Avengers #369: Of Kith and Kin (Bloodties Part V)

All About Exodus

Originally Published December 1993

We begin with a "whole new level o' danger" in the words of grizzled vet Col Nick Fury, who is watching from above Genosha as the island nation is encased in a mysterious energy bubble. Down below, super-mutant baddie Exodus is facing off against Fabian Cortez, who has taken as a hostage Magneto's granddaughter Luna. Luna's parents, Quicksilver and Crystal, as well as auntie Scarlet Witch and family friend Jean Grey, are also present.

Of course Exodus is the real threat -- look at his badass word balloons! Does that look like the dialogue of an underling?

Declaring himself to be Magneto's true heir, Exodus uses his phenomenal psychic powers to force Fabian to hand over the child. Once that is done, Jean says "All right, fun is fun, but that's enough." To which Exodus says fun is fun, and kills Fabian, dumping his body in the waste canal.

Exodus goes on to say he'll be keeping Luna as a memento of the day he murdered the entire country of Genosha. I personally prefer keychains and bottle openers when I go somewhere. Maybe a fridge magnet.

Topside, the X-Men emerge from their battle, tut-tutting both sides of the apartheid conflict on Genosha. Sure, the mutates were a repressed class whose very human rights were violated by the much more powerful and well-funded state, but that's no reason to be violent.

The Avengers arrive and agree to a team-up. The first order of business is to investigate this energy bubble that seems to be encasing the entire island. Storm flies up, but War Machine thinks it might be fake and flies in for a closer look.

It's not fake.

War Machine almost plummets to his death for the second time today (I guess that's his thing?) but is saved by a combined effort from Storm and, more importantly, the greatest hero on Earth, Sersi.

Xavier shouts into everyone's head to drop everything and come help him.

The heroes make haste to the concentration camp where Xavier, Beast, Gyrich, U.S.Agent, Philip Moreau, Jenny Ransome and others are fighting for their lives. The Avengers do an Assemble, and Rogue gets a little receipt for her treatment the last time she was in Genosha.

"Rude an' crude" is a polite southern way of saying "sexually violated."

After blasting Rogue with a mind whammy, Exodus (whose face they have now remembered is colored red) makes his big entrance. He announces that while, yes, Magneto may be in a sort of drooling state of living death, he speaks through Exodus, and what Exodus says is -- kill all the humans!

Captain America thinks Exodus sounds insane, but Xavier thinks Exodus is crazy like a fox, which is his one weakness.

The faceless shadows representing the Mutates are into this human-killing project, but thankfully Sersi is here to hold them back.

The Avengers and X-Men divvy up their forces, one to quell the mob and one to face Exodus. In the chaos, Revanche -- aka Caucasian Psylocke -- is knocked out by the Unforgiven, who have switched allegiance to Exodus, since he seems like a winner.

I guess Revanche is on the X-Men now? And everyone agreed to call her Revanche?

The zapping and blasting continues, while Exodus prattles on about the heroes' pathetic dream of racial harmony or whatever.

As they fight, the forcefield surrounding the island closes in, Exodus' master plan to leave nobody alive on this Godforsaken rock after ginning up all that racial strife. Having been reading this story for however many issues, I'm starting to root for the dome.

Also, Exodus plans to kill little Luna, who, as a flatscan, is a stain on the house of Magnus. I would think that being half-Inhuman and half-mutant would result in something other than a plain jane human girl, but even so she probably doesn't deserve to die for it. A lot of my best friends ard flatscans and most of them are fine.

But his boast leaves him prone to a combo attack from Xavier, and the second-most important Avenger, Black Knight.

With the hubbub having died down, Xavier reiterates for the Mutates that both sides are equally wrong in this situation, and I'll admit, the Mutates were pretty wrong to get so immediately and intensely swept up in their bloodlust so instantaneously. It's lucky they didn't make their way to the Genoshan Capitol Building.

Exodus comes-to, and Xavier helpfully spells out where he went wrong: seems that the follower of Magneto was just too young and headstrong and overextended his admittedly formidable mutant powers: the dome, the crowd, all that other stuff, it was just too many irons on the fire and he couldn't cope. Exodus, for his part, is like, "Hm, you got me" and agrees that he is too young for this shit.

The face of inexperience

Exodus, having been suitably chastened, flies off, but leaves Quicksilver with a quick blast just to remind everyone that he hates that guy.

But it's nothing that can't be fixed with a little CPR.

Quicksilver revives with a pithy quip.

Crystal thanks Knight for reviving her estranged husband and the father of her child. Black Knight is like "Hey, no problem."

In the end, the X-Men and Avengers oversee some of the FEMA-like care for the disaster zone from a distance. Jenny Ransome appears to let Xavier know that he's a nice guy and all, but kind of a hypocrite for doing all he does for mutants while not being open about the fact that he is one. Captain America thinks this is out of line (not sure if it's because he's into situational ethics or because he thinks young people shouldn't question their elders) but Xavier is like "Actually yeah, hey, maybe I am. Let me think about it."

Cap sends us home with some wise words of vagueness.

"It is what it is"

Further Thoughts:

A lot of the time, historically, when there would be a big clash between superheroes, there would be a reason for both of the sides to fight, whether because they were at cross-purposes or because of some dumbf**k misunderstanding that allows both sides to come out more or less equally favorably. The Bloodties story has none of that time-honored tradition: the X-Men and Avengers do not intersect until the final parts, having converged independently on Genosha by which time they're all geared up to battle their shared enemyl.

There wasn't much there there, despite robust themes in play to work with about the cycle of hatred and the legacies of ambitious but problematic men, or the potential for an intricate multi-factioned plot of intrigue and sectarian violence. Not that I ever expected Exodus to be a nuanced and interesting antagonist, but you know a story is really starting to go broad when the bad guy literally holds up an infant or small child and says "I am such a bad guy I will now murder this infant or small child!" 

This was big and broad and busy and calamitous. Oddly, in wanting to see the problems on both sides of the Genoshan issue, it ends up simplifying it to "Violence is bad, in general." Okay, but why did the violence happen? What are the grievances of the Mutates? How did we get here? And why is that the message of a comic where most problems are solved with some form of outrageous violence? Do you see why it might be disingenuous for a comic, especially one about a militant arm of the state like the Avengers, to spread that message? And really, Exodus was taken down because he's too green to be using his amazing, incomprehensible powers at such a scale, but don't worry, someday he will be a bit more seasoned. 

(Of note, in case you didn't get the gag -- we later find out that Exodus is over 800 years old, so how old does he have to be to reach his full potential? Does this mean there's hope for me yet??)

There's something very Silver Agey abput that, in the end, but dressed in the trappings of the hypertrophic superhero action of the early 90s.

The writing of Bob Harras is, to be charitable, not very good, and not conducive to the kind of ideas that are hinted at in this story, which in practice isn't really about anything except what a bad dude Exodus is. From a personal perspective, I've been giving higher marks to the less ambitious issues lately because I think they are doing what comics in 1993 were capable of doing perfectly well, and here we simply don't have the language to tackle all that could be said about Magneto and Genosha, let alone all at once.

So let's wipe the slate clean: it was action-packed, turn-off-your-brain adventure. Except it was weighed down by the ways it hinted at being more and fell short. And I don't just mean in exploring the themes: I mean in introducing bonus antagonists like the Magistrate Elite and the Unforgiven who literally appear for mere panels before being dropped hard and forgotten. This comic isn't great at being the comic it wants to be, but it's not wrong to be all blasty powers all the time, if that's what sells. 

I will reiterate my relief that this was a comparatively tidy five parts and not a 13-part epic that saw the X-Men and Avengers bumbling around Genosha doing nothing in particular until the big finale. Maybe someday superhero comics will be truly capable of unpacking the implications of their adventures, but for now... well, it's certainly very fitting that this was almost the last comic we'll be covering from the year 1993. It was a big, messy year, and this is a big messy story thaf epitomizes that, for better and worse.