UNCANNY X-MEN #389: The Good Shepherd

Xavier reflects on his life with Moira

Originally published February 2001

We begin with a ring-swing-thing as Xavier trains his upper body while he contemplates several recent personal and professional losses and setbacks.

The X-side has had to overcome a number of struggles of late: the deaths of Moira and Senator Kelly, and the respective powers of Rogue and Cecilia Reyes going haywire, the latter of which is part and parcel of her recent dalliance with the "performance enhancing drug" Rave.

While Mystique clings to life in a special infirmary for super-powered villains, Xavier reflects on how Senator Kelly was a good man who didn't deserve his fate.

I mean hey, I'm not heartless. I know he was experiencing a change of philosophy after years of pushing the anti-mutant line, but he was literally on day one of his new attitude when he was killed by one of his own followers and hadn't had a chance to do more to offset, for example, his role in upgrading the Sentinels in collaboration with Sebastian Shaw.

Okay, okay, back to the regular x-cerpts thing.

Charles flashes back to when he first met Moira during their time at Oxford.

After being warned away by her boyfriend Joe, Charles uses his telepathic powers to save both of them from a motorcycle wreck.

The Prof is interrupted in his reminiscences by tremors caused by Ceci's powers going out of control, causing her to fire force-field spikes all over the place. She's trapped in a cycle of addiction amplified by its effect on her powers.

Ce-ce my violent playmate

Refusing to take a break from his workout to look into this, however, the Prof continues to reflect, now briefly changing the subject to when he first met Dr. Reyes years ago and challenged her to accept her mutant identity the same way she accepts being a Puerto Rican woman, in one of those occasional cringeworthy clashes between the mutant metaphor and reality from its middle-aged white writer.

But this is just a segue back to the Charles n' Moira story, as he reflects on how the decision to found the X-Men came out of his experience in war. As you may recall, Charles served in the war overseas (you know, uh, Viet-Korea-Ghanistan.) This was motivated not out of a desire to serve his country, but to prove to Joe MacTaggert that he had a big dick.

Or Joe MacTaggart, whoever that is

Charlie used his telepathic powers for search and rescue -- a role which earned him the nickname of "The Good Shepherd" -- and to help avoid enemy ambushes, which was great, except, you know, land mines don't have minds to read.

Charles' near-death experience caused him to dedicate himself to saving as many people as possible to build a better future. However, in the process, he also lost Moira (to that prick Joe!)

Are we sure Moira wrote this? She doesn't say "cannae" or "och" even once!

Back at the mansion, Rogue takes a break from meditating to visit the room of the still-missing Kitty Pryde. Wolverine notes that there are pictures of Kitty with her deceased friends like Rachel, Doug and  Illyana above her headboard. I like to think Kitty takes a selfie with everyone she knows and then adds them to the Wall of Death as necessary. There's probably a lot of rotation.

As it turns out, Kitty left some instructions in case of her disappearance, all relating to Destiny's Diary -- which happens to be Volume 7 of the set (ugh, I hate it when there's no good jumping-on point.) They open it up and turn it to a page to see an illustration of... themselves, reading this page!

They watch -- er, read -- as Gambit and Storm arrive at Mystique's hospital bed, with Gambit intending to kill the convalescing terrorist, and Storm going "Wait, let her cook."

How does she say so much with a breathing tube in?

Mystique explains that there are thirteen volumes of Destiny's diaries, all written when her powers first manifested themselves in Teen Irene. Some have gone missing and some are written in code or foreign languages. Also a bunch of them have disappeared. From what they were able to decipher, it points to a cataclysmic disaster for mutantkind. No, a different one. No, probably not that one either. No, it isn't-- you know what, just stop guessing.

Anyway, she's decided to make it Charles Xavier's problem.

Back at the mansion, Cecilia's problems are reaching their breaking point. Charles wonders what he can do -- if he uses his psychic powers to help her come down, he risks becoming her substitute drug. Which is actually how you get someone off a powerful drug a lot of the time, but it's just too much for him to take on right now.

Charles enters the Danger Room, but the other X-Men are freaked because it's too dangerous right now, with Cecilia's powers going nuts. The other members of the team spring in to block for Xavier, at the risk of getting klonked by Cecilia's force field.

See?

While Cecilia rants and raves about how afraid she is and how there are monsters (and to be fair, she has seen a lot of monsters in the last few years) Charles calls on her to draw on her surgeon's nerves of steel, basically telling her to nut up or shut up when it comes to kicking the addiction.

Now, it's been a while since I attended a seminar at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, but I'm pretty sure this is not the way, but sure enough the mind-over-matter approach works and Cecilia is brought back down thanks to the healing power of hugs and stern words.

With that, and the knowledge there is always more work to be done, we bid adieu.

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Further Thoughts:

It's been said over the years that what Chris Claremont was doing with the X-Men was not just writing superhero comics, but serializing the Great American Novel, whose characters just happened to have superpowers. Some issues reflect this a bit more than others, but with the heavy focus on delving into the history between Charles and Moira, and how it affected his path toward creating the X-Men, the writer definitely earns that reputation. 

Okay, but there's something very off about seeing Charles using soldier lingo

This is a reflective and elegantly-written issue that pays tribute to a fallen character while also solidifying their role in the story we've read over the years, telling us things we could have sensed but had never seen, and connecting them to the story as it ended up playing out. Indeed, I had complained in my otherwise positive appraisal of Moira's death that the Charles-Moira affair seems to have been settled years ago, but you know, there's strings attached to every single lover. These things never really end even when they end. (Except for me, I don't think about my exes at all.)

It was a great issue that showed the writer at the height of his powers, which is funny considering he probably already knew that his role as dual-writer of Uncanny X-Men and Unmodified X-Men was coming to an end, with a brief intermission to be followed by the announcement of superstar new talents to guide the franchise into the new millennium (note: the previous new millennium refresh was a false start -- the century didn't start until 2001 you know!!)

That said, even as the main action of Claremont's run is starting to be resolved and given codas, he's still at work setting up the next things. The X-Men are given responsibility for locating and deciphering Destiny's numerous diaries, which will happen in the next Claremont-written X-Men series. This would seem like an exciting prospect if I weren't sick to death of the X-Men fighting some horrible future catastrophe that is seemingly already set in stone.

Spoiler alert: In the end, it's Cassandra who plays him

And as questionable as Charles' approach to healing Cecilia is, at least that story is seeing a resolution. I think hardcore drug addiction is probably one of those stories that is probably too big to be appropriately handled by superhero comics, but that doesn't really stop them from trying.

As we head toward the final drops of Chris Claremont's initial return to the X-Men, I must wonder -- why weren't any of the comics I've read over the past year as good as these last two? For the longest time, they were concerned with tunnel-vision goodguy-versus-badguy fights, including the stupefyingly irrelevant appearance by the Twisted Sisters. I get needing some time to warm up, but a year of comics times two seems too long to fritter away as the audience loses patience and editorial turns over. The gifts of storytelling and of character depth that Claremont was so noted for have hardly been in evidence until now, which makes it feel like a shame this entire yearlong excursion played out like it did. It would have been one thing if it was never good and I would have been able to walk away saying "Now we know Claremont didn't have it anymore by 2000," but no -- he could have, he just wanted to do other things first.

But, as I alluded earlier, this will not be the end of Claremont writing the X-Men, not by a longshot (although Longshot himself still doesn't appear.)