TREMBLE BEFORE HIS MIGHT

MUTANT X #22 (MARVEL COMICS)

“In another place–in another life–Alex Summers led a team of mutants in a battle against oppression. His methods were extreme, his tactics questionable, but–in his soul–he knew that he was fighting for the greater good.

Now that soul has been transferred to another world, and Summers, also known as Havok, has found himself living a lie, allied with a team of mutants who are sinister, parallel versions of his friends and family. It is to this dark, new place that Havok has come, where he stands as a man alone… a mutant alone. Alex Summers is Mutant X.

Fear him. Fear for him.”

25 years ago, Marvel Comics launched Mutant X, a Havok led X-spinoff. I recently came into a complete run of the series, and so now I’m going to re-read the series once a week, and you guys get to come along for the ride!

This week, the team faces off against Galactus…except that they don’t? Let’s check out the weirdness of “Tremble Before His Might.”

THE ISSUE ITSELF

Mutant X #22 is cover dated August 2000 and has story and art by Howard Mackie, Tom Lyle, Dusty Abell, and Andrew Pepoy.

Xavier does battle with The Six in an attempt to capture Scotty. Havok decides their best strategy is retreat, heading south towards Antarctica. The go to Apocalypse’s ship, meeting up with Magneto, who reveals his survival to the rest of the team, also confirming the survival of the rest of the X-Men in the process. Magneto takes Havok and Captain America to come up with a strategy for attacking Xavier. While the others wait, Ice-Man complains about Cap’s inclusion in the planning, since he’s not even a mutant. Scotty laughs and confirms that Cap actually is a mutant. Apocalypse’s horsemen, led by the Fallen arrive, and an altercation breaks out. Havok breaks it up, but Fallen pushes back, before being put in his place by Apocalypse. Apocalypse reveals that Xavier’s plan to take over the world requires him to create a simulacrum of Galactus, so that he may feed off of the panic of a world that fears being devoured. The Six and the Horsemen travel to New York to battle the fake Galactus. They cause this Galactus to melt into a green goo, revealing him to be a creation of Sinister, who manipulates the goo into several smaller, unfinished creatures.

This issue picks up pretty much directly from the last one, dumping you more or less right into the action. It’s a rather uneven issue, a point really driven home by the drastic shifts in style between Lyle and Abell’s pencils. They seem to have each taken pages at random, so there’s just these sudden jumps where characters suddenly look like completely different people. Most notably, Alex’s hair length varies by several inches from one page to the next. The Fallen’s role also remains ill-explored at best; early stories indicated his nastier persona was the result of a darker history in this universe, but with the change-up to make Apocalypse a less villainous character, this doesn’t fully track. Here, even *he* doesn’t seem to understand his motivations, and his presence seems largely to be about reminding readers the character still exists. He pops in and pops back out about as quickly. We do at least get an official confirmation of the X-Men’s survival this issue, but they still don’t make an appearance. Likewise, we get a reminder of the Starjammers in the form of the imaginary Galactus’ imaginary Heralds, but no proper appearance from them either.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

Last issue was a lot of exposition, and this felt like…more exposition. Not really even different exposition. Just more. I did like getting more time with Ice-Man for a change, but the Galactus plot feels kind of extraneous. But, we’ll finally get to the wrap up next time!

I snagged this whole run from my usual comics stop, Cosmic Comix, so I want to give them a shout out here, because it was a pretty great find.