UNCANNY X-MEN #196: What Was THAT?!!

The X-Men race against the clock to uncover a murder - without knowing who is the killer, and who is the victim!

Originally Published August, 1985

To begin with, one of the people in this room... is a murderer!

Unfortunately, the room in question is Professor Xavier's lecture hall at Columbia University, which looks to hold about 200 students, where he hears a stray thought about one student plotting to murder another. Thus, he is unable to narrow down the list of suspects - or potential victims - any further, on account of his psychic powers being on the fritz following the attack that left him on Death's door, which occurred not that long ago, outside this very lecture hall, after teaching these very students.

Hm. Who will be the victim indeed?

The Professor brings the case to his X-Men - Rogue, Colossus, Shadowcat, Rachel, Wolverine, not Nightcrawler, and Magneto.

Wait, what?

Wait, what?

That's right, if you didn't follow instructions and read Secret Wars II #1 as Jim Shooter specifically told you to do, you may have missed the fact that Magneto is in the X-Men's good graces now, drawn together to combat, or at least in some way acknowledge, the presence of The Beyonder, the mystical magical cosmic being who treats Marvel Comics Heroes like Action Figures he can just play with anytime he wants.

When we last saw Magneto, had been rescued at sea by Aleytys "Lee" Forrester, captain of the trawler Arcadia, who is also present. And a while before that, we learned that he and Charles were colleagues at a therapy clinic for Holocaust survivors in Israel - a fact that the two of them are finally deciding to acknowledge, now that they're finally putting in face time with each other. 

I'm sure the X-Men will just laugh and laugh now that they know that all these years, they were getting beaten within an inch of their lives by Charles' best friend.

While the Professor tapdances around the fact that his mental powers are failing him, Rachel takes notice of a mysterious stranger entering the deli who just radiates a certain... omnipotent cosmic je ne sais quoi.

This, of course, is the Beyonder, who has descended to Earth in human form to learn the secrets of the heart by living as one of us, just a slob like one of us, like a stranger on the bus, trying to make his way home.

Beyonder is very aloof, not knowing much about human customs, leading to Funny Out of Towner Times on a cosmic level. However, when Rachel tries to press him for more information about who he is and what he wants, he vanishes. Kitty espies this scene and asks Rachel who she was talking to, because nobody was ever there! Gasp!

But then the sandwich guy says "Hey, that creep  just stole a sandwich!" So who's the real idiot here?

Maybe the deli owner is an omega level telepath, you don't know.

Under a lot of normal circumstances I would advise you to not overthink it, but that's kind of how we get our material here, so go nuts.

Now you may be wondering, where is the X-Men's leader, Nightcrawler, in all of this? Naturally, he is having an existential crisis.

It seems the encounter with the Beyonder (in Secret Wars II #1, on stands now, in 1985) has left our devout Catholic X-Man a little shaken. Seeing a being with the emotional intelligence of an 8-year-old wield the power of capital-G God does not square well with Kurt Wagner's personal belief system. He is utterly gooped.

Instead of merely accepting, as many comic book characters and readers do, that a plethora of beings in the universe may possess godlike abilities without being Jehovah Himself, Nightcrawler decides that's it, it doesn't get any bigger than the Beyonder, the Beyonder Is It, the Alpha and the Omega. And as far as deities go, I would have to say he is far from ideal. After all we just watched him steal a sandwich.

Elsewhere, in case we are any doubts as to the intended target of this conspiracy, we see some shadowy figures planting some kind of device under Xavier's desk.

Could it be???

As Rogue and Rachel fly toward Columbia U, they discuss Magneto's recent turn toward the light - Rogue is a little shocked, but asks "who am Ah to talk?" when considering her former company of frequent would-be X-Men Killers, the Brotherhood. Rachel notes that in her time, Magneto is a friend and hero of the mutant resistance so this development isn't exactly shocking her.

Their talk is interrupted when the two spot a mugging in progress and decide to do the hero thing - only for their rescuee to express a lack of appreciation when he realizes he's been saved by a pair of stinkin' muties.

Rachel lashes out, annoyed to find that this timeline isn't quite so unlike the way things started in her own timeline.

Elsewhere, Kitty and Wolverine share a smoke and ruminate on the Professor's wellbeing, given he is acting very "off," as well as whether they can trust Magneto, a man who has literally tried to kill both of them on various occasions. Kitty speculates that perhaps Magneto has Charles under his control, but Wolverine decides that his senses say Magneto is legit, and also "People change." Which is more true in comics than in real life, for sure.

Kitty goes to check on the next group of subjects, who happen to be her cohorts from the seminar she is taking at the university (as a 15-year-old wizkid). When she arrives, she notices something distinctly off about the vibe in the room, and they immediately react to her with hostility, realizing that she attends Xavier's school upstate, and may, in fact, be a "mutie" like him. (Wow, when did it become common knowledge that Xavier was a mutant? Paging Jacob Dunman.)

They have the following incredibly uncomfortable exchange...

Yeah, that's right, in case you can't translate my tactful censorship, young Katherine Pryde, who is 15 years old, white, privileged, a mutant, living in the 1980's and fictional, seems to believe she has "N-word privileges."

By my reckoning, she does not.

This leads to a confrontation, and unfortunately this group of undergrad undergrounders gets the drop on our mutant hero, pepper spraying and chloroforming her before she has a chance to phase.

Shes fought the Brood, the Sidri and the N'Garai, but Phil and Bobby from Anthropology 203 were too much for her.

While Wolverine, Colossus and Rogue navel-gaze about what the use of being a mutant hero actually is (you know, protecting a world that hates and fears you) Rachel tries to alert Xavier and Magneto to the presence of the Beyonder. Unfortunately, when she uses her psychic powers to help them see him, it detonates the "psi-scream" device that the murderers have planted in Xavier's office, which is designed to reflect any psychic energy back on its source a hundredfold.

Which sounds incredibly sophisticated, both in concept and execution, for a bunch of flatscan humans.

In this case, it doesn't hit its intended target of Charles Xavier (whose infirmity ironically has protected him) but Rachel, whose darkside - the Hound in her - emerges.

She is not happy.

Rachel hies hence and saves Kitty from death at the hands of that El Debarge-looking cat Phil. When he fires a gun on Rachel, she uses her telekinetic supremacy to stop the bullet and redirect it toward him, but then it stops in midair, seized by the power of... magnetism!

 

While Rachel declares that she is doing no less than what they would have done to her and "no more than they deserve," Magneto of all people preaches clemency - saying that yes, at one point he would have been the first to meet violence in kind, but look at where it's gotten him? He is more hated and more feared, hunted the world over, abandoned by his children (when did it become common knowledge that Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver were his children - Jacob Dunman we need you stat!) and worst of all, his tactics have only made the lot of mutants worse, not better.

Rachel, through her personal experience in the future, is unconvinced. After all, she has seen the extreme manifestation of hatred and been used unwillingly as its weapon. It's a hard argument to top. 

Magneto manages to convince her that killing these people would be giving them the final victory, proving that mutants are dangerous and to be feared. Ultimately she relents, choosing only to erase the perpetrators' memories of who they are to protect themselves.

We part with some words from the Beyonder about how Magneto and Rachel chose to wield their power - they they could make the world anything they choose and yet do not even use it to extinguish lives that threaten them. And on that note, he departs.

Further Thoughts:

Before we get to unpacking this entire issue, I should also make note of a scene I skipped in the writeup where Storm communes with a lion on the African veldt, only to be struck down by a bullet from Andrea, the Nazi femme fatale who, along with her brother Andreas, she had encountered and clashed with in the previous issue.

Storm, being on a walkabout phase similar to Cyclops' post-Dark Phoenix pilgrimage, has been appearing intermittently with the events of her life parceled in brief bites between the major story. It's not easy to wedge it into a blithe description like mine but it bears paying attention to. She's gone from the team but not the story.

This issue handles Magneto's transition from would-be world-conquering villain to uneasy hero about as well as could be expected. If it seems abrupt, remember the ground was well-primed for it, following the revelation of his tragic backstory, his connection with Xavier, and even before all of that, the revelation that he was working alongside the future remnants of the X-Men in "Days of Future Past." The story gives him a perspective and a piece to speak that seems like a natural evolution of who he has already been, yet giving him a markedly different position in the story.

The most difficult part of this story to unpack is the the anti-mutant plot, which culminates in Rachel and Magneto's exchange. The mutant metaphor for oppression is a very important quality in X-Men comics, yet you have to acknowledge that it doesn't graft neatly 1:1 onto reality. Mutants can do spectacular things and choose to use their powers for good or ill, and it can be deployed to protect them and diffuse a situation by erasing a racist's memory of you. That's unlike any real-life marginalized group, and yet very much like certain myths used to propagate racism. It's a tough balance of keeping the metaphor intact by not removing it too far from reality, while also considering the implications of the fictitious scenario. 

I'm also of the belief that fictional racism must never supercede real-life racism. It was very wrong to put a slur in Kitty's mouth, much like it was wrong 30 years later when Tom King put a slur on the opening page of a Vision comic to make a point about robots (or in a roundabout way, try to use the robots to make a point about real life, much as Claremont is trying to use mutants to make a point about real life.) There is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the do's and don'ts of metaphorical racism, but there is a line there. Don't do this, folks.

Lastly, you have the Beyonder bumbling invisibly through the story. His presence does have some plot-relevance in that he is sort of what triggers the explosion meant to kill Xavier and sets Rachel off (I suppose literally anything could have been used in that slot) but mostly he is a Greek Chorus of sorts, commenting on the proceedings. I do find Nightcrawler's crisis of faith a somewhat specious plot direction, but it's something. I'm just disappointed that Beyonder's big Final Thought concerns "Gee, how is power used?" rather than "What's up with racists?" It seems to me that if you were trying to understand humanity, and make some meaningful comics out of it, that would be a place to start. It strikes me as something that was written by Jim Shooter, who was the father of the Beyonder, and who often used the dilemma of having ultimate power as a theme in his writing. 

If I am critical of a few moments and notes here, let it be known that I think an insanely ambitious thing has been done in this issue and very well, where a ton of disparate but equally relevant threads have been drawn together: the growing anti-mutant hysteria (marked by frequent references to how great Nimrod is), the specifics of the attack on Charles, Rachel's past in the future, Magneto's face turn, Storm's pilgrimage (the cause of which is an outgrowth of an anti-mutant initiative) and manages to work in the Beyonder in as unobtrusive a way possible. The great thing about X-Men at this point in history is that there are so many cards in their hand and just playing them as they come makes the book very strong.