UNCANNY X-MEN #251: Fever Dream

The X-Men kind of leave Wolverine hanging

Originally Published November 1989

To begin with, someone is a little cross with Wolverine these days.

"Yep, that's me. Bet you're wondering how I got into this mess?"

Our hirsute hero has seen better days for sure, including some of the days he has literally been killed. We are told he is, in fact the "Last of the X-Men" and it doesn't look like he'll be lasting much longer, as he has been lashed to a cross X-symbol under the hot Australian sun by Donald Pierce and his outlaw cyborgs known as...

Logan is brought face to face with those who have felt the steel of his adamantium claws in the past, including former Hellfire heavies Cole, Macon and Reese, as well as Lady Deathstrike and the last of the original Reavers Prettyboy, Bonebreaker and Skullbuster. We are told that Pierce is the one who created these Reavers, giving them guns for arms and tanks for legs and whatnot, although that's all well and good I'm not entirely sure how they ended up squatting in the outback and using it as their home base for a globe-spanning larcenous spree.

I guess it doesn't matter, we're here now.

For all his defiant words, Wolverine seems to be at a disadvantage here, with not another X-Man in sight, at least not an official one. The X-Men's resident squatter Jubilee watches the proceedings from her hiding spot, asking the same questions we are: where are the other X-Men?

Soon Gateway appears to Wolverine with the other X-Men but it's clear that this is only some kind of hallucination, as Rogue and Longshot fade from view, and Wolverine gets a replay of Havok zapping Storm (to gruesome effect.)

Next to appear is Psylocke, claiming to be no mere hallucination but the real deal -- which actually sounds like something a hallucination would say -- to reveal that the Reavers have mangled her into a cyborg like them.

But after reveling in her newly-bestowed claws of her own, "Betsy" reveals herself as Sabretooth, Wolverine's longtime nemesis, taunting Wolverine with the fact that both of them are supposedly dead.

Re-living the moments he was captured by the Reavers, Wolverine continues to commune with Sabretooth, his old mentor Ogun (from the Kitty Pryde and Wolverine miniseries, which we did not cover here) and finally Kitty, who tries to inspire him to fight for his own life. She takes him up to Gateway's hill where he sees a vision of the X-Men returning from their last mission to the Savage Land.

As they bicker amongst themselves about Just What It's All For, the Reavers approach to get the drop on them.

With some considerable difficulty, having reached a crisis point and with an unknown enemy encroaching, the X-Men decide it is time to pull their Break Glass In Case of Emergency and bust out the Siege Perilous, to escape their lives as X-Men once and for all and to start anew.

One by one, the gang dives into the Polar Bear Pit of the Unknown, where no nasty-wasty Reavers can touch them, leaving Betsy behind as the last one to lock up.

Watching in his fever dream, Wolverine determines that Psylocke used her telepathy to convince the other three to go along with the plan, with one of the key clues being Colossus not even thinking of his family, his sister, as he is like to do.

Back in reality, night has fallen, and with it comes more torture at the hands of Pierce.

From a safe(-ish) distance, Jubilee watches helplessly. While Wolverine refuses to scream, Pierce does taunt his captive that he will not be joining his teammates wherever they went, destroying the (cosmic, immortal, supernaturally powerful) Siege Perilous in his bare hands.

As a storm gathers, the baddies retire for the night and Wolverine receives a new guest.

Wolverine is visited by the ladies of his life -- Storm (who is mysteriously de-aging into childhood before his eyes), Jean, Mariko and Carol, who all urge him to fight on.

But of course, he's not done, as the rain falls and revitalizes him, he can muster just enough berserker energy to rip himself from his bindings, like Carla Gugino in Gerald's Game.

At long last, with great, great effort, he comes down, and sees possible salvation in the distance.

Finally someone notices this chick!

Further Thoughts:

This would be enough of a landmark issue for depicting the X-Men functionally disbanding and abandoning their mission, but that is only one of many interesting facets of this outing. Whereas the X-Men comics have largely been straightforward in their form and content lately, this is a return to the type of stylistic swinging for the fences that defined earlier milestones like "LifeDeath" and "Wounded Wolf." And while this issue is not quite positioned on the same tier as those ones, it's not far off in ambition and scope. Marc Silvestri may not be Barry Windsor-Smith, but he draws a hell of a Marc Silvestri comic here, and the comic relies strongly on his visual storytelling both to develop the tone and depict the content, even moreso than your usual monthly book.

Film fan Chris Claremont is known for incorporating elements from recent faves, and Wolverine suffering on a cross being taunted by visions suggests the then-recent Martin Scorsese opus The Last Temptation of Christ. Wolverine, of course, one-ups the son of God by willing himself off the cross at the end and resuming his fight. 

Hilarious blasphemy aside, this issue takes some real chances in depicting a few key elements -- the aforementioned disbandment of the X-Men via the Siege Perilous and the subsequent capture of Wolverine -- in sideways, disorienting ways, incorporating them into his "fever dream" the veracity of which is suspect, and yet which feels credible due to the presence of resident Magical Native Person Gateway. We the reader are left not knowing everything we feel we ought to know as dedicated X-Men followers, yet understanding enough. 

Similarly, the story alludes strangely to Storm's presence -- one must always think of her when abnormal weather is felt through the pages of an X-Men comic -- not necessarily in the past tense, as we might expect since we've just seen her die, but as a going concern. Wolverine sees her de-aged (which was the goal of Nanny, when she happened to get killed) something we don't quite have an answer for. Likewise, we see Psylocke undergo a strange transformation, and yet we also see her escape the Reavers, and we aren't told what to make of that.

While it doesn't feel that long since the X-Men's last mass death/status quo shakeup, it has in fact been a year and a half since the Fall of the Mutants and perhaps it was time to revamp the team again. As a story, I like the way this is built. Whereas with FOTM was building toward a massive conflagration between the X-Men and the Adversary, this unnamed parting of the ways is the result of fatigue, a death of a thousand cuts, and existential exhaustion. With the losses they've suffered recently and seeming to go astray from their path of goodness, the X-Men just don't know what it's all for and why they keep fighting. Of course, they don't know that there's a man with a typewriter who keeps putting them through all this shit, and that eventually they -- at least some of them -- will have to come back together and renew the fight.