UNCANNY X-MEN #298: For the Children!

The Acolytes are For the Children!

Originally Published March 1993

We begin with X-manspreading:

Taint easy being Xavier

Ever since the events of X-Cutioner's song (wherein he was shot full of a futuristic techno-organic virus that nearly killed him dead) the Professor has been in deep focus, heads-down, basement-dweller mode, keeping a keen eye on the mutant happenings around the world.

Naturally, locking yourself in a dark room and watching CNN all day is a red flag for anybody, so Charles isn't that surprised when Bishop arrives seemingly to perform a wellness check. But the real reason for Bishop's arrival is that...

That's right, once again, Bishop is having a hard time adjusting to the slow and relatively non-killhappy mores of the past. In his time, being a gun-toting maniac who shoots first and asks questions never is a plus -- hell, it's the ideal -- but here there are laws and regulations and ethics to worry about.

Which is funny, because we've just been through a huge crossover event that provided probably the best opportunity for Bishop to Be Bishop -- and regardless of what it preaches the comic pretty clearly wants to peddle Bishop as a hot new character that will resonate with the modern comic audience, like Cable and Wolverine and all those other lunatics.

Xavier rejects the request: quitters never win, and winners never quit.

Speaking of questionably-ethical police officers, the Prof is meeting with now-Detective Charlotte Jones. 

Charlotte has entered a quid-pro-quo relationship -- otherwise known as Allies with Benefits -- with Charles, providing him some as yet unknown info from the Coroner's Office. Detective Jones muses, not unreasonably, that she can't be certain she's doing this of her own free will, given Charles' proclivity for using his telepathy to  "convince" others, to which Charles agrees: "You'll just have to trust me." (I wouldn't, tbh.)

Unfortunately, the meeting is derailed when Charles gets a mental message from an old associate who has been mysteriously attacked...

For a guy who recently has been sequestered away from the world literally trying to see everything that was going on, he is taken surprisingly off-guard about this 

That being Sharon Friedlander, the nurse who, sometime ago, had been an associate of the Xavier Institute along with former police officer Tom Corsi.

Charles interrupts a Danger room session of reluctant-teammates Bishop and Gambit to gather the available X-Men to go investigate at the matter at the Catholic School where Sharon was working upstate.

Telephone, telegraph, tell-a-path

The school is being attacked by some unfamiliar faces in familiar garb -- the Acolytes!

These Acolytes consist of Carmella Unuscione in front there -- presumably the daughter, sister, niece or "fun aunt" of Unus the Untouchable -- former Alliance of Evil member Joanna "Frenzy" Cargill, and the Kleinstocks, a trio of--

Sorry, make that a duo of brothers. The group attacks the bus being driven by Corsi, but the ex-cop manages to fend off the attack until our heroes can drop in.

The X-Men fight to keep the Acolytes away from their target, which is a young latent mutant in the school bus named Teddy.

Eventually they manage to snag the kid, but are dismayed to find that he may not be exactly what they'd hoped...

In a moment that is somewhat cringeworthy even by villainous standards, the Acolytes reject the object of their hunt after all because he is "genetically impure" -- by virtue of the fact that he has Down Syndrome. Instead they cast little Teddy aside to be "purified."

Now personally, I don't think Magneto, who lived through the Holocaust, would be on board with murdering a child just because he happens to have a genetica conition, but he had to go and get himself killed so he's not here to represent himself. Fortunately, the angel of death up there agrees with me.

Anyway, Kleinstock (who has merged into a single being) blows up the bus...

But the X-Men are able to swoop the kids to safety...

...and Storm flies in to drop some rain on the scene to control the blaze.

The X-Men have won the day -- kinda -- but take a moment to wonder once again what it's all for, since the kids have to grow up in a world of man's inhumanity to fellow man. Which is a little heavy even for an X-Men comic, but Gambit of all people brings us back to the bright side.

Later that night, Senator Kelly pops up on the news to, as usual, stump for his anti-mutant agenda -- framing it, like the slick politician that he is, as a matter of doing things "for the children."

Further Thoughts:

Is it a little saccharine to invoke children with mental disabilities? A little preachy? A little too "very special episode?" Especially when the kid in question is barely a named character more than a prop? Yes, sure, but the comic's heart is in the right place. The kid isn't even drawn as having Down Syndrome, but if it's a choice between making him indistinguishable from the other kids or doing a terrible caricature of a child with Down Syndrome, well, I guess you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

I worry often that the X-Men comics -- even under Claremont bus especially after his departure -- are not quite capable of deftly handling the issues that underlie them month to month. They're built on these messages of tolerance and persecution but given too much of a heavy hand, or too much escapism and the message goes blooey. It's a fine line to walk and I wouldn't single out Scott Lobdell as being particularly good or bad at walking that line. He does his best, and honestly, despite a few hokey moments and a few bits that suffer in execution (the new Acolytes come out of nowhere, aren't well defined, and the fight scene suffers from it because we don't know what they can do) this is a pretty good comic for 1993 X-Men.

Senator Kelly is always an interesting figure, one whose cachet has remained steady over the years. In the real world, I believe government infrastructure, when properly guided, can do wonderful things, but that all too often individual politicians politicize a group's identity for their own gain, weaponizing hatred and prejudice to galvanize their own base. I don't need to tell you who I'm talking about today in 2023, but it was true in 1980, in 1993, in 2016, and will be five years or ten years from now. It's never really "for the children," of course.