Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3) Issue #6 – “Gifted (Part 6)”! In the previous installment, the metal guy named Peter is supposed to be dead and Pryde tries to hash this out with him, but he’s obtuse about it in only a way a supposed-to-be-dead guy can be. Meanwhile, Dr. Rao shows up while the rest of the X-Men were held hostage in that one room with the blue and yellow mutant girl corpse. She’s all like “RUARBABAURARBRBR WHAT’S GOING ON HERE??” and tries to explain that the blue and yellow mutant was already dead when she got here! Heh heh! Oh yeah, Ord shows up again somehow but Peter and Pryde make their way upstairs and give Ord a taste of TEXAS JUSTICE and by that I mean Ord pisses Peter off by saying he’s made of steel, when instead he is indeed made of rage, and then he rages all over Ord. When things look like they’ll be ok, Nick Fury pops in with his gun-toting fun bunch ready to give the X-Men a taste of TEXAS JUSTICE. What the fuck am I even talking about? Good god.

This is the final issue of the Gifted story arc. $20 says that I’ll have more questions than answers, which has been completely true so far anyway. So why the fuck would it change now? Maybe I should move on to Buffy comics next, Joss. You’d like that wouldn’t you.

Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3), Issue #6 [December, 2004]
Written by: Joss Whedon
“Gifted (Part 6)”

Nice cover art. Looks like erotic Star Trek fan fiction, except instead of Data it’s some chrome-plated muscle dude, and instead of Geordi LaForge it’s Kitty Pryde wearing a Georgi LaForge uniform. Personally, I’d rather read the Data/Geordi slash fiction than Issue #6! Am I being facetious?? Only I will ever know…

Right off the bat it looks like something flashbacky is going on since all the panels are in black and white. That’s a classic flashback film technique right there! Except they didn’t use it in the TV show Lost and we all know what happened to Lost. Hey, are there any Lost comic books? I should look into that. ANYWAY, Dr. Rao is talking to Ord, who appears to have provided her with tons of useful data regarding development of the “cure”, but Rao remembers her Hippocratic Oath and is skeptical that Ord’s intentions aren’t altruistic and pure. I mean, I suppose if the fact that he’s some sort of 9-foot tall monster man isn’t a clue enough. He reassures her sinisterly that he, in fact, actually brought Peter back from the dead. So there! Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Rao! The flashback sequence ends with Ord asking the green-haired lady from the end of the last issue (beside Nick Fury during the armed ambush) for Tildie Soames’ file. We’re starting to come full circle here! As you may remember, Tildie is the little girl whose nightmares came to life and killed her parents from the beginning of this story arc. Chills!

Things are in color again, so the flashback is over! Or maybe this is like Memento where the black and white parts are in chronological order and the color parts are in reverse order and Joey Pants gets shot in the head. Wolverine is super pissed, and he’s usually already normal pissed, so the only thing that happens when he’s super pissed is that he grits his teeth a little bit more. Nick Fury tells the X-Men team to walk away, but that’s not happening anytime soon, so we’re at an impasse. Wolverine asks who the green-haired lady is. No answer. Nick Fury asks why Peter isn’t dead. No answer. Stalemate again! Pryde accuses Fury of holding Peter in Benetech Labs and torturing him incessantly in pursuit of the mutant cure. Fury states his ignorance. Frost calls Fury a “berk”, and I’m going to look that up really quick… … rude! Fury, at any rate, is taken quite aback that Peter is indeed alive and frowning right in front of him, so he asks the green-haired lady (Agent Brand, as it turns out) for a quick sidebar. She basically tells him to go fuck himself, so even on the same side we’re getting nowhere here. Fury tells her to go fuck herself right back, and now we’re getting somewhere! Brand decides to start talking.

BOO! HISS! GET OFF THE STAGE! BOOOO! WE WANT ZEPPELIN!

Agent Brand works with the Sentient Worlds Observation and Response Department (S.W.O.R.D., which works alongside S.H.I.E.L.D., how about that shit huh? How about that fucking shit??) So while S.H.I.E.L.D. handles Earth stuff, S.W.O.R.D. handles all the other non-Earth stuff. Cyclops finally says something for the first time in this comic book: “awwwwwww nertz!” Wait, let me double check… …no, uh, he actually gets catty about funding extraterrestrial terrorism, but Brand argues back that they’re trying to prevent an intergalactic war.

Suddenly, some rather unpleasant-looking mutants bust through the wall and demand the cure. This includes a guy with his face on his torso (his superpower is self-fellatio maybe?), a child who looks like a flying blue flame (his superpower is lighting up high-hanging candelabras) and some Keanu Reeves-looking purple guy with long, skinny limbs (his superpower is basketball). Fury and Brand’s army are incapacitated while these freaks, and many more, start jumping around the place. During the FRACAS, Ord somehow regains consciousness and slips away. I guess. He ends up crashing through the window of the lab’s observation room where they’re holding Tildie Soames, because no one in this comic book series uses doors. Hold on, there’s a lot of goddamned stuff going on all of a sudden. Maybe this is like Memento after all?

Little Tildie Soames is going to need some therapy and about 40 prescriptions in about 10 years.

I think we’re at a point later in the story now. The X-Men team are all standing over Agent Brand, who is lying on the floor. She starts talking about breakworlds and timeshadows and god knows what the fuck else. Vampires? The Initiative? Wolfram & Hart? Rupert Giles? Anyway, these timeshadows that Brand speaks of can glimpse into the future. She makes it clear that they can’t visit or change the future, they can just kind of see it. I don’t know why the hell she starts talking about this. These mysterious timeshadows that I’ve never heard about before until now have seen the future and it’s not looking good, my friends. It’s not looking good at all. The breakworld gets destroyed! Utterly, utterly destroyed! Oh no! By a mutant! TILDIE SOAMES?! RUPERT GILES?! Ok, it’s coming together now, these seers saw the future and they say that some X-Man single-handedly destroyed whatever this breakworld is, but they don’t know who it was at all, so they began to design a cure for mutantism so that they could cure all mutants so that the mutants could be cured before this particular mutant destroys the oh-so-special breakworld.

All my S.H.I.E.L.D. training didn’t prepare me for this! Let me see that training manual again, where’s the section on cocksucking motherfucking spaceships?

Since all Kitty Pryde cares about is Peter McNoShirt, she asks if Brand knew they were torturing him this whole time. She admits that she did, but Fury didn’t, and before she can admit to Beast the Rao knew, Rao bursts into the room (NOT THROUGH A WALL AT ALL! SEE, THERE’S SOMETHING TO BE SAID FOR CURING THE MUTANTS, THAT’S ALL I’M TRYING TO SAY HERE!) to announce that Ord had kidnapped Tildie. Tildie Swinton??? That’s not anyone’s name at all!

Rao’s news alarms Brand, who radios Fury and tells him and all his men to evacuate the premises and get at least 500 yards away. When the X-Men asks her why, she simply says “He’s gonna leave.” Next thing we see is a cocksucking motherfucking spaceship blasting up into cocksucking motherfucking space! They can’t shoot him down, he’s got poor little innocent accidental murderer Tildie “Patrick” Mahomes in there with him! They can’t just do nothing, what about the, you know, whatever?! Peter has an idea, he’s going to throw Wolverine as hard as he can into the sky, and I’m sure the rest of the X-Men are more than willing to deal with the loss if Wolverine bites it right now. That guy’s a real crank.

Wolverine “lands” on the outside the spacecraft, and by “lands” I mean “slams into the damn thing pretty hard lol”. Inside the ship, Ord is talking scary-talk to the frightened little girl. “There will be nightmares. I will make the Earth an endless, shrieking blackness”. This guy must be good at parties! Wakka wakka! Before Ord can even finish a fourth sentence, Wolverine punches a fist through a window on the ship and goes elbow-deep into Ord’s sexy little mouth. He calmly instructs him to land the ship back on Earth.

Whoops, haha. Get the kids out of the room for this one. This mating ritual is intended for mature audiences.

Fury stands among the ruins of Benetech Labs and declares that everyone should just pretend none of this ever happened. The X-Men think Fury’s full of baloney! Fury defends Brand’s actions, even if he doesn’t agree with nearly all of them, and insists there’s something bigger going on here and they all need to walk away. At this point the X-Men all walk away.

EPILOGUE TIME! Things are worse than when they began! The cure is now in the hands of the government! Mutants are rioting everywhere! One of them is still predestined to destroy a breakworld and start an intergalactic war! On the plus side, says Cyclops, Peter’s alive! Good ol’ Pete, he seems sharp as a tack, that one. A real asset to the cause!

Cyclops asks Beast is he’s going to use the little sample of the cure that he still has in his private lab. Beast still doesn’t know (SPOILER ALERT, THIS IS 2004, RIGHT? HE’S STILL BEAST IN 2021, AIN’T HE? SHEEEEEE-IT), but is thinking he won’t since “an X-Men never gives up” or some other similarly empty superhero platitude.

Pryde and Peter are out on the school lawn. Peter is wearing a shirt! He wistfully looks across the grounds, lamenting that nothing in the world has changed while he was dead. He also finds it quite a coincidence that Pryde was the one that found him. Pryde doesn’t really agree that it’s a coincidence at all…

We end with Frost in the school looking out a window upon Peter and Pryde. She is talking to someone off-screen (off-panel?). The unknown companion tells Frost that Peter being alive “changes the equation”. Frost says that “she’s still the problem”. The unknown companion tells Frost not to worry. “When it starts… …we deal with her first”.

Final Thoughts

What a long write-up. Sorry for making you read all that on my blog where I write a lot all the time for people to read.

So that’s it for this story! The cure was meant to prevent an apocalypse, and now the cure still exists! What a problem.

I’m sure I’ll get back to this particular run eventually, but methinks I’ll pick up another X-Men series when I revisit this franchise. I’m not completely sold on the X-Men just yet, and I’m guessing some of Joss Whedon’s funny-boy business is partly to blame? Even if this IS one of the most critically acclaimed X-Men runs of all time. Meh.