UNCANNY X-MEN #315: Peers

It's the trial of the century on Avalon!

Originally Published August 1994

We begin on Avalon, the space base created by current waste-case Magneto. There's a big to-do today, as the Acolytes are preparing for their first ever military tribunal, specifically the trial of Neophyte, who turned coat to help the X-Men defeat the Acolytes back in the momentous Uncanny X-Men #300.

Representing Neophyte is our wayward one-time X-Man Colossus, Piotr Rasputin, who believes in the boy's innocence -- which is to say, that he didn't do anything wrong, not that he didn't do anything. We know what he did. He knows it too. The only thing we don't know is where his pupils are.

Piotr, however, insists that he alone sees the truth: that the other Acolytes blindly follow Exodus' word, while Piotr is the only one who seeks the truth behind the meaning of those words. Yeah, that Atticus Finch stuff is really gonna go down well here.

Because we wouldn't want to have to fit too much action in this single comic, a full page profile pic headshot of the comatose Magnus is followed by a two-page spread of a single image of Exodus speaking to his non-compos-mentor (a little latin legal pun there for you.)

When an Acolyte called Scanner calls Exodus to come for the trial, Ex is like "Sure thing, let me just get my robe," but then changes his tune when he realizes that Scanner has looked upon the face of Magnus, which is strictly forbidden (a normal feature of all functioning governments.)

Amelia Voght collects Piotr for what is obviously a show trial.

Piotr plies at Amelia, who normally seems kind of reasonable: you yourself have said you don't really believe Neophyte deserves to be punished. Amelia's answer: Yes, but I'm usually wrong about everything.

Exodus calls begins the proceedings by calling roll, expressing power and authority through his groin.

Voght's opening argument for the prosecution: He betray us... we kill him.

Piotr's statement is the more controversial tactic of reminding everyone present that the man they consider a savior was also kind of a bad guy who butchered innocents sometimes. He was... complicated. Like, you know, things tend to be.

And those interpretations largely depend on the writer, and the editor.

With help from psychic-seer Acolyte Milan, we flash back to Neophyte's youth as a lonely mountain boy that the kindly Acolytes agreed to take in, and whom he later betrayed, as was possibly his intention all along.

Voght then has Neophyte tell us what happened in his own words, which I'm starting to think is not totally necessary since they have a guy who can show us the actual past.

Neo tells us that everything was peaches and pickles until he started to realize that the Acolytes were hypocrites who served humans with the same hatred as they served mutants.

He goes on to say that that day, he got a better offer from a better man...

This invocation of the hated Charles Xavier inflames Unuscione and the Kleinstocks and causes something of a row, which Exodus quells.

Exodus tells the group that he's going to have a little chat with Magneto, although he already knows what Magneto's going to say, and we can probably guess too.

As Exodus retires to the judge's chamber, Neophyte has some words for his council -- why didn't you just let me plead guilty? Neophyte points out that even Colossus knows Xavier's way was wrong. Colossus corrects his client -- not wrong, just wrong for him. Voght teases Piotr that perhaps he is starting to learn that there is a middle ground between the two paths (help some humans, kill others?) But Colossus, privately, comes to realize that the truth is just that he didn't give 110% to Xavier's dream.

Exodus returns quickly, and with a minimum of buildup, prepares to fire up his Exodus powers to carry out the sentence.

Before he can carry it out, Colossus interrupts with another seemingly improvised-on-the-spot speech about how Magneto was tormented during the Holocaust by those "just following orders," and that the real lesson of Magneto's life is not to blindly follow orders. That's all well and good, but where was that energy ten minutes ago?

Exodus smirks and says that if you would have let me finish, I was going to say I would have killed him, yes, but Magneto says just exile him. And so he zaps Neophyte with a ray that presumably just sends him back to Earth and doesn't disintegrate him into atoms.

You're also out of the group text

Voght asks Colossus how it feels to have just alienated himself from all the others. Colossus shrugs -- he's a truth teller, and in time people will realize that.

Privately, Exodus has doubts too -- that maybe these Acolytes are onto him and that this whole operation is about to come crashing down. Without the faith that they put in him, after all, Exodus has nothing (*except for his numerous impressive mutant powers.)

We close on a note of ambiguity, though Exodus is not aware of it: could Magneto be... returning? 

Like, again?

That smile. That damn smile.

Further Thoughts:

Completely absent from this narrative is the fact that a major part of the reason Neophyte turned on Cortez isn't just that he thought they were hypocrites for torturing Moira, but that he learned that Fabian had -- at the time -- killed Magneto, and was using the Acolytes as pawns in his ambitions of winning the Upstarts game. Exodus himself later killed Cortez for similar reasons! You would think that would be relevant. 

Officially, the Acolytes are enemies of the X-Men, so spending an entire issue watching them put one of their own on trial is certainly.... a choice. Recently I chided the other X-Men series for spending a lot of time on Revanche at the expense of any other X-Men, and this would seem to fall into that pattern too, but I'm inclined to give this a bit more leeway. Obviously we're meant to want to know what's up with former X-Man Colossus as he undergoes his crisis of faith in Xavier's dream. We never thought he was a true believer in Magneto, but what does he believe these days? Colossus is, true to his nature, the voice of reason and compassion, now in the context of a group of bloodthirsty cultists, and getting to that point is essentially the heart of the issue -- as well as the tease that Voght may not be, despite her insistence otherwise, a blind follower either. Colossus has never been particularly outspoken -- famously, he's an X-Man who moped that words didn't come as easily to him as painting and drawing did, but I can respect the shift here to make him a Simple Country Lawyer.

Besides Voght, none of the Acolytes are in any way, shape or form compelling characters -- that includes Exodus, the all-purpose mega villain at the head of the table -- but as a group they are intriguing. It's not wrong to examine and interrogate their values. The book almost crosses the finish line with them. It wants to have big ideas about various topics and perspectives on Xavier's dream, and manages to mine it for substance, even if it largely feels very surfacey.

The subplot is a lost art in these comics. I keep saying there's less comic in each comic: big panels, page spreads with little activity on them, lots more talking and discussion, less room for plot development. That they can't find room for a couple of pages to check in on the X-Men -- who are dealing with the fallout from Emma's possession of Bobby's body as well as the ongoing affair with Sabretooth and maybe trying to learn something about the Phalanx -- is dismaying. But the issue is very upfront that this is "A Tale of the Acolytes," so I can't fault them for sticking to that premise. If they were only going to offer the X-Men a token appearance in their own book without moving their plots forward in a meaningful way, I'd rather they just leave it out.

Looking into the Acolytes and their structure is a worthwhile pursuit and gives us a chance to ask questions about justice and blind loyalty to an ideal that I think are worth examining in these comics. So I commend them for that. I can at least connect with the material a little better than I do when, say, we spend issues in the morass of sorting out Revanche's past. I don't think it's a perfect execution -- some of what Scott Lobdell is trying to say through Colossus seems a little clumsy, like, he gave himself this whole court set-up and now he's got to justify it with this big revealing speech that only really goes halfway. The intent is there, if not all the nuance and execution. The issue doesn't quite know what it's about but it does want to be about something. I'm not bagging on this issue specifically because it has very little in the way of action (you should know me better than that after 450,000 words) or specifically because the X-Men don't appear -- only that when they don't appear I have to think very hard about what we are getting instead and if it is an appealing enough alternative. The trial of Neophyte -- a character we've met once and don't have a huge connection to (he seems like a good kid) means well but falls a little short.

I do like a lot of what's going on in X-Men these days. The Acolytes, the Legacy Virus, the Phalanx, the Friends of Humanity. A lot of these situations offer interesting philosophical questions that are relevant to our heroes and the themes of their adventures. That's good. These are all interesting and viable situations to put the X-Men in, but it doesn't always result in the best and most exciting possible individual comics for whatever reason. Lobdell and Nicieza have both contributed to a very full, very busy, and very interesting world for the Mutants but it hasn't yet experienced a flashpoint of brilliance like, say, the Dark Phoenix Saga (a hard standard to meet, of course.)