Great analysis, rberman! I wonder what Morrison would think of it.

An excerpt from Supergods that you used made me smile:



Morrison may be engaging in hyperbole for the sake of argument, here, but this kind of statement really illustrates the inflated sense of self-importance that his public persona manifests. There is no common measure, none whatsoever, between the true evils of this world and the trivialities of comic-book stories. But Morrison is not a UN world peace envoy nor a volunteer worker in a leprosy; he’s a comic-book writer. As such, he is held accountable by his readership to adhere to certain standards, just as the guy in the coat hanger factory is answerable to his boss.

”Jenkins! This is what you call a coat hanger? It’s not symetrical! Clothes are going to fall off! Besides, it was supposed to be silver-gray and you made it bright pink!l

”Oh, really, Mr. Stevens... if you put as much sputtering and righteous wrath is fighting injustice and bigotry as you do in checking coat hanger quality, you would make the world a much better place!”

Comic book readers, even obsessive ones, can perfectly well do a whole lot of good around them AND bitch and moan about Superman continuity. Most peope would think they waste their time doing so, but it is their privilege and is completely unimportant except for a comic book writer. Can said writer decide to write a certain story even while knowing it will displease some readers? Of course! Absolutely! Especially if it means the story will be challenging, innovative or thought-provoking. Should a writer refrain from offending fans? Well, that depends on the nature and purpose of the offense, but it should be allowed if the result is a good comic. What a writer should not do, though, is write something that is lacking in some storytelling aspect, and then look down upon critics as if they were no good ignoramuses who live in their mother's basement and are not worthy of one’s inspired re-inventions of their beloved and stultified myths. 

Morrison is a comic book writer. If his ideas work, more power to him. If they don’t, heh... do biggie. It’s only comic-books. As for the “comic book fans scorned”, they are a large part of his readership; they are in large part the reason he has a job. If they did decide to focus on solving the world’s big problems as his little diatribe seems to suggest, they’d stop reading comic books altogether and give the money to the Red Cross, the United Way or Médecins sans frontières instead. Is that what he’s saying? Or is he just saying that readers should buy his enlightened stories and praise fate dor such a privilege? They’re only comics, for crying out loud, and in American comics fandom, complaining that they ain’t what they used to is part of the game. I’m sure he knows that by now, and his complaining about it is as silly as a reader complaining that the round things on Thor's chest are not always drawn the same way.

Anyhoo... Great analysis, once again. And while I may not like Morrison's general attitude, I did enjoy his stint as the X-writer and his reinvention of the mythos. Looking forward to your analysis of Here Comes Tomorrow!

New X-Men #151 “Here Comes Tomorrow: Part One” (March 2004)



Special Note: Grant Morrison intended the last four issues of his New X-Men run to make you say “What did I just read?” the first time through, then go back and (maybe) piece together the clues on subsequent readings. If you haven’t read it yet and want to preserve that experience for your own future, then don’t read the rest of this thread, because I’m going to be explaining each issue in hindsight of having read the whole thing so as to (hopefully) unravel the David Lynchian puzzle box that he presents here. The training wheels are off; here we go.

The Story: “Here and now,” in the ruins of the Xavier Institute, Rover the Sentinel saves his human driver Tom Skylark from a couple of (Night) Crawlers. They meet E.V.A., a sphere of liquid metal who also assumes sexy humanoid shape. They have the Phoenix Egg that The Proud People found on the moon before being killed, and were hoping to deliver it to Xavier’s team, but nobody’s here.



Heading to the radioactive Manhattan Crater, they are beset by a mutant combining the powers of Nightcrawler, Cyclops, and Madrox. He multiplies into have a dozen of himself and teleports away with the Phoenix Egg, which the 'Crawlers deliver to the ruler of Megamerica, The Beast, who is a Mr. Sinister-type genetic overlord who uses his extensive genome records to splice DNA and custom-grow chimeric mutant servants to his specifications.



The “Three-in-One” (Stepford Cuckoos Phoebe, Celeste, and the still-unnamed Irma) are now young adults based inside the Notre Dame cathedral, which is filled to the gills with Cerebra and its endless cables. They discuss the latest bad news with Logan and Cassandra Nova Xavier.



Scene change: “150 years earlier,” it’s autumn. Scott Summers stands over the grave of Jean Grey while Emma Frost tries in her unhelpfully caustic way to persuade him to re-open the Xavier School with her. He’s not interested and stalks away.

My Two Cents: This is the other shoe I kept waiting for Grant Morrison to drop. I think of him as an ambitious writer who can get bored with the spoon-feeding plot conventions of American comics and would rather take a cue from scif-fi novelists like Frank Herbert or David Brin or Dan Simmons who drop the reader headfirst into an unfamiliar world. Most of the issue is spent on world-building, so the actual plot is quickly summarized once you understand what it actually is, but my synopsis is much more straightforward than my actual reading experience.

Well, there are actually two options for reading this arc. The first is that this is some sort of loony future dystopia like the Age of Apocalypse, so that this “here and now” world is populated by wonky versions of our main cast. Loyalties have been re-aligned so that Beast is the main villain, and a Sentinel and Cassandra Nova can be good guys. But a couple of times we’re also told that this world is somehow 150 years in the future, and it’s hard to justify the presence of lots of the characters in that time frame.



As for the second possibility, which I think is more likely: I’m a fan of science fiction author Connie Willis. Her idea of science fiction involves actual scientists who do actual research on real world topics like “Why do fads come in waves?” (from Nebula nominee Bellwether, 1996). For me, her most memorable work is the terrifying novel Passage (2001, Nebula and Hugo nominee). It’s about a woman researching near-death experiences and also the Titanic. The reader learns a lot about both of those topics, and they come together when the protagonist dies, and we “get” to see that dying people don’t go peacefully into the hereafter; their dying synapses misfire, flooding their brains with jumbled images which elongate time into a nightmare that subjectively goes on forever as their universe collapses like a scene out of the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.



As best I can tell, that’s what we’re getting in this whole arc of New X-Men. What appears to be an impossible future, with the world’s great monuments gathered intact into the “Manhattan Crater,” is actually the dying dream of Jean Grey, murdered by Magneto’s massive electro-magnetic pulse at the end of the previous issue. As her brain loses coherence, she constructs a Wizard of Oz-like narrative in which all the pieces of Morrison’s X-writer tenure (and a few bits from elsewhere) collide. Morrison never tells us this outright, but he leaves clues for the attentive reader to piece together.Thus the Manhattan Crater contains Notre Dame, and Big Ben, and the Taj Mahal, and the Tower of Pisa, etc. It contains every monument that Jean Grey can think of as her synaptic world collapses.

And what people does Jean dream about? Logan is here in his noblest version, a stoic, majestic samurai Zen master, doing Tai Chi while others spout exposition. The three surviving Cuckoos are here. Cassandra Nova is here, at one point (next issue) wearing the French Foreign Legion garb in which she first encountered Scott in Ecuador. Jean might have seen this in Scott’s mind, or might have seen Cassandra when she was brought to the mansion.



Either way, it suggests that this is not the real Cassandra, and we are not 150 years in the future. She represents Jean’s hope that the retraining of Cassandra-in-Stuff into quiet, simple Ernst was a successful venture, so that now Cassandra can be the “Nova Xavier” (New Xavier) to go with our New X-Men. (One might object that as a shapechanger, Cassandra-in-Stuff can adopt whatever clothing she feels like. Still, she has no particular reason to dress for a safari for the oceanic night mission that we’ll see beginning next issue. Logan also calls out Cassandra Nova's connection to the mythological Cassandra, the Trojan seer cursed to have true visions of bad news which are not believed.



Beak is here too, but he’s no longer a craven poet. He’s a majestic hawkman named “Tito,” still wielding the baseball bat that he was brandishing against Magneto moments before Jean died. Jean was not actually there for that scene, so make up your own story about whose mind she plucked this detail from. But the reader was there. Maybe it’s from our mind? Remember, Morrison believes that we and the comic book characters are all part of the same hyper-dimensional universe. They exist, and we can reach each other if we know how.




How certain am I that this is Jean’s dying dream? Maybe 80% sure. It could just be Morrison giving what he considers is a legit alternate future, with all the weird elements just intended as some sort of commentary on how time is cyclical, and the universe is connected, bleah bleah bleah. And we’re talking about Phoenix, who can make thought into reality. So it’s fair if you want to say that metaphysically, Jean’s dying dream is accessing or even creating a dystopian future, a possible tomorrow in the usual sense often seen in comic books. But many of the details don’t make sense outside of a dream framework, so I’m going to call it a dream even if Morrison conceives of it as a dream that somehow causes a nonsensical future to sprout into potential being. The point is that it will be profitable for us to think of this as a dream, and dreams don't have plots or real characters; they have symbols.

E.V.A. is in Jean’s dream, no longer a sentient spaceship but a T-1000 style liquid metal babe in true Silvestri fashion. In this issue, she has a third eye in the center of her forehead, a nod to Morrison’s occultic obsessions. The “third eye” in Hinduism is the gateway to the higher consciousness, related to the notion of the Crown chakra. In subsequent issues, she will have a whole column of third eyes up into her Nefertiti-shaped crown. (Or is it Brood shaped?)

Biblical language suffuses Jean’s dream: “Mark of the Beast,” “Apocalypse,” “Apollyon the Destroyer,” etc. Morrison has steadfastly avoided biblical imagery for the rest of his X-Men run, preferring images and lingo drawn from the seedy, inebriated word of European discotheques and cinema. But we get it in spades here. “God has abandoned his failed experiment, the Earth. Now is the time of blasphemous creation,” says Beast in his first lines here. More along those lines follows.

Art on this arc is by Marc Silvestri, an X-Men stalwart since 1987. Jean’s memories would include lots of bad late 80s/90s X-Men images, and by choosing Silvestri on art (assuming it was his choice), Morrison is using this stylistic detail as a plot point, which is brilliant. However, as a reader, I still can’t get past the 90s-ness of it. Silvestri eschews the cinematic widescreen panels of Quitely, Jiminez, et al, in favor of gothic verticals and large panels with overlapping border, lack of white space between, and usually a character stretching some part of his body across the panel boundary. With all the cross-hatching, I keep expecting Cable to step out of the shadows holding a gun thicker than his waist. Sorry, Marc. It’s just hard for me to enjoy your art, even though I appreciate how Morrison is using it subversively. This also reminds me that Morrison has already used Image Comics-style art to satirize the brainlessly violent and hypersexualized comics of the 90s, in the one-off comic “Doom Force”:




I haven’t yet touched on the apparent protagonist of this arc. This story is titled “Here Comes Tomorrow” to fake us out about when it takes place. “Tomorrow” is not the future. It actually refers to one of the characters. Tom Skylark is an homage to “The Skylark of Space” from Golden Age sci-fi author E.E. “Doc” Smith, perhaps mashed up with Golden Age comic book hero Tommy Tomorrow. Now, it doesn’t make sense for those names to be part of Jean Grey’s dream; she’d be more likely to think of American pop culture icons for children of the 1950s/60s, like the Mickey Mouse Club if she was mashing up her childhood into her dying dream. Or maybe a Jane Austen setting like the one into which Mastermind dropped her back in the day. But those aren’t Morrison’s own influences, so he weaves himself into her story, in defiance of continuity.



Anyway, Tom uses calls his fallen enemies “wankers,” calls Eva "love," and then says “This is bollox.” These are Britishisms, but I don’t know what specific subculture in Britain they mark out. If I were a betting man, I’d say it marks lower class, club-going, Ecstasy-taking blokes like Morrison. Tom also wears one of the fluorescent X-jackets that the New X-Men have been wearing during the Morrison run. And it doesn’t look 150 years old, either.



Oh, and Tom’s helmet? It has a visor that he can lower across his face, and that visor has a narrow horizontal slit in it, not unlike the visor of someone else we know. So when he meets this shiny, shimmering woman, and they hit it off, but the woman is intrigued by the big strong Sentinel with whom Tom works… wasn’t it just a couple of issues ago that Logan was telling Jean how he was a Sentinel, bred to kill mutants but turned toward a nobler path?






But ultimately, I don’t think Rover the Sentinel symbolizes Logan in her dream; Logan is already there to symbolize himself, and we’ll see in future issues what the symbolic significance of Tom, Rover, and E.V.A. are within Jean’s psyche.

Rover has a magical death-ray built into his hand which incinerates mutants while leaving normal humans (namely Tom) completely unharmed. This shows again the dream nature of this story. Grant Morrison of all people has shown no compunction about killing innocent bystanders in these stories, and when it doesn’t suit him, there’s a very good reason. In this case, it’s about a flashing “not real” sign over this whole narrative.

The Scott/Emma sequence does position itself “150 years earlier,” but I view that as just Jean’s perspective, because so many of the details of this story don’t make sense if it’s a literal future story rather than a dream composite. Anyway, leaves are falling in the cemetery where Jean has been interred, which means that six months have passed since the Quentin Quire arc. Now autumn is turning to winter, and school should have started months ago. But Xavier has followed through with his threat not to be headmaster, and nobody else has picked up the slack, so the school is shuttered. This leads up to the beginning of this issue, which shows Tom Skylark on the ruined Xavier School’s campus. So Morrison is setting up wheels within wheels…

Maybe I missed in the discussion, but didn't we find out that Kick was ?

Which would give Morrison an out for having "ruined" Magneto--something else was controlling him.

Ahh ok. It's been some years since I read this, but I'll have to do it again sometime. I did not like or "get" "Here Comes Tomorrow" at all, but your interpretations are interesting.

Morrison left so much to discuss! For all the grief he caught about his Magneto, I haven’t heard howls of protest about the retcon he pulled on Logan.

New X-Men #152 “Here Comes Tomorrow Part Two: Surrender the Starlit City” (March 2004)



The Story: In dying Jean Grey's dream of the future, Apollyon the Destroyer, a U-Man who looks rather like Fantomex, has come to destroy the Proud People’s sanctuary of The Starlit City (Britain or thereabouts, apparently), accompanied by an army of Nightcrawler/ Angel hybrids. Mer-Max, a sentient, telepathic, Scottish whale, flees. Brian (Captain Britain?) is the first to fall, followed by Smith the Maker (Forge).





Tom Skylark takes the Phoenix Egg and escapes in Rover the Sentinel. The goth woman with purple hair is probably Psylocke, (though wearing purple and a cross, she could be JLA's Huntress) and the redhead with the gravity-defying pigtails that look like bird wings must represent Rachel Summers, but here she is Princess Corona. I don’t know who the albino woman with the halo is supposed to be; she shoots beams out of her eyes. Saturnyne maybe?






Tom Skylark, one of the last humans on earth due to the triggering of the Extinction Gene, later recounts this story to some mutant children at the Xavier Institute. They’ve never seen a human before. The “Three-in-One” (Stepford Cuckoos), Logan, and Cassandra Nova Xavier discuss a raid to destroy the Phoenix Egg before the Beast can incorporate its genes into his library. They board a Blackbird-looking war-glider powered by brain-in-a-jar Martha (Johannson).



The Beast is toying with his captive, Princess Corona of the Proud People, attaching a thought-sucking parasite to her head. The Phoenix egg hatches, and the fiery woman within recognizes Beast, who claims to have been waiting for her for three billion years and prefers to be called Sublime. In the background, Apollyon wimpers in an unseemly fashion that Beast is not giving him enough attention or genetic improvement. He may look like Fantomex, but he has none of his bravado. Truth be told, he acts more like Esme Cuckoo, feeling neglected by Magneto after setting her hopes upon him.

My Two Cents: If plot mattered (which it does not in this dream arc), I’d say this is a pretty decompressed issue with a lot of large panels; essentially all that happens is that the good guys decide to challenge Beast, while the Phoenix Egg hatches in his fortress. But it’s really about symbols. So what symbols do we get? There’s the Excalibur team in Britain, most of whom are readily identifiable, and who perish quickly, as heroes in imaginary/future stories are wont to do.



Mer-Max the whale sends telepathic signals with a thick Scottish brogue. This is a bit of a head-scratcher for me, not just because the X-Men had no whale characters as far as I remember. Scottish characters include Moira McTaggart and Rahne Sinclair. Could he be Irish, like Sean “Banshee” Cassidy? The phonetic spelling of an intended Scots (or Irish) accent in the text puzzles me since Morrison, a Scot himself, surely doesn’t consider his own speech to be in a brogue which requires a stylized spelling to come across on the printed page. When he reads any sentence, it’s already in a Scottish accent in his head. Maybe Mer-Max is a satirical job at how Chris Claremont used to render so many accents on the page? I’m just spit-balling here. (I also have some further ideas about Mer-Max in a post five days from now. I have come from the future with this message. I have always been here.)

The name "Apollyon" comes from the Bible and means "destruction." The book of Revelation contains many visions of divine judgment, including this one of a horde of divine warriors which resembles the horde of chimeric mutants attacking the Starlit City, as well as their leader, who is destruction personified:


The Cuckoos express grave concern that under the Beast’s totalitarian rule, “The future will belonged to mass-produced biological conformity.” This idea comes from Morrison’s own anxieties of that moment. As we saw a few entries back, 9/11 made Morrison worried that the American/Western response would be xenophobia, a greatly curtailed tolerance for cultural diversity in the overreacting face of an apparent threat to our way of life. Real history has justified that concern.

The thought-sucking tick placed on Princess Corona introduces an element of body horror to the story. We first heard Corona mentioned back in the Blue Area scene two issues ago; it was she that sent the two astronauts to retrieve the Phoenix Egg. That would make dream-sense, Rachel being a Phoenix herself. It also makes sense then that Beast would test his thought-parasite on Rachel Summers to see what effect it might have on Jean Grey-Summers once she hatches from the egg.



“Corona” is also the Latin word for “crown,” a frequent word in this story. When Jean hatches, she tells Beast, “I was in the crown, in the White Hot Room.” Now we’re back to Hindu notions of the Crown Chakra that expands one’s consciousness. Jean has a vague idea that her mission is “To fix something that was dying.” Jean herself is dying, but this probably refers to Xavier’s dream, which is in jeopardy following his decision to step down as headmaster, and Scott’s refusal to move past Jean’s death and continue his mentor’s project. I can’t find any outside literature source from which Morrison may have gotten the inspiration for the “White Hot Room,” or the “Black Bug Room” either, for that matter.



There’s more sexual tension between Rover, Tom, and E.V.A. “I think he loves you,” E.V.A. tells Tom, when Rover interrupts their deep conversation about the choice between intimacy and death. In Tom’s defense, E.V.A. looks very humanoid these days.



Beast is not the only one who talks in religious terms; Tom Skylark is right there with him. Overall evidence from the series points to Xavier being the "Lord" in question. Next issue, we see a young mutant praying to the Xavier statue.

 

So… let’s talk about Tom and Rover: a boy and his giant robot pet. There are lots of entries in the lineage of this idea, including the anime known Stateside as Gigantor (1956 in Japan, 1964 in the USA), the old and new versions of the TV show Lost in Space, the film The Iron Giant (1999), and the manga-inspired Big Hero 6 (comic book from 1998; Disney film 2014; TV series 2017). Marvel even had a comic book specifically about a boy and his Sentinel in 1992, and another one in 2003. I’m sure many other instances of this genre exist, given its obvious appeal for young boys who want to drive their own powerful machine, especially maybe if that machine is sentient enough to be a playmate as well.

New X-Men #154 “Here Comes Tomorrow Part Four: Rescue and Emergency” (May 2004)



The Story: Within Jean Grey’s dying dream (probably), the Sublime-Beast injects himself with Phoenix genes, over the protestations of his servant Apollyon, who hoped to be the one receiving this treatment. Out on the ocean, Phoenix confronts Logan. Reading his mind she remembers the X-Men. Cassandra Nova Xavier rams the Blackbird into the “Crown Chakra” at the top of Jean’s skull.



This severs her connection to the Phoenix momentarily, and she falls into Logan’s arms, where we get this romantic image to satisfy all the Jean/Logan shippers out there:



Logan catches Jean up on all the supposed back-plot of the last 150 years: Magneto killed the unity of the X-Men. Scott turned down Emma Frost’s idea to rebuild the school. Beast tried Kick, which contained not only drug but also the Sublime mitochondria/ bacterium that turned him into an evil megalomaniac. He refused to use his knowledge to prevent the Extinction Gene from wiping out most of humanity. Thus Beast became Sublime, and humanity died.

Back at the Institute, the Stepford Cuckoo trio (Weapon XIV) are assaulted by a horde of mad mutants that we saw last issue. They trigger some kind of self-destruct to earn a pyrrhic victory.

Beast kills Beak and gravely injures E.V.A., whom Tom Skylark swears he can fix. Rover the Sentinel rises from the ocean for one last strike at Beast. Phoenix sucks all the Sublime (i.e. all the mitochondria) out of Beast, while Apollyon, unmasking himself as an ancient, decaying Fantomex, finishes him off with decapitation.

All of this was a distraction from Phoenix’s real mission to repair “internal heart damage” on a particular patient, probably Scott Summers. She has a conversation with the M’Kraan Crystal, which calls her “White Phoenix of the Crown,” another chakra reference of course, but one which will be repurposed for (I assume) more mundane meanings in the 2005 Phoenix: Warsong series by Greg Pak which I haven’t read. Xavier had referred obliquely to the Crown Chakra in Jean’s skull back in Paris:



The pile of Sublime-matter in Jean’s hands transforms into a galaxy, micro becoming macro, as a host of Phoenixes from every planet, tribe, and tongue look on. A Phoenix version of Quentin Quire (who hated Xavier and the school) urges her to let Xavier’s dream die. Instead, Jean causes a replay of Scott and Emma’s conversation in the cemetery from three issues ago, and this time instead of Scott rejecting Emma’s idea to reopen the school, Scott embraces Emma, kisses her, and says, “Yes.”



My Two Cents: So much to talk about! On the first couple of pages, Morrison makes the "Sublime = mitochondria = the unifying principle of life on Earth" concept explicit, showing the course of Earth's history for the last 3 billion years. All the battles between human and mutant have been orchestrated by Sublime to keep the mutant population low. John Sublime’s U-Men, the Super-Sentinels of the Weapon Plus program, the nano-Sentinels who infected the X-Men, and even the Kick drug were all elements of this plot to keep mutants down. I don’t really understand how mutants threaten Sublime if Sublime is mitochondria; mutants seem to need mitochondria as much as anyone else.



Also, "Hypercortisone-D" is a drug name, not a biological entity like a mitochondria. Drug... organelle, same difference...



But it doesn’t have to make sense if it’s a dream. And it does explain why Cassandra Nova, a mutant, would make it her mission to kill the 16 million mutants of Genosha, if she too was being influenced by Sublime. But again, "the Devil made me do it" is not the world's most compelling character motivation.

Quentin Quire’s Kick addiction was the result of Sublime reaching out through Kick-dealers Esme Cuckoo and Magneto, fomenting strife among the mutants. When Quire failed to carry out his coup at Xavier’s and started babbling feverishly about a hidden danger lurking inside everyone, Magneto (also under the sway of Kick/Sublime) killed him before he spilled the beans. (I still don’t know why Xavier wasn’t upset by this, though.) This makes sense of Quentin’s dialogue from a year ago, referring to the presence of Sublime (mitochondria) as an internal threat to all mutants:



Morrison gives us a few more Britishisms when Beast quotes the favorite British hymn “All Creatures Great and Small” (also a novel series and much loved BBC TV series about a country veterinarian), and Tom says, “Stop all the mad bleedin’ chat,” and later “What a bloody smash-up this turned out to be.”



“Tito” Beak says that he’s the grandson of Barnell "Beak" Bohusk You might think that lends credence to the notion that this story really is in the future, not just a dream state, but two generations is way too short a time period for this young adult Beak to be, 150 years from now, the grand-son of the Beak we know.

So, the M'Kraan crystal that Jean talks to. Everybody here knows what that is, right? Just in case: It's a giant Shi'ar artifact, a jewel of immense reality-reconstructing power, first seen early in Claremont's run writing the X-Men. The mad Shi'ar Emperor D'Ken messed with it; it was going to break and destroy the universe, but Phoenix fixed it. 




Tomorrow I'll talk a little more about what the M'Kraan Crystal means in the context of Grant Morrison's story. For now, I'll just take a moment to complain about the abuse of apostrophes in comic books. In linguistics, an apostrophe is used to represent the throat sound known as a glottal stop. In the English word "uh-oh," that dash between "uh" and "oh" means that you close your glottis briefly, stopping air flow out of your lungs. That's a glottal stop. It's easiest for English speakers to imagine a glottal stop as occuring between two vowels, as in "uh-oh" or similar phrases. It is possible, though trickier, to have it with a consonant on one or both sides.  However, when I hear people (including Chris Claremont) talk about the M'Kraan crystal, they usually don't actually interpret the apostrophe as a glottal stop. Instead they say M'Kraan as "Imkran" or something like that. This just goes to show that authors don't always know the meaning of the symbols they choose to employ, which is no surprise and may also be relevant to this symbol-laden arc of New X-Men to some degree.

Apollyon turns out to a fairly minor character after all, except that his coup de grace against his megalomaniacal master succeeds, where Esme Cuckoo’s similar gambit against Magneto failed. Jean finally sees Fantomex's face under Apollyon's mask, and it's really not much to look at. No, really. It's decaying flesh, falling off his muscles. His minor and unattractive role in Jean's dream reflects that Jean is so over this poser mystery man with his fake French accent, despite an initial attraction. Scott is her guy, and if she's going to go and die on him, she's going to make sure somebody else takes care of him.

Cassandra’s dying words are, “Not like this.” These were also the dying words of Switch in The Matrix, which Morrison feels was largely based on his The Invisibles, so I wonder whether he’s intentionally tweaking the Matrix creators The Wachowski Brothers.



The Stepford Cuckoos are specifically called Weapon XIV, which means that they too grew up in The World and were supposed to be part of the Super-Sentinels which Sublime was training to kill all mutants. At least, in Jean’s mind they are. I believe future X-Men writers have run with the notion that this is canon, except they mix it with the idea that the Cuckoos were grown from eggs harvested from Emma Frost. Well, which is it? Are they genetically derived from Emma, or from thousands of generations of artificial selection inside The World?



Dying Martha gets her only direct lines in the entire Morrison run, telling dying Logan, “We’re going to the White Hot Room,” a place that’s previously been mentioned as where Bumblebee is going when he dies, and where Phoenix has just come from. Mind you, Martha was not there during either of the two previous discussions of the Room; her knowledge of it reflects that she is not a real person, just a thought passing through Jean’s dying brain. And Logan is the idealized Logan who will chastely catch Jean when she falls and tell her that everything is alright. I mean, look at that image of Logan and Jean above. It could be from a romance novel cover, certainly not an image of the barely contained animal that he’s been known to be in real life.

Morrison makes explicit his view that Jean Grey's telekinetic mutation includes the ability to tap into a cosmic Phoenix force.



Then there’s the personal story, the love triangle between Jean, Scott, and Emma, as represented in Jean’s dream as the relationship between Rover, Tom, and E.V.A. When Rover dies, Tom is ready to give up; nothing else matters to him. Tom confesses to E.V.A about his guilt over perceived infidelity to Rover. But after Rover's death, he comes to terms with the situation, detaches emotions from Rover, and declares his devotion to repair what’s broken in E.V.A. This represents Scott letting go of Jean in favor of Emma:



Leaving out all the confused ramblings of Jean’s dying mind, here is the overall plot of these four "Here Comes Tomorrow" issues: Dying Jean has a crazy dream, becomes convinced that the future depends on Scott hooking up with Emma, and telepathically shoves them into a relationship.



And here’s the smoking gun of proof that the whole story is dying Jean: The “future” part of this story ends with Jean and Phoenix each speaking directly to Scott from outside of our universe. They each say the exact words that we already heard them say at the moment of her death back in issue #150, causing him to transfer his affections to Emma (seen standing in the wings) and disproving Jean's claim that "All I ever did was die on you." Compare below:





The editors try to make some of this explicit in the lettercol.



That's the last issue of this arc, but we're not quite done considering the arc as a whole and its relationship to Morrison's whole  New X-Men run and his larger body of work. Tomorrow for a wrap-up, we’ll look at some themes that Morrison left laying out in plain sight all along, knowing that they would seem like throw-away lines at the time, when really, they were key. 

One last note: Although I complained about Silvestri's art as too busy and 90s-looking, I really like this issue's cover shot of the "New X-Men" posing before entering the battle.