superhero comic? That he's the hero. How do we know Longshot is the hero? Because he's fighting the villain. That's how superhero comics work, at least most of the time, and pretty much all of the time in this period. Moreover, the relationship here is transparently antithetical. Pup just can't wait to list all the ways that Longshot has screwed up his life. It doesn't matter that Longshot didn't intend for any of this to happen.  It doesn't matter that Pup is on Earth purely because he was brought here as a direct result of trying to murder Longshot. All that matters is that without Longshot, Pup might still be back home killing innocent people, and for that Longshot must pay with his life.

As with so much else in this title, the link to superhero fiction in general isn't hard to tease out. How many supervillains have sworn vendettas against heroes because they blame them for setbacks that aren't truly anybody's fault, or should be laid at some third party's door, or even that the villains themselves engineered and now won't accept the blame for. Doctor Doom is perhaps Marvel's ur-example here, but there are plenty of others. Pup then is not a villain simply by dint of wanting to murder people (and/or lamp kids, albeit ones packing heat) but because of his refusal to take possession of the consequences of his actions.

But does that in turn free Longshot from his culpability here? Well, no, but this too is a regular ingredient backed into superhero sponge-cakes. Whilst we might not be brimming with sympathy for those who use their misfortune as an excuse for inflicting pain on others, though, we do have to accept the fact that an awful lot of bad luck does seem to dog anyone nearby our heroes.  How else could comics keep generating new villains with a personal connection to their nemesis? Pup isn't actually wrong when he blames Longshot's probability manipulation for how things have turned out. But what in fact he's attacking is the logic upon which all superhero fiction works, just as the first two issues explored the endless stream of good fortune a noble hero enjoys, and the third concentrated on the unfortunate effect heroes seem to have on anyone who befriends them. As always, Longshot's powers simply allow the text to comment openly on what has always been lurking beneath the surface.

Issue 3 is helpful here, actually. When I discussed it I noted the "jinxed" man Longshot met was far less a victim of terrible luck than he was his own poor choices and his failure to recognise the many ways in which he was quite fortunate. Now, as then, I don't want to overstate my case, since this kind of selective blindness to one's advantages is a symptom of depression as well as privilege, and I've no intention of even implying obliquely that those suffering the bite of the black dog should try counting their blessings more. As I say, though, that's far from the only reason someone can become so caught up in their woes that they conclude themselves "cursed". And if you're doing that, are you not succumbing to narrative logic; replacing the actual messy randomness of the real world with a perversely comforting story about how your destiny is to be shafted?

It's clear that Pup is making the same mistake here, and Nocenti takes pains to underscore it.  Longshot is losing his battle against Pup when Quark - the goat-headed tracker demon Longshot fought on earlier occasions - arrives to help Luckmullet out.  Quark, of course, is in exactly the same straits as Pup, an alien visitor trapped in our dimension by Longshot's escape attempt.  He's just refusing to be a dick about it. Thus whilst we are reminded here of how the tropes of superhero comics function, we're also warned that as actual people we have a choice. A comic book supervillain can spend their non-existent days lashing out at those with the gall to live their lives in ways that don't correlate perfectly with the villain's needs.  The rest of us should probably reach for some perspective.

Alas, none of this has yet occurred to Longshot, who is too shot through with existential dread to help Quark out.  Instead he flees to brood somewhere else, leaving Quark and Pup to fight to a bloody draw.  It's here that the issue takes what Past Me found a screeching left turn, as Longshot uses his ability to read objects to catapult himself into a flashback/vision of himself meeting his creator, Arize, outside a house surrounded by mechanical butterfly fairies. Which if nothing else is a wonderfully fun sentence to write.

In a comic so concerned about the construction of superhero comics, it's hardly a surprise that as the finish line approaches we should get to meet our hero's actual constructor (I wish Arize was a woman so as to better reflect Nocenti, but I suppose follow that logic too far and you end up writing like Dave Sim).  Arize himself is difficult to get a handle on.  Early on he gives the best summation of the creative drive I've heard for a long time:

Yes, I create. I have just the proper temperament -- impatience for the way things are, and an angry desire to make things better.  

You see, the proper combination of irreverence and rage makes for a great inventor.

That's just perfect. We create because we can't stand the world in the appalling configuration it currently has, and because we have no respect for those who insist this is the way it must or even should be. And so we try to put together something better. This is why Arize creates Longshot, so that he can fight for the freedom of those enslaved by Mojo and the other Spineless Ones. Arize has no truck with Longshot's concerns about whether our hero is really "real".  Of course he's real.  He was created, but he's still real. And he has a job to do.

This is quite delightful. We're watching a fictional character being told that it couldn't matter less whether or not he is "real", what matters is the actions he takes.  Which is as true outside the comic as it is inside. Of course Longshot is real, insofar as his existence as a concept has an effect on other things that are unquestionably real.   If you read a story that inspires me to be braver, or kinder, or more loving, what possible difference does it make whether that story was "true" or not?

Stories change the world.  It's important they change it for the better.

As I said, on my first read-through it wasn't clear to me how this tied in with the first section's focus on the nature of implausibly bad luck in villain creation, but once it clicks it's obvious: this is about how we're all authors of our own life stories.  Not the only authors, obviously; we share writing duties with thousands of other writers as well as endless contributions from the Gods of chance.  But we're always in the writing room. No matter how sad or painful our story, anyone reading this has the capacity to try and make their stories at least a little better, if only by trying to make themselves a little better. We can let our pain turn us mean, or we can let it inform our compassion. Our story can be about how we limited the stories of others, or how we helped to shape them so they found them more appealing.

Which is a lovely sentiment, and something which seems an entirely fitting one to be spun out from a superhero comic (or at least from one not written in the '90s, where these ideas were seemingly forgotten entirely). So why did I fail to see it first time around?  Aside from innate incompetence, I mean? Well, what threw me the first time around was one of the last thing Arize says to Longshot: "Now I build only the frivolous, the amusing -- the beautiful -- nothing of purpose or meaning".  This is just a bafflingly bone-headed thing for Nocenti to put into her fictional counterpart. Of course the amusing and the beautiful have purpose and meaning. A world where mechanical butterfly-fairies exist would self-evidently be one that improved upon ours (until they rebelled against us and started eating our faces, which surely could only be a matter of time). Beauty can be overvalued, naturally, and it can most certainly be misdiagnosed, but neither of those means it should be dismissed.

But I realise there i9s no shortage of irony in my complaining about one moment of denigrating beauty spoiling so beautiful a book. So let's just declare it a bum note of no further significance and move on. There are bigger concerns on the horizon in any case. Longshot #5 spends over half its length riffing on the idea that we can and should work to generate better and more affecting stories.  That's a hell of a hill to climb on to when you've still got your own story to finish.  Longshot is heading off to face down Mojo and rescue the woman in distress.  Is there any way this most clichéd of set-ups can live up to the standards Nocenti has set for us?  Even with 40 plus pages to play around with?

We shall see.

Also in this issue: Mojo continues to torture Rita as they slide through dimensions and Longshot teams up with Doctor Strange to defeat Pup (nodding as they do to Mr Creosote, who devoured his final wafer-thin mint just three years earlier). Even after multiple reads, though, I'm struggling to find anything particularly interesting to say about these sections other than that Mojo is even scarier here than he was last issue, so perhaps it's time to bring this post to a close.

Clues

This issue continues directly on from the last one, and takes place over several hours.

The dialogue here unambiguously places this story on Halloween. That requires moving the whole miniseries back by about four months, but the storyline is sufficiently independent of other titles for that not to matter all that much.

Date

Wednesday 31^st  October 1984.

X-Date

X+6Y+244.

Contemporary Events

Indira Gandhi is assassinated.

Standout Line

Aside from Arize's line quoted above, it's got to be Mojo

"Strap this imposter to the prow, so that she may be cleansed. Render her baroque."

Or

"Then perhaps you'll start talking -- or I'll smash you oblique!"

Or

"Silent screams? Perfect! She must be in love with me already."

So. Utterly. Damn. Terrifying.

TWTYTW: 1985

Like all years, 1985 was stuffed to the metaphorical chrono-gizzards with beginnings and endings.  Let's start, as we more or less have to, with Claremont.  I mentioned last time that 1984 saw him at the peak of his time on the X-books, in the sense that never again would he have such total control over the franchise he had inherited during its first uncertain post-relaunch steps and forged into an apparently unstoppable force. I stand by that assessment, but it's worth noting how little sign there was of impending change there actually was in 1985 itself.  As my chart shows, Claremont's output in '85 eclipsed even his staggeringly prolific previous year. Two miniseries (albeit one that kicked off in '84), two ongoings, multiple annuals and special editions - this was still very much a man in charge.

As I've argued before, though, Claremont here is about to become the victim of his own success.  The problem with making a franchise so lucrative is that sooner or later people are going to want to expand it, and they're not likely to be all that concerned about how you feel about that. It seems almost a law of nature that any halfway successful franchise will either shrink to nothing or rampage out of control. Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the only way the falcon doesn't get too far from the falconer to hear him is if it falls dead from the sky.  At this point in the story of the X-books, the hawk isn't quite out of range just yet, but it's certainly realised it'll have to leave the aggravating shouty mammal behind if it's to get a chance at the tastiest rodents.

(Here tasty rodents are standing in for money. Metaphors are fun!)

The actual zero hour for Claremont having to share his toys hasn't yet quite arrived. Bob Layton's X-Factor #1 won't be released until the early days of 1986. But the change is in the air for those who can see it. A child doesn't get to wait until a new baby actually shakes loose before it finds its world adapting to support the new arrival. Parents with foresight will want to start more fiercely promoting the importance of sharing before the first meeting of siblings across the battlefield of enchanting toys. We see this here as Claremont eases Cyclops out of the retirement/happy ending he had planned, so that he could be reinvented as a colossal douche in the early issues of X-Factor. Given how universally this move was panned, it might be tempting to argue that Claremont should have been left in charge indefinitely of the X-books (and it arguably took six years to find another writer who matched him in terms of reputation and importance). That would be a mistake, of course. Sooner or later Claremont needed to be left behind as surely as Cyclops did (not that we've seemingly learned either lesson). Not just because no-one can remain at the peak of their creative powers indefinitely, or that sooner or later the best of us start to run out of ideas about what to do with the same franchise, but also because - again as with Cyclops - if no-one ever gets to retire, there's steadily less and less space for others to shine.

Which neatly brings me on to Ann Nocenti. I was rather down on her Beauty and the Beast mini which straddled '84 and '85, but her Longshot series, the majority of which came out in this year, was a genuine revelation. A coherent overall theme explored in its various facets each issue? This was the face of the future.  As soon as this arrived, Claremont's approach of endlessly repeated emotional beats against a randomly shifting backdrop looked dated in comparison. Somehow whatever was destined to replace the Modern Age in comics (which of course we've not settled on a name for yet) found itself being born at the same time as the Modern Age itself. Alas, some combination of growing '80s cynicism and veneration of the sacred cash-cow would smother the Nocenti approach of postmodern dissection in favour of dragging us into the darkness of the 1990s, where forests of dead trees displayed forests of dead bodies, and - if I may enrage Yeat's shade twice in one post -everywhere the ceremony of innocence was drowned in stale coffee and crocodile tears.

Speaking of death, despite there being two Dazzler issuea with an '86 cover date, this post seems the right place in which to mark that title's passing. Dazzler was always going to be a hard sell; a single lead in a franchise defined by team books, and a female protagonist in a male-dominated landscape without the benefit of legacy, history (Dazzler made only three or so appearances before DAZ #1 was released) or, if we're being honest, a particularly interesting power set.

For all of that, though, Dazzler in its early days was frequently a pleasant surprise. In some ways it was a twisted mirror of the Spiderman titles, in that it focussed on how superpowers would likely regularly interfere with one's attempts to find love or get a career off the ground. Whilst Spiderman thoroughly mined out his famous power/responsibility formulation, though, Dazzler replaced those words with "uniqueness" and "tribulations", respectively. Issue by issue, it probably did a better job of exploring the mutant metaphor than even Claremont's UXM, and no small part of that stems from how often the comic focussed on the small scale. "Microaggressions"is the term. In this regard, Dazzler was no less refreshing than Nocenti's Longshot mini, and just as destined to be buried beneath the detritus in the coming storm of bullets and boob-socks.

But never mind. Sometimes an idea needs to be exposed to the light more than once before it starts to grow. 1985 was a fascinating year in the margins, but the (bad) writing was on the wall. The X-Books have been noticed. The strip-mining must now begin. And if there's something that's inevitable about mining, it is this: there is no way to go but down.