UNCANNY X-MEN #284: Into the Void!

The X-Men try to Avoid the Void!

Credits via Marvel Fandom

Originally Published January 1992

We begin with a rather robust history of the Sakhalin Islands, which have passed between Japanese and Russian control over the years. This is really more for color than anything, as it's a way of backing us into the story to introduce this guy:

Yes, that's Shiro Yoshida, Japan's own Sunfire, here with a fetch new ponytail and some xtreme new armor for the 90's that we are told will improve his powers in various ways. His mission? Poke into this big weird hole in the ground and find out what's going on.

Unfortunately, sometimes, when you gaze into the void, the void chews you up and spits you right out.

Meanwhile on the Blackbird, the X-Men's Gold team are recovering from their recent scrap with Trevor Fitzroy, and laughing about how funny it is that Jean died again.

Ha ha ha, what a laugh, what a joke, what fun

The Professor needs to know more, saying in effect, "I'm sure that was traumatic and all, but would you mind re-living it for me?" 

As Jean explains that no, she doesn't know how she cheated death this time, they theorize that maybe it's just something telepaths do sometimes? And hey, they happen to have a dead telepath here on the table, what if Emma Frost pulled the same trick?

Professor looking like the late Joan Rivers here

As they prepare to examine Emma Frost's body -- or as they callously keep referring to it, her "corpse" -- the team get a distress signal from Sakhalin and decide to zip right over.

We rejoin Sunfire, who is motivated to make his last stand against the forces of the void, especially since, we are told, the void killed all the scientists and everyone nearby while we weren't looking, including Shiro's girlfriend Hideko, who we literally just met for the first time a few minutes ago (we hardly hardly knew ye.)

Unfortunately, it looks like Shiro has more on his plate than he has bandwidth to handle since the void is full of Predator-looking warriors.

Luckily, our heroes drop in in the nick of time.

We have a see-saw battle back and forth. Jean can't use her psychic blasts because the foes' minds are too "alien," and Archangel falls to the power of... clamps.

The fight goes on, with Storm noting that the attackers are not trying to advance, they're merely defending the pit. An explosion knocks out one of the Voidians (named Primate, apparently), and all the X-Men are surprised to find out it's a g-g-g-...girl!

A hot girl, of course!

Primate reveals that they weren't trying to attack anybody, they were trying to keep people from getting in there as a way of protecting them from what's in the void. Well, okay if you say so.

Anyway, the whole thing goes boom and sucks the X-Men in.

Is it too obvious to say "Sucks being the operative word"?

In one of her now-trademark Troll 2 Moments, Storm points out that this could spell doom for the X-Men.

The whole island explodes in a lot of lines, which is how you know it's serious business.

Meanwhile, back in... elsewhere, somewhere, idk, idec... some of those FutureMutants are having a good ole time being evil psychos from the future, drinking and laughing and admiring antique Polaroid technology and killing indiscriminately. 

Are they concerned at all by the fact that they're in the past and therefore may be killing their own grandmothers or the grandmothers of people important to them or history or whatever? What if Trevor Fitzroy's mama's papa was in that bar? How would they even have had gotten back to the past in the to begin with? The mind boggles.

Anyway, Bishop and his squad pops out and offers the baddies a chance to be arrested. They decline, and some lethal justice happens.

Bishop makes it clear that the X.S.E. is gonna keep killing future bad guys here in the present. So watch out for that!

Further Thoughts:

We'll get into it a bit later as the Void story goes on, but this is pretty much just Comics: a mysterious happening, some powerful bad guys, a big cliffhanger, you know the deal. It may not overachieve but it's not the worst thing ever. I still think ChatGPT could do a better job writing dialogue than John Byrne, but in fairness I don't think ChatGPT was born yet, and so was not available for the gig.

More, I'm concerned with the coda. I think most of us come to X-Men because we like nuance and complex social issues, but that was in short supply in the early 90's. So the future-psychos are painted as complete incurable maniacs who just want to rape and kill and whatever, and now they're on the loose in our time and only Bishop can stop them (with killing.) You know, it's Judge Dredd, played absolutely straight. And to be sure, I'm not coming down on the side of psycho-killers, but I do like, you know... civil rights and stuff. I think you're doing the discourse a grave disservice by inventing a limitless supply cartoony murder-villains that deserve instant death and pretending like that's the only kind of criminal that exists. Not a fan of that kind of thinking here in 2023.