Charles investigates the death of Wolverine!
Originally Published December 1999
We begin with the call nobody ever wants to receive: "Wolverine is dead. No, seriously, for real."
When could this have happened? Where else but in Astonishing X-Men, the three-part mini-series that combines the irresistible elements of Nina and the Mannites, Bastion (who turned out to be a robot, by the way??) and Apocalypse's new Bedouin-like Horseman Death, pitted against the star-fueled makeshift team of Cyclops, Phoenix, Angel, Cable and X-Man. If that sounds like word salad to you, you should check out my full write-up at Ko-Fi for only a nominal donation.
Anyway, having spent literally a full day on their own, the wayward X-Men return to the mansion to see for themselves.
I know it's shocking, but I think we can all agree that by1999 we'd seen all we needed of Logan, and the franchise is ready to move beyond him.
Unsurprising, what ensues is shock and awe, as well as a general setting of priorities -- Wolverine is dead and there's an autopsy to be done, but also isn't it about time we figured out what was going on with Marrow? Oh, and Mikhail is back, and unconscious, he could probably use a physical.
It appears someone -- some unknown person who might use a Horseman-type figure calling themselves Death -- might be waging war on the X-Men. It's time to circle the wagons, but Warren wants out -- his only thought is of Betsy, his lover and recently-depowered mutant.
With everyone on edge, the timing is poor for a brief power outage that causes everyone to go into alert mode, despite being seemingly harmless. Xavier chides them for being undisciplined, and more bickering -- the real selling point of 1999's X-Men comics -- ensues.
 |
| Thank God, I was worried this team might start to be united or something. |
Cyclops breaks down the battle lines -- it seems Kurt, Kitty, Piotr and Nathan want to follow Xavier blindly, while he, Jean, Rogue, Remy, Sarah, and Nathan -- er, the other one -- are skeptical and independent.
Out of nowhere, Charles accuses Phoenix of controlling Scott's mind (wives, am I right fellas?). Everyone starts pointing fingers like a spirited game of Werewolf and a donnybrook ensues.
 |
| This panel gets slightly better if you imagine Scott having Tommy Wiseau's voice |
Cyclops unleashes an optic blast at the Prof, but Kitty phases, causing Storm to get hurt.
Things kind of escalate from there, causing both factions to be separated by debris.
On the Xavier side, they wonder whether Gambit's recent exploits, or Sarah's transformation, or Rogue's conspiracy misadventure, has played havoc on their colleagues.
Meanwhile, the Jean squad muses whether any of their friends on the other side has been replaced by Skrulls during their recent adventure, or is Colossus' allegiance is in question, as he was a former member of the Acolytes.
To dust this story with extremely faint praise, this is depicted in an interesting parallel structure that highlights the mutual distrust going on while also reminding us that this team has been hit with a lot -- many of which remains unresolved -- in the recent times.
Meanwhile Warren, on his way to check on Betsy, encounters a strange flying saucer.
Back at the mansion, the fighting flares up again, with each side sending one after the other...
....with disastrous results.
With both sides taking casualties. That's right, not only is Wolverine dead, but Colossus and Rogue are soon to follow! Hard to believe, but it's all real and really happening!
At the mansion, the truth is revealed at last... the X-Men are being menaced by the return of... Onslaught!
Or is it Dark Phoenix?
Just before things start to really fly off the rails, Charles calls the whole thing off. That's right, it was all an elaborate ruse! Charles had to provoke the team to see if any of them could be determined as impostors, as he has recently suspected.
 |
| See Chuck, this is why people don't like you. |
As it turns out, the entire reason Charles was overworking the team was to keep their minds occupied so he could probe them, and then drive them apart to minimize damage done by an infiltrator. He explains how he went about vetting the X-Men one by one, many of whom are secretive loners by nature, others are borderline strangers (looking at you, Marrow.) There were reasons to bring in telepaths Cable and X-Man as well, although as far as I'm concerned that was for marketing purposes. (People love Nate's jacket and floppy hair!)
Was all of this really necessary? Perhaps. Unfortunately, and surprisingly, the worst plan I've ever heard proved somewhat ineffective, and the death of Wolverine moved the timetable up, resulting in the need for this whole clusterfuck today. And yes, Charles really did make some of the team believe they had died.
 |
| I'm thinking of a word that starts with "cun" but it isn't "cunning." |
Elsewhere, Angel's duplicate has him on the ropes, but he has assistance from a not-unexpected source.
When questioned as to how she could tell who was the real Warren, Psylocke has a pithy answer.
 |
| To be fair, he does have fabulous hair |
I guess "Only the real Warren gets his ass kicked that badly" is too harsh.
At the mansion, Charles brings everyone to the autopsy room, where, as a reminder, Wolverine is dead. Or so it would appear! Beast reveals that yes, this individual is Wolverine down to the molecular level, but with one tiny major difference: the conspicuous lack of an X-Gene, meaning whatever it is, it isn't a mutant.
It's time to pull the rubber mask off this old amusement park owner and reveal...
That's right gang, perhaps unsurprisingly, those shape-shifting aliens at some point managed to replace Wolverine with one of their own.
Charles breaks it down further: the electromagnetic blast that struck their ship upon returning to Earth was no stray from Magneto, it was a deliberate attack that left the X-Men vulnerable, thus explaining Charles' suspiciousness ever since that moment. It seems as though Wolverine was picked largely because he was the mutant whose powers would be easiest to fake without some kind of technological augmentation (minus the whole healing factor thing, which probably would have come in handy right about now.)
There's a lot left to ponder about this whole thing -- it looks like the Skrulls are mounting some kind of invasion in secret. What is the extent of this, what else might be going on, these are all things we do not yet know. But for now there's one question that is most pressing to the X-Men and their readers...
Further Thoughts:
It's far from the cleanest and best storytelling I've ever seen in my life, but at least now "The Shattering" is over with, and we have some kind of explanation for what is going on and a story or two to follow out of it. Whether you liked all the in-fighting and bickering, or simply gritted your teeth to get through it, it's a new day. Whether Charles' plan was good, or made no sense, or simply made him look like the asshole we all believe him to be, that's the story.
Fair enough, too, although I'd probably be more enthused about the prospect of a big Skrull story if they hadn't just been played as jokers and losers who can't get the details of their impersonations right in the pages of this very comic.
I'm not philosophically opposed to a story about suspicion in the ranks of the X-Men, but in all this we see a clunkiness that is characteristic of the X-Men stories of the 90's, where Charles' big plan sure just looks like "just doing random crap we'll justify or explain later." There are a bunch of individual parts that could work, but the series as it exists now doesn't quite pull off.
There's also my truism that when people pick up an X-Men comic, they want to read about all the X-Men, not a shattered, disorganized cluster of unaffiliated mutants, no matter how good the story is or isn't. This particular "no team era" may not have lasted long but it further dented an already less-engaging period of the merry mutants' story.
Anyway, do we think the X-Men are really going to follow-up on the massive, crossover-ready premise of a full-blown Skrull invasion of Earth here in 1999? They've got other things to address, like the Twelve and the returning Apocalypse and his mysterious Horseman Death. The Skrull impostor thing just seems like a means to an end, to explain the last few months of stories, to raise questions about the whereabouts of Wolverine, and to inject some forward momentum into this story. There are game efforts being made fo Do Something, and it's just a matter of seeing if all this is the big jolt the X-Men need.
No comments:
Post a Comment