ALF #20: "Gold And Love Affairs!"

(Sometimes it's hard to not be a woman)

Comments

We seem, at last, to have followed the downward spiral into outright self-parody.  Which afflicts a great many ongoing stories, of course, some of them much better than this. In this case, it seems to be a descent into hitherto undreamed of levels of sexist bilge, which means it's not merely unenjoyable, but hard to laugh at, too.  Really, anger seems like the only appropriate response.

Let's start with the B-plot here, since that continues the story from the last two issues. After their jaunt to the past, Alpha Flight finally have themselves some time to discuss what's happened and decide on what to do next.  Unfortunately, what Snowbird and Shaman want to do most is bicker over who and what Shaman's daughter is and represents. They do this in front of Talisman, ignoring her entirely. When she calls them on this, pointing out she has no interest in being part of some hinky prophecy, her attempts to remove the tiara that started this whole business leaves her in agonising pain.  The tiara can't be taken off!

Whereupon Shaman says "I wish there had been more time to inform you of what you faced".  Let's just stop here, for a little while, and absorb the full horror of this.  Shaman knew that his daughter - a daughter he had just been reunited with that day after a decade and a half of estrangement - wouldn't be able to return to her normal life - the life she chose - and would instead have to remain forever in the mystical world he is part of, and he didn't tell her because there wasn't time?  There aren't enough fields in Texas for the amount of bullshit I'm calling on that. Their visit to the past accomplished nothing beyond filling in gaps for the curious. Shaman explicitly states they had to ensure they didn't change anything, making the whole jaunt an intelligence gathering trip.  This is supposed to have been so important there was no time to tell his daughter about what she was letting herself in for? Is there any more stupid insistence than we must time-travel to the past immediately? Fuck, as they say, that noise.

It's very difficult to get past all this. A father decides his daughter's entire future, knowing full well it cannot be changed, and goes ahead with it without letting his daughter make an informed choice because he can't wait to get to his own shit? That's obscene. But does Elizabeth object to or even note any of this? Dear reader, she does not.

But Shaman isn't finished with his patriarchal shit-show just yet. He's noticed Puck making eyes at Heather as she slowly begins to rebuild her life after her husband's death. This, he concludes, cannot be allowed to go on without comment. Once Heather leaves to try and get hold of Walter Langkowski over living arrangements, Shaman corners Puck in the kitchen. There, he informs him he knows Puck's feelings, suspects Heather might one day feel the same way, and tells him to make sure when Heather "needs someone again", he makes sure he gives everything to make sure she's OK.

Looked at from some angles, this might not seem too bad. We can dispense with the "all this proves Shaman is sexist, not the story" argument straight away, of course - if a story keeps hitting the same beat and nothing is provided as push-back, the specific source of those beats is irrelevant - but one can take the position that a guy discussing with his friend how to best handle his feelings for a devastated widow is completely reasonable.

As an isolated incident, that might even work out. Shaman's advice is unsolicited, but other than that, I've had plenty of conversations with friends of both sexes that run along roughly similar lines. Coming just two pages after we learn what Shaman has allowed to happen to his own daughter, I'm far less prepared to be forgiving, particular since his meddling is taking place in a comic that repeatedly suggests that women are all just crazy, broken and emotionally unavailable in different ratios, and it's simply a man's job to suffer through the resulting storms.

Look. I'm not going to pretend I don't get it.  As a younger man, I was found women in a mess to be attractive - of course in retrospect,  they all just happened to be physically attractive as well; how surprising - so I can't claim complete innocence. And it's certainly true that if you're going to write melodrama, there's a damn good chance any given pairing is going to involve a lot of navigating emotional baggage. It'd be nice if the way fiction tends to portray a man's baggage so very differently to that of a woman, but that's a much broader problem that I'm not inclined to heap on Byrne in 1985, not when there's so much bigger problems here.

The real complaint here is that this shtick has become pathological.  Moving to the A plot, we see exactly the same concept being played out; messing with Aurora's power set (which, remember, Sasquatch did whilst not telling her what he was doing, and with no idea as to whether his meddling could be reversed; sound familiar?) is causing her unexpected problems.  Specifically, she's complaining all the time and making out with other men in front of Sasquatch, "for fun", all whilst wearing an utterly ridiculous costume.

Super-speed presumably comes in handy
during extended bikini-wax sessions

While all of this is going on, Walter is struggling to control a series of terrible rages that have started befalling him.  These rages are making it hard to keep his mind on the serious business of helping people, but oddly enough they never happen while he's by himself.

Let's all try as hard as we can to think what could possibly be upsetting him.  What "outside power" as he puts it could possibly be driving him crazy and unable to focus on doing good?  I've never read these Alpha Flight issues before, so it's entirely possible I'm wrong, but if this doesn't turn out to be over how his girlfriend has turned into a dirty slutty slut getting her slutty slutness all over the place, I'll be amazed. Relieved, but amazed.

The two lovers head off the next day to some property Walter owns on Vancouver Island, to see whether it will work as a base for Alpha Flight. Sure, he hasn't seen it in thirty years, and the locals all say the place is haunted by the nine-times widowed woman who lived there until the '20s, but who believes in ghosts twenty-four hours after their friends fought a hideous demon?

In fairness to Walter, though, it's not a spirit that haunts the house, though that's only because the widow from fifty-five years earlier is still alive. As well as a freakishly long life-span - she wears a gold mask, so its impossible to tell how well she's holding up - it turns out she has a nasty habit of turning her husbands into gold statues. A villainous woman who literally reduces the men she marries into nothing but wealth? How...inevitable.

(She can cloak people in utter darkness as well, apparently entirely so that Byrne can repeat his "Snowblind" joke with thought bubbles in otherwise completely black panels. If you're wondering if the joke works so well when you replace super-punching with a woman attempting to avoid severe psychological damage, the answer is no.)

In conclusion, then: Byrne turns in his most sexist issue yet, and spends so much time laying out said sexism that it takes sixteen pages for the story to start. Then that story is immediately sexist.  Goddamn.

Clues

Elizabeth Twoyoungmen notes that only 72 hours ago she was still a college student, which suggests three days have passed since she became Talisman.  The theme of oncoming winter once more appears, but we've dealt with the problems of this idea before.

The story itself straddles two days.

Date

Wednesday 18^th to Thursday 19^th April, 1984.

X-Date

X+6Y+48 to X+6Y+49.

Contemporary Events

The police siege of the Libyan Embassy in London is in the second of its eleven days, with WPC Yvonne Fletcher having been shot and killed the morning before by machine-gun fire from the first floor of the Embassy.

Standout Line

"Elizabeth was raised within the whiteman's culture. To her mind -- and rightly so -- there is only one place in history for a Messiah. " - Shaman.

I didn't mention this in the comments, because I wanted to focus on the gender politics, but what exactly is this line supposed to mean? I can't decide whether its a vote for assimilation into majority culture, or just a ridiculous non sequitur.

NMU #25: "The Only Thing To Fear..."

(Whose cloak is it, anyway?)

Comments

At long last the interminable Suncloak/Wagger story limps to a conclusion.  It happens over twenty pages here so that Claremont can fit in two more page-long character descriptions.  Interestingly, one of them is about Legion, which marks his first ever appearance.  It's an interesting idea to bring him in here, rather than wait for him to appear on-panel.  We'll discuss how well this works when he arrives in NMU #26.

For now, though, we still have Tandy and Tyrone to deal with.

There are two things our heroes have to nail down to bring this story to a close. First, they need to figure out how to transfer the Cloak and Dagger powers from Rahne and Robero back to Tandy and Tyrone. Second, they need to keep Tyrone calm enough for long enough that they can get the first job done.

OK, so. Tyrone.  We may have some problems here.  I mentioned last time around that I quite liked Tyrone insisting to Tandy that without their powers there was literally nothing they had in common (whilst confessing that a white British guy like myself could only speculate on whether this was actually a sound idea).  Here, I'm not sure things go so well.

We'll start with page one, in which we are told the pair's lives were "cursed forever, they thought, by the powers they wielded as Cloak and Dagger." Really, though, how true is this?  Cloak was certainly in trouble; the darkness he bore was never fully under his control, and recently that seemed to be getting worse.  He had to balance his desire to use his abilities with the fear that doing so would injure or even kill him. Tandy, so far as I can see, got the ability to shine really brightly.  When Roberto - also a dark-skinned youth - acquired Cloak, he started trying to eat his friends.  Rahne became Dagger and just looked like a million dollars whilst staying in a swanky hotel.

It is, in short, hard to believe the two kids have suffered equally.  This, in a story about the white daughter of a rich supermodel and a stuttering black teenager who blames himself for killing his best friend and ran from somewhere in Harlem that was, like, not fun, is an issue.  I'm not saying the power to look totally gorgeous is necessarily the best thing ever - and you better believe I recognise the underlying problem of having a white teenager be super-pretty and a black teenager be super-sinister - but making the two of them out to be equally screwed over by life strikes me as the exact wrong way to go about the duo.  Cloak and Dagger are a team because their shared need and ability to help youngsters overrides the fact that they have almost nothing in common.  It's a statement that what unites us is more important than what divides us, or what we allow to divide us.

This problem of unreasonable comparisons resurfaces when Xavier decides to give Tyrone a psionic pep-talk.  Or does it?  This is one of those intersections where I have no idea which side to come down on.  Is it a rich white man telling a young black man that he understands his pain and things aren't as bad as he thinks?  Or is it a man who survived domestic abuse - abuse for which his special abilities formed at least part of the 'reason' for - explaining that things can, in fact get better?  I prefer to think it's the latter, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's both.

Maybe we should just fall back on an old classic, and have a go at Professor Xavier. Even if we decide his pep talk to Tyrone wasn't self-absorbed whitesplaining, the fact he secretly includes Tandy in their telepathic tete-a-tete is an utter dick move. If Xavier is, as he claims, not reading Tyrone's mind, he has no idea what revelations could come spilling from the terrified teenager. And if he is poking around, he's just a flat-out liar, and worse, a white guy lying to a black kid because he's sure he knows best.

Xavier considering himself the ultimate and only arbiter of morality is hardly a new phenomenon, of course. So let's move on to the proposed cure for all these troubles.  I'm somewhat less interested in this section.  It's not that magickal shenanigans don't grab me.  It's more that magic in comics is so nebulous and slapped-together that it holds no interest as a concept.  All that matters is that what gets done with it is interesting in itself.

And I'll credit Claremont with this: the plan is certainly pleasantly out there.  Basically, since Illyana's attempted exorcism failed last week because she could neither contain the power sets nor pass them on to anyone else, Charlie has called in Rogue - much more experienced with such matters, of course - to absorb and keep hold of the errant energies until Illyana has time to transfer them to their original owners.  All whilst inside Limbo and therefore vulnerable to demonic attack at any moment.

At least it's adequately manic, then.  It's also nice to see Xavier calling in a specific X-Man for a specific task, rather than the usual approach of throwing as many mutants as possible at a problem until it somehow more or less resolves. I'm a little less sold on the specifics here - the idea the Xavier can control precisely which parts of a person Rogue can absorb despite being unable to read her mind seems a little out of left-field - and I don't remember this being mentioned again despite its obvious utility - but really, Ty's crisis of confidence has been just about the only particularly interesting part of this whole damn story line, and with that out of the way anything that wraps this all up gets my vote.

And wrap things up it does, despite a last-minute bid for freedom by Suncloak (I tell you, a couple of issues centering around exactly what Tyrone's "power" really is and wants would have been a lot more interesting, though no more relevant to this book), and an alarming moment where it seems Xavier's connection through Rogue to Wagger will grant him full access to Dagger's power set.  Fortunately this takes the form of gaining a glowing white ring around one eye, rather than the desire to wear a skin-tight catsuit with strategic sections cut away.

So everything's fine now.  Roberto and Rahne are safe and well, and Cloak and Dagger have gone back to beating up stereotypical pimps to keel white kids safe. Everything is back to normal by the end of the issue.

Just that "Legion" idea to worry about, then.  Still, a long-lost son of Xavier with at least three powers, one of which is the ability to set shit on fire just by thinking about it?  I don't see that being too much of a problem...

Clues

This story takes place over the course of a single night. 

Date

Saturday 11^th May, 1984.

X Date

X+6Y+72.

Contemporary Events

Eight teenagers are trapped and killed when the Haunted Castle attraction at Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey burned to the ground.  Six Flags was taken to court where the prosecution noted multiple warnings from safety consultants that the Haunted Castle should have sprinkler systems had smoke alarms.  The defendants argued the fire was an act of arson, and so a total lack of basic fire-safety systems wasn't really to blame for the deaths.  You know, like how if you leave your toddler in a bear pit and a bear deliberately bites them, there's absolutely nothing wrong with your parenting skills.

The defendants were found not guilty.

Standout Line

It's Slick the racist comedy pimp again! "These fo' you, m'man. Try'm on an' strut your stuff befo' yo' fox, show her you be one muy macho stomper."

DAZ #36: "The Human Touch!"

("Those who have seen your face
Draw back in fear")

Comments

Fun fact: this is the only issue of the initial 42-issue Dazzler run to be written by a woman.  I mention this for historical interest, mainly, trying to use this fact as a springboard to discuss how this issue differs from its predecessors would be problematic both in terms of gender politics and basic statistics.  I'll simply note that this is the first issue for a few months which doesn't include anything that could plausibly be described as cheesecake, and leave it at that.

It's also the first time for a little while that Dazzler has fought an honest-to-Gods supervillain in the title. I'm ashamed to admit that I had to look up Tatterdemalion - both as a character and a word.  He apparently turns up from time to time as a Z-list villain on either side of this issue.  Since this story basically works as his origin, however, it doesn't particularly matter, especially since this is all basically a repainted Gaston Leroux - Grant might have well entitled this as The Phantom Of The Hip Lounge Club.

Reilly's Ace of Clubs has itself a problem - its headline singers keep quitting. Unbeknownst to management, that's because Tatterdemalion - a mad tramp with burning hands and the common villain trait of referring to himself in the third person - keeps threatening to melt their faces if they don't cheese it.  Things have gotten so bad the manager is prepared to hire a mutant like Dazzler (here operating under the alias Dolores Rudolph, but her new boss sees right through that).  At last it's a chance for Alison to get money doing what she loves doing.  Even better, it doesn't seem as though her new boss is a murdering fame-whore or a would-be slaver, which is nice.

If only death-tramp didn't keep trying to kill her.

As I said, this is Tatterdemalion's origin story, and it's not remotely difficult to see what's going on.  The man seems determined to scare away every young singer who joins the club, but the older lady who provides piano accompaniment is left entirely unmolested.  Once the mistress of the ivories is revealed to be Julia Walker, one half of Wyatt and Walker, a movie dance duo that were once ubiquitous and now washed-up, with the male half having disappeared years ago, it's not hard to guess who's beneath Tatterdemalion's weighted scarf. An obligatory fight scene, and the misguided villain is unmasked as Wyatt, and is forgiven and taken back by Julia.

Tatterdemalion's story does not end up there - he shows up again as late as Civil War - but there seems every intention here that it should have ended with this. So taken as a whole, does it work? Well... not really. Whether one considers the return of supervillains to the title as a welcome change or an unfortunate reversion to a tired mean, the fact remains that Tatterdemalion is really basically just a Scooby Doo villain wearing oven gloves he just used to get out his lasagna. Which, fine, not every villain has to be a threat to humanity.  But in the process we lose the focus on Dazzler's life in general.  Indeed, whatever Tatterdemalion's problems, he indirectly actually helps restart Alison's singing career, and helps make her seem like a better bet than her mutant status would suggest.

With those two strands removed, what we have here is an obvious story about two people we've never seen before being reunited a half-dozen pages after we discovered they were ever together or ever broke up.  Worse, it reduces the theme of the title from the difficulties of making ends meet as a persecuted minority, making it instead about the unique difficulties of celebrity (OK, breaking up over a career divergence and then hitting the skids when trying to go it alone isn't only applicable to the famous, but it's still most recognisable as one of the cliched problems with fame). There is pretty much nothing I care less about than Alison worrying about whether fame will come with drawbacks. It's a terrible basis for self-pitying pop songs, and it's little better here.

Still, at least this is a tale about how a middle-aged woman can have a second chance with the love of her life, rather than about how young and nubile women can take their clothes off and it's all sexy and stuff.  If only this title could be interesting and non-exploitative all at the same time.  Hopes aren't high, though.  This is the mid-eighties, after all, and there are only six more issues to go...

(Also, that cover might be our first clear sign that we're slouching inexorably towards the infinite barren wasteland men call... the '90s.)

Clues

This story takes place over a full day, and creeps into the following morning.

Date

Thursday 5^th to Friday 6^th October, 1984.

X-Date

X+6Y+217 to X+6Y+218.

Contemporary Events

Glenn McMillan is born, the Brazilian Australian acting powerhouse who later found fame as the Yellow Wind Ranger in Power Rangers Ninja Force.  Frankly, I could make a joke about "yellow wind", but I find myself too queasy to attempt it.

Standout Line

"If you want to work with us normals you got to learn to take a little kidding, kid." - There's no evidence Grant realised that, but this is easily the most politically charged line in the whole book. "Of course you can part of our society. You just have to do it entirely on our terms."

UXM #191: "Raiders Of The Lost Temple!"

("My world was shattered, I was torn apart.")

Comments

Well, this is mainly fight scenes, which is good news for summarising, if not necessarily for reading.  There's just nothing interesting here.  It's not that I can't find anything to appreciate about a good comic book scrap - I'd be very much reading the wrong comics and writing the wrong blog were that the case. But if you're going to fill page after page with super-person X sticking super-person Y's head through window Z, then I need a reason for the fight, and an idea of what's at stake for the characters. Here, the former is too silly to grab me, and the latter is completely missing.  Not only are the characters entirely unaware of who they are, but the instant Cannonball dies in the first few pages we're reminded of what we realised reading the previous issue: there is simply no chance any of this is going to stick.  Major Avengers characters are not just going to disappear in-between issues because Claremont did them in over in UXM.  All those murdered children would be something of a problem, too.

With no consequences post-victory  - and a victory which is even more certain than usual - we've really not much to do but look at the scenery.  Which, in fairness, has a few things to recommend it.  The idea that the Vision has been transformed into a golem is a very neat one, as it the idea that Rogue's bulletproof skin has been reinterpreted as her being made of crystal.  There's an awfully cool idea buried in here that the spell Kulan Gath has unleashed must either be under the direct control of some other being, or be sentient in some sense itself.  How else can it have the capacity to interpret?  When Rogue is grabbed by a human guard, her powers are activated and she absorbs his, er, uncrystalness, which a) gets her killed and b) makes absolutely no sense. Rogue doesn't absorb not being a mutant from people, otherwise her long-running problem with her powers would be sorted pretty quickly.  Something somewhere re-wrote her powers to fit in with this insane new world.  I'd love to know how that works.

That's not what we get, though.  What we get is an exceptionally standard two-fight set-up, where our heroes lose the first altercation, launch a rescue attempt to save their fallen comrades, and succeed whilst on the very cusp of utter defeat.  It's nice that this victory involves not just Spiderman - Gath's intended target, which I argued last time was a poor grudge-match to host in the pages of UXM - but Storm and her light-fingered thief skills.  Even so, there's not much here.

Things become more interesting at the eleventh hour, when it's revealed Amara is actually a disguise being worn by Selene.  The fact she'd double-cross everyone was entirely obvious, so having her dressed up as someone else is a nice way to generate surprise.  It doesn't feel like a cheat, either, since Illyana has already noted Amara hasn't been using her powers to help out in battle (presumably the Selene Gath thought he'd captured was some kind of magical simulacrum). I also appreciate that it takes Warlock and Storm working together to stop her grabbing control of Gath's spell (having killed the sorcerer himself), which means the world was saved that day by Spiderman, Storm and Warlock.  That's just such a brilliantly non-obvious combination, and a nice reminder of how rich the shared history of the Marvel Universe is.

It also makes me wonder whether the world would have actually been better off had Dr Strange and Illyana not warped time and returned everyone to the point before the spell set off. Assuming the spell had been halted by Gath's death, I mean - obviously if it continued to build that would have been catastrophic.

But if not, if New York had remained a LARPers dream, would that really have been too high a price to pay to be rid of Selene?  How many people has she killed since UXM #191?  "Mutopia" alone sees her responsible for the deaths of, like, 2% of the remaining mutant population.  And whilst Gath's reign was obviously not free from death, the vast majority of New Yorkers remain alive, and can be brought back to their senses by being brought out of the city.

None of this was known by Strange and Rasputin, of course - though they did know casting their spell was a horrendously risky move that could do untold damage, so on behalf of everyone outside of New York; cheers for risking our lives, people.  There's also the fact that getting rid of Selene would also cost the lives of Warlock, Storm, Cannonball, Rogue, Colossus, Vison, and others, which has it's own knock-on effects that would be far less pleasant.  Of course, on the other, other hand, you'd be rid of dozens of New York supervillains.

Actually, what did happen to the supervillains?  They surely must have remained just as selfish, violent and venal as they did before Gath swapped their Uzis for crossbows.  There's no reason to think they'd sign up for his insane plans.  Why didn't any of them show up here?  I'd have loved to see, say, Doctor Octopus re-imagined as a fantasy character.  A tale of alternate-reality villains would have been so much more interesting than an X-Men/Avengers team-up where no-one knows who the hell anyone is.

Ah, well. It's all over now.  In fact, thanks to our spell-casters, it never even began. But magic always has consequences, as every single fantasy saga ever insists reminding us.  On this occasion, the consequence would seem to be the arrival of a white and pink Gobot who blows up muggers.  Which, you have to admit, you didn't see coming...

Clues

This issue seems to take place over a single night.  That doesn't matter, of course, since the conclusion sees time thrown into reverse, meaning we end this adventure the day before we began it.

Date

Thursday 3^rd May, 1984

X-Date

X+6Y+63.

Compression Constant

1 Marvel year = 3.49 standard years

(Beast is 32 years old)

Contemporary Events

Second day of the Liverpool International Garden Festival.

Standout Line

"Mourn not for thy werewolf..." - Kulan Gath.

BAB #2: "Heartbreak Hotel"

("Down at the end of Lonely Street...")

Comments

Come with me now, ladies and gentlemen, as we take to the highway in search of Metaphor City.

Young Alison Blaire dreams of being a star. She dreams of it so totally that she actually shines herself, and the less control she feels she had over her career, the more she loses her grip on her radiating. All this existential stress has finally become too much for her, so now she lives in a broken-down commune with people who like her for what she is, not what she can do.  Their powers are useless, even ridiculous, but it doesn't matter, because showing off for people isn't what it should all be about.

Young Hank McCoy dreams of the normality Alison seems so afraid of. He's got a really good heart, he just can't catch a break, owing to how he's he's kind of simian, and covered in blue hair.  You couldn't get much further from the George Clooney-type an aspiring singer-actress with a white hot body would be expected to court. He sees something to love in Alison, and doesn't understand why she can't. Women with low self-esteem can be so alluring, can't they? Well, they can if they're also unfeasibly beautiful. It's strange how that somehow becomes unattractive in those that aren't attractive.

As the days go past, Beast's constant drooling attention somehow begins to make Alison feel better about herself.  But she still yearns to be a star, even knowing the damage her ambition has already done to her, and when Alex Flynn arrives to ask her to honour her deal with Longride, she finds she cannot resist.

What Longride has in mind is entertainment for the rich and powerful of Hollywood. They want to see the young and the desperate for glory tear each other apart in front of them.  Dazzler simply singing for them doesn't hold their interest for more than a few bars.  What is talent without cut-throat competition? Why give fame to those who haven't proved they themselves hungry enough for it, by climbing over the bodies that got in the way? Even when Dazzler learns the truth, she can't break free.  "It's all pretend", they tell her; "all just a game". Desperate to believe anything that will get her her dream, she believes this - her reaction to the drugs her new "friends" are spiking her drinks with no doubt help here.

Only Beast can save our damsel in distress!  But will he stick by her, despite her poor decisions, and the fact she is no longer relying on him totally to validation? No!  No, he'll throw a tantrum and abandon her, so he can sulk all alone.

Tough when a woman leaves you for her career, isn't it? And by "leave you", I mean "not let you utterly control her every step of the way through that career".  Gods, I love Beast more than any other character in the X-Universe.  But that Beast is not this Beast.

Fuck this Beast.

Clues

The narrative here uses the phrase "days pass" twice here, and it seems clear we're rejoining the action at least a day after the previous issue ended, so we'll more or less arbitrarily assume we're looking at around a fortnight of time.

As mentioned when looking at DAZ #35, that issue clearly takes place before this miniseries, so we'll move all dates one week into the future to compensate.

Date

Sunday 22^nd October to Saturday 4^th November, 1984.

X-Date

X+6Y+235 to X+6Y+248.

Contemporary Events

The EEC stump up £1.8 million to help combat the famine in Ethiopia.

Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is assassinated.

Standout Line

"Sometimes just getting up in the morning is like getting hit with a shovel full of dirt."

Poor old Hank. It's not easy being an unpretty academic. Of course, it may be that I'm over-identifying.

ICE #2: "Instant Karma!"

("Pretty soon you're gonna be dead.")

Comments

Well, this is certainly uncompromising in its lunacy.  It actually comes across as something of a forerunner to Claremont's Excalibur wackiness, what with all the time-hopping antics, and Alan Kupperberg's pencils being not a million miles away from Alan Davis' approach.  Also, there's a fleet of giant flying killer spiders.  You know, for when a fleet of giant scuttling killer spiders just isn't going to get the job done.

Said arachnid air-force is under the control of Kali, who has been sent to finish the job White Light and The Idiot messed up in the first issue. Before she gets the chance to impinge on the narrative, though, Iceman needs to get out of his current predicament: arrested by an obnoxious mutaphobe cop for the crime of not saving his neighbours' house when suddenly attacked by supervillains.

The solution to this problem turns out to be absurdly simple: Iceman simply tells the police chief the beings that attacked him were Communist agents, and he's immediately sprung.  That's kind of ironic, when you consider Iceman was part of the original Sentinel storyline back in the '60s, which Stan Lee seemed very clearly to be using as a commentary on HUAC and the Blacklist.  You'd think a mutant would be more careful about the idea of using institutionalised bigotry in order to make others out as villains. Even when the people he's fingering are violent kidnappers, it just reinforces the underlying problem.  In his defence, Bobby does at least realise this is a concern, though not quite fully. His problem is how easy it is to lie to people when one has high level government clearance (given to the New Defenders recently), which is fair enough, but given that clearance, couldn't he have come up with a less damaging lie?

Anyway.  Bobby heads home and finds a strange box in the ruins of the Smith house.  He scoops this up and climbs into his bedroom window, only to find his parents waiting for him. They are less than pleased.

In later years it becomes standard shorthand for Bobby's father that he's a bigot.  Here the initial seeds for that are planted, but it's worth noting that things are clearly more complicated than the man simply hating mutants.  What drives Willie Drake is clearly fear.  The man is terrified his son is going to get himself killed by embracing who he is, rather than just pretending to be normal and keeping himself safe.  Sure, Willie tells Bobby he has "brought [his] poison right to our doorstep", but again, it's not clear he's referring to his son's nature, as oppose to his insistence on flouting that nature.  I'm obviously not trying to excuse this attitude. Everyone gets to make their own choice as to whether to out themselves, and to whom. My point is just that fear for his son's life - and, yes, his wife's and his own - is a more complex motivation than Willie Drake tends to get in the X-books; at least until Operation: Zero Tolerance.

Bobby's mother Maddie gets to contribute to all of this as well, of course.  She points out his father has a weak heart, and so Bobby will kill him if he doesn't do exactly what he's told.  "Don't kill your father!" she wails.  In summary: fuck Maddie Drake.

Having this blazing row with his parents makes Bobby nostalgic for his youth, looking at a holiday snap of him and his parents when he was three years old in (according to our timeline) 1964.  He starts to ruminate on how his parents were about his age back then.  This, for the record, is ridiculous.  Bobby's mother was thirty-nine in '64, and his father, if anything, is slightly older than that.  There is quite simply no way a twenty-year old is going to describe people hovering around forty as "not much older" than themselves. A twenty-year old is well ahead of the curve if they can see people two decades over as more than shambling, pointless zombies.  For someone as self-absorbed and superficial as Bobby, forty must seem almost literally unimaginable.

Implausible or not, though, Iceman's thoughts are picked up by the strange box he rescued from what remains of the Smith house, and it begins to beep.  A few seconds later, it has thrown him back through time.

(Somewhere in England, 1892, Maddy Smith and her family detect the "bounce-box" as it activates. Maddy is irritated that they clearly left one of their time-travelling devices in 1984 when they made a bid for freedom at the end of last issue, but she resists calls from her family to assist Bobby.  Much better to stay in hiding during what the comic calls "Days of innocence", presumably because all the violent English types were over in Nigeria hosing down native infantry columns with machine guns.)

Bobby's impromptu time-jaunt comes to an end in 1942 New York. Unfortunately,  he materialises next to another unpleasant cop - this isn't really much of an advert for New York's Finest, really; every cop is either a bigot, a trigger-happy lunatic, a gullible rube, or too stupid to close the door during a snowstorm - who shoots him for the crime of running away whilst scantily-clad.  Somehow - half-remembered photos, maybe, or the influence of the box - our hero finds himself outside the home of the wartime iteration of his parents. Bleeding badly and clutching his strange box, he passes out, but his mother- and father-to-be take him in and bandage his wound.

(OK, seriously.  How pissed off would you be if you had a box that could take you anywhere in time and you wasted it on visiting your parents?  I mean, maybe if one or both were dead it'd be nice, but two still-living and exceptionally difficult models? Screw that.  There are way too many more interesting options available.

See what I mean?)

When Bobby awakes he understandably finds events a little difficult to process, but fortunately he doesn't have to negotiate the emotional mine-field for long, because Kali chooses this moment to attack with her winged spiders (which apparently come with back-mounted heat rays as standard - handy). Marge Smith - watching events on some kind of time-scanner - still refuses to help, too scared of capture, but Willie Drake rushes out to lend Bobby a hand, grabbing the strange box on the way in case Iceman has some use for it.

Outside, Iceman gets as far as persuading Kali that Marge is nowhere nearby, but that just changes her mission from capturing Marge to torturing Bobby until he gives Marge up.  Eventually, Marge relents, and sends Kali a message giving away her location to save Bobby.  Kali beats a hasty retreat, but by then it's too late: Willie Drake has fallen in battle. Bobby Drake has killed his father! Foreshadowing, bitches! Do you see?

With Bobby's father dead nineteen years before Bobby's birth, the Grandfather Paradox kicks in with a vengeance, and Bobby disappears from causality.  Which, let's be fair, is a pretty good cliffhanger. Tune in next time, etc.

Clues

This story takes place in three time-zones, though the majority of time is spent in 1942, which is where we'll focus.  The Daily Bugle Iceman catches sight of upon arrival mentions that General McArthur is now in Australia, and gives the date as March 15th, 1942.

(Given McArthur had only been in Australia for three days by that point, I wonder if that news really did break so quickly?  It wasn't until the 20th of March that McArthur gave a speech about his return to the Australian people.)

Date

Saturday 15^th March, 1942.

X-Date

X-36Y+14.

(Roughly) Contemporary Events

General McArthur arrives in Australia after escaping with his family and staff from the besieged Corrigedo island. 

Australia and New Zealand declare war on Thailand.

Standout Line

"Funny, when you get the high level government clearance... people start believing whatever you tell them! I don't think I like that."

KPW #4: "Rebirth"

(Three men and a stupid baby.)

Comments

There's a strange moment on page 6 of this issue, when the narration tells us:

I'm Wolverine. This is my story.

The reason this qualifies as strange isn't particularly difficult to see.  It's right there in the title. At best, Wolverine should be sharing equal time in this story with Kitty, if not taking second billing.  It wasn't particularly surprising that Logan took centre stage in the previous issue, what with Sprite suffering from barinwashing (though that doesn't address the wisdom of sidelining your main character like that in the first place).  Here, it's harder to understand, and it gets us into a rather fundamental problem.

The overall plot of this issue is pretty simple: Logan wants to free Kitty from Ogun's unpleasant influence, and he figures the best way to do that is to train her properly, rather than by evil info-dump.  This feels partially like the old idea of earning something instead of being given it for free - Kitty might think Logan doesn't look the part, but there's a definite Empire... "quicker, easier, more seductive" idea going on here - but mainly this is an exercise in having Kitty reclaim her identity. If she can't unlearn what Ogun has given her, she can at least contextualise it - if she has ninja skills and goes through ninja training, it shouldn't matter too much which of the two came first.

That's a perfectly fine idea, and were we seeing it from Kitty's perspective rather than Wolverine's, I might have left it there.  The problem is that in getting Logan's view of the situation, we end up with three men - Logan, Ogun and Kitty's father, Caermen Pryde - fighting over how a young woman should spend the rest of her life.

At first blush, this might seen at least a little unfair.  Logan, at least, is insistent at every point that Kitty has a choice here.  Whilst Ogun clearly doesn't have any interest in Kitty's opinions, and Carmen seems unable to think about his daughter in any context beyond sulking over her refusal to speak to him, Wolvie at least wants Sprite's input.  But consider what that choice is, in Logan's framing. Either Kitty spends weeks having her body banged up or being thrown into freezing water, or one day Ogun will come back and that, to all intents and purposes, will be the end of her - unless she wants to run back to Xavier and hide behind him forever.

That, to me, is too close for confort to telling Kity she has to do what Logan wants, or she has to do what Ogun wants - with the only options giving herself over entirely to Xavier's largess, or  to do what her father presumably wants and burying her head in the Illinois snow. It's not hard to understand why Wolverine believes the pressure is necessary given previous events, but that just makes the problem structural.

The issue salvages itself somewhat towards the end when we return to Kitty's internal narrative. First she belatedly figures out Logan's angle - re-running Ogun's approach but with the option to quit - and then extrapolates that by deciding to face Ogun down rather than run back to the States. And in truth this does fit into the larger idea this series seems to be playing with - contrasting Logan and Kitty begore actually making them more similar.

The problem is that the agency in on Logan's part, and the changes on Kitty's.  It's a surprising choice to tell a story of personal growth and change from a man who - in this issue - does neither.  I'm hardly unsympathetic to the idea that Logan is a fundamentally more interesting character than Kitty - in their mid '80s incarnations, that is - but that's exactly why I wouldn't have paired them together as title characters and brainwashed the junior partner.

Clues

The narration during Kitty's attempts to become the new Wolverine mention that "days pass" as she trains.  That gives us plenty of leeway to work within.  Ordinarily we'd interpret this to mean as short a time as possible - perhaps as little as a week - but such an alternative isn't open to us here. Xavier's phone-call informing Logan of Storm's loss of power and James Hudson's death force us to extend the time-period significantly, since the latter occurrence explicitly takes place at the beginning of March.  I could try and move forward the whole of KPW to compensate, but that causes problems with this story having clearly begun in midwinter three issues earlier.

There's also the fact that Logan mentions Kitty having been in Ogun's clutches for a week.  This directly contradicts earlier issues, in which Wolverine arrived in Japan the night after Kitty, and crosses swords with her the night afterwards.  That said, I think the longer period makes more sense - to the extent that's a quantifiable quality when discussing mind-washing techniques to make people ninjas.  We'll therefore assume Kitty spent one week with Ogun, and two and a half weeks with Logan as shown here.

Date

Monday 13^th February to Friday 2^nd March, 1984.

X-Date

X+5Y+343 to X+6Y+1.

Contemporary Events

The 1984 Winter Olympics are held in Sarajevo.

Standout Line

"You're too tall -- an' too darn ugly -- to be Yoda."