X-Factor 39 - Inferno

Cyclops's eyes are fully opened.

X-Factor #39

Writer: Louise Simonson
Penciler: Walter Simonson
Inker: Allen Milgrom
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Colorist: Gregory Wright
Editor: Bob Harras
Editor-in-Chief: Tom DeFalco

At the ruins of the mansion the newly arrived Beast and Longshot fight against Mr Sinister and Malice/Polaris whilst the rest of X-Factor and the X-Men recover. Cyclops finds Mr Sinister is blocking his eye power and starts to remember him from his youth, including how he arrived in the hospital where Scott was taken after a plane crash and intervened when the young mutant's force blast blew a hole in the roof, knocking him out for a year. Sinister explains how he discovered Scott when the latter used his powers to reduce the impact of falling from a plane then had him transferred to an orphanage he ran and arranged for his brother Alex to be adopted to keep them apart. However before he could act Scott ended up with Professor Xavier and so Sinister prepared a trap by cloning Jean Grey then using Madelyne to secure a baby with potential. When the real Jean Grey reappeared Sinister set about cutting his losses now he had the child. Havok attacks but Sinister is unaffected and has no interest in the second Summers brother, ordering Malice/Polaris to kill him. Sinister continues to explain how he put blocks on Scott's power and buried his presence so no telepath could detect it but ultimately couldn't control the blasts with mental powers and had to resort to ruby quartz glasses. The others recover and through a telepathic conference they co-ordinate an attack, first knocking out Malice/Polaris then Wolverine disposes of Sabretooth. They release Havok who taunts his brother and fires plasma blasts at him which only have the effect of powering him up. Sinister breaks free and grabs Jean to kiss her. This riles Cyclops who overcomes Sinister's block and blasts him to fragments. Cyclops congratulates Havok on his tactics in powering him up as the X-Men head for home. Cyclops reflects on how he been vaguely aware of what he now knows was Sinister's influence and it drove him to try to be perfect but failed over the years.

And so we get to the final main chapter of Inferno (though there are several epilogue issues to come) with a showdown with Mr Sinister and more retcons to establish him as a longstanding presence in Cyclops's life. Why he has been so interested in one Summers brother but doesn't want the other is not explained beyond a "I could have if I chose" boast. I'm not sure just how much of Scott's childhood from the plane accident to the orphanage had been covered before the run-up to Inferno or just what if any contradictions there were in different accounts of those days that this telling sorts out but the insertion of Mr Sinister as a presence throughout his life is clearly intended to explain some of the awkward characterisation over the years, most obviously his desertion of Madelyne. The script doesn't quite go so far as to have Mr Sinister say that the desertion was directly because of him - indeed he instead blames it on Jean luring Scott to X-Factor - but Archangel voices it. It is as if the villain is intended to be a stand-in for the higher hand of editors over the years who have forced so much upon the titles that has had to be adapted to. But whilst it's possible for readers in the know to blame editors not writers for some of the messes, and there's also the reasonable defence that this development took place before Louise Simonson started writing the title, within the narrative it is still a weakness to resort to a supervillain manipulating everything as an excuse for past terrible characterisation.

There are many alternative ways the situation could have been handled but most of them required doing things differently when the series was created. Perhaps Jean could have been left for dead after all and the fifth female member of X-Factor could have been someone else - perhaps Polaris (a Silver Age member of the X-Men) or Dazzler (as seems to have been the original plan) or even a new character. Maybe Scott could have convinced Madelyne he had to return to his days in the costume and even taken her with him rather than just leaving her the moment the news of Jean's resurrection came. Having both one's wife and ex girlfriend around could have made for some interesting dynamics especially with the complication that Madelyne looked just like Jean. But all this required doing the start of the series differently. Instead first Scott walked out, then a large amount of time passed before he even tried to contact Madelyne and then a big crossover event (the Mutant Massacre) took up multiple issues so by the time a new writer was able to get him to travel back to Alaska it was not credible for his absence to have been a sufficiently short time for an easy reconciliation. The solution of just simply making Madelyne disappear as though she had never been there was tried, with the additional question of whether she had somehow been an amnesiac Jean all along to continue the long running tease, but it was insufficient especially once another writer brought her back. And so ultimately we get a tale of long-term manipulation with this issue adding elements to make Scott look better. It may convince Archangel but it's easy to see why many fans never truly accepted the explanation and Cyclops never fully recovered as a character.

It's also surprising just how major a factor Mr Sinister has been given how few issues he's been in. This is only the seventh comic he's appeared in and six of them have been chapters of Inferno. Although built up as a series unseen force there's something awkward about one-off villains being used to explain major story developments over multiple years. Also of surprise is that Sinister's relationship with Scott at the orphanage is not explained further. The hints all point to this "father" of Madelyne being Nathan (hence the son is named after all three of his "grandfathers"), the boy who tormented Scott and this has since been revealed as the planned origin of the character. However he gets killed off pretty quickly and doesn't return from the dead until later writers were on the title who infused their own ideas. "Mr Sinister" is actually quite a silly name for a villain, the sort of thing a child would come up with and the idea that one actually did is worth exploring more. Over the whole crossover there's been a lot of potential shown for the character and it's easy to see why he went on to become one of the leading X-Men villains not just in the comics themselves but also being an early presence in the toys and 1990s cartoon but he could have used at least one more story with his creator to be refined further. Also killed off surprisingly easy is Sabretooth as Wolverine casually deploys his claws though Sinister's use of cloning technology and the surprise resurrection of other Marauders provides a clear way to revive the character.

This is a surprisingly low key resolution to such a big crossover with just the two teams and three villains on a pile of rubble at the end and only one other character shown in a flashback. But Mr Sinister has not been directly part of the story of demons from Limbo invading Earth and instead has been the driving force behind the creation of Madelyne who got out of everyone's control. This is more of an epilogue to the main event and this probably explains why this issue and Uncanny X-Men #243 were not included on the advert for Inferno back in the summer of 1988. But it's still essential to the overall story as it resolves the role of Mr Sinister and brings closure for both X-Factor and the X-Men.

As an action showdown this is a strong piece. But as a retcon trying to fix one of the biggest problems caused by the creation of the series it's not the best approach, resorting to long-term manipulation by a basically new supervillain. However at this stage, and to be honest probably for the preceding couple of years, there isn't really a way to absolve Cyclops in a fully convincing way. At best one can parody the external influence that created the situation and it's not Simonson's fault that the problem was created. So this issue does as best as it can.