X-MEN #170

X-MEN #170
Golgotha Part 5: Fall-Out”

Featuring: Havok, Rogue, Polaris, Emma Frost, Gambit, Wolverine and Iceman.

This issue is going to be a pain to recap(itulate? ture? I don’t know what recap is short for), because it’s almost definitely the single worst issue Milligan wrote for the X-Men. If you remember the team were recently besieged by giant fungus creatures called ‘Golgotha’ which fed off thoughts and made them realise their worst fears. Well, just as they managed to kill off the last Golgotha on Earth, a whole herd of them began to swarn towards Earth from space. We start the issue with Emma Frost trying to persuade a US general to let the X-Men deal with the swarm, but the president is apparently very happy about the idea of having a war – I’m guessing this was written during Bush’s time in power. Good ol’ Blighty writers! – with aliens, and rejects them. Polaris and Emma start complaining at him until he gives in, and gives them a week to stop the Golgotha. Cut to a splash of a space shuttle taking off.

So now we’re in space, Emma counts the number of aliens to be destroyed – three hundred and sixty two! Lorna starts feeling a bit uncomfortable with the mission, and Iceman tells her that she can stay back if she wants. Havok, of course, is a prick about it and insists she forms the main part of the attack, along with himself. Meanwhile, Wolverine stands back and mutters darkly to himself. Havok sees this as the perfect time for an inspirational speech, and discusses all the slightly mad things (“crazy” says Lorna) they’ve done over the past few days. He thinks they should pretend that none of it ever happened. Way to go, Havok.

Rogue and Gambit, who in this issue are actually quite sweet together, are standing by a big window. She asks him for a glass of water, and he vanishes for a page – therefore getting to miss all of Havok’s speech. The rest of the team agree that it would be for the best to forget everything – apart from Wolverine, who just grunts. Perhaps he’s devolving. Iceman says “Compared to you guys, I’m like a picture of mental health,” which seems a bit cruel with Lorna standing next to him. I wish Iceman would die. Gazer, who lives on the satellite they’re currently in, appears and Emma introduces him to the others. Gambit reappears with a glass of water for Rogue. Aww. Gazer tells them about the satellite, and how his mutant power allows him to withstand the massive amounts of radiation which is prevalent on the satellite. Havok starts to complain, but Gazer cuts him off, and asks if anyone wants to play chess. Gazer is amusingly befuddled. The team decide to put on their suits and get on with it.

As they do so, Gambit apologises to Rogue, and she accepts it. They put on their helmets and blow kisses to each other. Wolverine, on the other hand, isn’t sure why he’s there – the claws aren’t much use in space, really. Havok tells him that it’s because he is a born leader, and has experience. Logan worries is that’s just another word for “senior citizen”, but Alex assures him that Wolverine can’t ever grow old. He’s always going to be The Wolverine. He then tells Rogue to absorb some of his powers in prep for the fight, and with that they leave the satellite. Havok leads the way, and tells them all not to think too much – “should be second nature to you, Iceman”, brilliant – but Lorna tells him off for being too hard on Bobby. You can never be too hard on Bobby, Lorna. He’s an idiot.

Iceman, Polaris and Lorna start bickering and it’s quite confusing to tell what’s going on, but Gambit gets irritated at Iceman for shirking his duty, so all is as you’d expect. The Golgotha swarm, but the team see them off without too much difficulty. Suddenly Havok and Lorna vanish. Iceman panics, and even Wolverine starts to get nervous at their absence, and wonders if this is part of Havok’s plan to get her on her own. Wolverine and Iceman continue explaining their theory to Emma, who gets very irritated with the pair of them, but then Wolverine decides to make a break for it and see if he can find them. Again, it’s next to impossible to work out what’s actually going on in at the moment. Before Logan can go anywhere though, the Golgotha all explode simultaneously. Emma guesses this must be some kind of hive mentality, and Wolverine calls her on making up her theories as she goes along. She smiles and agrees.

From out of the massive explosion come Polaris and Havok, and the X-Men all float together in a circle. Havok is mad that the rest of the team all thought he was trying to take Lorna for himself in a suicide pact, Wolverine tells him to forget about it. Giant space fear-monsters, and all that. The last Golgotha starts to sneak away. Iceman asks Lorna is she’s alright, but she seems traumatised. “It looked right at me…” she mutters, before she blasts the last Golgotha to pieces. Iceman pushes her on what she saw, but sh shrugs him off. She doesn’t want to talk about it. With a smile, she asks if they can get back indoors now.

On the way back home, Emma reveals that the only reason they were allowed into space in the first place is because the General assumed they’d all get killed, and thus there’d be seven less mutants to worry about. “You chose not to share this with us?” Wolverine asks. Emma says that she didn’t want them having negative thoughts before they went into battle. That made me laugh.

Back at the White House, the mutant-hating general has been impressed by the team’s work. He asks the President if they should really keep this a secret from the World. The President replies “I got nothing against these people personally… but that doesn’t mean I want to turn them into heroes.” Oh, George!


Thoughts:

The character stuff at the start was really fun, but the scenes of battle were utterly confusing and impossible to understand. This is probably the fault of both Milligan and Larocca, but Larocca doesn’t make any real attempt to differentiate the X-Men spacesuits, so it’s hard to see who is saying what. It’s a silly, overdone ending to a story which probably never needed to exist. This should’ve been dedicated to clearing up the last issue, but instead we got a space story that didn’t work. Shame, that.

X-MEN #169

X-MEN #169
Golgotha Part 4: Quarantine!”

Featuring: Havok, Rogue, Polaris, Emma Frost, Gambit, Wolverine and Iceman.

Emma Frost finally explains what’s going on for us poor readers. The Institute is being locked down for twenty-four hours because Golgotha has escaped. Emma has realised that the giant fungus things were just a shell for the little Golgotha pod that lives inside, and has now escaped and is somewhere in the building. If they don’t destroy it within twenty-four hours, it’ll reproduce and cause a whole mess of other troubles. The students have been locked in their rooms (must be strong doors then) so they won’t be a problem, and Emma doesn’t expect to be affected herself by the telepathic waves of crazy Golgotha emits. But then she looks in the mirror and sees her reflection has begun to age. She’s growing fat… and ugly. Oh dear, Emma.

The rest of the team are out investigating, with Polaris and Iceman searching through the kitchens and Gambit and Rogue investigating the tunnels. Ha! Brilliant. A creature which makes you go crazy and visualise your fears is in the building, and then send Gambit to the tunnels. They talk for a bit, but then sense that something is in the tunnels with them… Back with the other pair, and Lorna asks Bobby how he’s feeling. He’s says that he’s fine, but we get a look at the world through his ice-o-vision. He’s losing it. They go to the hangar and Lorna says they should check the jet. Straight away, Iceman says “Okay. That bird’s cleaner than Scott Summer’s underwear. Let’s go”. Lorna is understandably confused by Iceman, seeing how they never went into the jet, but believes Bobby and decides she must’ve had a blackout. She’s not helped by Bobby forcing his opinion on Lorna, and he then starts patronising her – “Don’t do that again, Lorna. It scares me” he tells her, so she blasts him away. He’s really irritating in this scene. She asks one more time if they did check the jet, and he assures her that they did.

We cut to a splash page of the pod sat in the jet. It looks adorable!

The something which is in the tunnels with Rogue and Gambit turns out to be Wolverine. He’s gone mad and paranoid on his own and is scratching up the walls something proper. You teach those walls, Logan! Before they can do anything, Logan grabs Gambit and accuses Remy of treating him like a silly old man. Rogue isn’t happy about this, and touches Logan on the back of the neck and takes him down. Instead of being happy though, Gambit is annoyed that Rogue fought his battle for him, and starts complaining about their “pretend” relationship. He says that if they could touch, they wouldn’t stay together and she’d have been just another one-night stand. He leaves her with Wolverine, saying that they always had a thing for each other anyway. Rogue is shocked, and this gives Wolverine a chance to take advantage of her – he says “is it craziness to say we always had a thing for each other?” and kisses her. Letch. And then, of course, Rogue’s powers sucks his life away. Before she finishes killing him, Emma telepathically breaks them up. She needs Rogue’s help, because her reflection has grown even more old and unattractive.

Gambit now has some time to himself, and convinces himself that he was right – he shouldn’t be with Rogue. Not because he’s a dick, though. Because she’s emotionally unavailable as a result of being unable to touch anyone. Naturally. He stops dead, as someone confronts him...

Emma is in her room, worrying about her looks. The only option for her is a face-life, she decides. She could even do it herself, so she picks up a pair of scissors and holds it up to her face… but she’s interrupted by Cyclops. “What’s wrong?” he asks, and she unloads. She’s terrified that if she ever lost her looks, Scott would leave her forever, and as she reveals all her fears we see that she’s talking not to Scott, but to a very confused Havok. He tries to explain but she knocks him down and reads his mind – and oh dear, sees that ‘Scott’ is in love with Polaris. Emma does not take this well at all, and starts psychically crippling Havok in revenge. Luckily Rogue turns up and breaks up the fight, and Emma realises the illusion she’s in. “Glad to be of assistance, bub”, she says, and Emma asks her why she’s acting like Wolverine. This leads to a brilliant scene of Rogue claiming that she is Wolverine – and to prove it, tries to pop out her claws. When she fails, she sits on the floor on her own, scared. Poor Rogue.

Lorna and Iceman have found Gambit, who is fighting an illusionary Mr Sinister. It’s hilarious. They stand there and wonder if they should break up the psychosis or not, and Lorna leaves this problem for Iceman to solve, seeing how she’s just had an idea. Once she leaves, Iceman freezes the entire sewers in fear. Polaris’ plan involves not believing Bobby and re-checking the jet. Which, naturally, is now covered in a gigantic spawn thing. She goes to tell the team, and they reassemble before the jet. Havok complains at the failure of the Polaris/Iceman team to spot the pod first time round, and gets into a hissy fit with Iceman where they fight for the attentions of Lorna while she wears a pained expression of “leave me the hell alone you childish losers”. Okay, I’m probably reading too much into it, but still. Alex and Bobby both make very clear their intentions with Lorna, and Emma breaks it up, disgusted by both of them for being so rubbish.

Emma sums up the issue, just as she began it, into her Dictaphone. She let Havok kill the Golgotha pod, even though she wanted to study it, and the X-Men sent the ashes into space. She sits back and relaxes at the end of the mission, but gets a message from Gazer, a mutant stationed in space. He has something to show her – a swarm of Golgotha are heading towards Earth, looking for vengeance…

To be continued!

Thoughts!

This was the best issue of the arc, by far. On top of a series of fascinating and imaginative twists into the psyche of many of the main characters, Milligan also fleshed out Emma's character and is doing a great job with the various love entanglements he's been handed. After a few shaky issues, he's got a grip on all his characters. The plotting is still a little haphazard, but within the context of the story that's a little understandable. He's not being as weird as you'd expect, but he's not playing the X-Men straight, either. It's a fun compromise, and Salvador Larocca's artwork is showing signs of promise.

X-MEN #168

X-MEN #168
“Golgotha Part 3: The Crazy Gang”

Featuring: Havok, Rogue, Polaris, Emma Frost, Gambit, Wolverine and Iceman.

In one of the best opening sequences in X-Men history, Emma unconsciously activates Cerebra even while lying on the floor, sending it several orders as she wakes up from being knocked out by Golgotha’s telepathy. What did she ask Cerebra to do? Make her a delicious cup of Lapsang Souchong. Thus satiated by her brew, she contacts Rogue to warn her that there is more than one Golgotha creature out there, but Rogue… well, she’s already found this out, because it’s attacking her team. Havok and Wolverine kill the thing, as Emma notes that some mutants in Los Angeles are still affected by Golgotha’s madness, and will need to be stopped before they kill any more people.

Meanwhile, the aforementioned mad mutants take a much-needed break after their killing-spree in LA, and Boy tells them that it’s time to set up a political manifesto. This idea promptly goes nowhere, as instead a brawl breaks out and a mutant called Frankie kills one of the other members of the group. Boy pulls him off, and tells Frankie not to be so sensitive all the time. Obviously they’re still all mental, then.

Speaking of, the X-Jet reaches LA (they must’ve beaten Golgotha off-panel, then) and Wolverine gives his orders to Havok. He wants some backup and he wants to be picked up by the X-Men once the mission is over. He then makes the customary joke that all X-Men writers make Wolverine say, when he frets about the hassle of getting his claws through airport security. Gambit and Polaris are chosen to go, but Iceman – who last issue mocked Rogue/Gambit, remember – offers to go instead. Havok isn’t happy, and Wolverine grumpily notes that Havok must still have something for Lorna. He then jumps out of the plane before he has to hear Havok complain. Smart move.

Los Angeles is a wreck. More so than usual, even, and the trio make their way through; Wolverine leading. Iceman is a lot nervous at the bad neighbourhood, but Lorna is concerned by the zombified state of many of the citizens. A man comes up to her with a flyer for the local church, but Iceman mistakes the man for an attacker, and freezes him. Polaris sighs at her choice in men, and tells Iceman off. She wanders away, and Wolverine tries to sort out the Lorna/Alex/Bobby triangle all on his own. Iceman protests that he doesn’t owe an explanation to anyone, and that all he wants is to keep Lorna same from everything. “From everything?” Logan says. “In this business? Good luck, Bub.”

On the Boy-front, his army go and attack a movie studio because the producers cancelled a TV show they really liked. One of the victims tries to talk his way out by saying that he’s a comedian, so Frankie asks the comedian to tell a joke. The feller stutters, and then comes out with his best effort: “There’s this Jewish guy, an Arab and a mutant…”

We emerge a short while later, after Frankie has dramatically killed the guy, and Boy asks them what they want to do next. Before they get anywhere, however, Wolverine appears. Brilliantly, the mutants are star-struck to finally meet the great Wolverine, but that doesn’t stop Frankie from attacking, proclaiming “he looks so short in real life!” Wolvie counters, “I think you’re confusing me with Tom Cruise,” and cuts Frankie’s razor-hand thing to pieces. The rest of Boy’s army attack, with Boy himself firing some nifty eye-lasers through Wolverine’s heart. Iceman wastes time icing up this wound, and Wolverine swears at him for being so useless. Luckily, Lorna takes out all the mutants in one swoop, and Iceman praises her ability as if she were a pet. She ignores him, as the X-Jet pulls up above them, and asks if she can have a window seat on the way home.

Back at the institute Emma admires the two Golgotha creatures they’ve captured and killed, which are now in giant tanks of some kind. Havok does not share her admiration. Their conversation is cut short when Wolverine and the team lead in Boy to the room, who is wearing one of Cyclops’ old protective helmets so that he can’t attack anyone with his eyebeams. Havok asks where the rest of the army is, and Lorna starts worrying about them - they’re in cells within the institute, all of them having gone mad. Boy laughs. He tells them that much worse will happen soon, once Golgotha gets into their minds. “In the land of the insane, the somewhat disturbed but not entirely fruitcake is king!” he proclaims, and Wolverine goes to shut him up. Yet Boy starts laughing at Logan, calling him an old man who hangs around with kids as a sad attempt to be relevant. This strikes a nerve, and Wolverine kicks his face in. That was not one of Boy’s wisest tactics.

Gambit pulls Wolverine away but Logan is in a berserker, and pulls his claws on the guy, saying “don’t you ever put your filthy Cajun hands on me again.” This makes Rogue mad, and she breaks up the fight and sends Wolverine away. Because she is fierce. Wolverine goes back to his room to calm down, but can’t stop going over his actions with Gambit. He self-examines himself, and wonders if Boy was right. Is he really just an old guy hoping that the X-Men’s optimism and youth will rub off on him? As ever, he stops his soul-searching to go down the pub for a beer, and heads for the door – but as he stands by the door, Cerebra suddenly hails him and says that the institute is going into lockdown for twenty-four hours. Emma appears behind him, and tells him that she’s issued a quarantine on everyone – so they can “swat this craziness out”. Crikey!

To Be Continued!

Thoughts!

This was easily Milligan’s best issue to date – from the fun characterisation which includes a new angle on Logan (and it can’t be easy to find one of those) right through to the pacing, which is FAR less confusing and bizarre. Emma and Wolverine especially come out well, while Polaris and Rogue also get small moments to shine. The setup is fun, and the sense of tension is slowly mounting. Larocca’s artwork is gaining expression, too. All in all, things are rapidly improving during this arc.

X-MEN #167

X-MEN #167
“Golgotha Part 2: The Night Of The Mutant”

Featuring: Havok, Rogue, Polaris, Emma Frost, Gambit, Wolverine and Iceman.

A mutant walks through the streets of Los Angeles, as an unknown narrator assures him that he’ll be just fine out on his own in the big city. Even as the narrator tells him that “they won’t try to hurt you”, two large mutants jump out of the shadows and attack him. Nonplussed, he casually fires hot lasers from his eyes and burns them to death before walking on. He has demon eyes! Alternatively, he’s a mutant. His name is Boy, he tells us, and he’s been working as a servant for a snooty family who treated him as if he were a sub-human. When they retreated to their bomb shelter once LA became a breeding ground for crazies (as Emma Frost informed us last issue) they had no desire to have their mutant servant live with them, so they chucked him out. Since then he’s hit the streets and recruited a small army of maligned mutants, and he is their leader. His army walk past a wall with “Golgotha!” written on it.

Back in the South Pole, Emma leads the team to Golgotha, which turns out to be a giant fungus-thingy encased in a large tank... Rogue asks her what the point of keeping a giant fungus thing in the colony, and Havok calls the dead inhabitants of the colony “crazy mutants”, which seems a bit harsh under the circumstances; and in fact Gambit of all people calls him out on it. Havok refuses to apologise. Suddenly Gambit smells the creature, and he starts to reminisce about a dead body he once found, which makes him feel sick. Emma explains that Golgotha is triggering random memories for no real reason, and must therefore be telepathic. She finds it interesting, but Havok doesn’t agree with her and is about to start an argument when Golgotha cracks the containment unti it lives in and swipes a tentacle at the blonde eejit (Havok, not Emma). He blasts it away.

Gambit, meanwhile, is in a state of panic for some reason, and Iceman tells him to “relax, dude. I’d feel like that too if my girl didn’t let me touch her.” Rogue is immediately fired up, because she rules, and gives him a thorough telling-off for being a twat. Polaris, meanwhile, is unhappy at everything around her and suddenly uses her powers to blast the fungus into submission. Havok tells her to “stop it! This is crazy!”, and she stops, upset at being called crazy. Iceman fails to console her, and Havok – who has had enough – tells them to take the fungus into the open, so they can destroy it. Cue a splash page of Iceman, Gambit (who is on all fours), Havok and Rogue all pulling Golgotha outside, while Emma is fabulously absent. Happy with where they’ve taken it, Havok tells the team to blow it up – but Emma stops him.

She wants to study it at the mansion, but Havok insists that it should be killed. He talks a lot of nonsense, while she mocks him repeatedly. It’s going nowhere, but then Wolverine appears from the wilderness and offers them a compromise. That’s right: Wolverine turns up. Yay for that. They hang Golgotha from the jet and fly home, and whilst en-borde Lorna starts talking about eating Gods, and Havok worries about her, and about his skills as a leader. Meanwhile Iceman apologies about his no touching comment to Gambit, who forgives him – but he sighs that the no-touching thing is perhaps becoming an issue for him. Rogue tries to look concerned by this news.

Back in Los Angeles, the posh skanky family are having a dinner party when they hear a sound outside. Boy has turned up, with his army behind him…

The team have put Golgotha in the bottom of the Cerebra room. In there, Emma frowns on Havok for having naughty thoughts about Polaris “after what you did to that poor girl”. And because she is now completely in charge of him and he’s a pushover, she tells him to go with the team to Calvary, which is the original site of Golgotha. He goes, and Rogue and Gambit meet an old man there selling trinkets. She starts to ask her beau (ha!) about the no-touching deal, but they’re distracted by a trinket which looks suspiciously like Golgotha. After showing it to the rest of the team, Havok decides that they should go deep into the underground caves nearby, to see if they can clear up the mystery any further. Emma, meanwhile, is still at Cerebra, and her probing of Golgotha’s mind backfires when it telepathically knocks her out. She collapses on the floor of Cerebra, with Golgotha leering from below.

On the news is a bulletin called “Night Of The Mutant”. Boy and his army have killed all the members of the dinner party, and left a message on the wall. In blood. It says “Golgotha”.

To Be Continued!

Thoughts!

This issue was downright confusing! I had to reread it several times, and fill in a fair few parts, in order for things to make sense. Lorna’s attack on Golgotha is poorly conveyed by both Milligan and Larocca so it’s hard to know what’s going on, and the later scenes in Calvary don’t make any particular sense at all. The relevance of the trinket is unknown and never really explained, which makes their decision to go further into the underground completely irrelevant to everything else. If you take it simply then the plot moves along reasonably well, but look too closely and you’ll realise that there are a lot of holes about. Further to the point, Golgotha is a bizarre thing, and isn’t yet explained properly. Hopefully Milligan will remedy this later on, because at the moment it makes the story hard to read.

However, the one thing which is clear is that Milligan has a fantastic grasp on character – Emma is on fantastic form throughout, and Rogue gets a chance to show off her fiery side, which makes Milligan the best portrayer of Rogue in a very very long time. Iceman is an idiot, Havok is a child, and Gambit is nonsensical. Just how it should be! If he can fix the plotting in future issues, he’ll be set.

X-MEN #166

Previously For The X-Men…

• Former villainess Emma Frost joined the X-Men and immediately had Magneto kill Jean Grey for her, so she could move in with Cyclops. She is now headmistress of the institute.
• Polaris experienced the Genoshan Massacre, and is suffering from trauma as a result
• Havok helped her out by jilting her on their wedding day
• To add to her misery, now she has to date Iceman
• Iceman is a tosspot
• Gambit was blinded by Rogue in an ‘accident’, but had his sight restored to him by the miraculous Sage. Naturally, this happened in a Chris Claremont comic because nobody else will feature Sage in their work.
• Wolverine likes stabbing people.

And now...



X-MEN #166
“Golgotha Part 1: And What Dark Beast…”



Featuring: Havok, Rogue, Polaris, Emma Frost, Gambit and Iceman.

Our band of heroes (and Iceman) have gone to the South Pole after receiving a distress call from some mutants who were trying to build “a mutant utopia” away from Magneto and the X-Men and all that political nonsense. Obviously, this plan has not gone well. Iceman has not read the case notes he was given by Havok, so Polaris tells him off for being such a child. After blasting a way in, Havok leads them into the compound and finds that all the mutants inside are dead. Gambit makes a sadistic joke about the poor structuring of the building, and Rogue rolls her eyes. It appears, however, that the mutants weren’t attacked by an outside force, but instead turned on each other for some reason. Iceman recognises one of the dead – Butterfly – and calls him a “z-list mutant, X-Men wannabe”, but Rogue ignores him and goes to check the bodies instead. This is because Milligan’s X-women are much smarter than the men. The body she kneels over has only just passed, and it appears that he killed himself by ripping his own heart out. On the wall is one word: Golgotha. Written in blood!

Rogue starts to explain what the word means – “Also known as Mount Cavalry, the place of the crucifixion of Christ.” She starts to explain the Latin terminology of the word, which leads the rest of the team to realise that Rogue is merely repeating what Emma Frost is telling her telepathically. Iceman asks her for the football scores, and Emma gives him the derision he deserves. In fact, she goes on better then that and tells him that his remark was so stupid that it deserves disdain. Remember the days when Emma Frost was the most fun X-Character? She tells Rogue about some other attacks – including one which has taken over the whole of Los Angeles - which may be linked to this one, but Rogue doesn’t have time to tell any of the others because a stranger appears. He calls himself “the sinner”, and then he then shoots himself in the head for no apparent reason at all.

Rogue gives us some monologue about how much she wants to hold Gambit’s hand for reassurance after seeing something so horrible, so obviously the poor girl is in shock and has started lying to herself. Lorna also has a reaction to the violence, although it is less ridiculous – she starts reliving the genocide she was witness to and starts shaking. “This is all my fault…” she begins, and Iceman goes over to comfort her by telling her that this isn’t Genosha. And in doing so, he has implied that she was responsible for Genosha. Oh, Iceman. Havok gets very clingy when he sees Iceman hug Polaris, and shouts at him for breaking defensive formation. While the two of them argue, another mutant appears and utters the immortal line “I’m gonna love you like only a mutant with superhuman explosive bone marrow, infrared eyes and low-level paranoid schizophrenia can love you…” Ooh! I love this character! Lorna does not, however, and she blasts him away. There’s a fight, but Lorna quickly ends it by choking the mutant to death with some metal tubing. Slight overreaction there, but fair enough.

Later on, Havok has a chat with Lorna about how killing is bad, and that true X-Men don’t do it ever. Well, sometimes. He’s interrupted by the arrival of some zombified mutants. I’m not sure the X-Men even move for the majority of this issue. The problems always seem to come to them. Anyway, Havok tries talking to the zombies but gets nowhere. This is probably because they are zombies, Havok. Rogue has another idea, and takes off her glove… Havok tries to stop her, but she says “what’s the point of having these ridiculous ideas if I don’t use them once in a while”, which tells us that Milligan’s going to write the first interesting portrayal of Rogue in a long while. She touches a woman and instantly relives all of her life – in reverse order, which means she ends up as a foetus. A Rogue-foetus. It’s an odd image, and Emma immediately goes in after Rogue in order to save her from regressing back into someone else’s testicles.

When Rogue wakes up again, she finds herself in the middle of an attack from some crazed mutants, and has to go on the offensive. While fighting, Havok asks her what happened, and she replied “I got weirded out.” It turns out that the memories had been wiped by someone, leaving blank holes of memory for her to get trapped in. Once the battle is over, Havok interrogates one of the attackers, but gets only babble in return. “You’ll be next!” cries the attacker, before he bites off his own tongue. Yikes. Rogue sighs, because she knows that she’ll have to touch this psycho in order to find out what’s going on, but Havok blocks her yet again. Before he can do anything, though, Emma turns up and immediately takes over, which says more about Havok’s leadership skills than I ever can. She takes the piss out of Alex and Rogue for a bit, and then watches on with a smirk whilst the tongue-biting mutant suffers a heart attack and dies.

Emma is smirking because she managed to quickly read the mutant’s mind before he died. “I know who Golgotha is,” she tells the group. “Or more to the point… I know where Golgotha is…”

To Be Continued!


Thoughts!

This was a solid first issue, although there are some jarring scene changes throughout. The way in which the creatures all came to find the X-Men one after another was a bit silly, and the artwork by Salvador Larocca – although solid, and with great emphasis on the characters – sometimes grows confusing and hard to follow. Milligan is having to deal with several old plotlines as he starts off, most notably that of Polaris/Havok/Iceman, and at the moment it seems that both Havok and Iceman are going to behave childishly as a result of their feelings for Lorna, so hopefully this is leading to a payoff later on. Lorna herself is far more broken than she was during Austen’s run, and seems to be reacting more realistically to the trauma she’s meant to be suffering from. The relationship between Rogue and Gambit seems forced, and they both seem quite bored of one another.

Milligan Mondays Are Coming

Peter Milligan:
Writer: X-Men #166-187
Primary Roster: Havok, Polaris, Emma Frost, Iceman, Wolverine, Rogue, Gambit

Ladies and gentlemen of the good ship Wilftonville, bring out your back issues! We’re about to tread into familiar territory, in the form of a newfangled ‘Peter Milligan: From The Beginning’ fortnightly update thing.

Now, many people don’t think too much of ol’ Pete’s tenure with the X, which lasted from issues 166-187, a few years back. He followed on from perhaps one of the least-liked writers in X-Men history, in the form of Chuck Austen, and was given a team made up primarily of clutter. There was Polaris, Iceman, and Havok, for a start. Polaris had been on Genosha during the Sentinel Attack, and was experiencing a mental tangent of sorts: after Havok left her at the aisle for some reason she had gone mental and attacked everyone, and then started dating Iceman. It was a tangle which hadn’t really made much sense at the time, and was even more bizarre now. Also on his roster were Rogue and Gambit, whose relationship was the same as it ever has and probably ever will be: untouchable (see what I did there? Ha!) You can start to see the troubles that Peter walked into now, can’t you? At least Juggernaut wasn’t around anymore.

But despite all this, his run isn’t nearly as bad as everyone remembers it being. In fact; it’s rather jolly. So in this thread, let’s see if we cant all revaluate his run with the X-Men and enjoy it for the subversive, shiny, spiffy piece of super that it really is. Eh? And even if you didn’t like the run and refuse to ever do so, now you have a chance to slag him off repeatedly in a place where your fellow dislikers can appreciate it. Drag out your old boxes and rummage through them in a feral manner, get out the comics he wrote, and join in! There’s going to be laughs and there’s going to be tears, and at one point Emma Frost is going to try and cut her face off. What more could you want?

So, Milligan Mondays start next week – but for now here’s something to get you started. What is your memory of his run? Do you remember it as fun and groovy, or as poor and bland? Before you read it again, what did you think at the time and are you hopeful that this thread will turn you into a Mate Of Milligan?

Twelve Vital X-Men Characters You Probably Don't Know

1: Emma Frost

The overwhelming winner of the list is Emma Frost.

Who Is She?

Once upon a time, there was a villain called The White Queen, who used her considerable telepathic powers to cause mayhem within the ranks of the X-Men. Her real name? Emma Frost. The White Queen served as a villain for a long time with the X-Men, alongside her allies in ‘The Hellfire Club’. After this, she opened up a school for mutants which was designed to compete with Xavier, leading to several fights with the X-Men over her teaching practises (she’d bugged the device Xavier used to find new mutants so she could get to them first). However, she really did like teaching her students, which si what made it so devastating when they were all killed during an attack that she wasn’t present for. This was the event which pushed her towards becoming a more heroic character, and she started to help teach mutants alongside the X-Men. Eventually, after another incident happened, she moved away to Magneto’s island (yes, he has an island), called Genosha. And she started teaching there - but history repeated itself, and the entire island was destroyed by sentinel robots, who killed sixteen million mutants in one strike. Frost herself survived the attack, due to a secondary mutation that gave her the ability to transform her skin into diamond. This gave her survivor’s guilt something rotten, although she hid it as well as she could. After this, she transferred to the main academy, to teach there.

Her personality matches her ability to turn into diamond, as she is cold, cruel, and sharp. She spends most of her time sarcastically laughing at anyone she doesn’t like, and is generally an upper-class bitch. However, inside the diamond she’s still human, and these weaknesses eat away at her every day – when you witness your students get killed, it’s liable to weigh on your mind. So, when she moved to Xavier’s academy, her main priority was to make sure that the students wouldn’t be hurt anymore.

Alongside everything else, she also fell in love with Cyclops (yes, him again), much to her despair. However, he reciprocated, and they had an affair behind his wife’s – Jean Grey, fact fans – back. When Jean found out, she was not best pleased, and Emma was preparing to leave the academy once and forever when Magneto attacked, and killed Jean Grey. Cyclops, a widower for the second time, chose to be with Emma, and they took over running the school together. That’s when House of M happened. Most of the students were depowered, and then the Purifier group of religious nutjobs started trying to kill off the depowered kids – blowing up a busload of them in front of Emma’s eyes. She’s really pissed off about this. Seriously.

Did I mention her sense of fashion? She’s easily the most fashionable X-Man character around at the moment, even if her choice of fashion does leave her a little… uh… exposed. This is the sort of thing that she tends to wear. In public. She has no shame:


Why Is She Important?

Emma Frost is the only alpha-female character left on the team. Jean Grey is dead; Storm is married off to another character, and trapped in his book; Kitty is lost in space; Rogue is AWOL, and Psylocke is in a parallel dimension. So really, Emma is the lone female around here, running things all on her own without much help. However, it’s pretty likely that this is the way she likes it. As the dominant female in the books, and as the girlfriend of Cyclops, she’s now taken over the role that Jean Grey had. She appears regularly in three or four different books, and is headmistress of the Xavier Academy. She’s also in the main team of X-Men, which means she gets to appear in the ‘flash’ comic – Astonishing X-Men. She’s been written by Grant Morrison, Joss Whedon, and now Warren Ellis, and is completely crucially vital to everything that the X-Men are doing.

She’s so important now, in fact, that in the new X-Men cartoon to be made – Wolverine and the X-Men – she is one of the main characters, taking the place of Jean Grey. With her villainous past, great selection of pithy one-liners, and revealing choice of clothes, she became a fan-favourite character who got promoted through the ranks incredibly quickly. Now, of course, there is a backlash because she appears so often, but for now and the immediate future, Emma Frost is going to be one of the most important characters to the franchise. And now you know who she is.

To sum her up. As she once said – “I can turn into diamond. I am, by definition, my own best friend.”

Twelve Vital X-Men Characters You Probably Don't Know

2: Cable

Who Is He?

I’m going to make this short, because frankly Cable’s past history is the most confusing thing to ever happen in comics. Clones are involved, as well as time-travel and robots and aging and de-aging and many, many other things which are incredibly disturbing and impossible to put together. Essentially, and this is going to be such a well-written and coherent section that future comic-readers will flock here in order to better understand their favourite character, Cable is a mutant. His real name is Nathan Summers, which makes him – you guessed it – another relation to Cyclops. His son, to be precise. And in this case, Cable’s parents both were characters who lived in the ‘616’ (that is, the regular) Marvel Universe. No alternate parents here! His dad is Cyclops, and his mother is called Madeleine Pryor, who was a clone of Jean Grey whom Scott married once the original died for the first time. Cable was taken to the future so he could grow up in peace, without being attacked by all the villains who always get in the way with the X-Men, and came back having grown to be about 40ish. He had a robotic arm, and could move things around with his mind, had a psychic shield, and carried very large guns indeed. He looked like this:




He’s sort of a badass. The flipside of his powers were that he has to use them to deactivate a virus which he was injected with as a baby, in order to stay alive. After he returned to the ‘present’, Cable defeated an evil clone of himself and took a place with the X-Men, fostering his own team whom he led and trained, called X-Force. After that, he went solo for a bit, and then he joined up with a character called Deadpool for a long time. Deadpool, of course, is insane, so that relationship was founded on bickering more than anything else. When that split up, Cable got in an incident and was presumed dead for a while.


Why Is He Important?

Should also mention that Cable isn’t averse to pulling double or triple-duties. While with Deadpool he also worked with a team of X-Men led by Rogue, and sided with Captain America during the Marvel Civil War event. Usually the only character allowed to be in so many different stories at once is Wolverine, so hopefully you’ll see that high esteem in which the company holds him. A lot of his appeal comes from his appearance and design – he carries ruddy huge guns, after all – but also from his personality, which is gruff but goldenhearted. As he is the son of Scott Summers, the leader of the X-Men, he’s been one of the main characters in most major X-Men stories by default. Inferno, X-Cutioner’s Song, and so on, are all stories which have centred on Cable and Cyclops. And it was in the most recent event storyline, Messiah Complex, in which Cable made a heroic return. Or at least, somewhat heroic.

The story was that, after The Scarlet Witch made it so no more mutants could be born… a mutant was born. And several different teams of characters went after the child, either to kill it (The Purifiers, The Reavers), study it (The Acolytes, The Marauders), or protect it (The X-Men). All five teams raced to Alaska to try and get to the child first, but they were all beaten to it, and started fighting each other in order to find out who had the kid. Well, and this is obviously a spoiler for the story, the person who had got to the baby first was Cable. At the end of the story, after several other twists and turns, Cable teleported away into the future, so he could raise the child in the same peace that he was raised in.

Y’with me? Basically, Cable is now raising the first mutant to be born since Wanda erased the mutant gene, which makes him possibly one of the most important characters in the Marvel Universe right now. Oh, and do you remember a few weeks ago, I told you about a character called Bishop? Well, that guy is now chasing Cable, because he wants to kill the child. So there you have that. The only thing keeping Cable from being known to the public, is that his backstory is so insanely complicated that no film-maker will probably ever want to touch it. Shame, that, because there’s a lot of potential there.

Twelve Vital X-Men Characters You Probably Don't Know

3: The Scarlet Witch

Who Is She?

Another one of Magneto’s kids. The Scarlet Witch, named for her scarlet outfit and the fact that… well, she’s a witch, is also called Wanda, which I’m told is a real name that people honestly have in real life. I remain sceptical. It’s a little bit of a stretch to put her in this list, in honesty, let alone this high up on the list, because she hasn’t logged that much time as an X-Man. Most of her time has been spent within The Avengers, instead, which is the Marvel comic that teams up most of their big names together to handle the biggest battles – Captain America, Iron Man, and so on. The Scarlet Witch has the mutant ability to control probability, which makes her potentially one of the most powerful mutant there is (sidenote: if you read comics often enough, you’ll come to realise that every single one of the X-Men could potentially be the most powerful mutant in existence). By controlling probabilities, I think she’s able to change reality in order to get her team the victory, making her a powerful deus ex machina device. She looks like this:

If it sounds like I don’t really know much about her, then this is because she recently had her powers revamped and redefined by a guy called Brian Michael Bendis, who sent her insane and added something called ‘chaos powers’ to the way her mutation works. It’s confusing, and I don’t understand it.

She was married, anyway, a while ago, to a robot. Yeah, I know, I know. Comics, eh? He was called The Vision, and they had some kids. Which, again, is bizarre – but this time there was some sense, because it turned out that Wanda had manipulated reality to create them. She eventually agreed to give them up, and had her mind wiped of their existence. A few years later, when Bendis took over writing The Avengers, he got another character to remind Wanda about her kids, and she went mental and started killing everyone. Thus, an event called ‘House Of M’ began.

Why Is She Important?

And that’s why she’s so important. In this event Wanda changed all of reality to her fantasy world where everyone got to live a happy life. Obviously she had to be stopped, and Wolverine (as ever) led the charge to fix the world and stop Wanda, which ended up with Wanda ranting and crying, and at the very end she called out:


Now you see why she’s so important. Those three words depowered almost all the mutants in the Marvel Universe, including some reasonably big names like Magneto and Professor X. Only two hundred were left, and the remaining mutants soon found that humans like to kick someone when they’re down. There is no way to reverse what Wanda did during the House of M, which means that eventually mutants will die out altogether. This has become the most important story thread in the X-Books, which is now at the heart of everything the X-Men try to do. One thing is for sure, however: if they ever find the gone-into-hiding Scarlet Witch, they’ll want to have some strong words with her.

Twelve Vital X-Men Characters You Probably Don't Know

4: Psylocke

Who Is She?

This one’s going to be fun! Elizabeth Braddock is the sister of Captain Britain (uh, yeah, there is a Captain Britain. He wears a Union Jack as part of his costume, and looks Aryan, but is totally radical. I think he used Excalibur once, too. Albion! This is besides the point.) She appeared first as a backing character in her brother’s comic series, until the lure of X was just too strong. Chris Clairemont, her creator and a man who seems to harbour an overwhelming crush on his character, sent her to an alternate universe where she was given ‘bionic eyes’. Now, I haven’t read many of the older X-Men comics, but just hearing the phrase ‘she was given bionic eyes’ intrigues me. Anyway, she returned to the real world with psychic powers and these bionic eyes of hers, and got recruited into the X-Men almost immediately. After she joined, at some point she died her hair purple – the defining character trait for her for a long time. She called herself Psylocke, and became a valuable member of the X-Men team. She ran interference mainly, keeping the team aware of what was going on using her telepathy whilst staying in a safe location.

Then she got kidnapped and her race was changed from British to Asian. Oh, yeah, there’s that. Chris Clairemont has some crazy ideas sometimes, and his idea for Psylocke was to have her be abducted and brainwashed into a crazy ninja assassin who would then attack the X-Men. She also, during this process, became Asian for some reason.

Not. Impressed.

Chris Bachalo can make anything look good, however, and when Betsy was most recently seen in the mainstream Marvel Universe she looked like this:


Hotness! Anyway, Clairemont killed her off in 2001, but she returned again later on, only to promptly be sent to hell. Did I just say hell? I meant to say ‘New Exiles’, a comic featuring a cast of characters who travel from dimension to dimension for little reason. It’s a comic Marvel seem to have given Clairemont as a way of keeping him away from the proper X-Men characters, but he demanded that if he were to be sent away in this fashion, he should at least be allowed Psylocke. So she went with him, and is now completely out of continuity with the rest of the X-Men, and that’s pretty annoying because she’s awesome. Happily, rumours abound say that she’ll finally return to the X-Men in 2009 at some point. Fingers crossed!



Why Is She Important?

On top of being incredibly awesome? Well, Betsy has been one of the main X-Men for aaaaaaaages. Like Havok, she’s always been hanging around in the background whenever something important happens, perhaps taking one or two moments in the spotlight before retreating again. What’s great about Psylocke is that she is accepted. If you list the main X-Men, you have Jean, you have Storm, you have Rogue. And you have Psylocke. It’s accepted that she is one of the most important X-Women.

There aren’t many of them left anymore. With Jean dead, Kitty missing, Rogue AWOL and Storm sidelined, the X-titles are coming dangerously close to having an all-male cast. That’s why Psylocke needs to return. She’s a classic character who has been vital in many of the biggest events – like Inferno, or X-Cutioner’s Song – and her presence helps make any comic feel like it truly belongs to the X-Men franchise. It’s hard to put, but surrounding Betsy is an air of credibility that the books are sorely missing at this moment in time. And she is a purple-haired ninja lady who has one metal sword and one psychic sword as her main weapons. She’s awesome.

Psylocke as a character is belligerent, too. Many of the X-Men passively sit by and wait to be attacked, but Psylocke is one of the few characters (along with Wolverine, natch, although recently he’s been pretty lazy as well) who seeks out the baddies before anything bad happens. It’s that kind of attitude that gives writers the chance to write a different kind of story – one where the X-Men go on the offensive, instead of find themselves in situations where they must struggle to survive. Psylocke is important, thusly, because she gives the X-Men momentum. And they desperately need that at the moment.

Twelve Vital X-Men Characters You Probably Don't Know

5: Havok

Who Is He?

Alex Summers, who uses to codename Havok, is a mutant with the power to (and I’m quoting from Wikipedia here) absorb ambient cosmic energy and channel it into powerful plasma blasts which fire out from his body in waves of concentric circles. In essence, he fires giant circles at anyone who gets in his way, and apparently they’re all really powerful and stuff because whenever he shoots someone they always act like they’re really hurt. When you think about it, plasma is actually another word for blood, but Havok doesn’t fire blood at people. Sadly. He does, however, like to “cry havoc” before he attacks people, which must be a bit of a burden on some of those black-ops missions the X-Men have sometimes gone on, but still. He is also a whiny ass who nobody likes.

Over the years, Havok has usually been unhappy with his role within the X-Men, because Cyclops is in charge all the time and never lets Havok have any power. The classic hissy-fits of the character changed recently when Havok was given his own team of X-men to lead, and he did a decent job with them. Then he was killed. Sadly, when he returned (as all X-Men do) he got drawn into a messy, messy love-triangle situation due to a writer called Chuck Austen. Austen pushed a character called Annie into the series, and to make her seem cool he brought back Havok, who was in a coma, and then woke Havok up. When Havok woke up he fell endlessly in love with Annie, and it all went to pot afterwards because he already had a long-term girlfriend. More on her later. Luckily, Havok managed to escape from all that when Austen left the books, and the writers of the franchise have slowly been making him likable again. When he reached the point where he was just about fully redeemed, he got sent into space.

It’s tough to be a fan of Havok. Good thing nobody likes him, then!


Why Is He Important?

I may not give two salty shovels about him, but there’s no denying that he’s important to the rest of the X-Men. For a start, he’s the brother of Cyclops, the one-eyed monster who leads the rest of the gang. He also happens to be dating Polaris, and has been almost since the beginning of the series. It was while she was waiting at the altar to marry him that he went off with that dreadful Annie character, but thankfully that nonsense is over with and Lorna and Alex have got back together again. Those two links there mean that even if he tried; he’s always going to find it near-impossible to leave the X-Men. Heck, he’s tried repeatedly to get away from the rest of them, to no avail. Despite his best attempts to live a normal life away from all the worries of being a mutant, something always seems to happen to him that requires him to dust off his old uniform, which is horrific and looks like this:


So that’s Havok. Havok is a seriously important character to know about with the X-Men, because he’s been there for so long. If you were to go and buy any of the various X-Men crossover events that have taken place over the years, you’ll find Havok has a role within it. Sometimes he appears just because big brother Scott appears, and a lot of stories have centred around their family dynamic. Arguably the best story, ‘Inferno’, boils down to an argument between the two over a woman which eventually allows Hell to open up in the middle of New York, and there are aliens and flying cars and the woman goes mad and calls herself ‘The Goblyn Queen’. And trust me, it’s all just as brilliant as it sounds. Whenever the main X-Men are captured or something happens, it is Alex who is sent with the B-Team to save the day, and it’s amazing that a character who is so well-known to fans of the franchise has never been given a major role in any cartoons or films.

Now sure, Havok is a whiny insecure guy whose main problem is that he doesn’t realise how good a leader he is, because Cyclops always overshadows him. But you know who else is like that? Luigi. And everyone likes Luigi more than Mario! In this case, nobody likes Havok more than Cyclops, but that’s a decent comparison of how important Havok is to the X-Men. He’s always been around, and even now when he’s in space and in jail and useless, he is being built up. The growth of Havok from useless idiot to highly capable team leader and idiot has been one of the slowest plot-lines ever (alongside Rogue’s inability to do anyone, but that’s why everyone loves her so it’s not likely to change anytime soon), but is paying off now. If anything ever happened to Cyclops – it seems likely that it will – it could be quite possible that Havok could take over the X-Men. The only people who’d be surprised would be the neverending masses who’ve never heard of him.

Twelve Vital X-Men Characters You Probably Don't Know

6: The New Mutant Women

Who Are They?

The New Mutants were the second generation of X-Men to be created, after Cyclops and Beast and all those people. The women, in particular, have been a part of X-Men history for a long time. The ones I’m focusing on here are:

• Wolfsbane - Rahne Sinclair, who is essentially a werewolf
  
• Mirage - Dani Moonstar, who used to have powers but has since lost them.
  
• Karma – Xi’an Coy Manh, who can possess other people.
  
• Magik – Illyana Rasputin, who was a mystic
  
• Magma – Amara Aquila, who controls, surprise, magma

These five women all joined, at one point or another, the ‘New Mutant’ group, and went off on adventures which only rarely intertwined with those of the X-Men. They all keep busy, with Wolfsbane, Dani, Karma and Magma all working as advisors and teachers for the new new new generation of mutants and Magik being… well dead, actually. But she came back recently. Rahne left the mansion after dating a student for a while, and since became a private detective and now works with a secret team of X-Men used for assassination missions. As a strongly religious woman, that sure does cause some problems. I won’t focus on anything specific here, but they’re a very diverse set of women (Karma is a Vietnamese lesbian, for example, while Illyana is the sister of Piotr Rasputin – Colossus, the guy who turns into metal – and travels into hell from time to time). Here they are:

You can see in the picture, going clockwise from top left: Illyana, Dani Moonstar, Karma, Magma, and Wolfsbane.


Why Are They Important?

They’re important because they are all strong women. The X-Men have never been short of strong female characters, but the New Mutants are different because their characters started out as teenagers and have over time reached their mid-twenties. They’ve been assigned many different things, but have always been defined by their strength and friendship with each other. It’s little things like seeing these character maintain their friendships that rewards fans of the X-Men, and keeps the whole series feeling, as far as possible, realistic. When Dani got a job working as an advisor for the new kids, she didn’t hesitate to invite Wolfsbane and Karma to help her with the job, and later she asked Magma to come along too. They’re all strictly B-List characters, but you’ll be hard-pushed to find any comics series which can give you such strongly-defined, humanised B-Listers.

Twelve Vital X-Men Characters You Probably Don't Know

7: Bishop

Who Is He?

He’s the black X-men character who isn’t Storm, that’s who Bishop is. He’s another of the X-Men characters who first appeared through the medium of time-travel – the premise of children growing up to become mutants is not one which allows for the easy introduction of new adult characters. Bishop first managed to arrive sometime in the 1990’s, complete with dreadlocks and a sassy black attitude. Did someone just say ‘blaxsploitation’? How dare you. But you’re right. Originally he lived in a dystopian prison-camp future, one of many dystopic futures which have existed in X-Men stories past. He arrived in the present time from the future with the intention of killing several criminals who had gone back in time beforehand, before they changed the future and thus wrote him out of existence like Back To The Future says would happen. Once he’d dealt with those criminals he found himself trapped in the past which is out future because we haven’t yet developed time travel technology that would let him go back to his present which is our future. In the 1990’s the X-Men writers really did have some fun with convoluted stories, which is probably why you’d don’t hear much about Bishop in mainstream TV or film about the characters. For the purpose of recognition, Bishop looks like this:

So to cut a confusing story short, Lucas Bishop joined the X-Men and then later became a detective. Did you just say ‘Shaft’? How dare you make that comparison. But you’re right. He kept in with various different X-Men teams at the same time, but he annoyingly allied with the Government during the events of the Marvel ‘Civil War’ (mate, don’t even get me started on it). This meant that where Bishop once originally existed to protect the X-Men from dystopian futures, he now artificially recreated one in order to keep them protected from outside forces. It was annoying. In a further twist of the knife for fans – and black people worldwide – Bishop has now discovered that the person who made his time into a dystopia has just been born, and is presently attempting to kill the baby. Yay Bishop!


Why Is He Important?

Well he’s a black X-Man, which of itself is unusual. The franchise is very concerned with showing people from all sides of life, but for all intents and purposes has only given us two prominent black characters. In and of itself, that makes Bishop kinda important. The other factor is that Bishop – himself a massive fan of the X-Men, which is his best trait – maintained a crucial aspect of the status quo for the characters. Recently giant man-operated robots were stationed outside the X-Men mansion, in order to protect the mutants inside from outside attacks. This plan was masterminded by Bishop, in order to help his friends. But isn’t that breaching the rights of the mutants, who weren’t allowed to leave? It was all leading to a fascinating confrontation, until the recent story ‘Messiah Complex’ turned Bishop on the X-Men, and he is now chasing through time trying to catch up with that child I mentioned earlier who caused him so much trouble as a kid. Bishop is important because he has always provided a moral grey-spot for the X-Men, and when you have characters who are literally called ‘Angel’ and ‘Colossus’, it’s nice to have some moral uncertainty once in a while.

Twelve Vital X-Men Characters You Probably Don’t Know

8: Polaris

Who Is She?

Lorna Dane is a woman with the ability to control metal. Like Magneto! She also has trouble consolidating her wish for mutant harmony with the realities of her life. Like Magneto! And she has from time to time had a bit of a breakdown, and turned evil. Like… well, you get the idea. The similarities to Magneto may be somewhat due to the fact that she may be his daughter, although in honesty the resemblances stop there. Lorna has always been a more heroic character than Mags, and has been one of the main members of the X-Men for quite some time, in the process enjoying a long-term relationship with Cyclops’ underappreciated little brother, and helped to save the world a few times. She looks like this:



Sadly, despite looking totally awesome all the time, Polaris has never been given a proper chance as a mainstream X-character, and has instead been lumbered with a heckload of trauma. She’s had her powers removed, then given back, then removed, then taken back, and all the while she’s had to watch while the other X-Men become famous. She’s the X-Man who was left behind, essentially, and all of this (coupled with that supervillain daddy issue she has) gave her a few mental issues. And then, because writers like to damage her, she then became one of the only survivors of a genocide. Yeah. Seriously. Lorna went full-on crazy for a long while after that, and turned completely-flippin’ mental in front of all the other X-Men. She tried to hide the crazy, but when her fiancé then left her at the altar – girl seriously can’t catch a break – she snapped and attacked everyone.

The pain doesn’t end for Lorna, because THEN her powers were taken away from her, and she was brainwashed and tortured by a long-time enemy of the X-Men, who set her against them. She was defeated, and that’s where the second age of Polaris begins. After all this time of mental illness and getting the tar knocked out of her, Lorna decided enough was enough, and she went off on her own, powers regained and ready for action. Oh, but then she got stranded out in space along with Rachel Summers, and is currently stuck in an interstellar jail-cell, getting tortured. Life’s tough.


Why Is She Important?

She sounds a lot like a character who nobody cares about, eh? Her life has been nothing if not made completely miserable by the comic-book writers. But at the same time, Lorna has become a very important character to the X-Men universe because she is one of the only female X-Men left. The others have either been killed off, or sent to parallel worlds, or left drifting in space trapped inside a giant bullet (bit odd, that one, I’ll grant). Slowly but surely, all the female characters in the X-Men series are being taken aside, and that leaves Polaris as one of the only strong female characters left for the franchise. Hopefully, she’ll be sent back home from space soon, as plans have recently been drawn by the creative teams to break her out, and when she does return home it’ll mean that finally we can have some variety in the female voices present within the ranks of the X-Men. She’s also an astonishingly strong and variable character, because of all this hell she’s been through, and you could completely imagine that one day she’ll be one of the leading lights of the X-Men. For the moment though, she is still important for anyone interested in the X-Men, because of her connections. She’s dating one of the Summers brothers, is the daughter of Magneto, and has featured in essentially all of the biggest X-Men stories. She’s been there from the beginning, and is still going strong.

She’s also my favourite character. She has green hair, for goodness sake!

Twelve Vital X-Men Characters You Probably Don’t Know

9: Northstar

Who Is He?

Jean-Paul Beaubier is quite different to the majority of other superheroes, and not just because he has the ability to fly and move at superhuman speeds. And not just because he wears these totally rad sunglasses when he’s on duty, either. Northstar, as he calls himself, is different because he is Canadian. Aside from Wolverine, there aren’t many superheroes that have been outed as Canadian yet, but this has turned to the advantage of the many, because it means the X-Writers can make him say little lines of French whenever they want, and it makes sense. Jean-Paul has a sister (who also has powers), Aurora, and as is often the case with comic-book siblings, his character is very much defined by that of his sister. He started off with a team called Alpha Flight, who eventually disbanded, and then moves to the X-Men a while later.

Northstar is a great character within the X-Universe because he’s famous already for being a world-champion skier. Using this position, he later wrote a book detailing his experiences as a mutant in order to help other people who might be in the same situation. Although he has a snobby attitude, and a wealth of literary quotes at his disposal whenever he needs them, Jean-Paul has the best interests of mutants and other minorities at heart (I’m really straining not to mention that other defining characteristic of his, you may be noticing, X-Men fans). He joins the X-Men quite late on, but wastes barely any time in having a miserable life when his sister got brainwashed and he himself got killed by an evil Wolverine. He came back, although he and his sister at this time were both in considerable states of mental… weirdness.

It’s all been cleared up now though, thank goodness, and Jean-Paul has taken on a proper role with the X-Men, on top of his role as an ambassador for mutants everywhere. Sadly, he’s seemingly got rid of those rad specs of his.



Why Is He Important?

Okay, okay, so let’s get this over with. Northstar is an out-and-proud homosexual character. As such, he’s one of two X-Men to have come out over the years, and one of the most well-known gay characters in comics…. ever. Not many other comics have gay characters in them, and it’s taken until recently for any of the gay characters who did exist to get recognition for something other than their gayness. It’s not his homosexuality that makes Northstar so important to the X-Men though; it’s the way he feels about it. It doesn’t define him. Other characters get saddled with turning gay as a way of generating cheap interest, but Northstar has been around for a long time, and his outing hasn’t been sensationalised much at all, if ever. It just became another of those parallels that the X-Men have so brilliantly drawn over the years, between minority groups and those who don’t like minority groups.

Oh, and did I mention that Jean-Paul is totally rad? I think I might’ve actually, yeah. Northstar is important to the X-Men because he is one of the few characters who actually tends to make sense. He’s one of the smartest mutants in terms of tactics, strategy, and common sense, and those are three skills that the mutants could really do with at the moment. If ever there is a character who could wrestle away the leadership from Cyclops, then it is Northstar, because he’s just so darned smart. He teaches business and economics, and speaks different languages! And he can FLY! Northstar is completely one of the most important X-Men that nobody talks about (and honestly, his role can only increase in future, given his limbo-status at the mo) and hopefully will get more star billing soon.

Twelve Vital X-Men Characters You Probably Don’t Know

10: X-23

Who Is She?

X-23’s real name, of sorts, is Laura Kinney. That name can be disputed however, because X-23 happens to be a clone of Wolverine. A female clone. She was created by a company who were planning on setting up an assassin-for-hire service, which took Wolverine’s DNA and applied it to children. Because it was so difficult to work with his DNA, however, the first baby to be born would have to be a female. In a twist to what you would expect, everything went to plan for the baddies, and X-23 was sent out when she was a child to kill people, and has so far killed hundreds of them. She got free eventually, as you’d expect, but in the process killed pretty much everyone who worked at the facility – including her nice mother, Sarah Kinney. Oh, cruel childhood, your joy lies with the X-Men children. X-23 escaped and attacked a lot of other people, because her upbringing as an assassin meant she never got to interact with other people, or have a happy time during her childhood. Eventually she met Wolverine and attacked him, before he took her in to the X-Men mansion.

Now, X-23 lives in the mansion, but is still cold and unemotional. She doesn’t know better, and her completely tragic past means that there is still the potential there for her to turn against her new allies at any moment. Her main attack comes in the form of the two sharp claws she has in each hand, which are made of the same metal as Wolverine’s. She looks like this:

As you can see, she’s more than a little angry at the lot she’s drawn in life. Cruelly, she’s now been drafted to an undercover, covert group of X-Men, who have been given assassination authority by current X-leader Cyclops, which has meant she’s returned to her detached state of being. The main hope with X-23 is that she’ll eventually become Laura Kinney, but it’s just not on the cards at the moment. However, there are moments that suggest she has compassion somewhere – on one of her assignments she is told to kill a family, but can’t bring herself to kill the young son when she finds him. Could X-23’s redemption be around the corner?


Why Is She Important?

So you’ve heard the story about her, and you should hopefully agree that the idea is pretty darned tragic. What’s important about X-23 is that she was a new character who was created and instantly integrated with the X-Men due to her connection to Wolverine. She is now one of the more well-known members of the former ‘new x-men’ – the kids. Whilst Cannonball has grown up alongside his team and graduated into the next rank of X-Men, X-23 remains with the third generation of children. She represents the future of where the X-Men will be heading eventually, alongside other characters like Anole, Rockslide, Mercury, and Hellion. The whole point to the X-Men is that they are trying to live normal lives, and by showing us frequent examples of the struggles they face in doing so, the writers can make the comics more meaningful. With her horrific upbringing and reaction to killing (she doesn’t have one), X-23 is an extreme example of this struggle. And also – she’s Wolverine’s freakin’ clone! If he gets to be in roughly ten different comics a month, then the future looks expansive for X-23.

Twelve Vital X-Men Characters You Probably Don’t Know

11: Rachel Summers

Who Is She?

Oh, now that’s a bloody difficult question. She first appeared in the alternate-reality storyline “Days Of Future Past”, where she lives in a dystopian future that she wishes to end. To this effect, she sends one of her friends back in time to change the course of history, which her friend succeeds in doing. Then she gets time-displaced as a result, or something, and eventually turns up in the real world. Something like that. If you think that’s a complicated origin story, then boy – you’ve got a lot to learn about the X-Men. Anyway, Rachel is the daughter of an alternate reality Scott Summers (Cyclops) and Jean Grey, although when she is sent back in time to meet the rest of the X-Men, Jean has since died and Scott is married to someone else. This gives her some, in fairness justified, family issues.

She then went backwards and forwards in time a lot, making her backstory more and more complicated and impossible for anyone to understand. So we’ll ignore it! Rachel, once she realised her mother was dead, renamed herself “Marvel Girl” in tribute to Jean, and wore an outfit not dissimilar to mum’s. Oh, but then her mum came back to life, and that was nice for Rachel. Then Jean died again, and Scott moved in with another woman. So Rachel changed her name to Rachel Grey, in disapproval of dad’s taste in women, and joined the X-Men properly. She looks like this:



She’s currently out in space, making rubbish dating choices and being angry at everyone after most of her family were killed off.


Why Is She Important?

Well for a start, just look at who her parents are: Scott Summers and Jean Grey, arguably the most important X-Men characters who ever existed. As such, she was implanted firmly into the ranks of the X-Men once she arrived, and has since been surrounded by family – grandparents, an uncle, a… cousin? Her family timeline is incredibly confusing to keep up with. Most of them are dead now, apart from cousin, dad, and uncle, but even without any of her family around she remains incredibly important to the X-Men, for one simple reason. She’s the host of the single most dangerous power-source in the galaxy.

Pretty nifty, eh? It’s called The Phoenix Force, and it’s what was responsible for killing her mother the first time round, or something. Anyway, with that power she can fly through space and blow stuff up with energy, on top of her already-formidable telekinetic and telepathic abilities. That could well be why the writers have currently sent her out into space – she’s just too strong.

Twelve Vital X-Men Characters You Probably Don’t Know

The X-Men happen to be one of the most well-known rosters of comic-book characters in existence. Everybody seems to know who Cyclops, Wolverine, and Jean Grey are, and the series also gave prominence to characters who were less well-known – Colossus, Shadowcat, and so on. Of course, Professor X and Magneto were the two mainstays of the films, and also of the cartoons that run irregularly on children’s TV from time to time. They’re the two most iconic ones. There are other characters though, who barely ever get shown in the TV shows and never appeared in the movies (or, in one case, had such a small role you wouldn’t recognise her). And we’re all about celebrating the underdog here on Wilftonville, so we are, and we thought: hey, why not give these characters their due? Anyone who reads comics will know who they are, but those of you who only know of the X-Men from TV and film will hopefully come away from this experience having learnt something epic and powerful.

Here are the unsung heroes of the X-Men, one of the biggest comic franchises in the World, what don’t never get their due from anyone. Until now!


12. Cannonball

Who Is He?

Cannonball is the alias of Sam Guthrie, a mutant who can release thermo-chemical energy from his skin, in a manner similar to a jet rocket. He releases this energy primarily from his feet, which enables him to fly through the air at high speed and force. This power also gives him an impenetrable blast field which is, y’know, pretty useful. He looks like this:



Note the goggles he wears while he’s flying: Sam Guthrie is no stranger to fashion. He was introduced as part of the second generation of mutants, The New Mutants, whose function would be to eventually become the next set of X-Men once Cyclops hung up the visor. As such, he teamed up with a group of other lesser-known characters for a long time, but has recently come to the fore and has entered the world of the X-Men proper, taking his place amongst their roster and proving himself to be pretty useful in a fight.

Sam Guthrie is from Kentucky, so the lucky fellow gets lumbered with one of those accents that comic book writers love to write – ‘I’ becomes ‘ah’, etc. Recently he was fighting alongside Rogue, another character from the south, and the number of ah’s almost blotted out the sun. He’s typically portrayed as a sarcastic sort of guy, who wants what’s best for everyone, and is completely loyal to his friends. He also constantly chews a matchstick, for no discernable reason, and is a natural leader. Perhaps those two facts are interlinked?


Why Is He Important?

Cannonball is important because he symbolised the ‘legacy’ aspect of the X-Men comics. The idea was that the mutants appeared in sets, where the first set would be replaced by the next after time, and then the next – because the Mansion where they all live is a school for other mutants, the idea was that you’d see the students grow up to become teachers, and then join the X-Men for real. Cannonball, thus far, has been one of only two of them to have really achieved this, as he joined first the team on ‘Uncanny X-Men’ (the flagship title) and then most recently became a part of the adjectiveless X-Men title, as part of Rogue’s team. He’s been one quite a journey, but now he’s made it to the big leagues, and that makes him a very important figure indeed in the continuing legacy of the X-Men.

How To Talk To…. A Comic Book Fan (Part 2)

There are moments in life that are sent to try us. When you go on a trip to the seaside and it starts raining, or when you try and tape a TV show and realise you’ve accidentally recorded ITV instead. But how about when you start talking to someone, only to find out that they have an obscure fascination of some kind which completely passes you by? In our occasional series here at Illicitly Eating Flowers, we’ll try to help you bluff your way through such conversations, with your sanity still intact.

The Different Comics: Marvel

The Marvel Universe is based more around teams than the DC Universe is, because there are so many characters running around together. Marvel own the X-Men, and Spiderman, and the Avengers, and the Fantastic Four, as their four main titles, and all of them are simple enough to follow in a conversation, if you know where to go. The important thing when talking to a fan of Marvel comics is to mention how much you hate “retcons”. A retcon is when a writer in, say, 2002, revisits a story from 1975 or something and changes the reason why it happened, or the ending, which means that characters come back to life or die or turn evil. This happens a lot in Marvel, and is in fact the only thing you need to mention if someone tells you they like Spiderman. See, Spiderman has just undergone a story called “One More Day” which wiped out the past 20 years of comic-book continuity, thus rendering all the stories told about him over the past 20 years void. It’s the most talked-about thing in Marvel at the moment, and by saying “I don’t care about Spiderman because of OMD (one more day), which ruined the series” you can skip having to talk about him altogether. There are other comics though:

The Fantastic 4 – The Fantastic 4 are made up of Mr Fantastic Reed Richards, who can stretch his skin into any shape he wants; his wife Susan, who can turn invisible; her brother Johnny who can burst into flames at will and fly around; and Ben Grimm, Reed’s best friend, whose skin has been turned into rock. They were all affected by gamma radiation during an experiment gone wrong, thus giving them super-powers. Their main enemy is Doctor Doom, and their stories tend to ignore the general Marvel Universe in favour of deliberately complicated and paradoxical stories about different dimensions and time travel and space.

The X-Men is the group with Wolverine in it. Founded by Charles Xavier, the X-Men run a school where mutants can gather to learn about controlling their abilities. The X-Men themselves are a military team who protect mutant rights around the globe, as they are thought of as a lesser species. The X-men are currently split up due to a massive event that happened last December, but all you need to say here is that your favourite comic is either ‘X-Factor’ or whatever Mike Carey is currently writing. Your favourite X-Man must NOT be Wolverine; he appears in at least five different books monthly and is oversaturated to the point of ridiculousness. Cyclops should be your character of choice, or Jean Grey (who is currently dead, but very much beloved by fans)

The New Avengers/The Mighty Avengers are also where you will find Wolverine. These two groups of superheroes are made up of pretty much every other famous Marvel character, including Iron Man, Captain America (although he has recently been killed), and Spiderman – who has his own book on the side. The two groups are on opposing sides of the law; the Mighty Avengers are a legal team, the New Avengers are an underground team made up of heroes who don’t want to work with the law (Wolverine, Spidey, and several lesser-known characters are in this group).

The main issues with Marvel are that there are so many different characters who have some kind of importance to the Universe they live in. DC comics focus generally around their big five people, whereas Marvel… well they tend to tell lots of big stories with as many people as they can. Another issue is that Marvel is currently in the midst of a big event called “Secret Invasion”, where many of their characters have been taken over by evil shape-shifters, thus rendering it the worst possible time for you to get drawn into a conversation about Marvel Comics. If the conversation does take this route, then quickly derail proceedings by mentioning your respect for one of the following writers:

Ed Brubaker – he writes Captain America and Daredevil, two of the most acclaimed comics at Marvel at the moment. Captain America especially is hailed as the best comic you can buy anywhere, currently. Brubaker killed off Captain America, who is a massive character in the States (of course), and has just introduced a new one. Brubaker is the first name you should drop into the conversation, followed by endless words of praise.

Chris Claremont – who is responsible for the X-Men, more or less. He took over X-Men after they got to issue 70 or so and ran with it for hundreds of issues. This guy is the God of X-Men, and is responsible for classic stories such as “The Dark Phoenix Saga” and “Days of Future Past”. Nowadays he’s been pushed to the side and writes stories which mainly seem to concentrate on filling in the gaps on the X-Men, but in his ‘glory days’ nobody was more important.

Joss Whedon – loved and hated in equal measure by Marvel fans, because his stories for the Astonishing X-Men (the most famous team – Cyclops, Wolverine, etc) and Runaways (about a group of kids who, uh, run away from home. Incidentally, he took over this title from Brian K. Vaughan, who is as loved by Marvel as he is by DC) are fantastic, but take ages to arrive. So mention how much you enjoy Joss Whedon’s stories, but point out that he takes so long to get each one out that it’s hardly worth it anymore. This will get you kudos.

All three are keeping out of Secret Invasion, thus rendering them unconfusing… well, considering. If you really want the conversation to end quickly, however, then tell the other person that your favourite writer is Chuck Austen. He’s possibly one of the most hated writers for Marvel of all time, and you’re guaranteed to disgust the Marvel fanboy just by mentioning him. That’s Marvel sorted, then: tomorrow we look at independents. And yes, the primer is going to involve bearded wizards from Northampton.