X-MEN #107: On The Yard!

The X-Men get roped into Maximum Security!

Originally Published December 2000

We begin with a little bit of guidance on what kind of prep work is needed going into this issue -- but whatsay we raw dog it this time and skip ahead? You know, every comic is somebody's first but I'll be damned if I let anybody's first comic be Bishop: The Last X-Man #15. I'm sure we can catch up.

Textually, we begin with Nightcrawler, the former X-Man who sure seems a lot like a current X-Man, honing his teleportation skills in the Danger Room when he is joined by some unexpected company.

Has Leinil F. Yu just gone way off scale with Wolverine's hair wings? Turn the page and find out!

No, unless I'm mistaken, that is not Logan (although there undoubtedly plenty of entries on AO3 where it is.) It is in fact Cerise, the Shi'ar agent who has a history with Nightcrawler, as chronicled in some issues of Excalibur I didn't read.

Kurt rejects the alien's overtures (also known as molestation) on the grounds that he is a priest, and has thus given his "body and soul" over to the big man upstairs and is thus No Fun Anymore.

Mark that one down on your Claremontism Bingo Card!

Cerise is here on a mission of import, but we'll get to that later. For now, we turn our attention to Rogue, who is drowning her sorrows in Salem Center's friendly soda shoppe, devouring milkshake after milkshake, as onlookers marvel that she's not ballooning up in real time like in Monty Python.

A hot girl who eats dairy? Now I've seen everything

Rogue is mulling over some recent Hard Choices she's had to make as leader of the X-Men, like k*lling interdimensional slaver The Goth. She recalls Gambit reassuring her that that one was a freebie.

All this moral uncertainty is a little wonky, because it wasn't that long ago Rogue was naming The Punisher as her Inspo, but anyway.

As with most bars and social houses, the TV is tuned to 24-hour news coverage of Senator Kelly's electoral campaign. Somehow in these comics there is always an election upcoming, but admittedly that's what life is like in the United States -- assuming you're reading this before the Republican party suspends them altogether and names their current guy Overlord for life.

Not far away, a woman with a secret is awakened on a bus.

That's right, you don't need me to tell you that's Z'Cann, a member of Cadre K, the troop of mutant Skrulls the Prof is palling around with these days. She's attacked by a duo known as the Blood Brothers.

Rogue arrives to defend the girl-presenting alien person from the Sanguine Siblings. Once they're defeated, Z'Cann knowing a thing or two about Rogue, makes physical contact as way of rapidly imparting vital information rather than saying it out loud or using her telepathy.

Meanwhile up in space, we hear a bit more about this Maximum Security thing and how Earth has become a prison planet for the worst the Galaxy has to offer. There's a processing facility just beyond Pluto where we meet a familiar inmate getting ready for transfer...

That's right, it's everyone's favourite time+tossed bandana enthusiast Bishop, and while something may have happened in his ongoing series to explain what he is doing there, it's my God-given right as a casual enjoyer of comic books to not bother finding out what that is.

Rogue returns to the mansion, all Skrullified, with an unconscious Z'Cann -- who has reverted not to Skrull form but to that of a pretty white girl because hey who wouldn't -- in tow.

The X-Men are a little flummoxed at first whether to take Rogue's word, since her physiology has become alien. She says she's Rogue, but the Skrulls are famously a race of liars. But wouldn't they know better than to walk in in alien form and claim to be Rogue? The mind reels at this quadruple bluff.

As the X-Men fail to detect the irony of doubting someone based on their racial status, Rogue proves herself by demonstrating her supposedly un-duplicatable powers.

With that settled Rogue and the team get down to the business at hand. Unfortunately, Z'Cann's ill-conceived attempt to relay info non-verbally has Rogue's mind all messed up. To the best of her knowledge, they are supposed to destroy the transmat portal that is located where else but on Ellis Island.

So they go launch an attack on Ellis Island, where it's completely okay to wreck all the guards because I assure you they are ALL ALIENS. Don't even worry about them.

Rogue's new Skrull abilities prove useful...

But also a little distracting as she finds Logan's enhanced senses overloading her. But also useful again in that it seems like Logan's healing factor is clearing up her muddled memories.

Something they've famously never done for him

At which point she realizes the objective here is not to destroy the transmat but to protect it, as someone useful is about to come through. When ThunderbIIIrd almost ruins the whole thing by, you know, following his direct orders, Rogue does what we all kind of want to do and throws Colossus at him to stop it.

And thus the payload arrives through the transmat, inexplicably not handcuffed or accompanied by any guards or anything since stuffing prisoners onto the prison planet is sufficient.

That's right bay-bay! And for what happens next, you can read Maximum Security #2 and then X-Men Unlimited #29, on sale now in fall 2000!

Further Thoughts:

Oh, by the way, Cecilia is trying to quit Rave cold turkey, with the X-Men's special detox chamber ($3499.99 at Best Buy.)

My heckling of his solo series aside, I'm actually kind of glad to see Bishop again. I have a soft spot for the guy, even though he has long since outlived his storytelling utility and he was never anyone's favourite X-person to begin with. The circumstances that took him away from the X-Men have seen him embroiled in any number of crazy interstellar wango-tangos, which was certainly... a storytelling choice. He'll be back among the X-Men for good, it appears.

You're probably of the assumption that my take on this issue is going to be "Blah, why are we wasting our time on Maximum Security, I don't care," but you're not 100% right. As we know, sometimes comics have an assignment, and in this case the assignment is to tee up the X-Men's involvement in this big ass crossover, and I think this issue did a reasonably good job -- as good as these comics have been for the past several months anyway -- fulfilling it. There was some interest, some intrigue, some action, some personal stakes, and even a little bit that almost came halfway toward making me care about Cadre K.

Cross "bunkie" off your Claremontisms Bingo Card! One caper and we win!

In 2026, having lived through the last quarter century of Marvel Comics, we know all too well that sometimes being part of a line-wide crossover is just what happens and sometimes you have to abruptly drop everything and do your part. Accepting that reality, I didn't hate this. As a comic, its main objective was to make me read Maximum Security. It did not succeed at that. Its secondary objective was to serve up 22 enjoyable pages of X-Men-forward on its own. It almost succeeded at that. And maybe you could ask, "Scotto, how can you care at all about the action in this comics when you don't care about the context surrounding it?" But in practice and execution, it's not that different than reading about the X-Men fighting the Neo, or the Goth, or the Crimson Pirates, or Tullamore Voge, or whatever. I didn't really understand the context surrounding those fights either, but in this case I wasn't supposed to. And it did a reasonably good job of explaining itself, which is more than many of the previous several outings did.

Sometimes the beauty of comics is that as much as they try to keep you up to speed, sometimes you just don't know everything and it's a whirlwind of confusion -- but if you don't feel as inspired to learn more as you should, then you can just wait it out until the next thing comics along and enjoy a ment of insanity. I'm not saying this is the greatest comic I've ever read -- ha ha ha, oh my, no -- but it does what it does capably enough.

I don't think I'm spoiling it for you if I just skip ahead and say that the X-Men join the Avengers in taking the fight to the Kree prison masters and combat the power-hungry Ronan the Accuser, and eventually they win out and Earth is liberated. I've leafed ahead and there's nothing there that I feel like covering, except an interesting moment between Rogue and Carol Danvers where the latter reluctantly agrees to set aside her hatred for Rogue to fight the Kree better. It's a moment that should have been really meaningful, and it's just sort of tossed off.

If you do want to read X-Men Unlimited #29, you should do so for an interesting backup story written and drawn by Cully Hamner exploring Colossus' relationship with his sister Illyana and his doubts about joining and staying with the X-Men, set way back during the early days of the All-New, All-Different Team. A quality aside.