UNCANNY X-MEN #207: Ghosts

All Day I Dream About SNIKT.

Originally Published July 1986

We begin with...

Yes, Logan. We begin with Phoenix -- Rachel Summers -- in the post-apocalyptic nightmare from whence she originated. For reasons unknown she is being pursued by her friend and teammate, Wolverine, and he aims to kill her.

As I said. Rachel fends him off with a telekinetic attack, but she knows it's only a matter of time before his tracking abilities enable him to catch up to her. As she shambles through the ruined city, she finds herself garbed in her Hound gear, shocked to find that, perhaps, it was all a dream -- she never made it back to the past, and she remains in the decaying city of New York under the rule of the Sentinels, fated to resume her place as a Hound.

But if that's the case, why is Wolverine here, and why is he so intent on killing her? He mutters about balancing the scales - about how her crimes as a Hound can never truly be forgiven - as he catches her and delivers the deathblow.

And, well...

Yes, it was all a dream, but Rachel is no less tormented in the waking world, haunted by survivor guilt and remorse for her actions. 

The X-Men have come to the Morlock Tunnels, where they are hoping the much-lauded Morlock Healer -- or as we know him on this blog Dave Stevenson -- can repair the damage done to Wolverine following his battle with Lady Deathstrike. In her distress, Rachel shatters a mirror, for which Kitty chides her, saying that it may very well be some Morlock's prized possession. It's a rude way to treat your hosts, having a severe emotional crisis all over their stuff.

Also handy for metaphor-making.

Elsewhere, Wolverine awakens from his slumber, dimly aware he's been busy in the night.

The X-Men and Morlocks gather in the alley, where Rachel receives a cold greeting from Storm. Rogue reasons that the X-Men's leader may be a tad put out by the fact that Rachel recently absconded with her life-essence -- specifically against her will -- in order to gain enough power to destroy the universe (well, at least it was for a good cause.) Rachel defends herself, saying she really thought she was onto something with that scheme.

There's also some doubt as to whether any of the X-Men actually did participate in that little caper willingly.

Something to chew on, for Ray.

Later that night, Rachel dreams of herself in a pastoral Japanese setting... a very odd locale indeed for a woman who seems to have lived her whole life in New York, first in its ruined post-Sentinel state, and and more recently in its only-somewhat-better pre-Seinfeld years.

Of course, she is having Wolverine's Dreams. That is, the part of him that she absorbed when she borrowed his life-essence, which would explain how come he keeps showing up looking like a fucking nightmare from hell.

Yes, Dream Wolverine (Wolverdream? We've got to workshop that) absolutely wants Rachel's blood on his claws. In a truly harrowing sequence by JRJr., Wolverine chases Rachel through the house as she pleads that the two are friends, and Logan snarls back "Friendship involves trust..."

Rachel awakens in an alley. She sneers at some passing humans, bitter that they get to go on with their lives complacently, while the X-Men save the world time and again (and only intermittently come close to ending the universe) even though the general population would rather see them dead. Rachel wishes, briefly, that she could have died in her own time, with everyone else she loved, which is... dark, for something you get at the corner store spinner rack next to the sourballs for 75 cents.

Dreaming again, Rachel finds herself under a hot sun, still running for her life. She tears at her clothes and skin until it reveals another self, the Rachel Summers that might have been.

But whatever solace she takes in this "second chance" is short lived.

She awakens again, this time in a subway car. Running from a cop who wants to bring her in, she finds herself back at a familiar setting...

She recalls the man and his acts of kindness as well as his unfortunate death at the hands of Selene, but is upset to realize she can't even remember his name. You know, if that sort of thing is important to you.

Rachel resolves to find Selene and take out her frustrations on her, first going to her boy Friedrich von Roehm to bring her to the ancient vampire sorceress, using his access as a member of the Hellfire Club.

Disguised as a maid, she sneaks into Selene's quarters and has a moment of hesitation - yes, she did recently behold the sanctity of all life in the universe from the vantage point of a God with the power of total life and death, and determined it was, on the whole, beautiful and worthy of mercy, but Selene? That bitch has got to go.

She powers up and begins her attack on the sleeping Selene. Being that Rachel has grown in mastery over her powers in the past few months, the witch is basically no match for the newly-minted Phoenix.

The quarrel intensifies when Rachel learns that Selene in fact remembers the name of the man she killed that night - Nicholas Damiano - and taunts Rachel that she "honors" the man she killed moreso than her foe does.

Don't feel too bad, Rachel -- I'm pretty bad with names too.

The X-Men, who have noticed that Rachel has gone missing from the Morlock Tunnels, are out searching for her, perhaps thinking that their most powerful member, who has a history of being emotionally erratic to say the least, and whom lately they have been a little less than warm and comforting, maybe shouldn't be out this late unsupervised. 

But Wolverine has gotten a head start.

Rachel can't believe it and seems to think she's having another nightmare, but she's awake. Then she wonders if Logan is under Selene's power, but her psychic powers tell her otherwise.

She pleads her case - Selene is a cold-blooded killer and no law can touch her. Any plea for mercy rings hollow, she says, coming from a killer like him. Wolverine puts it simply:

 

Wolverine is trained in the use of lethal force, and has a code of honor - he knows when to kill in the heat of battle and when it would be stone-cold murder. Attacking someone in their bed for something they did months ago largely falls under the latter category.

Wolverine reiterates his request - nay, demand - that she desist. Rachel declares that the only way to stop her is to kill her.

So that's it, they shake hands and walk away.

Or not.

Further Thoughts:

There feels like something of a meta element to discussions like these wherein two characters have to discuss when it is appropriate for them, as "heroes," to kill. It's actually not hard to see where Rachel is coming from, as Selene has taken untold lives over her millennia of existence (being that her prolonged life is as a result of fairly-frequent human sacrifice) and is guaranteed to take more on the way to causing much human suffering as a member of the Hellfire Club, so can it ever be considered wrong to kill her? That is, if one believes that killing in the name of justice is part of the remit of a hero. It just so happens that Rachel's mission here isn't totally altruistic -- she's acting irrationally, trying to seize control of something in a world where her sanity and sense of purpose is slipping away.

So when I see a conversation like this, about what "heroes" do and do not do, I often think about it in terms of what they are permitted to do by the standards of the medium. When someone like Wolverine, who does kill, shows mercy, there is often some rationalization for it for the audience's benefit, but there has also got to be some reticence on the part of Marvel Comics to glorify killing one's enemies -- these are, after all, comics that you can buy on a spinner rack for less than a buck in 1986, and as compromised as the Comics Code Authority is, the cover still bears the symbol of their approval, indicating it is safe for children. (Me, I think the X-Men comic has long been a bit too heavy for kidlets and is probably mostly being read by teens and twentysomethings by '86.) So having a code or a moral standard may just be justification for why they're not doing something in-universe that they are barred from doing out of universe. Which isn't to say I want to see Rachel kill Selene, only that it's hard to pin down exactly why I don't, and why I won't.

And anyway this conflict ends with Wolverine impaling his own teammate when she refuses to comply, so -- how strict can the code actually be?

That ending. Oh, wow, and all the buildup. At a time when Uncanny X-Men has become slightly inconsistent -- mostly enjoyable but not on any kind of uninterrupted hotstreak the way it once was -- this issue is a classic the moment you put it down. Claremont and Romita succeed in folding in all of the anxiety, trauma and frustration that has been heaped on Rachel, from the moment of her introduction right up to her most recent actions, playing it in the form of those fantastic dream sequences (which are amplified in scope due to Phoenix's phenomenal cosmic powers) and then literalizing it in her quest to kill Selene and Wolverine's attempt to stop her, leading to the most shocking twist since, perhaps, Jean Grey the Phoenix Entity destroyed itself on the moon.

And I absolutely must shout out the work that John Romita Jr. - along with inker Dan Green and colorist Glynis Wein, who always steps up when it's time to do freaky-deaky dream shit - does in this issue -- the real-world stuff is as tense and emotionally wrought as anything he has depicted, but in the dream sequences he flexes as hard as he can by depicting the slightly-off-kilter surroundings and the very monstrous dream-Wolverine as a monstrous interpretation of our favourite Canadian mutant, hidden in shadow and insatiably stalking Rachel.

We know that in the waking world, Wolverine is one of the good guys, but he has that dark side to him so to see him posited as the enemy of Rachel's dreams is a disturbing enough warping of the character - close to his reality yet so far. When we find the truth in waking light, that Wolverine is trying to save the world from Rachel, and Rachel from herself, rather than punish or torment her, it hits powerfully and tragically.

In killing(?) Rachel, Wolverine has somehow cut the Gordian knot of her character. Much like her mother the cosmic entity resembling her mother, Rachel represents a problem as much as she does a protagonist: she is powerful on a level of magnitude far beyond what the X-Men usually represent, but she is also the embodiment of a trauma too big to ever be resolved, a refugee from a world that has inflicted many deep psychological wounds on her, and truly a wild card among our heroes. Her frequently erratic behavior and inability to fully adapt to her surroundings has always reflected that, branding her an outsider among our heroes (who are already outsiders each in their own way.) She is tormented, dangerous, scarred and ultimately very unpredictable and capable of anything, which has really influenced the tone of the book during her time here. She has been an interesting fit here, she seems to pull the focus more and more away from what the book was supposed to be about (admittedly, Secret Wars II is largely responsible for that job, and she merely played the biggest part in it.) It could be then that there was simply no way for the book to proceed with the character, if her trauma could never be resolved and she is stuck reeling from her past baggage, and so something dramatic must be done to spur her, and the book itself, forward.