Storm makes some new old friends
Originally Published March 1987
We begin on a chilly San Francisco night, where... oh my God, no!
We are, in fact, getting a vision of the fiery plain wreck that is part of Madelyne Pryor's backstory -- the one that occurred the very same moment Jean Grey sacrificed herself on the moon (September 1st, 1980-something.) Madelyne, of course, walks away unscathed, to be forever haunted by the tragedy.
She awakens in an ambulance but realizes she's been hallucinating -- the crash was years ago. She's being taken by some familiar faces.
You'll recall a few weeks ago we saw that Madelyne had been admitted to a hospital in San Francisco with gunshot wounds. In a pretty interesting doubleback for this serialized story, we see how she got there, as she is being targeted by the Marauders Scalphunter and Arclight (Maddie gets a surprisingly good wak in on the super-strong Arclight) and for reasons unknown - but undoubtedly nefarious - her infant son has been taken.
She tries to escape but Scalp is, admittedly, very good at what he does.
Back in New York, the X-Men are loading their wounded and dying into the Blackbird, bound for Muir Isle where Moira is better equipped to tend to their injuries. This includes the comatose Nightcrawler, the paralyzed Colossus, and Shadowcat, who is stuck in intangible form, as well as numerous Morlocks. Accompanying them are Callisto, who is duty-bound to her people, Psylocke, who can telepathically screen for possible attacks from the X-Men's enemies, Rogue, who has the physical ability to fend off such attacks, and new members Dazzler and Longshot, who basically unknowns, which the X-Men don't really need to be dealing with at this time.
Storm and Wolverine, meanwhile, will be staying behind to take care of some issues on this side of the pond. Wolverine is a little enshookethed due to the recent failure of his senses that caused him to attack Storm, thinking she was still possessed by Malice (the evil ghost mutant who lives in a necklace and makes people be mean). Storm tells him, essentially, "Don't worry bud, we all have bad days." They have a mission to complete.
That mission takes them to the home of Jean Grey's sister Sara, which has been burned to the ground. Wolverine's arson-senses are tingling but it appears Sara and her kids got away. Storm is relieved, but laments that they're always
reacting to threats, always fighting on their opponents' terms.
It's funny you should mention that, because I believe Wolverine recently had an in-depth convo with Rachel on that very subject. How did that go again?
Riiiiiight, right, right, right... okay, we'll put a pin in that for now and circle back.
Storm is also disturbed that the Marauders are attacking the X-Men through their friends and even loose associates. This brings her to thoughts of Forge, and though she still hates him (and who could blame her) perhaps it is time to see if he can follow up on the whole "give me back my powers" project.
Wolverine continues to sniff around the scene and recognizes two familiar scents. Cyclops -- ("our former teammate" Storm specifies) -- and... no... it can't be... not again!!!
That's right, for the second time in recent days, Wolverine has caught a fresh scent of Jean Grey palling around with the other four original X-Men, now known as X-Factor, despite the fact that she's been famously dead for many years. Thrown into some kind of fit, Wolverine loses it and accidentally clonks Storm. Completely absorbed in his confusion, pain and grief, Wolverine runs off into the distance, leaving Storm prone and unconscious.
I'm sure she'll be fine.
On the Blackbird bound for Muir Isle, Kitty - reduced to a pale almost nothingness and unable to speak, steps out of her holding area to visit Longshot and admire his beauty and even stealing a kiss which, to her surprise, he seems to feel.
As she scuttles, embarrassed, back to her lifecell, Longshot confides to Rogue that when they "touched," he received a vision of her future - chaos-ridden and marked by a dark void that hungers for her. Longshot wonders if this means death.
Storm awakens in a dungeon, shackled to a wall - a predicament she is not unfamiliar with. Luckily, whomever has taken her hasn't done a very good job frisking since they left her famous lockpicks.
Storm wanders a while, thinking about whether Wolverine is there too, and if not, will he be able to find her -- and if he does, will she even want him to, given his increased instability? In the course of her search she happens upon a fellow prisoner, a punky runaway-looking youth.
She emerges into the main floor of what appears to be a hunting lodge. Soon the occupants return and while she tries to hide, she is quickly discovered by one of them.
The three men all appear to be older and wearing corny old-timey superhero costumes. She puts up a good struggle trying to fight her way to the exit, but is overwhelmed by their powers.
Later, the three men bring Storm and their other captive outside and explain their "deal." They are Frank Bohannan (Crimson Commando), Louis Hamilton (Stonewall), and Martin Fletcher (Super Sabre). They used their superpowers to fight Nazis in World War II but were dismayed to find that when they came home it was to a country full of do-gooder peaceniks and crooks and a government that wanted to retire them instead of sending them back overseas to kick foreign ass, because those namby-pambies in the Congress or whatever seemed to think that responding to the Soviets with unchecked aggression would provoke some kind of nuclear war or something, those cowards.
Instead, these three men retired to the woods of upstate New York to embark upon a mission of their own - targeting the criminal element by luring them in and hunting them for sport. Take for instance Priscilla here. She and her boyfriend Tommy come from an upper-crust, monied background in Newport, but get their jollies by dealing drugs around town. Thus far they've been able to escape the law because of their family connections, but no longer. They've already dealt with Tommy, and now it's Priscilla's turn.
Now, I may just be some bleeding heart goody-goody social justice cadet, but it seems to me the real crooks are those family connections, the scions of society, the law enforcement agents and government contacts who permit these small-time theill crooks to run their operation without so much as a peep, but I suppose that's too many people to kidnap and let loose in the woods. So Priscilla will have to do.
Storm, meanwhile, is caught in the crossfire. They've surmised that she was a looter and thief since they found her unconscious at the scene of the fire, with the victims' possessions on her person, a crime as deserving of the death penalty as any in the Old Soldiers' book. So she'll have to play their Deadly Game too.
The fact that this trio of crime fighting super whizzes could happen upon Storm in that state and surmise that she is in fact the perpetrator of the crime and not, say, a victim or at the very least a well-meaning associate of the victim, suggests that perhaps these would-be gumshoes are not utilizing the most stringent due diligence. Storm pleads her case briefly for the record, knowing that it's falling on deaf ears (metaphorically - I think these old guys can still hear) and takes off for the woods with Priscilla.
Further Thoughts:
Quietly - almost so subtly that we can't even be sure it's happening - we seem to be saying a long goodbye to longtime members Shadowcat, Nightcrawler and Colossus, three characters who have defined the book for many years. It seems impossible that this should happen, and yet when you realize how many supposedly permanent members have left over the years, combined with the team picking up new members like Dazzler, Longshot Psylocke you realize this could be it, at least for now. The transition at work here is kind of an ingenious sleight of hand since you don't even truly know what is being done.
Part of what propels the X-Men at this point in their existence is that things don't happen in a neat, orderly fashion, but more likely they'll have to face two or three things at once. It wasn't that long ago that a fight with the Hellfire Club was interrupted by Nimrod, who had been lurking in the background for months on end, and that itself provided an opening for Spiral, the body-modifying six-armed witch from the Mojoverse to swoop in and abduct a member of the team. Here again, while the X-Men are primarily concerned with the Marauders - a very pressing concern indeed, which now even concerns Madelyne Pryor and her now-missing son - Storm stumbles into this whole other, totally unrelated conflict.
If you happen to think that these Old Soldiers are just some kind of weird diversion - as I did when I first read this story years ago - we're going to go into a much deeper dive on what I think is the significance of this story in the next issue. But for now, I think we should all just breathe in the chaos and appreciate how non-compartmentalized these stories are, enabling an almost self-sustaining anything-can-happen hothouse environment. This is something that's going to come to a glorious apex in the next few years, but we'll get there when we get there.
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