Into The Storm

“Into the Storm” / “The World” / “Disintegration” 
Giant Size X-Men: Jean Grey & Emma Frost, Giant Size X-Men: Fantomex, and Giant Size X-Men: Storm
Written by Jonathan Hickman with Russell Dauterman (Jean/Emma)
Art by Russell Dauterman (Jean/Emma, Storm) and Rod Reis (Fantomex)
Color art by Matthew Wilson (Jean/Emma, Storm) 

The Giant Size X-Men specials were initially sold as stand-alone one-shots, but as it turns out three of the five issues are, in fact, a coherent story arc that appears to advance the slow-burning Children of the Vault subplot. These three issues amount to 90 pages of story, but the plot isn’t particularly dense: Storm gets sick following getting zapped in her attack on the Vault in X-Men #5, Jean Grey and Emma Frost discover that she’s got a “machine virus” and will die within a month, Monet figures out that she can be saved in The World, and Fantomex brings Storm, Monet, and Cypher to The World to eventually extract the virus from Storm’s body. 

The first issue of this arc is essentially a tribute/cover version of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s famous “quiet issue” of New X-Men in which Jean and Emma perform a similar “psychic rescue” with Charles Xavier, and as such it’s more of a showcase for Russell Dauterman’s considerable skills as an artist. The Fantomex issue is also a blatant Grant Morrison tribute, with several scenes involving Fantomex quoted directly from New X-Men issues. This is all very nice and well-executed, but feels a little odd in the context of Jonathan Hickman’s larger project on the X-Men, which before this point had excised the “hey, remember this?” nostalgic references that had piled up quite a bit in recent years and fully metastasized in Mark Guggenheim’s vile X-Men Gold run. And true, those nostalgic nods were almost always to Chris Claremont comics, but the spirit is still the same. Also, the “hey, I’ve already read this” feeling makes these issues seem more slight than they actually are. 

The Fantomex issue illustrated by Rod Reis is quite good. The plot depicts scenes from Fantomex’s life in which he brings different groups of people into The World, the artificial environment with accelerated time where he was created and raised. There’s an implication of unreliable narrative, that there’s only so much we should believe about what we’re seeing from the perspective of a man who is a living lie from a fake world – a “living contrivance, a product… a hall of mirrors with no end” as Psylocke puts it in Rick Remender’s Uncanny X-Force. But as much as the truth of it all is ambiguous, we see how Fantomex’s awareness of this weighs on his actual soul. 

The big reveal of this issue is that Fantomex and Ultimaton – both products of A.I.M. and Weapon Plus’ project of developing mutant-hunting super soldiers in The World – are essentially identical twins raised with as much variance as possible. Fantomex was discarded as a baby, and the other gradually evolved into the Ultimaton we see in Morrison and Chris Bachalo’s “Assault On Weapon Plus” story. Each time Fantomex returns to The World he encounters Ultimaton at different stages of his development, always asking him if he would like to leave with him. Ultimaton always declines, and as time goes on sees Fantomex as an abstraction – “some primal direction of man, some primal direction of me.” The issue leaves off with Fantomex bringing Storm, Monet, and Cypher to The World, and the plot thread concludes in the Storm issue with Fantomex deciding to remain in The World with his ersatz brother. To be continued, of course, but there’s a nice emotional charge to this beat – Fantomex embracing the only sort of family he has, and giving up something of himself to help or guide this warped reflection of himself. 

The Storm issue covers interesting ground. It’s a story about Storm fighting for her life, though in the first few pages Emma Frost points out how “overly dramatic” this is given that they have the means to immediately resurrect her. The point of the story is that Storm is a person who would fight for survival regardless – she refuses to surrender to anything, she will always try to find a way to overcome obstacles. Storm is also quite dramatic. It’s part of her charm. 

The mechanics of the plot of this issue are driven largely by Monet and Cypher, who are clearly two of Hickman’s favorite characters. The story serves as a reminder that part of Monet’s impressive set of powers is advanced intelligence, and her genius is ultimately what saves Storm. Monet largely serves a plot function here, but her presence in this story, as well as in House of X and Empyre: X-Men amount to Hickman making a case for her as an essential X-Men heavy hitter from here on out after years of the character being sidelined as a result of relative obscurity. 

Cypher is more of an observer and interpreter in the plot, just as he was in the Nightcrawler special. At the end of the issue we see the machine virus entirely removed from Storm’s body and held in a containment field to prevent it from rapidly evolving in the artificially accelerated time of The World. In the epilogue we see that Cypher recognizes that the machine virus is sentient and conscious. This is left as a ticking time bomb, as the possibility of an artificial intelligence developed in the artificial time of The Vault attaining “evolutionary critical mass” in the slightly different artificial time of The World can become an existential threat to mutants down the line. 

We’ll be returning to this machine virus thing at some point, but it’s hard to say which ongoing plot this beat connects to – is this going to remain a part of the Vault thread? Or maybe, since there’s a direct tie from A.I.M. to Orchis, this is part of how their Sentinels evolve to a Nimrod state? It could just as well be part of the Phalanx subplot. Just as with the mysterious tower built for Emma Frost in the Magneto special, it feels like it could be quite a while before we find out the actual significance of this issue to the macro plot. 

These specials were designed as showcases for artists, and as can be expected, these issues give a lot of room for Russell Dauterman and Rod Reis to flex. They’re both quite good but I prefer the loose, gestural qualities of Reis’ art to the extremely tight and slick lines of Dauterman. The latter’s work is beautiful and dynamic but a bit too stiff at times, and while he can draw very nuanced facial expressions, there are many panels where the faces seem oddly blank and vacant. Dauterman is called on to draw abstract environments in both of his issues, and while they work well on his terms, they seem rather cold and static compared to Reis’ more surreal and dreamlike drawings within The World. It’s an intriguing contrast of styles, with Reis more connected to cartooning while Dauterman’s aesthetics are more rooted in animation. 

Final Execution

“Final Execution”
Uncanny X-Force #31-35 (2012-2013)
Written by Rick Remender
Art by Phil Noto

Most fiction writers have a theme they work through in a majority of their work, and for Rick Remender it’s unbreakable cycles of violence. Remender’s run on Uncanny X-Force, which I would say is the best X-Men story to ever be published as a spin-off title, is a meditation on how violence only begets more violence, and that the notion of “redemptive violence” is just a rationalization. This is a very subversive but totally appropriate story to tell in the context of X-Force, the X-title that was conceived as a hyper-violent “proactive” form of super-team and had fully transformed into a clandestine “black ops” kill squad in the Craig Kyle/Chris Yost run just prior to Remender’s tenure. Kyle and Yost also wrestled with their characters facing trauma and moral rot in their stories, but it was still pretty clear that the primary point of their X-Force was “wow, these baddies are SO BAD, they DESERVE to die.” Their run was conceived during the George W. Bush administration and it’s very much an artefact of that era and the “War on Terrror.” 

Remender began his Uncanny X-Force with a despicable act of “proactive” violence – Fantomex murdering a child clone of Apocalypse in cold blood – and every story that came after that initial arc came out of unexpected consequences of that action. The entire run, which concluded in the extended “Final Execution” arc, is a critique of the very concept of X-Force. The core characters – Wolverine, Psylocke, Archangel, Fantomex, and Deadpool – are all poisoned by their cruelty and unjustifiable killing, and two of them die as a result of their actions. Remender’s cast are all characters who have had their bodies transformed against their will to become weapons for someone else’s use, and in the case of Fantomex, he was born and raised in an artificial environment to be a killer. They all want to act of their free will after having that taken away from them at some point, but can’t extricate “living weapon” from their identities. It’s “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” but these people have adamantium claws, psychic knives, razor wings, and a LOT of guns. 

Psylocke is at the center of most of Remender’s stories because she’s the character with the most moral conflict over what they’re doing and the greatest self-delusion about what she has become. She’s the reader surrogate in some ways – initially on the side of X-Force but increasingly aware that they’ve been kidding themselves all along. At the start of the second phase of “Final Execution,” which is illustrated by the subtle but rather stylish Phil Noto, Psylocke has lost both of her love interests – she was forced to kill Archangel when he was corrupted by Apocalypse’s cult, and Fantomex was executed by the sadistic Skinless Man shortly after he and Psylocke finally consummated their lust/hate dynamic after she’d hit rock bottom emotionally.  She’s a broken person, but she knows why. She just wants to get out of the cycle.

Psylocke’s relationship with Archangel was established in the early ‘90s by Fabian Nicieza in X-Men. It was an inspired match – they’re both from posh backgrounds, but had experienced similar physical transformations against their will. They had similar angst, but also shared a hedonistic streak. Remender’s pairing of Psylocke and Fantomex is similarly brilliant, but for darker reasons. Shortly after the two hook up, Psylocke cruelly dismisses Fantomex by telling him that he is a “living contrivance, a product… a hall of mirrors with no end” and that “there is no YOU to have feelings for.” She’s not wrong about this, but it’s also apparent that she recognizes this because she sees herself in him, or perhaps more accurately, what she fears she has become after the trauma of having her mind and body tampered with so many times over. Fantomex wants Psylocke because she is who he wants to be, and Psylocke lusts for Fantomex because he’s given in entirely to the absurdity and brutality of his nature. 

“Final Execution” is necessarily bleak in the resolution of its primary character arcs. There is some minor joy in Deadpool embracing his best impulses and serving as a demented sort of father figure to the second child Apocalypse, but Wolverine’s storyline ends with an act so horrible it shatters his illusions about trying to be a father figure/role model to the youngest generation of mutants. He knows he’s nothing but a hypocrite, and he’s doomed to live in a constant cycle of violence that will always result in the deaths of people he loves. Wolverine and Deadpool can’t change – the market demands nonstop bloodshed from the both of them, and so the reader is complicit in this terrible loop of misery and destruction. The readership has an endless desire for redemptive violence, and Remender is at least doing his best to show them that it’s a false premise. He’s been doing the same story with different characters in Deadly Class for the past few years, and you can tell he only gets more weary and cynical about this as he goes along.

Uncanny X-Force does end with a “happy ending” of sorts in its epilogue. Fantomex returns to life, but as three clones – he originally had three separate brains, but an error in the cloning made a body for each clone. The darkest aspects of his persona ended up in one body, and his kindest aspects were isolated in a female version of himself. In the end, the primary Fantomex takes Psylocke to meet his “mother,” a fictional construct who raised him in “The World,” the articificial reality where he was created. Psylocke questions the reality of the situation, and Fantomex essentially just shrugs it off. Does it matter? Can they just be happy, even if it’s fake? After all the chaos and pain and death, the only reasonable thing either of them can do in the end is embrace a happy fantasy. Sometimes the only escape is delusion and oblivion.