"X-Men: Prelude to Onslaught:" Structural Origins

Hey ho, everybody. The Rare megapost is coming soon, I promise, but in the meantime, I picked up a comic called "X-Men: Prelude to Onslaught," which is apparently obscure enough that Amazon doesn't even have the right cover for it.

You all probably remember Onslaught as the final boss in "Marvel vs. Capcom." He's this big, badass Magneto-lookalike with a really cool name and character design. I mean, he kind of has one of those 90s, over-the-top names, ONSLAUGHT, but it really works. And then he morphed into a giant, skull-faced monster and had great lines like "NO ONE IS SAFE" and "THE DREAM IS DEAD." He was one cheap boss, but a very, very neat one.

Of course, before appearing in the video game, he was actually a character in the comics, and... well, he's one of Marvel's greatest villains, in the sense that he turned most of the lineup into a wretched, abominable nightmare for several years. Marvel editorial used him to "kill" most of the non X-characters, such as the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, and rebooted them in their own individual pocket universes written by hot 90s talent like Rob Liefeld, so you can probably guess how it worked out.

Still, he's a cool character. Here's his origin, alright? He's the dark side of lovable Prof. Charles Xavier, given physical form and monstrously powerful. Isn't that a GREAT IDEA for a villain? Because, underneath all his peaceful talk and beliefs, Prof. X is a human being like the rest of us. I mean, he hides disappointment of people, he gets irritable and snaps at people, he has his moments of hopelessness. We all see these great leaders, Martin Luther King Jr. or Abraham Lincoln or what have you and they give off the impression that they're made of stone, that they are pillars of good thought and deed. And while, in large part, they are, they have all the piddling, petty crap rattling around their skulls that we all do. So, a villain that's a Xavier who's totally not above telling his students exactly why he thinks they're disappointing failures, or tell the world that maybe he has suspicions mutants and humans can't coexist peacefully, that's got potential, aye?

I digress a bit. The potential of "Onslaught" as a character wasn't what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about the use of continuity in 90s comics compared to today WAIT DON'T LEAVE

Anywho, back in the 90s, things tended to happen and stayed happened. If there was some relationship or event in a previous book, the editorial staff was pretty insistent that there was nothing published that contradicted it without a good explanation. Sure, they had their share of goofs and retcons, but for the most part, THIS was the universe, THIS was what happened, and writers had to deal with THIS. In short, it was more restrictive, but also more consistent, than comics today.

Comics today tend to live in their own little world... if something in the past is messy or inconvenient for the kinds of stories the writers want to tell, then its kinda glossed over, explained away, or swept under the rug. I mean, for example, a lot of stuff happened in the 80s and 90s Superman books, not all of it good... there was circus psychic Brainiac, crossovers like "Our Worlds at War" and "Emperor Joker," Lex Luthor became president (okay, THAT one is awesome). Right now, in the Superman comics, it's... well, basically like the old movies. Superman lives in a crystalline Fortress of Solitude and it turns out most of Krypton was built on crystalline architecture and he just didn't know it. Odd. When he has a personal problem, he goes and talks to the ghost of his father Jor-El (which he just recently discovered), despite the fact that at this point he's been the take-charge leader type for years and years. He hangs out with his cousin Supergirl, but... there's been like four other Supergirls before her, and I don't know, it seems like he would mention that? Like her being fourth in line of a bunch of oddly similar Supergirls would be a thing he would be affected by? It doesn't happen, and I'm not saying there's no value in that... you want to just get to simple Superman stories with simple explanations anyone can pick up at any time. It's just not the way they did it in the 90s.

So anyhow, this "Onslaught" trade is basically continuity catch-up for the Onslaught storyline. It reprints sections of all the old issues that the editors of the Onslaught storyline retroactively decided would be early events leading up to it. For example, in one issue Xavier decides he's had it up to here with Magneto's bullshit and wipes his mind completely clean; well, they say that while doing this he absorbed a little piece of his hateful little mind that eventually started "growing" into his dark side. In another issue, an X-Man from the future, Bishop, finds an old recording indicating that there's a traitor in the X-Men; eight years later, it turns out it's -gasp!- Prof. Xavier himself! At the time of publishing, those stories, and others like them, weren't written with knowledge of their future "ramifications," but, in order to create their new villain, they essentially went back and used these old stories, tried to tie them into a whole quilt. They weren't completely successful, but I'd say that that's the way you should do it. People do things, things happen, I mean...

Y'know what? I don't know what I mean. Don't worry about it.