UNCANNY X-MEN #308: Mixed Blessings

"Fall" in love with the X-Men!

Originally Published January 1994

We begin on a crisp autumn day, perfect for strolling through dry leaves with your childhood sweetheart in your biggest, puffiest coat.

Mutantdom's #1 "It" Couple, Scott and Jean, are perambulating about, thinking back wistfully -- as they are so wont to do these days -- about their shared youth and the moment they first realized they were the ones for each other, complete with dorky, guileless teenaged grins.

While Mutant Mom and Dad reflect, their teammates engage in some fall fun -- Beast and Jubilee jumping through leaf piles carefully raked by Sean, Forge (complete with high-tech cyber-rake) and Storm.

If you're worried -- and the Blessed Saints know I was -- about why Storm isn't simply using her wind powers to conjure up a mini cyclone that will act as a natural leaf blower, it's because it was suggested that doing the labor manually would be "therapeutic" -- thus increasing Storm's irritation when hours of hard work are undone.

But, it's noted, at least Jubilee is smiling again, a first since Wolverine took a leave of absence in the wake of "Fatal Attractions" when his bones were pulled out through his pores.

The rest of the team -- Rogue, Gambit, Bishop and Iceman -- spend some time building scarecrows and organizing a football game, which results in some har-dee-har-larity from our resident time-displaced action cop who grew up never knowing the glory of rooting for whichever team Taylor Swift's boyfriend is playing against. (A timeless reference I'm sure we will all still be laughing about years from now.)

Bishop nailing those hilarious Strange Planet gags twenty-five years early

Returning to our flashback reverie, Jean thinks about some sessions that she had with Xavier when her latent psychic powers began to manifest. As you may recall, Jean was traumatized when her little friend Annie was hit by a car in the street and her psychic abilities caused her to stay mentally tuned into the little girl's dying moments. Xavier swooped in and put her psychic abilities in check, and that's why when Jean first appeared she was only a telekinetic.

But while we were told at the time that Jean was given a portion of Xavier's own powers, the truth is that there was an outside source that was chipping away at Xavier's implanted safeguards.

That's right! Jean's schoolgirl crush on Scott was so strong it overrode Xavier's own powers. Go figure.

A few yards away Beast relives his youthful days as a gridiron gladiator.

Of course, it wouldn't be a walk down memory lane without a reflection on the Phoenix, although this is one of the first times we're really considered the content of that story from the perspective that we are not seeing Jean herself but the Phoenix Force looking like, acting like, and feeling like Jean. Scott discerns that Phoenix wanting to be Jean so badly made her so noble, thus leading to her ultimate sacrifice.

In an interlude, a nondescript suburban man gets in a mystery van emblazoned with the word PHALANX. That's certainly one way to introduce your scary new baddies.

Back at the football field, walking hormone Gambit uses football jargon to playfully flirt with Storm, whom he first met as a pubescent girl.

But when Archangel swoops in for the interception, thus violating the "No Powers" rule, the whole thing breaks down into hilarious jumbled bickering. From a distance, Scott and Jean think about family -- specifically, their strange patchwork one including the grown adult daughter they have yet to conceive from an alternate doomed future, and the son Scott had with Jean's clone who had to be sent to the future and may or may not have come back as a frothing psychopath.

Furthermore, they think about just how soap operatic their life is with all the craziness they have to endure you just never know what's around the corner. Apparently Sabretooth lives in the mansion now? I don't know when that happened and we don't even get a little footnote to tell me where to look. These editors are slipping.

As the footballers chase after the ole pigskin, Professor Xavier, who has come to let everyone know dinner is ready, finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Before Scott can go down to help the Professor back into his wheelchair, Jean abruptly cuts to the chase by asking him to marry her.

She says that their love was strong enough to rein in the Phoenix, and perhaps it is even strong enough to avert the multiple bad futures they have previewed. They're going to be the married X-Men.

Around the Thanksgiving table, a battered and bruised Xavier gives a little speech about the nature of gratitude.

Jubilee snarks that they've had a real "banner year" and Xavier actually agrees -- this one has sure been a toughie, with Illyana's death, Piotr's defection and Logan's maiming, but perhaps better things lie ahead.

On that note, Scott and Jean announce their big news, to uproarious celebration...

Except from the Professor himself, who ends us off on a note of strange uncertainty...

Further Thoughts:

While the X-Men's lives seem to be constantly ping-ponging from big event to big event, Scott Lobdell is making a little niche for himself with these breather issues. After all, if the market demands a certain number of X-Cutioner Songs, Fatal Attractions and Bloodtieses every year, it's so much the better to balance out the creative muscle by giving the heroes a chance to cool down after each, or as many as possible anyway. With fall setting in here in 2023, it couldn't have come at a better time.

What I particularly appreciated was that this wasn't just 22 pages of the X-Men frolicking while Scott and Jean moped wistfully about the past, although there was that. I've been pretty outspoken about how there's some pretty unproductive navel-gazing going on in these comics. "Gosh, the past, before things got so complicated and harsh" yadda yadda. I'm not a fan, by and large. I much prefer to keep moving forward. Even if it seems realistic for the characters to be thinking this way at times -- and I wouldn't say it's not -- it can't really amount to much and mostly reads, to me, as a writer's commentary on all the things the X-Men have had to endure as longtime comic book superhero protagonists, which of course, is the point of their existence, to have heaps of melodramatic tragedy heaped on them. You start getting self-conscious about it and the whole narrative can buckle.

But that, I would say, is not the case here. Here, it's at least situationally appropriate and contributes to the theme of the issue: where Scott and Jean have been together and how strong that love is. It does make sense for Lobdell to want to play around a little in their early relationship and tie their love into the fate of Jean's powers and everything. I like that, it's valid. It works.

And maybe part of it is just that I like seeing John Romita Jr. draw the young X-Men in their black-and-gold costumes. I know I get cranky about looking backward overall, but I likes what I likes.

Me as a critic or reader, I don't tend to say "This is an inherently bad thing" only that it has usually or always been done badly, or in a way I don't like, as the case may be. But almost any idea you can have could be done well in the right circumstances. So when it's good, I welcome it. Other people are less hardline about it than I am, but hey, that's the guy whose blog you're reading.

All of this to say, I liked the issue, it hit the sweet spot and used nostalgia and reflection and wistfulness in a good way, to help move the narrative forward as we toast the engagement of Scott and Jean. It's a big deal and a meaningful shift in the dynamic of a relationship that, until recently, was threatened by Scott's horniness for a body-modified pseudo-Asian psychic ninja bikini babe. Feels like people are ready to move on from that, as all parties concerned have bigger fish to fry.