GENERATION X ‘96 - 1996

Everyday People

Credits: Michael Golden (writer), Jeff Johnson (penciler), Dan Panosian (inker), Cabrea/Lazellari & GCW (colors), Richard Starkings & Comicraft (letters)

Summary: On a trip to New York City, Banshee leaves Skin and Synch to park the van while the team escapes a traffic jam. In the parking garage, Skin and Synch run across Fenris stealing a mutagen wave generator. Meanwhile, a depressed man runs into a chronically late woman. He agrees to go to work with her to explain why she’s late. The woman’s boss leaves that day with money embezzled from the company. As Generation X fights Fenris, the villains turn on the generator, which causes their powers to go haywire. Synch is able to destroy the device, inadvertently creating havoc in the nearby area. Jubilee accidentally generates a fire in the garage, allowing Fenris to escape. The embezzler is forced to flee traffic, and runs into the police. His employee learns that her office is being closed and the company is transferring her to a better job.

Review: Michael Golden drew the covers to the ’95 and ’96 annuals, which I guess somehow lead to him writing this issue. I’ve never read a comic written by Golden before, and while this isn’t perfect, I enjoyed it. Golden has a nice grasp on the characters, and is able to make a multi-page “stuck in traffic” sequence feel like it isn’t dragging. The dialogue is occasionally clunky, and he definitely overuses Skin’s Spanish exclamations, but most of the script is strong. The unnamed “everyday people” feel real, which is essential for the story to work. It’s obvious that at some point their lives will intersect with the superhero action, but Golden doesn’t go the obvious route of having the characters meet the heroes, get caught in an explosion, or get taken hostage. The late woman learns she worried about nothing because her office was closed during the confusion, and her boss gets caught in a related traffic jam and just so happens to run into the police when he leaves his car. (The first normal person, the depressed guy dealing with a breakup, doesn’t receive a lot of attention at the end, which is odd since the story seemed to mainly focus on him in the beginning. I guess his happy ending is meeting the late girl, but that would’ve happened with or without Gen X’s fight.) I’ve always liked stories that ground superhero action in the real world, and I think Golden’s devised a clever way to make a one-shot annual story stand out.

UXM #372 & X-MEN #92 – September 1999

Uncanny X-Men #372

Dreams End Chapter One - Rude Awakenings

Credits: Alan Davis (plot), Terry Kavanagh (script), Adam Kubert (penciler), Batt (inker), Liquid! (colors), Comicraft (letters)

Summary: Professor Xavier awakens the team in the middle of the night to test their reaction time. They spend hours training in the Danger Room, as Xavier grows more demanding and distant. When Gambit feels that Xavier is pushing Marrow too hard, he storms off. Later, Xavier agrees to speak only to Storm in his study. She emerges, telling Nightcrawler to call Jean Grey. Elsewhere, Renee Majcomb and Nina hide out in a hotel room. Nina begins to cry and disappears. She’s greeted by the Mannites. Meanwhile, Bishop and Deathbird discover a giant fossilized mutant in space.

Continuity Notes: Storm’s new costume debuts. It only lasted a few months because all of the X-Men received new costumes during the 2000 revamp. Alan Davis revived the costume when he returned in 2004, and she wears a modified version of it today (in the current version, her legs are bare).

Review: This is the beginning of the “Shattering” crossover, although the actual title inside the book is “Dreams End” (a phrase that really does get used a lot). This really just hammers home the idea that Xavier is acting strangely and alienating the X-Men. It’s capably handled, but there’s nothing exciting going on. You could conceivably do anything with a Danger Room sequence, but we only see the team fighting generic robots for page after page. Adam Kubert seems to lose interest in these scenes, as they become less detailed and energetic as the issue goes on. The rest of the issue consists of subplot scenes, ones that actually do tie into the main story eventually. It’s nice to see that Bishop hasn’t been totally forgotten, although I have to wonder why Nina is showing up again. I don’t hate her as much as some fans do, but it does seem as if the X-office thought a lot more of the character than anyone else did.

X-Men #92

Dreams End Chapter Two – Pressure Points

Credits: Alan Davis (plot), Terry Kavanagh (script), Jeff Johnson (penciler), Cam Smith (inker), Javins, Becton, & Hicks (colors), Comicraft (letters)

Summary: Cyclops and Phoenix arrive at the mansion. Upset with Xavier, Gambit quits the team, while most of the others plan vacations. Xavier speaks to Cyclops and Phoenix separately, and then berates the team when he learns most of them are leaving. Wolverine offers to stay, but Xavier abruptly tells him to leave too. Storm is sent to contact X-Force about replacing the missing members. Meanwhile, Nina enters the mind of her fellow Mannite, Beautiful Dreamer, where she sees an image of a monster. Nina tries to telepathically contact Xavier, but her plea is picked up by Phoenix. In space, Bishop is shot in the back by Deathbird while they’re examining the fossilized mutant.

Continuity Notes: Deathbird betrays Bishop because she “got a better offer”. This is foreshadowing for the upcoming Apocalypse storyline. Bishop awakens in the barren desert, next to a sign pointing towards Las Vegas. An editor’s caption says the upcoming Bishop: The Last X-Man solo series has the answers.

The story of Cyclops, Phoenix, Nina, and the Mannites is continued in the Astonishing X-Men miniseries. I’ve never read it, but it’s widely viewed as terrible. A typical line of Mannite dialogue reads like this, “That’s why Glub bringed you. You been eb’rywhere, you know eb’rybody”, so I’m sure they added a lot to the series. The letters column in this issue is dedicated solely to people’s responses to the Astonishing X-Men teaser image Marvel ran online. I seem to recall Marvel hyping it months in advance, positioning it as a possible third major X-Men title.

Review: I don’t want to beat up on Terry Kavanagh too much, but this is another issue that’s held back by poor dialogue. The idea behind “The Shattering” is that the X-Men are falling apart, and this is mostly a conversation-driven issue that’s supposed to split the team in different directions. Even if a conversation has a strong start, it’s only a few lines before a metric ton of backstory is awkwardly shoved in. It’s not enough for Phoenix to say, “Every time we come back, no matter how long we’ve been gone” as she and Cyclops arrive at the mansion. The next line, she has to throw in, “This is the only home either of us knew for so many years, since the moment our mutant powers first manifested…the moment we had to begin hiding what we were from humanity, our friends and our family.” Cyclops can’t just respond, “Do we have a choice? Professor Xavier’s in bad shape, according to Storm.” He has to add, “Frustrated and worn down by the strain of the past few months -- his imprisonment, Cerebro’s betrayal, Magneto’s rise to power in Genosha -- the X-Men’s failure to save the Skrull homeworld from Galactus must have been the last straw.” I get that every issue is (allegedly) someone’s first and all of that, but is this really the best way to treat past continuity? The characters don’t sound real, so it’s hard to buy into the drama the story’s trying to sell. Cyclops has a few nice lines, questioning if the X-Men will always prevent him from having a normal life, but the rest of the characterizations are just flat.

X-MEN #73 - March 1998 & UXM #355 - May 1998

X-Men #73

The Elements Within Us

Credits: Joe Kelly (writer), Joe Casey (script assist), Jeff Johnson (penciler), Dan Panosian (inker), Comicraft (lettering), Steve Oliff & Digital Chameleon (colors)

Summary: The X-Men receive a letter from Professor Xavier, but Wolverine is suspicious of its origin. Later, Joseph asks to speak to Maggott about his relationship with Magneto. Maggott is reluctant, because he knows Joseph isn’t Magneto after coming across the real Magneto in Antarctica. Their conversation is interrupted by Sabra, who attacks Joseph. Maggott stops the fight by convincing her that he isn’t really Magneto. Joseph abruptly decides to leave with Sabra, hoping that he can learn the truth about his past from her.

Continuity Notes: The continuity in this issue doesn’t work with the events of Uncanny at the time. UXM #353-#354 all feature Joseph, so they must take place before he leaves the mansion in this issue. However, #355 takes places directly after #354 (which ends with Rogue leaving the mansion), and it explicitly says that Joseph has left the team by this point. The only way for this to work is for the final few pages of #354, Rogue’s departure scene, to take place after this issue.

The story takes place on New Year’s Eve, and has the team making resolutions. Beast’s is to cure the Legacy Virus, which Cecilia Reyes bets him he cannot do within the year. This ties in with the house ad that hyped a resolution to the storyline in 1998, but it didn’t happen until three years later.

There are, of course, numerous subplot scenes in this issue. Sebastian Shaw receives a lot of focus in the issue, debating his future, before finally deciding to join forces with a mystical entity. This one is particularly frustrating, since it takes up so much space and is never resolved. The package addressed to Storm is making its way to America, and somehow African tribesmen are in a German post office, ensuring that it gets through (they might be a mental projection, it’s hard to tell). Senator Kelly is searching for Professor Xavier at Bastion’s abandoned New Mexico base, but he isn’t there. Finally, Marrow returns to the mansion after her fight with Wolverine and steals Cecilia Reyes’ doctor’s bag (since Marrow also made cameos in UXM during this time, this makes the continuity even harder to work out).

Review: This one looks pretty rough in retrospect, although I recall liking it at the time. Kelly tries to move some storylines along while still focusing on the characters, so we end up with the X-Men making New Year’s resolutions as a multitude of subplots carry on in the background. None of the resolutions are particularly insightful, (Wolverine’s is to “be the best there is at what I do…soon as I figure out just what that is”, a line I seem to recall Kelly mocking in his writing column for the early Newsarama) but there are a few nice moments with Beast.

Maggott and Joseph’s conversation seems to be a “let’s just get this done” formality, and it somehow turns into a rushed exit scene for Joseph. This is really just awkward all around, as Maggott was given an unexplained motive for finding Magneto in his early appearances, which was quickly dismissed when he joined the team (for equally vague reasons). Joseph was supposed to be Magneto, although no one bothered to explain how he ended up in his current state. Then, suddenly, he wasn’t Magneto, but was left on the team with nothing to do. It seems like the creators just want to ditch him at this point, so he gets the token conversation with Maggott out of the way, and then runs off with Sabra. Sabra’s addition doesn’t make a lot of sense either, as the Mossad agent is now working on her own, determined to kill Magneto. She’s never been concerned about him before, but now she’s hell-bent on killing him after he murdered a counterfeiter (not even in Israel, but in Prague). She claims that she has to do this “for my people” (presumably because she thinks Magneto’s a poor representative for Jews), but that’s not a very convincing motivation. And I have no idea why Joseph thinks she can help him learn about his past, or why he feels the need to leave without even saying goodbye to the others. It just reads as if someone wanted Joseph gone and no one actually worked out the logistics of how it was supposed to happen.

Uncanny X-Men #355

North & South

Credits: Steve Seagle (writer), Chris Bachalo (penciler), Tim Townsend w/Beatty & Smith (inkers), Comicraft (lettering), Steve Buccellato (colors)

Summary: As Wolverine takes the captive Sauron to Manhattan, he’s attacked by Alpha Flight. Meanwhile, Rogue visits Dr. Agee, who claims that he can remove genetic mutations. After her consultation, she flies past Wolverine’s fight. She recruits the other X-Men for help, and Alpha Flight is quickly defeated. Heather Hudson realizes that Department H lied to the team, claiming that Wolverine had killed Alpha Flight member Madison Jeffries. Wolverine shakes hands with Heather and the teams part amicably. Meanwhile, Cyclops expresses his concerns to Phoenix over her decision to wear the original Phoenix costume.

Continuity Notes: This is supposed to represent the X-Men’s perspective during their appearance in Alpha Flight from around this time. This was mentioned in an earlier Bullpen Bulletins, but I don’t see any indication within the issue itself. The reason why Alpha Flight is behaving strangely is apparently because they’re being brainwashed (I never followed Seagle’s Alpha Flight, and it’s my understanding that it’s also filled with unresolved mysteries).

Phoenix is wearing her original costume because she’s “tired of suppressing (her) abilities” and wants to “empower” herself. Cyclops is afraid that this might be a sign that she’s following the original Phoenix’s path. Speaking of costumes, Rogue is back to wearing the space suit she wore during the previous year’s Phalanx storyline for no apparent reason.

Review: This is mostly a commercial for the second volume of Alpha Flight, and it’s not a very good one since most of the characters aren’t very interesting and I don’t really understand what’s going on. I can understand why Seagle thought an Alpha Flight appearance could work as an excuse for a fight scene and as promotion for the title, but it just comes across as pointless. Bachalo’s art saves some of this, but for the most part it’s pretty dull.

The Rogue subplot continues, as she makes the first step in removing her powers. This is pretty much the most obvious story you can do with Rogue (as evidenced by the fact that the original cartoon and the third movie used the same idea), so it’s surprising that the comics themselves had never gone in this direction. Rogue was even targeted with a power-neutralizing gun during the original Claremont run, but he didn't take the obvious bait and have Rogue consider if getting hit would’ve been a good thing. I don’t have a problem with obvious ideas as long as the writer gets decent material out of them, so I can’t hold this against Seagle. Unfortunately, Rogue’s story is barely touched on in this issue, as the Alpha Flight fight takes up most of the space.

The Phoenix storyline is another one that I remember getting a lot of play before being totally ignored. Cyclops’ fears resurrect all kinds of continuity issues that probably should’ve been left alone. At the time, the established continuity was that the Phoenix was a cosmic entity who copied Jean Grey’s form, and that Jean never was the Phoenix. Seagle seems to be going back to the pre-retcon idea that the Phoenix represents Jean’s ultimate potential as a mutant, which makes Cyclops wonder if history is going to repeat itself. I don’t see how this story can work without retconning the retcons, because if you accept that Jean never was Phoenix, there’s not a lot of conflict here. Unless Cyclops thinks that the cosmic entity has returned (which isn’t where Seagle seems to be going with this), that means that he’s upset about his wife changing outfits. And if Jean never was Phoenix, then it’s hard to explain why exactly she’s creating fiery bird imagery and wants to wear the old costume (as for the name change, this was explained years earlier as a tribute to Rachel Summers, who did carry the Phoenix Force for a while). Maybe Seagle did have a plan that made sense within continuity and actually said something about Jean Grey’s character, but it just seems like shock value at this point. And since this turned out to be another dropped plot, it’s even more annoying in retrospect.