Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3) Issue #3 – “Gifted (Part 3)”! In the previous installment, our favorite X-Men busted up a banquet where hostages were being held by some jerkoff named Ord, but then he was possibly killed by a dragon identified as an X-Dragon out of nowhere! So that’s that. We learn some backstory about Kitty Pryde remembering Frost being a complete bitch while Frost was still a villain, so Pryde can’t trust her YET buuuuuuuut I’m thinking she will by Issue #13! Why? Because that’s how stories go, that’s why. We ended Issue #2 with Beast attempting to break into Dr. Rao’s Mutant Cure Lab of Wonders and Amazement. Rao goes “Don’t try to stop me!” and Beast goes “Ok”, and here we are now!
Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3), Issue #3 [September, 2004]
Written by: Joss Whedon
“Gifted (Part 3)”
Look at that cover! How much farther up Wolverine’s hairy-armed sleeves can they take us? Hooooo boy I’m blushing like a bride at a white wedding! Sorry, I spent a good 15 minutes staring at that cover. Where was I? Oh yes.
So far, I have to admit that there’s nothing astonishing about any of this! What differentiates the Astonishing X-Men from the All New X-Men, or the Uncanny X-Men, or the X-Treme X-Men, or the Extraordinary X-Men, or the Amazing X-Men, or the Ultimate X-Men?? How about the Go Fuck Yourself X-Men? God Damn. These mutants are all a bunch of whiny LOSERS! They remind me of me.
GROAN. On with the story…
Kitty Pryde is sitting on a bench with some kid named Wing. Wing’s superpower is flying, it’s important to him, it makes him feel good, and he doesn’t want it gone. Pryde assures him that nobody can make him do anything that he doesn’t want to do. Wing, in ultra-woke 2004, calls her a retard.
This kid is one more R-word away from getting cancelled.
Droves of mutants, meanwhile, are lining up at Benetech Labs for the cure, which means that many DON’T want their powers. Or, rather, it looks like a lot of them are parents with their children because nobody wants their kid to go all Tildie Soames on their asses, I suppose! Wolverine’s watching the news at X-Men HQ, or an apartment, or whatever, and Beast pops in to announce that he’s been up all night trying to analyze Dr. Rao’s cure for himself. Frost looks pissed.
Oh, I guess Ord’s not dead, because we see him in Rao’s lab hootin’ and hollerin’ at her about giving a sample of the cure to a member of the Big Bad X-Men (that’s what you should’ve called it, Joss, ya moron). Dr. Rao isn’t fucking having it, though, and basically tells Ord to buzz off. I’m not sure if I should like Dr. Rao or not, but I do so I’ll embrace it for now! Ord tries to play one last “fuck you, human, you can’t talk to me this way, I own you, you are my puppet, rawr! Snarl!” but it falls flat. Take that, Ord. Get a better name.
“You’re starting to make me Nick Furious, James Marsden.”
Scott “Bakula” “Cyclops” “Buffy” Summers appears to be questioning a S.H.I.E.L.D. officer (I don’t know anything about S.H.I.E.L.D. yet except that the guy from the Julia Louise-Dreyfus show is in it and also it’s a bitch to type out. I’m looking forward to learning that the acronym is probably some tough guy heavy-handed shit). He wants to know why these mercenaries following Ord’s orders were carrying S.H.I.E.L.D. weapons. The S.H.I.E.L.D. officer basically goes “I ‘unno” and then calls Ord a mutant just to make Cyclops mad! It works! It’s easy to make all these superheroes mad, and the other people all know it. That’s why they do it constantly! I can get behind that. Anyway, this S.H.I.E.L.D. officer is not shy about his anti-mutant bigotry, and he and Cyclops get into a back-and-forth hissy fit that shoehorns in some backstory to catch the readers up, but I’m snoring as we speak! Just kidding! But seriously, I guess Magneto razed Manhattan recently or something and Colonel S.H.I.E.L.D. is rubbing it in Cyclops’ face because all the mutants in the world know and talk to each other. When Cyclops asks him why the X-Men team would knowingly harbor a dangerous criminal, Mr. S.H.I.E.L.D. asks him how Frost is doing, and that’s pretty funny! These X-Men need to lighten up.
Beast is still staring at the sample through a microscope even though he probably did that already and there’s not much more you can do after you look at it once, I always say. Wolverine tells him to throw it away and then starts bullying him about wanting to possibly “cure the mutant disease”. They get into what can only be described as a “friendly tussle” that ends with broken glass everywhere. “I used to have a mouth you could kiss,” Beast tells Wolverine, which I think is selling himself a little high but ok. Wolverine tells him that X-Men stick together! And if the community sees an X-Man giving in to the miracle cure then they’ll all be lining up! And, personally, I don’t think Wolverine’s case is as strong as he thinks it is, and I guess Beast agrees, because the two of them start horsing around again like a couple of kooks, busting up the walls of the school in front of all the impressionable young mutant whipper-snappers.
Lucky kids. None of the teachers tried to kill each other at my school.
Frost somehow transports the team to a holodeck that looks like a giant little girl’s room. A giant-little girl’s room? A giant room for a little giant girl? I find out in this scene that the S.H.I.E.L.D. guy is named Nick Fury, and I know who that is because I remember reading about some comics where he was swinging some guy’s intestines around and Stan Lee was reported to have been very sad and bummed that such crude things were happening in his wholesome comics! I also heard Stan Lee was touching some nurses inappropriately in the hospital before he died! Anyway, the X-Men team is coming to terms with the reality that no one is going to help them right now to figure out this mutant cure crisis, so they fumble their way through starting some recon: Beast continues in the lab, Pryde is apparently a computer nerd so they want her to research who might be funding Benetech for this project, Frost is to “check the students”, whatever that means, Cyclops will see what other X-Men teams might know, Wolverine is going to keep drinking beer and watching TV.
Cyclops is not handling leadership very well.
During another long night in the lab, Beast discovers something simply ASTONISHING about the sample! It’s fiendish! Ghoulish! Rotten! Evil! Turgid! Stenchy! Not about the sample itself, but it’s about the body they’re performing the testing on!
Jean Grey?!
You bitch… You skunk… You dog… You cow… You cunt… You goblin… You clown… You snake… You slut…
Final Thoughts
I don’t know much about Jean Grey at all whatsoever, honestly. I don’t know who she is or what she does or who she means to anyone or what happened to her or if she’s dead and why she’s dead if she’s dead. I’m beginning to think that this series was NOT a good starting point for my foray into X-Men! But power through I must!
Also, even though I’ve only otherwise started Ultimate Spider-Man, the New 52 version of Batman, and the New 52 version of Batgirl so far (so my sample size is basically nothing), I can’t help but notice how deeper and more complex the social aspects of this particular story are. I do appreciate that, and it gives me hope that comic books actually can reach the levels of higher art and beyond! My mind’s not blown by anything yet, but I trust that it will happen one of these days.
*snort*
My parents were just into me reading anything as a kid and I was allowed one comic, newspaper or magazine a week on top of my pocket money. So in around 1969-70s I opted for whatever X-Men series was available in our village newsagents at that time, graduating from The Beezer. This was around the time I moved up from primary to comprehensive school – wanted to be seen with something cool, I guess.
Within the space of 12 months, at age 12, I had become pretty tired of it. Asked mum to change my subscription to the NME and never looked back.
This series you are doing right here is perhaps the single most entertaining superhero comic-related thing I’ve ever come across. Thank you for doing what borders on self harm for our deliciously meta enjoyment.
Thank you for your kind words, I’m nothing if not a man of the people.
My exposure to comic books was very limited as a child. My dad grew up with the Stan Lee/Steve Ditko Amazing Spider-Man and maybe a couple of others, but he fell out of it by the time he got out of school. I had a cousin that was super into whatever was going on with the X-Men in the ’90s, but it never imprinted upon me. The movies, any of them, have never done anything for me.
I always liked the idea of these stories, and then I realized that just the sheer amount of mythology and the way comics catalog stories into issues and runs and arcs and volumes, THAT was perfect for satisfying my OCD. And then it clicked. And now I’m in it for the long haul! And a long haul it will be; the deeper I dig the more I see is actually out there. It’s endless.