The X-Men get a visit... from the future!
Originally Published August 1984
We begin in beautiful downtown Dallas, home of Eagle Plaza, headquarters of the mysterious tech guru Forge. Two representatives of the U.S. Government - Raven Darkhölme of the Defense Advance Research Planning Agency and Dr. Valerie Cooper, Special Assistant to the President's National Security Advisor, are paying a call on the subject of weaponry that can be used to neutralize the mutant threat.
Unbeknownst to Val, one of those mutant threats is beside her, as Darkhölme is in fact secretly the mutant terrorist known as Mystique.
Upon arriving at Forge's Penthouse, they get a taste of the extent of his abilities...
That's right, Forge lives in a fancy-dancy hologram suite, which he can fashion to look like any beuatiful vista he likes - complete with mid-air free-floating platforms in the five-storey space just to make it crazily-inaccessible. How he ever gets any work done without a proper floor, I do not know.
Raven and Val walk in on the tail end of a severe disagreement of philosophy between Forge and his former mentor Naźe - a Native American (like Forge himself) who is, like most fictional Native Americans in comics, in tune with spooky-dooky forces of the beyond-realm, which appear to be of some concern.
When asked, Forge dismisses all this as "Tribal Business" and nothing for the Defense Department to be concerned about; certainly, it doesn't look like Naźe is signing any of Forge's checks.
See, he's one of these modern-day Native Americans who shuns the "old ways" and embraces the white man's science, the white man's money, and the white man's fashion. Just drink in that striped polo and jorts look! And with the Tom Selleck mustache!
Forge shows the ladies two devices he has whipped up, under the premise that they are to be used to combat Dire Wraths - freaky-deaky alien beings normally combatted by the Spaceknight known as ROM and currently invading Earth (how is nobody talking about this??!?). The first device is a gun that should - theoretically though it hasn't been tested yet - neutralize the power of any superbeing, effectively making them just a normal person.
Uh um, I'll say that again. This comic, which features a race of superpowered mutants as our protagonists, has just introduced a gun that can neutralize all of their powers. No big deal or anything. Can't think of any other reason that migbt be used besides Dire Wraiths. Is there even any literary precedenf for introducing a gun early in a story?
The other device is a radar that detects whether there are any mutants in a room. Forge turns it on to demonstrate, and when it makes a telltale "beep boop" noise, Raven is briefly perturbed, fearing she has been found out - only for Forge to smirk and go "lol it me."
Personally I'd be annoyed that the device doesn't specifically call out who in a room is a mutant, but whatever, nice gag. Mystique is relieved, but notes that that thing had better not be used on her.
Meanwhilst in the heart of New York City, an unscrubbed-looking young woman in a green army jacket watches a news report about the X-Men through a store window. She has some confusion, however, since Storm looks different from how she remembers, and as we all know people retain the same sense of style for their entire existence.
You may recall Rachel here from way, way, way back in the now-legendary "Days of Future Past" story line (this issue is even helpfully named to remind you.) But as noted, things are amiss from Rachel's POV. The news report also mentions Senator Robert Kelly, whom she believes to be dead, and she recalls seeing 15-year-old Illyana Rasputin when she stopped by the X-Mansion, but she should not be 15 for many years yet! What a goof, I hope somebody got fired over that!
While Rachel ponders these inconsistencies, however, she is unbeknownstingly being watched from the shadows by our new friend...
Selene, the 2000-year-old mutant vampire sorceress! And she is actually not looking to devour Rachel, but to make her a disciple, inducting her into her energy-vampiring ways! It's crazy the curves life throws at you!
The huntress is able to use her millennia of learned cunning to lay a master trap for her would-be protegé, to draw her into a web of intrigue so subtle she doesn't even realize she is being turned until it is too late...
Or, she just pops out of an alleyway and grabs her like a maniac. Either way.
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| I was given a more tempting sales pitch by World Financial Group. |
Rachel bolts and finds herself in a nightclub, where she is overwhelmed by the thoughts of the crowd within. She is about to get bounced, when the club owner, Nick Damiano, steps in and offers to take Rachel home.
Despite the obvious shadiness of a Nightclub Owner offering to take a seemingly impaired, frantic, and obviously vulnerable young woman to his home, Rachel mindscans him and determines there is no ill intent. Personally, I still think there is a clear red flag here, but I'm sure that Rachel, the super-telepath from the post-apocalyptic future, can handle it.
Nick serves his guest some refreshing orange juice and lets her help herself to a luxurious bubble bath, but she she realizes something is amiss when she can no longer sense Nick's thoughts. She gets up to investigate and...
Well, it wasn't very well going to be Kramer.
The two struggle, as Rachel demonstrates her telekinetic ability to hurl objects around the room, which Selene trumps with her ability to control objects (any objects? Like, all of them??) and turn them to dust.
Just as Selene is using her psychic whammy to bring Rachel over to her "dark embrace," she is interrupted by Professor Xavier, who was undoubtedly alerted to the sudden emergence of two intensely powerful mutants as soin as he got home from Japan. He battles Selene in his astral form while the X-Men extract Rachel from the battle zone.
Once they are safely out of the building, and Selene has made her escape, Rachel tries to debrief the X-Men, only to get distracted by Professor Xavier's ability to walk, and Storm's mohawk (again with this!) Thus confused, she collapses, and cries out--
Which seems like a bit of a melodramatic response to Storm's mohawk, but only slightly moreso than Kitty's.
To be continued!
Further Thoughts:
In this issue we meet - for the second time - Rachel, who is to be a new member of the X-Men. And boy do I have some thoughts.
I think it's a lot to put on your readers to have them follow essentially a whole new character for an issue, and pit her against a relatively unestablished villain with a kooky backstory. Selene had actually already menaced the New Mutants in the fantasy village version of Rome she had set up in Brazil (as one would do), but is a new face for anyone who has only been following Uncanny X-Men and/or this blog.
Rachel comes to us from an "alternate future," meaning the world where the Sentinels have mutantkind - and all of America - under their iron-composite boot heel. And also horses pull city buses. We had thought that future would be averted when Rachel sent grown-adult Kate Pryde back to help prevent the assassination of Robert Kelly, but not only is Kelly barreling full force ahead with the Anti-Mutant Agenda, the future where Rachel lives has not in any tangible way been averted. It still exists, she's from there, and it has a totally different past to what we have observed in the issues of Uncanny X-Men since the original DoFP story - Illyana never aged up in Limbo, Professor Xavier never regained the ability to walk, and most importantly, Storm never went Punk. Rachel hopped timestreams to a completely separate river that does not lead back to her home.
Which is all fine and good, but I am going to leaf ahead a little bit and illustrate a problem I have with this. And you can stop reading now if you really do rely on this blog for your entire X-Men readership and don't know what's coming.
As demonstrated by her red hair and telekinetic abilities, Rachel is revealed to be the daughter of Scott Summers and Jean Grey. But they never had a daughter. Jean has been dead since before DoFP, before she and Scott ever had any kind of family. So, Rachel's future was never the future of these X-Men, at least not since well before the Dark Phoenix Saga.
So my questions are...what, how, and most importantly, why?
And I don't mean why, in story. You can come up with any number of in-universe time travel tricks and glitches to explain how somebody whose parents never produced offspring is suddenly standing in the past where she could never exist. Whatever. It's fiction. I mean, why bother? Why create this character and have her as a regular fixture in the comics to begin with?
This is heresy for some, because Rachel evolves into a character that is definitely appreciated and even beloved by the fandom (what mutant isn't?) But I simply don't like Rachel's existence. It's needlessly complicated and not essential to telling stories about the X-Men and what they are facing in this time and place. What's the point of drafting her into the X-Men's roster? Is there anything her character says about the world that Rogue's, or Storm's, or Wolverine's, can't? Did we need a souvenir from DoFP so badly? Has the X-Men's team dynamic been missing the flavour of an overpowered redheaded telepath?
To me, the heavy lifting required to explain, justify, and explore Rachel's existence risks throwing X-Men too far off its axis. And the fact that she is introduced battling a similarly over-developed character - a millennias-old mutant vampire sorceress - only highlights how wackadoodles this whole thing is starting to get as Chris Claremont's wandering attentions Katamaris every piece of genre fiction he has ever glanced at into a giant homogenous orb.
And yet, getting thrown that far off its axis - away from everyday prejudice, government conspiracy and supervillain-thwarting and into sorcery, alien civil wars, and an extra complicated version time travel thatvallows a visit from someone who could never have been born - is ultimately part of the fabric of X-Men as we know it today. And in a way it has always been. The seeds were there when Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, and Neil Adams all variously did the book, stretching their imaginations with crazy concepts that had little-all to do with the X-Men as mutants solving mutant problems, a tradition Chris Claremont joined in on since Day 1. We just now happen to be at a tipping point where the degree to which that flavour informs the book starts to overwhelm some of the other concerns it has (even as it jockeys for position with a perfectly serviceable Government oppression storyline.)
With Rachel's arrival, X-Men as a franchise reaches the next stage in its evolution, where it truly pursues the boundaries of "anything goes." In the next few years it becomes the Comic Bookiest of Comics we would know it as for decades to come, knotting itself twice for every bit it untangles to incorporate more insanity. It may not exactly be my favourite incarnation of the series, but to love the X-Men is, truly, to love all this crazy shit.
Welcome to your future. Hope you survive the experience.
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