New X-Men #117 “Danger Rooms” (October 2001)



The Story: OK, time to meet one of the 152 students of the Xavier Institute. Beak (Barnell Bohusk) is the most piteous of the bunch. He looks like a canary plucked of most of its feathers, and he can’t even fly. He's more freakish than Nightcrawler and knows it. Beast sympathizes; Xavier casually suggests altering Beak’s painful memories of past mockery. A little too casually, as if he’s done it before. Beak represents young Grant Morrison, in his straight edge punk rock days. Beak is a deliberately pathetic figure, an outcast among outcasts. I’ve heard that some people can’t stand the character, but I like him. He goes on quite a personal journey over the course of Morrison’s run.



Wolverine is sitting out in the woods, meditating to ease the pain of regrowing his whole right arm after it was shredded to the metal in issue #116. (But his arm seemed just fine in the Annual which supposedly took place between this issue and #116.) Jean Grey-Summers comes out to chat about her frustrations with Scott and how alive she feels with her TK powers returning (I guess they were gone?). This is bad because (1) Jean getting excited about having more power has typically not ended well, and (2) Logan takes her moment of vulnerable honesty as an opportunity to kiss her. But then he backs off with “It would never work between us.” Nice going, Mr. Mixed Signals!



Beast is crushed when his girlfriend Trish dumps him over voice mail. Playing in the lab, he discovers that Cassandra Nova’s DNA is extremely similar to Xavier’s. Sharing this insight with Charles turns out to be a bad idea, since upon Cassandra’s death in #116, her consciousness beat its way into Xavier's brain and has been in control ever since. While attacking Beast psychically, she explains that she’s Xavier’s heretofore unknown "genetic twin." Is there another kind of twin? They can't be identical twins since they're not the same sex.



Anyhoo, as Beast resists her attempt to de-volve his brain back to some primitive state, Beak stumbles in, and Cassandra seizes control of him, forcing him to use a baseball bat to beat Beast bloody. Bummer! “Xavier” had already declared his intention to visit his interstellar girlfriend Lilandra, Empress Majestrix of the Shi’ar Empire. As a Shi’ar spaceship arrives to transport him, he muses about what he can do with all that alien firepower. 

My Two Cents: A lot happens here! Claremont might have gone off to tell some other shorter stories before returning to Cassandra Nova again, but Morrison goes right from “Nova shot dead” in one issue to revealing “Nope, Nova still lives and now completely controls Xavier’s body and is going to take over the Shi’ar” in the very next issue. No time to waste! So when Xavier revealed himself to the world, I guess that was really Cassandra Nova's doing? And she set up all these X-Corp offices around the world too?

Now we know where Cerebra is: It's in a secret room behind a bookcase in Xavier's office upstairs in the mansion. Far from the training facilities underground. This makes sense of the scene last issue in which Emma was in a taxi cab but then came back into the mansion and got to Cerebra ahead of Cassandra Nova.



I assume Morrison is playing up the Jean-Scott-Logan love triangle because it was a major element of the first X-Men film. But Logan doesn't work best as an actual threat trying to steal Jean from Scott. He’s better as the distant and idealized bad boy, intriguing to Jean and the secret envy of straight-laced Scott. Logan might have a fling with any pretty face including Jean, but his actual affections would probably settle upon somebody equally screwed up as himself. Another fighter probably: Domino, Elektra, Natasha Romanoff, etc. This is also why I never bought Logan with Mariko during Claremont’s tenure. But Yukio, sure.

Speaking of Jean: Xavier/Cassandra officially leaves her in charge of the Xavier Institute and its student body during his trip to Shi’ar space. This would be a challenge regardless, but moreso since Xavier revealed his mutant identity to the world, and now there’s a constant crowd of picketers outside the school, chanting and spraying anti-mutant graffiti on the walls.

Ethan Van Sciver handles pencils on this issue. He’s made a lot of enemies with foolish comments on social media, but his art is fabulous. His Xavier looks pretty Patrick Stewartish. Check out this two page spread showing some of the 152 students.  Many of them have outward mutations. Did those all go away on M-Day?



Zooming in on a few of the students: The pink guy with see-throgh skin is Herman, also known as Glob. He will be one of Quentin Quire's droogs in an upcoming story, and he's made it into ongoing appearances over the years. Right behind Herman is this guy wearing an Xavier varsity leather jacket.



This unkempt young man leaves a trail of fire when he walks. Can he turn if off when he goes indoors?



This girl with Psylocke's purple hair also has Psylocke's psychic butterfly logo on her shirt.



This guy's shirt is printed with the names of early 80s X-Men, upside down.



This girl has giant anime eyes and also suckers on her fingertips.

Logan and Mariko’s romance was probably doomed, but I think it showed the guy’s fascination with ladies whom he sees as beyond his reach: sophisticated, refined, civilized, everything that he is not. That’s the way his original unrequited attraction to Jean was played, too, and at the time (prior to the X-Men classics retcon), she clearly saw him as an uncouth boor.

It was good to see Wolverine evolve over time, and in Morrison’s hands I enjoyed seeing him play the true friend to Jean and Scott’s unstable couple, refusing to take advantage of their difficulties. Likewise, I like seeing Scott take Logan’s defense against those who saw him as nothing more than another Weapon (fill in the letter) experiment. The evolution of those relationships gave the impression that the reader’s investment in following these guys over the decades had had a point.

New X-Men #118 “Germ Free Generation Part One” (November 2001)




The Story: Jean Grey-Summers, Emma Frost, and Scott Summers confront the protestors at the gates of the Xavier Institute. The spokesman protestor accuses the Institute of being a paramilitary training camp, comparing superpowers to weapons (as Senator Kelly did in the first X-Men film) and pointing out that they wear combat togs. After listening to several minutes of this fruitless debate, Emma gets fed up and causes the entire crowd to orgasm and fall asleep. Back inside the mansion, Jean asks Scott if he slept with Emma in Hong Kong, and he cryptically responds, “No, she kept me awake all night.” Not cool at all, dude! This is when I would expect Jean to start throwing large objects telekinetically at both Scott and Emma, but for some reason we don’t see that.



New student(s) alert! We get our first introduction (just one tantalizing panel!) to the Stepford Cuckoos, five similar-looking (identical?) girls who dress like Hogworts students (matching blazers and skirts) and style their hair after their role model, Emma Frost. They seem to be a hive mind, sometimes speaking in unison and sometimes finishing each other’s thoughts.

Beast is still comatose after his beating by unknown (to them) persons last issue. (We know: it was Beak under the mental control of Charles Xavier under the mental control of Cassandra Nova.) Jean tried reading his mind but found it empty. Also, everybody at the mansion is coming down with a flu bug, sniffling and coughing.


Logan has been sent to Wyoming to find a new mutant. (But not a New Mutant, alas.) Nearby, a black teen girl is being beaten by her father for showing evidence of mutation (bubbles on her back, odd odor). When she awakens in the morning, she has pupated overnight, emerging from a chrysalis, albeit wearing the same clothes somehow. Now she has large fly-like wings and can spit acid. These powers come in handy for resistance when some armored troopers try to capture her, but she is captured anyway. (Protip: don’t fly into power lines, K?) Jean directs Logan to her location for a rescue.



A high school-aged disciple of John Sublime’s “3rd Species” philosophy (i.e. humans that want to be mutants) has killed one of his mutant classmates to harvest his super-powered eyeballs. The murderous student is now holding his school assembly hostage, ranting at them until a SWAT team bursts in and shoots him dead. Sublime decries the violence committed in his name. Magneto, killed in the Genosha extinction event, is becoming a cult figure, appearing on hipster T-shirts a la Che Guevara. Scott and Emma get an audience with Sublime, who denies his involvement in the things we saw him involved with in the X-Men 2001 annual. (Recap: Mutilating mutants to give their organs to species-dysphoric humans; trying to buy Xorn.) Suddenly Scott and Emma lose the ability to move, and they’re surrounded by Sublime’s security goons. Sublime has a literal brain in a jar in his desk, name of Martha Johannson, who has incapacitated our heroes. Sublime declares his intention to harvest organs from the Xavier students.



My Two Cents: If you’re looking for a decompressed comic book, this is not it. Morrison is moving quickly here. We’ve got three new mutants (Martha, the Cuckoos, and the as-yet unnamed bug girl), rising tensions with the protestors, Magneto and Sublime fanboys, two lead characters captured by an evil genius, sickness among the mutants, and Scott being a jerk to his wife. Other outstanding plot threads include Xorn, Cassandra Nova, and Beak’s guilty conscience.

John Sublime is a celebrity/entrepreneur/futurist like Elon Musk, except Elon Musk was not that well known in 2001. Similarly, Martha Johnannson is probably not named in tribute to actress Scarlet Johansson, whose breakout role in the comic book-derived movie Ghost World was hitting theaters just as this issue of New X-Men hit shelves. Martha is first mentioned as a missing mutant during a TV broadcast on "CNC News" (though later dialogue calls it CNN). Note that Jean can tell that the male newscaster is fantasizing sexually about his female co-worker, while the female murderously back at him.



The Stepford Cuckoos (who are not actually named as such in this issue) are one of my favorite of Morrison’s creations. He uses them as a Greek chorus to comment on the action, and also to humanize Emma, giving her a way to pass the Bechdel test in the process. I will try not to over-mention them in my reviews, but you have been warned. Note that the Cuckoos, despite their identical faces and hair, come in three different heights, so presumably three different ages, at this point.



I see an immigration Dreamers subtext when Jean asks a protestor with a “Mutie go home” sign, “Go home where? I’ve lived here [the X-Mansion] since I was a kid.” We know that Jean does in fact have loving parents and a home, and she’s an adult who could live anywhere, but that’s not the nod that Morrison is trying to make here. Morrison's "Mutants = nerds" and "Mutant chic" themes are in full force, evidenced by a discussion of Magneto's popularity on lunchboxes and T-shirts.



Ethan Van Sciver is on art duties here, and once again I like his work. We also get a thematic (rather than narrative) double-splash page of our posing X-Men. This sort of thing was rarely seen at Marvel or DC in the Bronze Age. I don’t know whether it’s come back into fashion more recently, or if this is a one-off, but it’s an interesting choice, as Cyclops brandishes his fist at someone (the reader?) while the rest of the team glares. Fun fact: Van Sciver hid the word "sex" in the art on every page. Kinda juvenile... One example is just above in the smoke trail beside the kid with the gun. Two others below. Find the rest yourself.

I actually loved that line! Sure, it’s mean... but I think tensions between them are high enough at this point that Scott won’t take unfounded accusations of adultery without snipping back, especially after seeing Jean kiss Logan in the previous issue (for I assume that he saw more than an alien ship approaching with his binoculars). It’s not the kind of relationship I would ever want to have with my wife, but I wish I were quick-witted enough to come up with such a great sybilline comeback!

I didn’t like Jean and Scott growing apart... They were the couple I was most rooting for in the mid to late ‘70s... but I like the way Morrison treated the split. Jean is serious about her marriage, and she feels hurt that Scott won’t confide in her. But at the same time, she’s proud enough to refuse Scott’s offer to read his mind; she wants them to talk like regulat people. That means she accepts their relationship only on her own terms. Meanwhile, her husband seems to finally grow more independent of her (I mean, he always was the puppy dog lover, right?) and to risk hurting her feelings, something she doesn’t appreciate. It’s not a nice dynamic, and it shows that their relationship is really on the rocks... but as a story point, it’s something that hadn’t been tried in the X-Men before.

Agreed.  It was the first time in a super long time I actually cared about reading X-books.  You do have to thank Axel Alonso for letting the Vertigo talent just tell stories for stories sake.  Milligan/Allred's X-Force/Statix run was pure pop with great storytelling; I'm in the minority that loved the Tischman/Macan & Kordey's Cable book; probably the most current event Vertigo X book than Morrison's.  

What comic book title and issue number did this take place? And who is the other woman? That's hilarious, almost like when the Cuckoos told on Emma and Scott, and notified Jean Grey.

Well, I guess we don't need to ask who drew that page.