X-MEN #45: The Enemy of My Enemy...

Gambit and Rogue talk it out

Originally Published October 1995

We begin with... wait, wait, wait, first let's unfold that big long cover...

That's the stuff.

So, Rogue and Iceman are on a road trip to nowhere in particular, guided by Rogue's vaguely instinctive, poorly-sketched ideas of the memories of the feelings she inherited from Gambit after their kiss. Bobby dares to ask for a little more detail than this, and fittingly gets a rock thrown at his head for having the icecubes to do so.

They have a little hero-on-hero action which certainly calms Rogue's jangled nerves, but ultimately the stress of having absorbed Gambit's deep dark secret is triggering some serious stress in her and she could probably really use some professional help, which sucks because all she has is Iceman, who is not so good with people.

But really, it's not for lack of effort.

Gambit has flown off to meet them in Seattle, killing time by standing moodily in the rain and looking for a good latte. 

Rogue and Ice find their way to a watering hole where of course the scantily-clad, buxom and outwardly gregarious mutant beauty has attracted the attention of the local bachelors. When Iceman puts a stop to it for their and her own good, it induces another bitter, screeching monologue about how she just can't touch anybody.

What it all amounts to is, she was really making progress with Gambit, opening herself up and all that, but then she had to go and absorb his stupid Deep Dark Secret™ and now she can't trust anybody. 

Not even Iceman? What could he be hiding that's so shocking?

The locals figure out that this woman who can benchpress the entire bar and has flown off into the night and the guy made of sno-cones are actually mutants, and are prepared to form a lynch mob on Bobby, when good old Gambit arrives to intervene.

Meanwhile, across the country, Creed plots out his next move.

Why do I feel like this is a viable alternative to what's currently on offer in 2024?

Gambit leads Iceman to where he knows Rogue will have gone -- a creepy abandoned theatre, of course! Finally, the two would-be lovers come face to face for the first time in weeks. Gambit's first move is to try to gaslight her into thinking that whatever she learned from inside his brain is no big deal.

Rogue tries to get away but Iceman and Gambit turn her around, with Remy pleading to actually face the problems head on for once. Rogue thinks that's a laugh and asks Remy what happened at this theatre that was so significant, and he says never mind about that, it's in the past and it's all water under a bridge off a duck's back. 

He seems absolutely determined not to reveal his DDS.

What it comes down to, more than the existence or the substance of the secret itself, is that there will always be barriers between them. Gambit finally offers to let Rogue touch him, absorb him, one more time, and bond on that level so that she can fully understand him. It is, in some way, quite moving.

But alas, it is not to be.

Saying a tearful goodbye, she flies off, not just away from Gambit, but away from the X-Men, for at least a little while.

Gambit sends Iceman home on the Blackbird and says he, too, needs a few days to process. But he only gets as far as the next block before he hears a familiar -- and unwelcome -- voice.

Because of course it all comes back to this guy

Whatever shared past Gambit has with Sinister, it's clearly not as over and done with as Remy would like to think.

Further Thoughts:

The drama between Gambit and Rogue has been one of the more compelling subplots of the early-90's X-Men, simmering in the background as the heroes do their thing. Naturally, the events of Legion Quest caused that drama to ratchet up and bring us to our current point.

This is not necessarily how I would want to do comics -- not just an issue-length conversation, but an over-sized "special" issue that is comprised almost entirely of back-and-forth between Rogue and Gambit about things whose details we don't necessarily know -- and neither do all of the characters. The conventional thing to do would be to tie it to some action, even a token bad guy appearance, but all the action in this issue is basically just color for the conversation, Gambit's and Rogue's powers spilling out onto each other as emotions get heated.

This would not be how I would do things, had I the keys to the X-Men franchise, but it works for the time and place: Gambit and Rogue, with their drama, deserve to be foregrounded, their problems given due emotional weight. We care about the characters, which is ultimately the strength of the X-Men. We've known Rogue for 15 years now, and no, we don't really need page after page of her crying out "I can't touch anybody!!" and "I trusted Remy and it went bad!!" but it's valid. There's a level of introspection and emotional complexity to what is, at its core, an unrealistic problem that could only be had by superheroes, that makes it a pretty satisfying read. 

Things are left on an ambiguous note, and so much the better for emotional resonance, even if we still don't know exactly what happened in Gambit's past, and we are going to face those unresolved feelings between these two for years to come. All we can do is connect the dots: Gambit, Sinister, Sabretooth, and someone called Greycrow. To be continued.

This is the end of Fabian Nicieza's tenure as a writer of X-Men. It's been hit and miss: he provided some of the clunkier or more missable stories of the past few years, and at least one maddeningly irksome one, but he gave a lot of attention to the characters and their problems, their inner lives and foibles, and handled it with perhaps more nuance than his colleague Lobdell. If the strength of the X-Men lies in their humanity and not just their super exploits, Nicieza was in the pocket for a lot of his run here; there are just other things that a superhero comic also needs to do that I feel he didn't marry well with what he was good at.