Blood Brothers: It's Bad

 

I enjoy bad comics, you know that, that’s why you’re here, that’s why this blog is here. But there are those rare and special moments when I come across a comic that falls beneath even my own incredibly low expectations. Today that is the 1998 X-Man event Blood Brothers. Playing out in the pages of Terry Kavanagh’s X-Man and Joe Casey’s Cable, the four-issue saga sees the two clones/brothers/alternate universe doppelgangers teaming up to battle their equally confusing clone/brother/doppelganger from the future Stryfe, who we covered extensively in my exploration of X-Cutioner’s Song. Sounds like a recipe for success, right? Stryfe is one of my favorite villains, Cable and Nate Grey are delightfully messy and this story even has Madelyne Pryor, one of my favorite classic X Men, but this event displays such a lack of understanding and poor plotting that even I can’t find much good in it. However, we must set the stage a little before we dive in as we actually haven’t had time to discuss X-Man aka Nate Grey before. If you need a primer on our two other major players, Stryfe and Cable refer back to my series on X-Cutioner’s Song. Nate Grey debuted during the Age of Apocalypse event, the test tube baby of that timeline’s Jean Grey and Scott Summers born through the interference of Mr. Sinister, where the young man exhibits a near limitless psychic power that is burning out his very life force. He is an alternate timeline version of the main universes’ own Cable, whose immense psychic power is the same as Nates but kept in check by the techno organic virus infecting his body. Nate Grey then found his way to our main time and space when the Age of Apocalypse timeline collapsed. It’s a little hard to keep track of though because Cable was born to the clone of Jean Grey, Madelyne Pryor, but Stryfe was cloned from Cable in his future and Nate Grey was born to Jean Grey? It’s complicated.

But moving past that our event opens, and we find Nate Grey in Ireland with Madelyne and having lost his telepathy. There is a weird and ultimately irrelevant subplot involving “tech-gnomes”, the important part of it is it proves to be a test by Cable’s mentor Blaquesmith who seeks to stop the return of Stryfe, and he reached out to Nate due to the absence of Cable. We cut to Latveria, where Doom has recently left the country unattended, and a citadel crashes from the moon directly on top of Castle Doom. It opens, revealing Stryfe and his dark riders who have arrived to destroy the world’s telepaths when they are apparently at their weakest and then take over the world. An excellent opening to any event sets the stakes and is a big bombastic re-debut for a villain who had been off the page for a while. There is a brief interesting interlude where Madelyne splits from Nate to go save Jean Grey from Stryfe’s minions as the two have a long and storied history of animosity due to their cloned heritage, an element they share with their sons and their clones/doppelgangers/alt-timeline versions. But sadly, this is left unplumbed outside of a few mutterings as Maddie leaves that moment to return to the side of Nate Grey, where she reunites with her actual son, Cable, when he arrives from New York with Blaquesmith. When she arrives Stryfe quickly captures Maddie and Nate Grey and begins monologuing as the event places all of its cards on the table, and it is here we encounter what is the core of my problem with Blood Brothers, it fails to engage with its characters and their motives past the surface level.

Stryfe is a character driven by the trauma he suffered as a child and the vengeance that inspired him to seek. In his mind he was abandoned by his parents to be raised by a cold uncaring tyrant, in this case Apocalypse who was ready to sacrifice him the minute he became an adult. The friction between his beliefs and what actually happened is what gives him an interesting tension. It’s this internal conflict that set him apart from a lot of other more pedestrian supervillains, who is telling the truth, was he actually abandoned, is his a cause of righteous vengeance and is he the original Nathan Summers or is Cable? He’s a villain with a point. This made him a much more personal and a much more real villain. Was it always perfect, no, a lot of X-Cutioner’s Song wasn’t great, it is needlessly Cable-centric and does ruin the MLF, but he was more compelling than just another villain concerned with exterminating mutants or world domination. It certainly helped that Fabian Nicieza’s heightened sensibilities gave Stryfe a certain dramatic and operatic flair he lacks in Blood Brothers. The campiness of his presentation and monologuing sensibilities placed him in a grand tradition of Claremont villains. Stryfe is a singular villain who is wasted in this event. His grand scheme is a simple plot of world domination, and he lacks the motivation that gave X-Cutioner’s Song its spark. Here a once vibrant villain is reduced to a thin pastiche of a hundred more compelling villains. Terry Kavanagh, bless his heart, is a capable writer but his monologues lack the panache of Stryfe’s earlier appearances, his monologues feel empty and soulless. Really you could sub in Apocalypse, Sinister or even Donald Pierce and the event would read pretty much the same.

And now we arrive at Madelyne Pryor, she is a character worthy of her own series of essays, but we do not have time to fully unpack her here. To me at least Maddie operates in a similar space to Stryfe. Both of them are clones who turned evil over the course of their arcs (Stryfe much earlier than Maddie), both have similar struggles with identity and who is the original and who is the clone (again an area where Maddie is much more evolved than Stryfe). Maddie eventually turned good, putting her into the same orbit as her actual son Nathan, which is where we find her in the pages of X-Man, she is a hero or is at least trying to be one after Nate brings her back to life after her death at the end of Inferno. She wants to belong; to be loved and to do good but she is constantly struggling with her actions in Inferno. That sort of development is a welcome arc for anyone really. But Blood Brothers handles her is kind of unpleasant to me. Maddie is rendered almost an observer through the whole event, standing by Nate and helping soothe his troubles and the only moment she takes an actual act of heroism within these four issues is when she free’s Nate Grey from Stryfe’s clutches which lets him to end the villain with Cable. She is mostly passive through the event, and we get glimpses of her motivations, like when she saves Jean Grey, but she never really gets to do anything. Maddie is a profoundly interesting character when you let her be a character but through most of X-Man she is a flat surface for other characters to bounce off of. And there is a brief segment in X-Man #47 I want to call out specifically where Madelyne pretends to betray Nate and side with Stryfe. A lot of it is just empty villain talk but there’s a strong undercurrent in the art and the dialogue that Stryfe is trying to sleep with Madelyne. For example, the speech saying “I see that in your dark, dark, desperate eyes. I feel it in the icy chill of your skin against mine … the cold pounding of your pulse – in time with mine now – you fairly reek with the taste for power” as he caresses Maddie’s face. And there are more examples throughout the issue, but I’ll spare you, but the problem is that this further objectifies Maddie, doubly so when you consider Stryfe is genetically her son, and it also reduces Stryfe further from a complex and nuanced character to a cartoon villain.

This feels like it is borrowing from a moment in Uncanny X-Men #295 where Jean Grey is trapped in a nest of robotic tentacles by Stryfe constantly being groped. It is a vaguely oedipal moment in the panel but is far from that textually as Stryfe asks “a horrifying feeling, no? To be clutched and clawed by strange, unfeeling, uncaring, alien hands. Not at all unlike, I must assume, what an innocent babe feels when bereft of the love and warmth that is its birthright.” Which goes back to my previous point, historically Stryfe is a nuanced villain but in Blood Brothers he is flat and empty. He goes from a fully fleshed out man who feels that his parents abandoned him to one dimensional bad guy bent on world domination trying to bang “the closest thing to a mother I’ve known”. And when Maddie double crosses Stryfe and sends a psychic bolt of energy to boost his powers, Maddie is gravely wounded to further Nate’s emotional growth. It’s just fucking messy. Maddie does not really get much of a chance to impact the story. She gets a handful of internal movements but spends most of her time concerned about Nate Grey. And I get that this is his solo series, but he is consistently the least interesting part of it. Here he is ostensibly trying to avert the end of the world twice, but he just can’t get me to care. Constantly getting beat down just to get up again with a surge of new powers he comes off a bit Mary sue-ish.

And even when we put this multitude of character issues to the side, the text of the event is just ridiculous. Stryfe plops his massive moon pyramid atop Doctor Dooms castle, lures the strongest psychics in existence to the pyramid to siphon their powers and take over the world, the galaxy and the whole of time and space. It’s a barely coherent series of world spanning schemes that does not have time to develop over the course of its four issues. The whole event feels like it has no stakes as we have no time to really experience the consequences of the events. It rushes from beat to beat from failure to failure with no time to catch your breath. The characters are under cooked, the plots are half baked, and the art is just middling. The only good thing I can say is it brought Stryfe back. 6/10