X-MEN: PRISONER X - May 1998 (Part Five)

Chapters 20-22, Epilogue

Written by Ann Nocenti

Summary:  Word leaks that there's a rat in the prison, which soon leads to a riot.  Longshot lies and declares himself the rat in order to stop the violence.  Wolverine faces Spiral and frees Phoenix.  Bone is reunited with Miles.  Longshot's allies unleash a computer virus that frees the prisoners, as Rita hacks into MAXROCK TV and exposes UltraMax’s abuses.  The inmates unite against the guards, and Longshot, the despised rat.  Phoenix frees Longshot from the execution chamber, while Major Domo is revealed as the warden and beaten down by the inmates.  The Quinjet’s blasts send UltraMax out of orbit.  Mojo escapes in his pod, not realizing that Phoenix has already placed the "Mojomaniacs" (killers created by his brain tampering) inside.  As the team tries to keep UltraMax in orbit, Longshot reveals that Gambit gave Spiral false information earlier.  Eventually, Beast manages to enter UltraMax’s controls and right the station.  The liberated mutants are taken to the mansion's hospital wing.  Public opinion, following Rita's broadcast, turns on UltraMax and it is shut down.  Major Domo rebuilds himself and prepares to rescue Mojo.

“Huh?” Moment:  Miles is referred to as a boy repeatedly, even from Phoenix’s viewpoint, but the numbers don’t add up.  His father spent fifteen years in prison, which didn’t happen until after Miles and his schoolmates were told to inform on their parents if they were involved with drugs.  That would make Miles, at the very youngest, twenty.  

Review:  There’s a lot packed into the final chapters of the novel, including a slightly gratuitous gladiator match between Longshot and Gambit,  so the ending is somewhat chaotic.  Nocenti obviously wants to tackle numerous issues, but there’s not nearly enough room to explore every wild thought she throws out there.  The major conflicts of the novel are resolved (Bone confirms he never wanted revenge on Miles, Miles asks for his father’s forgiveness, Mojo is defeated, Gambit and Longshot make peace, UltraMax is shut down), but several of the plot threads barely feel connected to the central story.  Is this is a story about the drug war, the prison system, teen suicide, human experimentation, War on Crime paranoia, junk culture, or the origins of insanity?  Of course a story can cover more than one issue, but trying to touch on everything that might be on the author’s mind is dangerous.  Mojo has three distinct plots going on during the novel -- he’s overtaken a prison and used it as the basis of a new television network, he’s released a series of bootleg videogames that will recruit highly intelligent players (apparently teens he wants to interact with, simply because he’s lonely...and he wants the rest to commit suicide, for some reason), and he’s using his mind-altering technology to breed a new race of remorseless killers.  All of these ideas have potential, but why are they running simultaneously; aren’t we reading the plots to three different Mojo stories?  What do mutants secretly placed in a space prison by the government have to do with bored teens that happen to be really good at video games?

It’s easy to forgive the overloaded plot, though, because so many of Nocenti’s pithy digressions and character moments are genuinely intriguing.  (She’s also the first person to pit Longshot and Gambit against each other in a fight, which is something I would’ve expected to see years earlier.)  Chapter Twenty-One even opens with an unsettling detour to the suburbs to examine Susan Carlton, a nice enough lady who’s been sucked into watching the live execution.  The entire passage is reminiscent of Orwell, a very brief example of just how good Nocenti can be.  Playing off the prison theme, Nocenti explores the larger idea of imprisonment, that everyone is in a cage of his or her own making.  Mojo has doomed himself to a life surrounded by sycophants, while Storm is caged by the demands of the responsibilities she’s accepted as leader of the X-Men.  Miles is consumed by the guilt he feels for indirectly sending his father to prison.  Phoenix is confined by the ethics taught to her by Xavier, which prevent her from “playing God” even as she touches the minds of the sick and deluded every day.  And Rogue’s body is, of course, its own prison.  

Even the virtual reality game, which could easily be a quickie plot device of no real importance, opens the door for a thoughtful exploration of the X-Men’s personalities.  The game tests the player to go past their normal boundaries in order to win, with the justification that nothing you do to your opponent is “real” so it’s okay to cut loose.  Phoenix mind-fries her opponents while Wolverine embraces his bloodlust.  When they regain consciousness, they have to readjust to reality and question the decisions they’ve made while in the transitional fog.  The game’s hook is that it shames you for beating it.  There’s also a recurring theme of lying as a virtue, the idea that a lie can be noble if it’s used to help someone overcome grief or self-doubt.  The last example is in the epilogue, as Wolverine pretends that he didn’t carry Bone on his back during the final level of the game.  “Wasn’t me.  You musta made it on your own.  You’re no coward, Bone.”  Nocenti loves the concept of deception, including self-deception, but doesn’t seem to have the room to truly explore it here.  I wish Nocenti would’ve focused more on these esoteric concepts, as opposed to the political activism that occasionally drags the novel down.  Less politics, fewer plot threads, and the novel would've been a much tighter read.  It remains a solid X-Men story, however, with some truly fantastic moments.

X-MEN: PRISONER X - May 1998 (Part Four)

Chapters 15-19

Written by Ann Nocenti

Summary:  Longshot escapes his cell and spies on Mojo.  Phoenix telepathically convinces Mojo that he’s having a hallucinatory conversation with Longshot.  Mojo declares that he will steal Longshot's martyrdom from him.  Later, Phoenix is thrown into a neutralizing cell after she resists Mojo.  Ricochet Rita tells Wolverine that Bone’s son was responsible for him going to prison.  Rogue meets with Longshot and grants him his request of a last kiss.  She absorbs his memories and learns of the planned revolt.  Longshot slips Rogue a chip, a universal key for the mutant ward.  She meets with Gambit and gives him the information.  Spiral later shows Gambit a computer-generated film of Rogue and Longshot's “affair.”  Furious, Gambit reveals Longshot’s plan to Spiral.  Meanwhile, Storm and Beast realize that Phoenix and Gambit are also inside UltraMax.  

Continuity Notes:  Beast has borrowed a Quinjet from the Avengers and modified it for space travel.  Why the Blackbird couldn’t be modified, as we’ve seen in previous issues of the comics, I don’t know.  Beast suggests a bluff to Storm -- their modified Quinjet will knock UltraMax out of orbit unless their friends are released.  

Review:  Everyone’s still getting into place for the finale, with a few decent twists thrown in.  DJ Bone might not have such a pure motive for seeing his son again, as Rita claims he actually wants revenge on Miles for ratting him out for those “funny cigarettes.”  Gambit is cast as a potential traitor once again, which uses the past continuity already discussed in the novel very well.  Mojo also has an interesting change in motivation, as he now realizes that Longshot is more valuable to him alive than dead, and isn’t about to let him die and spark a true revolution.  Mojo is often an insufferable character, but reading Nocenti’s interpretation gives a better idea of what she had in mind for the villain.  His exchanges with Phoenix during this section are a lot of fun, as Mojo postulates that they’re both mind manipulators, he’s just working on a larger scale.  By controlling the culture, he’ll rewrite history and remake the world in his image.  A fairly standard supervillain motivation, but with an insane means of execution.  

Nocenti also takes care to give each character his or her own moment.  Even if the plot doesn’t leave any obvious part for Storm to play, Nocenti connects Storm’s kinship with nature to Spiral’s aberrant teleportation doorway throughout the novel.  Storm can sense that something’s just wrong with the environment, giving Nocenti an excuse to write several lyrical pieces describing how exactly Storm sees the world.  She also revives Storm’s claustrophobia in a creative sequence set during her ride to UltraMax with Beast.  (Beast, meanwhile, discusses new theories about black holes during the trip.) 

Unfortunately, Nocenti isn’t done with the lectures just yet.  Now it’s Ricochet Rita’s turn to give a multi-page screed against the American penal system.  Nocenti is still rather vague about what exactly should be done to make prison “better,” without fundamentally changing what a prison has to be.  According to Rita, it’s inhumane to even ask someone to have a cellmate, as it’s a terrible violation of privacy.  Um, sure…  Rita is also now an avowed Marxist revolutionary, which elicits the only real counter-argument from Wolverine in the novel, even as Nocenti makes it clear that Rita and Wolverine are innately attracted to one another.  All things considered, I would rather not read references to Mumia Abu-Jamal in my X-Men stories, thanks.

X-MEN: PRISONER X - May 1998 (Part Three)

Chapters 10-14

Written by Ann Nocenti

Summary:  Wolverine reaches Level 10 in Miles’ VR game and is suddenly teleported with DJ Bone to UltraMax.  Ricochet Rita recruits Wolverine to her side.  Meanwhile, Beast receives an email Wolverine sent shortly before playing the game.  He deduces that pure instinct is needed to beat the game, but Storm refuses Beast's request to finish Level 10.  Later, Beast returns to the game, but forgets to turn on his failsafe.  Phoenix discovers the Beast comatose.  She joins the game and soon finds herself inside UltraMax.  On Earth, Gambit decides he won’t let Rogue go to UltraMax alone.  He allows himself to get caught robbing a store, then exposes his powers to the police.  He’s sent to UltraMax, onboard the same shuttle that’s transporting Rogue.  Later, Phoenix is taken to Mojo.  Disoriented, she begins to invade his brain.

“Huh?” Moment:  Rogue’s false identity has her as a death row counselor and security guard.  Is this a real thing?  It sounds utterly bizarre to me.

Review:  This novel is worth buying if only for the opening of Chapter 14.  Nocenti starts many of the chapters with a character study of one of the cast members, and her depiction of ten-year-old Jean Grey’s discovery of her mutant powers ranks amongst her finest writing.  Back in the '80s, Chris Claremont crafted a dark origin story that had Jean’s powers emerge as she cradled her dying friend Annie and experienced her final thoughts.  Nocenti continues the theme and creates an even more disturbing portrait of what telepathy could do to an adolescent.  The day Annie dies, Jean discovers her dog loves meat more than he loves her.  Soon, she’s learning the darkest secrets of her parents’ marriage.  Her salvation comes in the form of Professor Xavier, who teaches her that “a trace of hate between a husband and wife” is common.  The ethics, complications, and politics of telepathy are rich subjects that Nocenti could easily devote an entire novel to, one I’d love to read.  

The rest of this section mainly consists of characters finding ways to reach UltraMax.  It’s pretty standard as these things go, assuming you’re willing to accept the concepts of a) an outer space prison, and b) video games that can teleport you there.  Nocenti packs in an impressive amount of character work while she’s setting the pieces in place for the climax.  Beast is envious of Wolverine for beating the game first.  Gambit can’t bring himself to let Rogue go alone as the X-Men’s mole, so he develops an insane plan to join her.  Rogue has to silently tolerate the other guards’ casual bigotry.  Storm finds herself increasingly frustrated by the team’s unwillingness to listen to her.  Phoenix speculates that Mojo is incredibly lonely after surrounding himself with sycophants for so long, so now he’s desperate to interact with the minds sharp enough to beat his games.  Later, she mentally scans the convicts at UltraMax and finds herself torn between wanting to help them and kill them.  (The quickie profiles of the inmates Nocenti creates are also haunting.)  It’s easy to argue that the book has several disparate elements that don’t quite gel, but much of the novel’s appeal lies in the way the cast is written.  They’re engaging characters, and you truly want to reach the end of the story with them.

X-MEN: PRISONER X - May 1998 (Part Two)

Chapters 5-9

Written by Ann Nocenti

Summary:  Gambit returns to the mansion with the suspicious video game.  He arrives in time to see Rogue’s response to the “Prisoner X” television commercial.  Rogue immediately recognizes Longshot, igniting Gambit’s jealousy.  After the X-Men devise a plan to enter UltraMax Rock, Rogue and Gambit have a lovers’ quarrel.  Storm and Phoenix stop the fight, and Beast announces that he’s created a false identity for Rogue, who will infiltrate UltraMax as a counselor.  Meanwhile, the Rasta introduces himself to Wolverine as DJ Bone.  Bone claims that UltraMax is imprisoning mutants and teenagers, including his son Miles.  Wolverine visits Miles’ bedroom with Bone.  At UltraMax, Longshot is planning a prison revolt.  Spiral watches him plot with his fellow inmate, Ricochet Rita.  Later, Mojo tasks Spiral with finding a rat within the prison.

Continuity Notes:  

• According to Storm, both Cyclops and Professor X are working on “a project” at Muir Island with Excalibur.
• Ricochet Rita is a character from the initial Longshot miniseries.  She’s destined to become Spiral in the future, as confirmed in the (best forgotten) 1992 X-annual crossover “Shattershot.”
• Major Domo, Mojo's servant robot, is posing as UltraMax’s warden.  Mojo is in a hidden section, experimenting on teenagers, including Miles.  The teenagers that can beat the Spiral Ink games are teleported to UltraMax, while the others are left suicidal.
• Gambit acts as if he hasn’t met Longshot, although Gambit was with the team that rescued Longshot from Mojo in X-Men #10-11.

I Love the ‘90s:  DJ Bone claims the United States has “enemy deprivation” following the end of the Cold War, so defense contractors are now promoting the war on drugs and mutants to justify new prisons.  This novel was published a few months before Al-Qaeda bombed US embassies in August 1998.  Simultaneously, the attacks on the USS Cole, Pentagon, and World Trade Center were already in the planning stages.

Review:  And now we get the lectures.  Almost all of Chapter Six is devoted to DJ Bone (“DJ” because he tried to run a pirate radio program inside prison) giving a sermon about the horrors of the modern American penal system.  Wolverine is allowed to play devil’s advocate, but even the narration acknowledges that Wolverine essentially agrees with Bone and is only presenting the opposing view to rile him up.  Nocenti can present an argument, but she’s yet to define what exactly she means by “rehabilitation” and doesn’t seem to offer any specific ways to make the current system better.  She's obviously inspired by real life cases of people serving outrageous sentences for selling marijuana, but it strains crediblity a bit to believe that Bone has spent fifteen years in prison for selling pot, apparently as his first offense, and that he was one of the numerous low-level drug dealers that now occupy the federal UltraMax Space Prison.  I’m willing to listen to the argument that the government spends far too much money imprisoning such a large percentage of the population, but don’t tell me that weed dealers are going to be shipped into outer space, even in the fictional Marvel Universe.  The best utilization of political themes comes later in this section, as we learn the ACLU once complained that the UltraMax prisoners’ freedom of speech was being repressed.  Mojo responded by giving them their own television station, which is now a huge hit.

The plot goes into a few more illogical detours during this section of the novel, apparently for the sake of inserting some action scenes.  Gambit and Rogue get into an argument due to Gambit’s jealousy of Longshot, which is fair enough, but it’s hard to justify Gambit abruptly making the fight physical.  DJ Bone also has a sudden flash of violence when he attacks Wolverine for not investigating his son’s disappearance fast enough for his liking.  The story establishes that Bone has been using his son’s VR game, which is a fair enough rationalization for his fragile mental state, but why is Gambit suddenly violent?  He’s only held one of the discs; he hasn’t actually played any of the games.  (Gambit, as we all know, prefers Solitaire…unless he got somebody to play wit’.)  It’s certainly possible that Gambit’s change in demeanor is an intentional plot point, but why do the X-Men seem so nonchalant about Gambit suddenly striking his girlfriend?  In fairness, she’s literally built like a tank and can’t be hurt, but the scene still feels strange.

What’s frustrating is that if you ignore that fight scene, Nocenti presents some of the strongest characterization Gambit’s received at this point.  Nocenti paints Gambit as a loner that’s desperate to belong, who’s still hurt by the X-Men’s willingness to believe Bishop’s accusation that he’s a traitor.  The team knows by now that Gambit’s innocent, but he isn’t willing to forget the years of suspicion.  This is a characterization point that was oddly ignored following the conclusion of the X-traitor subplot (most of the storylines during and after “Onslaught” were a mess, of course), so it’s nice to see it here.  And, even if the continuity doesn’t quite work out, Nocenti also deserves some credit for acknowledging that Gambit probably isn’t going to like Longshot very much.  (As far as I know, Gambit’s never been given an opinion on Longshot before.)  Longshot is supposed to be a genetically bred matinee idol that any woman would fall in love with, so it’s probably not comforting to know that your girlfriend was once in a love triangle with the guy.  Before Rogue leaves on her mission, Gambit gives Rogue a passionate speech about just how much he trusts her, a soliloquy the narrator assures us is a lie.

Finally, there’s a great conversation between Storm and Gambit that does a lot to establish his role as an X-Man.  Storm tells Gambit the story of Galahad and Lancelot, telling Gambit that she respects his heroism for the same reason she admired Lancelot more than the born-pure Galahad -- Lancelot fought his instincts and worked hard to become a hero.  Just imagine, a scene that develops Gambit’s character that doesn’t devolve into more self-pity, and even recognizes his long-forgotten friendship with Storm.  How often did that happen in the ‘90s?

X-MEN: PRISONER X - May 1998 (Part One)

 

Chapters 1-4

Written by Ann Nocenti

Summary:  Wolverine enters a club, planning on a peaceful night, but finds himself drawn into a fight over a pool game.  When he’s stabbed in the melee, Wolverine releases his claws and goes into a berserker fury.  Meanwhile, Phoenix, Rogue, and Storm have dinner.  On their walk home, they stop an attempted rape.  One of the culprits quickly organizes an anti-mutant mob.  Phoenix clouds their minds and the heroes escape.  At the mansion, Beast examines a new video game from Spiral Ink.  Elsewhere, Gambit talks a teenager out of suicide.  Suspicious of a video game the teen has been playing, Gambit buys the disc from him.  After Gambit leaves, the teen’s demeanor changes and he jumps off a building.

Continuity Notes:  

• Longshot, identified only as “Prisoner X” at this point, is a prisoner at an orbital prison called UltraMax Rock.  MAXROX TV is filming him for what appears to be a reality show, Live from Death Row, which will culminate with his live on-air execution.
• A rebel DJ is broadcasting information from Mojoverse that Longshot is picking up with a direct connection to his brain.  The DJ is quickly killed by Mojo’s men.
• Phoenix says that Cyclops has been on Muir Island, “for so long,” with no further explanation given.

I Love the ‘90s:  The Spiral Ink video games are the latest in virtual reality technology, which we were all lead to believe would be the future of entertainment in 1998.

Review:  Ann Nocenti returns to Longshot and the Mojoverse with this novel, after many years without the promised follow-up to her initial Longshot miniseries.  It’s unlikely this is the story she had in mind for that Longshot series that Arthur Adams never started, if only because the pet themes she’s playing with here didn’t really show up in her late ‘80s work.  She did touch on American defense spending briefly in Daredevil, but I don’t recall a fascination with the psychology of incarceration, or her criticizing violent and nihilistic pop culture back in those days.  (By the late ‘90s, Nocenti was the editor of Prison Life Magazine, which is amazingly something that exists.)  

The opening of the novel is mainly focused on introducing the X-Men through a series of vignettes, each one devoted to summarizing a character’s internal conflicts or speaking to the franchise’s larger issues of prejudice and fear.  Nocenti has a strong handle on the cast, so even if these are clearly intro scenes, there’s enough depth and sympathy for the characters to entertain even the most jaded X-fan.  Wolverine fights to keep his inner animal in check while defending a Rasta from racist pool sharks, Rogue curses herself for not bothering to pick up her gloves before going out with her teammates, and Gambit spends a night alone, thinking back to his justifications for being a thief.  The X-Ladies also muse on the inherent dishonesty in having duel identities, an idea that occasionally appears in Nocenti’s superhero work.  

An early pattern emerges of the heroes expressing empathy for criminals; Wolverine compares his own demeanor to that of the recently paroled Rasta, Gambit thinks back on his previous rationales for stealing from rich people (not surprising in a Nocenti story, Gambit viewed himself as a class warrior), and Rogue is in for a shock when her skin makes contact with an attempted rapist.  She’s utterly repulsed by his view of women, yet finds herself reliving his life of dehumanizing abuse and incarceration.  Rogue considers him utterly repellant, but can’t deny his humanity.  Just how “human” a society can be allowed to view convicted criminals is a question Nocenti has to address when covering this topic.  Is a civilization judged by the mercy or the punishment it doles out?  Is “humane” treatment of prisoners, however that could be defined, an insult to their victims?  I suspect Steve Ditko is on one side and Nocenti is on the other.

The politics of this novel are divided between the prison issue and Nocenti’s critique of pop culture, with an odd attempt early on to tie the issues together.  She presents a somewhat strained theory that networks romanticize violence in order to keep the public afraid…which leaves us home alone in front of the television, consuming mindless advertising, and so paranoid we refuse to question any of the government’s massive defense spending.  How about “If it bleeds, it leads” -- the traditional justification for the media taking local crime stories and making them national gossip fodder.  I doubt there’s a conspiracy between the Department of Defense and whoever produces those idiotic Lifetime movies.  (Mother, May I Sleep with Danger…In Order to Distract You from the Inordinate Amount of GDP Spent on Redundant Defense Programs?) Pointing out that America spends an excessive amount of money on building and expanding prisons is probably a legitimate starting point for a story, but she’s approaching the issue from a strange angle.  

Fortunately, Nocenti isn’t being overly preachy at this point, the early chapters are actually well-balanced between X-Men character work and the societal commentary, and her view of where American culture was heading in the late ‘90s isn’t far off from reality.  Beast is shocked that these virtual reality games reward you for killing people in blue uniforms; people that almost resemble police officers.  This is years before every adolescent in America has a Grand Theft Auto game hidden in his bedroom.  Her send-up of reality shows, written when the concept barely existed, also doesn’t seem too outrageous today.  Allowing Nocenti to explore pet political issues and engage in media parody could be a dodgy proposition, but thankfully these elements aren’t overshadowing the novel as an X-Men story yet.