Iceman comes home
Originally Published December 1994
We begin with a kingdom of ice-solation
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| Has anyone ever used that before? I don't feel like checking |
Bobby has still got the mopes about how, in the span of about six hours, Emma Frost mastered his powers better than he ever did (except the part about reverting to flesh and blood but that's elementary.) He and Rogue are on their way to a place called Lawn Guy Land to visit his parents, which gives him cause to also reflect on how his dad is a raging asshole who never believed in him. Daddy Drake rails against the very concept of imagination, which is how you get a son who grows up to be an accountant.
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| There's not really a funny way to say this, the dude sucks |
Meanwhile, Charles is already in bed, dreaming about old times with Magnus in Israel -- the good old days when they was violated all sorts of medical ethics and also hunted Nazis together.
Dream!Magnus tries to bait Xavier into revealing his hatred for the man, but Chuck isn't biting -- he never really hated Magneto, not the man anyway, just been a little sad about the tiff that split them apart. He even says that fighting Magneto helped strengthen the dream of human-mutant co-existence that he has long harbored. Talk about perspective.
Magneto says, "Sure, but here's a hypothetical for you -- wouldn't it be sweet if I simply never existed? Like, wouldn't it totally rule if someone from today, like, I dunno, went back and time and killed me before I could provide any kind of obstacle to your goals?"
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| Would you still love me if I was a worm? |
En route to the Drake house, Bobby gives Rogue the straight tea about her fling with Gambit, completely unsolicited, as all good Judies do.
Rogue objects to this absolutely true slander -- he may be a jerk but he's Rogue's chosen jerk -- but she does admit there's a twinge of patheticness to her infatuation with the hot-and-cold pot of gumbo. Bobby flips it and says there's nothing pathetic about wanting to be loved.
At that moment, Papa Drake appears on the porch to castigate them for waking the neighbors and arriving three hours late -- I don't know if it's eight PM or midnight. Mrs. Drake puts dinner back on. It becomes clear Bobby knows a little something about not being loved.
Inside, they bicker about Bobby's choice of company, whether it's an Eye-talian, an Oriental, or a mutie. Bobby has just about as much as he can stand of his father's overt old school racism.
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| Can't you at least dog whistle, dad? |
They have it out, and Bobby storms off, sarcastically apologizing for not being "normal." Rogue follows after, noting that in all the ways Bobby had described his dad -- hard worker, loving husband, etc -- he never mentioned that Mr. Drake was a bigot.
In dreamland, Magneto continue to insists to Charles, "I'm bad and someone for sure should have killed me a long time ago." Charles disagrees -- there's no real way of knowing. So finally "Magneto" drops the facade and reveals his true face...
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| I'm back, baby |
In New York City, after a night at the Worthington-owned Starlight Club, the two upper-crust X-people Angel and Psylocke have an intimate evening of exploring their mutual attraction. They decide they're going to be the drama-free couple in the house: no angst, just hot people kissin'.
Out at the beach, over a meal of takeout burgers and fries, Bobby and Rogue lament. Having come face to face with what his father really is, Bobby wonders where exactly he got his sense of right and wrong. Rogue notes that one particular piece of nonsense spouted by Bobby's father is extra wrong: imagination isn't worthless, it's the only way we have of dreaming of a better world.
And back at the mansion, Charles awakens in a cold sweat with a shocking realization. Legion -- his super-powerful mutant son whose only impediment was his disassociative personality disorder -- is awake, and seemingly rehabilitated, meaning there's nothing stopping him from, well, becoming the most powerful and twisted mutant ever (largely due to his warped sense of right and wrong caused by a lifetime of parental abandonment.)
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| Lots of candidates for Father of the Year in this one |
Further Thoughts:
Scott Lobdell is the writer of Uncanny X-Men, one of two writers with ongoing access to one of the richest and most intriguing stables of characters in the Marvel Universe. For whatever reason, he's chosen to use this singular access to lavish a lot of his attention and creative energy on... Iceman. It's... a choice.
Despite my insistence that Bobby does not possess Main Character Energy, there is something to this. Amongst the X-Men he has a pretty unique background: he grew up in a relatively conventional household, not an orphan abandoned by a space pirate, not a circus performing Roma, not a runaway raised by a terrorist or a master thief. He just had a quiet life in the burbs with a father who, yes, seems like a nightmare but harbors feelings shared by a lot of members of his generation. Looking into that is a window into a grounded version of the anti-mutant plight, and through that the real-world plights of the marginalized, that X-Men doesn't usually reach. so I applaud it. It was a good issue that said some important and resonant things. Even I, in 2024, am wondering how I managed to diverge in some ways from my parents' values. It's funny how that happens.
I didn't expect to like the Iceman-centric issue, but it dragged me kicking and screaming into appreciation.
Elsewhere, we are building toward the big story with Legion, the neglected appendage of the X-Men's family tree. It's sad that he was introduced so many years ago but is rarely foregrounded, because as an ultra-powerful, unpredictable and traumatized mutant who is also Charles Xavier's son, he doesn't feel like something you just forget about.
It's stories like these that made me dislike what they did with him later. It just didn't really fit "oh, by the way, all this time". But it is what it is.
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