UNCANNY X-MEN #352: In Sin Air

Cyclops and Jean battle AIM in the sky!

Originally Published February 1998

We begin with birdwatching -- or is it a bird watching?

Jean Grey has taken to the skies in the "disguise" of a series of common birds -- something unlike anything we've ever seen her do -- to search for Charles Xavier while her body sis comfortably on a flight to Anchorage.

Okay, not that comfortably

The distraction brings Jean back to her corporeal form as chaos erupts due to -- Jean surmises -- the presence of some kind of crazy psychic entity onboard.

Also not helping is the fact that a mysterious miniature vessel has attached itself to the plane -- with intent to board!

Things quit down in the cabin and Scott and Jean have a telepathic convo, partly to check in on the fact that Scott had life-saving abdominal surgery two days earlier.

After an art change, one of the passengers starts freaking out about how they're all going to die. The superheroes decide that's none of their concern and leave it to the crew to settle him down.

Back at the mansion, Warren arrives late to wish Scott and Jean a safe flight (I'll say) and rightly catches shit for it, and for not being around for the chaos surrounding the return to the mansion. Angel's rebut is that he's got a lot going on being rich and all, which is not the winning argument he probably thinks it is.

The only person who seems to want Warren around is Marrow, who seems to have affection for the playboy.

Has a thing for blonds, does she

Back on the plane, Jean, who is having one whopper of a psychic headache, goes in search of some Tylenol, passing by the William Shatner guy and wondering hey, what's up with that anyway?

She's soon to find out, as this certainly very pleasant flight is soon interrupted by the arrival of...

Yes, AIM, those fearsome scientific beekeeper guys! And they want... something! But they're not going to get it, thanks to this guy!

That's right, there's some kind of valuable psychic entity aboard, but Dr. Sibelius has rigged it to explode if anyone messes around with it! It's a foolproof plan!

AIM says to hell with that and tazers Sibelius so that he can take them down to see the thing. They start threatening randos like the schmoe with the red sunglasses, but are interrupted when the entity starts causing everyone to bug out and re-live their worst memories.

Jean has managed to slip down to the galley to try to get a look at this thing, while AIM subdues the freaking-out guy and then taunts Scott with the fact that there are no superheroes aboard this flight to say them, nyah ha ha.

Back at the mansion, Cannonball receives an invite from Tabitha "Boomer" Smith of X-Force to join her at the Colossal Man festival in Texas, and Sam's like "Sure, what the hell, I haven't really been in this comic for months anyway."

"Why did I even join this team?"

Down in the cargo hold, Jean makes contact with the entity, which gives her the highlight reel of being tortured at the hands of scientists.

Waylaid, she ducks behind some crates for cover just in time to go unseen by AIM and Anxiety McGee. Since they can't mess with the entity while the plane is in flight due to the bomb, they make the sensible call to ground it, which goes a little sideways when the plane strikes the de-docking AIM shuttle.

Despite the fact that the plane is seemingly going into a nosedive, Scott gets up from his seat (??) and rushes the AIM guard for reasons unknown--

And thanks to an assist from a crew member wielding a fire extinguisher, the threat of AIM is negated.

Down below, Jean similarly neutralizes AIM with her signature left hook...

Then reaches out to the Entity to ask it to use its empathy-based psychic powers to calm everyone down while the plane makes an emergency landing in Winterpeg.

Because they're landing in Canada, the Entity is remanded into the custody of Department H, aka the shady group that oversees Alpha Flight. They say "Hey, if this thing is harmless we'll let it go free" which I'm sure Jean and Scott believe.

Scott and Jean decide to ring Wolverine and let him know that Dept. H is a thing again -- as soon as they get to Anchorage, because nothing is going to interrupt their leave of absence. They watch the Freakout Guy get loaded into an ambulance and wonder if they'll ever see that crazy psychic alien entity ever again.

According to Marvel Fandom Wiki, the Entity is never seen again, so this turns out to be, you know, just one of those things.

Ko-Fi

Further Thoughts:

You know it's always a marker of quality when you have more artists than you can count on one hand. Despite the promise of the cover blurb, however, it's actually not the most ever in one issue of Uncanny.

It wasn't that long ago that we had an entirely different sort of issue about Scott being on a plane that was under attack, which felt a little more well-executed, more exciting and more vital to the ongoing story of X-Men. I can't fault Seagle's approach here, wanting Cyclops and Jean to be as much like normal passengers caught up in a chaotic situation as possible, but the story still feels like it does nobody any favors, keeps our heroes out of the sidelines, and doesn't properly explain enough about what is going on.

This would have made a fine issue of X-Men Unlimited, a kind of inventory story for completists who need it to own all, but it's somewhat of an annoying diversion here because the X-Men have never fought A.I.M., Scott and Jean are seemingly not going to keep regularly appearing in the comic going forward, and the Entity never shows up again. I'm not against random one-offs and oddities as long as they're well-told -- Fabian Nicieza's best issue of X-Men may have been "Sunset Grace" -- but this was not that.

I've noted that Seagle comes off as a very writerly writer. His interests seem to be as much in form and execution as they are about proffering comic book content. This was a fine comic book in some ways, and certainly intriguing in outline form, but not one that would seem exciting to X-Men fans. The abundance of secrecy and mystery surrounding the Entity, its origins, powers and the intentions of those pursuing it makes it hard to feel engaged by what is going on. It feels like the X-Men have been dropped into somebody else's story, and in structure it's a bit of a case of trying to run when he hasn't fully mastered walking.

Say what you will about the X-Men comics of the early and mid-90's, they were crowd-pleasers and they knew how to get down to business. Did it take forever to pay off the dozens of stories that were simmering at any given time? Yes. Were there distant logical leaps and thin characterizations? Absolutely. But you can have that in a well-meaning story that aims higher too, and here it also feels too bogged down in minutiae to provide a satisfactory reading experience.