So that leaves all the adults scrambling to figure out how to stop these kids before they do something drastic! Such as stopping Old Cyclops, for instance. How radical.
Hilarity ensues.
All New X-Men (Vol. 1), Issue #3 [February, 2013]
Written by: Brian Michael Bendis
Today’s story flashes back to ten days ago, where Cyclops is recruiting his tiny team for a revolution! Magneto! Magik! Welcome to the new Xavier school! That crippled bald bastard would’ve loved genocide!
Cyclops takes his new buddies on a field trip to “Weapon X”, a place where humans performed experiments on mutants. Torturous experiments! Waterboarding and John Tesh album listening parties! Wolverine was created here, and you know how angry THAT guy is. That guy still hates John Tesh to this day.
This is their home now. This is the last place anybody would look. Now, let’s get some more dang mutants!
Hard to believe this only started ten days ago. Not even a fortnight. I can’t even do a load of laundry in ten days.
Jump to eight days ago! A military team is scoping out the outskirts of San Francisco. Intelligence must have already caught wind of Cyclops’ lofty plans, so they’re looking for him. They’ll take him down by any means necessary!
They’re also taking things quite seriously.
Hey, we all need our daily morning dose of the Whiny Old Radio Jew.
Oh no! Out of nowhere, a Code 4! A Code 4 is “mutants appearing out of thin air right in front of us in the middle of the road”, and out of 950 other codes it gets fourth billing. It must happen often enough.
It’s Cyclops and Magneto, and they both stare frownily at the oncoming convoy. The driver of the front vehicle is freaking out, but the commander insists that he sticks to the plan, does not pause, does not deviate, and stops complaining. Or else he’ll be picking his teeth up off the ground with broken fingers.
The helicopter starts firing. Magneto’s got this! He does his magnets…but it doesn’t work. He and Cyclops get nervous.
And the magnets still don’t work.
Talk about a sight for sore eyes! lol! lol!
The subsequent thirty panels show many outlandish explosions. The front vehicle slams into both of them, tossing the two around like sacks of disgusting meat. Cyclops loses his visor and his plasma eyeballs shoot every which-way, taking down the choppers and vehicles as they all start crashing into each other.
Cyclops tries to shield his eyes frantically with his arm. “Oh no… oh no…” he pants. Magneto gets up and runs toward him, asking what he fucking did. Like he couldn’t figure it out.
Scott “Blind Lemon Jefferson” Summers scrambles for his visor, wondering what’s going on. Meanwhile, Magneto starts flinging trucks around, making a ruckus. He unlatches a cargo truck, but one of the big mean military men puts a gun to his head and threatens him with scary gun violence!
“I just don’t care for that kind of talk,” Magneto drawls like a southern deputy marshal, “Never have.” He then magnet-crunches the rifle as it’s discharged, which explodes the gun into a torrent of fiery shrapnel!
This is exciting, isn’t it? The issue is already half over!
“What’s happening to us?” Magneto asks, definitely the more calm and collected of the two. Cyclops’ visor sparks and smolders. “It’s the humans, they’ve done something.”
It’s hard to tell exactly what’s wrong, I just saw ten pages of dumbass explosions and X-Men getting hit by cars.
The cargo truck opens and a woman comes out. “What did you do?” she asks, unhurt. Magneto struggles to get her metal facemask restraint off of her, which further panics Cyclops.
“Damn it, why’d you even bother?” the woman asks, rather ticked off. The woman is Emma Frost, and she tells Cyclops that “everything they built together and everything they were working towards is over.”
Plus, she’s mad because Cyclops left her in the hands of humans after stealing her Phoenix Force. The gravest of sins! Cyclops denies his involvement in that, but Emma gets into a hissy fit and starts hissy-slappin’ him. Emma should know that the Phoenix Force was making them both nutso!
Bullshit it wasn’t you. This has your plasma blast fingerprints all over it, sir.
“So it wasn’t you who betrayed me and left me for dead?” Emma shrieks and screams and spits, “It was you who murdered Charles Xavier in front of all of us?!”
Cyclops is ready to do a pinky swear on it if Emma Frost is willing.
Whatever. She’s outta here. Have a nice life, you fire-eyed loser. Eat a butt.
Cyclops urges her to read his mind. Go ahead! Dig deep in there! Wiggle and swerve your way past all the repressed childhood memories and the weird sex stuff and you’ll know how truly sorry he is! GO ON!
Nope! But she stops walking and turns around to talk.
“My powers aren’t the same as they used to be,” she says, “and neither are yours from the look of you.”
So what happened? Magneto and Cyclops are a couple of dumbass men. They need a woman to tell them what’s what. As usual.
“You don’t GET IT?! REALLY?” she cries incredulously. Jesus Christ and What the Fuck! It was the Phoenix, you dummies! It changed them! Broke their mutations! Does she have to spell it out for you, you braindead dipshits!
Magento sputters. He didn’t have the Phoenix! Why is he affected? What did he do to deserve this??
Well, if Scott Summers was truly innocent and free of all blame, Magneto’s mutations wouldn’t be all mangled and busted. But, hey, this guy over here *points* let him have it pretty damn good with the Phoenix Force. So, haha, whoops, talk to him about it.
I know I’m overdoing it with the Cyclops panels, but man are some of these too good to pass up.
While Emma appreciates the jailbreak, she’s got to mosey. Where? Away from them. Peace out, nerds.
Cyclops is desperate for redemption. Crying red tears of eyeball magma. Emma’s not having it. And she can’t say anymore right now because the fuzz is coming!
“ILLYANA! Get us out of here!” Cyclops screams into his Star Trek wrist communicator. No response.
Five police cars gun down the road at a trillion miles per hour.
“ILLYANA!! GET US OUT OF HERE NOW!!”
No response.
Magneto and Emma have a calm chat while Cyclops huffs and pants into his arm. “We’ll figure it out. We’ll fix this. There are ways,” Magneto assures her, but she just glares back at him wordlessly.
Finally, the police arrive. The three mutants are nowhere to be seen…
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS! TODAY! Meaning 10 days after the beginning of the issue. Meaning 8 days after the scene that just ended. Meaning 20,000 days before I might start giving a shit. A large protest is being held outside of a residence hall. Twentysomethings hold signs that say “MUTANTS ARE PEOPLE TOO” and “CYCLOPS CARES” and “HORN IF YOU’RE HONKY!”
A slightly dumpy redheaded woman tells a baggy-pantsed Crispin Glover-looking mofo named Benjamin to grab a sign, but he doesn’t wanna. Not his thing. He looks like he’d rather shoot up the school than participate in any mutant-related hippie congregation. He starts inadvertently making her feel bad; insisting that protesting is useless and trying to make a difference is futile!
The woman looks hurt and tells Benjamin to stop mocking her by imitating her voice. What’s really happening, though, is that Benjamin has basically turned into his friend.
Nothing to see here, people. Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy are just having a conversation.
This, of course, draws the attention of the crowd. People start taking pictures with their phones. Benjamin freaks out a bit, then suddenly his eyes roll to the back of his head like he was knocked unconscious on his feet.
Elsewhere, Cyclops is crying in the forest! His visor still malfunctions, he keeps sending blasts from his eyes unintentionally, he keeps yelling stuff like “No…” and “No, no, no…” and “NOOOO!” Pretty funny stuff! He loses his visor again. lol
“Scott, you’re embarrassing yourself…” Magneto tells him like a true friend. Scott’s sad, man, just shut the hell up. Don’t you know how many years Scott has spent trying to control his powers? His whole childhood, and then some! Now it’s like square one again. Have a little sympathy, Magneto, you mutant jerkass.
Plus, new mutants are going to be looking to them for guidance. How is being shitty with their mutant powers going to help anyone?
“And you think I wouldn’t be able to understand this? As least you did it to yourself,” Magneto complains while sending Scott’s visor back over to him. Time for some tough talk, Scotty: Magneto has been through hell and back himself. He knows what it’s like to suffer, he knows what it’s like to go insane, and he knows what it’s like to lose everything. He has done shit that still haunts his dreams! And guess what? He could’ve blamed the insanity. He has in the past. But, in the end, it was all his choice. So quit blaming the Phoenix. The Phoenix ain’t really done nothing. This is all you, muchacho.
Scott doesn’t want to hear it. He cries some more. Magneto tells him, if he really wants to make it right, he’ll give Magneto back his full god-given power or so help him he will throw a big turd at his face.
Mother has arrived to quell her Rude Boys.
Magik shows up to put an end to the fighting. “Magneto has finally admitted he’s mad at me, Illyana,” Scott tells her immediately, pointing a finger at him while he storms away. “I would be mad at you too if you screwed with my powers,” Illyana retorts. But she didn’t lose any powers. In fact, she thinks she actually gained powers! She can conjure energies from the Limbo Dimension now! The Limbo Dimension! I can’t think of a single joke about this, can you? The Limbo Dimension!
Here I learn that Peter Colossus steel guy is Magik Illyana’s brother. Scott asks if Illyana found him. Illyana says that Peter does not want to be found. It sure would be nice if Colossus could join us, you know, in our pursuit of whatsits…mutant genocide. That would be keen.
“If he finds out what happened to Xavier…he’s going to kill you,” Illyana warns Scott darkly. They even zoom into her serious face to show the seriousness of the murder scenario.
Emma appears from out of the woods. She’s holding a tablet with a Facebook page loaded on it. “Anyone in the mood to save a mutant? We got another one.”
Another one indeed. The face-morphing kid. It’s late at night now, and the media is swarming the crowd while Benjamin keeps morphin’ his face and getting his picture taken with college kids that are like “whoa”.
“Benjamin, you’re a mutant,” the dumpy redhead tells him, grinning, “You’re one of the new mutants!” And I don’t think Benjamin wants to hear that, but LIKE A BAD CASE OF ANAL POLYPS, the X-Men team pops in unwanted to tell him that it’s true. “And the new mutant revolution is starting.”
“Revolution? When did it become a revolution?” asks a voice from behind. It’s Young Cyclops! “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Young Cyclops asks a very startled Old Cyclops! The Young X-Men team is hear from the past to stop them!
Iceman’s gearing for a fight, puttin’ up his dukes like he’s going to kick anyone’s ass like he isn’t 4’6” tall and made of very brittle ice.
Final Thoughts
Good thing Old Cyclops’ powers suck right now. He won’t stand a chance against these prepubescent wimps!
Fun stuff lies ahead.
The post All New X-Men (Vol. 1), Issue #3 first appeared on Tom Writes About Stuff.
