Toot toot! Wolverine and Carol take a tour of a Green and Pleasant Land.
Originally Published November 1988
Wolverine and Rogue -- that is to say, Carol Danvers, whose persona has overtaken Rogue's usual southern belle identity -- have escaped from their imprisonment on Genosha and stolen an aircraft and are making a break for it, with the Genoshan Magistrates in hot pursuit. On the plus side, They are invisible to all technology, meaning the Magistrates will have to physically board the plane to confirm that the targets are on board, which sounds super-inconvenient for them. On the negative column for our heroes, they are currently without mutant powers, and when can you ever remember anyone accomplishing anything without the aid of their mutant abilities?
Yes, Logan and Carol will have to make do as a pair of regular schmoes with physically perfect bodies, elite level combat training and keen strategic minds. They haven't got a chance.
Leading the pursuit is Dr. Moreau, aka the Genegineer, the top muckymuck whose work lobotomizing mutants into placid servitude is what Makes Genosha Great Again. He wants these two taken alive, because why wouldn't you?
Our heroes give their pursuers the slip, rigging their plane to explode once opened (no Magistrates were harmed.) Moreau ponders the possibilities -- that these are foreign agents bent on learning, and perhaps exposing, Genosha's secrets.
His inquiring mind also wants to know why, exactly, they can't keep any digital records of these subjects, and so everything has to be written out by hand.
The good news is, they might not have to wonder for long -- without his powers, Wolverine's hemoglobin count is abnormally low. Without his healing factor, his body is killing him!
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| Paid for by the Genoshan Bureau of Everything's Great Here |
Through a tourism video Wolverine happens to watch through a store window (the kind of exposition that today would be delivered by data page and honestly I can't decide which is better) we get a primer on the history of Genosha, located between Madagascar and the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. It was colonized -- er, settled -- during the age of exploration, as a trading port, until the discovery of iron ore on the island which today provides the backbone of Genosha's economy.
The propaganda video goes on to boast that there is no poverty or hardship or even racism here in this place whose culture and society is the envy of the world, everything is Jim dandy, everyone is happy, don't ask how, don't worry about it, it's not important, we're just great, end of story.
Wolverine, of course, knows better -- he's peeked under the rug of Genoshan life and seen all the crumbs they've swept there.
Speaking of crumbs, nearby we see some Magistrates abuse a mutant sanitation worker for daring to sprinkle a few errant drops of water in his general vicinity, nearly getting his nice green uniform damp.
Logan and Carol head into a Magistrate Bar, where Carol extols the virtues of "Dressing Like a Ho so's people forget to remember your face," a time-tested tradition of spycraft.
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| This is why James Bond always rocks a tube top. |
Inside, Logan and Carol begin to work the room. They're aided, indirectly, by none other than young Phillip Moreau, who is glugging it up in the bar, causing a scene, antagonizing the government officials on their own turf.
A brawl breaks out, and in the chaos Wolverine and Carolgue pick some pockets to get some Magistrate IDs.
In the alley, the overhear the Magistrates say they're going to put the kid on the "mutie train." Wolverine, with his keen senses, twigs that this is the sort of thing they ought to look into.
Elsewhere, at the Citadel, Genegineer David Moreau has a face to face with Jenny Ransome, who is being prepped for her mutant enslave-ification. He delivers the bad news that Jenny failed her human test and the results were covered up. As she processes this, he tries to put things into perspective for her. "Sure it sounds like a fate worse than death..."
Yes, he gives her the rah-rah country-over-bodily-autonomy speech that no doubt wins over plenty of hearts and minds of prospective slaves. In fact, when Jenny drops the S-word, David notes that hey, they're entirely dependent on those so-called slaves, and with their mutant powers, they could kill us if we didn't get them first! A real winning argument to be sure.
In a final twist of the knife, Jenny won't even be able to use her skills as a nurse and healer, as she's being re-programmed for mining or whatever, which is where people are needed. Maybe her kids, though.
That is to say, the offspring generated by her raw genetic material. Obviously she can't be permitted to procreate, or have relationships, or even make decisions for herself. That'd be too much.
Elsewhere, Madelyne is getting the same treatment, despite being 100% normal human. The Genoshans present give her a little bit of an info packet about the skinsuit that she's wearing, which will be bonded to her permanently (it recycles all waste, prevents her from gettin' frisky, and of course marks her outwardly as a mutant slave.)
Maddie is... reluctant to participate.
Elsewhere on the island, the X-Men have finally arrived to wreck some Magistrates.
But while Psylocke is in the process of scrambling their memories, she experiences a strange and intense psychic backlash.
She can't pinpoint the source, but it seems to us that someone has installed a psychic anti-tampering device in our friend Maddie. Maybe it's her new friends.
Over on the Mutie Train, Wolverine pops his claws -- under great pain due to his lack of healing factor -- to gain them entry. Being that they are dressed as Magistrates, the mutants on board don't take kindly to them, but "backup" soon arrives in the form of their "fellow" magistrates.
They explain that "someone" dressed this normie up like a mutant and threw him on the train. The Magistrate explains that usually, if someone sneaks aboard, then the final stop is their final stop, no ifs ands or buts, but he recognizes the kid as the Genegineer's son, which is gonna be awkward, for sure.
Wolverine and Carol are left to mop up this "Genegineer's Son" Mess, as the Magistrates turn their attention to, ah... correcting the mutants who threatened them.
As they ride off Wolverine resolves to take a little bit of civic action, and I'm not talking about calling Gloria Allred.
Further Thoughts:
It's worth noting the intermittent effect of the privilege Phillip Moreau has from being the Genegineer's son. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't, depending on the mood, attitudes and sympathies of the people he's up against. Who can says what's worst -- selectively and inconsistently applying the law, or upholding it with strict rigidity, no ifs ands or buts? What's definitely worst is when those in power use it to protect their own and inflict retribution on those they dislike.
As the story develops, we get more and more details about Genosha here -- the hows and wherefores of it all. You don't really need to be doing a deep read to see the political and social parallels here: slavery is wrong, subjugation of an entire people is bad and building a nation on the back of an unwilling minority populace is not worth it.
I don't even think this book is preaching at us so much as exercising its position -- the X-Men need enemies who are ideologically opposed to them, and what could be more opposed than a group, an entire nation founded on the idea that mutants are less than people?
In that, it's good work and encourages us to look elsewhere. You can read about the history of slavery or Residential schooling but you can also look at our modern world, in cases like Indigenous opposition to pipelines and in Voter Accessibility and selective law enforcement to see the principles of Genosha reflected in our world. Hell, you can see it anywhere exploitative labour is taking place, which is basically any place labour is taking place, where impoverished and disenfranchised workers are given hard conditions that make the world work -- whether it be the warehouses of a powerhouse e-commerce corporation or a video game developer relying on "crunch time."
The work is, simply put, never done. This is just a fantastical echo of it, and one of the times the "mutant metaphor" really hits.
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