Storm and Gambit play Robin Hood in New Orleans!
Originally Published September 1990
We begin with the thrill of the hunt!
The Shadow King's Chief Sex Slave Lian has changed into her finest leather thong to lead the hounds out on the chase for Storm and her new friend Gambit, who have slipped through his shadowy fingers. While Shadow will do anything to bring Storm into the fold, Dr. Lian has a particular interest in Gambit, who played her for something of a fool thanks to his charm powers.
Our heroes have adjourned to Storm's pad, a non-functioning airliner in an aviation junkyard. Storm's plan: whip up a wind strong enough to lift the plane and carry them to safety. Seems....... ambitious.
But just as they hit the skies, the Hounds crash the party.
Gambit makes like Harrison Ford and kicks them off the plane, torn between cracking hilarious one-liners and lamenting what the Shadow King did to these people.
Seemingly in the clear aboard the "ghost plane", Gambit and Storm follow the Mississippi River southward. When Gambit finds a knife that Storm uses for protection and notes that it's not for bluffing, Ororo reveals some of the hardships she's had to endure during her journey.
But as Gambit consoles her, another ship appears and overtakes theirs...
As Nanny beams a hologram of herself aboard the plane, Storm recalls a memory of the events that brought her here. Back during the fight in Australia, Storm -- still a grown woman at that time -- was taken aboard Nanny's ship where a Life-Model Decoy -- a fancy robot duplicate -- took on her appearance to fake her death when Havok struck the ship, so that nobody would come looking for her.
Storm lashes out at Nanny, sending her ship away, but in the process nearly crashes the plane, just barely regaining control of her faculties to correct it and keep it from crashing.
Later, Storm awakens from a dream recollecting more of what transpired between her and Nanny -- de-aged past the ability to use her powers, she attempted to escape, only to be locked against her will in some of Nanny's power armor.
Startled awake, Storm reflexively throws her knife at Gambit, barely realizing what she's done--
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| Don't try this at home, when you drop a knife in the kitchen |
Gambit and Storm have arrived in his home of New Orleans, where Gambit treats them both to a sumptuous meal in the French Quarter...
After doing a little sightseeing, they fall into an easy partnership, putting their shared skillset to use pulling Robin Hood jobs all around the Gulf Coast, robbing from the rich and giving back to the poor.
Then one night -- during Mardi Gras, which is the only time any story is allowed to be set in New Orleans -- Nanny and Orphan-Maker arrive and kidnap Gambit. Gambit tries to charm his way out of it, but Orphan-Maker won't allow it and throws a fit.
Aboard the ship, Storm finds that her powers are somehow dampened. She also happens across a cocoon she remembers being held within, when her body and mind were de-aged from adulthood.
Her memory is jogged -- she realizes she is not a child at all, but a grown woman who has been violated and abused at the hands of Nanny.
Her only option to free Gambit is to don the power armor that Nanny had planned to stick her in.
Knowing that she can't attack Orphan-Maker directly (her suit was specifically designed to be weaker than his, because Nanny unsurprisingly has some very old-fashioned ideas about the roles of girls vs. boys) she fires wildly within the ship, damaging him indirectly...
And freeing Gambit to secure Nanny's defeat once and for all.
The ship goes down in a swamp and Gambit and Storm crawl to safety, unsure about the status of Nanny and Orphan-Maker. Gambit notes that Storm no longer sounds like the girl she once was, and indeed she is not. But she does have one question for him...
Further Thoughts:
The art here is credited to Homage Studios: Jim Lee, Whilce Portacio, and Inker Scott Williams (as opposed to X-Cerpts Writer Scott Williams, which is me.) As I've mentioned before, as great as artists like Marc Silvestri and other previous pencillers were, it's not hard to see Lee & Co's arrival as being the Next Leap Forward in comic book art. It's stylish, it's sexy, the action bursts off the page, it takes design and layout chances the likes of which have not been seen since Neal Adams. The drawback is that at times it can be a little hectic and a little superficial -- when you have a story whose stakes are maybe not the most thrilling or whose premise for action is a little more lackluster, it can read a little hollow. It's actually a little startling to think that the partnership between Lee/Homage and Claremont might be a mismatch, since artists on this series have not only always been superb in their abilities, but seemingly great creative partners to the storyteller.
That said, we'll have more on the impact of Jim Lee's arrival on X-Men when we talk about future issues.
The opening fight against the Hounds is a very quick way to tie off that storyline for the time being -- you can see a climactic showdown with the Shadow King being deferred down the line. The climax of this issue concerns the final conflict with Nanny and Orphan-Maker. I think they're a cute pair and philosophically what they've done to Storm is very much nefarious, but I doubt anyone sees them as major threats, so disposing of them feels all the more obligatory. In that sense I didn't feel like this issue was the best showcase for Lee/Portacio/Williams' skills, as Claremont's captions and thought bubbles had to do a lot of heavy lifting to convey the information we were supposed to be getting. But at last, we heard the full story for how Ororo came to be in Cairo, de-aged and on the run from Nanny, when we thought she had died.
The other main concern of the issue is to continue to build Gambit, pushing him to the forefront as everything we could want in a character: a charming, roguish, street-smart and slick outlaw who is also very much handy in a fight, thanks. A lot of the time when characters are given so many positive attributes it comes across as artificial, but I can see the right touches being applied with Gambit to let the audience take to him right away. He also has his special bond with Ororo, which for this issue is very Lone Wolf and Cub, the grown thief and his kid sidekick.
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