ICE #4: "The Price You Pay!"

("It can be in any tense, but it must make sense.")

Comments

While I await the arrival of my copy of X-Men & Alpha Flight, let's finish off the two miniseries we've been looking at over the last few months. 

First up, we have the concluding part of the Iceman miniseries. Last issue I passed out major credit for DeMatteis combining some bonkers scenes with tightly structured layouts and themes.  This time, alas, it's much closer to the other way round.

Which isn't to say there isn't a theme at all, which is at least something.  We're clearly still on the same beat as the series maintains overall, that of the power struggle we have with our parents. When Iceman and Mirage return to her father Oblivion's dimension and he begins to kvetch about how she doesn't appreciate how much he's given her, Iceman - and we - immediately cotton on to the fact that this is just the same argument every young person has with their parents, over and over again.  Yes, Oblivion is the ultimate expression of this, having quite literally fashioned Mirage from his own anima, but the link is pretty obvious.

This isn't the most original idea in Western fiction, naturally; variations on this particular guilt trip go all the way back to the garden of Eden.  But exploring human nature through the lens of unimaginably powerful anthropomorphic projections of philosophical concepts is a path rather less well trodden.  Sandman is still four years away, after all.

So all of that is to the good.  The problem creeps in when we try to pin down exactly what the story believes it has to say on the subject.  Mirage is the central problem here.  She begins the issue screaming at her father for not allowing her autonomy, and our sympathies are clearly supposed to lie with her. But once Iceman knocks her father over with some frozen water (which is apparently supposed to be a big deal despite Oblivion being indestructible, nigh-omnipotent, and the creator of those particular molecules of oxygen dihydride in the fist place) she turns on a dime and announces she wishes to stay with her father forever.

(Actually, this turns out to have been Oblivion's plan all along, with is pretty fucking creepily manipulative.)

This is a woman who two issues ago was willing to let innocent people be munched to death by flying death-bugs rather than speak to her father.  And now a bad day at the water-park turns all that around?  You can hear the story mechanisms creaking loudly here.  It is almost time to end the series, so the conflict between Mirage and her father must be resolved.

But the mirror conflict of Iceman and his folks needs to be dealt with as well - not much point in a thematic mirror if you ain't going to use it. It's important the book explains how the Drake family differ from the Oblivions, and the answer, inevitably enough, is love.

Which, in a general sense, I can follow.  Once Mirage declares her willingness to stay with her father, she immediately becomes subsumed by him.  The suggestion, then, seems to be that without love, you have exactly two options: cut all ties with your parents, or fall utterly and forever into their shadow.  You need to love them enough not to run, they need to love you enough to let you be your own person.  I'm far from convinced that works as advice, of course; suggesting smothering and control stem from a lack of affection seems too obviously to ignore the correlation between love and the wish to control. But fine, it's a coherent position.

The problem is that Mirage's desire to literally return to her father's bosom is explicitly spelled out as stemming for the love she bears him and has only just learned to recognise. Oblivion is unable to temper his love for the daughter he created from himself because he cannot love her, but the daughter carved from his own nature returns to him out of love.  The left hand is re-writing the right here, and the whole narrative becomes badly frayed as a result.

None of this is helped by Iceman's beef with Oblivion.  I mean, fine, he's the dude that started all of this, and it was his minion that killed his father in that time-travel mix-up (how does being the daughter of Oblivion give you a time machine, now that I come to think about it).  Bobby starting a fight makes perfect sense (except on a tactical level, but then since when has Iceman cared about minor details like that?).  The trouble is why he does it, which is his conclusion that all the times in his life he's been riven with self-doubt are actually Oblivion's fault.

Which makes not one lick of sense. Not even one of those tiny licks you employ on ice lollies straight from the freezer, when you fear getting your tongue stuck to your treat.  Not the most non-committal graze of the tongue-tip from the smallest, most nervous kitten.  None.  Oblivion is the avatar of pre-creation and post-destruction.  He is the dust that has settled.  He doesn't fiddle with your emotions when you are alive, he takes you after even death has lost interest in you.  The thought process here seems to be that Oblivion treats his daughter like the Drakes treat Bobby, the Drakes have left Bobby with a self-confidence problem, therefore Oblivion is as responsible for that as Iceman's parents are.

Which means, in short, that a fight which makes no sense breaks out so as to result in a declaration of love that makes no sense, entirely so that the story can head to its conclusion, where Oblivion remembers his deal with Bobby and restores his father to life, and Bobby to our reality.  Whereupon, of course, he gives his parents a lecture about how their love should be more important than what Bobby does with his life, and all is mended.

Well, except the story, of course.  That lies in a smoking heap of delirious ridiculousness.  But it was an interesting ride, for all that.  It never really pretended to be much more than that. Young man gets on roller-coaster with family issues, gets off with new insight.  Job done.

Just not done as well as it might have been.

Clues

Once this story escapes the strange timelessness of Limbo, we return to the night of the Drake's disastrous party.   When Angel and Beast show up they specify that this is Friday, necessitating a minor change to the timeline.  Taking this story a day back in time makes no difference to Iceman's timeline, since we've been ignoring him ever since he quit the X-Men, and we don't have Beast showing up in Los Angeles to kick of Beauty and the Beast until over a week later.

Date

Friday 29^th September, 1984.

X-Date

X+6Y+212.

Contemporary Events

Grand Ayatollah Haj Sayyed Abdullah al-Shirazi dies, aged 92.  Amongst other things, al-Shirazi was known for helping to build schools, house earthquake victims, and provide care for civilian victims of Iran's war with Iraq.

Standout Line

"What is union without separation? What is peace without struggle? And what is love -- without hate?" - Oblivion.

Jeez, I dunno.  Obviously fucking preferable?  What is wrong with these people?

ICE #3: "Quicksand!"

(Sweet Oblivion.)

Comments

Well, this is a pleasant surprise.  Based on the previous two issues, I wasn't expecting much here other than another twenty-three pages of wacky irrelevance. Instead, what we have here is a good deal more interesting.

Last time round, if you remember, Bobby Drake had accidentally travelled back in time to visit his parents, only for his father to be killed in a cape-fight between himself and Kali, an assassin tracking the original owner of Bobby's purloined time-machine.  Unsurprisingly, such meddling with the space-time continuum quickly resulted in Bobby being erased from existence.

This turns out to be a more involved process than one might think.  Rather than simply crossing over from "being" to "not being" without hassle, Bobby finds himself trapped in some kind of void, filled with memories from his past.  Except there not actually memories.  Beast never said "Exigency! Parabolic! Impecunious!", nor did Jean sing "By the time I get to...  Phoenix...". Darkstar never called him a "capitalist pig" and "money-loving exploiter of the masses".  This is Bobby's past seen through the lenses of his own immaturity.

But the void doesn't just reflect that attitude. It explains it, boiling down Bobby's young life into a series of situations into which he was unwillingly thrust and which he finds impossible to process. Take mutant rights, for example, which here is simplified to Xavier being shot by mutant haters as Bobby tries to give him a piggy-back to Westchester. "Who would shoot a nice bald cripple like you?" he asks, almost like a child, as Xavier falls.  His initial discovery of his mutant powers is shown here literally killing his mother, though his father responds that she won't get really upset unless he fails to become an accountant.

These are pressures with which Bobby simply cannot cope.  Even his own self-pity makes things worse; he can no more face up to the power of his own unhappiness than he can the expectations of others.  In the end, all he can do is hope for oblivion.

This is all presented in five pages of jokes and "guest appearances" (after shouting at Byrne last time for misleading covers, I should really take DeMatteis to task here too; a vision of a character is not an appearance by that character, except maybe if that character is the Vision), which are both fast paced and frequently very funny. The comic plays with structure here as well; the initial crash-landing of Bobby into the void is accompanied by widening panels as he approaches the "ground", the symmetric layout of every subsequent page breaks down at the exact same moment he does. It's all very clever.

So where is Bobby? Well, it turns out he got what he wanted.  This is oblivion, helpfully ruled over by a being calling himself Oblivion, kind of what one of the Endless might have been if Stan Lee had been in charge of designing them.  Oblivion mentions others like him; Death, Joy, Eternity. Presumably Drake escaped the clutches of Death by being written out of life rather than having life end.  Whether or not this is preferable is not yet clear.

Still, it seems Oblivion has plenty going for him.  Access to Bobby's not-quite past, for example.  For every event that happens there are an infinite number of events that could have happened but didn't, and are cast into oblivion.  Does Death get the past that actually took place?  Is there a difference between things gone that once were, and things gone that could have been but weren't?  Oblivion isn't saying. He has a mission for Drake.

It might seem a terrible coincidence for a man so willing to entertain the idea of non-existence has arrived at Oblivion's door.  Greater coincidences have been trotted out across Marvel history than this, of course.  But perhaps there is more to it than that. Perhaps Iceman, subconsciously seeking a way out of his life, didn't protect his father as well as he otherwise might. Perhaps Oblivion's daughter placed herself next to the Drakes precisely because she recognised in them a spark of herself.

You read that right. Oblivion has himself a daughter named Mirage; a piece of himself he gave independence to so as to have more than puppets and the disappeared to engage with. But, as with women and apples, Oblivion has learned to his cost that granting free will to someone you then insist follows your instructions isn't a tactic with a long-term success rate.  Now Oblivion wants her back before she gets powerful enough to overthrow him, and he needs Bobby to do it. If he fails Oblivion runs him out completely, but should he succeed, Oblivion will untangle the recent causality snafu and return his father to this mortal coil.  I'm not entirely sure how that's in Oblivion's jurisdiction, but I'm new to this game.

Either way, the irony here is delicious. Bobby craves oblivion as an escape from his unmanageable life, and all oblivion has to offer is more work.

All of this set-up is quite wonderful.  Alas, the payoff is less interesting. Oblivion sends Bobby from his reality to Mirage's so he can confront her.  There's some potentially interesting morality at play here: should someone give up their freedom in return for the life of someone she's never met or claimed any responsibility for but who is nevertheless dead because of her carelessness? Unfortunately, we skip all that in favour of Mirage freaking out and trying to kill Bobby. I suppose it's hardly surprising she would turn out to be as clearly batshit as her old man, but it does mean the second half of this issue amounts to a fairly standard dose of comic book hyperbole and beat-downs, which is a bit of a shame considering how strongly things started.

We end here with Mirage coming within inches of killing Iceman, but deciding ultimately that her father is the one she has to deal with if she wants her freedon permanently.  So she zaps herself with Bobby in tow back to her home dimension, only to discover this was what Oblivion had been waiting for all along...

Clues

It's hard to say when this adventure takes place, since we have no idea of when in time Iceman actually is when he confronts Mirage.

Date

Unknown

X-Date

X + Unknown

Contemporary Events

Singing and murder and fucking and food, I've no doubt.

Standout Line

"I forgot how dangerous self-pity can be! I'm drowning in my own tears!"

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."

Iceman #1: "The Fuse!"

(Supersexyicecoolalienfightin'familyman)

Comments

Things are really starting to speed up now, this is the third X-Men miniseries kicking off in 1984 (or the fourth, depending whether this shipped before or after the first part of Beauty and the Beast).  Usually, we'd spend some time trying to figure out this book's justification as part of the larger picture, but things are a little different this time.  First of all, Chris Claremont is entirely absent here, which means we can already offer "X-Man written by someone else".  Second, there's the fact that Ice-Man has been off our radar since 1975 (I may be forgetting a cameo here and there, but the point stands regardless).  Let the New Defenders fans figure out why they might need to read four extra issues of Iceman antics.  We have our old friend back.

So there isn't really a need for this story to justify itself in the same way as, say, Kitty Pryde & Wolverine does.  Nevertheless, we can manage it pretty easily.  Indeed, if there's a problem here, it's that there's too much being juggled here.  In this issue alone Iceman meets up with, in no particular order, his disapproving and smothering parents, a mutant-hating local cop, two interstellar criminals, and the drop-dead gorgeous redhead next door.

The clear implication here is that Iceman has a ridiculous amount on his plate to simultaneously juggle: a difficult family situation, angry racists, rampaging supervillains, and a seemingly hopeless love life.  This is pretty close to the Dazzler template I've spent so much time complimenting over the last year.  We could, if we wanted, argue that a male protagonist going through the same motions as a female one has a built-in audience of all those folks who would have enjoyed Dazzler had they bothered to pick it up, and we'd be right, for all that "let's target the readers with outdated gender perceptions" isn't a sales policy I'd want to back.

Really, though, we don't need to.  There's an even more obvious link here.  Indeed, given J.M. DeMatteis' later career, we could almost consider this a warm-up.  Change smothering parents who hate their son's superheroics for a kindly aunt unaware of them, and swap racist cop Ralph Ratchit (what, no "R"?) for an intolerant and intolerable newspaper mogul, and what we have here is obvious: Spiderman.

(Really, it's the gorgeous redhead next door that gives the game away.  That, or I'm just making links based on half-buried memories of '80s children's shows.)

What's important here though isn't the similarity of set-up, it's the difference in character.  Peter Parker is utterly fixed on trying to do the right thing by as many people as possible, and so ends up pulled in multiple directions.  His desires are clear, but conflicting at best and incompatible at worst.  In comparison, Bobby Drake hasn't the faintest idea what he wants, so he ends up bouncing from distraction to distraction, which may or may not involve trying to stop people from destroying the world.  What's interesting is how the two very different approaches seem to lead to pretty similar escapades.

There's also the delirious rush of squeezing the entirety of Spiderman's shtick into a single issue.  Bobby is on the way to a family reunion when he spots  gorgeous girl Marge and tries to impress her, leading to him being harassed by a bigoted cop, so he runs, only to find the same girl outside his house since she lives next door, and so he gets a chance to chat her up at the family reunion only for supervillains to jump in and try to kidnap him (or more likely, Marge), leading to the trashing of Marge's house, after which the supervillains teleport out just in time for Iceman to be left holding the metaphorical baby when racist cop shows up to arrest him.

It's fun to see it all squeezed together like this.  It's probably necessary as well; you don't want for people to figure out Spiderman's collection of animal-themed grotesques fulfils a role in the narrative that you can't necessarily replicate with generic antagonistic aliens (who by the way seem to be putting an awful lot of hope in an agent named Idiot).  Every truly great hero is defined by a strong rogues' gallery, and I'm not really seeing that here.

Our standard disclaimer applies here, of course; it's only the first issue.  The cover for the second issue seems to bear so little connection to what we've seen here that any attempts to guess what's coming seem doomed to failure.  If things can continue in this gloriously, defiantly deranged fashion, I may not even care.

Clues

This story takes place over the course of a single day.  With Iceman so far out of the loop in terms of X-books, there's not a lot to tie this in with events elsewhere, but Iceman does mention Dazzler's recent publicity problems.  We'll therefore set this just after the events of MGN #12.

Date

Saturday 30^th September, 1984.

X-Date

X+6Y+213.

Contemporary Events

"Kiss rocks?  Why would anyone want to - oh, wait, I get it."

Standout Line

"That was another joke, by the way."
"I kind of thought it was."

Bobby Drake struggles to land his humour with the girl next door.

(Also: post 400.  Woo-hoo!)