UNCANNY X-MEN #277: Free Charley

It's the X-Men vs.... the X-Men? What a novel concept!

Originally Published June 1991

We begin aboard the Starjammer, where the Lilandra Loyalist crew (who are also called The Starjammers) are preparing a strike on the rogue X-Men, having tracked them to the planet Omicron Toyota V. The Jammers have the X-Men in their sights and are preparing to fire -- which I might as well remind you, would a laser blast from a ship being used on human persons, not another ship. Luckily, that scoundrel Gambit has oozed his way into the cockpit to scuttle things, which gives him a chance to look like a cool, mysterious badass for once.

The ship's laser beam does miss all of the X-Men outside, but their plan is nevertheless going awry: They had kind of counted on Deathbird and Lila Cheney to be of some assistance, but the two had teleported off as the battle began. When Storm whips up some high-atmosphere winds to fend off the Starjammer, the gusts smash Forge's space-sled, but he's able to use a grappling hook to get inside the ship to safety.

Hey, only one X-Man is supposed to ape Flynn, and he's... well, he's not here.

Inside, Gambit dukes it out with the Starjammers, including Corsair's catgirl friend Hepzibah, who reveals some... unusual tendancies.

Yes, it turns out the Starjammers are all evil Skrull replicons!

Soon the other X-Men are aboard, and they too are privy to the Starjammers' secret.

Meanwhile, if you were wondering where Deathbird and Lila had got to, the interstellar version of Thelma and Louise had been summoned by a mysterious voice to a place called The Maul, a series of floating rocks orbiting a gas giant, where they find various X-Men-type people strung up and attached to what appear to be a web of lifeforce-and-identity-draining power cables. It's a pretty lucky strike that the women wound up there -- when I follow the mysterious voice in my head, it only ever leads me to eat more delicious Wendys' Hamburgers.

Before they can do anything about it though, they are met by...

Yes, dead man Xavier in the flesh, ready to rock and roll. And he's added a few new allies to his squad, as well...

...as Wolverine and Jubilee have likewise broken bad.

Lila, however, notices that there is, in fact, a second Xavier strung up in the Web of Kidnapped Good Guys, and starts putting two and two together. She vamps out, leaving "Wolverine" and "Jubilee" to fight over the honor of killing the former Empress.

Fake Xavier -- aka Prime -- discerns that the real Xavier -- aka Charley -- has been mentally goading his warriors into squabbling, which is amusing if not totally helpful to the cause. What is helpful, however, is when Lila Cheney returns with backup in tow.

Good work, Lila. I might actually stop mentioning the time you tried to sell the Earth to alien overlords.

The two sides brawl, and Gambit gets to look like a cool, mysterious badass for a change by going toe to toe with Gladiator.

Forge is able to disrupt the Nexus Amplifier, which causes the bad Psylocke to lose her form and the ability to mimic Betsy's powers, but as Storm flies in for an assist, she's attacked by bad Wolverine. He comes within moments of adding her to the collection of stolen mutant identities when he's killed at the last second by the person you'd least expect...

That's right, it was Gambit, who gets the drop on his foe in an extremely rare opportunity to look like a cool, mysterious badass.

The fake Wolverine isn't completely dead though, and the fight continues with everyone attacking everyone, especially Prime.

But his advantage does not last for long...

To defeat Prime once and for all, Xavier does his favourite thing in the world... fisticuffs.

Xavier explains that his punches had a purpose: to keep Prime off his game so that he couldn't overcome Xavier's psychic attack to keep him from initiating the transformation back into his superior physical form (giant green alien.)

With that, the good guys win and the bad guys evaporate, all's well that ends well. Xavier explains that after he was taken, the only psyche he could reach was Deathbird's so he indirectly tried to influence her to get Lila Cheney and through her, summon the X-Men. Lilandra laments that the main reason the Skrull invasion worked so well was because of the familiar strife between herself and her sister. Deathbird, for her part, is ready to call it water under the bridge and make peace with Lilandra, perhaps over a 99-cent Frosty. She may have signed the articles of abdication under duress, but having your own empire is like, a drag, man.

Before anyone can literally take a breath, Sean is ready to do what he came here to do, which is tell Charles about the danger posed by Horny Moira. Storm butts in by informing Charles that that's just one of many things that have happened since Charles left. Really, there's too much to tell: some people attacked us, a few Morlocks died, several X-Men were critically wounded, all of reality was briefly in danger, there was a guy named Longshot, we literally have no idea what became of Rogue, Reavers Reavers Reavers, I was briefly a tween, yadda yadda yadda, no point in assigning blame, who's up for a Baconator?

Charles scans Storm's mind to get the full download and realizes there's only one foe who can be behind all of this...

It is clear what must be done -- Charles must return to Earth to lead the X-Men against the Shadow King once and for all. This, sadly, means his days as Royal Consort to Lilandra are at an end, as duty comes between them.

In a blip, the X-Men are gone, but are they too late? Back on Earth, Stevie Hunter is assaulted by a familiar face.

The Shadow King has added Colossus to his puppet show, and he wants Stevie to use her knowledge of Xavier's security systems to gain access. You would think that, being a psychic monster, it would be a simple matter to reach into her brain and take what he needed, but... I mean, come on bro, give me a break, writing is hard.

To be continued!

Further Thoughts:

Has anyone noticed how a lot of work is going into trying to make Gambit a big breakout star? Is it working? Or do we need another showcase for him to be a one-liner throwing shady badass who can outsmart and outfight any opponent?

It's funny how a simple concept -- the X-Men must fight alien duplicates of some team members -- is so complex to write up when you try to unpack all the details. It's not that complicated of a story, and we already knew that the bad guys were Skrulls impersonating key players as of last issue, so it was just a rote matter of revealing that information to the X-Men and getting to the point where they earn themselves a W. I still think Jim Lee: Plotter/Storyteller has some growing to do because the endings of his stories tend to be a little clunky and in this case it's hard to discern what's going on until finally Xavier gets up and just starts wailing on Prime. At that point you can breathe easy because you know you've seen the big climactic moment and the story's about to come to a close. Which is kind of weird, when you think about it, how stories sometimes omit key setup details but rely on you the reader recognizing the iconography of when something big and important enough to end the story has happened. It's really just messy action that looks pretty. Whatever sells, though.

The X-Men fighting other X-Men is not such a novel idea, no... it was one of the first things to be done after the new X-Men took over the book at the dawn of the Claremont Run when the X-Men had to fight a brainwashed Havok and Polaris, and then it was one of the first things to be done a second time when they did battle with the X-Sentinels in X-Men #100, and then it was done a third time in a cheapo fill-in story in #106, and has been done in numerous permutations ever since. It's just something that the X-Men do at this point. 

It's funny -- with the appearance of Lilandra and the Starjammers, who date way back to the early part of the All New All Different X-Men, as well as Magneto reverting back from his brief turn as a heroic figure himself, and now the Shadow King, one of Xavier's "earliest" foes (who also debuted much, much earlier in the run) this whole stretch of comics has an air of bringing the story in for a landing, of tying off loose ends, of reflecting on the past as the story draws to a close, some strange aura of finality. But would you believe this was not meant to be the end or anything like the end? Chris Claremont had plans for what he wanted to do with the X-Men up to issue #300, which wasn't published until two years later! It's not meant to be an end at all, just another chapter!

And yet, reading these comics you can't help but get this vibe of a big finale in the air... this sense of "we're almost wrapping up, folks, smoke 'em if you got 'em." Perhaps some people knew, and others didn't.

Even fake Jubilee is the best thing on a given page.