X-MEN #51: Deathbound Train

The X-Men catch a train, but will their efforts be in vain?

Originally Published April 1996

We begin at the mansion where Professor Xavier works hard to finish the repairs to Cerebro after it was destroyed during the Phalanx Covenant storyline like a year and a half ago. Bishop muses about whether they truly need Cerebro -- they are friends with Caliban, an accomplished mutant-sniffer, after all. Before Charles can say "What are you talking about, this is an insanely sophisticated piece of technology, Caliban is just a guy" he gets a ping -- an extreme spike in mutant activity in, of all places, New Jersey.

Let's see Caliban do that

It may be a malfunction but more importantly maybe not, so Bishop gathers the only two X-Men on duty that night, Gambit and Beast, and heads out to investigate.

Hey, it's the credits again

Before you can say "Pascual Ferry," the unlikely trio of the man who might betray the X-Men, the cop who is investigating him, and an actual secret infiltrator of the X-Men who is extremely wary of said cop, find themselves on a commuter train where, as it happens, the passengers are being transformed into fearsome ghoulies.

Excuse me, this is the Quiet Zone

Meanwhile, Scott and Jean are having some quality time with Jean's parents and her recently-motherless niece and nephew. Uncle Scott is having a good old time playing kiddie games like "Which hand is the coin in," "Guess which number I'm thinking of" and, time permitting, "Try really hard to move a book off the shelf without touching it."

Jean calls him out on probing the kids for mutant powers and I agree -- there are other, less stupid ways of determining if someone is a mutant. Jean's argument is that whether they are mutants or not, it's not fair to drag them kicking and screaming into the world of mutant drama at such a young age. Give them at least until they're 12 before they're out there fighting the Shi'ar Imperial Guard on the weekends, you know?

The discussion is tabled, however, when Jean's father flips the channel to see noted hate-monger Graydon Creed announcing his candidacy for President.

A complete monster campaigning on out-and-out racism? How did Mark Waid know?

At the mansion, Xavier puts in a call to Ambassador Louis St. Croix, a member of his mutant underground. It's broached whether the Prof will have to go to extreme measures to curb Creed's momentum.

On the Mutant Train, our heroes appraise the situation: this appears to be some kind of mutagenic disease that is spreading rapidly by physical contact. Right now it's confined to the train but once the train pulls into the station -- and presumably, the mutants all get off and go to their jobs -- there will be no stopping the outbreak.

Beast, who I will remind you is dark, ponders whether this is such a bad thing, given it would mean that mutants are no longer a minority fighting for their very lives. 

When this notion fails to gain any traction with his teammates, he plays it off as a joke -- yeah, I think we've all been there.

This rates a "hmmm" on Bishop's cop-o-meter.

Beast decides to actually contribute to the mission and uses brake fluid to whip up some knockout gas, which seems to have a side-effect of reverting the new mutants to their normie forms.

This is displeasing to the virus' creator, who is on hand to witness the whole ordeal -- and you will never f*&king believe who that is.

Well it ain't Richard Dawson

That's right, it's the literal last person on Earth Beast wants to see right now.

With only moments until the train reaches the heart of Manhattan, Gambit does the sensible thing and charges the entire flicking train with kinetic energy. Bishop has some qualms about the plan.

Further Thoughts:

Lately, I have been doing a lot of multi-issue posts, and at first glance, I expected this to be another one of them. On the face of it, this is just another "The X-Men have to thwart a runaway train carrying infected mutant virus passengers" story where it takes two issues to really get a sufficient quantity and quality of comic to discuss in depth. And I want to make it clear that I don't think there's anything wrong with that: the X-Men comics of the last year or so have been fine to good, enjoyable for their own sakes and have stories that make you want to keep reading, so if the individual issues are a little light, it's only because evolution has selected that that might be okay.

But I think I would be doing this particular issue a disservice by barreling through to the conclusion. I think what Waid and Ferry have done with the first part of this story is extremely solid. They have a fairly conventional problem with a not-really-unexpected twist to it, which commands them to juggle several planes of action (fighting mutants, saving civilians, stopping a train), which they do laudably, so that the story gets more and more exciting when it becomes clear just how urgent the problem is.

The premise also gives us a chance to see the intersection of these characters whose fates are intertwined in ways that some of them understand and some of them don't. As I mentioned, there's a Gambit-Bishop link and a Bishop-Beast link, as well as a Beast-Sinister link and, although we don't know its exact nature yet a Sinister-Gambit link. What the X-Men comics have done in the 90s is intertwined dozens of characters in bizarre, perhaps intractable ways that nevertheless provide numerous potential flashpoints for intrigue and action, and then parceled out those flashpoints so sparingly that it provides a compelling read just to watch the characters in their inevitable collisions. That's a triumph of the design of the X-Men at this point in time (credit to Lobdell, Nicieza and Harras for stewarding the franchise to this point) as much as it is of Waid and Ferry for conceiving and executing this issue. That was what was so addictive about the X-Men in this era, because the stories, outside of major events like the Phalanx Covenant and the Age of Apocalypse, barely shuffled forward with any progress or urgency, but you liked seeing what little dribs and drabs were doled out.

There's a few different ways to make a comic stand out: make it important, make it surprising, or make it good. This issue is not all that important or surprising -- it just happens to be the X-Men's outing for that month -- but it is good, and doing a comic that is good is sometimes the hardest route to go. And the way that this is good is that it is exciting (train story) and gives us a visitation with other subplots we are interested in. What about Creed? What about Jean's niblings? And what part does Sinister have to play in all this?

It's an unlikely candidate for an extremely solid issue, but Mark Waid is a writer who doesn't seem to bring less than his A-game to even the average outing, in spite of his status as new writer on the block (or rather, recently-promoted pinch-hitter.)