harry@ucbvax.UUCP (Harry I. Rubin) (08/12/84)
When the 'new' X-Men first meet the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and Nightcrawler first sees Mystique, he says something like "<German for 'Holy cow'>, you look like me, what's going on?!" Mystique replies "Ask Margali Szardos." (The sorceress who raised Nightcrawler.) Sorry, I couldn't find the issue, though I checked back to the Brood war, so it must be before the 150s. In 158 (X-Men and Carol Danvers fight Rogue in the Pentagon) Nightcrawler tells Rogue he wants to find Mystique: "She and I have much to talk about." In 177 (Colossus fights Pyro and Avalanche and gets freeze-dried) Nightcrawler tells Amanda Sefton (Margali's daughter and Nightcrawler's long-time flame) about the exchange with Mystique and they decide to telephone Margali (who is in Germany) "tomorrow." Now here we are in the late 180s and there has been no further mention of any of this. I am all for subtle subplots, but three bits of dialogue over some 40 issues is really TOO subtle. Granted that life has been busy for the X-Men, but they have had time to make a trip to Japan for Logan's almost-wedding, to prepare for and carry out Scott's wedding, for Kitty's transferred-to-the-New-Mutants identity crisis, for Peter and Kitty's breakup. They eat, sleep, train, and complain. Surely there has been time for Nightcrawler to make a phone call! But no. Don't get me wrong, I like for a story to emerge and develop, not pop up and get knocked away in one issue. I think it is extremely important. But the flip side is that when the scripters start to develop something, they shouldn't just drop it, or put it on "hold" until it is convenient to deal with it. Reading a number of back issues of X-Men, I have noticed lots of loose ends. Looking just at the two issues referred to above, 158 and 177: In 158 the X-Men decide the since the U.S. government is becoming anti-mutant, they must erase the government's files on the X-Men. Moira McTaggart claims that Prof. X worked with the gov't in first setting up the X-Men. Can anyone confirm or deny this? I've seen X-Men 1 and there was no mention of this. Moira says there are probably files on the 'new' X-Men also, although there is no indication of how that might be. Kitty says they need to write an erase program and "plug it into A central Federal data bank." (Emphasis mine.) So they go to the Pentagon. First, why are the X-Men's files in the Pentagon, and second, surely there is a more easily accessible "Federal data bank" than the Pentagon. In any case, they manage to pull this off although there are a few fights along the way. Now, surely the gov't people are able to tell that certain records were erased, especially since the X-Men were identified in the fighting, and some of the fighting was in the computer room. Even if they couldn't reconstruct the records, there must be logging and audit trails in the Pentagon's high security computer systems. (See Team America 1). Furthermore, what about back-up tapes?! In any case, one would expect that mutants breaking into the Pentagon and erasing records would make the gov't very upset, probably even trigger an anti-mutant war. But no, we hear little more about the anti-mutant movement until recent issues (mid-180s) when Val Cooper goes mutant hunting. On the plus side, issue 185 has a couple of references to the events of 158. This is getting long, so I'll just mention one item from 177: in it, Mystique uses a "specially-designed combat suit" which lets her absorb Storm's lightning and zap it back at her. Who designed and built this suit? Why have we never seen it since? As you can tell, I am a bit perterbed to discover all this. Is that just the way it is? Or have I missed something, like completely misunderstanding the relationship of comic time to issues? Or did I just by chance pick a bad issue to pick on? Comments?? Please post them to the net. Thanks. Harry harry@berkeley ...!ucbvax!harry
moriarty@fluke.UUCP (Jeff Meyer) (08/15/84)
Well, I agree totally... X-men subplots are inflating like the national
deficit (nice simile, that), and few are being tied up. I particularly
notice Kurt & Amanda are being cut out of most issues anyway, which
disgruntles me quite a bit, as I like the characters. Oh, Mystiques
"lightning suit" probably was stolen or copied from those wonderful DOD
prototypes Mystique has access to as a national security something-or-other.
"Oh, intercourse the penguin!"
Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer
John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc.
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