The X-Blog

Well the Second Coming is here and halfway over and I must say that this storyline is fantastic. This is exactly what the X-Verse needed to get itself back in the game. With story archs like Utopia, Nation X, and even Necrosha, the X-Men have faded into the background to let comics, like the Avengers, take the mainstage–WTF!? However, salvation is here in more ways than one–Introducing the teenaged messiah of all us X-Freaks, Hope Summers. Back from the future, Hope and everyone’s favorite cyborg, Cable, have returned to our time period (shaking off the Bitch of a Mutant, Bishop) to put an end to this whole cat-n-mouse chase. However, when they return they are not met with the promise that they thought they would. The mansion is in rubble (if we can remember back to the times when the X-Men still worked out of Westchester) and Cable doesn’t now what to do. Fight or flight leads the pair to a motel where they find an old Newspaper that says the X-Men are now working out of San Fran. In hopes to find their friends and family, the pair are ambushed by Bastion and his groups of anti-mutant fanatics causing the pair to go off map, causing the X-Men to even have difficulties finding them.

Cyclops breaks the X-Men into two groups Alpha and Beta (Alpha being a mix of Uncanny and X-Force and Beta being the New Mutants). He sends Alpha to find Cable and Hope while Beta is sent on the task of putting a stop to Cameron Hodge’s slowly growing army of smiley face bots. The Alpha team falls short of a victory, losing Magik to some interdimensional rift (which archs us into Hellbound, a subserious happening at the same time as Second Coming) and loses sight of our time jumpers. Meanwhile, Beta team, while more successful in their ploy, take heavy damage; Karma loses are leg to the cyborg Hodge/Spider thing while Cypher tells Warlock to go back on his promise of not taking a human life. Luckily for the New Mutants, Warlock uses his TO virus to save the say and sucks all the life out of Hodge and his followers.

Cyclops now understand that Bastion is trying to set up the X-Men by taking out all of their strategical advantages, such as teleporters and communication via telepaths. Cyclops rounds up a team to send to Limbo to rescue Magik (Cannonball, Pixie, Anole, Trance, Gambit, Dazzler, and Northstar) while he calls back Beta team after the damage they took to their team. Meanwhile, Cyclops assigns Ariel as teleporter for the X-Men’s Alpha team (I included the link to her Wiki page, since the majority of you probably don’t know who she is, minus her small appearance in Utopia) and sends them out to find Cable and Hope. In their attempts to find them, the team is gunned down by a helicopter and Ariel is killed in the explosion.

Meanwhile, Rogue and Nightcrawler port like crazy trying to get to Hope and Cable. They are successful as meeting up with the pair, but are attacked by Bastion himself. Rogue, having suped up with all the Alpha teams powers, takes on Bastion while Nightcrawler attempts to get the trio out of the line of fire. Rogue gets her ass handed to her due to Bastions regenerative abilities and is seconds away from killing Hope when Nightcrawler, in one final porting attempt saves the pair, but in doing so is slain by Bastion. RIP Elf, we will miss you (guess Cyclops never has to explain to you about X-Force though, phew… oh yeah, X-Force isn’t a secret anymore).

Hope is now back on Utopia, but it seems that not everyone is as excited to see her. Dani Moonstar and Wolverine are among the group that aren’t so sure about all this risk for one girl, Dani even getting into a fist fight with the Messiah. However, not even Utopia is safe from Bastion’s plans, for the mutant hating Cyborg Peirce is sitting dangerously unknown to the X-Men in their containment brig. Danger is made to believe that Donald Pierce’s presence is still there thanks to the TO virus Bastion has infected all his hosts with and allows Pierce to blow up the the area with the Blackbird and all the X-Men’s means of transportation. He has stranded them on their island, making them sitting ducks.

However, something far worse is happening–a huge impenetrable red sphere engulfs the entire San Francisco area, locking all the mutant population within it. Also, a rift in the space-time continium has opened up in the middle of the Golden Gate bridge and it leaking in sentinels from the Future. The X-Men, seemingly trapped with their lives at stake, send all they can into the front to stop the onslaught from the Nimrod Sentinels while X-Force is sent into the future (with Cable and Cypher) to combat at the source of the problem–however, there is a catch. To go to the future Cable must use his armtech to jump them there though he only has one jump left. It is ultimately a suicide mission that Cyclops and all the X-Men know is completely necessary.

Saying their goodbyes, the team ports into the future where they see that all the X-Men have been eliminated and a huge “wanted” board is decked out with posters of ever mutant. The team quickly gets to work, however, it seems that their task might be impossible for an infinite line of Nimrod Sentinels awaits the jump into their timeline. Their plan is to use Douglas’ abilities of language and communication to tell the source of these robots to end this, though how they plan on accomplishing this is still up in the air.

Back at home, the team has taken some damage and are not able to continue at this pace, it seems that the X-Men might face some more causalities in the near future for their is little that they can do to fight the onslaught of Nimrods.

I am in love with this serious, so much is happening and absolutely everyone is being used or at least mentioned–even the Avengers and Fantastic Four are out there trying to help out the struggling race. Also something that is really interesting in this plot line is all the story lines that are going along with it (Hellbound, Blind Science, and X-Factor). This literally is affecting every single mutant on the planet and it will only stop if every mutant, evil or good, comes together and stops this. I love it. I can’t wait to see what Hope has in store in this plot line because as of now she has had very little

impact, other than being the catalysis to all the pandimonium. Slowly but surely we are seeing that Hope’s powers are a lot like Rogue’s, though I’m not sure if they work like hers. She seems to have more like Prodigy’s powers.