X-MEN #111: Prelude to Destruction: Tick, Tick, Tick...

Magneto makes his big move

Originally Published April 2001

We begin with someone purporting to be Trish Tilby.

Blonde Fake Tilby is here with a special report on the island nation of Genosha as it prepares to rain destruction on the world of homo sapiens. At the risk of editorializing, Alleged Tilby thinks humankind may be doomed.

She takes us back to the origins of the conflict, when the supposed "green and pleasant land" of Genosha was revealed to be an Omelas of sorts, built on the forced slave labor of Mutates -- genetically modified, lobotomized and sterilized mutants. Oopsie.

She recounts how the X-Men "insinuated themselves" into the peace process, leading to a fragile peace between the humans of Genosha and the Mutates, led by Jenny Ransome and her fishnets.

Then game the Legacy Virus, which had a disproportionate effect on the Genoshan mutates and re-reinforced their status as second class citizens.

From the flatscans in the Government, the Mutates recieved only "thoughts and prayers."

"I don't recall saying 'thoughts.'"

Enter Magneto, who was given this war-torn, disease-stricken land as a prize for successfully cowing the United Nations with his last scheme and immediately championed the downtrodden population. Some would say he offered a mountain of support.

Off-brand Tilby -- again probably editorializing a bit -- laments that Magneto is no longer the man who once willingly stood trial for his crimes (In Uncanny X-Men #200, a mere 16 years earlier.) In his place is a monster intent on destroying us all, probably because that's more exciting to write about.

Sharon Carter, interim director of S.H.I.E.L.D. (She Already Done Had Herses Law Enforcement Division) holds a press conference to heroically declare that the organization, which can step in and solve any superpowered problem at any time mostly successfully and with impunity, will be taking no action.

Counterfeit Tilby notes that the huge swelling of Genosha's military ranks is ironically due to the recent curing of the Legacy Virus. In an exclusive interview, Hank McCoy states that, gosh, he has no idea how that happened, but it may have had something to do with the research of Moira MacTaggert. Maybe. Possibly. Just a hunch. I wouldn't know.

How did Tilby manage to get this interview, I wonder??

Beast adds -- and don't ask how he knows this, he just does -- that surely the cure came at a grave cost and, gosh, wouldn't using their newfound strength to mount a genocidal war against mankind be just a smidge disrespectful to anyone who may have died to cure the disease?

Captain America is also on hand to declare that the Avengers will also, bravely, be keeping an eye on things.

Also weighing in is Sabra, who honestly cannot believe that Magneto would be enforcing an apartheid policy, sentencing an entire race to death, and committing various atrocities like this. That's her country's fucking job!!

If you'll excuse me, I have medics to assassinate.

Genoshan ambassador to the UN and former shoulder pad enthusiast Johanna Cargill lays it out provides Magneto's generous terms: bend the knee and be spared. Sounds fair to me!

Also, recently discovered mind-wiped and loopy was Magneto's son Quicksilver. Nobody's sure what that has to do with anything, but it can't be good, can it?

Watching at home, Professor Charles Xavier is alarmed that his old colleague is taking things to such unprecedented levels of megalomania. Well, maybe not unprecedented, but certainly on the upper echelon of the Magneto Scale.

We not go live to Magneto, who has this to say:

The gist: "Never Again" means "Just this one last time."

Temu Tilby leaves us with some parting words, wondering why, if mutants are so evolved, are they preparing the commit the exact same crimes they accuse the humans of?

Unfortunately, one man who won't be able to ponder the question is Charles Xavier, who has been pulled away from his TV set rather abruptly.

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Further Thoughts:

In last week's post, I mentioned that taking time away from the main narrative to tell a small, personal story about two characters in their own setting was a very forward-looking move, something that feels more like an issue from the later 2000's or the 2010's than early 2001. In a similar way, this issue -- which is all background info about Genosha that you may or may not have caught over the years, as well as setting the table for the forthcoming conflict with Magneto, is also very cutting edge for 2001. 

The overall effect in this issue is to draw focus to the forthcoming conflict as being exceptional, to raise stakes and therefore expectations. We've never done this before, it must be a big deal.

Prior to this, what you would do is tell a story -- usually the X-Men in action, or perhaps focusing on their opponents making a big move -- and catch the readers up as you went along. Whatever story you had, you would underscore it, probably, with narration captions saying "This is what happened in Genosha so far, this is where this character comes in, this is what someone is after," to provide the necessary context and exposition. You wouldn't spend an entire issue, with a premise of a news broadcast, just kind of laying groundwork for later issues. Maybe in some kind of spinoff one-shot, but not in your main series.

And that was for a very simple reason: you wanted people to buy and read every comic. Comics do serve the function of getting you to buy other comics, with cliffhangers and teases and simmering subplots, but what they don't usually do is spend their entire length laying groundwork for something else with barely a panel of story-advancing action (the last image of Charles having been abducted being the only jolt forward the issue has.) Today, we're used to comic fans continuing to read a series through good and bad times based on inertia, habit, and let's face it, a little bit of addiction, so pulling an issue like this would be reasonably common in an era that is more open a out what an issue might look like. At the time, there was more concern than now that if you did not give your reader their $2.25 USD worth of story, they might not come back, even if you were promising the good part was coming. I have never read a comic for this project quite like this, where the entire issue is spent going "Hold on, we're going somewhere with this."

By some standards, that could represent a creative failure: the inability to wed all this important information and table-setting to some relevant action that gets the story underway.

On the other hand, it might represent a creative triumph, and a sign of vision as to what comics are going to look like in the 21st century. The pacing of this issue is, of course, a deliberate choice. The creators are confident they won't be scaring off the X-Men's regular readership with an issue in which they don't appear and nothing happens until the last page. That's mood-building and world-building to make the later part of the story (hopefully) stronger. That's a stylistic and structural choice that would not have been available, for the most part, in earlier years.

It's an acknowledgment that in 2001 -- with the arrival of Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada, although he may not have had any specific designs at the time -- the individual issue of a comic is going to matter a little bit less. These stories are going to be big chunks -- 4, 5, 6, 10 issues -- that will be chopped up and delivered as the creators see fit, not engineered to specifically contain a certain amount of story in each installment. And the readers mostly will go along with it -- assuming you get some payoff at a certain point -- and become a bit more accustomed to reading them all at once in collected editions. 

We're a little myopically focused on X-Men history here at the blog, but by this point, Ultimate Spider-Man will have just spent 6 issues retelling Spider-Man's origin from Amazing Fantasy #15. That comic was revolutionary not just because it gave Peter Parker a floppy center-part haircut, but because it acted as a test lab, as much as Joe Quesada's Knights imprint a few years earlier, for what Marvel Comics were going to look like in the 21st century. And here is one of the stalwart titles of  the main Marvel line trying to get a handle on that. Going forward, comics are going to look like whatever they need to look like, and creators are getting more of a free hand to take a view of the bigger picture, providing more varied moods and reading experiences that wouldn't have been possible a few years before.

Which is interesting, given that the decks are about to be cleared in just a few weeks, and in fact Scott Lobdell will never write the X-Men again after that. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.