X-MEN #69: Last Exit

Iceman and the gang have their final showdown with Bastion!

Originally Published November 1997

We begin years ago.

Actually, we don't -- we're looking at the here and now, but Iceman's mind is years ago, thinking back to the time when it was accepted, nay, expected that he be the class clown of the original X-Men, making terible puns and not leading a ragtag group of malcontented mutant neophytes -- including reluctant combatant Dr. Cecilia Reyes and vicious Morlock Marrow (who now no longer speaks all raggedy) -- into battle against a cadre of genocidal robots.

And you may ask yourself, how did we get here? The last time we saw Iceman and his new friends, they were cornered on an otherwise deserted stretch of Manhattan, poised on the brink of obliteration by Prime Sentinels.

It's true that they were looking backed into a deadly corner by the OZTinels, but the sudden collapse of the building they were backed up against puts a wall of rubble between them and their foes. 

Iceman hastily erects an ice dome to protect his squad, while they wonder what exactly is going on. The answer is, of course, this chick:

Yes, Sabra has linked up with our little troupe, here to share her knowledge and talents, whatever they may be. She explains that Bastion has a dark secret that the Israeli government has uncovered -- no doubt because Bastion had logged onto PROMIS at some point. 

She should be linking up with J. Jonah Jameson -- what ever happened to that guy??! 

Back in the present tense, this kooky quartet is skating along the Connecticut coastline looking for Bastion's secret getaway. Cecilia, whose ACAB values definitely extend to the Mossad, questions why a foreign agent is here in the United States. Sabra replies with a show of power, countermanding Dr. Reyes' forcefield like it was nothing and stomping vicious killer Marrow like an unruly dog just because she can.

Yeah, we get it, Sabra's the best...

Sabra explains that there's a war on, and it's all right for soldiers to fight and die but she draws the line at innocents and children.

Go tell your bosses that

She goes on to say -- touting her homeland as the epicenter of peace and tolerance -- that Israel would never endorse some kind of genocidal "final solution" at the hands of a mad dictator. It's just not something they would ever do, making Bastion Israel's Enemy #1.

Meanwhile back in Washington, Kelly and Gyrich continue their conversation, musing about whether Kelly has committed political suicide by backtracking his support for Operation: Zero Tolerance. Kelly reiterates his somewhat naïve believe that Americans by and large reject the politics of hate (despite the fact that the pages of this very comic have shown popular support for Bastion.)

Gyrich, in the end, is actually proud of Kelly for standing up for something, being the first American politician in living memory to do so.

Up in Connecticut, Iceman leads his ladyfriends up to Bastion's beachfront hideaway. He asks them not to follow, and they don't listen, because it's still Iceman after all.

So they enter the lion's den and find Bastion there with a bunch of his lookalike friends, sipping merlot and having a grand old time.

Iceman asks Bastion to let the kid and the "old woman" go, and Bastion's like sure, I'm done with the kid, and the "old woman" is basically my mom.

Bastion then takes a deep breath and explains his origins -- in roundabout terms. Once he was not human, but then some mysterious deity or other granted him humanity, and he was pushed back out into the world to defend humankind against mutants. However, he was sort of a blank slate, so still had to be molded, which he was at the hands of kindly old Mrs. Gilberti.

The story seems to be missing a few details, but anyway. Mrs. Gilberti pipes up that she didn't teach Bastion to be a racist, which is news to Bastion, but before Basty can interrogate that any further, Marrow lunges at the helpless old woman, sensing that hurting her will cause a lot of grief to Bastion. Bobby puts her on ice because, as satisfying as that would be, killing innocents is not really the X-Men way, and we're doing things the X-Men way hete despite only one X-Man being present.

Instead, Iceman decides to take point, launching into an Oscar-worthy speech about how America isn't just a faceless mob but also 300 million individuals, who all get to make up their own minds. 

It would be a beautiful thing to say if it weren't for the fact that, in this comic as in life, racism seems to be extraordinarily popular among those individuals.

Iceman, however, is on a roll, and continues his moment, talking about how he nursed his formerly-racist dad back to health after being beaten down by the Creed camp that lit the torch now carried by Bastion, and how the X-Men only formed because of the evil forces that threatened human and mutant alike, and how Bastion isn't any different from Magneto or Apocalypse, or any of those other bad guys.

Bastion bristles at being compared to various mutant terrorists, and fires back with a speech of his own, espousing replacement theory rhetoric that can be found in the mouths of any number of prominent racists today and throughout history.

Iceman, however, gets the upper hand, and resumes his side of the story, talking about how much he hated Creed and OZT and wanted to do violence in retribution for what happened to his father, but he realized he was being overcome with hate, which was causing him to forget to be human, much like the OZT'ers.

He powers down and essentially offers a free shot, confident in the knowledge that giving in to hate will make Bastion the thing he most despises.

He's banking big on Bastion giving a shit about being a hypocrite. The bad guy readies his next shot...

But just as he's reading the deathblow, he's stopped by the arrival of...

SHIELD! The Government has heeded Kelly's testimony and decided to shut down OZT mid-stream. Bastion knows when he's beaten, and gives in.

With that, Bastion is led off in cuffs for the crime of carrying out his duties as an agent of the United States Government. We learn that the other X-Men escaped captivity (that happened in a Wolverine comic that went roughly as you would expect) and Jubilee is home safe -- in case you remembered she was kidnapped.

And I think that's the last we'll see of that nutty Bastion fella. I think we've all learned a valuable lesson.

Further Thoughts:

Allow me to begin by outlining what I believe to be the positive merits of this story.

First of all, it's an ending. It's not exactly Jean Grey sacrificing herself on the moon, but it's certainly the last part of Operation: Zero Tolerance, and we won't have to think about it anymore. It resolved the problem and had a lot to say about the core themes of the X-Men. 

It's not like we could have expected Iceman's rhetoric to cause Bastion's heart to grow three sizes that day, but maybe somewhere, someone reading this will have a breakthrough about the folly of hatred and intolerance. 

If you happen to be all in on Iceman as the protagonist of the X-Men -- and really, from the beginning of his tenure as X-Men writer until now, Scott Lobdell seems to really have put a lot of energy behind building Bobby up as a character that can stand on his own two feet -- you might enjoy this one. Bobby, the last X-Man standing because of the events that happened to his father, has to rejoin the fray and essentially put aside his joking ways to guide a mishmash of reluctant allies into battle. I don't happen to be a big Bobby fan, he just doesn't have main character energy to me to where I would want to read about him for issue after issue after issue, but if you're a believer, then that faith is rewarded here. OZT is the Iceman Show, for better or worse.

It was a good idea for a story, even if, as tends to happen, it just devolved into the X-Men (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) getting chased around from place to place by cybernetic boogeymen. The X-Men becoming enemies of the state, having all their secrets stolen and all their resources obliterated feels like it should have been a much grander story -- I'm aware that there are tie-ins in other X-related comics but it still doesn't feel like the full potential of this event was really exploited. Hell, there's even a whole squad of X-Men who are off doing something else! (Or nothing at all, as the case may be.) As such it reads as surprisingly quaint and small scale for what is basically the culmination of the entire Scott Lobdell era (or half of it, as the other half is resolving the Gambit-Rogue business in the other title.)

We get some vague allusions to Bastion's origins -- which you can look up if you happen to be curious -- but maddeningly, the big secret Sabra was intending to reveal is not explained and never becomes anything close to a factor in the proceedings. Officially, no confirmation of Bastion's backstory would be forthcoming until a Cable/Machine Man Annual in the following year, by which point, I hate to say it, but the moment had passed.

Similarly, Dr. Reyes and Marrow were just... along for the ride.

Here in the real world, I don't think we can wait for the Government to have an abrupt change of heart and send SHIELD after the bad guys, so while the ending is appropriately sized to put down the threat of Bastion and OZT -- albeit while sidelining our protagonists so the real heroes, the faceless agents of SHIELD who did nothing until their Government told them it was okay, did their work -- it doesn't inspire much hope. Continue to find ways to do the good, important work of combatting hate and trying to make the world suck less for the real "mutants" we have, who are hunted and hated and yet nevertheless protect (or at least try to improve) a world that hates and fears them.