X-MEN #108: The Future Is Now! (Dream's End Part IV)

The X-Men race to save Moira!

Originally Published January 2001

We begin mid-flight, as Bishop attempts to freight a dying Moira (and a dying Mystique, but we don't care about her right now) back to Westchester.

Plus, the in-flight movie is Bio-dome!

Rogue springs into action, with her half-remembered medical ability borrowed from Cecilia Reyes (along with the ability to rock a set of cornrows) being the only thing keeping Moira alive.

Nobody has explained why they have to go back to New York instead of going to a hospital on the mainland of Scotland, but oh well, I guess we wouldn't have a dramatic comic if we did that.

While the rest of those aboard focus on their tasks, Wolverine visits Raven to pay his last respects. She's not dying of her injuries, but one never knows.

Before Logan can do the deed, however, he's sent away by Rahne, who has her own reasons to hate Mystique but is less inclined toward murder.

Back in New York, unaware of what's headed toward them, Beast, Colossus and Gambit return from their apparently successful thwarting of the attempt on Senator Kelly's life. They allow themselves a brief moment of hope for the future.

Semi-professional wet blanket Colossus, however, chimes in that the cost of victory has always been a bit high for his liking, and the cause of mutant acceptance has hardly budged. In short, it freakin' sucks being a mutant and an X-Man.

In Boston, Cable and Kelly bond over lost loves at Sharon's grave. Cable talks to him man to man, soldier to senator, about how yes, Magneto and the Brotherhood and all sorts of evil mutants exist, but the X-Men are there to counteract them, so there's really no need for all the hatin'. 

He also gives his entire life story, which is a questionable way of endearing himself to this normie. I know when I want to make people into fans of the X-Men, I don't start with Cable's backstory.

Anyway, it really seems like the X-Men's foremost political enemy might be turning around on the issue.

Above the Atlantic, Moira doesn't appear to have much time left, but if she dies, so does the hope of curing the Legacy Virus, because I guess she doesn't believe in taking notes. Rogue says say no more, and prepares to absorb Moira's powers and memories (the powers of being a scientist, because after all Moira is just a normal human....... right?) but Moira protests that she wouldn't survive the experience even enough to make it worthwhile.

Speaking of Charles, he finds Colossus taking out his aggression by mucking the stables of the Xavier Institute. I didn't even know they had horses. Piotr apologizes for speaking out of turn, but Charles insists that speaking out of turn is practically the rule here. He then apologizes to Colossus for taking him from his safe Eurasian home and conscripting him into a genetic war, which Piotr brushes off as overall a pretty worthwhile experience.

Ultimately, though it means perhaps a lifetime of hardship, Colossus knows that the best place for his strength and ability is in trying to build a better tomorrow for his people.

In Boston, Kelly prepares to give a speech outlining his new platform (as announced by his press manager who is confusingly named Sharon.) Cable remains by his side in case of any further attempts on his life. After all, Kelly was lucky today, but he has to be lucky every day and his enemies only once.

Moira mentally screams out for Charles, and he finally hears her, using Cerebro to attempt to reach out, to no avail.

He and Jean combine powers to strengthen their contact -- and it works!

In fact it works maybe a little too well -- they can't seem to let go of one another.

One more psychic grope for old time's sake

Jean, whose psychic powers first manifested when she saw her friend Annie die, recognizes the radiance of a mind that's about to go out -- and if it does, it seems like it will take Charles with it.

For assistance in breaking the two onetime lovers apart, Jean calls up the team's other other psychic Cable, who is willing to take a moment away from his bodyguard duties to help, sure.

In the end, it is Moira who lets Charles go, knowing he has more work to do on the Earthly plane.

And that was just one of the many occasions on which Moira met her death

With that resolved, Cable returns to his physical form, just in the nick of several seconds too late to prevent catastrophe.

That's right -- the greatest threat to Senator Kelly was not the deadly mutants he was taking a hardline against, but the very people whose hatred he had spent a career stoking.

And thus it ends.

  

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Further Thoughts:

It is my sad duty to inform you that this was, in fact, a great issue of X-Men.

Leaving aside the small matter that Charles' and Moira's romance was never played as any kind of present-tense thing, that it was an affair they'd had in the past and moved on from, this was an extremely moving comic. That can be forgiven given the circumstances, as there's no doubt they always cared for each other and held a special place in one another's hearts, and that at the moment of death all sorts of emotions are likely to overwhelm even someone as outwardly stoic as Charles Xavier.

The run-up to this particular issue may have been as clunky and inconsistent as any stretch of comics published under the X-Men banner in recent years, sure. The previous two parts were haphazard-seeming bits of necessary business as we finally saw the latest attempt on Kelly's life and the showdown with Mystique on Muir Island, both of which were underwhelming in presentation. But if you want to read a really good comic in a vacuum, this was it. If you can let yourself be swept up in the drama of trying to get Moira back to New York in time to survive, if you can buy into the philosophical discussions with Senator Kelly and with Colossus, and if you can submit to the emotional farewell between Charles and Moira, this one had it all in spades. To me, this was as affecting as any death that's happened in comics since someone-who-looked-like-Jean sacrificed herself on the moon, or at least since little Illyana succumbed to the Legacy Virus a few years earlier.

The issue is highlighted by flashes of brilliance from Leinil F. Yu and Brett Booth. It's hard to know where to ascribe credit to each, but between the elegant astral plane juju and the Kelly twist they made a meal. Yu in particular, I've felt has been a star through his time drawing X-Men and should be thought of well, it's just that the comics he drew are less-loved. 

Comics are never note perfect. For all the advantages they have as a medium, they are still often largely improvised narratives that spin and then drop threads at their own leisure. If you were building toward this moment for any length of time it probably wouldn't have looked quite like this, but under the circumstances I don't think you could have asked for anything better. This issue has all the things I love in an X-Men comic: thoughtfulness, emotional, strong character moments, drama. Hope in the face of a brutally oppressive reality. For its own sake, these twenty-two pages were as good as anything I've read from the X-Men in the last few years of doing this project.

Which makes it all a tad bittersweet that here at the very end of this run, Chris Claremont is proving, to some degree, that he can still go, after squandering most of his opportunity with endless irrelevant bland good guy vs. bad guy outings.

The thing that probably has me most interested is the final fate of Senator Kelly. In the end, it was not evil mutants that got him, but his own followers. I think it's one of the most powerful messages the X-Men comic can spread, that hatred is a very human thing, not confined merely to the bombastic actions of supervillains like Mystique, but a very real flame that flickers in the hearts of people in our world, the kinds of which turned on Senator Kelly when he was no longer feeding it.

Mind you, it's also hypothetical -- to learn whether this is something that would actually happen in real life, we'd have to find a politician who would renounce hate.

Was it the best comic evarr? No, no, but it's a diamond in the rough that manages, despite its origins, to be reasonably poignant and rather exciting. It's sad that Claremont was never able to get on any kind of a roll in this return engagement, but that's as much his own fault as anything else, assuming he chose to write a dozen or so issues about The Neo and the Goth and Tullamore Voge of his own free will.