X-amining Generation X #25

"The End"/ "Behind the Eight Ball" / "Cutting to the Chase" / "Putting Out the Fire" / "The Great Escape" / "Point of No Return" / "Enemy Mine" / "Duel" / "Splitting Heirs" / "On Land or Sea or Foam"

March 1997

In a Nutshell

Black Tom and Mondo attack the school! 

Writer: Scott Lobdell
Penciler: Chris Bachalo
Inker: Al Vey and Scott Hana
Letterer: Richard Starkings/Comicraft
Colorist: Vancata
Editor: Bob Harras

Plot
After secretly lurking in the school's biosphere, Black Tom executes his revenge plot against Banshee, capturing Monet, Paige, Chamber, Synch and Skin while taking control of Emma's body and letting his evil Mondo creation loose in the school. As Banshee fights his demented cousin, Bastion secretly arrives and captures Jubilee. He also executes the evil Mondo. Meanwhile, Franklin Richards, Artie, Leech, Tana Nile, Howard the Duck and Beverly Switzler are rescued from Black Tom by the Man-Thing. Black Tom proceeds to force Banshee and Emma to fight one another. Banshee refuses to hurt Emma, but she takes control of his mind and forces him to blast her with his sonic scream in order to save the students. Just then, Banshee realizes the kids Tom has captured are just lifeless shells, and Black Tom reveals he's sequestered the real kids somewhere safe. Suddenly, the overlooked Penance attacks Black Tom, slicing apart his plant body. Thousands of miles away, with Black Tom's influence lifted, a plant pod releases from the ocean floor and rises to the surface, where it opens and reveals the real Monet, Paige, Chamber, Skin and Synch, adrift in the middle of the ocean. 

Firsts and Other Notables

After a few teases in previous issues, Black Tom Cassidy attacks the school in this issue. 

As part of his attack, it is revealed that the Mondo who joined the team in Generation X '95 is actually in cahoots with Black Tom and has been feeding him information about the team; he is then killed by Bastion. Mondo will return in issue #60, where it will be revealed that this Mondo is a plant-based construct created by Black Tom. 

During the Black Tom/Mondo attack, Jubilee is captured by the Bastion, setting up her "Operation: Zero Tolerance" plotline. 

The rest of Generation X (save Penance) is captured between panels by Black Tom; they seemingly appear on the school grounds as Black Tom's captives throughout the issue, but they're revealed to be more plant creatures by the end of the issue, with the real kids popping up on a floating hunk of plant matter in the ocean after Black Tom is defeated.   

The Generation X 'tweens (Franklin Richards, Artie and Leech, along with Tana Nile, Howard the Duck, and Beverly) get rescued from Black Tom and Mondo by Man-Thing, setting up the Daydreamers miniseries in which that group will star. 

A Work in Progress

Emma Frost's unexplained troll-like Bachalo-y chauffeur Bumpkin is swallowed whole by Mondo. 

Bastion is very off-model in this issue, both in terms of his appearance and the way he is more action-oriented, personally capturing Jubilee and killing Mondo instead of sending a flunky to do it. 

During the Mondo/Black Tom attack, Artie gets mad thinking he may be experiencing a second Mutant Massacre. 

It's revealed here that when Gateway delivered Penance to the school and uttered her name, he was stating his motivation for freeing her from Emplate, as penance for the role he played in the deaths of the Hellions, the school's original students (when he opened a portal that allowed Fitzroy's Sentinels to chase Pierce to the Hellfire Club in Uncanny X-Men #281). 

Black Tom cites Banshee turning Siryn against him as his motivation for the attack.  

When Tom suggests he will be a better teacher for the kids of Generation X than Banshee, Sean points out how Tom has turned himself "into a bloody tree". 

Austin's Analysis
Let's start with the art. There is no denying this is a spectacularly well-drawn issue, packed with energy and lushness and tons of little details from page to page. It is Peak Bachalo, coming at the pivot point between his early, more traditional, style and his later, more experimental and expressionist, style. This isn't typical comic book art, something more akin to Bill Sienkiewicz's work on New Mutants, but at the same time, it is still clear and easy-to-follow. Bachalo hasn't yet abandoned storytelling in favor of pure imagery (as he will at various points later in his career). It is the best of both worlds, exciting and rewarding to look at yet still able to tell the story. 

Yet where this issue suffers is that story. In part, because Black Tom's attack more or less comes out of nowhere (a few teases that really only make sense in retrospect aside); the last story we saw him in was the second Deadpool miniseries, and while he and Banshee didn't exactly part on good terms, there was little of the vitriol towards Banshee expressed by Tom in this issue, nor any good reason to assume it's built back up over the intervening time (nothing in that mini series, for example, appreciably changed Siryn's relationship with Black Tom). Lobdell seems to have wanted to feature a villain with some history for the book's anniversary issue (an understandable desire), but Black Tom really doesn't have that much history with Generation X, other than Banshee. The end result means sidelining the bulk of the book's cast, between issues, and making them hostages, in exchange for a Black Tom/Banshee fight (more on that below). 

Similarly, the heel turn of "Mondo" doesn't hit as hard as it could because it also mostly comes out of nowhere (Lobdell has teased something weird going on with Mondo, but even in hindsight, those teases don't really add up to "has been bad and secretly working for Black Tom all along"). It also doesn't help that Mondo, despite having been ostensibly hanging around since the earliest previews of the series, hasn't actually been around all that much or done much of note, meaning the reveal that he's evil doesn't pack the punch it's clearly meant to have. It's basically "Mondo is evil, you say? Who the heck is Mondo?"

The other reason the story suffers is because it sidelines the vast majority of the central cast for what is meant to be a celebration of the series hitting 25 issues. Banshee and Emma are front and center, of course, and Jubilee gets a spotlight while the Biodome kids and Howard the Duck get a little page time to setup their miniseries and get them out of the way for "Operation: Zero Tolerance", with Penance delivering arguably the issue's best moment via her last minute deus ex machina attack. But everyone else barely appears (and when they do, they appear mostly as captured plant replicants), which isn't really what you want to see in a big double-sized anniversary issue, especially when it's not that dissimilar from the way Lobdell handled the cast during "Onslaught" and coming in the midst of a long period in which the kids have all already been largely scattered. We're basically at a point where a collective Generation X rarely appears in its own series, and not even a special 25th issue was enough to change that. 

Ultimately, the Bachalo art is so good, it's difficult to write off Generation X #25 completely. But it's also hard to deny feeling a little disappointed in it as well, that more of the characters didn't get more to do, that its central antagonist more or less came out of nowhere but acted like he's been a central fixture of the series, that the big twist lacked punch. I felt that way when I first read the issue as a kid, and revisiting it again now, there's very little that changes that feeling. 

Next Issue

X-Force runs amok in Latveria's past in X-Force #62!

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