GENERATION X #58 - December 1999

Something Wicked

Credits: Jay Faerber (writer), Darick Robertson (penciler), Rod Ramos & John Czop (inkers), Kevin Tinsley (colors), Comicraft’s Jason Levine (letters)

Summary: The team searches the woods for Penance, who they believe has harmed a human student, while M stays behind with her visiting father. Gen X soon discovers that an escaped sasquatch was behind the attack. With Penance’s help, the sasquatch is subdued. Emma uses her telepathic powers to force the military to forget about the sasquatch, and Banshee calls Alpha Flight in to take care of the beast. Penance carves a note into a tree indicating her desire to stay with the team. Meanwhile, after visiting his son Emplate, M’s father announces he’s withdrawing her from the school.

Continuity Notes: Emplate tells the story of the day his powers surfaced, revealing that he killed his mother by feeding upon her. (She held on to Emplate to comfort him as his powers surged; whether or not he killed her on purpose remains unclear.)

Review: Oh, yeah…M, Penance, Emplate, and the St. Croix twins do have a father, don’t they? In retrospect, not using him during the M/Penance origin storyline was an oversight, even if it’s a fairly minor gaffe in comparison to the rest of that arc. Faerber doesn’t get a lot of material out of Mr. St. Croix in this issue, I suspect he’s mainly here to set up a story about M being forced to leave the school, but it’s nice to see some kind of response from M’s family to all of this insanity.

The main story exists to tease the reader into thinking this new Penance, whatever she is, is a villain, which apparently isn’t so. For an extended red herring, it isn’t so bad, and I don’t think anyone saw a sasquatch coming. Bringing in Alpha Flight as guest stars, based solely on the idea that “the” Sasquatch would know how to properly treat a “normal” sasquatch, is kind of clever. I question if Darick Robertson is an appropriate fill-in artist for the book, though. He’s apparently obsessed with detail lines at this stage (to the point that every character’s teeth are meticulously rendered), which doesn’t work for characters who are normally drawn as caricatures. I think the last thing Chris Bachalo was thinking of when designing this cast was “realism.”