The issue I wanted to talk about this post I wanted to write about as soon as I could. Therefore, don’t assume that this is the only book out of what was published last week that merited commentary (I haven’t finished last week’s books), but it was definitely top of my reading stack and has been since it started. As always, Spoiler Warning in full effect.
Some background information is needed to understand the purpose and ground being covered in All-New X-Men. Let’s set the Way-back Machine to November 1989 and Avengers West Coast #51, “I Sing of Arms and Heroes…” The Vision and Scarlet Witch have been happily married since 1975 and in 1986 have twins. It was explained at the time that the unusual birth was result of Wanda (aka Scarlet Witch) using her powers to alter the odds in the favor of her getting pregnant. In Avengers West Coast #51, Wanda learns that her children were never “real”. They were constructs made of wild magic and errant souls that belonged to a demon. The demon reclaims the souls and her children vanish, having never really existed. The resulting trauma unhinges Wanda, and she spends the rest of the 80’s overcoming her loss.
Some 13 or so years ago, the X-Men and Avengers titles began to undergo some drastic changes. In an Avengers storyline entitled ‘Avengers Disassembled', the Avengers essentially, have the worst day ever: Jack of Hearts, thought dead, appears, and when greeted by Ant Man II, Scott Lang, blows both of them up, Vision crashes a Quinjet [the aircraft the Avengers fly around in] onto the grounds and starts releasing a miniature Ultron army, She-Hulk goes into a ‘Hulk-Smash!’-type rage ripping the Vision apart [This is uncharacteristic for She-Hulk; her defining characteristics that separates her from her cousin is that she can control her changes, enjoys being She-Hulk, does not fly into mindless rages, and has a set strength level], and the Kree invade. Hawkeye is killed making a kamikaze attack with the remaining Quinjet into the Kree warship. Meanwhile, Tony Stark acts drunk at a political event and threatens to kill an ambassador. All of this is a result of manipulation by the Scarlet Witch who unknown to readers at the time, sought out Doctor Doom and enlisted his aid in trying to get back/re-create her children. The resulting ritual summons an unnamed cosmic/mystic entity which possesses Wanda. It resurrects her children but hides the knowledge of their existence and whereabouts from her (all of this would be revealed in Avengers: Children’s Crusade #7, November 2011). The entity provokes her to blame the Avengers for the loss of her children and subconsciously lash out at them. This leads to the Avengers disbanding, their mansion destroyed, and their funding pulled (As a result of his “drunken” escapades, Tony Stark has to choose between funding the Avengers or keeping Stark International a going-concern; he picks his company). Magneto, Scarlet Witch’s father, shows up and takes her into his custody taking her to Genosha to be tended to by himself, her brother Quicksilver, and Prof. Xavier.
A new, smaller team of Avengers forms from the ashes of the old, and Prof. Xavier is unable to help Wanda keep her powers in check setting the stage for the ‘House of M'storyline. Xavier reaches out to both the Avengers and X-Men and proposes a summit on what to-do to help the approaching out-of-control Scarlet Witch. Hearing talk of killing her, Quicksilver rushes to her side and urges her to create a perfect world where everyone can be happy. A white flash occurs and the world is rewritten as a world where mutants are the dominant power led by his royal family: Magneto, Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch, her children, and Polaris (Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch’s half-sister). While most of the major heroes are given happy lives, a few start to remember and seek out the Magneto family to force them to return reality back to the way it was. Having the truth revealed to him, Magneto turns on his son Quicksilver who he blames for manipulating Wanda. Wanda can’t take it anymore and blames her father for choosing mutants over their family and with the words “No more mutants!” there is another white flash and reality is returned to the way it was, except the mutant population has dropped from millions to just over 200.
The sudden decrease in the mutant population would be the first blow to the mutant community. Shortly after the House of M event, it is revealed that Prof. Xavier sent a heretofore unknown group of X-Men to rescue the original X-Men from Krakotoa, including Cyclop’s third, younger brother, Vulcan (also not known to exist before this story) in ‘Deadly Genesis'. Prof. Xavier wiped the knowledge from Cyclops’ mind resulting in Cyclops abandoning his brother when the third team (Storm, Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Colossus, Banshee, Sunfire, and Thunderbird) were formed and sent to rescue the original team. Based on what is viewed as a violation of trust, Prof. X is banned from the X-Men and Cyclops takes over the X-Men fully, going into full-survival mode. Cyclops pushes a bigger visibility for the X-Men in the super-hero community becoming the official heroes of San Francisco, authorizes a black ops group to deal with the militant extremists they can’t publicly fight, and establishes a mutant nation off the coast of California using one of Magneto’s old bases. During this period, the child Hope is found, rescued, and sent to the future with Cable in the ‘Messiah Complex' story. Cyclops takes the birth of a new mutant after House of M as a sign and bases all of his survival strategies around his faith in her and belief that she will somehow rekindle or revive the mutant race. It is also during this period that the Beast learns of Cyclops’ black ops group X-Force and leaves believing Cyclops has betrayed the dream of Xavier and his own moral compass.
Hope does come back during the ‘Second Coming’ storyline which draws every bigoted anti-mutant group out of the woodwork for a massive assault on Utopia, the nation Cyclops has founded. Cyclops’ faith in Hope proved to be well-founded as she had two mutant abilities: the ability to mimic the mutant powers of any nearby mutants and the ability to trigger the latent mutation in mutants suppressed by Wanda’s spell. During a class field trip, a group of Utopia students are attacked by a squad of Hellfire Club soldiers. Wolverine tells the kids to hide and wait for him to come and save them, Cyclops tells them to do whatever it takes to protect themselves. One of the students kills the entire squadron. Wolverine believes Cyclops has stopped treating their charges as kids and started treating them like soldiers, putting them in situations they shouldn’t be in. Wolverine leaves and takes a good bit of the X-Men with him, including some of the younger members and reforms the school. It is during this period that the Scarlet Witch, with the aid of the Young Avengers including her sons, cast out the entity that had been corrupting her. The Avengers and X-Men existed in an uneasy truce, Captain America viewing Cyclops as his man in the mutant camp while Cyclops reminded Captain America that he would not let Utopia become another reservation. All of this changed with the arrival of the Phoenix.
The Phoenix is a cosmic force of death and renewal. It has potent meaning for the X-Men as the Phoenix possessed Jean Grey aka Marvel Girl one of the original X-Men. It corrupted her, and she consumed a planet under its influence. Jean committed suicide by causing a laser cannon to shoot her (Well it wasn’t really Jean, but the exposition in this post is already past a sane limit. If you want to know more about this, read the Dark Phoenix Saga).
Cyclops believes the Phoenix force is coming for Hope and she will be able to use it to reignite the mutant race at a global scale. The Avengers are made aware of it and believe it to be an extinction level-event. The Avengers come to forcibly take Hope triggering the Avengers vs. X-Men storyline. After kidnapping Hope (she later stayed with them willingly, but I still contend she was kidnapped), the Avengers send a contingent into space to destroy the Phoenix, while Cyclops leads a group to stop them. Iron Man fires his Phoenix-killer weapon, which splits it and sends it into five hosts, the X-Men team in space: Cyclops, Namor, Emma Frost, Colossus, and Magik. Each becomes incredibly powerful, and they set to restore and fix the world while looking for Hope. They have multiple skirmishes with the Avengers and as each host falls the power is integrated into the remaining hosts, with the remaining becoming more powerful each time. Finally, the sum total of the Phoenix host is in Cyclops. Magneto, who fears Cyclops is becoming overwhelmed reaches out to Prof. Xavier. Xavier confronts the Phoenix-controlled Cyclops and is struck down dead. Hope and the Scarlet Witch confront Cyclops. The Phoenix force moves to its intended host, Hope, who reignites the mutant race, then casts the Phoenix force back out into space. Cyclops is arrested for being a terrorist and murdering Prof. X. Once he discovers he is being gitmo’d , he has Magneto break him out and he, Emma, Magneto, and Magik immediately goes on the offensive tracking down and taking in the new mutants as they appear to protect and train them while trying to re-learn how to fix and use their “broken” powers after having been possessed in an ill-fit by the Phoenix. Which finally bring us to All-New X-Men.
The premise of All-New X-Men is that Beast seeing and experiencing all of this has enough. He brings back the one person who can talk some sense (from his perspective) into Cyclops and that’s Cyclops himself. Beast goes back in time and brings the X-Men from X-Men #8, November 1964 to the present-day. He wants either Cyclops to realize how far he has strayed when confronted by his younger self or the younger X-Men be so repulsed, they take actions upon return to never turn out like this. Hoo-boy. The only two who seem mostly unaffected from the original X-Men are Beast and Iceman. Cyclops comes to a time where everyone accuses him of killing Prof. X and hates him for it, Angel discovers that something horrible has happened to him resulting in his present-day self being a man-child, and Jean Grey gains her telepathic powers early, discovers that the boy she loves supposedly grows up to be a horrible person, she’s dead, and something of a mutant martyr. The original X-Men (which I will abbreviate as OXM from here on out) decide to stay, learn what they can, and see if they can make a difference before returning to their original time with Kitty Pryde taking it upon herself to be their guardian and teacher.
All-New X-Men #12 (whew, mountain of exposition over), by Brain Michael Bendis and Stuart Immonen revolves around a confrontation between the Uncanny Avengers and the OXM. The Uncanny Avengers are a team conceived by Captain America to put his spin on Xavier’s dream and support integration. It is purposefully made up of mutants and non-mutants. As a PR move to counter Cyclops’ propaganda, he has appointed Cyclops’ brother Havok to lead the team, and among its members is the Scarlet Witch. For her own mysterious purposes, Mystique is leading a team of Sabretooth and Lady Mastermind to commit a series of robberies, using Lady Mastermind’s powers to make it look like the culprits are the OXM. Now let me tell you what I love about this issue and this series as a whole. The writing is top-notch. I’ve had problems with Bendis’ writing in the past and thought outside of the events, he was ill-suited for the Avengers, but here he shines. Bendis is best with talking heads, and this book is about ideas and conflicting ideologies. He’s brought back a spirit to Marvel that I don’t think most people, including myself had realized was gone. You see Marvel, in its hey-day was always rebellious and anti-authoritarian. It was the cool teenager to the staid adult that was DC Comics. What I like about this comics is that the OXM, by-and-large, have not had the reaction the Beast and the others expected them to have. They question everything. They question what they are told and they question the decisions the “adults” are making. There are actually only 4 OXM in this book, because Angel left and joined the present-day Cyclops because he doesn’t trust what the grown-ups have been telling them. There are really only two things that happens in this issue: Alex (Havok) gets to see his brother unencumbered by the weight of the world the future would bring and Scott (Cyclops) gets to see his brother is alive and doing really well. The familial love is palpable. The second is that Jean Grey “accidentally” reads Scarlet Witch’s mind and learns about “No More Mutants”. Now remember, these are the X-Men from 1965. At that point in Marvel continuity, the Scarlet Witch was part of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, the arch-nemesis to the X-Men. To see her standing with the Avengers and learn that she was responsible for the decimation of the mutant race, and her to be almost rewarded for it in Jean Grey’s eyes is just unbearable. And what do the adult X-Men and Avengers do when their asked “Why? Why is she here? Why is she free?” They sweep it under the rug. They deflect. It wasn’t her fault. She wasn’t in control. That’s not important, what’s important is these robberies. Not more important than near racial extinction and sterilization?!? It’s not possible for Cyclops to be absolved of his actions while possessed by a cosmic entity, but it is for Scarlet Witch?!? The hypocrisy hangs heavy in the air, and the kids know it, and I’m waiting for it to explode. I’m not expecting them all to defect to Cyclops’ side, but I’m expecting all the dirty laundry to get aired and hopefully for there to be an accounting. Anyway, there you have it, All-New X-Men, the best Marvel comic being published today.
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