MYTHCOMICS: [“ORIGIN OF A SPECIES”] (THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF CYCLOPS AND PHOENIX 1-4, 1996)

 

       

 

I wasn’t regularly reading Marvel’s line of X-books in the late eighties. I did purchase secondhand issues, so I was vaguely aware of the debut of two major X-villains, “Apocalypse” in Louise Simonson’s X-FACTOR and “Mister Sinister” in Chris Claremont’s X-MEN. But few such developments had any personal resonance for me once I was no longer reading with a sense of total involvement. I even scoffed at the latter villain, since his design seemed derivative of the X-Man Colossus. Eventually I came to understand that Sinister was some sort of clone-maker, which became significant in the long and winding “Madeleine Pryor saga," and that Apocalypse was an immortal badass dedicated to “the survival of the fittest.” Most of the stories collected in the TPB “X-MEN: THE RISE OF APOCALYPSE” didn’t make me any more invested in the two villains. The one exception, though, was the mini-series THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF CYCLOPS AND PHOENIX, written by Peter Milligan and illustrated by John Paul Leon and Klaus Janson. The four issues possess no over-arcing story-title, so I’ve chosen one of the intertitles to designate the whole narrative: issue #2’s “The Origin of a Species.” The cover-copy promises the reader a more specific origin—that of Mister Sinister—while the cover itself shows the figure of Apocalypse, Sinister’s sometime partner-in-evil, looming in the background.

 

Origin-tales require their authors to turn back time’s winged arrow figuratively, but in “Species” the time-shift is literal. With the help of your basic “time lord intervention,” X-heroes Cyclops and Phoenix are charged with journeying back to 19^th-century England to prevent the immortal Apocalypse from wreaking havoc in that timeframe. The heroes are dropped Terminator-style (i.e., buck naked) into 1859 London—which date Milligan clearly chose because it was the year in which Charles Darwin published ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES. It’s also a time-period when Marvel-Earth harbored no mutants except Apocalypse, who was spawned in ancient Egypt. In effect Cyclops and Phoenix have entered a “terra incognita” for their kind, a singular era in which the scientific idea of mutation was first codified—as well as one in which the conflicts between humanity and inhumanity took on new dimensions.

 

Coincident with the arrival of the heroes, Apocalypse awakens from hibernating in a time-capsule beneath the sewers of London, without much detail about when and why he chose that site for his big sleep. Upon awakening, the villain doesn’t seem to have any particular big scheme in mind, though as always, he’s raring to unleash the dogs of war upon humanity as part of his personal eugenics program. But by dumb luck he happens to learn the name of a scientist named Essex—and thereby hangs the story of the first collaboration of Apocalypse and Sinister.

 

The reader meets Nathaniel Essex and his wife Rebecca before either Apocalypse or the heroes. Following a two-page teaser which takes place in “real time,” Milligan and Leon send us back one extra month, to show us the background of the Man Who Will Be Sinister. Essex, a prominent English biologist, is seen at his estate reading the recently published Darwinian magnum opus. He complains to Rebecca—who is pregnant with the couple’s second child—that Darwin is “still shackled by too many moral constraints.” Rebecca, a mother-to-be who’s already lost their previous child to illness, defends the need for morals to structure society. But Essex, despite never having seen a super-powered mutant in his life, intuits that “some humans might, in time, evolve into gods,” and so he has no use for anything reminiscent of a Christian god and his restrictions.

 

Later, Essex unveils his radical theories to a conference of the British Royal Society, which the celebrated Darwin himself also attends. The obsessed scientist confirms the influence of “incremental changes” upon the flow of life, but also argues for the position we now call “saltation theory,” which allows for sudden, rapid transformations as well. To illustrate his almost religious conviction, Essex imitates one aspect of the Frankenstein mythos—constructing a hybrid organism out of corpses, apparently “mutated” by the addition of angel-like wings—though he stops short of the Full Victor, since the corpse-construct is no more alive than any other medical cadaver. The gathered scientists are revolted by this mix-and-match approach to biology, and Darwin opines that Essex has been addled by the loss of his son, broadly implying that the new theory is compensation for that loss. 

 

Essex’s reaction to this rejection is precisely that of Frankenstein: he buries himself in experimentation on unfortunate “freaks” taken prisoner by a local band of cutpurses, “the Marauders” (figurative ancestors of a similar group of henchmen Sinister will use in the 20^th century). Rebecca sees her husband more and more consumed by his inhuman crusade, and by the end of this jaunt into “one month ago,” she intuits that he may even have defiled the grave of their first son for his experiments. This is the resolution of the two-page teaser I mentioned earlier, wherein pregnant Rebecca is seen feverishly digging up her first child’s grave—and finding an empty coffin. A reader might reasonably expect that Essex exhumed the corpse to revive it, but Essex doesn’t do resurrections, and Milligan doesn’t ever say what the scientist did with the boy’s remains—though the fact that the kid was named “Adam” brings in yet more Shelleyan overtones.

 

Around this same time, Apocalypse wales up and just happens to question one of Essex’s Marauder-henchmen, which makes the villain eager to talk with the scientist. Cyclops and Phoenix not only arrive naked, they also get separated into very different venues. Cyclops manifests in the depths of the sewers from which the Marauders cull their deformed quarry, and, despite an early contretemps, he ends up making allies of London’s quasi-Morlocks. Phoenix gets to make a more celestial descent, crashing through the roof of Westminster Abbey during services. Leon and Janson (whose inks here are some of his best work ever) get quite a bit of visual mileage out of the contrast between the “upper” and “lower” worlds, which contrast is of course something Milligan exploits throughout the SPECIES script.

 

Milligan explicitly refers to the relationship between Essex and Apocalypse as a “Faustian bargain,” but like Faust, Essex hasn’t completely given himself over to evil. Essex does put Apocalypse (deftly wearing a human disguise) in contact with a society of corrupt aristocrats whom the mutant can manipulate, and these sordid rich guys are also an X-reference, for they make up the 19^th century Hellfire Club—albeit long before it was taken over by the full-time villainous club-members who make life difficult for the X-heroes in the 20^th century.

 

When Cyclops and Phoenix finally encounter Essex, they recognize him as the man who caused them endless suffering with his cloning science, and Cyclops is mightily tempted to play “kill baby Hitler,” even though Essex has not yet become Mister Sinister. Apocalypse fights with the duo and spirits away Cyclops, after which he binds the hero and makes him listen to screeds like, “You cannot combat strength with goodness and loyalty, only with greater strength.” Meanwhile, Essex regains a little of his humanity by succoring Phoenix when she’s injured. However, it’s too late for the Man of Science. Rebecca dies in childbirth, taking her second child with her, and leaves her husband with his new identity, that of being entirely “sinister.”

 

Apocalypse continues his plot to make Earth into a “modern Golgotha” (by which one assumes he means a “hill of skulls,” not the site of a transcendent savior). Phoenix tries to rescue Cyclops, but the villain subdues both crusaders. Apocalypse then confers super-villain status upon Essex, so that he becomes “forever branded” as Mister Sinister. However, the machinations of the high and mighty are laid low when some of Cyclops’ lowlife-allies venture into Apocalypse’s lair and free the X-heroes. By that time Apocalypse is off to foster the, uh, apocalypse. Phoenix manages to restrain Cyclops from killing the nascent super-villain Sinister, and to some extent Sinister responds by telling the heroes where they can find Apocalypse. The two of them prevent Apocalypse from one of his dastardly deeds, but the time-spell starts wearing off, drawing them back to their own era. Apocalypse, his plans foiled by both Sinister and the X-Men, returns to his hibernation chamber, the better to set up continuity with whatever Marvel writers had him do next.

 

In my review of GOD LOVES, MAN KILLS, I noted that only rarely had X-writers managed to use the implicit themes of the X-concept to best effect. “Origin of a Species” can take its place as one of the few times an author managed to use those themes to meditate on the divided nature of humanity. There are no super-powered mutants, but our myths of exaltation and damnation are as real as the proverbial Berkleyan stone. “Species” concludes in 1882, as the mutated Essex attends the funeral of his former colleague Charles Darwin. The story ends with the villain reaffirming his commitment to inhuman experimentation—and yet, the last image is that of a music box that once belonged to Essex’s wife. Sinister discards the trinket, trying to put the past behind him. But the “camera’s” focus on the box, uttering its bell-like sounds, may be sounding the toll for the eventual overturning of his evil devotions—to the extent, that is, that any comic-book super-fiend’s destiny can ever come to an end.