Fever Dream
“Fever Dream”
Uncanny X-Men #251 (1989)
Written by Chris Claremont
Pencils by Marc Silvestri
Inks by Dan Green
The image on the cover of Uncanny X-Men #251 of a crucified Wolverine is both boldly sacrilegious and totally appropriate to the character. Wolverine is, at the core of things, a hyper-masculine martyr fantasy. His rapid healing power and indestructible metal skeleton make him effectively unkillable, but he is constantly in agony. His power gives him license to be brave and reckless in ways that would be suicidal for anyone else – he’s routinely broken, burned, and gored while other characters are barely scratched in combat. It’s not just that he’ll “get better,” it’s that he’s willing to experience excruciating pain in order to do the right thing. This is a lot more important to the character than mere endurance and invincibility. Wolverine suffers for us all. When Donald Pierce and the Reavers crucify him in the Australian Outback on an X – just a cross turned sideways, after all – they’re deliberately mocking his martyr shtick.
“Fever Dream” is the climax of a storyline in which Chris Claremont dismantles his second team of X-Men, the group of eight characters he focused on in the three years following the Mutant Massacre in 1986. Up until the Massacre, the cast of the X-Men had been relatively static since 1975, with only minor variations in lineup. After the Massacre, half of the core cast was written out, with Storm, Wolverine, and Rogue remaining alongside four new members – Psylocke, Dazzler, Longshot, and Havok. (Colossus returned a bit later, while Nightcrawler, Kitty Pryde, and Rachel Summers were sent off to the spin-off series Excalibur and sidelined from nearly every key X-Men story until 1998.) This time, however, Claremont was not as interested in shuffling the cast so much as entirely dissolving the concept of the X-Men as a team. From issue #252 through #274, there are no X-Men, just assorted X-Men characters scattered around the world having adventures in small groups and pairings. It was radical enough to alter the cast of the most successful comic in the American market in 1986, it was even more so to do away with the cast entirely in 1989. This phase of the series represents Chris Claremont at his most narratively ambitious.
As we come into “Fever Dream,” nearly half the cast is already gone. Longshot had quit, Rogue had disappeared through the portal of the mystical Siege Perilous, and Storm appeared to have died. (She didn’t, but let’s not get into that here.) The remaining members – Psylocke, Havok, Colossus, and Dazzler – were off on a mission on the other side of the planet while Wolverine, who had been disappearing periodically from the main X-Men comic to appear in his own concurrent solo series by Claremont and John Buscema, had arrived back at the X-Men’s secret base in Australia to be ambushed by Reavers, a gang of rabidly anti-mutant cyborg psychopaths. At this point in the story, Wolverine’s healing powers had been exhausted and slowed down considerably, and there’s some question of whether or not he can actually survive the Reavers’ torture. This just feeds into the Reavers’ sadism – nearly every member of the group is a cyborg as a result of being mutilated by Wolverine’s claws, so they’re all very invested in having revenge on him.
The majority of the story is focused on Wolverine’s visions while nailed to the cross, all brilliantly illustrated by Marc Silvestri at the peak of his skills, but the most significant part of the issue is the B plot revealing the fate of the four other X-Men. When the group return to the Outback to discover that the Reavers had returned, they panic and weigh their options as the gang approaches, ready to murder them all. Psylocke, a powerful telepath with increasingly dubious morality, makes an executive decision to use the Siege Perilous, a mystical portal that had been gifted to the group by the goddess Roma, as a retreat. The premise of the Siege is that those who pass through it will be judged and given new lives – the pure of heart will be given their fondest desires, and the rest will get their just deserts.
The sequence in which Psylocke gently coerces her teammates into giving up their lives as they know them is one of the most unsettling moments in Claremont’s initial 17 year run on the series. Colossus, Dazzler, and Havok question the logic of running away – surely these four immensely powerful superheroes could hold their own against a group of psychos they’d already defeated once before – but Psylocke nudges them through regardless. Havok is the one to openly question whether he or the others have been psychically hijacked, but is still forced through the portal.
It’s not entirely clear why Psylocke makes this extreme decision. She’s the most physically vulnerable character and probably the most afraid of a gang of maniacs with machine guns, so it checks out that she’d be the least inclined to face them. It’s a decision that comes as much out of her physical anxieties as her ruthlessness, a character trait that had been slowly evidencing itself over the past few years of issues. She was a demure, posh British girl on the surface, but as cold and cruel as Magneto when she had to be.
Psylocke’s decision sets in motion nearly two years of plot, as the X-Men gradually reappear in “new lives” after passing through the Siege Perilous, but more importantly sets up the most drastic and lasting change to her character for about 30 years. A few issues later, in the first full X-Men storyline illustrated by Jim Lee, Psylocke would surface in Hong Kong, to be transformed by the Mandarin and the criminal organization The Hand into their perfect weapon – a psychic ninja assassin. As part of the process, they gave her an entirely new Asian body. Psylocke, the woman who forced her friends to give up their lives and identities, had been stripped of her mind, her agency, and her body itself. It’s a cruel karmic punishment.
Claremont had been obsessed with psychic possession, body swaps, and variations on physical and psychological domination and subjugation for years – almost always a reflection of his obsession with kink – but this was by far the most radical move he’d made, and the most lasting. Psylocke’s transformation into an Asian woman was only recently undone in 2018, mostly out of concern that it was problematic in racial terms. It was, for sure. But it’s also deeply fascinating, and created many opportunities to delve into the character’s complicated relationship with both her body and mind, as well as allowing for a creepy subtext about British colonialism.
“Fever Dream” is as bleak as X-Men stories get, which is really saying something. Near the end of the issue, the Reavers’ leader Donald Pierce destroys the Siege Perilous, refusing to give Wolverine the option to escape through it, and casting some doubt on what might happen to the other characters as a result. But there’s some hope. Jubilee, then a brand new character who had secretly stowed away at the X-Men’s compound, witnesses Wolverine’s crucifixion, but also sees him tear himself off the cross. On the final page, the two meet for the first time. The broken, bloodied hero addresses her in the last panel: “So, kid…you gonna give a fella a hand, or what?”