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Welcome to the first installment of what will hopefully become a recurring segment here on Headphone Bros: rXtrospective! As anyone who read my top 100 movie list can probably guess, I am a huge fan of Marvel characters. This love began with trading cards in the early '90s, followed quickly by the X-Men animated series, but I got into the comics thanks to the Age of Apocalypse crossover. I have read comics off-and-on ever since.
There are a TON of websites, and podcasts already dedicated to going over the rich history of X-Men comics, so the niche I'm carving out is very specific; I will go over every X-men story I can get my hands on from the last ten years only. (The last X years! Get it!?)
This time frame wasn't picked randomly, or even because of the convenient wordplay. You see, 10 years ago I became a father, and my wife and I sadly made the wise decision to stop spending too much money (#toomuchmoney) on comics every month. This created a gap in my awareness of X-Men continuity starting in the late Spring of 2008, so that's where I will begin today.
Get Mystique! is a 4-issue storyline (Wolverine Vol. 3, 62-65) by Jason Aaron and Ron Garney, with Jason Keith on Colors and Cory Petit on Letters. It was released over the Spring of 2008. Even though the last issue came out one month before my first son was born, this seems like a good place to start. I was not collecting Wolverine's solo comics at the time, so I did not read this story. It also immediately follows the giant Messiah CompleX crossover of X-books. Messiah Complex is pretty much the last full X-Men story I remember reading before dropping comics. (Messiah ComleX is a pretty great X-Men story. Check it out if you haven't.) Mystique was a member of the X-Men at the beginning of the crossover, but betrays the team in a major way and then goes missing.
Get Mystique! is essentially the story of Wolverine hunting down Mystique with explicit orders from Cyclops to kill her, a sentiment that Wolverine wholeheartedly agrees with. The first three issues show a cat-and-mouse chase across the MIddle-East between one mutant with the ability to track anyone anywhere, and another mutant who can appear to be anyone they wish. They are nearly perfectly matched, which makes the chase very fun to read.
Even more fun to read is the unexpected but excellent secondary story that's interwoven throughout the chase: the story of Wolverine and Mystique's first meeting... in the Wild West!
Sort of. They actually meet in Mexico and spend most of the story in Kansas City, but the whole flashback story is definitely in the Western genre. Weaving this story alongside the story of Wolverine hunting Mystique made for a great contrast. As Mystique repeatedly slips out of "modern day" Wolverine's grasp, frequently leaving Wolverine nearly dead and Mystique not much better, we keep flashing back to versions of both characters who are just getting to know each other. As Wolverine gets closer and closer to killing Mystique, "Logan" and "Raven" are also getting closer and closer, even going so far as to plan "one last robbery" and moving to upstate New York.
I don't plan on spoiling the ending of every story I review here, but I have some issues with the ending that I'd like to talk about. Consider this your
!!!SPOILER WARNING!!!
Ok, now that that's out of the way, of course Wolverine eventually catches Mystique and there is no escaping the inevitable brutal fight. The brutality doesn't bother me. What bothers me is that Mystique is completely naked for the whole fight. In preparing for the fight, she intentionally disrobes (in her own shape-shiftery way. It's weird that her clothes are always actually part of her body.) I know that Mystique uses sex appeal to her advantage when she can, but there is no subterfuge here. She knows that Wolverine will not be dissuaded by her nudity, so this clearly is just an excuse to draw a sexy comics villain naked. (Or perhaps tie her in more closely to her film counterpart, but that was just an excuse to have a naked woman on screen anyway.)
What makes this worse is at the end, when she is crawling away, bleeding from a seemingly fatal wound. Comic books have a long-standing tradition of showing dead or dying women as sexy, and it's a big problem. There is nothing sexy about violence against women. I am not, by any means, saying that you cant have a female villain get into a brutal fight with Wolverine. I am just saying that you should draw it the same way you would draw a man fighting Wolverine.
To top it off, Wolverine doesn't even finish her off. He leaves her a gun so she can either bleed out, die from exposure in the desert, or shoot herself to avoid the pain. I have three major problems with this:
1) Wolverine is supposed to be a good guy. Even in the morally gray area Wolverine operates in, he is supposed to be, above all else, a good guy. To leave Mystique in this condition to either die slowly and painfully, or to be forced to kill herself, is torture. I can be convinced to believe that good guys can kill if absolutely necessary. I cannot believe that good guys can torture.
2) We just read a story that confirms that both characters are at least 100 years old! Why is he so convinced that Mystique will die from her wounds!? I understand that the practical reason is that Mystique is a popular villain, and they wanted to leave an out for her to show back up again when they had another story for her, but I don't see any in-story justification for Wolverine's choice here.
3) You just got yourself blown up and torn apart many times for one very specific reason: Kill Mystique! Why would Wolverine doggedly and effectively hunt down Mystique with explicit intent to kill her, only to walk away when the job is 99% done.
The way I would like to have ended this story requires me to also spoil the ending of the 1920s sequence. Their big robbery proves to be a set-up, but in a surprise twist, it was Logan and not Raven who betrayed the team. The result is the death of their entire crew, except, of course, Logan and Raven.
In their final confrontation, Mystique references his betrayal. She says that Wolverine is just like her; he will betray the X-Men sooner or later. This is when he leaves her to die in the desert. Instead, I would have liked to see Mystique push the point farther, appealing to his guilt over the betrayal and death of their friends. She let him off the hook and didn't seek revenge back then. Can't he do the same for her now? That's the point where Wolverine can deliver the killing blow and comment that maybe they aren't that much alike after-all.
With Mystique's incredible shapeshifting abilities, it would be easy to later explain that she moved any vital organs out of the way internally and only faked her death, but Wolverine's whole hunt wouldn't have seemed to be a waste of his time, and the lives of many people who Mystique killed along the way.
Overall, I would say I definitely liked the story. The flashback story was absolutely great, and I loved seeing the more inexperienced versions of both characters. The whole cat-and-mouse chase was also very enjoyable. I only had trouble with the sexy dead lady trope and the anti-climax, but they did bother me quite a lot. I give this story 3/5 X's.
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Next time, on rXtrospective:
