X-Men Days of Future Past: Doomsday #2 // Review
Magneto has shown up to attend the funeral of Jean Grey. There are more than a few people there who are more than a little upset about the situation. Logan pulls a gun at a funeral and points it at Magneto. The high-density plastic shells wouldn’t be anything that the master of magnetism could do anything about once the bullets left the muzzle, but there’s no way he’s going to fire the gun in X-Men Days of Future Past: Doomsday #2. Writer Marc Guggenheim continues to explore a dark parallel timeline for the X-Men with penciller Manuel García, inker Cam Smith and colorist Yen Nitro.
Magneto is there to talk. He feels things changing and knows that they’re going to get much worse for the superhuman mutants. Xavier doesn’t believe in Magneto’s vision, and the two-part with a handshake. Of course, Magneto IS right about things getting worse. The Mutant Control Act finds the government concentrating mutants in relocation centers. Sometime later, Xavier is in his mansion talking with government liaison Henry Peter Gyrich. Some of those at Xavier’s school have been targeted for relocation. They’re criminals...but only the crime of being born. Gyrich is quick to point out that being born a mutant is a crime nonetheless...
Guggenheim moves dramatically through the events that had largely been established by Chris Claremont and John Byrne back in the early 1980s. Only the larger events seem to warrant his attention, so Guggenheim isn’t exactly adding a whole lot of insight into what Claremont and Byrne set up a few decades ago. There ARE elements of the script that lend some resonance to earlier writing, though. Back in the summer of 1984, Rachel Summers told the story of Xavier’s death to the X-Men. This issue shows a little more of the day he died from her perspective, which is interesting.
García nails some very vivid specific moments. It’s a bit weird to see García handle a more explicit look at Xavier’s death than the few iconic panels that John Romita Junior illustrated for the same event back in 1984. García is at his best with certain iconic images...a Sentinel robot towering over Xavier’s school is particularly chilling. The wedding between Kitty and Colossus feels like the final, satisfying resolution to a whole lot of romantic drama from the early 1980s. García handles it with grace and poise.
There is some poetry to the way that Guggenheim is framing the former future history, which was not destined to be the present’s present on the comics page. The issue opens with a funeral and ends with a wedding. There’s a great deal of potential in a closer look at Claremont and Byrne’s Days of Future Past, but Guggenheim is rushing through events in the course of the series. A more satisfying approach might involve a whole subset of issues set in that dark future. Rachel Summers’ saga during the era would be interesting enough to warrant its own series.
