The X-Men must team with the Hellfire Club in a winner-take all battle against Nimrod - plus the fate of Phoenix!
Originally Published September 1986
The X-Men are in a pickle.
See, they had arrived in Central Park in search of their wayward teammate Rachel (of late known as Phoenix) who, in a moment of questionable judgment, had sought to kill in cold blood her longtime personal foe Selene, but instead ended up on the wrong side of Wolverine's unbreakable adamantium claws. In the course of their search, the X-Men ended up in a scuffle with their enemies the Lord Cardinal of the Club Hellfire (Shaw, Leland, Selene, plus gal-friday Tessa, hanger-on Friedrich von Roehm, and numerous hired lackeys.) And the fight wasn't going great for the X-Men, but I wouldn't say it was a total disaster, until this guy showed up:
Yes, in the center of the action here is Big Fuchsia himself, Nimrod, the killer robot mutant-hunter, occasional fishmarket worker and weekend child educator from the future (he's got a lot of side-hustles, this Nimrod.) Rod is here to finish his stated mission of killing mutants for the crime of being mutants with a particular focus on his fellow futurian Phoenix, who at this moment is lying near death elsewhere in the park.
The first blow against Nimrod is struck by Rogue, who uses a combination of her Ms. Marvel powers and Colossus' organic steel skin to create an earthquake effect. This enables Shadowcat to slip underground and rescue Colossus, who has been sinking below the ground due to Leland's mass-related powers, in a deft bit of leadership strategy from Storm.
The X-Men's offensive continues as Rogue hurls Shaw at Nimrod, who deflects with his super shields or whatever, sending Sebastian rocketing into the atmosphere, possibly free of the Earth's orbit.
None of the assembled mutants, or their various subgroups, are a match for Nimrod, of course - his super nuh-uh powers allow him to say nuh-uh to Selene's matter-manipulation abilities (no fair!) and other weapons prove equally hopeless against him. Their only chance, Storm declares, is to work (gasp) together!
Von Roehm, who is in less-than-clearheaded state, having been devolved to an animalistic mentality by Selene, objects, and opts instead to try to kill his would-be allies.
While Rogue attempts, in vain, to keep Nimrod busy with her combo powers while the assembled mutants strategize, Rachel watches from a distance, seeming to breathe her last breath, when she hears a strange sound emanating from the park's Delacorte Theater, beckoning her onward.
This is (for the time being at least) the entry to the Body Shoppe, the mystical establishment where Spiral - that psychotic six-armed extradimensional warrior-sorceress with a sideline of her own as a member of the Government's Freedom Force - plies her trade as an extreme makeover artist. We've seen what we can do with Yuriko Oyama, dare she turn her talents on Rachel?
Elsewhere, the consolidated mutant group works to take on their unbeatable common foe. Leland - who throughout this battle has revealed himself through his inner monologue as something of a coward, steps up to the plate to use his mass-increasing powers on Nimrod. With the robot on the ropes, Nightcrawler charges ahead - over Storm's protests - to attempt a stunt that had worked before, teleporting piece by piece of Nimrod away. But the X-Men's leader correctly surmises that the robot is capable of learning (and not just geometry!)
That's right, Nimrod hits Nightcrawler so hard he just flicking gets bamfed out of his damn clothes. Did he teleport to safety? Did he disintegrate into a million little pieces? Is Nightcrawler dead? Trapped in another dimension? We don't know. We literally don't know.
Things go from bad to worse when Leland uses his powers so hard he has a damn infarction.
The situation is looking pretty bleak as Nimrod prepares to resume his attack. But then...
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| Oh, you didn't know? |
Colossus rises from the grave and brings his tag team partner with him.
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| Your ass better call somebody! |
Using the "phasing inside of you in a way that totally is not sexual, purely tactical" technique previously road-tested against the Beyonder's Sentinels, Shadowcat and Colossus are able to give Nimrod a good what-for, just in the nick of time.
Selene uses some buried cables to hold Nimrod prone while Leland, with his last breath, brings Shaw plummeting back to Earth, in what is admittedly one of the coolest possible things I've seen from my very least favourite Lord Cardinal.
Unfortunately, as Wolverine prepares to deliver the deathblow, Nimrod has the wherewithal to teleport himself away.
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| Aw man, we're missing the deathblow! |
The X-Men escape mostly intact (okay, two of their members are possibly dead) as do the Hellfire Club (well, two of their members are definitely dead) but the sound of sirens in the distance put all the mutants into cheese-it mode, and Tessa offers the X-Men a brief continuation of their truce to offer tbe X-Men the sanctuary of the Hellfire Club. (The Morlocks have already seemingly long since vanished, as is their brand.)
Elsewhere, in the mysterious Body Shoppe, Rachel sees one last vision of her friends in the X-Men, and realizes that yes, that part of her life is truly over and it's time to move forward - into whatever Spiral has in store for her. She sashays away, out of the X-Men forever and into the mysterious blinding light, her fate a true unknown.
Further Thoughts:
By God King, that was a slobberknocker.
As a comic series, the Uncanny X-Men is a lot of things: hugely character-driven. An absorbing ongoing soap opera. A piquant social commentary on the nature of prejudice and oppression. And yeah, it's a superhero comic book where characters with fabulous powers are tasked with defeating each other in fights that cause a lot of damage. Oftentimes, some of its other characteristics overshadow that last one, causing the fights and action to come off as somewhat obligatory and rote, as if the creators can hardly believe they have to bother with them, but when this book wants to do a really good fight, it can pull it off with aplomb.
There's something really appealing about having the X-Men join forces with some of their worst villains in a situation that pits both groups against a remorseless and implacable killing machine that wants them all dead. And it's a hard balance to strike putting your protagonists on the ropes and having them pull off an exciting, well-earned (albeit narrow) victory. There was just so much going on here and it all hit. And while interviews reveal that Chris Claremont was usually less than engaged with the super-fight-writing part of his job, he clearly engages and gets a lot of inventive material out of the assembled powers.
Between the blockbuster action and the mindbending walk through the Body Shoppe, this issue was also a hell of a round for John Romita Jr.
Nimrod has been a going concern for much of the past year, one of several utterly unstoppable villains the X-Men have met lately, along with several they'll be up against in the near future. Setting his power at such a magnitude makes it hard to deal with him as an antagonist but the book sorts through all of that capably by letting you know that even if he can't be put away for good, he can be worn down to nothingness of our heroes have enough guile, tenacity, and resources. This is not a final victory, just a cartoon one, where Nimrod will return whenever the story calls for it, at some vaguely-defined place down the road.
Me, I would love to see a very particular arc with Nimrod, since he noted in the previous issue that he seemed to be growing, learning, teaching, and learning - including learning, somehow, to like and love things. I think it would create an interesting symmetry to see him eventually learn, much as Rachel did when given the Beyonder's ultimate power over the universe, that all life is sacred, even mutants causing his programming to truly reform, in an extreme extension of your typical "trick your robot with logic" scheme that once saw Cyclops send all the Sentinels to go fight the sun. But unfortunately, despite some grounding in the text here, I don't believe this angle is ever pursued, and Nimrod does not become an antecedent to further robots who befriend small boys with heartwarming results like the Terminator, the Iron Giant, and Kevin the Robot from Saved by the Bell.
The Hellfire Club's role in all this is interesting. When they were first introduced back in 1980, they seemed to have a very unique role in the X-Men's ongoing saga - conspirators, master-plotters, chessplayers (even styling themselves after Chess pieces!) Shaw in particular seemed to be someone invested in playing three or four steps ahead, perhaps even on another level from his adversaries. In the years since, however, they've only intermittently come into conflict with the X-Men directly or indirectly, mostly as Saturday Morning-style villains in the kooky (and poorly plotted out) body-swapping scheme, and then as a vehicle to showcase and support the orders-of-magnitude more powerful Selene. Now they're wearing ugly costumes and fighting in the park, while Leland plays funny-fat-coward and Shaw is used as a human meteorite. They've taken the reverse course from their former-help Cole, Reese and Macon, who have been elevated from generic gun-toters to real threats under Lady Deathstrike.
On a wide scale, that leaves me cold since I had to see potential squandered but it doesn't stop this from being a good story.
The other focus of this issue is Rachel, whom I have noted in the past is something of a problem, much like her mother the entity resembling her mother. She is extremely powerful and what's worse, extremely wracked with trauma and bears a somewhat reckless streak. As such, she has tended to overtake any story where she is featured since being introduced about two years earlier. As dynamic of a character as this makes (I know she's a favourite of a lot of readers) and I can truly respect that, there comes a time to lay a toy aside when you've truly played with every feature of it and aren't getting anything new. Wolverine "killing" her would have seemed to be the solution to that riddle, but in the end, more compellingly, she winds up on this mysterious path with Spiral, preying on her weakness with seductive promises. This is so much the better, signaling to us that while Rachel's part of this story is coming to an end, her story is not over. Clever, Chris.
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