Supernovas

“Supernovas”
X-Men #188-193 (2007)
Written by Mike Carey
Pencils by Chris Bachalo (188-190, 192-193) and Clayton Henry (191)
Inks by Tim Townshend et al (188-190, 192-193) and Mark Morales (191)

Mike Carey is one of the most prolific X-Men writers, having written 72 issues of X-Men and the original graphic novel X-Men: No More Humans. In that span of time he was a primary author of two major crossovers, “Messiah Complex” and “Second Coming,” and the sole author of the “Age of X” event. His tenure is easily overlooked, mainly because he’s never at any point the main writer on the franchise. His run begins as a relaunch alongside Ed Brubaker’s Uncanny X-Men while Joss Whedon and John Cassaday slowly published the second half of their best-selling Astonishing X-Men series. After “Messiah Complex,” his book – long the co-flagship of the line – is retitled X-Men: Legacy and becomes a Charles Xavier solo title. Once that story runs its course, it shifts into a Rogue solo series. These periods have their moments, but it’s mostly a lot of inconsequential stories that are often mired in a lot of continuity baggage. Carey not having a set team of characters to work with freed him to follow his muse and go deep on Xavier, Rogue, and Magneto, but also damned his book to seem very much like an extra X-Men title published for die-hard completists rather than an essential series. 

Carey started very strong though. “Supernovas,” his opening arc, is a showcase for his focus on thoughtful character beats, hard science fiction, and deep-cut X-lore. The story follows Rogue as she’s tasked by Cyclops with creating her own team to specialize in responding to crises while a lot of the other X-Men are either focused on running the school or off in outer space. Rogue is a deeply strange character to be given a leadership role, and that’s a lot of the point here. She’s a veteran, sure, but she tends to be a reckless loose cannon. Cyclops chooses to see her chaotic tactics as “inspired improvisation” in Carey’s first issue, and the remainder of his initial run up through “Messiah Complex” is essentially a referendum on the pros and cons of Rogue’s approach to leading a team. 

Generally speaking, it does not go well for her, pretty much from the start. Rogue’s team is a ragtag assortment of characters, some of whom are close friends – Cannonball, Iceman – but the rest are mostly antagonists she needs to keep on a tight leash – Mystique, Sabretooth, Lady Mastermind – or random people who just happen to be on hand, like Cable and Omega Sentinel. It’s more of a cast than a team, but Rogue tries to hold them together as much as she can despite half the characters actively working against her goals. 

Carey’s selection of characters set up a lot of good drama, but also highlight his intriguing approach to the very concept of a “team book.” He’s essentially making lemonade out of lemons – he didn’t have the option to have a more standard X-Men team, so he instead assembled an unlikely group of characters who are set up to fail. Most superhero team stories are built on a fantasy of people working together in harmony, but Carey is curious about what happens when that’s not an option.

The story also plays on one of the central themes of Rogue’s overall character arc – she is a reformed villain who became an X-Man after a brief stint in her foster mother Mystique’s Brotherhood as a teenager. She’s invested a lot in the idea of redemption, but is aware that it’s a bit too much to expect of a sociopath like Mystique and a full-on psychopath like Sabretooth. Over the course of this run, Carey asks the reader to be as optimistic as Rogue is trying to be about all this, but in the end he’s quite honest about the nature of the characters he’s working with. Rogue’s haphazard team-building only leads to betrayal and failure, and while that’s not entirely her fault, it very much is a story about how not everyone is cut out for leadership. 

“Supernovas” is mostly illustrated by Chris Bachalo at one of his creative peaks. Bachalo’s work is highly distinctive but also constantly mutating, and this story comes at an intriguing point in his evolution where he’s increasingly drawing with color in mind and sometimes coloring his own pages. (The remainder is colored by Christina Strain and Antonio Fabela, who turn in some lovely work.) Bachalo has gone through some phases of strange, cluttered page designs but at this point he’s loosened up quite a bit and allows for a lot more negative space to be filled by ambient colors. One of his best narrative tricks for big dramatic moments here is to drop out backgrounds entirely in favor of large expanses of white space on the page, such as the aftermath of one of Rogue’s risky moves in the first issue, or a particularly creepy page in which a brainwashed Northstar appears before his suicidal twin sister Aurora in the second issue. 

Bachalo did not draw the fourth issue of this storyline, likely due to scheduling problems. This is to be expected with monthly superhero comics, but this is a case where having a fill-in artist totally wrecks the specific atmosphere and aesthetic of the primary storytellers. Clayton Henry isn’t a bad artist but his bland traditionalism is jarring and breaks the spell of Bachalo’s designs. The switch to his pages is roughly equivalent to watching a Star Wars movie in which all of the cast is inexplicably replaced by soap opera actors and all of the production values drop to student film level for 20 minutes before going back to normal for the last 40 minutes of the picture.

Henry’s art disrupts the mood and drama, and his drab and unimaginative style actively undermines Bachalo’s designs for the story’s antagonists, the Children of the Vault. This group of characters, who were created by Bachalo and Carey, are not mutants but instead the result of the standard human genome being artificially evolved over a period of 6,000 years in a temporal accelerator. Carey was exploring the evolutionary biology concept for genetic drift and Bachalo was having fun with a set of characters who are meant to seem even more eerie and inhuman than the mutants. Henry’s interpretation follows Bachalo’s designs but makes them all look rather…literal. In context, it all just looks like bad homemade costumes, with all the visual poetry of Bachalo’s art removed. This problem of translating Bachalo’s work to other artistic styles probably explains a lot of why these characters have rarely been seen again outside of a follow-up storyline by Carey late in his tenure.

Third Genesis

“Third Genesis” / “Searching” / “Dead Silence” /
“Between the Cracks” / “Don’t Touch That Dial!”
/ “Notes From the Underground”
Generation X #1-6 (1995-1996)
Written by Scott Lobdell
Pencils by Chris Bachalo
Inks by Mark Pennington

Generation X, much like its namesake cohort, is a strange middle-child in the X-Men franchise that never quite got enough space to fully grow and thrive, and is largely overshadowed by school-centric X-books that came before and after it. The comic seems to move in fits and starts without building to any defining storyline, and the series loses direction and identity once its creators Scott Lobdell and Chris Bachalo depart. The characters created for the series – Husk, Monet, Chamber, Skin, and Synch – have rarely been used to their full potential since the book ended, and the latter two were killed off years ago and have never returned. (Which is fine, more characters ought to stay dead, but it wouldn’t ever hurt to have more black and Latino characters around.) The series’ greatest legacy is that it marks the first use of Emma Frost primarily as a heroic character. 

The biggest reason why the classic Generation X issues work is also the reason later issues and other interpretations of the characters have failed: This series is VERY MUCH about the synergy of  Bachalo’s highly distinctive art style and Lobdell’s sardonic wit and skill for writing low-key character development. Everything that is appealing about the characters and the stories comes down to these two guys being allowed to indulge in their quirks. It’s in the character and page design, it’s in the way Lobdell is clearly a lot more interested in writing scenes where characters get to know each other over a game of Scrabble or a field trip to Manhattan than typical superhero conflicts. Even those are unusual, and mostly focused on Monet’s creepy quasi-vampiric brother Emplate and her odd connection to the mute enigma called Penance. 

Much in the same way Warlock never looks quite right when illustrated by anyone but Bill Sienkiewicz, it’s hard to translate the burst of light that Chamber has where his chest and lower jaw ought to be outside of Bachalo’s style. It looks awful when rendered with a more photorealistic aesthetic, and the sad poetry of his form is lost if it’s drawn with a more standard superhero look. Bachalo and Lobdell nail something very potent with Chamber. Lobdell took Bachalo’s design of a boy with flaming hole in his chest and made the implicit metaphor the basis of the character – he’s a sad, lonely, self-pitying kid whose damage is on permanent display. 

He’s a literal flame, and Paige “Husk” Guthrie is the proverbial moth. Paige is the younger sister of Cannonball, one of the leads of the original X-Men spin-off school series New Mutants. At this point in time, Cannonball had “graduated” to become a full member of the X-Men. Husk is presented as a classic Type A person – an obsessively focused student, the type of kid who gets up at the crack of dawn and goes out for a five-mile run – and extremely eager to follow in the footsteps of her brother as an X-Man. She’s basically the Rory Gilmore of Generation X, and Chamber is her Jess Mariano. (Angela Chase wasn’t a great student, so a comparison to the roughly contemporaneous My So-Called Life doesn’t quite work, sorry.) 

Paige’s power is a metaphor for her personality too. She can induce metamorphoses by literally tearing off her skin. She never knows what her next form will take, but she always reverts back to her primary form as what Lobdell describes as “a doe-eyed blonde fresh from her native Kentucky home.” Unlike Chamber, who has to wrap himself up in layers of scarves to venture out into the world, she can choose to pass as normal, but is often a grotesque freak. The body-shedding thing understandably grosses people out. She starts off as the seemingly normal girl who’s quite odd and interesting below the surface, but grows into the girl who’s always finding something in herself that she didn’t realize was there. 

Husk spends the first few issues of Generation X fascinated by Chamber, and surprised as she learns that he’s not always a brooding dick, but actually a very sweet and generous person when left to his own devices. They bond in the fifth issue, shortly after Husk learns about the Legacy virus, a thinly veiled mutant analog to HIV and AIDS. He finds her drunk off of one beer, utterly despondent because she can’t help but think that all her hard work and promise as a mutant might not mean much if she catches this disease and dies before she’s even out of her teens. Lobdell and Bachalo manage a delicate balance in this scene – it’s funny, it’s cute, it’s depressing, it’s romantic. The scene conveys a moment of intimacy and connection, but Lobdell shows that these two aren’t quite on the same page. As she informs him that life is unfair – “with a capital UN” – he gazes off into a mirror at what remains of his face. “Tell me about it, Paige.” 

The Omega Mutant

“The Omega Mutant”
Uncanny X-Men Vol. 3 #26-31 (2013)
Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Art by Chris Bachalo (25, 27, 29, 30, 31) and Kris Anka (23, 24, 26, 28)

“The X-Men are a family” is a trope I’ve never been all that invested in, as I tend to prefer stories in which the X-Men are more of a movement. Some writers can pull off the “found family” aspect better than others – Chris Claremont established it in the ‘80s, and Scott Lobdell was particularly good at sentimental beats in the ‘90s – but I find that a lot of writers use this as a lazy shorthand for character connections, mostly just leaning on nostalgia for those Claremont or Lobdell back issues than what is written into their own stories. The one writer who really took this idea and pushed it to a logical extreme was Brian Michael Bendis, who over the course of his parallel runs on Uncanny X-Men and All-New X-Men essentially wrote one big story about what happens to the X-Men after their paterfamilias Charles Xavier is killed by his surrogate son  Cyclops in a Phoenix-fueled rage. This story thread comes to a head in “The Omega Mutant,” an arc that is framed by rival X-Men factions having to come together for the reading of Xavier’s will. 

Bendis’ X-Men is a family divided. Cyclops, who was radicalized in the prior runs by Kieron Gillen and Matt Fraction, was already at odds with the X-Men based at the school and was now a full-on pariah. At the start of Bendis’ run, Beast – long Cyclops’ closest friend, basically more of a brother to him than his actual biological brother, Havok – was so furious and deep in mourning that he ripped apart the space-time continuum to bring their teenage selves to the present just to spite him. Wolverine had reclaimed the old school, and passive-aggressively renamed it the Jean Grey School. Storm is frustrated by Cyclops’ tactics (though they aren’t very different from how Claremont wrote her in the ‘80s…), and Iceman outright loathes him for his role in Xavier’s death. This is the X-Men as a grieving dysfunctional family, and it rings more true than the idealized sentimental version of the idea. Ideologies clash, long-simmering resentments flare up, and love/hate relationships abound. 

Bendis’ Cyclops is a glorious mess of self-destructive impulses and monomania. He’s obsessed with redeeming himself while proving that he’s always been right, but so wracked with guilt that he’s constantly sabotaging himself because he wants to be punished. His only allies are ethically dubious figures – his ex-girlfriend Emma Frost, his longtime enemy Magneto, the generally amoral Illyana Rasputin – and he’s being watched over by Kitty Pryde, a character prone to harshly judgmental moralizing. He’s absolutely miserable, and every decision he makes just makes everything spiral further into chaos. 

When the X-Men are summoned for the reading of Xavier’s will, the school-based characters are all convinced that their worst fear is about to be realized and Cyclops would be granted full control over the school and the X-Men. But before getting to that part, they’re informed that Charles is married to Mystique – wait, whuuuut? – and that he needs them to look after a mutant named Matthew Malloy so absurdly powerful that he’d spent decades suppressing his godlike reality-warping abilities. Cyclops is furious to discover Xavier’s hypocrisy, and when he’s sent with the X-Men to confront him, he attempts to recruit him to his cause. It’s an act of hubris that, or course, backfires horribly. 

Matthew Malloy is grieving too. Without the psychic blocks Xavier put in place, he’s aware that he killed his parents, and is understandably overwhelmed and confused by his extreme level of power. Malloy is not a villain, and he’s barely an antagonist. He’s just a traumatized guy with a shaky handle on reality who happens to be able to do pretty much anything he can imagine. He’s just a guy who was living a normal life unaware that he was a mutant, and suddenly has Cyclops and Magneto vying to influence him, and S.H.I.E.L.D. looking to eliminate him. He’s pushed over the edge, and it goes very badly. Cyclops dies. A lot of people die. 

There is a deus ex machina in this story in the form of Eva Bell, a time-hopping mutant Bendis and Stuart Immonen introduced who has been mostly a student of Cyclops’ through the run. Over the course of 20 issues or so, Eva has transitioned from being starstruck by Cyclops to becoming a harsh critic of his methods and unstable mental state. She takes it upon herself to fix the Malloy problem by going back in time to a point where she can convince Xavier to do something far worse than simply block a mutant’s powers and erase their identity – she has him make it so his parents never meet. Matthew is wiped out of reality, and the story resets. But Bell goes out of her way to make sure Cyclops knows what really happened, partly to scare him straight and partly out of spite. It’s puzzling why this character has barely appeared since the end of the Bendis run. She’s fascinating and sets up a lot of story possibilities, particularly in her rather bitter relationship with the X-Men at the end of his long-term story. 

The art in this arc is handled by two different but complementary artists – primary series artist Chris Bachalo, and Kris Anka, a rising star at the time. Bachalo, a veteran of several X-series, is so distinctive and stylized that it can be quite difficult to pair him with other artists. Anka, who is also quite distinctive, doesn’t alter his style to ape Bachalo’s but does match his aesthetics and tone. Both artists go for big panels and an emphasis on wide open space in pages focused on Malloy, and allow a lot of room to let the colorists carry emotional tone with a lot of pastels and ultra-saturated primaries. Anka is particularly good at drawing facial expressions and body language and thrives in the family feud scenes, while Bachalo really sells the psychedelic terror of Malloy’s power. They both make a lot of dialogue-heavy scenes look fresh and dynamic. 

“The Omega Mutant” is effectively the climax of Bendis’ Uncanny run. The remaining issues mostly tie up loose ends, often in abrupt ways that suggest that he did indeed leave the X-Men a bit earlier than he had originally planned. It’s a very Bendis sort of climax, focused mainly on several of his core characters – Cyclops, Beast, Iceman, Eva Bell, Magneto – acting out on the emotions that have been driving them through dozens of issues. The Malloy plot is interesting, but is mostly just a backdrop for a story about Cyclops’ reckoning and the X-Men’s various ways of processing grief. The emotions are vivid and the interpersonal dynamics are nuanced. It’s a very bold take on the X-Men in general – more of a philosophical family soap opera than a straight superhero thing.