UNCANNY X-MEN #351: Hours & Minutes

And now, a day in the life of Dr. Cecilia Reyes

Originally Published January 1998

Note: this issue is clearly set after the events (to the degree anything happens in it) of X-MEN #71 but I read and wrote about this first for whatever reason. It should have almost no effect on your day-to-day life but in the event you experience psychic nosebleed, time-unstickiness or visions of a future yet to be, please consult a physician. UNCANNY X-CERPTS is not responsible for any negative impacts on your perception of reality or alternate presents including but not limited to canonicity of your entire past up to this point, crises on Earths finite or infinite, or any and all Ages of Apocalypse.

We begin at the ungodly hour of 5:02 AM, which is admittedly only 48 minutes before my alarm goes off for my commute into Toronto. Steve Seagle informs us that it has been 6 days since Dr. Cecilia Reyes was pressed into joining the X-Men, in terms that make it sound like he's writing a tribute to RENT.

La Vie Bo-Mutant

Cecilia is heading back to O-MOM (that's Our Mother of Mercy hospital in the Bronx) to try to reclaim her life. On her way out the door, she runs into Storm, who implies that yeah, being a Doctor is great and all, but wouldn't it be better to be a world-saving mutant hero?

She heads down to the kitchen where she encounters Wolverine, who offers her a lift down to the city, while noting that yeah, being a Doctor is great and all, but wouldn't it be better to be a world-saving mutant hero?

Clinging to life on the back of Wolverine's bike, Cecilia thinks about the past week and how quickly she got wrapped up in all this mutant superhero stuff. They arrive at the hospital at 7:02 AM (an hour and 22 minutes door-to-door by motorcycle, which is actually less than my commute) and Dr. Reyes reflects on the fact that Somehow, the Heroes Have Returned (in Heroes Return #1-4, according to some guy named Mark) so the world doesn't really need another mutant super-person... right?

Parting ways, Wolverine has a few words of advice for this Black Puerto Rican woman about what it's like to be a minority.

Thanks, old white guy!

Before long -- well, after a significant wait with an ancient People Magazine -- Cecilia is in the office of Hospital Head Honcho Dr. Gibbons, who doesn't personally have a problem with mutants, but worries that patients might, so... you know. You know, right? You know? Don't make me say it.

Cecilia fires back that being a Doctor is her entire life, which I'm not sure she's mentioned ten or fifteen times in her handful of appearances thus far.

She's worked with bigots and sexists all her life, so why should the anti-mutites be any different?

Dr. Gibbons reluctantly accepts this position.

Meanwhile, Scott and Jean are on a flight to Anchorage, apparently taking the long way around by flying over Eastern Canada. They strike up a chat with some nosy nelly who's headed to the same place (an Alaskan on this flight to Alaska? What are the odds?) when something attacks Jean's psychic powers.

The nosy nelly offers to ring the flight attendant for some Aspirin and that must work fine because this is the last we'll see of this particular subplot for the rest of the issue.

Anyway, Dr. Reyes has a busy day, starting with getting kicked out of a routine appendectomy because the patient's family don't want a mutant operating on him.

After finding a patient she can operate on, she heads to lunch, where she finds herself, shock of shocks, shunned by her colleagues.

I'm sure they all just had to get back to work

Dejected, Cecilia goes back to her desk, but gets a spirit-lifting visit from Lilly (note: I don't know who Lilly is or what she does, but I think she's a doctor because she's wearing scrubs) who explains that everyone around here's got some shit, and yet somehow people learn to work together, so... you know... maybe there's hope?

 

Hope arrives in the form of a nurse, who summons Cecilia to deal with a patient by specific request. Dr. Reyes is glad, until she finds out the reason -- go ahead and guess it.

Yes, annoyingly, the patient is a mutant, so he was assigned to the only mutant doctor on staff (that we know about.) Offensive!

Pyro, meanwhile, wails about how he's a mutant, and he's got the Legacy Virus, which makes him a minority within a minority. Add in the fact that he's... y'know... Australian, and you've got a triple minority. As far as I know that's all the ways that Pyro is a minority.

Pyro notes that he got shot trying to rob a bank to pay for a treatment from someone who claims to be able to take away mutant genes, which is funny because he's one of the few mutant terrorists with a day job (romance novelist) but writers don't make "experimental mutant treatment money" anyway.

Also the Legacy Virus seems to be causing his powers to go wild because, as even noted within the text, Pyro doesn't create fire, he merely controls it. This all shouldn't be happening but... whatever, man!

By an astonishing coincidence, Dr. Reyes' power comes in handy.

Once he's treated, the authorities want to take him away but Cecilia has to remind them he's still a patient and has not been discharged.

Meanwhile, on the shipping docks... something... is happening... which may or may not involve a shipment belonging to Kevin Plunder (aka Ka-Zar) from Antarctica (aka where the Savage Land is.)

We're treated to a montage of Cecilia making her rounds, which involves working with all sorts of patients, only some of whom object to her being a mutant.

Eventually, she is contacted by Daredevil -- whom eagle-eyes readers may have noticed was hiding very subtly in the background of some previous pages. After explaining that despite dressing like Satan, he is in fact one of the good guys, he requests that Cecilia treat him.

While she treats this festering gunshot wound, DD pries uncomfortably into Dr. Reyes' personal life by asking about her mutant powers and reminding her that yeah, being a Doctor is great and all, but wouldn't it be better to be a world-saving mutant hero?

And spare me the excuses, I run a law firm when I'm not cosplaying Beelzebub

Later, she goes to check on Pyro again, who appeals to her, mutant-to-mutant, to loosen his straps. She does, and he predictably bolts.

When Dr. Gibbons finds out, he predictably fires her, and she shrugs it off, realizing that the universe has possibly been trying to tell her something all day.

A few hours later, she's back in Westchester, ready to give in and be some kind of Superhero Doctor or whatever.

Further Thoughts:

At a certain point, my continuous complaints about the particular tone struck by the Cecilia Reyes character -- that she doesn't want to be an X-Man and doesn't want to be in the X-Men comics -- is tilting at windmills. The character is here to stay. I don't say it because I think my words can go back in time and modify what Scott Lobdell and now Steve Seagle have done with the character; I say it as part of the close reading exercise that is this blog and in hopes that we can take note of it for the future.

Despite her protests, Cecilia is in the X-Men comics and is more or less destined to at lest spend some time as a full-fledged X-Man. The comic is more or less railroading her, but ultimately it needs to be her choice to join. Rather than have her say, several issues ago, "Looks like I'm on this crazy journey with you guys now," the creators are really mining the situation for as much story material as possible.

Steve Seagle is one of the most writerly creators we've seen on the book so far. I could tell from his first credit that he was interested in the literary facets of the medium: what to do with narration and structure. Here we have a day-in-the-life structure that demonstrates, as Cecilia goes about her business, all the ways in which she cannot escape her situation and will always be pulled back into superheroing.  It resolves with her finally acknowledging not just that she has no choice but to join in the comic book character lifestyle, but that perhaps, even with other options on the table, that would be the correct one.

It's well-intentioned, even if I see a couple of flaws here.

I've pointed this out before, but this comic can't quite quit the notion that being a doctor is a very real, important thing that a person can do with their life, and that by comparison, as we in the real world know, being a superhero is not actually a thing: that dressing up like Satan and punching ninjas is a bizarre fantasy that does not help people who are suffering in actuality. That a guy who is permanently on fire (even if, ugh... I'm not going to get into it again...) is not a real thing anyone needs to worry about the way they might worry about an abusive spouse or getting shot in a robbery.

We, the reader, don't want or need to be reminded of that and it's not like I think this is something Seagle is consciously saying. I think he wants to say the opposite because those are the words he literally put in Daredevil's mouth to convince Cecilia to use her powers for good. In the world these characters inhabit, the people who stop Galactus or Magneto from fucking up their day are serving an important function. 

Part of the problem is that there's something inherently comical about watching Matt Murdock lift the shirt of his Daredevil costume up and strip down to his BVD's. It looks like it belongs in an issue of What The--?! and not a top-selling issue of a superhero franchise that is ostensibly meant to take this stuff seriously -- and which for the most part does a remarkable job lashing the action to real world problems albeit in a metaphorical way.

If you're a wrestling fan, you might know the term "kayfabe," which is the level of reality in which wrestling is ostensibly a real competition: it's the act, the fakery of it, that fans need to be brought into to suspend their disbelief. This comic breaks kayfabe for me with moments like that, or like Pyro openly referring to himself as a villain, as if that were his job description. It becomes something referential and meta, a message to readers about comic stories without being a story itself. And it kind of undermines what was fixing to be a perfectly valid and creatively-done story that accomplished the very important work of finally getting Cecilia onside with the X-Men.

Well, it's done. And my hope is that this means the end of Cecilia's "I don't want to be here" tone, but as there has been very little development of her character beyond that, I expect it still might come up, which means I'm not really any more excited about this character than I was in the previous several issues. But if we are ready to move forward, I'm happy. I'd love to know more about who tough, abrasively dedicated and resourceful Dr. Cecilia Reyes is within the context of the X-Men and not fighting against it.