X-MEN #7: Inside... Out!

It's the final showdown between the X-Men and Omega Red!

Originally Published April 1992

So, Logan's been through it, having been kidnapped, tortured, rescued, resuscitated, re-kidnapped and now re-tortured by the Upstart team of Fenris and Matsuo Tsurayaba in the name of discovering the whereabouts of the carbonadium synthesizer, which will help stabilize Omega Red's "mutant death factor" and allow him to get on with the business of upstarting the Upstarts to where they belong. 

Wolverine, for his part, has a novel suggestion: why not just ask him where he put it?

Next they'll be putting him in Saturday Detention

Matsuo and the Von Struckers pressure their resident scientist, Dr. Cornelius, to up the torture quotient and basically kill Wolverine in hopes that his dying thoughts -- which Matsuo is monitoring via a handy dandy head clamp -- is of carbonadium. Cornelius is reticent -- he did take the Hippocratic oath after all -- but figures "Meh, it's him or me."

The enhanced interrogation techniques actually yield some results, as Wolverine's thoughts return to the night he, Creed and Maverick "liberated" the C-Synthesizer and Creed callously shot their embedded asset, Janice. It turns out Wolverine maybe sorta had a thing with Janice, and left the C-Synthesizer with her body.

Satisfied, the baddies order Cornelius to finish the job and kill Wolverine, but Psylocke, who has been standing by under Matsuo's hypnotic control, intervenes.

V-TRIGGER!

As so often happens, seeing Wolverine in a near-death state snapped Betsy out of it, and she's now free to move about unfettered. Red is bemused to say the least: he beat all the X-Men on his own, and he's got his "mutant death factor," which has been sapping the X-Men's strength and empowering him.

But about that...

Yes, Betsy used her telepathic powers to make Omega think he was doing his thing, but he actually wasn't, and is as weak as a kitten! What a Tricksy Mattel.

In the commotion, Maverick is able to free himself. Seems Psylocke had put Sabretooth under a psychic whammy that left him repeating himself mindlessly while Mav plays possum. Or is it opossum? I don't know and frankly don't have time to find out.

 Getting the cue to spring into action, Mav interrogates some henchmen as to the whereabouts of the X-Men using his top gun, then cruises to floor seven to rescue them, luckily avoiding some kind of wild goose chase. Maybe they can even get home before the rooster crows.

I'd keep this bit going but Iceman doesn't appear in this comic

Maverick and Sabes -- who is forcibly working with the good guys while Psylocke is conscious enough to use her psychic powers -- go to rescue the X-Men, but... whoopsie, did I mention only while Psylocke is conscious?

You know how that song goes.

Luckily, the X-Men are sufficiently free to mount a defense.

Back in the A-Plot, Matsuo stands over the defeated Psylocke -- after all, he taught her everything she knows but I guess not everything he knows -- crowing about how close they are to the Carbonadium Synthesizer, and how nothing can stand in their way.

And right on cue, here's Nothing:

Wolverine and Red tussle, with Red getting the better of the exchange, until...

It's nice that in the midst of all this heated battle, the bad guys give the X-Men a chance to strike a heroic pose and do some comeback posturing

The X-Men are able to smack Red and the other bad guys around a bit, until an explosion happens and everyone has to bug out their separate ways, with the X-Men retiring to the Blackbird. With their business in Germany concluded, the X-Men and Maverick part ways, with Wolverine going off to tie up loose ends... specifically, heading off Matsuo and Cornelius at Janice Hollenbeck's gravesite, where the C-Synthesizer is.

Okay, but why did you have to bury yourself in her coffin?

Wolverine quickly wrecks some henchmen, but is stopped when Cornelius pulls a gun on him, which is actually just kind of adorable. Cornelius wishes Wolverine could one day forgive him for all the shit he's put Logan through in the past, and Wolverine grants him that despite not remembering any of said shit. He's just being polite.

Maverick arrives and ends Cornelius, saving Wolverine (to the degree that the unstoppable mutant warrior needed saving from a middle-aged scientist with a gun.) 

Matsuo vanishes, but the important thing is that the C-Synthesizer is safe. Wolverine hands it over and pulls a Batman act of his own, disappearing into the rain.

And that's that!

Further Thoughts:

Oh, also, we're still building toward a fight between the X-Men and Mojo, who has thoroughly quelled Longshot's rebellion, so keep an eye out for that, I guess we'll be expected to care about it sometime in the near future.

Ultimately, the last four issues comprise a pretty straightforward story about Wolverine getting kidnapped and tortured by figures from his past and the team going to his rescue, but there are elements designed to complicate it, for better or worse. Around this time there was sort of a movement to increase the mythology of Wolverine's missing past, partly by making it literally missing -- it's revealed in the Wolverine solo series written by Larry Hama that some of Wolverine's memories are fakes designed as a smokescreen by his former employers: this is part of that, with Wolverine not even remembering his past association with Maverick. The book also takes the unusual tack of spreading the flashbacks out across multiple issues in a non-linear way, leading to a formal unity that wasn't de rigeur in comics of those days, but also a bit of disjointedness that -- if I'm being honest -- makes it harder to summarize in this blog's usual format. I'm sure I'll adjust in time as we get more of this.

'Taint much but it's honest work

It's a fine line between intriguing and confusing, as a lot of stuff happens and a lot of stuff is said, and sometimes characters speak elliptically to maintain the fog of mystery, so it can be hard to actually know what's going on until at long last it happens -- and sometimes it doesn't end up doing so. This lack of detail can be vexing -- I still don't know what a "mutant death factor" actually is or does, I suppose it saps life-force out of people nearby and pumps it into Omega Red, but that's just an educated guess after four issues of roundabout discussion. People say that Chris Claremont tended to spell things out overly much, but is there anything wrong with that, leaving no room for uncertainty?

There's good with the bad because this is engaging and enticing and makes you feel like there's something going on that you need to stick around for. The art is a feast for the eyes and doesn't get enough credit for being stylistically expansive but never just wacky for the sake of wacky panels. Jim Lee has a great touch and has improved his storytelling capacity over the years, but even with that, the book is mostly just designed to highlight the X-Men in toyetic poses and fight scenes, and to string the reader along with teases of mysterious pasts and such.

Nevertheless, for what it is, it has value: an action-packed, exciting comic book that is very much a comic book. It's still not hard to see how and why this version of the X-Men became a phenomenon, and X-Men is very much the leading flagship book in early 1992, in terms of quality.