By Matt Fraction, Terry & Rachel Dodson, Mitch Breitweiser, Daniel Acuña & Justin Ponsor (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-2999-8
Most people who read comics have a passing familiarity with Marvel’s fluidly fluctuating X-Men franchise and even newcomers or occasional consumers won’t have too much trouble following this particular jumping-on tome, so let’s just plunge in as our hostile world once more kicks sand in the faces of the planet’s most dangerous and reviled minority…
At this particularly juncture, the evolutionary offshoot dubbed Homo Superior is at its lowest ebb. This follows the House of M and Decimation storylines, wherein Wanda Maximoff, former Avenger Scarlet Witch – ravaged by madness and her own chaos-fuelled reality-warping power – reduced the world’s entire mutant population to a couple of hundred individuals with a three simple words…
Most of those genetic outsiders have accepted a generous and earnest offer to relocate to San FranciscoBay, but of course, trouble is always happy to make house calls…
This sleek, slim tome re-presents Uncanny X-Men #504-507 and Uncanny X-Men Annual volume 2, #2, cover-dated January-May 2009: one of a number of collections cataloguing the assorted mutant heroes’ and villains’ responses to the offer in a publishing event dubbed Manifest Destiny.
This compelling compilation commences with the 4-part ‘Lovelorn: Every Little Bit Hurts’, scripted by Matt Fraction and illustrated by Terry & Rachel Dodson with colourist Justin Ponsor, beginning as Russian expatriate Piotr Rasputin languishes in remorse and agonises over the recent fate which took his beloved Kitty Pryde from him.
Colossus‘ moping is beginning to affect every survivor at the newly occupied Greymalkin Facility on the Marin Headlands so leader Scott “Cyclops†Summers and Emma Frost, ex-White Queen of the Hellfire Club resort to tough love, ordering him to get his head together.
The uncrowned rulers of the mutant enclave are going through a tense patch in their own rocky relationship. The telepathic Frost is chafing over the fact that Scott is keeping one small section of his mind permanently closed to her probes and her resentment is growing daily…
As Piotr wanders through San Francisco’s Russian quarter in the Richmond District he stops for a snack in a diner and finds the owners being harassed by mobsters from the old country. Against his better judgement he agrees not to interfere, but then realises the gang leader is a mutant… one he recognises from his childhood…
Founding X-Men Angel and the Beast are in Argentina trying to recruit one of Earth’s oldest mutants for a unique “think tankâ€. In the 1930s abrasive and obnoxious super-genius James Bradley worked with Phineas Horton to create the android Human Torch before becoming the masked vigilante Doctor Nemesis. Now, preternaturally spry, he spends his days hunting down those Nazi war criminals he didn’t finish off during WWII.
He has no interest in helping the X-Men undo the effects of the Scarlet Witch’s spell – but none of that matters to the high-tech neo-Nazi supermen hunting Nemesis in turn…
Suddenly the world changes again as reports of a massacre leak out of Alaska. Terrorists have razed remote Cooperstown to burning rubble, apparently because a mutant baby was born there…
Already anti-mutant activist Simon Trask is stirring the flames of panic and prejudice as a Press Statement from his Humanity Now Coalition asks if this is true “what happens when one is born in your town?â€
With anti-mutant hysteria growing and Trask actively lobbying in Washington, Cyclops, Beast and Emma visit the San Francisco Mayor. However, even with most of the feared and despised genetic outcasts now housed in her city and the entire population potentially at risk from fanatics and mutant-hunters, Sadie Sinclair stands firm on her offer of sanctuary.
She does however eventually suggest that they relocate the community to an uninhabited, more fortifiable island in the Bay…
Colossus is hunting. The thug in the diner was the same tattooed mutant monster who had terrorised and blackmailed his family in Russia long before the X-Men were formed. Now that he has spread his web to America and Piotr has found the reasons he needed to resume the role of hero…
As what passes for normality returns to the X-enclave Scott broods on his daughter Hope, first mutant born after “the Decimation†and currently lost in future with his son Nathan AKA Cable. Emma broods because she still can’t read her man’s mind and, in the Yukon, mutant tech-morph Madison Jeffries broods on his impending demise at the clamps, claws, grippers and wires of the autonomous mechanical life forms he’s just created.
His certain doom is deferred when Beast, Angel and Dr. Nemesis arrive to offer him a position in their “X-Clubâ€â€¦
In San Francisco Piotr has decided on a long game and joined the mutant racketeer’s gang, and Emma’s fretting has turned to nights filled with bad dreams. As Trask’s hate-message spreads, an increasing number of former mutants and their parents begin to arrive begging for sanctuary and Colossus only adds to the influx crisis when he rescues a cargo of trafficked Russians and brings them the relative safety of the X-enclave.
After dealing with the mech-things, the ever-expanding science team has travelled to Japan to recruit atomic mutation expert Dr. Yuriko Takiguchi where the reclusive paranoid has a slight problem.
He’s trapped on a remote island by the giant monsters he created to protect him from being abducted by the Soviets and the travellers only survive the Brobdingnagian assaults after Angel is forced to reveal his own deadly transformative secret to his astounded and horrified colleagues…
Back in San Francisco, Colossus ends his infiltration of Tattoo’s mob in decisive manner when Emma – never a big fan of men who abuse girls – invites herself along for the ride…
Later the reassembled and victorious mutants enjoy a moment of relative calm but are blithely unaware of the distant reawakening of an old and dreaded foe…
This engaging Costumed Drama then concludes with a lengthy examination of the history and motives of Emma Frost in ‘White Queen, Dark Reign’ from Uncanny X-Men Annual #2, illustrated by Mitch Breitweiser on modern-day chapters with Daniel Acuña handling the scenes from her sordid serried past…
When she was young and a villainous consort of Hellfire Club ruler Sebastian Shaw, the precocious telepath was “expected†to get cosy with Atlantean monarch and public enemy Prince Namor of Atlantis. Now the new US Metahuman Security Supremo Norman Osborn (see Dark Avengers volume 1: Assemble) has invited both Emma and Namor to join his covert cabal of criminal masterminds and global outlaws, the conniving Frost sees an opportunity to pay a few old and still-painful debts…
Exciting, enthralling and exceptionally entertaining, this stirring, supremely sensuous Fights ‘n’ Tights tome is treasure trove of treats for fans of sexy superheroes and combat connoisseurs and also includes a selection of cover reproductions and variants by Mr. & Mrs. Dodson, Greg Land & Michael Golden
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