I had started on Stryfe’s Strike File as an entry for the Advent
Calendar, but after nearly doubling the 250-word limit I had set for myself
on Advent entries, I realized it required further study, and additional jokes.
The X-books were obsessed with G.I. Joe-esque character profiles
for a while in the early ’90s. They filled the back pages of issues of X-Factor
and X-Force, and finally got a full book of their own at the end of the "X-Cutioner’s Song" crossover, written by the man in the spiky metal costume
himself (through his servants Scott Lobdell and Fabian Nicieza) and full of
melodramatic screeds and portents of plotlines yet to be abandoned.
At 13, I pored over this book ceaselessly, looking for clues
to the future. At 34, I read passages like “So do I love you or hate you? Do I
nurse at your breast or do I tear at your throat? Do I look for you, if I
survive the final curse of my mad song?” and chuckle while shaking my head.
Among the events and new characters the one-shot foretold:
-Colossus’ defection to the Acolytes
-Illyana’s death from the Legacy virus
-Graydon Creed, though it’s pretty much spelled out that his
dad is Sabertooth.
-Threnody, who would appear months later in X-Men #27 as a
pawn of Mr. Sinister.
-Sienna Blaze, who would later get shunted into the Malibu
universe.
-A sketch by Larry Stroman that hinted at the coming of
Revanche, aka The Other Psylocke, a confusing storyline that served as my
introduction to the X-Men comics.
Other things worth noting:
-“Collectable” is misspelled on the cover
-It miscounts the number of Upstarts: Under
a listing for Graydon Creed, they are called a quartet. In fact, not including
their referee, the Gamesmaster, the Upstarts included Fabian Cortez, Graydon
Creed, Trevor Fitzroy, Shinobi Shaw, Sienna Blaze and the Fenris twins.
-Gideon is referred to as the “Ziggy Stardust of the
corporate boardroom,” which may be my favorite phrase in the whole book.
-Cannonball is foretold to be a major leader of mutantkind, which,
as I wrote about during the Advent Calendar, hasn’t
quite panned out 20 years later.
-It introduces Holocaust, but an exoskeleton-less version of
the character, who would not actually appear in the comics for two years, and
then in the Age of Apocalypse reality, though he would eventually cross over.
Stryfe’s file on the character is all questions and vagaries, as if the writers
themselves were like, “Yeah, somebody did a sketch of this guy, and we’ll
probably use him, but we don’t actually know anything about him yet.”
The writing itself is exceedingly melodramatic. Of course,
Stryfe had just spent the entire "X-Cutioner’s Song" ranting and raving and
giving verbose speeches, so it’s not like it was out of character. But it made
me yearn for the Stryfe of the Askani’Son
limited series from 1995, when Scott Lobdell and Jeph Loeb wrote the Chaos
Bringer as more of a young Joker.
The framing device for the issue is that Xavier finds a
computer disk with the files on it at Stryfe’s base on the moon. Xavier looks
through all the files, decides information about the near future would make
Scott and Jean’s fragile hearts explode, and erases the disk. It wouldn’t be
long before he ended up doing the same thing to Magneto …
… which is ironic, because of all the 1993 plotlines he
foretold, Stryfe completely misses the climactic event of the biggest X-story
of the year to come. Because Stryfe actually believes he killed Xavier during
the "X-Cutioner’s Song" and that Magneto died on Asteroid M back in 1991. What a
dummy.
Earlier “strike files” in X-Factor and X-Force featured the
private files of Apocalypse and Cable, respectively.
Apocalypse’s “Manifesto” files ran in X-Factor #65 and #66
and featured portentous ramblings on the five members of the team, which were
then the original five X-Men. Though X-Factor was written by Chris Claremont
and Whilce Portacio at the time, Nicieza wrote the Apocalypse files, and you
can see the same love and care went into writing these as did the Stryfe files,
when he calls Archangel “The birth spawn of my soul, if not my loins.” Great,
now I have to picture Apocalypse’s Apoca-loins!
Cyclops’ file reminds readers he is one of The Twelve, “the
archetype beings that will one day save or damn mutantkind.” This refers to a
comment made by the Master Mold waaaaay back in the series’ early days. The
Twelve subplot would lie largely dormant for nearly an entire decade before
coming to the fore in a year-2000 X-Men crossover about Apocalypse attempting
to siphon the mutants’ powers to achieve omnipotence. The rest of The Twelve
were Xavier, Magneto, Jean Grey, Iceman, Polaris, Sunfire, Storm, Cable, Bishop
and, fresh from obscurity, Mikhail Rasputin and the Living Monolith. Nate Grey
was additionally revealed as The Thirteenth, intended to provide Apoc with a
new body.
There was one neat moment of most-likely-unplanned foresight
in Apocalypse’s files. Of Beast, he writes, “If not for the rape of will
performed by Xavier, Hank could have been a son of my own heart, my own pain,
my own fears.” This perfectly vaguely describes the so-called Dark Beast of the
Age of Apocalypse, who would not meet the page for almost four years.
Cable’s files, which appeared in X-Force #1, featured
then-new characters Deadpool, Feral, Shatterstar and G.W. Bridge, and,
according to Comic
Book Legends Revealed, were apparently a cheap way to cram Deadpool into
the issue without actually including him in the story.
Of the walking cat with Bride of Frankenstein hair known as
Feral, Cable writes: “Feral will sit on your lap, purring for attention one
second, and just as easily kill a passing bird and drop it at your feet for
approval the next.” Also, she hates Mondays and there is video of her playing a
keyboard on the Internet.
Another one-shot character guide was published during the
Age of Apocalypse, in which En Sabah Nur separated the alternate reality’s
major players into categories of Chosen and Forgotten. Despite being a
proponent of survival of the fittest, there were more Chosen than Forgotten.
This one doesn’t work as a vague prognosticator of the future, however, as this
version of Earth was meant to go away with the storyline in just a couple
months’ time. But hey, it’s nice to know there’s a world where characters like
Wild Child, Abyss, Mikhail Rasputin and Aurora are elevated to stations of
importance.
Dan Grote has been a
Matt Signal contributor since 2014 and friends with Matt since there were four
Supermen and two Psylockes. His two novels, My Evil Twin and I and Of Robots, God and Government, are available on Amazon.
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