The X-Men see the future, brother, and it is murder.
Originally Published January 1981
We begin in... the future!
New York City is a ruin in the early 21st century. An adult version of Kitty Pryde - going by Kate - is en route to a rendezvous with Wolverine, through a part of town roamed by face-painted outlaws, as part of some kind of secret mission.
Through Kate's eyes we soon learn that this is a time when Sentinels (conspicuously ginormous purple mutant-hunting robots, remember) rule America, and man they've let it get so bad Donald Trump might as well be president. The Sentinels are in the business of forcing all the known mutants into confined areas so as to better contain and/or oppress and/or exterminate them, which I think is something that has happened at least once or twice in actual history, but I'm not sure if this is in reference to any specific event.
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| "Intentionally Humiliating" is very much a Weird Claremont Sex Thing, btw. |
Things are bad, not just for mutants but for all humans as lawlessness and a general collapsing of civilization abounds.
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| For crying out loud they're using horses to pull a city bus! That's how you know it's bad. |
In short order we are told that many of our faves are dead at the hands of the Sentinels - Nightcrawler, Cyclops, Professor X - as well as non-mutant superheroes like the Fantastic Four. But the X-Men do survive in a fashion, in addition to Kate and Logan (who is part of the Canadian resistance), there is still Storm and Colossus, as well as Franklin Richards (son of the Fantastic Four's Mr. Fantastic and Invisible Woman, and a powerful mutant tyke in our "present day" of 1981) and his ladyfriend, a mysterious young redheaded telepath named Rachel. They are working on some secret project, the last component of which Wolverine was delivering to Kate. Now that the "jammer" is in place to override the mutant's power-inhibiting collars, the work can begin...
Meanwhile in... the past!
Kitty Pryde (precocious tween version) stumbles into one of those classic "someone is literally going to get killed" Danger Room workouts. This disrupts the X-Men's "flow" and throwing them out of sync by introducing a random element of chaos that the heroes weren't counting on. And nor should they - after all as we all know all their superhero fights take place in rigidly structured conditions that are easy to prepare for.
Once Kitty's safety is assured and the session is terminated, it's time for Kitty's first ever training session. She gets the same "all you have to do is walk across the room" schtick that humbled the recruits back when the New X-Men were first formed (Thunderbird RIP). It almost seems cruel to put Kitty in that situation...
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| Cruel for the Danger Room I mean! Hotcha! |
Of course with Kitty's ability to walk through solid objects, there's almost literally nothing the room can do to hurt her. We even see how she "walks on air" as a trapdoor opens beneath her and she doesn't fall.
But no sooner is she celebrating her victory than she is struck by a strange sensation:
In the Medlab, the readings on the machines - the same ones that presumably told us that Nightcrawler was "no longer alive" (in those specific terms) not that long ago, show a strange reading on Kitty's brainwaves - fundamentally the same, but different, more complex... older maybe?
Kitty awakes, claiming to be the (grizzled, traumatized) Kate Pryde of 2013, mentally inhabiting her younger self, and boy has she got some news for her friends. The X-Men are skeptical, but we are assured this is on the level by the only lie detector anyone needs: Wolverine's nose.
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| What exactly does that mean, Logan? On second thought don't tell me, I don't want to know. |
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| Honestly not bad for machines that once flew themselves directly into the sun because Cyclops dared them to. |
Kate goes on to say that the rest of the world had announced intentions for a full-scale nuclear attack on North America in the event the Sentinels try to extend their reach beyond their current territory - which they are now (in the future) brazenly about to do, being that they are ginormous cold-calculating mutant-hunting robots who don't give a eff. Sending Kitty back to avert Kelly's assassination would seem to be the only way to avoid a certain nuclear holocaust. A plan elegant in its simplicity.
Meanwhile though, the future is still going on..
We see the remnants of the X-Men slogging their way through the sewers, an unconscious Kitty Pryde (occupying her older self's body and everyone just hoping she doesn't wake up and see how wrinkly she is) in tow. Because of the method of time travel involved, the clock has not stopped in the future and they have work to do to try to prevent the nuclear holocaust in the event the whole time travel thing is a bust.
I'm sure it'll go better for everyone else.
The X-Men battle some Sentinels in a much-needed action sequence that helps break up the heady, conceptual issue, which honestly feels just stuffed by now.
Meanwhile, again, in the past...
We are introduced to the New Brotherhood of Evil Mutants - our old friend The Blob joins Pyro (who controls flames but has to wear a fancy bbq lighter backpack to make fire to work with) Avalanche, (who likes to shake things up with his power of... making things shake, I guess) and Destiny, (a visually impaired senior citizen who sees the future. She does her supervillainy in a sci-fi burlesque costume that makes her look about 50 years younger.)
Leading this Breakfast Club of psychos is the shapeshifter Mystique, who has been posing as an employee of the Defense Department named Raven Darkholme in order to secretly form this group using the Pentagon as a base of operations.
Mystique is actually one of my favourite characters, immediately establishing herself as conniving, unscrupulous, resourceful, and ruthless right off the bat. She has little or nothing to do with the interpretations portrayed by either Rebecca Romijn-O'Connell or Jennifer Lawrence. She's pretty ballsy, plotting to brazenly assassinate a member of the U.S. Senate in broad daylight and in front of hundreds of witnesses. And if Kate is to be believed, is completely successful at that, even if shit goes way off the rails in the ensuing years.
The X-Men arrive at the hearings just in time to hear Kelly about to make his right pretty speech about Ordinary Joe's place on the evolutionary ladder, but they're too late to warn Xavier of the impending doom. The All-New All-Different Brotherhood of Mutants has arrived!
They're here to kill Sen. Kelly. However, that's in a world where the X-Men aren't warned by a timetravelling Future!Sprite. Now, they're here to run defense. To be continued!
Further Thoughts:
When you're hot you're hot. The makings of bona fide classic here comes only a few months after the last masterpiece in the Dark Phoenix Saga, which itself was on the heels of another career high point in Proteus. What I'm trying to say here is that these guys were good.
Despite having read Dark Phoenix as a kid so often it became foundational to my love of reading, I actually only ever read this story itself for the first time a while ago in preparation for this blog. Instead I absorbed it by osmosis as a young comic fan, in times it was adapted into a cartoon or movie, times it was written up warmly by sources like Wizard Magazine, times it was referenced by later X-Men stories. By the time I read it for reals - a few years ago in preparation for this blog, as a jaded lifelong comic reader - its contents were so deeply absorbed in my psyche that it was easy to feel underwhelmed by way it all played out.
When I came back to it this month, having mainlined the entire history of X-Men up to this point and my palette otherwise cleansed, it feels clear that this is something special - a formally challenging, suspenseful story that also grounds itself in the core spirit of the X-Men.
When this story first hit, there was no Back to the Future or Terminator. The basis of the story was later determined to be a Doctor Who serial called "Day of the Daleks" from 1973 but this probably had limited visibility even to comic book fans. Paradoxes and bad futures weren't commonly explored in comics. Superheroes sometimes zipped back and forth through time but rarely to glimpse such a nightmarish world. Certainly nothing the X-Men had done, even in their previous year of incredible adventures, is precedent for this.
What may now feel like a typical visit to a dystopian future is remarkable for the work done in building the hellish New York of 2013 and the lives of the remaining X-Men. Here, Kate and Piotr are married, and more-than-implied to have lost children (ie, through forced abortion, a fun topic for the kids.) Again, before "grim n gritty" became the buzzword and every book was racing to feature as much gore, vivisection, rape and genocide as editorial would permit, this book went to some shocking lengths - and not frivolously.
Perhaps part of the reason the Days of Future Past future feels so obvious and cliche now is because it's so apt. It's the true apocalyptic worst-case scenario for mutantkind, taking the prejudice metaphor at the heart of the comics to a horrifying extreme with all too realistic parallels with the internment camps - which maybe might have seemed like melodramatic hyperbole before this year - while also not foresaking the X-Men's place as superpowered heroes, since the doomsday here is a mix of real-world human ignorance and comic book science fiction robots. So like the best X-stories, it works on multiple levels.
What's particularly notable is the work done to put the "bad future" scenes on even footing with the present day ones. We are dropped in in medias res and brought up to speed while touring the world, as opposed to, say, Kitty getting conked on the head and waking up in the future where the situation must be explained to her. Likewise, when Kate travels to the past, the action in the future continues and we are meant to feel this is a story with ongoing stakes and not some throwaway "imaginary tale." (And boy howdy, in the long run this is secondary only to Dark Phoenix for being the opposite of a "throwaway" in X-Men lore.)
We also see an unexpected face counted among the X-Men's allies of the future:
I think the idea was to see the wheelchair first and think the Professor is still alive, but Claremont scripting Kate to blurt out "Magneto!" in the panel before we see his face kiboshes that. That said, even if that the "fakeout" was executed properly, Charles Xavier's gravesite is front and centre in the internment camp before that moment (Funny, since he's supposed to die years before the Sentinels even take over.)
Lastly, that Redheaded telepath named Rachel, I wonder what's her deal? Where did she come from and how did she link up with the X-Men? Well I'm sure it's not important and won't be revisited at any point.
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