X-FACTOR #38: Duet!

Jean and Madelyne hash it out!

Originally Published March 1989

With N'astirh the Living Computer Demon having been thwarted thanks to the power of humidity, the X-Men and X-Factor had assumed everything would just go right back to normal and we could go back to living our lives. Unfortunately, the source of the demon-infested New York was not just N'astirh, but the Goblin Queen herself, Madelyne Pryor who is still ticked at Scott, Jean, Sinister, and the world at large for making her who she is.

But you know, when you point a finger, you have three pointing back at you, so...

Madelyne declares her intentions to go through with the sacrifice of baby Nathan, and has even abducted Jean just for the goof of it all.

Maddie sets about unleashing some demons on the X-Men and X-Factor to keep them tied up while she sacrifices her child, along with other, lesser-known babies, to increase her power.

There are some miscommunications between the X-Men -- who are still acting loopy from Madelyne's demonic influence -- and X-Factor, who remain vanilla (apart from Warren, who's got his own stuff going on.)

In their aggression, the X-Men point out that X-Factor are mutant hunters and race-traitors, and Cyclops protests that that hasn't been their deal for a while now -- don't you read X-Factor?? 

Storm asks, if that's true, why don't we know about it? After all, we get news feeds from all over the world, and they all point to one thing: X-Factor are bad guys.

But wait, who was monitoring those news feeds?

Who was picking and choosing which footage to show the X-Men?

Dare I say... fake news?

As the X-Men come to this realization, they turn their attention to Madelyne and begin to fight alongside X-Factor, with Cyclops firing a stun blast at Madelyne, which she defects by throwing Jean's demonified father in harm's way.

As the battle is joined, Madelyne recruits Longshot and Dazzler by playing on their desire to be stars, rather than ensemble players in the X-Men's drama.

The Goblin Queen also makes a play for Angel, tempting him by offering more than Apocalypse could have, but he resists and -- amidst a frantic scuffle that sees Cyclops blast away at Maddie again and Havok firing at Scott -- disrupts Jean's bonds. Wolverine, his head cleared, then saves Warren from the Demonic Pet Greys, aiding the man he has specifically been feuding with all through the past two issues for the story's big "Awwww" moment.

As Storm fends off Dazzler and Longshot, Cyclops and Havok square off. With the knowledge that their powers don't harm each other, Cyke elects to settle things the old fashioned way.

Madelyne encases herself and Jean in a force field so they can have their own little fight, as Madelyne explains her origins at length, peppering it with cathartic exhortations about how she hates herself, and Scott, and Jean most of all for being the original, while Jean sees the parallels to how the Phoenix Force also emulated her identity without her consent.

Why everyone wanna be this chick?

Jean realizes how this all happened was that when the Phoenix!Jean killed herself, it tried to return what it had borrowed to Jean (that is, the Jean that was in a cocoon underwater) but -- those memories being tainted by darkness and destruction -- she declined. 

Instead that portion of self went to Madelyne, who awakened from her creche, now having that extra spiritual je ne sais quoi to animate her.

While Jean and Maddie have their moment, on the outside the heroes formulate a plan to get into the bubble, using a very nuanced and highly technical "throw everything we have at it" approach. They manage to recruit Dazzler by convincing her that she'll never really be a star with Madelyne around, but Havok will not go against his Queen.

Maddie is unbothered and continues her group therapy session, with Jean realizing the truth of the part she played -- albeit unknowingly -- in Maddie's misbegotten existence. Madelyne declares that Jean can stuff her sorrys in a sack.

On the outside, Havok comes around when Wolverine points out that this is not the Madelyne that they originally knew. It's hard for Havok to swallow, being such a classic Nice Guy friendzone simp or whatever for her.

The summary of Madelyne's backstory continues at length, as we continue through the Fall of the Mutants. Psylocke convinces a sulking Longshot to get back in the game. Longshot feels tainted and dark inside, worried that his powers won't work -- they are fueled by pure intentions and his have been tainted -- but Psylocke tells him to think of all the innocent little babies that are going to die if they don't do something, and what's more pure than that?

And so they unleash their barrage.

Inside, Jean comes to understand Maddie and even have sympathy for her. She wants to take her in and make amends, but the clone is too far gone and single-mindedly bent on destruction and revenge -- against Scott, and against Sinister (who still wants the baby himself, somewhere out there.) And so she makes one final attempt to end all her troubles in one fell swoop.

In the blast, it seems as though both women are doomed, when the piece of Phoenix that lives inside Madelyne emerges and offers to rejoin Jean to save her and disentangle this whole thing. After some consideration, she accepts and -- so it would seem -- becomes whole again.

The heroes watch as all the demons fade and New York returns to normal.

And Scott...

At long last expresses some sincere regret about his part in all of this. But Jean reasons, not wrongly, that Madelyne was the bait in Sinister's trap, who could blame Scott for falling into it?

On the other hand, did you have to leave her to give birth on a kitchen floor?

In the wake of all of this, the heroes are in their feelings. 

Warren, for example, feels poorly about how he let his darkness consume him, let him become the Dark Angel, but to Beast, he is actually the Archangel, christening him with a new, catchy name for his new persona. The Greys try to process the living nightmare they've just experienced. And Havok... well, Havok's going to need some time.

But time they may not have, because Sinister is still out there, and it's time to make him pay!

To be continued!

Further Thoughts:

This extra-sized issue is certainly a hectic, cacophonic experience. Its main thrust is to resolve, at long last, the entanglement between Jean and Madelyne, which of course can only end with one woman's death.

The death of Madelyne Pryor is not a moving sacrifice or even an illustrative lesson about the central message of the X-Men or a parable about the bittersweet triumph of good over evil. It's really an almost-Shakespearean tragedy about the sad suffering fate of a woman -- an ordinary woman -- whose existence was too much to bear. She paid the price for a compressed lifetime of comic book style schemes surrounding her, in dramatic fashion. She crashed hard, but for a brief moment, against everything conspiring to bring her down, she flew high under her own power.

At times during this story and increasingly in this issue, Madelyne has fallen into very two-dimensional evil territory where she is merely "I'm the bad guy here, let me be bad!" but by the end I certainly felt very affected by her plight, so it all came around. I feel it would have been very hard for any writer to dramatize, as Louise Simonson opts for a "long spiels amidst a blasty shootout" approach -- the X-Men and X-Factor busy themselves first fighting against each other then trying to get into Madelyne's bubble but the action doesn't really matter. What matters is that all the information Maddy has is imparted to Jean, and that the slate is ultimately cleared. Madelyne, Jean and the Phoenix "force" were all tied together from the beginning, even if the original intentions of the story -- that Jean was Phoenix, and that Madelyne was her own woman -- do not resemble the final result presented here. In terms of disparate elements that were ultimately fused together, it makes for a fine, even epic and grandiose resolution that is not necessarily the best individual comic I have read, but a very satisfying conclusion to this part of the story, bringing it all full circle.

In comics, you often have to serve many masters. Even someone like Chris Claremont, who has stewarded these characters for over a decade, does not have autonomy to direct the story as he sees fit. There are outside pressures and demands that can reverse the course of a story's future flow or even redesign its past. Everything is in play and while, if one is a purist of any kind, it may seem unappealing, that is -- increasingly as time goes on -- the nature of the medium and mode. The story grows and changes and rewrites itself.

The important thing is to get something of value out of it, and I believe we have. The themes of a woman being manipulated and struggling with a world that has rejected her and her own inability to determine her identity echo as, if not universal, then very much relatable. People often decry moments of the X-Men's saga that are not directly or even tangentially related to the mutant struggle, but to me, as long as it's a human story -- something that resonates with our emotions and desires as individual people and not merely a story about stopping the bad guys and protecting the status quo. There's something very "There but for the grace of God go we" about Madelyne's whole deal, and that makes it sit right with me.