UNCANNY X-MEN #280: One Step Back -- Two Steps Forward

The X-Men and X-Factor must defeat the Shadow King and put an end to the Muir Island Saga!

Originally Published September 1991

So, Muir Island has been blown up. Every structure on it has been razed to the ground, the topsoil stripped away to reveal only bare sediment beneath. Every X-Man and member of X-Factor and numerous other allies were on that island at the time, so surely the psychopathic Shadow King, who is currently inhabiting the body of Xavier's wayward illegitimate son Legion, managed to make the most of his opportunity and kill some of his hated foes.

Well, I guess not -- SK has just been holding everyone in a telekinetic blob of whatever, waiting for Xavier to put his special anti-telepath snowpants on and march over. It turns out Jean Grey had enough telekinetic mojo to protect everyone we know and care about from being killed, but Legion will eventually get around to it...

Starting with an overzealous Agent DeMarco and Heacock, who picked this unfortunate moment to start having names and identities.

Back on the anti-telepath sub, Russian Colonel Vashin -- remember him?? He's here too!! -- discusses potential contingencies with Mystique, who has smartly decided not to venture out onto Muir. Vashin wants to nuke the island, which, considering there's not much island left and everyone on it already survived its first destruction, may not be the most well-thought-out option, but it's what he's got.

Back on the island, Shadow King smacks Charles around, speaking as a weird hybrid of Charles' ultimate foe and his ca-rayzay son who just wants to get revenge on daddy.

Storm swoops in for the save, but Legion escapes into the underground portion of the facility, where he reminds us, the reader, that he cannot truly be defeated without the X-heroes killing Lorna Dane, the nexus between the physical and psychic world. How did Lorna end up as that exactly? Because of some weird after-effect of Zaladane stealing her powers that made her sort of a weird amplifier for peoples' hatred and horniness? It's never spelled out, and it's not important. Nothing's important. It's all just lines on paper.

When Polaris weakly tells him to try to stop being a bad guy, Sklegion freaks out and sends his puppets -- Jubilee, Gambit, Multiple Man, Moira, Psylocke and Big Boy Guido -- to go do a fight.

For the good guys, the plan is simple: Xavier will go into the astral plane and have a psychic slapfight with the Shadow King, just as he did in the iconic Uncanny X-Men #117 (twelve damn years earlier.) Some of them will stand watch to protect his body, and others will go find the Nexus (which we know is Lorna) and sever it (without somehow killing her?) Easy as pie.

Charles jumps in with both feet and SKing does some primo monologuing about how he wants to corrupt humanity, and maybe also eat Charles?

That's a new one

Back in meatspace, Jean, Scott, Colossus, Archangel and Storm watch helplessly as Charles' body contorts painfully, his bones being re-broken by the psychic powers of the Shadow King. It leaves them feeling helpless -- what use are razor wings and optic blasts against an attack from within?

Snap, crackle, pop, Rice Charlies.

Downstairs, the attack force is looking for a fight with the last Shadow Puppets. Forge gets a ping on his enemy-o-meter, and Logan says he smelled them three minutes ago. 

And what the hell? Three minutes is a long time in a fight, and Logan, the veteran warrior, just gives up that advantage by not telling anybody? It's like the person writing this did not have a lot of time to put thought into it!

There's a fight. Wolverine and Gambit have not-the-most epic encounter they've ever had, which Wolverine gets the better of.

As the Xavier-watching crew watch Xavier fight a losing battle for his life and the fate of humanity (and maybe also space??), Jean makes a stunning determination: they will have to go into the psychic plane to help him.

That may be the only way for Xavier to gain the necessary leverage to defeat the Shadow King, but it will prevent anyone from walking by and giving Xavier -- and them -- a wet willie, or worse, while they are tranced out. But of course, with all the Shadow King sockpuppets fighting the Non-Possessed Goodguys, and Legion-King tending to his wounds and probably also tranced out to focus on his astral plane fight, it shouldn't be a prob--

Or, maybe not

In the Astral Plane, Shadow King is three seconds away from giving Xavier the psychic swirlie he's always wanted to, when he is shocked, shocked I say by the sudden arrival of the cavalry in the form of Jean, Cyclops, Archangel, Colossus and Storm.

Which is surprising since, as Legion, he is also up and walking around and was standing right there when they said they were going to go into the Astral Plane.

You know guys, there are certain problems with this comic.

Back in the real world (such as it is,) Forge and Banshee deprogram Horny Moira to revert her back to Regular Sex Drive Moira.

While Beast mocks Guido's nomenclature, or lack thereof.

Well what would you call a guy who was so strong? It's a puzzler.

In Starworld, Shadow King manages to regain the upper hand by imagining he is even larger and scarier looking. He threatens to physically destroy Xavier's body on the regular plane if the X-Men do not yield, which was exactly the thing they were supposed to stay out of the Astral Plane to try to prevent.

I will give you a dollar out of my own pocket if you can explain why Xavier needs to be asleep for this but Shadow King doesn't.

But in the nick of time, Forge manages to reboot Psylocke and use her psychic knife to do a thing to Polaris that does a thing to the Shadow King, and we are mercifully ready for this comic to end with a big fat "no" from our bad guy.

Xavier, in narration, feels a little bad for his neglected, mentally ill son getting caught in the crossfire, but notes with characteristic empathy, that's the way the cookie crumbles.

The X-Men gather around their mentor, who is pleased to announce that this comic is finally over the fight is won and the dream survives. Everything is okay, except Xavier has once again lost the use of his legs, which is sad, but also comfortingly familiar, as the status quo feels ripe for a reset.

Seacrest out.

Further Thoughts:

Thanks, I hate it.

Sixteen years earlier, a writer named Chris Claremont began his association with the X-Men. The path forward was not done according to any blueprint with a final design in mind, but by planting seeds and tending to them like a gardener, to see what bloomed. The story that was being told took many unexpected twists and turns, and weathered several storms of outside influence, but continued to flourish under the consistent stewardship of its longtime writer.

In 1989, Claremont began to plant the seeds of the next big phase of his story, bringing back the monstrous Shadow King, who had not been seen in quite some time. The X-Men, as we knew them, were scattered, disparate pieces strewn across the playing board only to be drawn back together step by agonizing step, towards, unbeknownst to them, a final conflict that felt sure to take place on Muir Island. This is the payoff of two years of storytelling and build, but because there's a big new refresh in the works, it can't help but feel rushed and like a lame duck moment to be swept under the rug and done away with as quickly as possible to move onto the next thing.

I feel for Fabian Nicieza here. He's a good, credible comic writer whose work I would enjoy in the future. Left to his own devices, he understands story, and comics, and the world of Marvel, and his material is reliably enjoyable. He took an assignment like any writer would, but one that was mercenary by nature and not a great opportunity for craft: finish this fucking story. And he does. And you can tell he put some work in to make it as good as possible under very adverse circumstances. And to his credit, the story was not off to a great start. Even the parts credited in whole or part to Chris Claremont felt the burn of being rushed. This was not a time to grow roses, this was a clearcutting.

So the X-Men and X-Factor crash together on Muir Island. The Shadow King, a centuries-old figure of malevolence who supposedly has a long game in mind is just a big cackling blob of nastiness eager to devour the heroes asap. The set-up of Moira as any kind of figure of control or leadership at the center of it, is completely cast aside and barely gets 2 panels of resolution since it's just about Shadow King at this point. Next, the story has to try really hard at the eleventh hour to wring some significance out of the clash between Xavier and his fucking sonnnn because nobody -- not Claremont, not Harras, not DeFalco, not Jim Lee, not anyone credited with creating the last two years' worth of comics -- did much to examine that character, so if you never read the original Legion stories in New Mutants several years earlier you don't know what his deal is or why to care about it. Something that could have fueled many months of story is sewn up quick, and we the readers are left to think Charles is just a neglectful daddy.

With a little clarity, they could have pushed the angle that the mental and emotional fortitude Xavier instilled in his pupils was the difference maker that proves Shadow King's undoing, fighting hate with love and understanding. Or perhaps even have Legion do an about-face from within and begin the process of healing and reconciliation. It would be corny, but the Shadow King, a psychic demon who eats hate, is a little corny himself. But, you know, zapping everything into submission was another choice, sure.

I'm brought to mind of the final episodes of Game of Thrones, based on the books by Claremont's pal Georger R. Martin. Years of careful plotting and development are cashed in abruptly in the final moments when the creators realize, shit, we've got to end this somehow, and quick. 

Normally, in comics, there is always a next issue, always more time to draw it out if you need to, but not here. Here we need the X-Men and X-Factor to do away with the Shadow King in a hurry because next month, everything changes. We planned it. We had this great idea and we're going to make so much money off of it but we need to no longer be farting around with long-running sagas and slow builds. That is not how we're going to do things in the 90's: it's going to be fast and exciting and marketable and if it makes a little less sense or resonates with the themes a little less or seems a little more hackneyed and flat, well, fuck it because we are going to sell eight million copies of a single comic.

But we'll have more on that in a minute.

The beginning of the Muir Island Saga was the beginning of the end. It was the beginning of the end of a long-running story, it was the beginning of the end of a storied run on the top comic of the 80's, it was the beginning of the end of the way comics were made in the 80's, it was the beginning of the end, nearly, of Marvel itself and the entire comic industry, as it began to turn away from making entertaining comics you could buy for a buck at the corner store to rare investment opportunity products you had to own and protect because someday, that $2 comic might turn into a $10,000 rarity.

(Yeah, fucking right.)

That all has little to do with the comic we've just read, but oh so much. Because with all due respect to Nicieza, who does a good job doing the exact assignment he was given, and to Andy Kubert, and to everyone who made comics in 1991, this was not a great read. It wasn't bad -- it did the trick, it did exactly what it was supposed to do. It ended the story. It was reasonably entertaining as comics go. If it was a big drop off from the sensitivity and nuance we liked to see from the very best of the X-Men in the past, it wasn't in any way unreadable. It was just less. It was just a step down. you can't cruise at 10/10 forever. Nothing gold can stay. But when you've been so great for so long, just being good enough, seems so bad.

In the big picture, I didn't hate it quite as much as I said above, I only see what a missed opportunity it was. It was just sound and fury and messy excitement. Nicieza even puts a really solid button on it with that closing line about how the X-Men will have to walk Xavier there, working to tie the themes of what we've just read to what is next. It's fine, really.

It's just going to take time to warm up to the idea that things are changing.