UNCANNY X-MEN #385: Shell Game

The X-Men battle... the X-Men??!

Originally Published October 2000

We begin in Madripoor, at yet another one of those big business comma crime fetes that are always happening. Unfortunately for these crooked captains of industry, while they may consider themselves apex predators, tonight they are squarely in the role of prey.

That's right, the X-Men are now working side by side with the Goth and Crimson Pirates, in a development that would have been unthinkable two months earlier (as the characters had not debuted yet.)

It is my sad duty to inform you that Beldame's got jokes

The caper (damnit, why can't I stop doing that??): kidnap as many as possible and sell them into slavery. But luckily, here to oppose our good X-Men gone bad are... the X-Men!

And their flying motorcycles!

It's X on X action as the heroes have it out with their closest lifelong friends. Will Phoenix pull her punches when forced to face down Thunderbird III?

No, but seriously folks, if you happen to enjoy stories where the X-Men fight the X-Men, this one really goes all out. Rogue faces off against her sometime-lover Gambit. Jean, the almighty telepath, is taken into slavery by Bloody Bess of all people. Beast and Nightcrawler tag team Colossus (in a comics-code approved way, not the way you'll find on AO3.)

Though we know, thanks to Jean, that these Goth-assisting X-Men are not being mind-controlled (for once,) Gambit is able to convince Rogue that he's got an ace up his sleeve.

When seeming true-believer Cable supercharges Gambit's powers, however, all the former friends fall, leaving the Broken-Bad X-Men the victors of this scrap.

With that, the team heads back to the thousand-year-old underground Chinese village, their bounty in tow. The Singular Goth is so stoked at his latest prizes that he shockingly renegs on his previous deal with Remy and returns all the other X-Men to slavery.

Back at the transmat portal, Jean uses telepathic trickery to make the guard (who looks confusingly like Tullamore Vogue but isn't) think that he and Beast and captives of Beldame, when in fact...

Jean also manages to hotlink Beast and Forge's minds so that can become an ultra mega gestalt super-scientist inventor hacker guy and deactivate the power-neutralizing collars.

With the X-Men free, the result is pretty academic, which is why it takes about one page when we had the X-Men fighting each other for the first two thirds of this issue.

Psylocke uses her psychic katana -- the ultimate manifestation of her telekinesis if you weren't aware -- to destroy the transmat.

The Goth (1 ea) becomes "supersaturated" by all the big mutant energy flying around, which is concerning to Voge, but THEE Goth is kind of into it.

As he monologues about how he's the avatar of iniquity and whatnot, Rogue, who has absorbed Gambit's power, serves up one wafer-thin mint too much for this big boy.

All's well that ends well, but Rogue, who just yesterday named The Punisher as he professional role model, is feeling feelings about the fact that she just killed an interdimensional slaver. Gambit, however, is there in her time of need.

Ko-Fi

The Claremometer:

1 caper

1 scrap

No confirmed mind control, but whatever's going on with Cable

Further Thoughts:

Do you think Chris Claremont really wanted to do a Shadow King story but had to settle for using ersatz characters like The Goth and Tullamore Voge because it would make no sense to simply re-introduce Amal Farouk without explaining how Psylocke's defeat of him was undone, and relating it to her current telekinesis powers, and all that? And if so, is the story better or worse for all that?

I'll admit, when I saw a trio of fill-in artists contributing to this issue instead of Adam Kubert, I was a little dismayed, but while I don't know exactly who did what pages, I know Michael Ryan would eventually come to be a really well-regarded artist, and German Garcia, whose style is not my cup of tea, turns in some of his most appealing work, and the issue ends up mostly working. As I alluded to, the story is mostly given over to yet another brawl between the X-factions of X-Men working at cross-purposes, but at least we are absolutely sure the other ones aren't being mind-controlled, and are instead trying -- unsuccessfully -- to work an angle on the Goth. The fight itself was pretty interesting and well done as these things go, if not an entirely economical way to spend most of an issue.

It was a fine story, if a bit uneven in that we had to rush to the ending once we got through the X-Men vs. X-Men stuff. The resolution for how the X-Men escape slavery is about as close to "deus ex machina" as you're going to get, since the X-Men have a veritable god of machines on their side (albeit not physically appearing in the story.) That's a little simple, but it would hardly be the first time the X-Men wrapped up their adventure in an incongruently convenient way. I was just glad that between the last three or four issues we've actually gotten a whole story with a beginning, middle and end, villains with plans to foil, the heroes being heroic, rising action, a climax, emotional stakes, resolution... facets that are literally day one stuff for writers and yet fails to show up in a surprising number of comics we've read.

Again, I have to be a wet blanket by putting things in perspective. So the comic was pretty good. How do you sell that to a skeptical audience that needs a reason to care about the X-Men again? What's special about any of this other than it isn't totally bad? I've seen the X-Men foil slavers before. I've seen them fight each other. I've seen it all, and this is just not the best version of this story, nor the one that was going to reverse the X-Men's fortunes at the dawn of the 21st century.