Broken Frontier

Welcome to this week's installment of BF's continuing retrospective on the X-Men crossovers of the last two decades, prompted by the ongoing Messiah CompleX storyline.

If 1991's X-over, The Muir Island Saga, has faded into obscurity, its successor the following year has become the stuff of legend. From November 1992 to February 1993, the X-Men and their allies would be embroiled in their most popular and best-selling crossover to date, X-Cutioner's Song. Devised by the Marvel brass to compete with upstart publisher Image, X-Cutioner's Song ran through Uncanny X-Men 294-297, X-Factor 84-86, X-Force 16-18 and X-Men 14-16, an intricate action-mystery that hinged on the indisputable X-symbol of the Nineties, the time-lost Cable.

Cable had been introduced in New Mutants #87 in 1990, allegedly created by Rob Liefeld, an artist and writer who would soon go on to help found Image. The character was an early example of the visual archetype that would become so closely identified with the "Image style"; laden with shoulder pads, ammo belts and guns, the cybernetic mutant quickly recruited the New Mutants to fight the mysterious Stryfe and his Mutant Liberation Front.

Renaming the group X-Force, he would transform them into a mutant paramilitary unit, taking a proactive stance in defense of his interpretation of Xavier's dream. As is standard in mainstream comics, this naturally brought him into conflict with the other mutant heroes of Marvel, and as the events of X-Cutioner's Song began, the status quo was uneasy, to say the least.

One of the primary goals behind X-Cutioner's Song was to provide some clue as to Cable's origins. There had been hints that Cable might in fact be Nathan Summers, the son of Cyclops and Madelyne Pryor who had been sent to the future as an infant in order to save his life. This fact, combined with the revelation in the last issue of New Mutants that Stryfe was an almost exact double of Cable, led to the foundations of the crossover's plot.

As the story begins, Professor X is shot by Stryfe, disguised as Cable, while delivering a speech. The bullet infects him with a techno-organic virus that ravages his body. Shortly thereafter, the Horsemen kidnap Cyclops and Jean Grey under orders from Stryfe's ally Mr. Sinister, who has disguised himself as Apocalypse.

Sinister hands them over to Stryfe in exchange for a container holding Summers genetic material, only to betray him to the X-Men at his first opportunity. X-Factor and the X-Men Blue Team come to blows with X-Force over Cable's whereabouts before learning from Sinister that he is not responsible. As the teams head after Stryfe, the X-Men Gold Squad confronts a weakened Apocalypse, who knows nothing of what has occurred and manages to escape.

A battle with the MLF leaves Rogue blinded, while Stryfe ambushes Apocalypse and leaves him for dead. The injured Apocalypse seeks sanctuary with the X-Men, promising to cure Xavier in return for safe conduct. As this is happening, Wolverine and Bishop locate Cable, and after a brief battle the three men agree to track down Jean and Cyclops, who are being tortured by Stryfe. The mutant terrorist makes intimations that the two of them are his parents, continuing to plant the seeds of a biological connection between Stryfe and Cable. Jean and Cyclops eventually manage to escape, only to find that they are in Apocalypse's old base on the Moon. Jean sends a psychic signal to Wolverine, and the X-Men and Apocalypse head into outer space.

Stryfe rescues the two X-Men from vacuum as their allies arrive and battle the Dark Riders, former servants of Apocalypse now allied with Stryfe. Apocalypse is beaten almost to death and asks Archangel for a mercy killing; he refuses. Cable and Stryfe enter into single combat near a time portal, and Stryfe refers to his enemy as an "imperfect double". The two men then appear to die in a temporal explosion, leaving the other X-Men wondering what the truth of the matter might be. In a coda to the main story, Sinister opens Stryfe's canister to find it apparently empty, unwittingly releasing the deadly Legacy Virus into the world, as Stryfe had intended all along.

Such a lengthy summary is necessary given the nuances of the story and the long-term repercussions it would have on the X-Men franchise. Cable, Stryfe and Apocalypse would all be revealed to have survived, but the plot threads that were set in motion by these events would dictate much of the property's direction for several years afterward.

It would not be for another two years that the full mystery of Cable and Stryfe's connection would be solved (Cable was the original, and Stryfe the clone). Stryfe would become a perennial recurring foe of X-Force and the X-Men until his apparently final death some years later. Apocalypse, of course, would return in 1996's Age Of Apocalypse and many subsequent stories.

The most vital consequence of X-Cutioner's Song, however, was undoubtedly the Legacy Virus, a plague that would sweep through mutantkind for a decade of real-world time, slaying friend and foe of the X-Men alike. The cure for the virus would come at the expense of the lives of Moira MacTaggert and Colossus, and the traumas that it caused still reverberate today in the pages of Astonishing X-Men, as the cast copes with Colossus' return from the dead.

X-Cutioner's Song signaled a new phase in the development of the X-over. High sales in a competitive market made the economic advantages of these events clear to Marvel executives, and the franchise began to shift footing to allow for their regular, yearly recurrence. The story itself also centered on newer characters rather than the established stars of the books, a trend which would continue as it became standard procedure to introduce new X-Men and villains as integral parts of future X-overs. As is so often the case in mainstream comics, the successes of X-Cutioner's Song would become dogma, pushed to extremes that stifled creativity and would negatively impact the success of X-overs in later years.