UNCANNY X-MEN #344: Casualties of War

The X-Men fight to liberate the Shi'ar Throneworld

Originally Published May 1997

We begin with Lilandra looking less Empressive than usual.

She is at the mercy -- such as it is -- of the Phalanx invaders who have overtaken her throneworld en route to using her entire race as fodder for future Phalanxlings. And they had gone -- what -- six or seven years, our time, without the empire being invaded?

Watching from the shadows, the X-Men (feat. Trish Tilby and Deathbird) quietly discuss whether the situation is hopeless. Gambit seems to think so, Beast disagrees.

Deathbird discerns that the Phalanx's plan is to assimilate the Shi'ar children, effectively wiping out a generation. Horrified, Deathbird asks if she and Bishop -- the X-Man she is most attracted to -- can go try to liberate the kids. Everyone looks to Rogue for confirmation of this plan, and Rogue wonders when exactly she became leader.

for what it's worth, I like that this team doesn't happen to have any obvious leader like Storm or Cyclops, they're just a bunch of teammates who have to organize themselves and are deferring to the members -- Beast and Rogue -- who happen to have the most experience.

Beast reluctantly agrees to let them splinter off, Deathbird praises the X-Men's courage for being "only human." She must have missed the part about the X-gene that gives them superpowers and enables them to do stuff like this to begin with (except Trish.)

Back on Earth, Senator Kelly and Special Agent Gyrich discuss the goings-on at Operation: Zero Tolerance, and wonder if things are maybe getting a bit out of hand. Bastion seems to have raised an army unlike anything the world has ever seen and he intends to aim it at the very people of the United States who back him, thanks to clout gained from anti-mutant concerns.

So you're telling me a dictatorial figure is leveraging hatred of The Other to subvert the very principles that America was supposedly built on, with the full support of the government itself?

Could that really happen, here, in our world, literally today, under the current administration?

One does wonder.

What a crazy hypothetical.

 

Anyway, back to fun spacey stuff. Bishop and Deathbird arrive at the Nest where Shi'ar babies are grown, and she philosophizes about the rights and freedoms that the Phalanx seek to trample out, and how sure, she may have tried to usurp a throne once or twice, but it's only because she cares so much.

Bishop re-focuses them back to being on the lookout for the Phalanx. Deathbird notes that Bishop is a little different from his teammates, and Bishop explains that it's because unlike them, he's a cop from the future. Deathbird realizes that's probably why she's so turned on by him.

Deathbird falls suddenly and Bishop realizes it's not because they're under attack -- she's re-opened her wound from when they found her a week ago. She still vows to fight to her last breath.

Meanwhile, looking at all the shit the Phalanx are up to has stirred some suppressed memories in Magnet Joe, and they're not good ones.

Gambit can see the rage welling up inside of his reluctant teammate and counsels him to turn his feelings off for the good of the mission -- they need to keep things under wraps while Beast works on a techno gizmo to disrupt the Phalanx's techno-organic nature.

Unfortunately, his pro-active supervillain side kicks in and he starts to rampage. Rogue and Gambit jump into the fray to run interference.

The heroes briefly have the upper hand, until the Phalanx start adapting to their various powers.

I don't know why everyone is saying the Phalanx are exactly the same as the Borg from Star Trek. Clearly there are differences. I don't know what they are, but they're there.

Down below, Bishop and Deathbird fight back to back with the implicit promise that if they make it out alive they are totally going to hook up already.

But just like that, the Phalanx start disintegrating; whatever it was that Hank was doing worked.

We end with the X-Men standing in the remains of their victory -- a pyrrhic one, perhaps, given all the destruction and devastation, but you know what, it will probably all work out.

Further Thoughts:

This perfectly fine issue is a testament to how good X-Men is when it's firing on all cylinders. There are links, albeit subtle ones, to the doings in the Shi'ar Empire and the struggles that the mutants face back home. More pressingly there are very strong links between the fictional struggles of the homo superior and the world they inhabit, and the very real problems facing the world today. You don't need me to philosophize on it, but any conscientious reader knows that this resonance is part of what makes the X-Men so special.

Although it was kind of messy in terms of what happened and why, this was an action-packed conclusion to the preceding multi-parter. Melvin Rubi's guest art has less in common with Joe Madureira's than, say, the previous generation of artists who left to form Image in terms of style, but with the gravity and presence of a Bryan Hitch. That makes for a bit of stylistic shock when reading from issue to issue but in the context of these pages the art is quite good and I'm surprised that's not a name I know. It's beyond competent, but perhaps just missing out on any kind of superstar factor (not everyone's got it, you know.)