STORY: "The Boy Who Saw Tomorrow" (22 pages)  Rachel Summers travels back from the Askani timeline to three years before the X-Men's debut, in order to stop Sanctity from altering history.  However, she does not stop Sanctity from planting the identity of the Twelve in the original Master Mold.

What you need to know:
Ah yes.  Issue minus 1.  This is part of Flashback Month, in which Marvel ran an entire month almost entirely composed of stories set before the Fantastic Four debuted, and done vaguely in the style of the Silver Age.  Somebody obviously thought this would be a great promotional gimmick.  Actually, retailers cut their orders back for almost the entire line (aside from a couple of really low selling titles whose orders rose).  What were Marvel thinking of?  Well, see Comments below...

Sanctity, a mad Askani leader who pops up occasionally in Cable's stories, is revealed in this issue to be Tanya Trask, the daughter of Bolivar Trask (creator of the Sentinels) and the sister of Larry Trask (who also led the Sentinels for a while).  Like Larry, she's a mutant with time-related powers, but she got lost in the timestream and was eventually rescued by Rachel Summers.  According to this story, they were close friends until Sanctity went mad.

The captions tell us that Rachel rescued Sanctity shortly after Excalibur #75, but that doesn't really fit with the later X-Men: Phoenix miniseries.  Presumably Rachel rescued Sanctity at some later point, after the formation of the Askani sisterhood.

Larry Trask is a precognitive mutant, although he won't find that out until some time later on in the Silver Age run.  Bolivar Trask knew about it all along and gave him the medallion he wears all the time, which controlled his powers.  The full story can be found in issue #59 (yes, #59).  Of course, back in the sixties, the polo neck and medallion look didn't seem quite as stupid.

In this issue, without Larry's knowledge, Bolivar is recording his unconscious precognitive ramblings.  The irony, of course, is that while Bolivar thinks he's basing his doomsday predictions of mutant domination on Larry's visions, Larry's actually talking about the assassination of Robert Kelly by Mystique's Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.  That was foiled by the X-Men in issues #141-142, but in the alternate Days of Future Past timeline, it was the key event that triggered the Sentinel domination of America - the exact reverse of Bolivar's fears that led him to create the Sentinels in the first place.

The Twelve plot was originally introduced in X-Factor when the second Master Mold suddenly turned out to know about twelve particularly important mutants that it wanted to destroy.  That Master Mold had a copy of the mind of Steven Lang (its creator), who in turn had access to the records of the Trasks' Sentinel project - which is presumably how he found out about the Twelve.

According to Sanctity, "humanity waited so long for the Twelve" and "they sorely disappointed us."  To put it mildly, it's hard to see how she can possibly be referring to the same Twelve whose identity was eventually revealed in 1999.  The Master Mold's (and therefore Sanctity's) Twelve don't match the Twelve eventually revealed in certain respects so either Sanctity got it wrong or Sanctity deliberately misled the Master Mold.  One thing that does make sense, however, is that Sanctity presumably wants the Master Mold to kill the Twelve.  That would have prevented Apocalypse performing his ritual to absorb their powers, and therefore have prevented him ascending to godhood and dominating her timeline.

Comments:
As I mentioned above, Flashback Month was not a commercial success, to put it mildly.  An entire month of Silver Age pastiches deviating almost entirely from the ongoing plots tested readers' patience unlike anything since the notorious Assistant Editors' Month (basically, an entire month of comedy issues, if you're not familiar).  Yet, to start with, it was such a good idea.

Scott Lobdell had e-mailed me a few months before this issue.  He was thinking of doing something with the Twelve in that year's summer crossover (which eventually went to be Operation: Zero Tolerance instead).  I seemed to be pretty up on my continuity.  Did I have any thoughts on the subject?  Well, at this point the Twelve plot hinged almost entirely on some cryptic comments of the Master Mold, and I wrote back with some suggestions on how the Master Mold might have come into possession of such a list in the first place.  Scott didn't use any of them, although I did suggest that Larry Trask might have identified the Twelve in his precognitive visions (thus explaining how the Sentinels knew about the Twelve).

However his mind got onto this track, Scott came up with the idea of a two-part story featuring Rachel Summers, Sanctity and the Trasks.  It would run through Uncanny X-Men and X-Men and be set in the past.  Not unreasonably, he thought the fans might like it.  It would be a self-contained story, it would advance the Twelve plot (which fans never seemed to shut up about even though it never went anywhere), and it would have the popular character Rachel Summers in it.  And it would take up the X-Men books for a month. Hey, wouldn't it be great if they made it something across the whole X-Men line?

Well, that's what it sounded like when I first heard of it, and I thought it was a great idea.  It would fulfil the X-books' requirement for an obligatory major event without being a crossover.  It would be an interesting change of pace.  And it was supposed to be setting up plots for the future, or at least exploring interesting areas of characters' histories.

What it most certainly was not, at that stage, was a month-long sprawling concoction of mostly irrelevant and unimportant Silver Age pastiches and novelty stories.  Some of them were actually alright, but a whole month was going to test anyone's patience.  It certainly seemed a commercial loser, and given the order figures for that month, retailers seemed to agree.

Anyhow.  Irritating Stan Lee framing sequence aside, this is the sort of story Flashback Month was originally meant to have in it - nice little character pieces, advancing plots.  Perhaps if Lobdell had ever got to do his version of the Twelve story (and before the e-mails start, no, I don't know what it was going to be) this pleasant little story might be more fondly remembered.  As opposed to being completely forgotten about, like the rest of the Flashback Month issues.

Art, incidentally, comes from a pre-fame Bryan Hitch, and it's great. The cover is Jose Ladronn in full Kirby mode, as you might expect given the retro design sense.

FEATURE CHARACTER
Rachel Summers (between Cable #23 and #65)

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
Jean Grey (last in the third diary entry in X-Men: The Wedding Album; next in X-Men Forever #3)
John Grey (last in flashback in Bizarre Adventures #27; next in issue #5)

VILLAINS
Sanctity (her real name, Tanya Trask, is revealed; chronologically earliest appearance; next in Askani'Son #1)
Bolivar Trask (last in flashback in issue #57; next in issue #14)
Larry Trask (last in flashback in issue #58; next in issue #57)
The Master Mold I (chronologically earliest appearance; next behind the scenes in issue #14)

Last revised: 16 August 2004

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