From Marvel Comics
Jubilee is our lens into the X-Men, the team and found family that she stumbles into accidentally. Through her, we learn all about the players we’ll come to know and understand: our team leaders, optic-blasting Cyclops, and Storm, who commands the weather at her beck and call. Jubilee will also meet Wolverine, a superhealer with an adamantium skeleton, keen senses, claws, and a swimming pool of secrets. There is also the warm and Southern Rogue, able to siphon another person’s powers and memories, coupled with strength, flight, and the invulnerability of Carol Danvers. We also have the bio-kinetic charger Gambit, the agile and intellectually impressive Beast, shapeshifter Morph, and Jean Grey, a telepath and telekinetic, whose full scope barely scratches the surface in Season 1.
Our opening two-parter lays down the primary “Big Bads” who will stick around in the worst way—the Mutant Control Agency (MCA), supported by Senator Robert Kelly and headed by federal go-getter Henry Peter Gyrich, and the Sentinel Program, funded by the MCA, and operated by engineer, Dr. Bolivar Trask. Both agencies have tapped into the public’s hysteria surrounding mutants, established from our opening news roll cameoing Sabretooth.
Trask is the one building the massive, mutant-hunting robots… the likes of which Jubilee encounters at her local mall when she’s arcade-ing away the blues. It’s still pretty fresh, it seems—Jubilee’s ability to manipulate light into explosive, firework grenades. It's scared the you-know-what out of her foster parents, and now she’s the very real target of a very real threat. When a Sentinel trails and nearly kidnaps her, off-duty Gambit, Rogue and Storm, are in the right place at the wrong time.
Jubilee gets to see two dazzling X-Women toss and electrocute the Sentinel like it’s a plastic toy. It’s an inspiring display of badassery, and an easy sell for Storm to recruit her into their fold. Once she’s awake. Jubilee recovers dazed and confused at the X-Men’s HQ, Professor Xavier’s mansion that is both their home and mission base.
It’s when the X-Men decide to infiltrate the Mutant Control Agency that our full stakes sink in. Obligated to destroy the registration files that could endanger so many other mutants, Professor X has little choice but to send off his team towards imminent disaster.
It’s at the battle for the MCA base, where Wolverine secures first place as Team Rebel. There’s some unspoken tension between “Logan” and Cyke, and we’re not sure where that’s stemming from yet...
Then, our first tragedy. Morph is killed by a Sentinel’s blast, and the team’s left reeling. Beast, a core member, is also apprehended and imprisoned—and he’ll remain that way for almost an entire season. With Beast benched, we get a further sense of loss, that the X-Men are now grieving and down a central member.
Jubilee’s rescued and “adopted” by the team, but there’s little resolution, or even hope. Gyrich and Trask will continue their Sentinel Program, bucking Presidential orders. And Morph’s death still looms largely, sharpening the X-Men’s purpose against the MCA.
This is their livelihood. On the daily, the X-Men face external challenges, always felt on a personal scale. Their world is an emotional and private one, rooted in shared freakishness”and sacrifice.
Details
Written by Michael Edens and Ralph Macchio (adaptation). Art by Manny Clark and James Pascoe. Cover by John Hebert.
Lady Deathstrike and the Reavers chase Leech into the Morlock tunnels where they find an alien vessle that Callisto and her band cannot open; Deathstrike, an old flame of Logan's, lures Wolvie into the tunnels to force him to help her breach the artifact; After they battle and rehash old wounds, the vessle gets cracked and begins to open. Adapts Season 3 of the cartoon series.