XFA #4: "Trials And Errors"

("Are we the baddies?")

Comments

There is no trial here without an error. No error that does not prove a trial for someone else, almost always Jean.

Jean in fact is the focus of this issue, in particular how she's still struggling to come to terms with her return to a now-unfamiliar world. Rather pleasingly, this is kept in the realm of subtext - no clunky dialogue outlining her frustrations here - but it's all still pretty clear. There's three issues she's struggling with: her relationship with her former team-mates, her relationship with her new charges, and her relationship with the team she's on.

It's not particularly surprising that Jean's struggle to work out how and why the dynamics have changed among the five original X-Men mainly boil down to not understanding how and why her dynamic has changed with Scott. Naturally, she's getting nothing from the source, because Cyclops is an inscrutable cove even when he isn't hiding the fact that once he thought his true love was dead he married her exact double. So instead she goes to talk to Warren to see if he has any insights.Which is an entirely sensible idea, in theory, but one rather complicated by the fact Warren is carrying a torch for her as well, and would rather that was the primary topic of conversation.

Which is fine in theory. Nothing wrong with telling someone you think you'd make for a better match than the one they're currently chasing after. But in this particular case things are rather complicated by Warren knowing Scott's secret, and choosing not to divulge it. Starting a relationship with Jean with that feline still in the Prada would surely be problematic; she clearly still feels something for Scott, and might choose to pursue that or not once she knows the whole truth. Propositioning her without her having that context seems like a pretty good way to build up resentment. I'm not saying Warren should necessarily tell her about what's going on with Scott - breaking a good friend's confidence is no small thing, even when doing it seems like it would save another good friend pain, or at least render the pain acute rather than chronic. But if he doesn't want to do that, then he doesn't get to chase after Jean. Those are his choices.

There's also the small issue of Candy Southern to consider, as well.  The fact that she and Warren are still together isn't in itself a reason to criticise Warren for wanting to confess his feelings to Jean. Like Scott, he can be absolutely forgiven for not seeing this turn of events come to pass, and even if he had, if Warren is poly or even just struggling with unresolved feelings that separation had suspended but not swept away, we can sympathise. What's much harder to let slide is the fact he's clearly ignoring Candy whilst all this is going on. She feels the need to remind him who she is when she calls, and he still brushes her off and hangs up on her. That's acting like an arsehole whatever agreement regarding other partners Candy and Warren have reached. And Jean calls him on it, for all that that conversation, like the one in which Warren tries to confess his feelings, gets interrupted by an incoming call.

This second call is from Cameron Hodge, summoning X-Factor for a mission. The team are off to a Massachusetts boarding school to investigate Martin Davies, a student blackmailing both his classmates and the staff with the secrets he's stolen from them with his terrifying mutant brain-powers. There's just one problem: Martin isn't a mutant, and can't read minds. All he can do is build listening devices.

What we see here is several parts of the current public hysteria over mutants interacting. One hopes Headmaster Woodley was never a maths teacher, because he's terrible at probability. Even with a student claiming to be a mutant, the idea that it's more likely he's telling the truth than that he's bugged rooms in the school, or even that he's listening at keyholes, is flatly ridiculous. Aside from wanting to absolve himself of guilt over his failure to keep his secretary-shagging a secret, his reaction stems from the same root as those who become hysterical following terrorist attacks - the sheer scariness of the concept utterly overwhelms the rational knowledge that you will almost certainly never come close to encountering it. It's almost as stupid as insisting a Muslim child is less likely to commit a minor infelicity of common English than he is to claim he's invented clocks in a deliberate attempt to imply he's a bomb-maker through the sheer absurdity of the statement, to take a random example.

X-Factor itself is contributing to this failure to understand risk. Their very existence seems to serve as proof that mutants are less rare an occurrence than sources like the media and scientists and personal experience suggest. If there really is only one mutant per ten thousand people, and if only a fraction of those have the power to be truly dangerous, how could X-Factor make a living by hunting them down? Either they're more common than the official line, or they're more dangerous, or both, and with people like Senator Kelly drafting anti-mutant legislation (his change of heart notwithstanding), it's not like the official line is particularly comforting to begin with.

All of which is a pretty convincing argument that X-Factor doing more harm than good. And things are likely to get worse, too, The longer X-Factor gives the impression of having a successful business model, the more chance there is genuine mutant-hunter businesses will spring up. Which means the faster X-Factor saves mutants from mobs, the more mutants will be kidnapped off the streets and imprisoned/deported/executed.

"We're taking you in, Sabertooth!"
"WHICH ONE IS SABERTOOTH!?!"

As real as these concerns are, though, it's something else that clues Jean into how bad an idea X-Factor might actually be, and that's the reaction of the alleged mutant mind-reader to the team's arrival. Martin is obviously utterly terrified. He pretended to be a mutant in a desperate attempt to escape being tormented by his classmates - and it's interesting how he's figured out that (claimed) membership of a widely despised ethnic minority can paradoxically earn one cultural cache, or at least help you sidestep personal oppression even as you (claim that you) are subjected to grotesque systemic oppression - but now he thinks he's going to be kidnapped by bounty hunters and the idea horrifies him.  A kid being bullied knows what X-Factor is when he sees it.

The realisation that her team has stumbled into the business of scaring the crap out of schoolchildren who just wanted to be left alone brings Jean up rather short - especially since Scott is clearly deliberately upsetting Martin as a way of uncovering the truth. It makes her think of Rusty. If the faked half of X-Factor's approach has backfired so spectacularly, maybe their actual mission isn't working out either.

Certainly, it's been tough going training Rusty recently. A lot of that isn't Jean's fault, admittedly. Cyclops contributions to the newcomer's education this issue consist of blundering into Rusty's training session for no reason - which is an utterly inexcusable thing to do when dealing with a pyrokinetic with major control issues - and then ticking off Jean for "overreacting" when she yells at Rusty for almost flash-frying both Scott and Artie. Apparently Cyclops won't say anything to Jean about his past or his feelings, but he'll happily harangue her for the crime of not wanting him burned alive.

Rusty himself isn't making things any easier, in part because he's still having great difficulty in accepting who and what he is. Rusty seems to be consumed by the kind of denial and self-loathing you see in those who one day learn they were what they've been taught for years to fear and hate. By this point in the Marvel Universe mutants have been known to exist for at least seven years, and been hated and mistrusted by the public for virtually this entire time. It's obvious that many young people who learn they are mutants will have spent most of their conscious lives hating what they suddenly are. This manifests itself in a particularly - and ironically - ugly way, with Rusty congratulating Hank on the fact he can now pass as human, and yelling about how much he hates the fact the team insist on treating Artie Maddicks as if he's "normal", rather than a "freak". Even as Rusty stews in self-hatred about his new status, he's wielding his passing privilege as a metaphorical weapon against those who can't go out without the benefit of an image inducer or heavy make-up.

Plus on top of all of that, he's still a teenager, which means everything is much worse. Even if Artie was the platonic ideal of an eleven-year old boy, you can bet Rusty would still throw a strop about having to share a room with him. It's just not, we can presume, "fair".

Still, despite all this, Rusty does have a solid point: he genuinely didn't ask for any of this. Perhaps that's a rather facile comment from most teenagers - though I've always had some sympathy with the sentiment - Rusty's specific situation lends it more weight. It's perfectly acceptable for him to have no ambition beyond not being too dangerous to walk down the street anymore. Jean's insistence he buy into the team's larger goal of harmony between human and mutant must seem colossally presumptuous.  Sure, the former X-Men are trying to help him, but when your doctor gives you your prescription they don't generally suggest you should take the pills whilst helping out at a soup kitchen.

It's only upon meeting Martin that Jean realises this, and it's pretty important that she does. There's a direct link between Martin's terror and Rusty's misery, and that's that the team has lost interest in actually making the argument for mutant/human collaboration. Rusty is just expected to work out the importance of this for himself, and the general human population are supposed to do the same even though X-Factor are themselves working to make that harder. Their tactics don't just fail to align with the goal, they're running contrary to it. And no-one seems to have noticed, because no-one actually seems to be talking to each other. Scott wants to hide the truth from Jean; Warren wants to sleep with her, Hank is (understandably) busy looking at his own face a lot, and Bobby? Well, I'm not sure what Bobby's deal is, but given the position this blog has repeatedly taken we can assume he's got a lot of Hank-staring to get done as well.

Which leaves Jean the only one obviously interested in how all this is actually going to work long term, as half the team fret about situations that are obviously unstable and the other half apparently checked out more or less totally. On this occasion her post-revelation activity centres on improving her teaching approach (again, without any help from the rest of the team). But the suggestion is clear that it can only be a matter of time before she take the next logical step, and starts tearing down this entire rotten structure. It is time for something new.

It is time for something that can work.

Clues

This story takes place over a single day. Rusty says the team brought Artie back to base "last week". Since we have that as happening on the Saturday, that would presumably mean this story takes place on the following Saturday at the earliest, which is what we'll go for.

Date

Saturday 20^th April, 1985.

X-Date

X+7Y+49.

Contemporary Events

Johnathan Davies plays his first match for Wales.

Standout Line

"When has Scott ever not been broody?" - Warren.

XFA #3: "Regression Obsession"

("A useless, futile thing...")

Comments

So far in my still-new coverage of the X-Factor title, the overwhelming theme has been the book's obsession with the glories of the past, and how they can repackaged, replicated and reordered in the present. This book, as is obvious simply from its cast list, has one foot defiantly planted in the 1960s.

This in and of itself is no vice, at least not necessarily. But in issue #3 a sense of dread is beginning to descend. By all appearances, this is not an issue interested in riffing off the past. It is interested only in restoring it.

The most utterly obvious example here of course is Henry McCoy's reversion to his original appearance. As an unrepentant Beast fan I must confess to enjoying the idea of him finally escaping the consequences of a single mad impulse half a decade or so earlier. But from a writer's perspective, the immediate question raised is what we actually gain by having Henry be no longer blue and furry. What potential does a restored Hank have drama-wise? The possibilities of furry Beast were obvious and wide-ranging, hence why those few Amazing Adventures issues in which he was introduced were so powerful. A genius forced to look like an animal by their own arrogant hand. A peaceful intellectual warring with animal instincts and violent rages. These are not in anyway original concepts ("What if Dr Jekyll ALWAYS needed a haircut?" would seem to be the elevator pitch), but they were at least there.  What does a reverted Hank get us, other than one more way in which this title can claim to be resurrecting the past?

(Speaking of resurrection; note how Beast is shown on the cover: wrapped in the standard visual shorthand for an Egyptian mummy. A nod to those whose time is long past but might yet rise as pale fractions of their former selves, unable to face their irrelevance in the present day? Given what Layton is doing with this issue, that's a pretty hilarious sight gag.)

The sense of what we might call a "traditional" approach to comics were we feeling generous - and a "dated" one if not - continues throughout. The rather interesting interplay between the X-Men's identities as X-Factor and rebel mutants (in effect, attempting to run two conflicting secret identities at once, which must get confusing) that we had last time round is swept away in favour of an utterly standard plot template: the X-Men need to rescue their friend, so they attack a base filled with gun-wielding goons. There's nothing in the A plot that couldn't have been written back before Jean Grey first died. This feeling of a comic out of time is only strengthened by moments like Dr Maddicks' page-long exposition explaining his plan. It's a clunky sequencein any event, but it jars all the more for coming at the issue's conclusion, robbing the story of any momentum whilst we view a psychic slideshow of his life following his appearances in AMA.  I'd have thought it would be obvious to almost any professional writer that the right place for this would've been at the start of the issue - why not have him explain he was searching for a way to regress his son Artie's mutation (which left Artie mute, an interesting wrinkle in the "is a 'cure' for mutants morally acceptable?" debate) to Beast at the top of the issue? Could Layton really have been so incompetent?

Well, who knows, but there is an alternative explanation which helps Layton to come off rather better - perhaps Maddicks reveals his plan so late so as to delay the audience guessing that his genetic meddling might give us back the original, far less hirsute McCoy. But whilst that's an argument that makes sense, it's hardly one that gets Layton off the hook, because it immediately suggests the entirety of this story exists for no other reason than to return Hank to his pre-Brand Corporation days. Maddicks' desperation to "save" his child and Artie's horror at what his father is prepared to do become more or less irrelevant, no more than a nostalgia delivery system. A pointless tale to justify a pointless character cleanse.

Viewing the issue like this makes one suspicious even of what otherwise might be strong material. The revelation that Cameron Hodge has a friend inside the government looking out for mutants is a very interesting one, and his arrival to tell Hodge what a mistake he's made with X-Factor might have given hope at the time that the whole ridiculous idea of the original X-Men abducting their fellows under the guise of mutant hunters was going to be dropped. Coming as it does in this issue, though, readers could be forgiven for fretting that this was similarly an attempt to sweep the present away to allow a return to the past; that as with the tale of Carl and Artie Maddicks, X-Factor was just scaffolding to allow the construction of "The X-Men" 2.0.  Hell, even Jean and Scott's interactions here feel just like the good old days. Scott's refusal to open up might now be because of secretly having an estranged wife and son, but the basic dynamic is unchanged; Jean wants to engage and Scott won't do it, or tell her why. Needless to say, the fact they're interrupted before the conversation can progress absolutely doesn't help matters.

There is, obviously, a hard limit to how long this rush backwards can last. Sooner or later - and it'll be sooner - the reset will be complete, and XFA will have to start moving forwards again. The sooner it does so, the better, but the fear remains that we've already seen the only direction Layton is interested in.

Clues

The narration states this issue begins just five minutes after the last one ended. The story itself continues into the following day.

Date

Friday 12^th to Saturday 13^th April, 1985.

X-Date

X+7Y+41 to X+7Y+42.

Contemporary Events

Transgender model Carmen Carrera is born.

Standout Line

"So why didn't you just float us up over the fence?!"
"I was showing off!" - Iceman and Marvel Girl.

XFA #2: "Bless The Beasts And Children"

("It's not the same world I knew before.")

Comments

It's an entirely obvious and common point that whilst the first issue (or arc, these days) of a new comic needs to set up the characters and concept of the series, the second issue (or arc) has the job of demonstrating what a "standard" adventure in the title should look like.  X-Factor #2 is an interesting example of this, in that in some senses it clings to this approach, but in other ways it rejects it.

The most obvious rejections are at the story level. Yes, there's a brand new mutant-of-the-week for our heroes to battle (the thoroughly uninteresting Tower), but his attack on Vera's apartment causes complications for the team's X-Factor cover identities, meaning we're only two issues in and already the ostensible structure of the title is in danger of toppling over. The decision to outright reject writing a story in which X-Factor works as intended is a fascinating one, and combined with Jean and Warren's horror over the causal anti-mutant slurs offered to them whilst in disguise as mutant hunters makes it clear Layton realised very early on that the X-Factor scam couldn't last for long. In other words, only two issues in this title is obviously already in a state of transition.

Which makes sense given the wider context of the issue. Whilst plot-wise this doesn't operate as a template for later issues to riff off of, the underlying theme of X-Factor is very clear here, which is that this is about the past and the future meeting. Naturally this is clear from the book's very nature; how could a book reuniting a '60s super-team to fight '80s threats not be about that? But the degree to which past and future interact and often clash here demonstrates Layton's commitment to the idea. Newcomer Rusty develops a crush on Jean that pits him against Scott - new against old - but Scott himself can no longer function with respect to Jean in the way he used to, being now married with a child (though both have now disappeared leaving no forwarding address). Beast bumps into his old girlfriend Vera, only to find that she's ditched her '60s librarian look to bring herself up to date - a link to the past that demonstrates just how much has changed since we first heard names like Juggernaut and the Mimic. Tower's hunting and kidnapping of Beast seems like a new threat until we learn it was on the orders of Carl Maddicks, a villain from Amazing Adventure's Beast run at the start of the '70. Maddicks too has changed, though, he's no longer doing the bidding of the Secret Empire, instead he's looking for an "antidote" for his mutant son. Even Angel becomes part of this through his old friendship with Cameron Hodge which is now taking on a new and unfamiliar shape, exerting new and unfamiliar stresses on the old girders that structure their relationship.

The situations, relationships and characters have been returned to us, but in new configurations, underlining just how much has changed since Jean was thought dead (the opening pages of the issue make this explicit, in fact). Indeed, as Scott's refusal to open up to Jean and Bobby's desire to "steal"[1] Vera from Henry demonstrates that's there no good reason to believe this team can actually function at all any more, save for nostalgia. This of course would hardly be the last comic to attempt to power its sales mostly or even wholly through nostalgia, but it's nice to see it so thoroughly recognised in the text.

That said, there is a problem here, which is that the brand-new elements of the story aren't particularly interesting on their own terms. Rusty is an obvious analogue for a younger Cyclops - his powers are horribly dangerous and beyond his control, and he has a serious crush on Ms Grey - but he does little here to make himself interesting in and of himself. Tower as mentioned is thoroughly boring, a random mutant goon with nothing to distinguish him beyond an unusually unappealing costume. Artie Maddicks, the son for whom Carl went to the effort of abducting Beast is nothing but a prop, a staring, dead-eyed MacGuffin to be waved at to explain Carl's plotting. In fairness none of these characters really get enough to do here for things to be otherwise, but that just demonstrates that there are pacing problems here too. Either way, it's obviously concerning when an issue about how the old inevitably changes to give rise to the new doesn't actually have much in the way of newness that can excite us. This issue does a fine job of demonstrating the problems of a comic that spends its time looking backwards for inspiration.

Now it needs to show us some solutions.

[1] Just to be clear, I'm not arguing Dr McCoy has any kind of proprietary rights over Vera. Is she wants to pursue her ex's best friend, that's entirely up to her. I'm simply pointing out that it can be plausibly argued there was once a time when Bobby would never think of trying to make a move on Vera. The two of them used to strike me as being much more into the "bros before hos" mindset.  

Well actually, the two of them struck me as an obvious gay couple deep in denial (am I shipping? Is this what shipping is?). And following recent revelations in Bendis' X-books, I appear to have been proved at least half-right.

Clues

It's not clear how long this story takes to run its course. The pace of the narrative suggests it all takes place within the same day, but since it's also implied Carl's men drive Hank from New York to Atlanta, and at a sensible speed, which means a trip that would surely take some fourteen or fifteen hours to complete.

We shall therefore assume the action here straddles two days.

Date

Thursday 11^th to Friday 12^th April, 1985.

X-Date

X+7Y+40 to X+7Y+41.

Contemporary Events

Ladyhawke escapes into the world to frolic through the imagination of a hundred thousand geeks.


Standout Line

"Brainwashed by aliens?"
"Nope."
"Drug overdose?"
"Doubtful."
"Vietnam flashback?"
"Unlikely."

Bobby and Hank attempt to figure out the root cause of Vera's extreme make-over. The correct answer, by the way? Elvis Costello. Go figure.

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!