X-Men:Endangered Species

Written by Mike Carey, Christopher Yost, and Christos Gage.

Illustrated by Scot Eaton, Mark Bagley, Mike Perkins, Tom Grummett, and Andrea Divito.

ISBN: 9780785130123

A story in eighteen chapters, these tales originally ran as short chapters at the back end of regular X-Men stories, a sort of cross title bonus section.

The X-Men are mutant heroes, sworn to protect a world that fears and hates them. They have had hard times in recent years. First, at the behest of her father, Magneto, Wanda Maximoff set off the events of the House of M, reshaping the world with her mutant probability power so that her father ruled the world, and mutants were the ruling elite. However, this utopia was fundamentally flawed, and the already unstable Wanda sought to address what she saw as the source of all her woes. She spoke three words, and with them reshaped the world. Those words: "No more Mutants."

This led to the Decimation or M-Day as it was called. In the entire world, only 198 mutants retained their powers. For the rest, they vanished as if they had never been. Now, far from being the next step in human evolution, Homo Superior is an Endangered Species.

Dr. Henry McCoy, also known as the X-Man Beast, is one of the greatest geneticists in the world. Since M-Day, he has searched tirelessly for the cure to this problem. So far it has eluded him.

And thus, it is a desperate man who is the protagonist of this tale.

Hank tries many angles. He consults the greatest minds on mutation, including Dr. Kavita Rao, the woman who developed the "cure" for mutation. He travels to Wundagore Mountain to force the High Evolutionary to meet with him. He explores hidden programs that deal with mutation, from the American Weapon X, to the Canadian genocide camp, Neverland. He even offers to ransom all he has learned for help from monsters; Arnim Zola, Pandemic, Sugar Man, Modak, Mr. Sinister and Dr. Doom. None are interested.

But another answers his call unbidden, Dark Beast, the Hank McCoy who in another dimension served as Chief Geneticist to Apocalypse. He is willing to help, and makes a compelling case for why he should be allowed. And Dr. McCoy, desperate, accepts his help.

This is a deal with the devil, for Dark Beast is without mercy, or ethics. All is fair in the pursuit of knowledge. Hank hates him, because Hank can see so much of him self there, twisted into a monster.

They pursue many avenues of research, even traveling to Genosha to study the corpses of the Mutants who died there, and exploring the last stash of Mutant Growth Hormone, an addictive drug that grants temporary super powers. In each case, the X-gene is missing, even from corpses dead long before M-day.

Nor does it seem that it will exist in the future. Time travelers like Bishop, Cable, Rachel Summers, even the Dark Beast, all are immune to being depowered. But when Forge combines Cerebro and a time scanner, it can detect no mutants in any of their future time lines.

Their efforts to isolate the factors in humans that produce mutants proves even more disastrous and ends the collaboration between the cross dimensional twins.

So since Science has failed, biology and physics, he tries Magic. Dr. Strange, Sorcerer Supreme, takes him into the Astral, and shows him the spell. It is so interwoven into the fabric of the multiverse, if Strange were to make a mistake in extracting it, he could cause the entire multiverse to implode.

Finally, he projects Hank across reality, to view all of the Henry McCoys' efforts to unravel the mystery. Men of Science, men of faith, sorcerers and mixtures of all, across infinite reality, no Beast seems to be making any progress.

So the answer does not lie in science, it does not lie in sorcery. Hank has one last course of action. He goes to the source.

Since M-Day, Wanda Maximoff has been a human woman living in Transia, caring for her elderly aunt. He arranges to run into her there, but she has no memory of her life as a super hero. And when he starts to bring it up, she tells him an interesting story: A man caught a mermaid, and to free her, she gave him her comb which can grant three wishes. His wife complained he should have brought the mermaid to be in a freak show. He says, if you can't see any good in me I wish you had no eyes. And so it was.

She grabbed the comb and shouted, I wish you had a thousand eyes to see what a fool you are. And so it was.

So they argued for a long time and then used their last wish to wish they had just four eyes between them. And so it was. She had three, he had one.

So he took the comb back out to sea and threw it back to the mermaid.

"I have a magic earring, if you would like to give that a try?" she called.

But he had had quite enough of those kinds of games.

So, in a round about way, Hank has his answer. Wanda had used her powers to remake the world in line with her father Magneto's vision (House of M) and when that proved a nightmare, she fixed that with three words "No More Mutants." (Decimation) so what she is really is a wish machine. The more you use it, the less happy you are likely to be.

And so, Hank gave up.

Think that through. Super heroes never give up. They persevere. It is what they do.

Hank McCoy has literally made a deal with the Devil, faced the horror of what he could become, had to wrestle with the moral implications of research tainted with the suffering of those who were tortured and killed to obtain it, and exhausted every single avenue of solving this problem that he can conceive. And he has made no progress. This is not a feel good comic.

It instead really deals with morals, ethics and obsession. If you want something bad enough, how far are you willing to go to get it? How much of your soul are you willing to sacrifice before you finally say "no more?"

Dr. Henry McCoy finds out. And it does not make him happy.

Made in a one shot and seventeen eight page serials with three authors and five artists, this book would read very choppy. It doesn't. The writing in particular flows seamlessly from the start to the finish. And while the artists have very different styles; the painted prologue is most distinctive, they all follow certain conventions; this is a dark comic. Shadow and shading rule. They all use realistic styles without a trace of manga influence, and they all agreed on what Hank looks like; a big anthropomorphic blue Persian cat with a shoved in nose and glasses. So the art flows without a great deal of disruption.

No, the disruptions are all emotional, and this comic serves to underscore the plight of Homo Superior, a cauterized stump of a species. And it sets everything up for the next major story arc, Messiah Complex.

This is not a cheerful comic, and it is not a team book; its all the Beast. But it is still a good book, and thought provoking. Four stars.