A SINISTER THREAD

MUTANT X 2000 ANNUAL (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!

And we’re back, this week with an issue that I totally didn’t just miss when I was supposed to read…look, guys, the Annuals don’t actually have the cover date printed on them, and they’re not worked into the actual narrative, so it’s easy to miss them and not realize it. So, I’m gonna fix it now, and take a look at a Gambit and Bloodstorm-centric story. Oh goody. My favorites.

THE ISSUE ITSELF

The 2000 annual of Mutant X was “cover dated” April 2000. It has story and art by Howard Mackie, Colleen Doran, Scott Elmer, Andrew Pepoy, Rod Ramos, and John Czop.

Bloodstorm and Gambit break into a facility, as the captions set the timeline as shortly after Ororo left the X-Men. The two banter as they make their way through traps. They open a large door and discover The Fallen behind it. The Fallen reveals to Gambit that Ororo is a vampire, and introduces the pair to War. They do battle, and Gambit and Ororo get away, moving further into the facility. As they move forward, Ororo recalls her transformation into a vampire. They arrive at their goal, a room where two young children are kept in stasis. The Horsemen catch-up, and Gambit is fatally wounded. Ororo turns him into a vampire to save his life, and they escape with the children, ending the first “part.” In the second part, Gambit wrestles with his new vampirism, and runs off, after wishing Ororo had let him die. In the French Quarter, a pair of thieves attacks a young woman, who reveals herself to be a member of the assassins. It was a set up, and the other Assassins attack. The Assassins are taken out by Gambit, who then attacks the woman. Gambit reconvenes with Ororo and the children. Ororo departs, and Gambit meets with the man who hired him: Sinister. Sinister takes the boy, and orders Gambit to dispose of the girl. Gambit refuses, and takes her himself, while Sinister addresses the boy as “X-Man.”

The last annual focused on building out the universe a little further, and built up a handful of new characters. This one is a lot more retread. We get another look at Ororo in her early days of being a vampire, who seems to be pretty much the same as her present counterpart. There’s also some things that don’t seem to line up with her last flashback issue, since this one portrays her as being on good terms with the X-Men when she departed. What she and Gambit are doing is ill-defined, as is their relationship to each other. We get another appearance of the Fallen, who, like Bloodstorm, seems to be in about the same spot as presently. The story’s two-part structure is odd, because part two just picks up moments from where part one ended, making it feel like the whole separation was unnecessary. At the end, we get a clearer explanation of why Gambit is a vampire, and where X-Man and Raven came from…sort of. The coolest part of the whole thing are the “alternate history” covers we get at the end, showing off some events from prior to Havok’s arrival, but they seem jarringly placed at the end of a book that is otherwise very focused on one thing.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

 I had a lot of trouble getting through this one. It was equal parts boring and confusing for me. It certainly doesn’t help that Bloodstorm remains a character I just don’t get the hype behind, and that this is the second time in a year she’s gotten a flashback issue. The information provided by this story is minimal, since it’s dealing with stuff that we largely already knew, which makes me feel like it wants to be a character study, but there’s very little actual character growth or interaction. So, it’s ultimately an extra length story about how Gambit got turned into a vampire, and did we really need that?

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.