(So, this'll be epic. It just, like, magically manifested in full detail over an incredibly short period of time. The whole thing was plotted out in a second, but it's long, so I'm going to be typing it out in pieces, 'cuz I'm lazy. There's more to come, and I'll probably drift the rest of it in over the next couple of days)
Okay, so we'd open on a prologue. It's 1945, shortly after the fall of Berlin, and an American tank infantry unit (probably including Steve Rogers and a young James Howlett, 'cuz we can, and 'cuz they'll show up later) is off patrolling the country, when they see an SOS bent out of metal scrap, just floating hundreds of yards in the air, miles away. They find a concentration camp, with a miraculously high number of survivors. The soldiers seem to have inexplicably taken a group dive off of a cliff edge, the ravine below being the preferred disposal method of prisoner bodies. The officers have been skinned with their own weapons. In the officer's lounge, they find a missing paraplegic US military medical officer named Charles Xavier and an ethnic Armenian political thinker named Erik Lehnsherr. The Americans, knowing their Russian allies will be pushing onto the site soon and recognizing the value of these men who apparently somehow managed the hostile takeover of their camp, bring the men to Berlin, where they're interned in a secure location within the American quarter. The men reveal that they were part of an Ahnenerbe experiment into superhuman research. They were hand picked from the camps throughout Germany and brought here, where they were kept highly sedated to prevent them from exerting their powers outside of the experimentations. Their interrogators are alarmed at the possibilities of a fascist superhumans program that advanced, but they're even more worried about the Communists getting their hands on something like this. They worry that Lehnsherr might be the result of such a program within the USSR, a weapon stolen by the Nazi military. They eventually let Charles Xavier return to America, with a red flag on his file. Lehnsherr is left in a primitive, dank sub-basement, and West Berlin builds around him. The US, afraid to try to transport him across the ocean, for fear of the kind of carnage he could wreck, forget about him, except for the few low-ranking officials who deal with the regular routines of caretaking, until they can find some better way to contain and study him. Throughout the story, we'd get flashbacks of Xavier and Lehnsherr's time together, both in the camp, and in American custody.
We pick up 12 years later, in 1957, where we're introduced to our main cast. It's the height of the Hollywood blacklist, and Jean Grey is the young starlet to be. We open with her standing before a HUAC investigation, for fraternizing in allegedly socialist circles. Miss Grey has a reputation for congeniality. Her directors and co-stars credit her with an almost mystical quality of bringing out the best in the people she works with. Fellow actors claim that the roles they play have never felt more real or passionate than when they work alongside her, and the directors say, when working with her, the whole crew seems to move like clockwork. She shows up to HUAC with a martini glass in one hand, and a martini shaker poking out of her purse. She's sloshed, but no less charming. They ask her about her association with Herbert Biberman, a blacklisted film writer and director. She replies that she finds both him and his wife delightful, and she attends lunch with them weekly. Despite her candidness, the HUAC treat her with extreme courtesy, and she walks out smelling like roses (and vodka). Charles Xavier is a tenured sociology professor at Berkeley University. He's a vocal rights activist, with strong ties throughout the labor, union, and civil rights movements. He's got friends in the Beat movement - He's friends with Ginsberg. He also speaks vocally against the Cold War, against the danger of America sinking into a cycle of arms races against the USSR. Naturally Joe McCarthy's not the only one in Washington with worries about Professor Xavier. Xavier's right hand man is Scott Summers, a quiet young grad student who's seemingly blind. Warren Worthington, another target of HUAC, is the only heir to the vast Worthington fortune - built from the labors of the first two World Wars. Worthington's spent the better part of his fortune spending his parents' money. His Beverly Hills mansion is always overrun with young partiers, and he's the toast of the social scene… But while the party rages on around his mansion, Worthington has, in the past six months, sequestered himself off in a remote set of chambers deep in his house. Few people have seen him, and the one's that have aren't saying anything, but rumors are starting to circulate that Warren has suffered some kind of horrible deformity. Fleet-footed, mountain-big Hank McCoy was a phenom forward for Berkeley basketball, as well as a genius in the science department. Upon graduation, he was immediately plucked up by military recruiting. Now he's helping developing new types of plastic under government contract, the plastic that will be used to create suitable transport and containment cells for Mr. Lehnshnner. In school, Xavier had been his favorite professor and private confidant. Bobby Drake's a 17 year old beach bum and delinquent, to angle in all the coolness of 50's surf culture. There'd be a real slick introduction where we have Bobby running into the surf, and boarding up, riding up a big wave, cresting, and then he just keeps going, rising as the wave freezes and tapers upward indefinitely. The idea is, his powers manifest when he gets caught looting an electronics store. Nobody's hurt, but the manifestation of his powers is enough to get the attention of the CIA. He's locked in a beach city hold-up until they can find safe transport for him. Except Cyclops busts in and treats them all like *****es! **** yeah! Cyclops is a pro.
So, Scott Summers brings Bobby Drake to the Worthington Estate in Beverly Hills, where, sequestered in the private chambers, find Professor Xavier, Jean Grey, and a winged Warren Worthington. It's not a super team, but rather a social circle, a small collection of intelligent friends who discuss politics, ethics, and the burgeoning challenges faced by a world with mutants. This is where the first issue would wrap up (I know, it seems like a lot to fit in an issue, but that's because I'm throwing out a bunch of exposition that wouldn't be so necessary in comic form), and it's probably a good place to outline the characters, generally. We've already got a pretty good feel for Jean Grey, who would be modeled on Kim Novak, the gorgeous redhead who starred opposite Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo. The inimitable Jimmy Stewart, in turn, would be the design model for Scott Summers, who comes across normally as a shy, quiet, and self-effacing in normal situations, but who, when faced with social injustice, swings into outraged Mr. Smith mode. Charles Xavier would be modeled on either Sidney Poitier or Harry Bellafonte, both incredibly charming and well spoken actors and activists (and musicians, in the case of Mr. Bellafonte), who forwarded the rights movements of the time both in their activism and their personal careers. Hank McCoy would be modeled on James Cagney, Bobby Drake on Bobby Darrin, Warren Worthington on Idunno, Rock Hudson maybe? Magneto would be a stately Henry Fonda, with Wanda and Pietro (who will appear shortly) modeled on Peter and Jane.
Bobby, who currently has a warrant out for his arrest, is offered secret asylum in the Worthington manor. He's a delinquent still, but is put as a student under Xavier's wing, going with him and Summers to speeches, campaigns, meetings. One meeting in particular has Xavier leaving his students in the car while he secretly meets with Hank McCoy (this would be the first time a relationship between Xavier and Hank McCoy is established, in the book) to discuss his progress as an infiltrator in the military-industrial complex. It would also be the first we learn the extent of the project McCoy is working on, if not necessarily the purpose. Xavier is also giving Warren advice on what organizations to invest his considerable wealth. It seems that Xavier is preparing for a ****-storm, the exact details of which aren't yet revealed. Scott, meanwhile, shows up at Jean's door with a bouquet of flowers. The two begin courting. The romantic subplot would be a sweet, relatively uncomplicated thread, without anything like the Wolverine complications from 616 to make it soap operatic. There would be a tiny beat where Scott's worried about the friendship between her and Worthington, but again, it would be a tiny beat.
Her response would be, "Oh, sweetie! Warren's queerer than a three dollar bill." Throughout the day-to-days, we see the friends being trailed. The first act would close with the revelation that they're being followed by Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., a ruthless subdivision of the CIA which we discover has been formed over the past five years or so to monitor "omega level" threats to American sovereignty.
Which would bring us to Act Two. It's 1961, and, like the first act, it starts with Steve Rogers leading a squad in enemy territory. Except this time, it's Cuba, and the squad he's leading is America's top secret project Weapon +. It's the Bay of Pigs, Marvel-style, *****es! Replace American-trained Cuban refugees with American-trained human weapons. The team, consisting of Steve Rogers (code name Captain America), James Howlett (code name Wolverine), John Wraith (code name Kestrel), and Victor Creed (code name Sabertooth, also known for the nickname the fearful Germans gave him in World War II, Der Schlacter). They're soldiers, not superheroes, and they use any weapon at their disposal, and they need it. When they step onto the island, they find the enemy has come prepared, with a battalion of Soviet rocket soldiers known as the Crimson Dynamos. This could also be an opportunity to kill off some Soviet era supervillains, maybe Red Ghost and his super-apes, or the Red Guardian. Anyway, it goes terribly. Kestrel and Sabertooth are both rather brutally torn to bits, and James and Steve are forced to limp away. As an aside here, this version of Weapon + would be modeled after the Morrison version (although, the details of this would likely only be hinted at, at best. It's a story about the X-Men, not Weapon-X). The project was started in World War II and continued in through the Cold War. Steve Rogers is Weapon I, James Howlett is Weapon X (after Rogers' recommended him to his superiors, seeing the scrappy resilience of mutant Howlett under his WWII command), John Wraith is Weapon VI (the project's experimentation with various minorities, and Victor Creed is Weapon VII (experiments on convicts). Steve Rogers would be physically modeled on the very intense Lee Marvin. He's a jingoistic idealogue with the paranoid delusions of General Ripper, from Dr. Strangelove. James Howlett is a rather more sympathetic soldier modeled on Brando.
Back home, the ****'s hit the fan. After the incident in the Bay of Pigs, the knowledge of both the American and Soviet superhumans projects are public, and the superhuman arms race is official. While Hank McCoy's team is racing to finish their project. In Detroit, MI a tense auto worker's strike starts to go sour as the crowd pushes against police and police push back. Theresa O'Rourke, the young daughter of one of the workers, just wants it all to stop. She screams, and all the glass in a quarter mile radius shatters. One of the cops, startled, fires on the girl who now seems to be levitating over the crowd entirely. It sinks into violent rioting. Warren, Jean, and Scott are watching on their TV from Beverly Hills. Prof. Xavier is at a speaking engagement a few hours away, is too late to do anything about the tremendous devastation. Bobby Drake, who has taken the public name "Jack Frost" (and I see him as being sort of an Americanized Dane McGowan anyway) and has been serving as Xavier's bodyguard, dips out to get involved in the carnage. He's still a hood after all. In the aftermath, police raid the apartment of the girl's father, Sean Cassidy. They allegedly find pamphlets, propaganda, and directives tying him to a (alleged) Communist cabal of "Russian supermen" with the intent of "subverting and destroying America from within". It's called the Brotherhood, and it's all hysterical red scare propaganda, but things are suddenly very bad for the mutants. Jean Grey, three months into the filming of the huge budgeted epic "Dark Phoenix" (about a fictional queen in the Phoenician Empire), suddenly finds herself out of a job. She's been blacklisted. The studio cuts filming and replaces her with another actress (Madeline Pryor, maybe?). Jean spirals rather quickly into a rather depressed sea of alcoholism. Sen. Henry Gygrich responds by forming the Senate Investigation of Nascent Extrahuman Leninism (SENTINEL) Commission. S.H.I.E.L.D. has been tapping the Worthington estate and following the associates of Xavier for years now, but come up with almost nothing. By this point, the party's moved elsewhere, and it's mostly just Worthington and his friends that are seen coming and going. The rats are fleeing the cellar before things go sour. Xavier is subpoenaed to stand trial in front of the commission. Henry Gygrich is in pitched hysterics. He dubs Xavier and his "cronies" the "Ex-Men", claiming them to be eugenic supremacists who believe they've become greater than human. He further claims that all these mutants are agents of the Soviets, genetically enhanced and implanted in America to tear the country apart from the inside. He believes these "Ex-Men" are leading the national Soviet conspiracy dubbed "The Brotherhood". He invokes the Moscow Show Trials to suggest these projects have been going on since the mid-30's. Xavier responds eloquently and rationally, warning of the threat of sacrificing individual freedoms out of fear, and of the dangerous and precarious technological races running parallel to each other. Naturally, that doesn't do a bit of good. When Gygrich closes the interview by requesting that Xavier be detained and held for further questioning, we discover that the Xavier at the commission has just been a psychic projection. Him and the rest of the "Ex-Men" are dubbed national security threats. Under the presumption that no normal government agency could feasibly hope to apprehend these people, Washington sanctions the formation of the world's first superteam. The Avengers' first mission is to apprehend Xavier and his confederates.
So the Avengers are the remnants of Weapon + (James Howlett and Steve Rogers), along with the Invincible Iron Man and the Navy SEALS' best ace sharpshooter, Clint Barton. Publicly, Iron Man is known to be playboy millionaire Tony Stark. He's not. Tony Stark, who made his fortune as a war profiteer during Korea, is a complacent and cowardly lush who's only concerned about booze, *****es, and cash. The real Iron Man is former Air Force ace James Rhodes. Rhodes, who was perhaps the most phenomenal jet pilot in the Korean War, came home to find their weren't a lot of folks looking to hire his kind. He managed to get a job as part of Tony Stark's personal staff, and is now the incognito pilot of Stark's premiere combat armor. The Avengers charge in on the Worthington Estate. To make it believable, maybe they implement some sort of experimental psychic dampening weapon called The Vision. Anyway, they bust on in. Wicked cool fighting ensues. Barton fires a shot at Xavier, and in that moment, Howlett and Xavier make distinct eye contact. Howlett jumps in the way to block the bullet, but it shreds through his palm and continues its course, until, about a foot short of the mark, it just stops in place and clinks to the ground. It's like, Bobby Drake pointed at the bullet and froze its molecules, forcing it to a brake. He's as surprised as anyway. Howlett turns on his team, and helps the rest of Xavier's crew get away. The Worthington estate is seized, all their assets are frozen. They're fugitives, branded as Communists, and Xavier is in the US government's custody.
The team regroups, recuperates. Xavier has suggested to Scott that he's worried his mole in the military-industrial complex may be compromised. And if not, Hank McCoy will at least have some answers for them. Bobby Drake, a basketball fan, fills them in on who Hank McCoy is. "He's got palms the size of dinner plates." Meanwhile, in response to the announcement of the Avengers, the Soviets unveil their own public super squad, the Crimson Guarg. Consisting of two pairs of siblings (Wanda and Pietro Maximoff, Piotr and Ilya Rasputin) and their leader, Omega. The Maximoffs are the children of Erik Lehnsherr, who've spent the better part of their lives in Siberian work camps. Piotr's a genuinely good-hearted Russian soldier who's just trying to do the best for his country, and Ilya is his protective younger sister. Omega Red is the culmination of the USSR's equivalent to Weapon +, who feeds off life around him to sustain his powers. Back in America, Jean's psychic powers make for easy infiltration of S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters. They don't have it nearly so easy in Boulder, where they find a massive, military-armed research and production facility. They storm in, guns blazing, only to find an undertaking more massive than they thought. Every piece in the facility seems to be constructed out of stone and plastics. That means tools, mechanical parts, everything. Construction is wrapping up on what seems to be a sort of massive cage. Down here, they find Hank McCoy, and after brief introductions, the team makes their exit. The two teams reconvene at a beach house off of the Florida coast. Xavier had, years ago, suggested Warren buy this, as well as a scattering of other properties, in a way that couldn't be traced by paper trail. It's paid out now, apparently. Jean and Scott discovered that Xavier is being held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, in Cuba. Hank McCoy reveals more. The US government, fully expecting the situation with the Soviets to escalate into a hot war of human weapons, has been constructing a detention camp for such weapons. The facility has been under construction for a number of months, over which they've been shipping parts from the Colorado building to construct a plastic containment wing. Howlett has to make some calls to get them the security intel they need. While they wait for the calls to be returned, they play a round of baseball in the yard. There's something really unique about those old Stan Lee/Jack Kirby action sequences with the X-Men. There's a really nice sense of family there, but it's altogether different from the Fantastic Four. I think the X-Men playing baseball in 1950's America would capture this perfectly, and provide a nice upward beat before racing into the climax of the second act.
So the final issue of the second act would be Xavier as the guest in S.H.I.E.L.D.'s "Magic Room" (maybe retitled "Danger Room" to fit in with the X-Men stuff). And that's what most of this issue is. We have Xavier undergoing fierce psychological torture and interrogation. No sci-fi stuff, just good old fashioned Cold War espionage. It's interspersed with cuts to the X-Men raiding the facility (The idea of Bobby Drake riding in on the frozen gulf, grinding ice waves likes a skateboarder is just too cool an image to pass on) as if it was in a dream, along with Xavier as he starts to crack. Laced with these are the flashbacks to his similar experience under Nazi imprisonment, and through these flashbacks, we piece together what happened there and shortly after their liberation. Lehnshner and Xavier were brought together from two separate labor camps after exhibiting paranormal powers. Lehnshner was at Dora, which provided labor for the V-2 rocket construction project in Nordhausen. At their new camp, they're kept drugged and under heavy guard within the camp. Neither knows the other's language, but they learn. Xavier was involved in the American civil rights movement, a rarely privileged black man born into money, before he volunteered. Erik was an Armenian revolutionary who had been swept up as a prisoner of war in the Nazis' march on the USSR. The two are subjected to horrendous experiments, and have only the support of each other to stay alive. Xavier hears the thoughts of the invading Allies before even the Germans know. They're forced to stand and march outside, under heavy armed guard. The bulk of the prisoners are being led in file out of the camp and towards the nearby cliff, but the Reich has special plans for Xavier and Erik. They tell them to load into a truck. Xavier tells them (in German) that he refuses to be their weapon. The soldier says he can walk or crawl. Xavier doesn't budge, and the soldier instead empties his machine gun into the man's legs. Xavier falls. Erik screams. The bloodied bullets pull themselves
from Xavier's flesh. It is a maelstrom of metal, and the surrounding guard is practically liquified by it. Xavier, lying on the ground, bleeding at a dangerous rate, is feeling sick. All the thoughts around him, muted somewhat in the dankness of his self, is amplified too much out here in the open. When he comes to, his legs have been operated on. Xavier, presumably, while blacked out, led the Nazis to their deaths. Erik openly took great pleasure in skinning the officers who were left alive. Shortly thereafter, the Allies find them.
We also get pieces of Xavier's interrogation following the rescue, juxtaposed against the interrogation he's undergoing in the present. We get to play with some ideology there, argue sides a little. But primarily, we get to see some early Xavier and Howlett interaction. Howlett's the young soldier who's left to take care of basic necessities for Xavier while he's staying in East Berlin - sort of the liaison between Xavier and the military. We see him sitting across from the dismal card table in Xavier's cell as the survivor eats. We get a close-up of Howlett's knuckles, heavy calluses of scar tissue built ontop of scar tissue, where his skin has just repeated healed up lacerations from his claws. Howlett has been offered a position in Weapon X, but isn't sure if he should take it. He hasn't said anything
about it out loud, but Xavier says something about how he doesn't have to be "their weapon". There's a back and forth, and Howlett finally leaves, disgusted. The act ends with the X-Men busting in to the Magic Room.
So we find ourselves in the final act. It's 1962. The Crimson Guard has been deployed to East Berlin. Here they find their Soviet contact - The Black Widow. Their mission is to sneak over the wall and recover an American weapon. The X-Men, meanwhile, have landed in West Berlin. Xavier doesn't know the location of the building Erik is being detained in, but he remembers the building itself, and so he cruises the city, looking for the psychic imprint of the building. The rest of the crew tour the city. The Avengers are also en route, escorting the plane that's going to transport Lehnshner. Erik's drugged, brought to the surface from the deep sub-basement he's been confined to for almost two decades. The Guard busts in, and there's a brawl between them and the Avengers + armed guard. Omega Red is like a wicked cool dervish, but he gets taken down. Pietro breaks into his father's plastic cell, but instead of securing him for transport, he frees him. The Maximoffs turn on the Soviets and quickly dispatch the American Avengers. Erik finds the city's changed. There's a wall splitting it in two, and armed guards everywhere. His ideology is significantly different from the mainstream version. Here, he's a man who's spent the greater part of his life as a prisoner of nationalism - first in a Soviet work camp, then a Nazi concentration camp, and finally in American custody under Berlin. His children have suffered much the same lives. He's here to teach the nations of the world that they can no longer treat their their citizens like slaves. He rips the metal siding off of a Soviet tank, crafting the steel around himself in helmet and armor. The Berlin Wall is ripped asunder as Magneto tears out the metal skeleton of the thing.
The various X-Men fight their way through the streets of Berlin, heading straight for the eye of the storm, working as emergency service in the process. They finally team up with each other, and when they find the Rasputin siblings, end up joining forces with them. Pietro is sent to Nordhausen, to recover a hidden cache of V-2 rockets from the war. Erik, who had served in the Dora work camp, is aware of the location of the concealed weapons. The V-2, which were used for the bombing of Berlin in WWII, are notably inaccurate and dangerous. But with Magneto's powers, they can be devastating against the US or Russia, even fired from Germany. Bobby Drake is sent after Pietro, and the two race across the German countryside. In Berlin, Magneto and his daughter are recreating Berlin. They plan on devastating the USSR and USA and rebuilding a utopia in the heart of Germania. He feels that the current political structures are incapable of handling the advances of mutantism, and if allowed to continue, the two empires will continue to escalate their superhuman war against each other until nothing's left. He'll build a new world, where the people can usher in a brave new age of freedom. It's the Ex-Men and the Rasputin siblings vs. Magneto and the Scarlet Witch. We get a fastball special, but they don't seem to stand a chance against Magneto. Then Xavier rolls up. And he talks Magneto down. That these people don't need to suffer, that surely, the two greatest minds in the world can find a solution to the problem. That, together, as the most powerful mutants in the world, they can prevent themselves from being victimized without engaging in wholesale slaughter. There's a whole new world he wants to show Erik. Magneto finally takes off his helmet, falls to Earth, and into his friend's arms. They hold, crying. Two shots fire, clean rifle bullets through the skulls of the world's two greatest mutants. The Black Widow, nested on a Berlin roof with a sniper rifle, reports her job done.
The epilogue would take place in 1967, at the height of the Civil Rights movement. The Worthington Estate has been turned into the Charles Xavier International School, an academy that teaches academics and tolerance to all, regardless of x-gene, or race, or gender, or religion. Warren is the primary trustee, Jean and Scott (now married) serving as Dean and headmistress. Following the rampage in Berlin, Howlett and Pietro Rasputin exposed the inhuman experiments of Weapon Plus and Project Red. The hysteria of HUAC and SENTINEL are crumbling, and Kennedy, before his death, pardoned the mutants involved. Piotr and Ilyana are working with Kruschev, and hold significant responsibility for the signing of a treaty by both the US and USSR that bans continued human weapons projects. Bobby Drake has become a civil rights leader incredibly popular with the youth. He's a heart-throb. Hank McCoy is doing civilian research into the origin of mutation, hoping, that once we can understand how the mutation works, we can usher in a new era or limitless energy and possibilities.
So that's that! Everything's in place. There's a couple of things I'm not completely satisfied. The third act could use a little meat, so I may come back later and plot out the smaller character beats in that act, cuz right now it just looks like a big fight. The other thing is, I wasn't totally satisfied with the span of the years. I would have preferred if it was a slightly shorter period of time, but to key it to the Bay of Pigs and Berlin Wall, it had to finale in 1962. All in all, I'm satisfied with the whole thing. Whatta you all think?
