X-MEN #27: A Song of Mourning, A Cry of Joy

The X-Men have a Sinister encounter in L.A.!

Originally Published December 1993

We begin in Los Angeles, where a mystery mutant known only as Threnody is having a hard time -- seems every time one of "them people with the powers everyone hates" dies, it makes her feel kinda funny inside...

And when that happens, it makes her, well... do this:

All Cops Are Blasted

Same thing happens to me when I have burritos, but do I stop having burritos? Obviously not.

Rogue, listening from a hospital room above, thinks she hears something, but her compatriots Bobby "Iceman" Drake and Hank "Beast" McCoy, are preoccupied tending to their old enemy Infectia, who is lying abed stricken with the same virus that recently claimed Illyana Rasputin -- the Legacy Virus.

Hank, the biogenetic researcher tasked with investigating a mystery pathogen that has spread frighteningly quickly through the mutant community of which he is a member, looms over the patient without a stitch of PPE. Maybe it's a budget thing.

Rogue takes the Legacy Virus somewhat personally -- she already has a pretty complicated relationship to her mutant identity (being that she can't touch yuh without absorbin' yoah powahs an' mem'ries) -- and now those very powers, that very X-gene, may be the thing that kills her. All in all, a huge bummer sandwich.

Yeah, what about Hank's feelings? He's pretty blue about the whole thing!

The sulkfest is interrupted by the arrival of a Dr. Nathan Milbury. Milbury -- whose name and face look somewhat familiar to me -- is noted for being quite calm in the presence of several known mutants. He claims to have some familiarity.

While he sets about extracting a blood sample from Infectia-- er, Josephine as the X-People are surprised to find she is properly called -- the Good Doctor soliloquizes about the delayed response to the AIDS crisis, preaching for tolerance of one's fellow man, or mutant in this case. He also muses about how they've come to call this disease the "Legacy Virus" and how maybe that doesn't make sense as a name. And that may be so, but it's catchy and we're going with it. (Well, Doc, it's the legacy of a mystery villain from the future who was bent on discrediting all progress on Mutant Rights due to unresolved issues with his father...)

Milbury also reveals that Josephine was in LA seeking out one Dr. Gordon Lefferts, a brilliant bioresearcher who had a lab nearby, who also happened to be a mutant and, darn the luck, one of the first victims of this so-called Legacy Virus.

Milbury takes his leave to attend some pressing matters (probably a golf game, am I right folks? Doctors.) A leggy nurse arrives to take some blood from the patient, but when the X-Men mention Dr. Milbury already took some. The nurse's baffled response: "Doctor Say-what?" (A lesser known sci-fi franchise.)

There is in fact no Dr. Nathan Milbury at this hospital; no middle-aged white mustachioed doctors at all!

Back in Westchester, Betsy is playing with herself-- uh, darn, I mean she's having a sparring match against her duplicate.

Psylocke and the recently-named Revanche (the British woman with the Asian moves and the French codename) debate what it means to be the "real" Betsy Braddock. Miss 'Vanchie mentions that despite the fact that she has contracted the Legacy Virus, she can still fight, and kill as much as she used to.

Asian Psylocke retorts that Betsy Braddock never did any of those things -- which is a slip-up that reveals she must be the fake, because everybody knows that the real Betsy Braddock is a bloodthirsty maniac who was a constant danger to herself and others. Check and mate, game Revanche.

Oh, and I guess Revanche is dying. The book doesn't make a big show about revealing this information so I don't see why I should have either.

Not a heartbeat later, we see Rogue, Iceman and Beast arrive at the abandoned research lab of Dr. Gordon Lefferts. Iceman mentions that "the thing with the Doctor is still bugging me," but Beast and Rogue blow it off -- who effing cares, it was probably just a random event with no significance. You gotta fill 22 pages per month somehow.0

More pressingly, the Lefferts Lab is being used asca squathole by some derelicts, including our gal Threnody.

Is it just me or does Rogue's outfit look simply wrong without a jacket?

Threnody, is who barely coherent, indicates that she is the protector of "The Bubble Man's" stuff, which is part of his pain, which affects her and triggers her powers, but also she kind of likes it I guess?

The Bubble Man, in this case, refers not to a grown version of Jimmy Livingston, the Jake Gyllenhaal character in the 2001 American black comedy film Bubble Boy, but to the late Dr. Lefferts, who exhibited the characteristic bubbling pustules of flesh that are symptomatic of the Legacy Virus, which we never saw in Illyana Rasputin or any other character who had previously suffered the disease, but did at least see on Revanche in this very comic, so there you go, it's real, it's a thing.

Thren runs off and Beast digs into Lefferts' research. Rogue finds Threnody, but she's already been found by Sinister, for undoubtedly nefarious purposes. As superpowered people are wont to do, they have a fight.

Which, you should guess how that's going to go, since Sinister has those super nuh-uh powers and doesn't really do a lot of fighting anyway because that's not his jam. Also Threnody explodes with anxiety, which I've done from time to time.

Beast and Iceman arrive. Beast wants to know what Sinister's game is, but the would-be Dr. Milbury swears there's nothing ulterior about his motives: he literally just wants to cure the stupid Legacy Virus, and he thinks that having Threnody in his crew -- as a mutant who senses other mutants' pain -- will help him do that.

He refers to Threnody specifically as a "bloodhound" for her ability to seek out people who are suffering the disease. Rogue is not on board with a fellow mutant being exploited this way, especially because Threnody's powers cause her such epathic pain and torment, but Beast -- in what the many Hank-haters out there will undoubtedly gladly point to as an early instance of Henry McCoy's demonstrable lack of morals -- is pretty okay with Sinister's shady dealings if it means the greater good. Sinister is simply willing to go to lengths that the X-Men are not and that may be what's needed.

Sometimes science needs to be totally unethical, y'see

They let Sinister walk, and head back to the hospital, where Hank offers Infectia-- er, Josephine a little look at the stars before she passes.

Further Thoughts:

In case you were wondering, Gordon Lefferts was Sinister's head geneticist, and indeed one of the first victims of the Legacy Virus. When we last saw him he was working out of Sinister's Nebraska base of operations, and his body was interred in Alaska so when he had time to move to L.A. and meet Threnody will have to be the subject of many Fanfics to come. (Saucy ones, I'm sure.)

This is sort of a "status quo" issue. We see the X-Men working on the Legacy Virus without making any meaningful strides toward solving it, because it's going to be a problem going forward. Dong it this way gives us a chance to see the characters living with it as an ongoing issue in their lives, and expound on it a bit, which is cool and sells the enormity of the issue. That doesn't mean nothing happens, but it's a gain of inches rather than yards, as Sinister has openly thrown his hat into the ring as a possible savior of mutantkind, and Threnody figures into that with all of the moral chin-scratching that entails. I have to believe there are easier ways to get what he's after, but any direction is forward I suppose.

The thing with a "status quo" issue like this is that it doesn't offer thrills, excitement or big moments, it just kind of lets you know where the mutants are at in the midst of what is proving to be a long-running dilemma for them going forward. I don't think it would be too exciting to have too many issues of Beast looking into microscopes (or putting on a VR Helmet of Science as the case may be) but you've got to see it sometimes To let the audience know it's happening. And then, because this is a comic, you have to tack on some kind of mutant punch-em-up even though as we well know, Sinister is never about fisticuffs and any attempt to put him in a fight is simply unsatisfying.

Ew, Hank, don't put that in there

Take from it what you will. Sometimes I wonder I'm making the right decision by peeling back every single issue of the X-Men comics and if we all can't just jump ahead a little quicker, but this is a comic, this is a unit of story, and it bears examination. There's an earnest effort to give the situation some real weight by pressing on the moral issues of using Threnody, and in general what moral compromises often are made in the name of advancing science -- she could be the mutant Henrietta Lacks in a way -- but I would be pleasantly surprised if the book continues to develop this plot. Nevertheless, Fabian Nicieza also tries to put a little humanity into the proceedings with her and with Josephine, which is a nice touch -- without those moments of grace you have nothing, and this gives you a little something to sink your teeth into. I admire it and I think being able to view the X-Men's world through all of its various facets is stealthily one of the best parts of regularly visiting them in comics.