Amidst a new mutant baby boom, an old foe of Xavier's is revealed.
Originally Published July 2001
We begin with Wolverine, who can probably stop doing that.
You may be wondering: How did we get here? well, for the answer to that question, we go back 30,000 years to the year 27,999 B.C.E.
No, no, this is just a holographic simulation. The world's foremost evolutionary biologist Cassandra Nova -- clad like all biologists in jodhpurs and pith helmet -- is making a point to Donald Trask, the nephew of Sentinel creator Bolivar, about how new species tend to come in and eradicate the old, using Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis. Trask is skeptical -- and not wrongly -- about it being quite so bloody, but Nova has a compelling feelings-based argument about mutants that would be at home in modern conservative thought.
Back in Westchester, Hank McCoy -- now looking like a well-fed feline -- has designed an upgraded Cerebro for the Professor. Taking a page from Richard Dawkins' book, he gives this sexless machine a female name so that he can convince himself it's okay to want to poke it.
Beast notes that his own latest mutation seems to be linked to a recent "mutant baby boom," murmuring something about sunspot activity, mood swings, and his own swaggering libido.
The Prof plugs into Cerebra, and we are treated to a starmap of all the mutants on Earth, including a strange flare-up in South America.
They resolve to send Cyclops and Wolverine out to look at it, as they are on their way back from a Sentinel fight in Australia. Along for the ride is their evacuee, Ugly John, so-called because his parents liked the name John.
In South America, Nova brings Dr. Trask DDS to a long-forgotten Master Mold and it is quite the epic scene.
In the conference room of the mind, Charles checks in with his faculty. With all these mutants cropping up, the school is going to be schooling again. Wolverine would also like us to know that he is glad he doesn't have to dress like a superhero anymore, and will instead by rocking a fashion that will certainly never go out of style.
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| Now, a day-glow puffer coat and leather pants? That'll blend in everywhere. |
After the meeting, Cyclops and Wolverine mentally return to their flight, where Logan chirps Scott for not necessarily being in sync with his wife anymore.
At the school, Beast has a similar line of thinking for Jean, but she shifts the topic quickly to Xavier, who appears to be having a manic episode with all of these rapid changes. Hank sees the rationale.
As Charles unplugs himself from Cerebra, he is visited by a strange and menacing voice.
The voice makes some not-so-oblique threats about coming from Charles' past and making him a murderer.
Charles composes himself long enough to make a counter-threat to his intruder.
The villain releases their hold on Charles just as Jean arrives, leaving Xavier with a dire warning.
In Ecuador (I suppose Bolivia would have been obvious) Ms. Nova takes Dr. Trask to meet the Wild Sentinels, self-replicating models made out of whatever spare parts they could get their mechanical talons on. She demonstrates their power by massacring a bunch of reanimated corpses she had lined up for this express purpose.
However, they don't target him, being tuned into his Trask DNA. Nova removes her helmet, revealing someone who looks suspiciously like Charles Xavier with a bit of lipstick on (or as Chris Claremont would say, Charles Xavier on a Friday night...)
...And welcomes Donald into the family business.
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Further Thoughts:
When the 2001 soft-relaunch of X-Men hit, it had been accompanied by breathless hype in places like Wizard Magazine, which at the time I was reading more actively than actual comics themselves. So it's not as though the changes brought by Morrison and Quitely (and to a lesser extent Casey and Churchill and an even lesser extent Claremont and Larroca,) came as a surprise to me. There was a lot of advance notice that things would be radically different, so I can't actually imagine what it would have been like to pick up this comic with absolutely no warning and no inkling of what it contained. That doesn't mean I couldn't be apprehensive though.
At the time, I was 14 years old and I had been an X-Men fan for nearly half my life, or more if you begin with my watching of the Saturday morning cartoon. I was aware that comics changed over time but I still had a fairly fixed idea of the X-Men in my head: who was on the team, how they dressed, what kind of adventures they had, what the logo looked like. These new creators came in and upended all of it in deliberate fashion. I was skeptical. I was resistant. But I couldn't deny I felt something. I was wary of being denied the particular pleasures I had always gotten from previous X-Men comics, but the staff at Wizard assured me and my older relative "This is good. This is what a good comic looks like." I was encouraged to keep an open mind.
Comics, historically, have been a slapdash, improvised medium. For the most part, the creators are focused on the issue they are making today, and only think ahead insofar as they know that sometimes you have to set up future storylines. A real pro can make it look easy and relatively consistent -- the Claremont Run was mostly done this way. A lesser talent lets the seams and disjointedness show, which happened a lot in subsequent creative runs (not naming names.) And generally, formally, the comics are made the way the makers know how to make them, they way they are always made. The less time you have to spend thinking about "how to make a comic," the more energy you have to actually making that comic, and the next one. Why re-invent the wheel? This one rolls just fine.
That was yesterday's wheel.
The big innovation of this comic, which is, in retrospect, visible right from the start, is not anything that happens on the page -- the villains, the ideas the characters espouse, the style of artwork, the fashion -- but how it is done. The big innovation, to me, is a new level of intentionality. That sense of, "We have a certain amount of lead time, and we know we have runway to keep doing comics. Let's set ourselves up for long-term success instead of just trying to put one foot in front of the other until we get canceled."
Now, to make it clear, this is an innovation in the X-Men comics only. This is a philosophy that has been tried successfully in independent comics, at DC's Vertigo and Wildstorm -- where the creators of this comic honed their skills -- and some of their proper comics, and then came to Marvel with the Knights imprint and the Ultimate line before finally being ported over to flagship works. This staid old franchise is one of the last ones to get this treatment, where you can marshal your creative resources and focus on making all the comics as good as they can be, instead of simply good enough to meet that month's release schedule.
To wit: nothing happens in this issue. Unlike its counterpart in Uncanny X-Men, which soft-launched the new paradigm with a villain-punching outing, the story is mostly a bunch of people standing around talking about what the X-Men are like, what mutants are, et cetera. The closest thing to an action beat, if you are reading a summary on the page, is the brief moment when Cassandra Nova threatens Charles. Now, on the comic page, Frank Quitely makes a meal out of it, using a twelve-panel grid to sell the tension, but if I told you all that happened in the twenty-odd pages of this comic, you'd be like "Then what." Then see you next month, that's what.
Nothing happens in this issue, but the way that nothing happens in this issue is remarkable. For the time being, it's impressive enough just to take a tour of Morrison's ideas for what the X-Men are going to be, what the world they inhabit is going to be like, and who the villain is although there's still a lot to be shown about what she's up to and what she's capable of. Wild sentinels, huh? Am I supposed to be impressed, given we've had Prime Sentinels and Phalanx and all manner of alien rigmarole? Yes, because of the level this comic is pitched at, something less goes a lot further.
Quitely's art was a shock to the system when I first saw it applied to the X-Men 25 years ago. I'm not sure how to describe its aesthetic, nor the unsettling, arresting feeling I still get from looking at it. At first, the thing I always noticed was the prune-featured faces, particularly on the likes of Xavier and Nova (I have always noted, with some dismay, that because Quitely was the first artist to ever draw Cassandra Nova, any of her rare later appearances tend to keep her exceptionally withered) but those stylistic tics of his belie his ability to marry the grandiose and the mundane, the profound and the dark. And of course the very weird, the kind Morrison was rebuilding this world around. I had been accustomed to the square-jawed and studly X-Men of the 90's. Stylistically, there could not have been a more perfect artist to invert everything you knew about this series, nor to emphasize its mutant nature as we prepare to unveil scads of mutants more like Ugly John than Storm or Colossus and to help guide the scale way, way up from what we had seen the X-Men doing.
Which is to say nothing of his storytelling prowess -- the story mostly unfolds in gently cascading widescreen panels, the better to ease the reader through a very cerebral and conversation-heavy story and to recall the cinematic screen. (This is not a new technique or one unique to Quitely, but damn is it effective here.) Only when the time comes to ratchet the tension up or reveal something big do those panels contract or expand, masterful manipulation of the form.
In an earlier year, this issue would have ended with Wolverine and Cyclops arriving in Ecuador, falling into some trap, and being in trouble with seemingly no way out on the last page: "To Be Continued." You would be pulled back by wanting to see how the plot is resolved and our our heroes escape. Morrison is banking that enough curiosity has been piqued by everything they have shown you to bring you back: you may have seen Sentinels before, but you've never seen what I'm about to show you. This comic is designed so that you can't even really make a ruling on it until you've read the next two, which is how comics will work for much of the next several years up to today. Previously, single issues may not have been standalone, but they were expected to stand on their own two feet. This one nakedly says "Here is part one of three. You're going to want to come back to it and read it all together later, when you can fully see the story we've been telling." And that's something that gets abused a little bit in coming years by lesser writers, but we have Morrison now, and they're awesome.
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