Ghosts

“Ghosts”/“Retribution”/“Salvation”
Uncanny X-Men 207-209 (1986)
Written by Chris Claremont
Pencils by John Romita Jr.
Inks by Dan Green

This run of issues near the end of John Romita Jr’s tenure on Uncanny X-Men is the climax of years of ongoing plot going back to the late John Byrne period, paying off on story elements involving the Hellfire Club in “The Dark Phoenix Saga” and the bleak future timeline introduced in “Days of Future Past.” This story, which I’ll collectively refer to as “Ghosts” as that is the title of the trade paperback in which it is all collected, is also the prelude to the radical overhaul of the series’ cast and status quo that would happen after the subsequent “Mutant Massacre.” Chris Claremont very obviously intended this story arc to mark the end of an era, and a transition into a phase where the influence of his most ambitious contemporaries – most notably Alan Moore – would be more apparent. 

“Ghosts” is primarily the conclusion of the Rachel Summers plot thread that had carried through Uncanny X-Men for about two years at this point, but originated in “Days of Future Past.” Rachel was introduced in that story as the daughter of Cyclops and Jean Grey in a grim future in which the Sentinels were largely successful in snuffing out mutants, and Rachel was a brainwashed “hound” used by the government to hunt down other mutants. Rachel eventually makes her way back to the present, and gradually insinuates herself into the X-Men. She’s a very troubled character – she is rattled by the notion that her very existence is impossible in this timeline given that Jean Grey had died, she has severe PTSD from her experience in the future, and becomes an existential threat to everyone once she gains access to the extraordinary power of the Phoenix force. Everyone is terrified of Rachel’s power, knowing that her much more stable mother was driven mad by the same power and killed an entire planet on a whim. Near-omnipotence in the hands of someone this sad and broken? Yikes. 

Claremont deliberately avoids retracing the steps of “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” and writes a different sort of tragedy. Rachel’s trauma and anger don’t result in a Dark Phoenix meltdown, but do lead her to other forms of self-destructive actions. At this point in Rachel’s story, she’s fallen into a deep depression, and feels extremely isolated from her friends, and is overwhelmed by guilt and grief. In “Ghosts,” Rachel has a series of vivid dreams in which she is murdered by Wolverine, and essentially wills that scenario into being as she decides to hunt down and kill Selene, the vampiric Black Queen of the Hellfire Club. Wolverine, clearly afraid of this leading to either a Dark Phoenix situation or her simply becoming more like him, feels compelled to stop her. She refuses to stand down, and tells him the only way to stop her is to kill her. So in the final panel of the issue he pops his claws into her chest. It’s suicide-by-Wolverine. 

In the next issue, Rachel is bleeding out in Central Park near the Guggenheim. She’s weak, and can’t keep the thoughts of thousands of passerby out of her head. She’s only alive because her telekinetic powers are strong enough to mitigate the severe damage Wolverine did to her heart and lungs. She quickly discovers that Selene has killed again, and Wolverine’s intervention has done no good at all. Despite her condition, she’s still so powerful that she can locate Wolverine from across town and torture him from afar. 

These scenes, like most anything in this period of the Uncanny X-Men, work in large part because John Romita Jr’s art is so grounded in the reality of mid-80s New York City. Romita Jr draws street scenes with remarkable accuracy, and keeps the reader very aware of physical space. Claremont takes advantage of this during this run, keeping stories close to the ground and full of vivid, specific locations. The character design follows suit, as Romita Jr gradually transitions most of the characters away from traditional superhero costumes in favor of stylish street clothes with the colorful aesthetics of superhero outfits. At this stage the X-Men mostly look like a new wave band. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the best the characters have ever looked and it’s sad that almost no one draws the characters as punky hipsters after Romita Jr and his successor Marc Silvestri did so well with this look in the ‘80s. 

As Rachel continues to stumble through Central Park on the edge of death, the X-Men clash with the Hellfire Club and Nimrod, the nearly unstoppable Sentinel from Rachel’s future. It’s the unlikely culmination of years of X-Men/Hellfire Club rivalry, as the enemy factions team up to take down the immensely powerful robot. Half of the core Hellfire Club characters perish in the battle on the bramble, and the rest establish a truce that would last through the remainder of Claremont’s original run on the X-books. This plot development came less than a year after Claremont had fully transitioned Magneto from arch-villain to Charles Xavier’s replacement as headmaster of the school, and highlights his narrative boldness at the time. The Hellfire Club had been the primary antagonists of the X-Men comics for half a decade, and were now being set aside. Claremont was ready to bring in new threats, and to make the moral center of the series more ambiguous. 

Whereas the end of “The Dark Phoenix Saga” ends with Jean Grey’s suicide on the moon, Rachel’s arc concludes by embracing a different sort of self-negation. As Rachel staggers through the park, barely holding her body together, she is dazzled by Spiral’s magic and lured into the Body Shoppe with the promise of being given an entirely new life. Spiral is, of course, a nefarious character, but Rachel is too weak and too psychologically tormented not to be the perfect mark. It doesn’t take much to seduce Rachel into giving up her entire life. All she’s ever known is agony, horror, and failure. Claremont writes Rachel’s final scene as half happy ending, half pathetic tragedy. Rachel departs Uncanny X-Men as a coward, as someone who refuses to face responsibility for her actions and embraces the promise of absolution and/or oblivion. 

This is obviously not the end of Rachel Summers, but it is. This is the clear ending of Rachel’s arc, and true to Spiral’s promise, we never do see this version of Rachel ever again. Rachel Summers reappears about a year and a half later as one of the stars of Claremont’s Excalibur series, and she’s basically a new person. The Excalibur version of Rachel is far less tortured, written as more overtly queer, and fits in more with the deliberately light and goofy tone of that series. There’s some merit to this version of the character and some other later iterations of Rachel by other writers, but all of the pathos is drained out. Rachel, over time, becomes nothing more than a stand-in for Jean Grey in the X-Men during the periods when Jean is dead. The more Rachel has been established as a generic hero or Jean replacement, the further writers get from anything that made her compelling, including her queerness. Attempts to pair Rachel off with men, particularly Nightcrawler, have been incredibly unconvincing and dull. Nothing has really worked with Rachel since Uncanny X-Men #209 for a simple reason: Her story ended. If only anyone, especially Rachel’s creator, could have left well enough alone.