Welcome back to Chicago, where the anti-mutant human pressure group Purity, the anti-mutant super-team Galérer, and the ninja-demon Ogun do their best to wipe out our heroes and take control of Rachel Summers’s Phoenix Force and/or her brain. Will anyone survive the experience? Find out in X-Treme X-Men #3, writing by the inimitable Chris Claremont, art by Salvador Larroca, colors by Guru-eFX, letters by VC’s Clayton Cowles.
If you’re just joining us, you’ll want to know that this series takes place In the Past: it’s set just after Mekanix (2002), with Kitty (later Kate Pryde) as a graduate student at the University of Chicago (and a bartender at Belles of Hell). Famed baddie Ogun, a ninja-spirit demon who once trained Logan and mind-controlled Kitty in Kitty Pryde and Wolverine (1984-85), has popped up in Kitty’s consciousness, to the distress of the X-Treme Team of Storm, Logan, Sage, Rachel Summers, Gambit and a de-powered Rogue.
In fact, Ogun has been living in Kitty’s psyche, biding his time and perhaps manipulating her choices, all along, until now. She and Rachel would love to drive him away. But they’ve got distractions: Purity, the hate group from Mekanix, and Galérer, with their three super-baddies (Beasty-Brute, Sanzu, and Soulscream), and flying Purity leader Alice Tremaine, who comes with her own mini-Sentinel, Scrap, a kind of robotic counterpart to Lockheed: he’d be cute if he weren’t on the side of genocide.
Got all that? Good, because they’re going to be fighting for most of this issue, while Claremontisms (mind control! De-powering! People committed, body an’ soul!) spring up like mushrooms after a Storm-produced rain. Claremont has made clear that he likes working with artist Salvador Larroca, and while the art in X-Treme X-Men #3 is sometimes stiff, with dark inks, it certainly serves the story. If you’re up for contemporary Claremont you are almost certainly up for continuations of the character work he did, and the ships he forged, either in his Classic Period of Inventing the Modern X-Men (from 1975 to 1991), or in his Later Periods (hello, Sage!).
I’m always up for those things, and here they are: Rachel is 100% Here-for-Kitty, as she could not have been in Mekanix, and the two spar lightly over how best to get Ogun out of everyone’s mind. Rachel charges into battle, backed by a Phoenix flare, Kitty stops her (“You’re charging into a trap!”) and Rachel transports the two of them to a safe space inside her own mind: a frothy beach, where they both wear bikinis. Ogun takes over the rocks, and the foam on the waves, and delivers a villain speech: “What I do to you — devouring spirit and flesh both… will be reflected on your corporeal form!” Good luck with that, my dude.
Fighting against Ogun’s beach-party hostile takeover, Kitty and Rachel transform the environment into a green-grey, overcast, tornado-warning sky, with the two of them levitating in skintight leather. That scene occupies a whole page, and on the next page, when the beach returns, both Kitty and Rachel stand up to Ogun in an uninterrupted flow of Claremontisms: “I’m nothing compared to Rachel. She means more to me than you could ever imagine. I’d do anything for her — same as she would for me.”
And that’s just Kitty. Eyes aflame, Rachel in close-up takes up the same familiar tune, her body posed like a cat on the prowl: “Pryde and I, we’re bound, body and soul.” Then Rachel — who has been trying to keep Ogun out of her mind, too — knocks Kitty out of the sky, so Pryde won’t get injured in their psychic fight: Kitty falls into, and I mean into, the ground, staying phased and trying to fight her way back to the surface, one arm at a time.
That’s the emotional core: that’s X-Treme X-Men #3’s best part, and I loved it. Frankly, the knock-down, drag-out, claws-out fights among Rachel and Logan and Beasty-Brute and the power-siphoning Sanzu and Soulscream that occupy the rest of this comic’s pages end up anticlimactic as a result, though also dramatic. Beasty-Brute almost takes out Wolverine, then Gambit ambushes the Brute, and then Storm zaps everyone with lightning, and then… and then…
What’s this comic about?
So far, I think, it’s about whether mutants, and Kitty in particular, know what to do with their powers, whether it’s long-term OK to be more than human, more than the usual. Kitty’s been trying to live as a regular graduate student/barkeep/leather fan, but Purity keeps interrupting. Rachel’s been trying to save her, and Rogue’s been trying to live as a hero despite her lack of powers. All of them get challenged at the end, when Sanzu and Soulscream grab Rachel and steal Rachel’s powers, in a fiery sequence whose Claremontisms abound once more: “The power — more than I ever imagined!”
So much power flows from her through the Galérer types into the Sentinel. And then there’s no power at all: Scrap and the Sentinels cancel out all mutant powers. Sage’s super-cognition, Bishop’s energy channeling, Storm’s weather control, so that Storm starts falling to Earth, and — worst of all — Shadowcat’s phasing, so that she’s stuck with one arm poking out of the ground. We know she’s not dead, because we know the subsequent continuity (which leads, alas, straight to the Whedon run). She must survive being phased through the Earth. But how?
We’ll find out next time. Maybe the sun will come out.
There’s always tomorrow.
Body and soul.
Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. Her podcast about superhero role playing games is Team-Up Moves, with Fiona Hopkins; her latest book of poems is We Are Mermaids. Her nose still hurts from that thing with the gate.
