X-MEN #50: Full Court Press

The X-Men get a Post notification from Onslaught

Originally Published March 1996

We begin in the Upside-Down...

That is to say, someone has kidnapped Cyclops, who currently finds himself dangling from his feet sans ruby quartz visor. He's not the only X-Man who got grabbed either, and some stranger things have been done to his cohorts, like Iceman for example...

Who currently has a massive gaping vacancy where chest should be.

While Cyke, Storm, Wolverine and Iceman work to figure out who has taken them and how they got so banged up along the way, back in Westchester Charles gets a visit from everyone's favourite non-verbal magical mystical aborigine.

Bishop, who apparently stands guard outside Xavier's bedroom every night (which is fair, given he knows that Charles is due to be betrayed and murdered sometime in the future) bursts in guns a-blazin', to no particular effect. It takes a psionic blast from Phoenix to subdue the teleporter. They determine that he is the means by which all of the missing X-Men have been abducted, but not particularly personally responsible -- that is to say, when Jean manages to stop him, it's because he wants to be stopped.

Back in Battleworld or whatever, Iceman is freaking out about the massive hole in his torso, but Cyclops advises him to take a chill pill and worry about other things for now, in perhaps a questionable example of his people skills.

Also, calling a guy you've known half your life and is the same age as you "kiddo" is the ultimate power move

Wolverine and Storm apprise the situation and the terrain: the place is all spooky and dead feeling, apart from all the grass and trees, which are nice. Logan's razor-keen senses aren't quite as trustworthy as they used to be before Magneto ripped the adamantium out of his skeleton (25 issues ago this very day!) but he does pull it together enough to sense a mysterious, invisible presence among them... right...

Here!

They give their mystery foe a 1-2 punch and manage to disable his cloaking device, revealing...

A big scary guy covered in skin tags!

When he tells the X-Men they've impressed Onslaught, they're like "Oh, you're Onslaught?" and he's like "No, I'm not Onslaught, I didn't mean to give you that impression." His name is Post -- I'm not sure why. Maybe he's a cereal killer.

His job is to test the X-Men and transmit the results back to Onslaught. Call it advanced market research. He slams Wolverine and Storm down then gets his cloaking device back online to give them the slip.

Back at the Mansion, the remaining X-Men try to figure out what's what, but there isn't much to go on, especially since Gateway's mysteriously magical indigenous mind is un-readable. Even Banshee, who recently had an Onslaught cameo over at his school in Boston, has precious little insight.

They do, however, catch a glimpse of what may or may not be Onslaught, a floating, see-through tie-dye computer-generated number with giant vacant baby eyes courtesy of Electric Crayon.

Back at the fight zone, Cyclops and Iceman -- who has decided he's just going to walk off his massive chest wound -- rejoin their comrades, who inform them about Post and his testing ways. Cyclops is pretty into this, because he's a big nerd who loves tests but Wolverine calls him out on this and they have a fight about it. 

It briefly turns into a tag team match between Cyclops & Iceman and Storm & Wolverine, but -- swerve! It's all a ruse to ferret Post out.

They momentarily have him on the ropes, but he comes back thanks to his advanced knowledge of X-Men history -- I wonder if he, too, has spent the last several years reading every single issue?

That would have been much harder in 1996

Back at home base, amid some "So that's why that happened" exposition that is impossible to care about, Beast deduces that the missing X-Men have been taken somewhere in particular that has to do with the source of their foe's power. Indeed, Storm realizes that the land around them is tied to Post, so if she attacks it, Post gets hurt.

Ultimately they are able to team up and put the finishing moves on him...

Which zaps them back home instantaneously!

As the returned quartet of mutants debrief their teammates on the Herald of Onslaught, the man himself speaks, letting everyone know he is a very big deal indeed, and he is still coming, and Post wasn't all that great anyway so it's no big deal to have beat him and in fact it makes them look like losers that it took so long so nyah.

And the X-Men are left to contemplate the future... which includes a new scribe!

Further Thoughts:

Hey kids, remember in the Proteus Saga, when Cyclops started a fight with his teammates to get them all on the same page in a brilliant fake-out? Remember that iconic moment from 17 years ago? You were alive for that, right? And you have it in your collection? Well, here it is again, just to keep re-living past glories! FFS.

Far be it from me to draw wild conclusions about the workload of writing two concurrent X-Men series, but I think there was a bit too much on Scott Lobdell's plate in early 1996. Whereas the Crimson Dawn story left me feeling like there was more that could have been done, this one left me feeling like it was hardly even half-baked.

I don't mind action issues per se, but I like them a lot more when it's clear what's happening, why, and who can do what. This was just a chaotic melee where the details of Post's abilities and motivation are kept obscured -- partly on purpose and partly because there they just did a clunky job of explaining it. 

As I've pointed out, the X-Men are kind of on a roll in 1995-1996, with an exciting story that twists and turns and is executed in a stylish way, so pointing out its deficiencies at the time would have been a little bit futile, because the big rule is whatever works works. The franchise has momentum so if they want to have a whole issue with four key X-Men duking it out with some nebulously-defined baddie as a prelude to a future nebulously-defined baddie, that's the book's prerogative. (It gives me cause to think just how much time the X-Men spend in recent years fighting various factions of henchmen representing bigger, more obscure bad guys like Stryfe, Sinister, Apocalypse and now Onslaught.) The book probably could have gotten a C- from Wizard Magazine's "Report Card" section and still sold like hotcakes, so what's really the matter?

The purpose of this issue -- besides having a fancy holographic cover -- was to tease the future coming of Onslaught. That's one thing the X-Men books are absolutely doing with full force, making sure that Onslaught is the name on everyone's lips, that there's a crazy curiosity about what exactly he is and does and what it's going to mean for the X-Men when he arrives. Logically speaking, why does Onslaught -- who or what ever he is -- need to test the X-Men with some flunkie like Post? Because it's something an important, Eearth-shaking bad guy would do. It's a signal that this big, blurry baddie is almost ready to move out of the sidelines and shoulder his way past Sinister and Apocalypse and everyone else to be the X-Men's #1 threat at least for the summer of 1996. Whether it can possibly live up to all that build, remains to be seen, but superficially they are making all the right moves to keep that anticipation building.

Speaking of living up to the hype, the closing caption makes a point to call out that Mark Waid is coming aboard! At the time, Mark was something of a golden boy at DC, having made an impact with his ongoing work in The Flash and the legendary Kingdom Come prestige series. He was known for works that were steeped in legacy and respect for the past, so clearly he will be a huge success on the most "here and now" series Marvel has ever done.