X-MEN #37: The Currents Shift (The Phalanx Covenant Book One: Generation Next Part Four)

The Next Generation of Mutants put it all on the line!

Originally Published October 1994

The Generation Next kids are in a pickle, my friends, being cornered and tormented Harvest and his particular brand of Phalanx.

Nothing bad better happen to sweet Clarice!

Clarice is able to "blink" her way free of the constraints, and Monet -- alias M -- finished the job with her mutant power of punching.

It's easy enough to finish off the mooks, though. The real threat is Harvest himself, who boasts about how he forfeited his former humanity to throw in 100% with the Phalanx.

I used to be a Friend of Humanity. Now we're just Distant Acquaintances.

Help is on the way, however, as Banshee and Everett climb up the side of the ship, having determined that with the Phalanx loving tall things and metal, this is the only place it makes sense to be.

Also boarding are Jubilee and Emma Frost, who find plenty of rats on this not-yet-sinking ship.

Emma takes note when Jubilee mentions that she doesn't push her powers that often out of fear of hurting people and destroying property. She thinks that maybe someone, like for instance a steel-willed girlboss and an Irishman with a heart of gold, might consider training young mutants like Jubilee in the near future.

As Harvest slowly closes in on the Next Generation of Mutants, they are saved by an unlikely rescuer...

Angelo asks Paige if this is one of the X-Men that she insisted was going to come rescue them. Paige says, er, that doesn't look like Wolverine...

Fortunately, some more recognizable mutants arrive quickly.

With Harvest reduced to scrap, Banshee asks Creed how he found them, to which he notes "I've got my ways" and leaves it at that. He also implies he would like to eat the young mutants.

At least I hope that's what he's saying he wants to do to them.

Sabes turns his attentions to Paige, whom he notes has two scents, one of which seems a little too Circuit-City for his liking.

Sabretooth rips the skin off of Paige's body, but fortunately, that's literally what her power is, as it reveals a secret sci-fi skin underneath.

Well that's all right then!

Everett notes that Banshee's sonic scream seems to have destroyed Harvest but not the techno-organic Phalanx that was infecting Paige. There could be numerous reasons for this, but the most obvious and pressing one turns out to be...

That Harvest isn't dead at all! Psych! He actually drained all of the Phalanxiness out of the rest of his underlings, so now he's some kind of Combine Harvest. It may just be him -- he's cut off from the rest of the Phalanx you know -- but he's throwing everything he's got at these kids.

The experienced mutants jump into battle and instruct the neophytes to stay back. Emma psi-probes Harvest and confirms that there's totally definitely nothing human left in him so none of you should feel bad about letting loose with your full firepower.

But from the crowd, young dewy-eyed Clarice starts doing the mental math. Harvest is just going to keep coming back, because he's got those super Phalanx nuh-uh powers. There's only one way to stop him for good.

Digging deep, deeper than she's ever dug in the 3 hours we've known her, Clarice fires up her "blink" powers, over Banshee's protests, destroying the enemy in an extreme and visually-impressive way.

Unfortunately, this means succumbing to her own powers as Banshee fruitlessly tries to rescue her.

This all seems eerily familiar to him

The rest of the mutants land in the water and drift to safety. The danger is passed, but... at what cost?

Find out in Generation NeXt!

Further Thoughts:

This is exactly what I wanted. A clear-cut battle, stakes, character moments, drama, twists and turns. Whereas one of the other threads of this story elevates it to a potential world-ending calamity and gets a little bit stuck in the morass of having to feature something like two dozen characters, this one keeps it simple, sticks to the mission of rescuing a small number of new characters who we get to know and will feature in their own series soon, and manages to be clean and precise in doing so. 

The flaws in the Phalanx Covenant story have been pretty well-established: the Phalanx are a bit of a moving target as far as what they want and what they do. You just kind of accept that them winning would be a bad thing, whether they end up assimilating mutants or killing them or taking over the planet... but it comes together reasonably well in the end, and the lower scale of this particular part of the event is a lot easier to follow, in addition to being more fun.

The sacrifice of poor sweet innocent Clarice was a great climax -- I know it's kind of "the move" to have a character sacrifice themselves just moments after being introduced, but at least I liked and cared for her, and gosh darn, if only there was some way she could come back.

Probably won't happen though.

My friend and fellow X-Correspondent Jaye notes that the Generation Not-Next-Just-X kids all have pretty complicated powers compared to their mutant forebears, which I wouldn't necessarily disagree with. They seem to have been over-thought: we don't really know what M can do or what Synch can do or what the parameters of Skin and Husk's powers are. That's for their own series to flesh out (pun not intended?). It's kind of an ongoing trendline -- the All-New X-Men's powers were a little more specifically delineated than the Original 5's, and with more gaga to each of them to boot. The New Mutants continued this trend: Sunspot is not just strong, he derives his powers from the sun, Dani Moonstar isn't quite a psychic, she has a very specific iteration of psychic powers, and Magik... well, we won't get into her. The recent trend as of 1994 has pretty much been "blasty powers" -- Boom Boom, Jubilee, Gambit, Bishop, and that's when characters have a specific powerset explained at all (who can tell me what most of the Acolytes' powers are?) So we may have over-corrected with the specificity of the GenX kids' powers, but it's all fair game. I like that so many of them are body, based, to highlight the horrific nature of the mutant body and test how we think of these characters, not as studly blasty-hand cops (no offense to Bishop) but as scared and vulnerable kids with no control over their destiny.

The kids... seem all right. For now.