UNCANNY X-MEN #188: Legacy of the Lost

We're still fighting the Dire Wraiths I guess?

Originally Published December 1984

So, the X-Men have been all tangled up in a physical manifestation of the sorcerous void between realms of being, as tends to happen:

Specifically, these are mystical Shadowbeings, who reside in the realm of magic that the Dire Wraiths call upon. Storm is able to free Forge by shooting his prosthetic leg, and he hobbles off to find Nazé, his magical mentor, who is their only hope of defeating these things.

Nazé is hard at work doing just that, but when he calls upon the Great Spirit, he gets a wrong number:

This mysterious presence goes on to read Naze for looking like the Shaman of the Cheyenne, but in soul, being an alien Dire Wraith. Which means we've gotten to a kind of three-car-pileup of sorcerous powers. The mysterious one decides to take possession of Nazé's form, regardless of who is currently occupying it.

Showing a certain ability to co-ordinate, the X-Men not currently tied up by Shadowbeings go about collecting anyone they know who can use magical powers to help, most specifically Amanda Sefton, whom Nightcrawler absconds from the Pilots' Lounge at Dallas-Ft. Worth (handy that she was nearby!)

And Colossus' own little sister Illyana, who has secretly been harboring some talent at sorcery since returning from her years as a hostage in limbo:

These Head Witches in Charge do their best to combat the magic of the Dire Wraiths and their sorcerous realm and their Shadowbeings and all of that stuff, but still prove no match.

Storm realizes that this is the doing of the one last Dire Wraith she didn't quite finish off earlier in the fight, stuck outside on the roof. Forge has Nightcrawler teleport him up there to handle things the old fashioned way - which would actually be the modern way compared to the traditional magic-fighting-magic way, the way Forge sorta-pretty-much turned his back on.

Which is to say, guns.

Bamfing back down to the Aerie, the fight has indeed ended. In the aftermath, Illyana spills the beans to her brother, that yeah, she picked up a little bit of magicality during her stay in Limbo.

Studio audience: Awwwwwwww!

Forge finds Nazé at the Sanctum, unconscious but saveable. Swearing off magic forever - for real this time - Forge tells Storm he must take his old mentor to the hospital (where surely, they will be able to treat him for his case of Demonic Possession.) Storm says, that's great and all, we're going to head out - don't follow us, and when we inevitably meet again you'll probably regret it.

Elsewhere, in the heart of the Bermuda Triangle, where you'd think X-People would know to stay away from, we find the familiar crew of the Trawler Arcadia - Captain Aleytis "Lee" Forrester and her trusty mate Paolo.

Spotting a body being encircled by sharks, Lee demonstrates her marksmanship by firing the shark gun off into the distance with sniper accuracy, then honors the Code of the Sea by diving right the hell into the ocean to recover the drowning man. When they bring him aboard they find it's none other than...

That's gonna be awkward - they have something of a history (of him kidnapping her.)

Back at the X-Mansion, Nightcrawler touches base with Storm, who wonders about her future with the X-Men, as a powerless former-mutant. Kurt himself is having doubts too; he has called a huddle of the X-Men present (Wolverine and Kitty are off having an adventure of their own in Japan.) While telepathic future-kid Rachel eavesdrops from the stairway outside, Kurt lays it out.

He is mad as hell and he's not gonna take it anymore.

It's easy to see how Kurt has reached his breaking point. He points out that the weapon that maimed Storm was not commissioned by some supervillain, but the by the U.S. Government (potato, potato.) Even now, Mutant Restriction Policies are being being debated in the Senate and have a better than even chance of being signed into law.

Professor X asks whether Nightcrawler is more interested in Magneto's vision of mutant domination of the planet, and Kurt responds that frankly, both sides can go screw. He'd rather just go live with Amanda somewhere and leave the fighting to other people because he is d-o-n-e. 

Upon overhearing that Jean Grey was, in fact, killed in action, Rachel's powers go into overdrive:

Ray bursts in in tears, demanding Nightcrawler retract his statement - that Jean Grey can't be dead, because not only did she hear her voice on the phone not that long ago, but she's Rachel's MOM! 

Rachel says that life here in 1984 is a picnic compared to the world she came from, recounting the numerous horrific deaths of the X-Men. Kurt, Amanda, and Illyana, killed on their way to a bus stop. The Mansion, attacked by Government forces, the Professor assassinated and bleeding out in young Rachel's own arms!

This monologue serves to bring us as fully up to speed as I think we are going to get, about where Rachel comes from what what she sees as the difference between our X-Men timeline and her own past, which has so far come out in dribs and drabs.

It still doesn't do much to account for the crazy loopy logic that has Rachel, a person who missed her chance to be born, sitting among us, but as an X-Men fan you just learn to take these things as they are. For my part, I've already gone on and on about the concept of Alternate Futures and it doesn't get any more fun to think about.

At hearing this account, the X-Men are shooketh. Kurt thinks about how this really just proves his point. Rogue laments how her own foster mother was behind the assassination attempt that would have kicked this whole thing off, and Colossus is amazed that according to Rachel he actually did marry Kitty.

Priorities, Pete!

The Prof himself is brought to tears, finding a hollow kind of solace in learning he at least did not live to see his dream burn to ashes.

Rachel goes on to emphasize the symbolic meaning of the Professor's dream - how it encouraged the survivors to strive for a better tomorrow instead of giving into hatred and the desire for revenge. That the continued existence of the X-Men may someday be the symbol that the struggling mutantkind needs to survive.

Moved by this, by Rachel's statement that the way we live and die may be more important than the simple fact of it - Kurt agrees to stay with the X-Men, and the team hugs it out, electing to keep fighting to protect a world that hates and fear them.

Elsehwere, at New York's fabulous Fish Market, a dock worker named Jaime Rodriguez uncovers a mysterious glowing amulet that promises him the world if he obeys.

Just what we need! To be continued.

Further Thoughts:

Through branching out on the Internet, I have been in contact with enough people to learn that seemingly every moment of the X-Men's history is a favourite of someone's, including this one. Personally, I've been somewhat vocal about my ambivalence toward the Dire Wraiths as antagonists. They're fearsome, and their brain-slurping gimmick makes them nasty pieces of work, but they came out of nowhere with no prior history with the X-Men. And beyond that, our heroes have to start flipping through their rolodex for anyone they might know who can do magic.

I've complained before about the X-Men being guest stars in their own book, and here they are guest stars to the guest stars, as the guest stars Magik and Amanda Sefton take the lead in the action and still can't put the bad guys away, while the real protagonist, Forge, finally takes the lead in finishing them off. Tactically, it makes sense to ask these people for help, but it doesn't pass the "Why am I reading this?" test for me. The book isn't about Forge, Amanda is only an occasional character, and while Magik is a New Mutant, the spotlight is not on her in Uncanny.

I don't necessarily have a problem with the X-Men fighting magical beings, and you can see Claremont, with his left hand, adding to the complex cosmology of X-Men antagonists with what happens to Naze. But the book is a lot better when the heroes themselves are empowered to combat these forces.

Luckily, in the immediate present, this all does go somewhere, to Kurt's big spiel at the end. When he recounts the various traumas inflicted on the X-Men since they first grouped in Giant Size #1 (skimming, to be sure) it's very easy to see how he has reached the end of his rope. Oddly enough, nothing major has happened to him personally recently - he wasn't there when Storm was zapped, he wasn't in the thick of the fighting with the Dire Wraiths, he has barely seen much major action at all lately. He is just feeling all of this through empathy for his friends and family. 

Kurt's grievances ring true to us here in 2020, where oppression, suppression, and fascism are back in a big way, and the fight to stop them is being led by the most marginalized of us, who are undoubted so fucking tired of all of this, doing work on behalf of a population that doesn't often seem to understand, or care. In the past, I have kind of laid out how the Mutants-as-Marginalized metaphor is not a 1:1, and how putting the specific experiences of a real-world group into the mouths of mutants can be problematic, but scenes like these are where the strength of the metaphor lies, as we reach an inevitable epiphany about mutants' places in their world, and hopefully can do our own work to draw a parallel to the real-world from there. 

Similarly, Rachel, who is the physical manifestation of the literal Worst Case Scenario for giving up on Xavier's fight, describes a world that is also all too familiar to those of us living in the present day. I don't live in the United States but I'm close enough to see how it is teetering on the brink - hell, slipping right down the slope - toward the kind of world Rachel describes. No, there are no giant robots and dissidents aren't getting their houses blown up (yet) but people are killed in the streets and their own beds for specious or no reasoning, with impunity. Concentration camps already exist on the American continent (as they had decades prior to the story's publication) and all too much of the population has reacted with apathy or outright joy. We can never accuse a book like this of being alarmist again. 

The fight must continue.