Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Uncanny X-Men (Vol. 4), Issue #3! In the previous installment, who cares. I don’t like this series one bit. Let’s just keep it rolling.

Uncanny X-Men (Vol. 4), Issue #3 [April, 2016]
Written by: Cullen Bunn

Uh oh, Magneto literally has blood on his hands! The cover art is a little on the nose already! What other allusions, metaphors and idioms are they going to shove down my throat today?

There is a protest outside Seattle, Washington’s M-Pox Crisis Center. “Mutants = Disease” says one sign. “Don’t Bring Sickness” says another. “Finish the Damn Book, George R. R. Martin” on yet another! Psylocke maneuvers through the crowd incognito, and by that I mean she has her big pink lightning bolt-esque eye-mask thing on. Magneto’s with her looking all dolled-up Magneto-style. “I can tweak the surface thoughts of everyone in the crowd as long as they’re distracted. They can’t see us.”

You better hope not, baby. The crowd looks like they’re going to eat a bunch of mutants for breakfast like so many Berry Berry Kix. They sneak into a tent where Triage is hanging out healing M-Pox victims much to Psylocke’s surprise. But Triage, rubbing his sleepy eyes, tells her that the cure is only temporary. He then looks straight into Magneto’s face and says “Magneto…”, so now everyone is up to speed!

“I thought you were dead or something,” says Triage. “But here you are.”

Like a bad habit, son.

Triage wants to help mutants, but he’s done with the X-Men. Fuck the X-Men and the big, beautiful horses they rode in on.

We can throw your bones in a sack and dump them out an airplane, too, if you’d rather do it that way? I’m game.

Psylocke’s lockey-senses start tingling. “…they’re here. I’m picking up three of them.”

Oh no! Not the Rough Riders! Or the Dirty Riders! Or whatever they’re called, I don’t remember! They’re here to shove Triage’s buttcheeks up into his anal cavity! Run!

“All mutant healers have been marked for death,” Psylocke says with a face that suggests she’s mad at Triage for not knowing this already. “You’re next.”

Magneto says “I’ll deal with the riders” and then he makes them pancakes.

The Dark Riders try to use wind powers to blow tents out of the way, revealing that sweet, sweet healer man candy, but Magneto is here to distract them with some boogity-boogity glowing eyeballs. And he warns Psylocke not to stop him or else it’ll be her butthole that she’ll be pulling Triage’s buttcheeks out of.

While Magneto distracts them, Psylocke attempts to penetrate their brain skulls. But they’ve been trained to resist psychic intrusion! So now what? Well, since Magneto is distracting them, Psylocke is able to penetrate their brain skulls. That seems awfully underwhelming, you know.

In about four seconds, Psylocke is done and now they have everything that they need. Magneto, you can now fuck them up royally with your ultra magnets and your dipoles and your what-have-you. And after he does that (and he does it quite gruesomely, I may add), he turns back to Triage. “Now, Mr. Muse… as my associate mentioned… you need to come with us.”

Triage doesn’t wanna. He needs to be here treating the M-Pox. Magneto informs this sucker that the Dark Riders will just send more forces next time. Buttcheeks and buttholes, remember? You’re in deep doo-doo unless you come with the big, scary X-Men.

Awww, I wanted to make a sign. It would have said “The X-Men suck and Wolverine smells like a dead cat”.

Triage asks straight up if these X-Men are going to stop the dudes killing all the healers, and the answer is “sorta”. The problem is that the Dark Riders have a head start. They’ve already killed a million billion healers and there’s just you and Yuna from Final Fantasy X left.

Speaking of nothing I just talked about, Monet “M” St. Croix flies to Tibet to barge into a Buddhist temple to deliver a warning to some sittin’-cross-legged menacing figure shrouded in white with glowing turquoise eyes. Always with the glowing eyes. “I know who you are,” says the figure. “And I know of the grim tidings that have brought you before me. While I appreciate your concern… I hope you will also respect my wishes when I say… I have no intention of leaving this place.”

Why? It looks like a dank shithole to me. Is it rent-controlled? Is that what it is? The figure is named Shen Xorn, and after some quick research on Ask Jeeves I became bored to tears so I stopped looking him up. Monet tells the healing mutant that bad guys are coming to hurt the healing mutants. And that means him. He’s not taking it seriously.

Monet informs the guy, who has been living under a rock since Obama brought some sass to the White House, that mutants are dying, Terrigen mists are sweeping the continents, and democracy is crumbling in Hungary.

Xorn offers Monet tea.

Isolation gets boring after a while, actually, right? Come with the X-Men and they can protect you while you chat with Wolverine about… armpits. “If the mists find me here, so be it,” Xorn says, sipping his drink. “And if these hunters you warn me about come for me… perhaps I will offer them tea. In any case, I am prepared for the fate that lies before me.”

Sounds like a real manly man, this guy. Meanwhile, Triage has been successfully scooped up by Magneto and Psylocke and they’re flying in the Magneto Jet talking about why the Dark Riders want the healers dead.

It’s probably because you talked hella smack about their mamas.

Magneto and Psylocke fill him in on the whole thing. It’s because of natural selection being interrupted and also because healers aren’t very environmentally friendly. Littering all over the fucking place, honestly.

So here’s the bright idea: Magneto and Co. are smuggling all of the healers and whisking them away to Genosha. The Magneto Jet lands in the dry, dusty desert where, once upon a time, Magneto was trying to build a mutant colony as a refuge. Because that would have been fun. Hey, mutants. How about some sand for dinner?

Magneto reminisces about how a rogue sentinel killed 16,000,000 mutants (eek!) and how a Terrigen mist cloud killed 60 more (ook!). So that was the end of that idea. “Now… Genosha is naught but a staging ground for war,” Magneto says bleakly.

Sabretooth is already there waiting, and he wastes no time being scary and intimidating for no reason with Tirage. Then he briefs Magneto and Psylocke on Monet’s failure in Tibet. Meanwhile, Psylocke was able to figure out “the hole” where the Dark Riders are hiding. They’re going to carpet bomb the place! With kisses!

Tirage realizes that he is the only healing that these second-rate X-Men were able to save. When this is brought to Magneto’s attention, he absent-mindedly goes “we’re gonna carpet bomb the Dark Riders’ hideout with kisses, son.”

Meanwhile, at the Someday Corporation storage facility, some guy who fancies himself as Fantomex snoops around with a couple of companions. “The Hellfire Club went to a lot of trouble to locate this little warehouse,” he says. “Now that we’re here, let’s make the most of our time.”

*gets out the Twister mat*

They find a room packed with stasis tubes. “Look at them all,” Fantomex says. “Mutants who have willingly placed themselves in a state of suspended animation… hoping to one day wake up in a better world.”

And then it’s a whole bunch of BRAKKA BRAKKA BRAKKA BRAKKA BRAKKA BRAKKA BRAKKA!! That’s gunfire, you see. Should’ve been obvious from the onomatopoeia, right? Anyway, Fantomex gets away in his weird pink spaceship and starts talking to Mystique on the videophone.

The plot thickens.

?

Final Thoughts

Fuck this shit. It took me three sessions to get through this write-up and I’m not about to let this shitty comic ruin my day. Except it already has! My lividity knows no bounds.