Pop! Goes the Icon

So my annual cold is working its way from my head to my chest … which means I can function with a clearer head, but I can’t stop coughing. Ah well, what can I do?

Finally picked up X-Factor No. 27, otherwise known as Chapter 11 of “Messiah CompleX.” It’s starting to come together, I see. I really need to re-read it, because I kinda rushed it after dinner last night and surely missed the nuances I so love in Peter David’s writing. Seriously, I have loved that man’s writing since … Spectacular Spider-Man days? … and I am so glad he is on this book.

At least we now know why Bishop wants to ax the baby, as he reveals (in the future, as a kid) that the “messiah” will bring harmony to the world before throwing it into chaos by killing a million humans. Of course, there’s no guarantee of anything here: The baby might not be the messiah Bishop refers to, or there might be some mitigating circumstance he is not aware of. Also, here’s a question: If he were to successfully kill the baby, wouldn’t he then eliminate his timeline and his eventual growth into the XSE, thereby negating his ever coming back to murder the messiah in the first place??

That’s my major problem with these time-travel stories: By the future characters’ mere presence in the “past,” they are jeopardizing their own existence. Time-travel paradoxes have never been handled that well in most sci-fi and comic book settings anyway. Honestly, I think the Back to the Future series was one of the few to truly address the consequences of upsetting the time-space continuum.

Wow, I think that was the nerdiest paragraph I have ever written in my life. Suddenly, I don’t even think being the editor of a hipster magazine will be able to overcome the geekery of that above graph. If any potential dates read this post, I’m seriously never getting laid again.

Anyway, I can’t wait to see how this whole thing turns out, though honestly, I hope it’s the last of these super-weighty “save the future” storylines that seem to have overtaken the X-books in the last decade.