Remember a time waaaayyyyy back in the day (AKA all of the 90s and most of the early 00s), when Marvel used their mutant line as a flimsy allegory for every single minority struggle in the world? Of course this recurring theme ended when mutants became an endangered species and their motive shifted to “survival and reproduction” as opposed to “acceptance and overcoming established social norms” (thanks a lot, conventional super hero storytelling…since if our characters aren’t f*cking in between panels, they ain’t worth reading, yeah?) However, before this happened, Marvel released a small, quiet, four issue mini series in 2002 written by a then unknown creative property named Geoff Johns with art by Shawn Martinborough which borrowed a familiar name and applied it to a similar, albeit differently angled, group of individuals…The Morlocks.
This book featured seven all new characters, all mutants living in Chicago during an undefined point in X-History when the Sentinels were still the ultimate evil of the line (and not the messed up hyper adaptive bio sentinels…the giant robot ones that were controlled by human handlers.) To go into explicit detail of all of these characters isn’t quite the point, especially since Litterbug was the only one to ever appear again and even then sporadically and in the background. The point of the story was not the individual characters, their abilities or even, really, their back stories…the point of the story was survival, companionship, empathy and most importantly the existence of all three of these things in a world where corrupt government officials masturbate to video footage of mutants being violently murdered (it was 02…some of that 90s shock and awe sensibility hadn’t quite worn off yet, apparently.)
The premise was simple…seven human beings, all different in both their physical attributes and lifestyles, uniting together against a common threat that wished them dead due only to one extra gene that they were born with…a common scenario. However, unlike the Magneto’s of the world who sought revenge against those that spurned them, or the Professor Xavier’s who sought peace and a united future, these individuals just wanted to be left alone to pursue their lives like they had before their powers manifested. However, the world they inhabited was committed to not letting this happen…and so before they disappeared forever, they united to help each other complete their own final wishes.
Whether those wishes involved revenge, closure, reunification or simple destruction, this group banded together and completed them all before riding off into an uncertain future. Just like that, in four issues, Geoff Johns, still new to the craft that he would go on to reinvent in the years to come, managed to summarize that era of X-History perfectly and in a way some writers just failed to comprehend. While everyone and their mother has written a story about mutants “banding together against a world that hates and fears them”, very few have looked at the nature of WHY they band together. It’s easy enough to throw a bunch of characters onto a team (admit it, we all have our dream rosters), slightly harder to make those characters click together…but almost impossible to properly convey the empathy inherent in our nature as human beings that brings us together in the first place…but Johns did it…and did it with gusto. He managed to not just craft a story about mutants running from giant robots (though there certainly was plenty of that…also explosions), he wrote a story about persecution, perseverance, unity and the often times impossible strength of the human spirit.
Near as I can tell, these issues were never collected into a trade…but given that I found the fourth and final issue for fifty cents, 8 years after I bought the first three on the stands, you shouldn’t have any problem longbox diving for this one…and it is well, WELL worth it.