Un-Ring

“Alien Plants Vs. Mutant Zombies,” “Growing Strong,” “Staff Infection,” “Un-ring” 
Empyre X-Men #1-4
Written by Jonathan Hickman with Tini Howard, Gerry Duggan, Benjamin Percy, Leah Williams, Ed Brisson, Vita Ayala, and Zeb Wells
Art by Matteo Buffagni, Lucas Wernick, Andrea Broccardo, and Jorge Molina
Color art by Nolan Woodard with Rachelle Rosenberg

Empyre X-Men is two things – a loose tie-in with a Fantastic Four/Avengers event and a formal experiment in publishing a mini-series as an “exquisite corpse” exercise in which each of the current X-book writers get to write a segment of the story – but is more importantly third thing, which is Jonathan Hickman setting his Scarlet Witch story in motion after teasing it in both House of X and X-Men #7.  The jam elements of this miniseries are fun, especially the aspect of it that’s basically watching each writer do their best to introduce a wild plot beat before handing it off, but it’s ultimately all a bunch of enjoyable filler between the Hickman portions at the beginning and end of the series. 

Since so much of what Hickman has been doing at this stage of things has been moving characters and plot points into place for bigger things later on, it’s encouraged a way of looking at the stories in terms of what’s been established or advanced. In this case, there’s some small but notable beats – we finally get to see what Angel and Monet have been up to since House of X since they don’t appear in any of the spinoff series, and we see Beast steal some science stuff from Hordeculture, the evil botanists/Golden Girls pastiche characters from X-Men #3. 

Angel – who is apparently free of his menacing Archangel persona for the moment – is heading up some business operations for Xavier with the assistance of Monet, and his main plot beats amount to him being like “put me in the game, coach” to Xavier and then just bumbling around as a beautiful himbo who is objectified by most of the women in the story for the remainder of the issues. It’s all very cute and a nice change of pace from the usual angst-ridden Angel/Archangel stories, but it’s still not giving this fairly central X-Men character much to do. When notable characters aren’t in any spin-offs I assume they’re part of Hickman’s larger plan – certainly the case for Monet and Nightcrawler – but with Angel I just wonder if the writers don’t have any particular ideas of what to do with him that isn’t just going back over the Archangel/Apocalypse beats yet again.

The Scarlet Witch plot goes like this: Wanda Maximoff, overcome with the guilt of stripping millions of mutants of their powers in House of M, has tried to make up for this by attempting to resurrect the 16 million mutants killed in the Genosha genocide from Grant Morrison’s New X-Men. She screws up the magic and brings them all back as zombies, and the middle section of the story is a melee with the mutant zombies, the Cotati aliens from the Empyre story, Hordeculture, and demons from Limbo. She goes to Doctor Strange to fix this and after harshly criticizing both her shoddy magic and misguided intentions, he fixes the situation on the zombie/magic end of things. 

The Wanda plot is interesting to me for a lot of reasons. For one, it’s sort of amazing that in all the time since House of M was published in 2005, there’s never been a proper X-Men story that has truly engaged with her effectively destroying mutantdom for many years. This has come up in some Avengers stories, but it’s not really the same thing. Given that House of M was a thing that deliberately hobbled the X-Men as a franchise at Marvel in favor of the Avengers for many years, the anguish of mutants about “M Day” is mirrored by the people (like me!) who frustratedly read X-Men books in the aftermath of it. From an X-Men fan perspective, setting her up as “the pretender Wanda Maximoff” and having her villified by Krakoan culture feels correct both in the text and on a meta level. Wanda is a made-up character, but she represents an editorial decision a lot of readers resent. 

But despite all this, Wanda Maximoff is still basically a heroic figure in Marvel lore. Even if her actions in this story create a huge mess, she’s still presented as a sympathetic figure who desperately wants to make up for what she’s done in the past. Doctor Strange’s dialogue with her in the fourth issue is blunt to the point of brutality, but he’s not wrong about her: She’s a reckless person who creates chaos and other people always have to deal with the mess she makes. She’s always trying to erase her sins rather than “eclipse them with greater deeds,” as Strange puts it. Hickman’s dynamic between these two characters is intriguing to me – he wrote Doctor Strange extensively in New Avengers and Secret Wars, but Wanda didn’t appear in any of his Avengers work. Strange is presented as very intelligent, but condescending and dismissive, particularly towards women. Wanda comes off as dim and impulsive, but very sensitive and decent at heart. Even if Strange is absolutely correct about her, Hickman pushes the reader to feel empathy for her. It’s going to be rough when she eventually has to confront who she is the mutants of Krakoa somewhere down the line. 

The X-Men don’t know Wanda is responsible for the zombie mutant situation, but Wanda doesn’t know about the Krakoan resurrection rituals. This is addressed in a subplot with a mutant called Explodey Boy who first appears as a zombie and then later as his resurrected self. There’s an extended sequence in the last issue illustrated by Lucas Wernick in which the two Explodey Boys meet and talk through their odd existential situation. This very Brian Michael Bendis-y sequence is very sweet and makes good use of the possibilities of resurrection as a major feature of Krakoan life, but it grates on me that Hickman and Wernick portray Explodey Boy as a cute blonde white boy with an “aw shucks” demeanor when they had the option to make him… so many things besides a cute blonde white boy! For one thing, he looks and talks just like Cypher, so there’s a matter of redundancy. But when the entire point of Explodey Boy in the story is that he’s a wholesome normal kid, making him a blonde white boy is basically equating that with the utmost of sweet normalcy. It just seems to me that an X-Men comic in 2020 should avoid a lazy trope like that. 

Welcome to Genosha

“Welcome to Genosha” / “Busting Loose” /
“Who’s Human?” / “Gonna Be A Revolution”
Uncanny X-Men #235-238 (1988)
Written by Chris Claremont
Pencils by Marc Silvestri (236, 238) 
and Rick Leonardi (235, 237)
Inks by Dan Green (236, 238), P. Craig Russell (235), 
and Terry Austin (237)

“Welcome to Genosha” is one of the most politically charged stories of Chris Claremont’s original 17 year tenure of writing Uncanny X-Men and its associated titles, and introduces the island nation of Genosha, which in retrospect is his last major conceptual contribution to the X-Men mythos. Genosha is a country which has quietly enslaved its mutant population for its economic gain, and have developed nightmarish brainwashing techniques that reduce mutants to docile, obedient workers who live only to use their powers to serve the state. 

Genosha was clearly inspired in part by apartheid-era South Africa, but the severity of the situation was ultimately Claremont showing us a worst case scenario of how humans might treat mutants that’s as grim as the death camps of “Days of Future Past” but more plausible in the sense that it’s unlikely a capitalist system would prefer to exterminate a resource as potentially profitable as mutants. Genosha is, on a conceptual level, a dark reversal of Wakanda – whereas the latter fictional African nation is a sci-fi Afrofuturism fantasy of a black nation that was able to make major scientific achievements without the intervention of Europeans, Genosha’s advanced science is a direct result of exploiting mutant labor. The mutants of Genosha are collectively responsible for the existence of the high-tech weapons and processes that shackle them. 

The story is a logical conclusion of a path that Claremont set his characters on starting with the “Mutant Massacre.” Under Storm’s leadership the X-Men became more ruthless and radical, and focused more on shutting down threats and pursuing justice for mutants than in promoting Charles Xavier’s dream of peaceful cohabitation of humans and mutants. Storm would never disavow those goals, but she was driven mainly by pragmatism and moral outrage. The Genosha arc tests the militancy of Storm’s X-Men – when faced with the absolute worst of humanity and a morally bankrupt society, what would they do? Would the X-Men actually overthrow a corrupt government? 

Of course they would. But in doing so, the X-Men have to abandon their role as superheroes to become revolutionaries. Superheroes traditionally exist to prop up a status quo, and under Xavier’s leadership the X-Men’s goals were mostly focused on protecting a society that hated them in the interest of gradual assimilation. Storm’s X-Men have no interest in protecting a corrupt social order, so in this story Claremont can present a fantasy of extremely powerful minority figures smashing a system. The conclusion of this arc is all catharsis – the Genoshan state is shattered, the “mutates” are liberated, and the X-Men head back home in the end. It’s a satisfying conclusion, but it’s hardly the end of the story. A couple years later in “X-Tinction Agenda” we find out that Genosha was only briefly set back by the X-Men’s intervention and their violent actions only further radicalized their government. The X-Men can damage the system, but without the necessary tedious and difficult ongoing work of building a better society, the worst elements will persist.

This story marks the end of Claremont’s initial arc for Storm. He writes her out of the series for a little while after “Inferno,” and his last significant Storm story of his original run was a drastic left turn involving her being regressed to childhood. To some extent, the Genosha story represents what the X-Men ought to be – full-on revolutionary freedom fighters –but that role would be difficult to maintain in the format of a shared-universe superhero comic. Like, if the X-Men are going to overthrow Genosha, why not the United States too?

But this political radicalism is the appropriate end point of Storm’s leadership of the X-Men. She is not someone who is willing to let unjust systems stand, and will do whatever it takes to smash racist, patriarchal, and fascist capitalist states. It’s odd how much of this aspect of Storm has been erased in subsequent years – many writers forget her passion and “by any means necessary” approach, and while Cyclops took on a similar form of radicalism through this decade, every writer cast her as fundamentally opposed to these moves despite the number of major canonical Claremont stories that would suggest that she’d more likely look to his efforts and think “yes, finally.” 

The Genosha arc was published bi-weekly in the run-up to the “Inferno” crossover, and as a matter of scheduling, was illustrated by regular series artist Marc Silvestri and recurring guest artist Rick Leonardi. Leonardi’s art is strong but has never been to my taste – there’s something about the contrast of roundness and scratchiness in his linework that has never been appealing to me. Silvestri, however, is one of my all-time favorite X-Men artists. He’s sort of an odd figure now – somewhere in the mid-90s his work severely devolved on a technical level, but through the late ‘80s he’s a top-notch draftsman with a rough but elegant style that pulls as much from classic fashion illustration as it emulates the grounded realism of old school Marvel artists like Joe Kubert and John Buscema. Silvestri’s men are grizzled and macho, and his women are rendered like pop stars and supermodels but somehow more beautiful. As idealized as his heroes get, his pages are rooted in recognizable settings full of average-looking people for contrast. 

Claremont, always so good with playing to his artists’ strengths, gradually took the glossy sensuality of Silvestri’s artwork – along with the creative blank check that came as a result of Uncanny X-Men’s massive sales and the recent departure of micromanaging Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter – as license to push the X-Men into explicitly horny territory. A large chunk of the Genosha arc is devoted to a subplot about Madelyne Pryor’s corruption and transformation into the vengeful Goblin Queen prior to “Inferno.” These pages, many of which take place in abstracted fever dreams, present Pryor’s trauma and rage but also her emerging extreme sexuality. 

Claremont’s X-Men had always featured subtextual nods to his interest in BDSM and roleplaying but with Silvestri he was pushing it all to the surface. Pryor spends all of Inferno wearing an insanely revealing costume that’s deliberately trashy as a way to taunt and scandalize her ex-husband Cyclops. Cyclops’ brother Havok, who at this point is fully seduced by Pryor, ends up wearing even less – pretty much just a loincloth, and a fairly skimpy loincloth at that. Mister Sinister, who was designed by Silvestri, ends up looking like a leather daddy goth dom in this context. It’s wild stuff, and even more so when you consider that the overwhelming majority of the readership at the time – including myself – were children. I appreciate the subversive energy behind these comics, and respect the overwhelming horniness of it all. It’s certainly the work of eccentric individuals rather than sanitized corporate content. They were going waaaaay over the top at a time when comics were still mostly quite old fashioned in story and art, so it’s hardly a surprise that these issues sold in outrageous quantities relative to most anything else. 

Capital Crimes

“Capital Crimes”
Uncanny X-Men #272 (1990)
Written by Chris Claremont
Pencils by Jim Lee
Inks by Scott Williams

“Capital Crimes” is the seventh issue of the nine-part “X-Tinction Agenda” storyline that ran through Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor, and New Mutants in the fall of 1990. It’s a very frustrating story in that the Uncanny X-Men issues, written by Chris Claremont and illustrated by Jim Lee at the pinnacle of their talents, are as exciting and visually thrilling as superhero comics get, while the remainder of the story is largely incoherent and unattractive. Louise Simonson, who wrote the New Mutants and X-Factor issues, doesn’t seem especially inspired but is as at a massive disadvantage in that her artists are nowhere near as exciting as Jim Lee. Two of her three New Mutants issues are illustrated by a young Rob Liefeld who is obviously scrambling to meet deadlines while inkers like Joe Rubinstein wipe out nearly all traces of his ridiculous charm, leaving only messy, ugly pages. (The third is drawn by a total rando doing a fill-in issue.) Her X-Factor issues are illustrated by Jon Bogdanove, who would be fine enough in other contexts but whose lumpy linework looks extremely drab and old-fashioned in contrast with Lee’s dynamic and densely rendered pages. Flipping through a collection of “X-Tinction Agenda” today is jarring, but does adequately emphasize how original and exciting Lee’s art was at the time. It’s somewhat comparable to the roughly concurrent seismic impact that Mariah Carey, Garth Brooks, N.W.A., and Nirvana had on their respective genres in music. 

At the time of “X-Tinction Agenda,” Chris Claremont had been writing Uncanny X-Men and most of the spin-off titles for 16 years, and had worked with some of the best illustrators in the history of the medium – Dave Cockrum, John Byrne, Paul Smith, John Romita Jr, Barry Windsor-Smith, Arthur Adams, Bill Sienkiewicz, Marc Silvestri, Alan Davis, John Buscema – and had learned how to write to make the most of their respective styles. Claremont very quickly learned how to best utilize Lee and capitalized on his skill for drawing sexy, idealized bodies and the sort of action scenes that made most blockbuster movies look bland by comparison. “Capital Crimes,” in which the reunited X-characters escape captivity in the fascist slave state of Genosha, is basically a string of “FUCK YEAH!!!” hero moments executed with precision and grace by Claremont and Lee. 

The story doesn’t just pay off on the events of the story thus far, but gives readers moments they’d been hoping to see for years, like Wolverine fighting the newly dark and blade-winged Archangel, or Cyclops reasserting his role as the leader of the X-Men. A lot of the most thrilling bits are character-defining moments for new members like Gambit and Cable, and in the case of the recently transformed Psylocke, character-redefining as she takes on a full-on action hero role as a psychic ninja with a machine gun. 

My favorite element of this story is the villain, Cameron Hodge. Hodge started off as a supporting character in X-Factor but was gradually revealed as a crazed anti-mutant maniac with a militia called The Right over the course of Simonson’s runs on X-Factor and New Mutants. At this point, he was barely human – just a head attached to an enormous grotesque mecha-scorpion with robotic tentacles, spikes, guns. As illustrated by Lee, it’s one of the most memorable and terrifying character designs of the era. There’s never any adequate explanation of how Hodge became attached to this vast killing machine, or even how he ended up in a position of great power in Genosha, but it hardly matters. Claremont essentially writes Hodge as a completely unhinged version of George H.W. Bush. He’s lost all connection to his humanity, and is little more than a gleefully sadistic maniac with a psychotic grudge against all X-people, but especially his old rival, Archangel. 

Claremont clearly loves writing Hodge’s over-the-top dialogue (“♫What a day, what a day for an auto-de-fé♫”), and Lee obviously delights in the creepy spectacle of his mechanical body. It makes no sense at all that while Hodge has appeared in subsequent stories, he’s only appeared once more in this form, basically as a mini-boss in the late-‘00s crossover “Second Coming.” This should be one of the definitive recurring X-Men villains, and yet. It’s hard to understand why many artists wouldn’t leap at the chance to draw this version of Hodge, but then again, attempting to compete with what Lee accomplished with the character in these issues seems very difficult and the other art in the crossover demonstrates just how badly you can look in comparison.