The important X-Men stories

As Kiel mentioned in Linko!, I had the privilege and pleasure of speaking with Kieron Gillen over on Marvel.com earlier this week about his upcoming tenure as writer of Uncanny X-Men among other things.

I’ve met Kieron a couple times now and spoken to him a few more; he’s a swell dude as well as a talented writer, and what’s more, a sharp fellow with some keen insights into comics that go beyond your average fanboy. In particular, both when we talked at New York Comic Con and during our interview, Kieron expounded on the importance of the X-Men being relevant not just as a top-line comic book, but as a reflection of societal trends, from race relations and prejudice to fanaticism and the obsession with celebrity.

It got me thinking how many things the X-Men franchise has been over the years; it’s been both a tremendous commercial success that has at times represented the excess of the comics industry, but also a franchise that holds up a mirror to the real world and tells important stories about those who have been outcast or disenfranchised, with mutants serving as stand-ins for racial minorities, homosexuals, etc., and it’s often been both things at once.

However, not every good X-Men story is necessarily an important one as far as that second half of the equation is concerned. In other words, an X-Men story does not necessarily need to have a deeper social meaning in order to be of high quality, but there’s no denying many of the best ones do.

But while the Dark Phoenix Saga is considered one of the best X-Men stories of all-time and has tremendous emotional resonance, the tale of a space deity taking over Cyclops’ girlfriend and becoming a star-eating menace before making the ultimate sacrifice doesn’t really carry with it a profound commentary on the issues of the day. Similarly, I love stuff like X-Cutioner’s Song or Messiah Complex, but those are really just fun action epics with lots of super-powered heroes and villains running around fighting, not allegories of any type.

That X-Men can do both types of stories well is a big reason it has had such sustained success.

Talking to Kieron did get me thinking about which X-Men tales really did speak to the social issues of their time, so I took a look back and came up with a few standouts I think speak to the power of both the franchise and the medium (I’m certainly not saying this is it as far as what should make this list, but that’s what the comments section is for).

AMONG US STALK…THE SENTINELS!
X-Men started out really as just another teen super hero book, with the slight caveat that all members of the team came about their powers naturally, as did most of their foes. Having not read all the early issues, I’m not sure exactly when the ideas of mutants representing minorities or Professor X and Magneto being the Martin Luther King and Malcolm X of the piece came about, but I’d say the original Sentinel trilogy from X-Men v1 #14-16 is a safe enough bet. Here you got the introduction of Bolivar Trask, the first in a long line of human bigots who would menace the X-Men over the years, as well as the Sentinels, the ominous killer robots who would come to symbolize the “final solution” to the mutant “problem.”

DEADLY GENESIS
Of course Giant-Size X-Men #1 is most noteworthy for the first appearances of Storm, Nightcrawler and Colossus, the introduction of Wolverine into the X-Men, and the formation of what would become the team’s most popular incarnation, but it’s also quite remarkable when you break down what Len Wein and Dave Cockrum were doing. The all-new, all-different X-Men were the first comic book group I’m aware of where the cast boasted a lone Caucasian American male (Cyclops) surrounded by a virtual United Nations of heroes, including an African female and representatives from Russia, Germany, Japan, Ireland and Canada as well as a Native American. While the Legion of Super-Heroes may have had a crew made up of representatives from various fictional planets (where most people were still white), the X-Men struck a huge blow for diversity in comics in 1975.

GOD LOVES, MAN KILLS
The fifth volume in the Marvel Graphic Novel series features Chris Claremont and Brent Anderson’s markedly mature and edgy take on the lethal and terrifying combination of zealotry and racial prejudice. The very first sequence has two mutant children executed by the religiously-motivated Purifiers and found by a vengeance-swearing Magneto. Reverend William Stryker’s persecution of mutants and insistence that they are an abomination and blight on humanity definitely strikes a harsh but all-too-real chord when you think about all the wars and horror that have come about because of those who insist on twisting faith to their own sick ends. However, while the story is full of cringe-inducing moments, it is also uplifting in its way, with many humans refusing to indulge Stryker’s bigotry, their acceptance of Nightcrawler as a true hero, and Cyclops’ affirmation of Professor Xavier’s dream for peaceful coexistence between all races; even with the religious aspect stripped out, the framework of this story still made for a powerful and awesome movie with X2: X-Men United.

FATAL ATTRACTIONS
In the midst of this massive 90’s crossover, a momentous event occurred; I’m not talking about the return of Magneto or the temporary loss of Wolverine’s adamantium, but rather the defection of Colossus. After several years enduring numerous tragedies that left his entire family dead, the popular and peaceful X-Man lost faith in Xavier’s dream and opted to give Magneto’s more aggressive approach a try as a member of the Acolytes. It was the first time a noteworthy X-Men stalwart had openly decried the doctrine they followed, but reflected the very real world circumstances that often see civil rights activists embrace a harsher outlook out of frustration.

THE LEGACY VIRUS
Paralleling the AIDS epidemic, in the 90’s the writers of the X-Men titles concocted the Legacy Virus, a brutal disease that struck randomly at mutants and decimated several characters without regard for their being good or evil, beloved or obscure. Just as many heterosexuals decried AIDS (or GRID) as being a “homosexual disease” in its early stages when it seemed to afflict only that population, humanity in the Marvel Universe lashed out even more fiercely against mutants out of fear the Legacy Virus would spread to their ranks, which it eventually did when longtime supporting character Moira MacTaggert became afflicted. The story of the Legacy Virus stretched over several years and ended only when Colossus, back in the X-Men fold, seemingly sacrificed his life to activate the cure in a particularly poignant tale.

E IS FOR EXTINCTION
When Grant Morrison came on New X-Men in 2001, a clear line in the sand was drawn between what had become a storytelling structure even a diehard like me can admit was somewhat bloated by the end of the 90’s and a return to the relevant, hard-hitting stuff that first gained the franchise notoriety. I hated New X-Men at the time it was coming out, but have since been able to go back and really appreciate it both as a fan and somebody who appreciates the craft. Morrison’s very first storyline with Frank Quitely tossed in the game changer that the human race was going extinct and would be replaced by mutants entirely within a few generations. This very much drove home the point that mutants were the “other,” regarded by normal humanity with both fear and awe, now heightened by the idea they truly were the next step in evolution and possible their replacements; this certainly echoes the new century anxiety of white America that immigrants will take our jobs and neighborhoods, among other hot button topics. The remainder of Morrison’s run would continue to address ideas about how “normal” folks view those separate from them, exploring not only fear, but envy and reverence.

GIFTED
A lot happened in Joss Whedon and John Cassaday’s opening salvo on Astonishing X-Men, from the introduction of Ord to the return of Colossus (man, that guy is in every big story), but perhaps lost among the loud stuff was Kavita Rao’s discovery a “cure” for mutants that would make them into normal humans. The agonizing of some Xavier Institute students and Beast in particular made for some of the story’s most heartfelt moment and certainly paralleled the struggle I’m sure many people young and old who may be in a racial or sexual minority feel at wondering what it would be like not to be different weighed against staying true to who they know themselves to be; a tricky but important debate that Whedon handled admirably.

Cruel Summer: Mister Sinister

My history with Mister Sinister begins, as so many of my comics-related tales do, with “The X-Cutioner’s Song.” He was the tertiary villain at best, showing up near the beginning to kidnap Cyclops and Jean Grey, then again at the conclusion, getting bamboozled into released the Legacy Virus on the world. He looked kind of like an evil Colossus and didn’t impress me much; in a crossover where Stryfe was at the top of his game and Apocalypse was also running wild, Mister Sinister seemed like an afterthought with a goofy name.

Then I saw the cliffhanger finale to season one of “X-Men: The Animated Series”—and the version of Sinister intended to fly on a cartoon aimed at a Saturday morning audience comprised primarily of children scared the crap out of me and left a lasting impression.

Following the big battle against the Sentinels, Scott Summers and Jean Grey are chilling on a beach when the visual framing of the scene shifts and we’re now viewing them through a camera lens. The perspective flips and we see a silhouetted figure seated upon a creepy throne of tentacles or something; he leans forward to reveal a pasty-faced ghoul with sunken eyes and a grinning mouthful of yellow, fanged teeth. And then the kicker: a fiendish laugh that sent chills through my young soul and had me cringing through the summer months awaiting new episodes.
Mister Sinister as the foreboding, undefeatable, supremely confident overarching villain of season two, voiced spot-on with hollow menace by Christopher Britton, became my template for the character, and also intrigued me as far as looking into his comic book history more in-depth.

Truth be told, at first, I didn’t find much.

Chris Claremont’s original concept for Mister Sinister as he tells it is pretty cool: the idea was that he was a powerful mutant who had been around for some time but his physical development had stopped around age 11, so in order to be taken seriously as a super villain, he created the Sinister vessel modeled after what a kid would find scary then sent him out into the world. Certainly some potential there as a sort of evil Captain Marvel—the Fawcett/DC version—analog, but for whatever reason, it seems like the writer never got to play him that way.

Instead, Sinister gets kind of dropped into the X-Men mythos in the late 80’s seemingly just because the Marauders needed a boss and Inferno needed a mastermind, set up as an ambiguous and foreboding figure surrounded by mystery with vague ties to Cyclops. In his early appearances, Mister Sinister does seem when you look back on it with Claremont’s original intent in mind the embodiment of what a kid would think of as a scary bad guy, but since his creator only got to really tell one story with him and then departed the books a few years later, the payoff never took place. Instead, Claremont’s successors were left with a villain who almost seemed a parody—with good reason, since, again, he’s meant to be a kid’s conception—but without explanation.

That’s the comic book version of Mister Sinister I met, and not that surprisingly I wrote him off as a product of late 80’s/early 90’s excess where everybody was a shadowy mastermind with too many secrets and ill-defined powers; he worked as a boogeyman on Saturday mornings—again, Claremont’s intent used in a way he probably never conceived—but seemed unnecessary in comics.

However, writers like Fabian Nicieza and Scott Lobdell saw something in Mister Sinister—and also good X-Men villains are kind of few and far between—so they kept bringing him back and giving him more and more connections to our heroes, without ever revealing much about the man himself. It was frustrating, but also admittedly tantalizing, as I would get annoyed that we never knew Sinister’s deal, yet of course this made me want to know his secrets more than ever and gasp whenever he appeared suddenly in an X-Men comics; the guy had presence, I have to say that.

In 1996, nearly a decade after his creation, Sinister—writers had largely dropped the “Mister”—had his origin told in the Further Adventures of Cyclops & Phoenix limited series, written by Peter Milligan with art by John Paul Leon and Klaus Janson.

Interestingly enough, I never got around to reading the book and once again got my Sinister fix from “X-Men: The Animated Series,” the penultimate episode of which was “Descent,” adapting Further Adventures for Saturday morning consumption about a year after it came out in print form.

In both Further Adventures and “Descent,” we learn that Nathaniel Essex was a 19th century scientist obsessed with Darwinism and evolution who performed depraved experiments and eventually made a pact with Apocalypse to grant him power and immortality as Mister Sinister in order to continue his work beyond his natural lifetime. In subsequent years, it would be revealed that Sinister’s obsession with the Summers and Grey bloodlines were born out of twin desires to harvest incredible genetic potential while at the same time creating the ultimate failsafe against his former master—at some point he got on Apocalypse’s bad side—in the form of Nathan Christopher Summers, who would become Cable.

Probably not what Claremont had in mind, but finally this guy had motivation, and one with potential at that.

Sinister was the old Golden Age mad scientist who got lost in his work and exploited by crime bosses done up in a new way for a generation who expected more layers to their villains and for a franchise that thrived on shades of grey. That the unshakeable ego and calm of Sinister could be rattled be Essex’s gnawing and uncontrollable thirst for knowledge was a different paradigm for the X-Men antagonist of the day. You couldn’t bully or intimidate Sinister through physical force or emotional blackmail, but dangle the carrot of information in front of his diamond-adorned forehead and he becomes a junkie jonesing for a fix.

One of the very best Sinister stories I ever read was “Sinister’s List” from 2003’s Weapon X #14 by Frank Tieri and the guy who I suppose may well be the definitive Mister Sinister artist, John Paul Leon. Following up on the revelation that Doctor Windsor, the seemingly kindly scientist helping mutants to escape from Weapon X’s Neverland detention center is in fact Sinister, who is only abducting them from the prison to his lab for dissection, we get a flashback to Essex during World War II, where he worked alongside the Nazis, cloning Namor and observing the Invaders while attempting to glean knowledge for his own ends. It’s the perfect snapshot of Sinister as a man lost in his own pursuit of answers, completely unaware of the world around him save for the raw elements it can provide him. A pretty on-the-nose comparison between Sinister and Josef Mengele is drawn, but Tieri is quick to differentiate as well, with Essex musing on the “wastefulness” of the Nazi agenda and clearly not adhering to any sort of doctrine of racial superiority, instead viewing all people regardless of creed as nothing more than specimens for the “greater good” of scientific inquiry; true to his Darwinist roots, Sinister doesn’t care which race ultimately survives, he just wants to observe it all.

That was one of the very last times Mister Sinister was featured prominently before his demise in 2007’s Messiah Complex crossover. Truthfully, I think it’s impressive the character made it that far—20 years exactly—given the disparity between his creator’s intentions and where he ultimately ended up, but you have to be impressed at how he seemed to succeed in spite of those conflicting directions, thriving in several different roles and drawing impressive work out of multiple creators who at the end of the day really just seemed to want to solve the riddle of who he was and why he did what he did.

In the first issue of X-Men Forever 2, a comic written by none other than Chris Claremont, a mysterious boy appears in an orphanage alongside Cyclops’ son, speaking ominously with a familiar silhouette surrounding him, so two decades later, we may finally get to see where—to end on a fairly awful pun—this Sinister road leads.

Cannonball: Upward Trajectory

I first encountered Sam Guthrie, aka the once and future member of the X-Men known as Cannonball, in the pages of X-Force circa “The X-Cutioner’s Song.” The paramilitary teen X-team was in the process of being ditched by their mentor figure, Cable, and young Sam had already begun seizing the reins of leadership.

The Cannonball I met back then was a Southern gentleman to be sure, but more he was a self-assured youngster with strong convictions and a chip on his shoulder; he was a nice guy, but not too nice, and that quickly made him one of my favorite characters.

At the time, I had no idea that Sam Guthrie had not always been this way. As I was still a kid and yet to really delve into the dense forest of continuity, I had a passing awareness that Cannonball had been part of a younger, less intense team called the New Mutants at one point and from early issues of X-Force I found at my local store, I gathered his confidence and poise with his own powers was a relatively new developments, but I was certainly more familiar with Fabian Nicieza’s “angry young man” take on Sam than any other.

This is why I was so disappointed when Sam joined the X-Men post-Age of Apocalypse and somehow became this wide-eyed rookie in awe of his teammates and incapable of any real sort of competence. This was not the Sam I knew and loved.

Over the years I’ve gotten to know where Cannonball came from a little better, most significantly via the New Mutants Classics trade collections, and while I still don’t buy that Sam should have been quite such a screw-up during his first run in the big leagues, I get where it came from, and also see how the character’s evolution makes him somewhat unique in the Marvel Universe while also instilling him with a huge amount of potential that writers have only scratched the surface of in the three decades or so that he’s been around.

Chris Claremont’s original take on Cannonball in those first several years of New Mutants is one I look back at and can barely recognize as the hero of my youth. In his early days, Sam Guthrie was an awkward, overeager, clumsy and often downright nerdy country bumpkin who seemed in way over his head as a world-class hero. However, while Sam may have been gawky and not quite oozing cool in those initial appearances, the core characteristics that would make me a fan years later were there from the start: he was a true blue hero whose motivation for doing good came from the most pure and unselfish of places, and despite the fact that he may have been crashing into walls half the time, he was a natural born leader who commander the respect of his peers.

In re-examining the trajectory of Cannonball from wide-eyed New Mutant to almost world-weary X-Force leader and beyond, I realize that Sam Guthrie represents perhaps one of Marvel’s best examples of a character who has actually grown up over the years.

Over in the DC Universe, you can look at Dick Grayson and Wally West in particular as well as the original Teen Titans in general when seeking out examples of one-time youngsters who have grown and changed over the years, but there are fewer examples of that path at Marvel, with Cannonball being among the more pronounced. For those who have followed his entire comic book “life,” they’ve seen Sam Guthrie go from an awkward boy to a teen struggling to prove himself and most recently witnessed him blossoming into adulthood as a responsible soldier who guys like Cyclops put total trust in. Cannonball’s progression has been pronounced yet for the most part natural, and it’s neat to see the seeds that were planted way back when and the fruit they have born.

Dick Grayson and Wally West both grew up and assumed the mantels of their respective mentors; while Sam has yet to become the new Professor X--and likely never will--he has ascended from teen sidekick equivalent to fully-realized adult hero.

Another aspect that makes Cannonball so cool is something that used to get brought up a lot back around that era of X-Force I loved so much: unlike pretty much any other character in the X-Men Universe, Sam is a guy who received the tutelage not only of Professor X and his opposite number in Magneto, but Cable as well, providing him with training and a cumulative knowledge that could perhaps put Scott Summers to shame. There was always something neat to me that Cannonball is a character whose power is fairly pedestrian, but the strategic skills and ability to lead instilled in him by the most impressive and diverse collection of teachers any Marvel mutant could accumulate distinguish him. Again, there is so much potential in exploring a protagonist who has been exposed to three incredibly differing philosophies and perhaps is the only person able to balance them into the best possible course.

I really dig what Zeb Wells is currently doing with Cannonball in the current New Mutants series, highlighting him as, again, somebody Cyclops really sees the worth and value in as he works to safeguard the mutant race--and as a possible heir--while also showing he’s a strong leader who is not without imperfection. Surrounding him with his old friends adds an element I also enjoy as while Sam may be a soldier and a hero, there’s certainly a human element you never want to ignore.

I do still think there is much ground to be mined when it comes to Cannonball, not just in a team setting, but maybe as a headliner in his own limited or ongoing series. Really dig deep into the stuff I’ve written about here in regards to his evolution as well as his stance on his various teachers and I think you’ve got a strong foundation for something that could really take off (pun intended).