With Madelyne Pryor held captive, it's time for some Sinister exposition
Originally Published February 1989
When we left off, Madelyne was taking a tour of a rather sinister-looking orphanage in the heartland of America, which inspired more questions than answers: why does this place feel so familiar? Where is her baby? And who is that gothy Ken doll with the ribbon cape?
Well that's preposterous of course -- Madelyne would know if her father were the living embodiment of Spirit Halloween. She does, however, correctly identify Sinister by some of his other works...
 |
| Yaaas, Goblin Queen |
 |
| 'Shards' is my new go-to epithet |
Back in New York, the X-Men's battle with the Marauders has spilled out to the streets, which are looking meaner than usual these dats.
Yes, while the battle rages, the demonic essence of limbo possesses the very infrastructure of New York City -- with hilarious results.
And amidst the battle, Colossus is done a fright when he sees a g-g-g-ghost!
 |
| Once more won't hurt |
When some demonic police officers arrive, Malice turns their possessed monster vehicles into a flurry of shrapnel to send at the X-Men. Vertigo compounds the problem by turning their world upside-down but a blind throw from Longshot -- whose aim is true when his intentions are pure -- puts a stop to that.
And Havok picks an ideal time to get past his little compunction about using his powers to kill.
Back in Nebraska, Sinister settles in for a nice little chat with Madelyne, who protests -- while dressed like a sorcerous 2001 Xtina and commanding a cadre of demonic pets -- that she's really just a nice, normal girl of no significance with an ordinary upbringing and strait-laced parents.
So Sinister challenges her to tell him literally one thing about her parents.
Aha, not so! Maddie immediately calls up a traumatic moment from her childhood when she was playing with her friend Annie. The girl ran into the street and never saw an oncoming car.
Bzzt-- wrong!
Sinister goes on to shed some light on the situation, and like all things, it begins with Jean Grey.
Seems ole' Mr. S was aware of young Jean's telepathic prowess, and had planned to "eliminate" her parents and raise her here at the orphanage, but instead she went to Charles Xavier, a famed expert on mutant genetics, who managed to dampen her powers for a while and later bring her into the X-Men.
Meanwhile, Sinister used blood and tissue samples that he'd acquired of Jean Grey -- don't ask how -- to bake his own.
Unfortunately, this off-brand Jean was a flop, the Mr. Pibb of Mutants, lying in chrysalis in her birthing tube, growing to adulthood without ever manifesting any fantastical powers. What a waste of some perfectly good blood and tissue.
But then one night, he heard the screen-door slam...
Back in New York, the X-Men have their hands full with an increasingly chaotic city. Not only are post-boxes eating people (which Wolverine tries to remedy in an amusing exchange) but the quarrelling foes are attacked by a third faction -- S'ym's smiley face hordes from Limbo!
Colossus manages to get the download.
S'ym and N'astirh have overthrown Illyana as rulers of Limbo, wanting to make a place that's safe for demons with apostrophes randomly in their names. Their next move -- if they can collaborate effectively without turning on each other -- is to make Earth just like Limbo!
This is all set to go down at the Empire State Building, which is looking bigger and meaner than any building should.
And meanwhile, the X-Men themselves are starting to look, uh... a little off-model.
Colossus sulks off from the fight. There's no hope for his friends who have been infected by the Inferno, but his metal body, as always, has prevented him from being victim of the spell. (Nevermind that demonic magic has been used on metal things before, like the smiley face guys and the police cars... I guess it's all about putting up a resistance.) Piotr knows that it's up to him to scale the Empire State Building and save both New York and Limbo.
Back in Mr. Sinister's basement lair, he continues his explanation. He learned that the moment of Madelyne's "birth" was simultaneous with the "death" of Jean on the moon. Perhaps, he thought, there was some connection between the two, and Madelyne could resonate with what we now called the "Phoenix Force." (I guess nobody explained to Sinister that it wasn't really Jean who died on the moon, but a second -- or is that third? -- carbon copy of her, this time generated by the Phoenix's xerox powers to Totally Look Like Someone Else while the real original recipe Jean was safely cocooned at the bottom of Jamaica Bay.)
The point is, Sinister hypothesized that a baby made by Jean Grey's genetics (ie, Madelyne) and Scott Summers, would produce a mega-powerful offspring, which Sinister would then very much like to own and raise. So, he let her out of the jar, told her her name was Madelyne (I guess he's a big Steeleye Span fan), spun her around three times and sent her to Alaska to meet Scott.
 |
| Don't ask why he didn't make one in his lab, that's just what Sinister's into |
It was a veritable match made in heaven (where heaven equals some creepy underground laboratory.)
It's a great plan, assuming no competing supervillain tries to use Madelyne as part of his own revenge scheme against Cyclops, incorporating what he thinks is the merely coincidental resemblance between Maddy and Jean. But, you know, dirt off your shoulder.
The real problem was when Jean v1.0 came back. Not only would Jean's telepathy reveal the whole scheme (maybe, I dunno, Maddy was unable to be read by Professor X before) but the whole existence of Maddy was now unneeded since she fulfilled her purpose and made the baby. So, he sent the Marauders to kill Maddy and steal the baby, a project that had its successes and opportunities for improvement.
Back in New York, N'astirh has chosen this moment to make a big move against the increasingly bloodthirsty X-Men. He takes a bite out of Longshot's soul, presumably taking the difficult-to-corrupt alien man-baby off the board, and announces his presence ostentatiously, declaring his ultimate desire to feast on Maddie's soul, after ripening it up with hate and loss and all that other good negativity that adds flavour.
Back in Nebraska, Madelyne goes Super-Saiyan and breaks free of Sinister's confines.
They have a staredown -- it's time to get this show on the road.
A demon arrives with a special delivery for Madelyne -- her baby. Having gotten what she wants, it's time to set herself on a bigger task.
To be continued -- in X-Factor??! Aw, man!
Further Thoughts:
And so the truth about Maddy comes out. Sinister's struggles to create Maddy, and then undo her as soon as Jean is back, mirrors the creative flux of this entire series: is she a real girl, does she have a secret, is she connected to Jean, does anybody know? We get all the answers in one big lump sum here.
Having arrived at the thick of Inferno, there is a lot going on here. The genesis of Inferno, which would prove to be the model upon which every cacophonous, sprawling X-crossover would be built for over a decade, is based upon a confluence of unlikely and unplanned events that are inextricably intertwined, and the work it took to patch up the effects of those events within the narrative.
Consider: Jean Grey was never supposed to die in the first place. She was supposed to survive being the Dark Phoenix and become a lobotomy victim, or perhaps a recurring villain or a prisoner. When Claremont and Byrne were at loggerheads with editorial about an appropriate punishment/redemption for Jean, the death story was concocted in a fit of pique, resulting in perhaps the definitive moment for the X-Men as a franchise.
A few years later -- after many, many months of characters mourning Jean in print -- Chris Claremont conceived of Madelyne Pryor, a Jean lookalike who would stir things up in Cyclops' life. Is she Jean or not? After all, she was called The Phoenix for a reason. There seemed to be several hints at a mystery surrounding her existence but the story eventually settled on "Maddy is a normal woman with nothing particularly special or sinister about her" and let her and Scott have their happy ending -- all those clues were suggested to be red herrings and the only problem was Mastermind was manipulating the situation to look like Maddy was evil.
Not long after that, some absolute geniuses had the brilliant idea to bring Jean back in a way that suggested that none of what the Phoenix did (Dark or otherwise) was perpetrated by Jean, that is the Jean we knew, but a freaky-deaky-alien-space-fire-bird-clone-lady-thing. Jean was back and free to resume her romance with Cyclops -- if only he wasn't, you know, already married. With a damn kid. So because these characters must remain together, he leaves his wife, joins X-Factor, and Maddy is just this weird loose end hanging at the fringe of the narrative crying her eyes out. But you know our boy Claremont: waste not, want not, and soon she's part of the X-Men, on the run against powerful forces that wish she had never been made.
Sinister, who concocted a backup plan when he realized he couldn't use Jean, then was forced to pivot his plans once he learned the original Jean was still alive, mirrors Chris Claremont, who never planned any of this when he introduced Maddy, but -- remarkably, in one of the greatest feats of retcon-uation I've ever seen in all my years of reading comics -- tucks all of this neatly into what is, and is not, known about Maddy's past, turning the chicken scratch of editorial mandates into Chicken Kiev. Arguably, Sinister is Claremont, struggling to assert his long-laid plans even as outside forces undermine and tamper with them.
All of this converges with a story that has been built mostly elsewhere about a battle for control of limbo that concerns Illyana and the New Mutants and spills over to Maddy's righteous anger over what has been done to her by Scott and Jean, leading to a veritable four-car-pileup as the Marauders and Sinister, the hordes of Limbo, Maddy, the X-Men and now X-Factor all battle it out in the demonified streets of New York.
At this point in history, X-Men is one of the, if not the very, top-selling comic books on the shelves. A huge coterie of fans follow their adventures every week and our beloved creative team has rolled the dice on a story in which the X-Men themselves are proving not to be the protagonists, as they start openly behaving like demonic villains by the end of this issue, exacerbating the increasing ruthlessness they've shown for the past year or so of stories.
What's more, this is not a dour, serious affair, because the demons bring a kooky, campy sense of humour to their razing of New York, with the evil mailbox and fire hydrant and all this other wacky stuff (sez the mailbox when Wolverine attacks him: "I'm government property!") This is a book with character and charm to spare, along with all the action, excitement, twists and turns. No wonder so many readers (and I've asked around) consider this to be the best the X-Men ever were. There's so much comic book in this comic book, it thrills me to be a fan, to be reading and writing about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment