Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: All-New X-Men (Vol. 1) Issue #9! In the previous installment, Young Warren gets the heebie-jeebies when he encounters his older self and he’s all weird and overly happy like some sort of pod person. The Avengers get involved in a fight with Hydra and learn that Beast has manipulated the space-time continuum AGAIN.

While Young Warren cries and attempts to use the Time Cube to get back home, Jean Grey manipulates his mind and stops him in his tracks.

“Stop worrying,” she tells the rest of the very worried X-Men. “I’m in total control.”

Eek! Ook!

All New X-Men (Vol. 1), Issue #9 [May, 2013]
Written by: Brian Michael Bendis

The young X-Men find themselves with Kitty Pryde in Times Square. “So in the present day everything is a commercial?” Young Scott asks his current-day tour guide. The answer is a resounding YES!

Jean Grey invades Pryde’s head, which pisses her off. “Just because I leave my bedroom door open doesn’t give you the right to go in and start going through my stuff, right?” Jean’s like “eep” and wonders how Pryde can even tell. It’s because she was trained to tell, so watch whose brain your invading, kiddo! Plus, there’s a lot of sex stuff that a lot of people are into that would freak you the fuck out. Kitty Pryde, for example, is really into tubs full of orange Jell-O and–

Whut? Where was I? Anyway, sorry! Pryde warns Jean that she’s going to need to get a lot better at her ability to pull a fast one on people like Kitty Pryde.

“Why are you scared of me now?” Jean asks, changing the subject, looking angry.

“Because you’ve been acting scary,” Pryde responds. “That stuff you pulled with Angel? That scares people.”

Now that we’ve had a helpful lesson on what is and isn’t scary, and why infiltrating his mind and changing his mood wasn’t a good thing, we can focus on the task at hand: lookin’ for Sentinels! Mutant-hunting artificial intelligence.

“They make mutant-hunting robots?”

“They do.”

“Specifically to hunt mutants.”

“Specifically.”

“Who is this ’they’?”

Listen, we go through the ins and outs of who “they” are, but it doesn’t matter who “they” are. It matters that these young mutants know how to defeat or escape the Sentinels. I think the “they” should matter, but I’m just a guy on my computer looking for answers! I’m very suspicious of any and all “theys” out there.

Speaking of Sentinels, what a coincidence! The Sentinels descend down to them in the middle of Times Square. “Everyone! Like we practiced!” yells everybody’s favorite mutant supervisor, Scott Aloysius McGillicuddy Summers. If that is his real name. Then, like they practiced, they use their mutations to mutant these bitches away from Mutantville.

*lifts baseball bat with brain and smacks Kitty Pryde with full force*

The X-Men all jump around and cavort while Kitty Pryde stands there arms-crossed and judging their tactics. Crash bang crash oww bang bang woop woop crash awooogah beep beep and so on and so forth. This goes on for a while. It doesn’t look good. They fail miserably.

“Times Square program pause.” Pryde pretty much facepalms. “So what do we think we did wrong there? And don’t say everything. It was almost everything.”

She shuts down the program completely and asks the Iceboy what he thinks the problem was. He’s preoccupied. “Seriously, our Danger Room is like a big red ball that flies at us really fast. Some hoops and a– a– this is really elaborate.”

Pryde tells him to shut up about his Quidditch Danger Room and explain what they did wrong, goddamnit. The answer is this: Iceboy tried to save Kitty Pryde even though he should already know that she can phase through shit. Those robots can’t hurt her. He wasted precious nanoseconds and now they’re all fucking dead. DEAD.

Now, Young Hank Beast, this guy sucks too. And Scott, oohhhhhh Scotty. The worst of the bunch! Here’s what you did wrong, Scott: fuck you. That’s what.

In short, everyone has to figure out who the leader is and let him/her lead! Everyone was doing their own thing all willy-nilly and they all looked like complete garbage doing it! Ugh! Where are Kitty Pryde’s anxiety meds?? She’s going to need the whole bottle.

Whoa whoa whoa, James Dean. You think you’re cool standing there looking aloof?… well, yeah… I guess you kinda do…

“Each of you will be getting a copy of the training footage,” Pryde tells them, assigning them some homework. “I suggest you relive the pain and we’ll discuss more of it after dinner.”

Oh boy, dinner! Mac and cheese with little pieces of Spam in it? And chocolate milk!

Angel isn’t impressed. He doesn’t want to be there. He hates this whole X-Men thing. He wants to flip burgers at Subway and they don’t even make burgers. “I thought we were here because you guys were scared that Cyclops was about to commit mutant genocide. Where is this mutant genocide?”

Fair. This is news to Pryde, who is just now learning that Henry “Big Beast” McCoy told the youngins these exact words. Hmm… well, at any rate, Pryde has been tasked with boning up their powers and making sure they don’t die! The stuff about mutant genocides is a side quest.

The kids file out, but Scott stands in a corner with his head down. Looking pitiful on purpose, probably. He catches Jean’s attention. “Who is Mystique?” she asks him, suddenly. Getting in people’s brains again, I see. Uncouth. “You met a blue woman named Mystique,” she continues after he angrily protests.

Kitty Pryde is alarmed, especially since she hasn’t eaten her bottle of pills yet. “When did this happen? Here in the school?”

Listen, lady. None of your fucking beeswax. He runs out without another word, but Pryde gives him the ol’ “don’t you dare leave this room when I’m trying to talk to you, young man”.

Oh, he dares, all right.

Meanwhile, at Ryker’s Maximum Security Installation on Ryker’s Island (where seconds-in-command win over ladies with their immaculate trombone skills), Maria Hill shows up in her fancy S.H.I.E.L.D. helicopter to do what the Ryker’s guards think is an impromptu inspection.

Don’t worry, it’s nothing like that! She just has a big, scary criminal here! The newest inmate! Everyone say hi!

Wait a minute, no one said Maria Hill was visiting. No matter! She’s here now, ain’t she. Not to worry, this new inmate is wearing adamantium shackles from Tony Stark’s personal sex dungeon.

Wait a minute, maybe these aren’t actually adamantium shackles.

Wait a minute, maybe adamantium shackles don’t actually exist?

Wait a minute.

Bringing a terrifying bad guy to kill the whole army stationed on a prison island. Classic Maria Hill.

So, yeah, she’s actually Mystique in a clever disguise. “Hello. Believe it or not, I’m here to rescue you,” she says to a thus far unseen prisoner. “I know you and I have not always seen eye-to-eye, but you know I admire you and your powers.”

Mystique tells this thus far unseen prisoner that she used to care about mutants. That was back when Charles Xavier was still alive! Now that he’s a dead piece of shit, his dead piece of shit dream has died along with him. “So screw it.” Mystique then asks the thus far unseen prisoner if they want to get together and use their powers to get filthy rich. We’re talking vaults full of fuck-you money. Swimming pools filled with chocolate syrup just for fun. We’re talking all sorts of world leaders lining up just for the opportunity to be sniped through the forehead. That last one has nothing to do with riches, but it sounds fun.

The now seen prisoner likes the idea of getting rich. “Better than sitting here and staring at the wall.” I guess this woman is someone named Lady Mastermind, which Mystique points out as sexist, but I’ve never heard of her nor her sexist name before. She’s wearing a leather top that exposes her whole torso and barely covers her nipples, which is typical attire for the most maximum-security prison in this section of the universe.

A few guards point their guns at them as they try to leave. “The Avengers will be here any minute! On the ground! Now!”

Oooooh, the Avengers. What are they going to show up to do? Suck some prison dicks? These women aren’t phased one bit. In fact, it’s time to enjoy destroying some nameless grunts. “Just scare the hell out of them so we can get the hell out of here,” Mystique says, antsy.

Lady Mastermind scares the hell out of them! She conjures up some zombie versions of the Avengers and has them tear the guards all up. There’s a full-page spread that looks like a blood orgy and just as gross!

Come here and I’ll show you. It’s right across the street from Fist City, punk.

Warren approaches Beast in his lab and asks where the fuck all this genociding is at. Beast deflects and starts talking to him about the school. The Jean Grey School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The school is safe haven for all deplorable, ugly mutants, but step one foot outside of the school grounds? Then the Mutant Police show up to ram rusty hooks into your rectal cavity the first chance they get. They’re out there right now, waiting! And Scott Summers, Scott Fudging Summers, he wants to kill these human beings with the rusty butthole hooks! “This is dangerous talk.” To start a revolution when there are just a handful of mutants and billions of non-mutants, those numbers don’t look good at all. Even if many of those regular humans are just babies from South and East Asia, they still roam in packs! Have you ever been confronted with a group of infants from Brunei? Ruthless!

Beast sees two options: “We either fight Cyclops, take him head on… or we join him in his fight with the humans.”

And no one wants to do either.

It will take humans with a Sentinel knocking on Beast’s front door for him to start pushing back. And even then, meh. Beast is a lover, not a fighter, and boy does he enjoy some good lovin’. “I didn’t bring you here to witness the mutant genocide,” he reminds Young Angel. “I brought you here to avoid a mutant genocide.”

Cool beans. We all work hard every day to avoid a genocide. Some of us work harder than others. I don’t have to work very hard at it, for example. But someone like Vladimir Putin doesn’t work at it at all. Quite the opposite, in fact! Where am I going with this?

Beast then sees something that makes him gasp and drop his monocle into his wine glass, but we don’t get to see what it is yet. We move on to Kitty Pryde approaching Young Scott in the school’s, uh, large kitchen. Someone who looks like a very drunk vampire is getting something out of the fridge. “Mystique?” she frantically gets up in his face. “You bump into a character like Mystique, you tell someone.”

No! Scott doesn’t wanna! He’s, like, 12 and angsty and he ain’t gonna let no woman push him around. Pryde doesn’t get to say much more, because something outside the window distracts her completely. And then Scott looks. Then the rest of the youngins look. Then Wolverine looks and, if you can believe this, he’s not happy.

It’s Old Cyclops and his merry band of misfit toys.

Final Thoughts

SHOWDOWN AT JEAN GREY MAGORIUM’S WONDER EMPORIUM. Beefs will be settled right here, right now. Beast is gonna be like “LOOK, MAN, YOU BETTER *cut* *it* *out* WITH YOUR GENOCIDAL REVOLUTION FEAR-MONGERING MALARKEY”, and Cyclops is gonna be like “ok”.