UXM #203: "Crossroads"

(Mass Effect 3 can piss off as well.)


Comments

"Good morning, Ms... Summers, is it?"
"I prefer Phoenix."
"The... I'm sorry. The Phoenix that took over your mother, murdered billions, and came within inches of obliterating the entirety of existence?"
"The very same."
"I see. Well, welcome to the First Bank of M'Kraan, Ms Phoenix. I hope your journey wasn't too arduous?"
 "It was fine. I stole the life-force of several of my friends to power me, so it wasn't too long a slog in the end."
"That's... good. Onto business, anyway. As I'm sure you can understand, there are a number of stages to an application like this, all sorts of dots and crosses we need to push through. But let's start with the biggest question: how much do you intend to borrow?"
"Everything."
"Everything?"
"Everything. Everything you have. Everything the universe has. The whole nine billion trillion square yards. I'd like to take every life, every planet, every molecule in the universe. Right now. Please."
"Ms Phoenix, that's... well, that's certainly a refreshingly original request. Just so as we can understand your application fully, when exactly were you planning on paying this back? Because I'm not entirely sure how I can start calculating compound interest on literally everything. It'd be a philosophical and mathematical nightmare, I would've thought."
"I wasn't exactly planning on paying anything back. There won't actually be anything left five minutes after you approve the loan. Not so much as two molecules to rub together."
"Hmm. This is not exactly what banks like to hear, Ms Phoenix. One of our central operating principles is that, on balance, we be repaid through cash or electronic transfers that actually exist."
"I thought you'd say that. But there is a deal that I can offer you. Once I've obliterated all that exists, I'm quite sure a new universe will be created in the resulting vacuum.  You can consider that yours."
"So to summarise, Ms Phoenix - and our apologies if we appear dense, but I'm sure you can understand that it is rather new territory to discuss the destruction of all territory of any kind - you are proposing that you borrow the sum total of corporeal existence, and utterly obliterate it?"
"That's right. I want it utterly absent. I want to finish what my mother started.  And don't worry; I know what you're thinking."
"There are very few thoughts to choose from regarding a proposal such as this."
"Also I'm a telepath. I know it sounds insane, even inhuman-"
"We are inhuman, Ms Phoenix. Do not attempt to... tar us with your brush, is it?"
"-But it's the only way. The only way to stop the Beyonder's horrific plan."
"Which is?"
"To destroy the universe! To obliterate all that lives!"
"I thought that was your plan?"
"That's different. I don't actually want to have to do this. but it's the only way to kill the Beyonder!"
"And you're sure he wants to annihilate existence?"
"Absolutely. I read his mind just a few weeks ago."
"A few weeks? People can change their minds, Ms Phoenix. I came in to work this morning thinking I would enjoy this meeting, for instance. I ask again: are you sure this is what he wants?"
"OK, maybe not totally sure. But how can we afford to take that risk?"
"I am - look, there's so much here it would take six weeks and a qualified psychotherapist to wade through it. We might have to dissect your brain. But again, start with the biggest question. Why would the Beyonder want to destroy reality? Won't he end up just as dead?"
"No. He's not like us. Not tied to one reality. He can side-step into his own dimension once the fuse is lit."
"So, if I may summarise: you are so terrified an entity of terrifying cosmic power might destroy the entire universe, a process only he can survive, that you want to use your status as an entity of terrifying cosmic power to actually destroy the entire universe, so as to kill the only person who can survive the process?"
"He won't escape if he doesn't see it coming!"
"So as long as the being who can see atoms doesn't see the universe collapsing, we'll be OK? Well, except all the people who will die. Which is everyone."
"Stop twisting things! It's not the same! At least my way will result in the birth of a new universe!"
"Are you really going to sit there and tell me you have sufficient background in theoretical physics to guarantee this is a restart and not a shutdown? Weren't you just moments ago arguing the stakes are too high for us to take risks?"
"I know that framed like that it sounds foolish-"
"No. It does not sound foolish. It sounds monstrous. It sounds like a madman with his finger on the button, convinced that if destruction might be coming anyway all that matters is that he fired first.  It sounds ike a lunatic convinced that their foe outstrips them so totally in every way that mutually assured destruction is the only way to destroy him, as though it were impossible this utterly superior enemy might not have prepared for such a scenario.  You should never run a battle plan that relies on the enemy being stupid, Ms Phoenix. Especially when the enemy is a god and the battle plan is "set fire to all that lives". You come to our bank shouting "Nothing lasts forever, so why not destroy it now?" and expect applause for the sacrifice you demand everyone else must make. You're a nihilist who wants to be seen as a humanitarian, a murderer who wants credit for not stretching out her kills. You'll forgive us if we don't find you sympathetic. You'll understand if we look at you and struggle to keep our breakfast down. You stole your friends' lives to betray their life's work, and you did it because you thought your banal desperation someone made you better than them. You've taken the genocidal heritage of the Phoenix Force and somehow made it worse. We are the oldest banking institution in the cosmos, but even we aren't going to touch something this fucking evil."
"So... I don't get the loan then?"
"You don't get the loan. Good day Ms Phoenix. Do please take a complimentary pen."
 
Clues

It's apparently been a few weeks since the events of New Mutants #36, which puts this issue towards the end of March/start of April. Since this issue has to take place after NMU #37, I'll start this on the following day. The issue itself starts in late evening and continues to sunrise of the following day.

Date

Sunday 14^th to Monday 15^th April, 1985.

X-Date

X+7Y+44 to X+7Y+45.

Compression Constant

1 Marvel year = 3.17 standard years

(Beast is 33 years old)

Contemporary Events

South Africa ends its ban on interracial marriages.

Standout Line

"I'm not an executioner, Ray. We do that... we play the Beyonder's game -- provin' ourselves no better than him." - Logan.

The one and only time this argument will ever be acceptable, folks. You saw it here first. Or, you know, back in 1986. Or any time between then and now.

NMU #37: "If I Should Die"

("What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night" - Crowfoot, Siksika First Nation)

Comments

This is about as far as you can get from the swashbuckling larks. Everything here that isn't gloom is doom instead. Well, there's a brief bit at the start featuring the kids relaxing whilst the senior team is away. These little "slice of life" sections are always some of Claremont's best, even if they tend to be stuffed with more corn than just the kernels Amara is popping to make snacks.  Even here there is sadness, though, as Rahne is forced to take the others to task for cheering on a Western filled with villainous "Indians" whilst their friend Dani is in the same room. Not being American, and to my great shame never having to my knowledge ever met or spoken to a Native American (though I've read writing from some) I can't tell whether this is too heavy-handed or not, but I personally appreciated it. Especially since Dani is trying to talk to her Cheyenne mother but can't hear her over the sound of hooting teenagers rooting for the US Cavalry. That's a hell of a metaphor about the violent overwriting of indigenous dialogue by colonial oppressors to be found tossed away on the first page of an '80s superhero comic.

 But then what is the Beyonder but the ultimate colonial, a force come to our lands to overwrite the story of humanity however he sees fit, secure in the knowledge we cannot stand against him, and utterly convinced that this same weakness makes us ineligible to contribute to the discussion of our fate. It's the ultimate white man's fear: that someday someone else is going to do to us exactly what we did to others for centuries with impunity [1]. Shooter's main SW2 title rather bypasses this in favour of elevator-pitch tales of hilarious misunderstandings and reality-juggling, but Claremont here takes the far more plausible route (to the extent that phrase has meaning here) and presents the arrival of the Beyonder as being a terrifying black swan event that would terrify you so much every internal organ would vacate your body.

Here Claremont ties in the sheer incomprehensible horror circling humanity's head by tapping Dani's status as an agent of death, specifically Hela. I've discussed before my discomfort with having a native American forcibly added to the ranks of the force of a white culture's god, but it certainly has some power here. There's a particularly nice moment in which Dani sees death hovering over each of her friends, but the form death takes depends on the beliefs of each New Mutant - so for Illyana it's a demon, for Amara it's Pluto, etc. For some reason Sam's death appears to be Jesse Custer, but then I suppose he did do more than his share of killing, so fair enough. Roberto manages to escape the portentathon, since he's elsewhere, doing a bit of standard hero work and Claremontian brooding, presumably to remind us that normal service at least continues somewhere; that the Beyonder's shadow does not yet cover everything. But for everyone else on the team, it looks like being a pretty bad night.

For Beyonder, God of Imperialism, is a jealous deity, easily offended. He offered Illyana the chance to join him willingly last issue, and she refused. He came to her all smiles and gifts, and yet she rejected him, wanting to choose her own path. What is the Beyonder to do in response to such obvious and total irrationality? How could anyone fail to see his way is the best way? Who else can claim such power? Why would he have such total control over reality if not to rearrange it as he saw fit? Illyana's refusal is a sign she does not understand. Worse, that she would happily doom her own people rather than attempt that understanding.

The Beyonder turns her to dust the moment he sees her.

The rest of the New Mutants try desperately to avenge their friend, but the fight is obviously hopeless.  Indeed, the only reason it happens at all is because the Beyonder seems to want to toy with them, offering them hope specifically so he can take it away, as Dani puts it. This is more or less inarguable, given the Beyonder could have erased them all from existence without them even knowing he was there. Ultimately, though, the effect is the same; the Beyonder murders the team one by one (in a way that's probably the most horrifying team wipe-out I can remember since Alan Moore gave us The Fury) and then erases them from the entire timeline. Removing their stories utterly, and replacing them with his own.

The End.

[1] Claremont underlines this by gifting Dani a vision of her grandfather explaining how some amongst the Cheyenne believed the white man had been sent to punish them for their pride. I confess I've been unable to find anything on whether this is something that was genuinely believed at the time, or whether it's entirely fictional.

Clues

This story takes place over a single evening.

Sam mentions that summer is almost over, though since he turns that into a discussion about Thanksgiving it's not clear quite how good his grasp of chronology is.  In any event, with the Beyonder having been on earth since at least the start of the year (see UXM #196) placing this issue eight or so months later strikes me as letting him plague the planet for entirely too much time - the gaps between issues of #SW2 would have to become too large.   We can move the timeline on a few weeks, though, since it's clear from the next UXM issue that the X-Men have spent quite some time in San Francisco trying to sort out the mess there.

Date

Friday 13^th April, 1985.

X-Date

X+7Y+33.

Contemporary Events

American model, burlesque dancer and actress Carmen Carrera is born.

Standout Line

"They're watching some dumb cowboy movie -- of course we're the bad guys -- yeah, I wish things were different too."  - Dani.

NGT #4:"The Wizard Of Oops!"

(Like Sliders... on acid!)

Comments

This shouldn't take too long to wrap up. since all the problems of the last issue are still present here: Claremont's "Boggie World" didn't really work as an exploration of Kitty's whimsy in any case, but it's even more unsuccessful as the primary location in the second half of a four-art mini, unless you have a much stronger tolerance for silliness than I do.

Actually, I don't think it's silliness that's the problem per se, it's silliness that doesn't show much in the way of invention. The basic building blocks are borrowed, and the structure Cockrum builds with them entirely unsurprising. It's not entirely without charm, I confess; every now and again something surfaces here that I really quite like. The giant lumbering Dark Bamf is lots of fun - his dismissal of our own dimension as being "weird... all straight lines!" is such a nice little artist's joke - and Nightcrawler trying to get home by taking a cue from Mr Mxyzptlk is a nice nod to the Distinguished Competition. And defeating a living wall of grasping tentacles by discovering it is ticklish is exactly the sort of silliness I adore, which if nothing else suggests my aesthetics as regards this kind of romp are all over the map and shouldn't in any way be trusted.

Still, though, the not-X-Men fight Shagreen for a while, then defeat him, and nothing else happens beyond a parade of individual slices of nonsense. These don't have a high enough hit rate for me, though YMMV. The one thing here that seems to move beyond personal taste into something genuinely unfortunate is the inclusion of the female Bamfs, who are just as horny as their male counterparts, but look like teenage girls rather than stuffed toys.

The problem here is a stuffed toy with omnidirectional horniness is funny (or at least, it's funny to a point, in small doses and not pushed too far).  A young woman with the same drive is something rather different.

Anway, as I say, fight fight fight, win. Nightcrawler gets sucked into a vortex as a result of breaking Shagreen's staff though, and ends up in yet another dimension. And then all of a sudden, a cowboy dinosaur appears, and everything is briefly wonderful. Let's just take a moment to process that. A Cowboy. Dinosaur.

Don't deny mammals, Kurt! Mammals are your mother!

 If only it all could've been like this. I mean, I highly doubt a Tombstonasaurus tale would keep up the momentum through a whole issue, let alone a four-part mini, but it's an indication of how much more interesting and fun this title could have been had Cockrum had more interest in exploring his own whimsy instead of borrowing Claremont's.

A little more reality hopping, a thoroughly unconvincing (though commendably brief) bit of hand-waving about how all this came about in the first place, and Nightcrawler is back where he belongs. And same as he ever was, of course. No changes to body, mind or soul. Hell, even the clocks haven't shifted all that much, what with the Narnia effect in play. The whole story, in effect, might as well never have happened.  Which is about as appropriate a conclusion to this minseries as you could ask for, really.

Clues

This story seems to take place over a few hours max in the "real" world. Kitty and Illyana are in the same clothes as the previous issue, suggesting it takes place on the same day.

Date

Tuesday 25^th December, 1984

X-Date

X+6Y+298.

Contemporary Events


Standout Line

"Dark Bamf only pawn in game of life".

Poor Dark Bamf. All he wants is love. And to smash people. That most of all.

Yielding The Floor

Given the focus of fully two thirds of my blogs, you might have been expecting me to comment on the news that Iceman will soon be coming out as gay in All-New X-Men.  Really, though, Rachel Edidin has concussed that nail so totally - poor thing must be seeing Angel and Xorn's face flying around its head right now - that there's precious little for me to add. Just read that piece, twice.

(Yes, that's a Playboy link, but obviously Edidin's article itself is smut free, and the surrounding ads are no less SFW than any other ad involving models in bikinis).

LGS #6: "A Snake Coils..."

('84 in '86)

Comments

We reach the final issue of a title I've thoroughly enjoyed up to now.  Each one of the first five issues has included some lovely ideas riffing on the nature of stories, whether comic-book tales or fiction in general.

With the need to bring the series to an end, however, opportunities for such cleverness are harder to come by, even with 41 pages to play with. Giving something thematic heft is hard. Writing a satisfying ending is hard. Trying to do both at once must be like juggling mercury.

And yet Nocenti hits a home run here [1]. The issue is perhaps slightly fractured, with lots of good ideas thrown in without all of them necessarily getting time to breathe,  But there's a through-line here, and that to my mind is what matters.  It starts with having Longshot team up with the terminally pessimistic Quark, another resistance fighter from Longshot's dimension. Quark came over with the slave-hunters as an undercover agent but is now having major second thoughts about joining up with Longshot's rebellion. At first glance Quark's endless complaining and conviction in his cursed luck seem overly reminiscent of Jinx in issue #3, but the focus is subtly different. The tale of Jinx was all about how people can blame endless bad luck as a way of refusing to both take responsibility for their actions and accept the ways in which they've been dealt a much better hand than plenty of others. Quark's miserable attitude is born of something different; whilst Longshot suffers from near-total absence of memories, Quark suffers from having far too many.

Frankly, given the way Quark describes the struggle for freedom from Mojo's tyranny, I have a hard time blaming the guy for being sick of it.  I've mentioned before how unnerving and twisted Mojo's zaniness is, and Nocenti keeps it up here as Quark describes how many of his and Longshot's comrades have been "turned inside-out by wizards", an image at once deeply silly and profoundly disturbing. The result has rather understandably left Quark an embittered, hopeless wreck, which of course contrasts with Longshot's almost unhinged positivity. There's a certain irony in Quark being the grizzled veteran to Longshot's wide-eyed rookie considering as best as we can tell it was Longshot who first recruited Quark, but things go deeper than that. The idea here seems to be that too much memory can distort your view of the world just as much as too little. For every one of us who hasn't had lessons to learn from, there's someone who attended the lesson, but learned the wrong thing from it. This again nods to poor old Jinx, whose famed bad luck comprised in large part of him making conscious decisions he later came to regret.

But let's be fair to Quark, he's got better reasons for sulking than Jinx could claim. Not only is he clearly suffering from his time spent fighting a horrific war, but he's also stuck with a goat's head in a world where goats get fenced in and forcibly milked every day, and that's if they're lucky. It's this, more than anything else that takes place in the series, that makes it feel like an X-Book; though there's more to Quark's issues than simply the standard conflict a mutant feels when being asked to save those who oppress them. Quark is a slave who first fought simply to be free, but now is being asked to fight to save people who hate and fear him because he reminds them of creatures they have already enslaved. Little wonder he's not convinced he wants to risk his life taking on Mojo.

Speaking of which: the spineless sultan is on great form here. Once again Nocenti writes his dialogue as coming from the exact midpoint of a desperate stand-up comic and a narcissistic serial killer. This latter characteristic comes to the fore here as he demands Spiral and multiple mind-controlled humans construct a cathedral to himself, from which he can draw power. Fame, it seems, is not just the goal or the coin of the realm in the Mojoverse, it's how one generates power, and potentially immortality. 

Which is a little like how it works in real life, I suppose, and has been standard operating policy in fiction going back at least as far as J.M. Barrie, but it's rather more sinister when it involves a murderous villain. This is always the risk with writing, that you'll unleash something that lurks in the shadows forever. How many innocent actors have had to pretend to die at Dracula's fangs alone? Thousands? Tens of thousands?

(Besides, what demonstrates the immortality of popularity better than comic characters? They get to outlive their titles, their times, even their creators; living forever for as long as people demand it. It's in this context that I note when Fliss flicked through this book to see what I was up to she asked why a a blob with spider legs was fighting Ziggy Stardust,)

But Mojo's long-term prospects aren't nearly so concerning as what he's up to right now. Already he has the power to turn cats to skeletons and turn dog's heads the wrong way round. But as Longshot points out, the dog's head looks like it was always on backwards. Mojo isn't just killing, he's rewriting lives out of existence. Longshot - already having had his memory overwritten, at least in pencil - isn't just fighting for his life, he's fighting to avoid being written out of his own story.

This demands an appropriate response, and fortunately Longshot can remember just enough of his creator Arize to know he already provided it: you simply tell the slaves they're not slaves any more (say, what does "Arize" sound like anyway? What does building one's own legs imply?). As a literal piece of advice, this is surely insufficient, perhaps even insulting. But what matters is the philosophy the suggestion carries with it.  Slavery is an abomination, a brutal parade of broken bones and bleeding skin, death and worse than death and degradations I cannot possibly even imagine.  But is also a narrative, a story told not only to the slavers but also to the slaves.  This is what you deserve. This is all you can be. This is for your own good.

Tyrants are also storytellers, turning fiction into a weapon. Which means stories can be weaponised against them, too.  This is what Longshot ultimately learns here; victory will come not by slaying Mojo on Earth where his people cannot see the dictator humbled. Instead he must return to his own lands and spread the story that the tyrants are vulnerable. Orwell always knew this: what the powerful fear above all else are the stories that say the powerless can have access to all the power they want.  You defeat a vile, damaging story by choosing to write a better one.

Which, if nothing else, Nocenti has without doubt achieved.

[1] If you'll forgive the mixed metaphor. You can't hit a home run in mercury juggling; the metal would wrap itself around the bat.

Clues

This story takes place over a single day. Since Mojo makes a point of greeting the sunrise as this issue begins, we'll place it on the day following the conclusion of LGS #5.

Date

Thursday 1^st  November 1984.

X-Date

X+6Y+245.

Contemporary Events

Natalia Tena - everyone's favourite Order of the Phoenix member/raccoon-channelling Wildling - is born.

Standout Line

"Hallowed be his fame!" - Random Mojo worshipper.

X-Factor #1: "Third Genesis"

(Ray Wilson)

Comments

Sometimes you get famous for all the wrong reasons.

To get the obvious out of the way, X-Factor #1 was intended to be a major deal.  The original five X-Men back together? Including the one thought dead for years? A new series of adventures for them now they've outgrown the teenage angst Lee lumbered them with over two decades earlier?  That's a far stronger hook than Dazzler or Alpha Flight could claim. And indeed, with those two titles being at best tremendously oblique spin-offs (to the point people have asked me why I bothered including either of them on this blog), there's an argument to be made that this stands as the X-Universe's second genuine title to grow from Uncanny X-Men, and the first to not be written by Claremont.

Given this, it's perhaps something of a shame that this issue is arguably best known these days for two absolutely colossal fumblings of the ball. The first of these is the decision to have the new team pose as mutant-catchers so as to hunt and whisk away new mutants without causing suspicion. That goes away soon enough, though, so whilst the idea is awful it does no lasting damage. It's the second problem - turning Cyclops into a deadbeat dad - that really haunts the title going forward.

I think it's a fairly common reaction when something has been so slated for so long to try and offer some kind of defence. So how could we construct such a defence, and how far does it take us? Regarding the plan to save mutants from persecution by pretending to persecute them, I think any attempt at a defence has to be considered DOA. As always, it's not my place to tell an oppressed group how it should combat its oppression. But it does seem fairly clear to me that if in the '70s a group of gay men decided to pretend to be PIs who people could call to hunt down down gay men and cart them off to prison for them, that would fairly unarguably be the worst idea ever. There's a reason Edward Murrow fought McCarthyism by decrying it over the airwaves rather than pretending to help the State Department track down suspected pinkos and then hiding them in his house, and I don't think that reason was just that he was more comfortable behind a microphone.

So that pretty much can't be salvaged, indeed it went down so badly that Layton's successor Louise Simonson revealed it all to be a deliberate plot by Warren's PR man Cameron Hodge to make things worse for mutants - a twist that rather makes our heroes look like utter idiots, but I guess that barge had sailed. Can we get anywhere arguing Scott Summers acted less atrociously than is commonly accepted? Is it possible we can get some way towards forgiving him on the grounds that almost no-one reading this post has the slightest idea how they would deal with learning they were wrong about the unquestioned love of their life dying two and a half years earlier?

That's something I'll come back to, but for now I want to move on to Jean's actual return from the dead; talking about how that affects Scott before it affects Jean herself doesn't strike me as sensible.  The interesting thing about Jean being revived by Marvel just in time to put her in X-Factor is that the two ideas came from separate sources. The original cover for this issue simply has a blank outline where the fifth, female member of the team would be placed once it was decided who it was going to be (with Dazzler being a front runner for the role).

Not hard to criticise this from a feminine perspective, is it?

Meanwhile, Marvel writer Kurt Busiek was exploring the possibility of resurrecting Jean Grey, basically because he was a big fan and didn't like how her story had originally ended. With him pushing the idea of bringing her back, it was eventually decided that it could be allowed, so long as she was completely exonerated of any role in the Phoenix's genocidal actions, and one of comic's most notorious retcons was on its way out of the door.

Whether or not one agrees with Busiek regarding the conclusion of the Dark Phoenix Saga, it's clear his solution raises problems of its own.  This is where the levy breaks, and we start down the road ending in it becoming standard policy in the X-Universe to run stories that, should they go wrong, will stink up the past as well as the present. The X-Men can now no more die than the titles of the comics which feature them can. There can always be another chapter, so long as we fans demand it, unloading onto the internet, clamouring to vote for who should become immortal. Ultimately those fans can end up in the bullpen themselves, like Busiek, a new generation of writers determined to fix the mistakes of the old, for rather idiosyncratic definitions of "mistakes". That all of this should kick off the very moment someone other than Claremont gets their claws into the franchise proper is perhaps fitting.

As to the utility of bringing Jean herself back, I'm defiantly agnostic. I suspect that for many fans the desire to see her return stems mainly from nostalgia. After all, the Jean of the '60s and '70s was at worst a sexist cipher, and even at best she was defined almost exclusively by her relationship with Scott and the generic "strong woman" approach so beloved of male comic writers who don't to put the effort in with actual characterisation. The result was a woman so eminently replaceable Claremont managed to do so with the exact same person; Jean was never anything more than an attractive redhead who loved Scott.  It would be nice to think that Jean's reappearance here was intended as a way to allow her to be written right this time, but with the explicit motivation for this resurrection basically being that Jean was too good a character to die the way she did, hopes obviously aren't high.

Anyway, on to Cyclops.  First let's talk about how his presence here bends the narrative. Generally speaking, when kicking off a new book it's important to justify its existence to the punters. One tried and tested method for this, as we recently saw in Alpha Flight (though in that case it was a change of creative team necessitating justification rather than a new title) is to have the characters themselves doubt and debate their usefulness, so that they can go on convince themselves - and hopefully therefore us - that they are a viable concern. Instead, the narrative gives them Cyclops, and goes out of its way to reinforce the idea that the other guys can't adequately function without him, something which I imagine came as a surprise to any number of Defenders fans.

The reason why this is done is fairly obvious, of course. Leyton wants to justify Summers' return from his retirement. But inevitably placing Cyclops above his three oldest male friends rather makes them look weaker, which is an odd choice when they're 60% of your new book's main cast (it's particularly strange in a book that's already referenced Scott not having the skills to run the X-Men anymore, which means this book is being pitched as a second-tier hero leading his third-tier mates). Instead of learning why we should read about this team, we learn only that we couldn't read about this team without Scott, which frankly reads like Layton is justifying himself to Claremont rather than to the reader. And there's yet another problem generated here. Cyclops' decision to choose the team over his marriage can really only be as justifiable as the team's existence is itself, and that justification hovers somewhere between sketchy and idiotic here.

But even if XFA #1 had done a much better job of selling us the new team (and at the very least they do prevent Rusty Collins from getting himself and plenty of other people killed), would that help exonerate Scott? Let's review what he actually did: he left his wife and newborn child to go on a trip he refused to discuss, and then didn't call them for over two weeks. What manner of defence can we possibly mount here?

First of all, let's do some parsing. I think it's worth considering Cyclops' decision to take the trip separately from his decision to not phone home for a fortnight. The first of these two we can possibly at least partially justify. As I've said, there's a low ceiling on the extent to which we can process Scott's predicament here. And it isn't as though Maddie is helping here either, having just the previous day laid into Scott for caring too much about mutants and not enough about her and the baby.  Which is a pretty ugly look in any case - until I come up with a better name for this I'm going to go with "flatscan privilege" - and is particularly ridiculous when you consider that Christopher might be a mutant as well.  When you insist someone need to stop worrying about the safety of themselves, their friends, their minority group, and possibly your own baby because it's slowing them down getting hold of the nappies, it's possible it isn't your priorities that need rejigging. Yes, Maddie apologises for her outburst that night, but since she then does exactly the same thing again when Scott gets the fateful phone call, I'm not actually all that impressed by her contrition. If you keep pulling the same shit it stops mattering if you're mumbling "sorry" in between.

But if we're going to talk about a pattern of repeated behaviour, we need to shine that harsh light on Cyclops as well. As Abigail Brady pointed out when we briefly discussed this issue (whilst on different continents; I love Twitter), the degree of ferocity behind Maddie's outbursts strongly suggest that this is a recurring problem. And yes, whilst I'm no fan of telling mutants to stop stressing, I can certainly see it might be more helpful if Cyclops could brood and perform simple tasks simultaneously. He made the decision to quit fighting evil and raise a family instead. Requiring him to stick to that decision - at least to the extent that it allows him to function as the father of a new baby - seems entirely reasonable, and if Maddie has reached the point where she's driving that point home with what seems absent context unnecessary force, well, I don't think anyone who reads this blog needs to be reminded that Scott's tendency to brood can be an issue.

In addition to all this, we have the fact that the situation is weighted in favour of Madelyne in any case. In part this is because she just spent nine months carrying Scott's child, and ended up having to give birth without him whilst he was - of course - stress out about mutant rights. As once again Abigail pointed out, a certain degree of benefit-giving and slack-cutting is in order here.  Maybe even stronger a point, though, is that this is another instance of a fake oppression - anti-mutant laws - rubbing up against the very real problem of women being abandoned to raise kids alone because the father suddenly discovers something more important they should be doing (here it's literally another woman Scott wants to see instead).  Trying to generate fictional situations where a man can legitimately abandon their wife and baby without explanation (and it is abandonment; two weeks of silence after a superhero disappears on a secret mission and you're fully justified in believing they're dead) is not a writing exercise we should in any way be encouraging.

So how far can we defend Summers over leaving? Not very far at all. Maddie might have been a pain over the last day, and she might have told you to never come back (because you should clearly take everything your partner shouts at you in anger completely literally) but you still have a responsibility to the woman you agreed to support, and you certainly have a responsibility to the child you fathered. That simply cannot be said enough. You have a responsibility to the child you fathered. We should Clockwork Orange that sentence into every new dad as a matter of course.

All of which leaves us with no option but to conclude we can't excuse Scott over his decision to skip out with no explanation. And with the decision to not phone home for an entire fortnight whilst he moped around Westchester clearly utterly unacceptable, I'm afraid legal counsel simply has very little it can do.  You should have taken the plea deal, Mr Cyclops.

So ends the trial of Scott Summers. The verdict is guilty. The sentence is... well, we'll get to the sentence soon enough.

Clues

This story takes place over sixteen days. It has to start after Cyclops and Storm had their duel in UXM #201, and from the sound of it that must have been weeks ago. We'll therefore start this story a fortnight after that issue. I'd like to set this earlier, since the first page states this is set before the winter, but since this issue has to follow Cyclops and Storm's duel in UXM #201, there's nothing to be done.

Date

Tuesday 26^th March to Wednesday 10^th April, 1985.

X-Date

X+7Y+24 to X+7Y+39.

Contemporary Events


 
Standout Line

"Taking off your clothes -- in my office?"

Beast knows how to deal with bigotry. You rescind a job offer because of your colleagues' witless bigotry, you're going to get the Real McCoy. Strip For Justice!

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