snap judgments

The comment that got me in trouble?  I hear my manager and a customer talking about the Messiah CompleX as he’s picking up a good chunk of issues and Mister Manager is going on about how this ‘really changes things for the X-Men’ and it seems like there’s a lot more at stake.  I ask, quite innocently I’ll admit, what exactly is at stake?  We kind of know why Sinister would want the baby (genetic experimentation) and why the Purifiers would want the baby (Destroy All Mutants!) but why is Cyclops so dead set on no one else, not even his own son (Hey!  Back from the dead!  You’d think it’d make him happy), getting to the finish line with the baby.  Why he’d sacrifice Madrox to learn about the future.  Why he’s kicking Xavier to the curb and hiring on a secret super stabbing team.  Why he and Wolverine seem so chummy all of a sudden!

Right.

So I know I stopped reading Messiah CompleX due to the fact I couldn’t tell what was going on, why Cyclops would send a kill-death squad after his own son after assuming seemingly suddenly that Cable sicc’d Sentenels on the Mansion (long story) and why everyone seemed so blasé about sending Madrox into two different  timelines without 1) figuring out what kind of effect this would have an effect on the original guy  and 2) expecting him TO KILL HIMSELF to download the new info to the original guy.  Yikes, talk about forgetting to care about the men under your command.  I understand they want to make Scott Summers ‘x-treeeme’ to placate some readers (like a man who’d watched the love of his life DIE horrifically how many times and led the X-Men through Hell and Back,  sacrificed his life to try and destroy Apocalypse and raised his son by  travelling to the future ISN’T hardcore enough for you people), but come on!  This is getting into ’90s Image title territory.  Expect big pouches soon.

Enough complaining.  We sold out of X-Factor #27 (part 11 of 13, better end this nonesense quick!), but I managed to grab a copy and read it  before it was a black spot on our shelves.  Warning:  SPOILERS.

Still with me?  Good.  It turns out that this ‘baby messiah’ that  everyone and their mom’s so hot to get ahold of is the cornerstone of Bishop’s future.  Yep looks like Onslaught wasn’t the thing that did his future in after all, it was this baby who  grows up to unite mutants and humans, usher in a new era and then kill a million humans.  Why, we don’t know because we’re getting this all from the Madrox who went into Timeline B with Layla, which just so happens to be Bishop’s timeline.  They hook up with lil’ Bishop after getting into Chez Mutant Concentration Camp, he gives the exposition and Layla gives a hand grenade to the Madrox dupe so he can get the info back to the  present.  Yeah, fun book.

Let’s set all the drama aside for a moment and think this through:   Messiah CompleX is about Bishop’s timeline?  For serious?  Isn’t that  like 10 years too late?  Why are we going over info that was already dealt with and solved?  Of all the dangling plotlines that the X-Man have to their name it looks like their going back over one of the very few that was  actually finshed.  Okay, so Onslaught wasn’t the smartest story in the  world but it was cool on some level (Magneto/Xavier combiner robot that’s evil and kills nearly every hero in the Marvel Universe?  At the time, that was  pretty awesome.  Then again, I was in high school…  Moving on.).   Layer on top of this we have Cable back and running around after being dead  for… what, maybe five issues, and in his old school duds to boot so my guess is that this is a younger Cable going in to stop Bishop from getting to have the important future timeline and to preserve his Askani’son nonsense.  Man,  all we need is Rachel Grey back and it’d be a Future Free-for-All.

And Quesada says Marvel doesn’t have a multiverse… yeesh.

(Though it’s worth noting that if memory serves, Cable vs. Bishop was the direction that the animated series from the ’90s went. )

Anyhoo, they have two issues to wrap this up which really doesn’t feel like enough time.  On one hand, there have been some fun fight pages (not as fun as WWH: X-Men, but that’s another story) and this is a big ol’ old school X-over  that the X-Books were known for back in the day, but on the other hand… can someone tell me exactly what all this is about?  I know, the baby, but why?  Aside from the momentous event in genetics, we really don’t know anything else.  There are two evil factions out to get the kid, the Purifiers and Sinister’s Crew, which seemed like enough.  The surface story was solid, all they needed to do was explain that the baby needed to survive so that the mutant race wouldn’t go exinct and then Bang!  A plotline that would give weight to M-Day, give us some bad guys to fight and come out with  some heroism to save the future.

But now, we don’t know who’s future we’re fighting for and why that future  should survive in the first place.  We don’t know who’s side to root for as now Sinister isn’t even leading Sinister’s Crew, the Purifiers have Lady Deathstrike on their side (whaaaa?) and Bishop’s gone rogue and Rogue’s gone absent and/or comatose or… something.   And killing a baby to keep people from dying (a storyline that was done better in Peter David’s Captain Marvel) isn’t something I think is going to change things for the better.

I really want this series to end, mostly because at that time we can find out what the heck was really really going on (since just saving the new branch of the mutant race wasn’t enough) and get some real answers to questions we already thought were settled.  I believe that there are some things intrinsic to an X-Men book (the Dream, a Team and some Teens to coin a phrase),  but now it looks like even that might not make it out alive.