#judgementwar

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We close out the Judgement War storyline with this double size issue, complete with a semi-decent looking cover drawn by Rob Liefield. Well, semi-decent except for Jean’s foot there.

Wft is going on with that foot. It looks Kermit the Frog’s face after he’s spent a session engaging in some butt play with Miss Piggy.

Rob was getting his stank all over the X-Men comics at this time, popping in and out of X-Factor and also becoming the main artist on the New Mutants through the end of the series. I have often wondered what the responsibility split was like on these covers which were credited to both he and Todd McFarlane. Their art is similar enough that I can’t tell who drew what. Except for that foot of course. Maybe that’s the only thing Rob drew. (X-Factor #50 – Jan 1990)

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The Judgement War ends as the warring inhabitants of this alien planet are about to destroy each other. But instead, both the Chosen and the Reject factions join forces with X-Factor and everyone pools their energy into a mystic optic blast which Scott uses to blow the shit out this Celestial’s hand just before the Celestials can judge this planet of being unworthy of existing.

I can honestly say I do not get the Celestials’ vibe, man. Bunch of omnipotent assholes. Going around judging everybody. And apparently, they are impervious to any form of considerate interaction unless you pool up an entire planet’s worth of mystical energy and shoot it at them spirit bomb style. Then they all run away. Fucking dicks. Hey I wonder how they would judge planet Earth. I’m thinking… not so well. At least we’d be out of our misery. Can you even imagine what our planet-wide spirit bomb would look like, if we could possibly gather a bit of everyone’s energy into a concentrated space? It would be a shrieking gloom of Twitter bile, tearing through the air and literally vomiting all over everything. It would splatter insignificantly all over whatever we threw it at. Ugh we are all so toxic. Oh, and also, Jean is free from the psychic habitation of Madelyne Pryor and the Phoenix which she was suffering from since the end of Inferno.

(X-Factor #50 – Jan 1990)

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We actually get a melting snowflake of character development time here. Jean and the rest of the X-Men, X-Factor, and New Mutants have just gone through hell, literally, fighting off a demon invasion that resulted in the corruption and death of their loved one Madelyne Pryor, as well as the realization for the rest of the X-Men that Jean Grey has been resurrected, but we haven’t yet seen any of the characters attempting to emotionally deal with these developments. Here Jean gets triggered by the sight of space and reflexively tries to fly into a worm hole and murder another 6 billion people, forgetting that as a regular old mutant she can’t breathe in a vacuum.

Apparently she’s struggling with a few extra voices in her head now, one of which is Madelyne’s, who is still pissed about Jean stealing her husband, and wants to suicide the whole lot of entities that living within Jean. Yikes. (X-Factor #43 – Aug 1989)

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Ok back to our regularly scheduled program, with the heroes of X-Factor stranded on an alien planet where everyone is a super powered mutant and they are all embroiled in a bitter war between the pretty looking mutants and the ugly looking mutants in a not so subtle metaphor to the possible future of Marvel’s Earth-616 should the evolution of the mutant species continue on the course that it’s on. Yes, we all got that metaphor in like the first issue, did we really need 8 comics to tell this story. (X-Factor #48 – Dec 1989)

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I bet no one dies in this comic. (X-Factor #49 – Dec 1989)

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Hmm an interlude from this Judgement War storyline? Looks like the writers were as bored with this story as I am. 

“Brought to you by those folks who were late with their deadlines.” That’s funny. I was just complaining about the quality of Paul Smith’s artwork on this Judgement War storyline, conjecturing that perhaps he was rushing to meet the schedule of an ongoing series. And now we get this not so subtle jab from the editors on the first page of this comic book about someone not meeting deadlines. I wonder who they were talking about? I mean, do you think the script writer or letterer was having trouble meeting the schedule? I doubt it. The long pole during the production of a comic book is almost always on the actual artwork of the comic, and by extension, the artist. In this case, legendary X-Men artist Paul Smith. Seems my hunch about him rushing his artwork in order to keep up might have been correct. A damn shame. To be fair, most of the X-Men comics being published at this time had made the jump to bi-monthly publication. Not only that, but the similarly paced New Mutants Asgardian story line I read before this also had a side story plopped down right in the middle of it, so maybe I’m jumping to conclusions. One thing’s for sure. I’ll never know real story. Since I’m never going to think about this again as soon as I stop typing about it. (X-Factor #47 – Nov 1989)

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Oh shite. After getting telepathically assaulted during the battle between the Rejects and the Chosen at the beginning of this Judgement War storyline, Jean finally regains consciousness while prisoner of the Rejects, but much to the Beast’s surprise, it’s not Jean’s own consciousness that rises to the surface once she wakes up, but instead it’s Madelyne Pryor’s. This was unexpected to say the least, but not surprising, considering the mind meld that took place when Jean finally took down Madelyne at the end of Inferno. This must not persist for very long, because I don’t remember Madelyne being resident in Jean’s head for any great period of time back in the day, but it will be interesting to see how this gets resolved (I hope they resolve it and don’t just forget about it). (X-Factor #46 – Nov 1989)

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Iceman, who has amnesia here and thinks he’s a member of an alien race of fascists, clearly has not had a shower or a change of clothes since arriving on this planet 5 issues ago, because if he had, he would have accidentally removed that universal translator on his chest there and realized that something was horribly amiss when all the gleep gloop aliens stopped speaking American. Oh and also, these aliens that Bobby is living with don’t believe in touching, so of course Bobby breaks that taboo not with a gentle caress or a peck on the check of the woman he’s sweet on, but by fishing Lev’s tonsils out of her throat with his tongue. This guy belongs in one of those frats that people don’t graduate out of. (X-Factor #49 – Dec 1989)