Posted in: Comics | Tagged: marvel, x-men, x-men gold, X-ual Healing - The Weekly X-Men Recap Column

X-ual Healing: X-Men Gold #28… IN SPAAAACCCEEE!

Published Mon, 28 May 2018 15:30:54 -0500

Sworn to sell comics for Marvel executives who feared and hated the fact that Fox owned their movie rights, The Uncanny X-Men suffered great indignities, but with a corporate merger on the way, the X-Men can finally get back to doing what they do best: being objectively the best franchise in comics.

Each week, armed with the joy, heartbreak, and frustration of 30+ years of reading X-Men comics, we read every new X-book that comes out, recap the events, provide the historical context so you can read it on Marvel Unlimited, and wonder when Marvel will let Chris Claremont write something again.

It's the way X-Men comics were meant to be read! It's the column that can only be known as…

For more about the column, check out the reboot issue here.

X-MEN GOLD #28
MARC GUGGENHEIM (W)
Geraldo Borges (A)
Cover by Phil Noto
THE COUNTDOWN TO THE MUTANT WEDDING OF THE CENTURY!
• Everything is going wrong.
• The X-Men are under attack from all sides…
• …and there's still a wedding to plan!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99

No matter how hard you try to control every detail of your wedding plans, you can never rule out something going awry. Take Kitty Pryde and Colossus, for example. They're supposed to get married in a big comics event next month, but Colossus has been kidnapped by a mutant sentinel A.I. and taken into space on a rocket.

X-Men Gold #28 opens up with Colossus flashing back to his time secretly imprisoned by Ord and the Benetech corporation, particularly the moments leading up to his rescue by Kitty in Astonishing X-Men (2004 Series) #4. Now, he's imprisoned again, flying away from the Savage Land in a rocket ship. Alpha recaps X-position from the previous issue: he needs to extract remnants of the Legacy Virus from Colossus's blood. He assures Colossus that while the procedure won't kill him, he's definitely going to die. Doesn't Alpha care about deadlines?! That wedding issue has to go to the printer!

Exactly three seconds after the rocket blasts off, a caption tells us, Storm (now looking full-on Thor-like thanks to the souped-up powers of her Asgardian hammer, Stormcaster, helps Iceman and Pyro escape the blast zone. It's too fast for them to escape, but thankfully Iceman's powers happen to be perfectly suited to stop an oncoming fireball.

Inside generic anti-mutant villain Lydia Nance's Savage Land headquarters, Kitty, Prestige, and Nightcrawler ask Lydia Nance to repeat her evil plan again in case anyone missed it. She obliges: the Legacy Virus remnants in his blood were what Dr. Rao used to create a cure for mutations (also in Astonishing X-Men), but Nance wants to use it to create a different cure:

X-ual Healing: X-Men Gold #28… IN SPAAAACCCEEE! — Er… thought bubbles are ours. :)

Nance says that Alpha will use the Legacy Virus to replicate himself all over the world and wipe out all mutants. But she's not a monster, she insists. She offers the X-Men a chance to head home and say goodbye to their loved ones before she commits genocide on the mutant race. Kitty punches her out. Rachel offers to mess with her mind psychically so that she doesn't kill the mutant race, but moral absolutist Nightcrawler says that would make the X-Men no better than her. Kitty checks in with the other X-Men, including Rogue and Gambit, who we almost forgot were here. Everybody is okay.

They load Lydia Nance on their Blackbird jet and head to an undescribed location. On the way, Storm tries to get Lydia to tell them where Colossus has been taken, but she refuses, so Prestige brutally rips the information from her mind with telepathy, shocking Kitty, but not enough to stop her. Do you know how much it would cost to reschedule that wedding?! Alpha and Colossus are on an old Roxxon space station.

Kitty leaves Iceman and Fake Pyro behind to keep an eye on Nance while the rest of the team heads to The Triskelon where they take the Aerolift to Alpha Flight's space station. Puck meets them and lends them a spaceship, also promising to try to shoot down anything the Roxxon station tries to launch at the Earth. As the X-Men approach the station, it launches about a hundred missiles at them. The X-Men are in trouble, but Storm takes care of it…

Unfortunately, Storm was only able to take out 99 out of 100 missiles, leaving conveniently the exact number needed to disable the craft, sending the X-Men on a crash landing course for the Roxxon station. Luckily, a crash landing, in this case, isn't so bad since Kitty can phase the entire ship, getting everyone safely inside the station. Once inside, they're attacked by Alpha clones/manifestations/whatever you want to call them, as Kitty phases through the floor and heads to rescue Colossus before she has to return all the wedding gifts from her registry. TO BE CONTINUED!

The Bottom Line

While yes, it's highly likely that Colossus will be rescued in time for the big wedding, and unlikely he'll be dying since he's featured on the upcoming cast of Astonishing X-Men, cynicism aside, the book has been on a roll throughout this and the previous story arc. It's also nice to see the subplots building slowly (Storm growing more powerful thanks to Stormcaster, Prestige slowly losing it, the various team couplings). We would be remiss in not pointing out, however, that there should have been a caption box listing the issue numbers for all of the old Astonishing X-Men references.