UNCANNY X-MEN #189: Two Girls Out to Have Fun!

Rachel and Amara infiltrate Hellfire: Two girls, one club!

Originally Published January 1985

We begin with a panoramic view of the beautiful New York City Skyline circa 1985.

Rachel Summers - the X-Men's houseguest from (an alternate version of) the future, and Amara Aquilla, the recent recruit of the New Mutants known as Magma (for her magnanimous attitude, no doubt) are taking in the sights from the crown of the Statue of Liberty.

While Amara may appear from this panel to be a typical Small Town Girl With Dreams of the Big City, her backstory is considerably more complicated, as the small town she hails from is Nova Roma, a colony founded by refugees from the Roman Republic during the reign of Gaius Julius Caesar. In Brazil, of all places. And for the sake of simplicity, the culture remained completely isolated and frozen in amber for two thousand years. So it's like she's a time traveler.

Awestruck as Amara is by the city that never sleeps, Rachel has a somewhat more conflicted feeling, as the sight of New York City in its pre-Giuliani heyday brings to mind the Big Apple's somewhat more degraded condition from her time. This is accompanied by a considerably more prescient trauma than Mr. Claremont probably intended when scripting this issue.

No, I did not expect to have to contemplate 9/11 when opening this X-Men comic from the mid-80's, but life is full of surprises.

While we don't learn the exact circumstances of the fall of the Twin Towers in this reality, Rachel is made to consider the time she spent being forced against her will to act as a "Hound" or mutant-hunting mutant in the service of the totalitarian pro-Sentinel regime that ruled the early 20th century.

The memory brings haunted tears to her eyes, but she declines to explain to Amara their source, playing it off as a speck in her eye.

Down at the harbor, the X-Men are aboard a ship, bidding farewell to Storm. 

In a surprisingly brief scene considering we're saying goodbye to such a prominent character, Storm is sailing off into the sunset, almost literally, deciding that without her mutant powers her place is no longer with the X-Men. She's taking the opportunity to get back in touch with Ororo and travel the world. Probably do some eating, maybe a little praying, and if she's lucky, a little bit of loving.

With nothing to do until it's time to meet the rest of the X-Men for dinner, Rachel and Amara head uptown, passing through the seaport, where, if they knew what they were looking for, they may have run into on Jaime Rodriguez, the dockworker who recently struck it big by discovering an enchanted, and obviously malevolent, necklace in the belly of a fish, which he is storing in his locker (the necklace, not the whole fish.)

Jaime fends off several looky-loos who are being called to attention by the necklace's dark magicks. It makes a very tempting offer:

Nearly as compelling as the pitch I received from World Financial Group.

Rachel takes Amara to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she provides an update on the latest happenings in the Roman Emperor following the ascent of Emperor Augustus Caesar.

Their edu-taining field trip is interrupted, however, when Rachel senses the presence of Selene, the 2000-year-old mutant vampire witch who tried to make Rachel her protege not that long ago. Rachel runs after her, but gets the slip. 

When Amara learns of Selene's presence, she turns to anger - as you would know if you were reading a New Mutants recap blog to go along with this one, Selene actually hails from Nova Roma, and in fact even killed Amara's mother.

You know what that means...

It's PERSONAL!!

As an aside, when Amara catches Rachel scanning her mind, she momentarily lashes out at her friend, quite reasonably feeling violated at this unauthorized use of telepathy on her. But they move on quick to address their mutual enemy.

Tracking Selene to the Hellfire Club's headquarters, our girls intend to sneak in dressed like maids, or to use the unfortunate terminology favored by Amara's backwards culture, "Household Slaves."

Which, as you can guess, does not sit right with Rachel, who has actually spent some time enslaved in her life.

Amara may not like having her thoughts read, but I'm sure she wouldn't have minded having the ability to do that herself after that blooper.

Down in the Club's secret Rumpus Room, one Freidrich von Roehm, a climber if there ever was one, introduces himself as well as his associate, the proposed new Black Queen for the Hellfire Club -- who else but Lady Selene!! 

Shaw is somewhat ambivalent. It's all well and good to show up to your interview dressed for the part but what does Selene bring to the table? She provides a demonstration of her ability to control all forms of inorganic matter:

Inwardly, Seb here thinks how his power to absorb force and energy that is used against him into his own strength does not save him from "passive" attacks like this one, wondering whether Selene somehow knew that would be his weakness. He's already not a fan.

Selene then zips away, saying she'll be back with a special gift for Sebastian. When she disappears into thin air, Shaw, that total rube, asks his handmaiden Tessa whether Selene can teleport and Tessa - savvy girl she is -- completely punctures Selene's image by saying no, she just put is in a trance for a second and slipped away before we recovered. Well, whatever works.

Elsewhere in the building, Rachel laughs to herself about something she walked in on in her guise as maid. It's not made explicitly clear whether it was some kind of kinky sex, or if Jeff Dunham is visiting, or what.

The puppets!! Haha-- saying such things!!

Unfortunately, Rachel's good-natured chuckle is interrupted when she spots Selene approaching out of the corner of her eye. Instinctively, she wollops her with one good telekinetic blast, basically finishing the millennia-old mutant vampire sorceress in a single blow. And you know what, it was surprisingly easy too.

Rachel's only regret is that Amara isn't here to help finish this off this witch for good.

Well, you see, about that...

Yes, unfortunately, Selene has used her nebulously-defined powers to disguise Amara as herself, then spun her around three times to make her stumble blindly into an attack from Rachel, thereby allowing her to get the drop of her redheaded prey.

Pretty sneaky, sis.

Selene brings a hypno-dazed Rachel and Amara to Shaw as her gift. Trapped within her own mind. Rachel struggles to break free of Selene's powers, she finds herself unable to overcome - but is able to slip her way into Amara's mindspace thanks to the psilink she had established earlier.

Pretty sneaky sis!

Also, her mental self is outfitted with a sexy-evil outfit and fetish mask, you know, to give us guys something to look at for once.

 

With Amara under Selene's influence, they spar a little, prompting Amara to go into her Magma form and unleash her fury... not on Rachel, but on the statue of Selene that presides over the setting.

Pretty sneaky, schist! (That's a geology joke and no, it's not funny if you know what it means)

With that, the hold is broken and the fight resumes in meatspace, with Selene's ground-suffocating powers proving more than the equal of the two young mutants.

Right on cue, the X-Men burst in. Nightcrawler neutralizes Selene by bamfing her away from the battle.

The rest of the X-Men - Rogue, Colossus and Professor Xavier in his astral form - make sure there will be no trouble from the other members of the Hellfire Club, and for his part Shaw is like "Not my circus, not my monkeys."

Amara is still bowed up and wants to go kill Selene, but Professor X informs her that she's an X-Person now, and on their side they don't kill. If you don't like it, there's the door (on the floor, where Colossus knocked it down.) Amara reluctantly accepts that Selene has been non-lethally neutralized by use of a nerve pinch from Nightcrawler.

The group of them then help tidy up the Hellfire Club wait wait, hold on, stop everything, record scratch sound effect, wait.

A nerve pinch?

A nerve pinch?

A nerve, pinch.

From Nightcrawler, not even Colossus or Rogue.

Okay.

Amara asks the X-Men how they found her, and I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I can't. Hold on one more second.

So you're telling me that this 2000-year-old energy-draining, matter-manipulating vampire, who has proven herself in a short span to be able to overwhelm some of the most powerful mutants we've seen, with sharp cunning and a vicious streak a mile wide, can be incapacitated when you squeeze her really hard. 

Like a massage or something.

And courtesy of a character who was on two pages in the entire issue and had no quarrel with her, as would be narratively satisfying.

Ffs. Let's move on then.

Later, we see Jaime Rodriguez, catching the subway home, listening to a news report on his portable TV about the upcoming Dazzler movie, which doubles as a vibe check on the national mood on mutants. Jamie is a little paranoid because he happens to be in possession of a cursed necklace that happens to be beckoning to those with evil in their hearts to free the power within and let him rule the world in exchange for all their worldly desires fulfilled -- typical New Yorker stuff.

Jaime is, unfortunately, unable to notice the mugger sneaking up behind him, who shanks him, and steals the necklace, which leads to...

Suboptimal!

To be continued!

Further Thoughts:

Toward the end of the issue, Rachel does one of "Mom's favourite tricks" by using her extreme telekinetic powers to change all the X-Men's clothes to streetwear. Never mind that back when Jean was doing this it was meant as a signifier that maybe she was getting too powerful and things were about to get Dark. Apparently in Rachel's memory, Jean was constantly flummoxing Scott by doing this to him.

One can only imagine what, exactly, she was making him wear. Get on it fan-artists.

While I did have a serious issue with the incredibly unsatisfying ending, I thought this particular issue was a solid entry, considering it is based on what I would identify to be a dicey premise to begin with: See, the X-Men aren't in it.

Okay. Rachel is obviously intended to be fully inducted into the X-Men's main team from the way she has been positioned. And Amara is a New Mutant, which is X-Men adjacent. Both are new characters, and as we know Chris Claremont can't ever resist a new toy, so it's natural that they get a focus story where they are caught up in their own superheroic pursuit.

What's more, they make a pretty interesting pair. Both have fish-out-of-water identities here in this culture - one a privileged scion of a wealthy Roman family, one a refugee from a dystopian future. Both are working on finding themselves as young women, mutants and superheroes, and as fate would have it, both have had run-ins with Selene. I quite like the dynamic at work here, actually, as both take turns being the moody one and the joyful one. We get even more insight into Rachel's traumatic backstory as we see a thorough glimpse of her time as a Hound, adding layers to a character who has already been robustly developed in sich a short time.

It just happens that, if you've not yet fully bought in on our new character Rachel, and you don't happen to be a fan of the New Mutants, you might find the absence of the X-People we know and love to be distressing. (I myself don't love Magma with her kooky Nova Roma backstory but it is what it is.) For what seems like the third story in not that long, the X-Men are relegated to a last-minute cavalry appearance to save the day and hurriedly dispose of our otherwise-ultimate villainess, which is a shame because we don't even get closure from the actual story that has been building.

(Claremont's declaration that "The fights are bullshit" has never been more apparent than these past few stories. But he does wring lots of juicy psychodrama from the proceedings.)

At this point in the book's run, the X-Men are barely even a thing. They haven't formally disbanded or anything, but the book is increasingly concerned with spotlighting individual members for solo outings and focus-stories rather than ensemble adventures where everyone gets airtime. The X-Men superteam dynamic is crumbling before our eyes, and has been for a while.

This is actually a look that works for the X-Men more than it would any other superteam. While the Avengers are the A-Team banded together to fight the greatest threats, and the Fantastic Four are a family, the X-Men are really just a loose-knit association of individuals who have common goals and common enemies but are really out there living their own lives as best they can. With Wolverine and Kitty off having solo adventures, Storm depowered for a journey of self-discovery, Cyclops off the table, and the team's membership in continued flux, this has never felt more true.

The amazing thing is that this is actually a direction that has been pursued in the past, albeit briefly. You'll recall, after Xavier died (the first time) the X-Men were technically disbanded on orders of their overseers in the U.S. Government, with various members supposedly being stationed in different parts of the country and working in isolation. This was clearly meant as a new status quo to explore for the flagging title, which ended up only lasting about one issue before the original five X-Men were back together under one roof again. But it's a direction I thought was worth pursuing, and sort of manifests itself in this mid-80's period for the X-Men.