Oh, dear lord. How has it come to this? Everything that could have gone wrong in the finale of Inhumans vs. X-Men goes wrong in the new issue. A violent sect of religious extremists are given all the credit and hailed as heroes. The legitimate good guys are shamed and retreat with their tails between their legs. And even that turdburglar Young Cyclops gets a moment to be even more of a sanctimonious prick.

And on top of all that, no Strong Guy!

And so my Strong Guy Watch has ended

I try not to let comic book stories bug me as much any more. I don’t want to come off like the typical Comic Book Guy, getting all heated over these funny books. But man, nothing raises my ire more than Marvel grinding their supremely awesome Cyclops storyline into the mud. For years there, they were telling the most exciting, nuanced and brilliant X-Men story in a long time. Renegade Cyclops was like reading gold.

But Inhumans vs. X-Men is the final indignant boot heel into all that good will. Cyclops is dead, his legacy rotten to the core, and Medusa gets to be the pretty, pretty princess superhero that Marvel wants.

This is madness.

Join me after the jump! Full SPOILERS for Inhumans vs. X-Men #6.

I want to start out by saying, again, that I kid because I love. I love Marvel and I love the X-Men, always will. But they can do better. I know there’s a lot of pressure at Marvel to make the Inhumans into a popular franchise, but this is not how to do it. This poorly executed, year-long crossover has only tainted both the Inhuman and X-Men brands.

I don’t want that. I want both to be great comics. And it is with that in mind, I offer the following critique/angry rant.

Let’s set the stage for everybody so that you can all understand what I’m angry about. I’ve written about this before, so I’ll make this recap quick.

The Terrigen Mist is only a few days away from saturating Earth’s atmosphere, making the air toxic to mutants. Medusa and the Inhumans have forbidden the X-Men from destroying the cloud because Terrigen is holy to the Inhumans. It’s how they get their powers. When Cyclops and the X-Men destroyed one Terrigen cloud, Medusa and Black Bolt murdered him for his transgression.

In a last ditch effort to destroy the cloud, the X-Men launched the titular attack of Inhumans vs. X-Men. They incapacitated the Inhumans and tried their best, but the Inhumans continued to oppose their efforts to save the mutant race.

Now, in the final issue, the X-Men are making a final stand to destroy the cloud, with the help of the Young Inhumans, who have become wise to the stakes. But the regular Inhumans are still fighting.

So…what happens? Who wins? Do mutants get to live? Is their fight to save their species successful?

Well shucks, folks! They didn’t have to fight at all! As soon as Medusa learns the truth, she gladly destroys the Terrigen cloud.

This is mind-fuckin’-boggling.

So it’s as simple as that, huh? Medusa finds out that the Terrigen is about to saturate the planet and kill all mutants and she doesn’t even hesitate to destroy the cloud? She ends the entire conflict with the press of a button, simple as that?

What about the EIGHT MONTHS she spent refusing to allow the X-Men to destroy the cloud? They knew that the cloud was killing and sterilizing mutants. They even named the damn disease the cloud caused. It was the M-POX! They gave it a name!

Hell, Medusa was even preparing for war she was so willing to stop the X-Men from destroying the Terrigen cloud.

From Inhumans vs. X-Men #0

But no. Apparently, all the X-Men had to do was tell Medusa what was happening at the start and she would have completely changed her mind.

She MURDERED Cyclops because he dared to stop just one Terrigen cloud. She let the remaining Terrigen continue to KILL and STERILIZE mutants across the globe for EIGHT MONTHS. But just letting her know that the Terrigen poison was getting a touch worse was enough to make her change her mind?

Jeez louise.

And, of course, Medusa is the hero of this story. Her heroic actions to stop the cloud and save the day make her champion.

Oh! Em! Gee! You guys!

She gets to be the bestest, most prettiest princess ever and gets to fall back in love with her husband, Black Bolt! Isn’t she great? Don’t you just want to read a bunch of Medusa comics and buy Medusa merchandise and watch Marvel’s upcoming Inhumans movie/TV show, starring Medusa?

Boy howdy.

But that’s just the start of this crappy issue. Because, as predicted, the story really ends when Emma Frost is turned back into a villain and revealed as the real threat all along!

She wasn’t trying to save the mutant race from chemical genocide. Oh no. Nothing that heroic. Emma has gone crazy and wants to kill the Inhumans herself! And she mind-controlled Forge to build herself an army of Inhuman-hunting super Sentinels to do it!

Welcome to Crazy Town!

Hey, do you all remember when legendary comics writer Grant Morrison took a fascinating anti-hero character named Emma Frost and turned her into the most interesting and exciting new X-Man in a long while? Remember how she was a hero with nuance and layers and complexity? A breath of fresh air after the 90s-era X-Men?

Well that’s all gone. She’s evil now. Insane and evil.

How evil, you ask? Why, Emma Frost is now so evil that she’s gonna combine both Magneto and Cyclops’ head gear to make a SUPER EVIL HELMET!

And she added little spikes to her costume! Super evil, you guys

But the worst is yet to come.

The absolute worst fucking thing about this finale is that, in one line of fucking dialogue, Young Cyclops rewrites history and destroys the last vestiges of heroism in his older version’s legacy. History that was written, by the way, only last year. So it’s not like Marvel can have forgotten that they wrote Death of X.

As far as anybody knew, the X-Men discovered that the Terrigen mist was poisonous to mutants when it killed Jamie Madrox, the Multiple Man. As we, the reader, know from Death of X, that original poison also killed Cyclops. He was killed by the Terrigen Mist cloud on Muir Island.

The death of Cyclops then prompted Emma Frost to project a mental copy of Cyclops and use that illusion to launch a successful attack against the cloud that killed him, dissipating it completely and safely. Another X-Man, Alchemy, died in the process. No Inhumans were harmed.

Then, of course, Medusa and Black Bolt murdered ‘Cyclops’. They didn’t know he was a mental illusion. They thought they were killing the real guy.

Marvel would have us believe that everybody on Earth interpreted Cyclops’ actions as “pre-emptive genocide”. That’s how he became the next Hitler.

But we’re not idiots and we’re not blind.

Cyclops was killed by the Terrigen poison. Emma Frost was spurred on by this fact to destroy a Terrigen cloud, saving countless mutant lives. And she used an illusion of Cyclops to do it. So instead of the world knowing that Cyclops died a horrible, ugly death from M-Pox, he instead went out like a hero, fighting to save the mutant race and murdered by the religious extremists who opposed him.

But over the course of Inhumans vs. X-Men, Young Cyclops learned the truth about how Cyclops died. And when he confronts Emma and the other X-Men with the truth, he decides to change history a little.

Are you fucking kidding me?

An “accident”? Cyclops died in an “accident” before they even knew the Terrigen was poisonous?

What madness is this?

Cyclops didn’t die in an accident! Cyclops led a heroic X-Men mission to save Jamie Madrox, and then just by standing around, he was poisoned by the Terrigen Mist and died within hours.

His horrific death, CAUSE BY THE TERRIGEN, is what spurred the X-Men to launch their attack in the first place! Both Cyclops and Madrox GAVE THEIR LIVES so that mutants would know that they were in danger!

And Medusa and the Inhumans were okay with that FOR EIGHT MONTHS!

From Death of X #1. Cyclops dying from Terrigen while informing Beast that it’s poisonous

In the end, Medusa gets to be the hero who saves the day. She no longer has to feel anything about murdering Cyclops because now everybody knows it wasn’t really Cyclops. She doesn’t have to feel any guilt over all the mutants killed by M-Pox in those eight months. She gets to be a princess and fall back in love with her prince.

And everybody gets to relaunch new comics! Emma Frost was responsible for everything! She’s the fall guy, and everybody else gets to remain super heroic, you guys. So you should buy both new X-Men and new Inhumans comics! Have you heard about ResurreXion?

All their sins have been wiped clean, you guys! You can just forget about the moral complexity of the past two years of comics because it was all Emma Frost’s fault! She’s super evil now, and that solves everything.

At this point, Marvel isn’t even trolling the X-Men anymore. They’re just purging anything even remotely complex or consistent and just hoping we’ll all stop worrying about the details.

Hey! Have you seen the teaser for the new X-Men comic? Oh boy, I wonder who those remaining shadows could be?

Old Man Logan, now in as many simultaneous X-Men comics as regular Logan

I can’t wait to find out what random and perfectly ordinary X-Men characters are going to be in this perfectly ordinary X-Men comic!

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