Seeing the solicit for the ‘Get Mystique’ story arc in the pages of Wolverine gave me a feeling of hope. You see, Decimation had been awkwardly handled by the X-Offices as no one could really decide how effective Sentinel Squad ONE was, how many mutants were left, whether they were all at the mansion or not, details that started to fray at the big serious change for mutantkind.
But Messiah CompleX promised big changes this time, really big and the idea that a satellite title like Wolverine which always seems to be sort of off in its own little world (and now Wolverine: Origins which is off in its own little world different than the little world of the main book…) sounded pretty cool. Now that we know that the X-Men are, indeed, NO MORE it makes sense that Wolverine would be showing some wear and tear now that his home team went belly-up. Going after Mystique after all that happened made sense too, a sort of forwarding of the plot created by the great wave of change!
Today, the conclusion of Get Mystique hits the shelves and where do we find ourselves? Surprisingly further back than I thought we would be.
WARNING: Contains spoilers for Wolverine #65, as well as #62-64. Find a few issues and follow along!
Okay, for four issues we’re gonna Get Mystique, just like it says on the box. Her actions in Messiah CompleX were considered going too far and you bet Cyclops’s ass he wants her to pay. No really, it’s what he said. Wolverine is on this ‘getting’ mission because Cyke needs him, a one man killing machine on a ‘by any means necessary’ mission… as opposed to the group effort of kill-team X-Force or the newly minted ‘go get ‘er, Ray!’ of the Young X-Men.
Man, Cyclops wants a lot of people dead for a guy who took a bikini vacation after Messiah CompleX.
Anyhoo, Mystique’s actions, while traitorous, desperate and dire, made sense within the story that had come so far. Even Milligan’s run had this ‘over-attentive’ mother vibe to it that gave Raven Darkholme a new facet in her personality. So, end of Messiah CompleX, she threatens a baby’s life to save Rogue in an overly complicated fashion because Destiny foretold it all those years ago; Rogue, in turn, forces her mother out of her life once and for all by absorbing her power and leaving her where she fell. This is pretty heavy stuff, very X-Meny if I do say so myself. Basic inter-human relationships with super-powers and what offspring hasn’t gone through that moment of leaving mother’s apron strings? All that hard work and sacrifice lead to nothing and you’d think Raven would be taking sometime to either go get that ungrateful little girl or trying to find something of Destiny’s to tell her what to do next, even just finding some new direction in her life.
This is where I thought ‘Get Mystique’ would be going, some place that actually followed the Messiah CompleX story that could provide a little character moment for everyone. Silly me, I looked for it in Wolverine. After all, who’s name is on the cover? When it’s the Mystique book, then we can talk but obviously we’re going to get the point of view of a man on a mission and less a jilted mother looking for direction. The story really doesn’t seem to be all that related to Messiah CompleX, other than Cyclops telling Wolverine to go get Mystique because she was involved in it.
Wolverine tracks her to the Middle East and begins a series of cat and mouse like badassery as he starts in with the ‘getting’, all the while reminiscing about 1921, a time of 23 skidoo and easy grifting. In the past, Mystique leads a band of misfits and cheats and wants Logan to join up as, in the present, Wolverine leads a hunt for a liar and a cheat, wanting her to join up with his claws in her stomach. All in all, a decent premise if not… familiar.
In fact, this story reads like something from a few years back, that ‘bad girl with a hard luck past fights tough guy she did wrong’ style of story that seems a little odd in the modern day of Wolverine tales. After Messiah CompleX, you’d expect something darker, something trickier than a basic story about what it means to trust no one. Nothing more momentous than two people trying to give in or deny who they are. At first, I was kind of disappointed. Where was my Messiah CompleX hullabaloo? Why was Mystique standing around naked with guns like it was the bad girl boom of the 1990’s all over again? Weren’t we past all this?
I’m kind of glad we’re not. Today, they have it out, claw and tooth, gun and blade, Raven and Logan will beat the crap out of one another as they have lied and cheated to get where they are today. Logan will take a bullet to the face while Raven will take some claws through the chest and they will lie there and they will bleed and they will think. And here is where the story bears beautiful fruit: Logan, healing first between the two of them for the upper hand, tells Raven that while he has changed from their time in the past, she essentially has not. He’s more right than the dialogue can say.
Despite her changes from bad-girl-gone-good with the X-Men, from over-protective mother trying to do the right thing in the worst way possible, Mystique is still the same character she was from the beginning: a deceptive, sexy shapeshifter with one card up her sleeve. Is this so wrong? Does she have to have some redemptive streak to her, find some great good, do the right thing and turn a new leaf? Or does she keep making the same mistakes over and over no matter what, remaining a villain despite her own wishes? What I felt was wrong about the story was what Wolverine was trying to say all along.
Wolverine doesn’t kill her, leaving her in the desert to ‘bleed to death’ meaning she’ll come back to fight another day. In the end, he doesn’t ‘get Mystique’. But I think I do.
May 14th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
“Does she have to have some redemptive streak to her, find some great good, do the right thing and turn a new leaf?”
Uh yeah. As Brand New Day is proving, set-in-stone rules for characters are hugely constrictive.