The hunt continues for the REAL bad guy!
Originally Published December 1992
We begin with Apocalypse, as he heads for his secret beach house hideaway while some narration captions explain us his deal -- he's thousands of years old and he believes that to live is to survive (which, yeah) and to survive you've gotta be tough (sure) and to be tough you've gotta use alien technology to unnaturally enhance your power and lifespan (um okay.)
Considering we have never seen much of Apocalypse in the pages of Uncanny, we get a bit more insight into his character, including the fact that he secretly doesn't know much about the alien technology he uses to increase his powers. Given he is over 3000 years old, this tracks -- my mom doesn't know how her Amazon Firestick works either.
Big Blue wants to know why his Horsemen have been out picking fights with the X-Men without his sayso, but when he gets to his fabulous beach house, he finds his enemies there waiting for him.
Back at the X-Men's fabulous mansion, Jubilee has some harsh words for the captive X-Force.
The renegade mutant team is being held in a cell in the Danger room with cramped conditions and blank walls in conditions that frankly remind me of my old Toronto high rise condo.
Above them in the control room, Polaris sheds some tears over the fact that X-Factor is a bunch of government sellouts doing their jobs.
Val Cooper calls all of the non-detained X-people together for a briefing, interrupting Betsy's planned euthanizing of the Professor.
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| Uh, maybe someone else should be watching over him |
According to Sinister, the real real bad guy here is Stryfe. Of course, they don't really know anything about Stryfe, he just sort of showed up one day wearing cool spiky armor and being a bad guy. Jubilee has an interesting theory on who Stryfe is.
Wolverine and Bishop, however, are not present at the meeting, having skipped out to go retrieve some files from a Canadian military base that might be of some use to them.
Elsewhere, Jean Grey is being clawed at and assaulted by robot hands, and Stryfe torments her with some nonsense about being like an abandoned child. Come on now, what could that possibly have to do with anything, right?
The X-Men's fight with Apocalypse proves a tough battle. They're pretty intent on believing Sinister's testimony that he's got something to do with this, refusing to believe his alibi of "Bro, I was asleep."
Archangel in particular is ready to separate Apocalypse's head from the rest of his body, but Big 'Lypse has a few tricks up his ancient sleeve, like turning his body into laffy-taffy.
Having discombobulated the X-Men, he takes his leave, figuring that while he can kill them, totally, right now if he wanted to, he'd rather save his energy until he figures out wtf is going on here.
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| Catch and release |
At the mansion, Havok and Gambit (who I guess is in some kind of leadership position now??) try to cut a deal with Cannonball to help them track for Stryfe. Sam wants a full presidential pardon for all of X-Force, but that's not happening, so they counter-offer with "Just help us already."
Meanwhile in Canada, Wolverine and Bishop run into a familiar face who is also in search of records...
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| You've got what I need...! |
Further Thoughts:
I have to admit, it's a little taxing on my increasingly-limited patience to see the X-Men spending time fighting someone we know is not the actual bad guy for ultimately no purpose. It really reads as, "Apocalypse is cool, and we want a scene of the X-Men fighting him, ipso facto..."
As confusing as it is to drag in Sinister and Apocalypse when they really have nothing much to do with the plot -- an in-universe red herring shaggy dog story -- they at least have some marquee value, as evidenced by the fact that Apocalypse is on the cover of all these issues he appears in, making it look like he's a big mover-and-shaker in this story and not a patsy who's been drawn in by someone else's deception. But there could still be a larger part to play in the bigger big picture.
As I've said before, the X-Men's world is getting more confusing and harder to follow as we have a ton of shady bad guys whose secret backstories and schemes are obscure to us, the reader, but that's the way people liked it back then. It gave the story some sense of fullness and momentum and reason to keep turning the page, so I respect it as a publishing strategy. After all, there needs to be some sense of grandiosity to keep this thing going for a whopping twelve parts, and as much as we complain about how overstuffed and padded out it is, I still feel like it justifies its length more than the similarly-girthy X-Tinction Agenda, which felt like week after week of people bumping into Hodge and getting captured.
Of course, with seven issues to go, I could get completely tired of it at any moment, if I don't get some answers.
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