STORY: "Onslaught, Phase 1: --Apocalypse Lives!" (22 pages)  The X-Men, X-Force, the Avengers and Nate Grey combine forces to plan against Onslaught, who has taken over Professor X completely.

What you need to know:
It's part of the godforsaken Onslaught crossover.  Of which more later.  Suffice to say that this issue is mainly devoted to packing various characters off to appear in other tie-in issues.

Apocalypse wakes up from another of his patented healing slumbers, ready to intervene in the Onslaught story.  In other books.

Uatu the Watcher hovers round the edge of the story looking ominous.  For those of you not familiar with wider Marvel continuity, Uatu is an alien whose sole job is to observe and record events on Earth.  He shows up to attend major events in person. Unfortunately, over time he's become a cheap way of adding weight to a flimsy story.  And that's what he's doing here.

The X-Men Mansion is in a pretty nasty state, after an entire wing got blown up in battle with Onslaught in Onslaught: X-Men.  They start rebuilding it after Onslaught.

This is the first time Nate Grey meets Cyclops and Phoenix.  Their counterparts on his world were his genetic parents, although he only met them briefly.  Naturally, Nate mistakes Jean for her clone Madelyne Pryor, a supporting character from his own book.  Not much is made of this, however.

In a brief subplot scene, Moira MacTaggert announces that it's time to unseal the Xavier Protocols.  The founding X-Men go trudging off to Muir Isle where they clog up the otherwise totally unrelated Excalibur #100 looking into this.  Basically, it's just a load of instructions on how to kill X-Men, and it's not of any great plot significance.

The rest of the heroes split into three groups.  Some of them go off to find Magneto, some of them go off to warn the Fantastic Four that Onslaught has taken an interest in Franklin Richards, and X-Force are left at the mansion to babysit Nate Grey.  Oh, and Storm goes off to take care of Cable - her interest in him is one of several allusions around this period, mainly in Cable's own title, to a potential romance between the two of them.  It goes nowhere. Wolverine heads off on his own as well, to investigate a hunch. Anyhow, all of these plots are picked up in other titles elsewhere in the crossover.

Psylocke and Archangel make more vague mutterings about how she's been changed by the Crimson Dawn.

And in a closing subplot scene, Onslaught is a bit nasty to the Dark Beast (who left the X-Men to join up with him in Onslaught: X-Men). Once again, all this is picked up in other books.

Contrary to popular belief:
One of the odd things about Nate Grey is that he was only referred to as "X-Man" in guest appearances - such as this one - but never in his own book.  I choose to take the view that writers using that name are getting it wrong.  After all, Nate was supposed to be distrustful of the X-Men - why on earth would he call himself X-Man?  On the other hand, this view takes a bit of a hammering from later stories scripted by Terry Kavanagh, the writer of X-Man, in which Nate still uses the name.  But, oddly, still only in guest appearances.

Comments:
Well. Onslaught.

Onslaught is not the least coherent crossover Marvel ever published.  That honour belongs to The Crossing, an Avengers story so impenetrable that it was later unceremoniously booted out of continuity by being explained away as a deliberate attempt by a villain to confuse everyone.  The Crossing is unlikely ever to be beaten on this score.  But Onslaught's pretty bad as well.

When Scott Lobdell created Onslaught, his concept was a simple one.  The X-Men hadn't had a big cosmic-level villain since Dark Phoenix, and wouldn't it be nice if they had one?  Well, yes, it would.  And that's about the last stage at which Onslaught was a good idea.

The character lumbered gamely into print in a variety of oblique hints and subplots long, long before anybody had really worked out who he was or what he was trying to achieve.  Larry Hama, then writing Wolverine, reported that he had been asked to use Onslaught - but the editors could not tell him anything about the character at all.  Not surprisingly, this resulted in a load of impenetrable and irreconcilable hints which were never satisfactorily explained.  This issue makes a feeble attempt to wave them aside by saying that everything we know about Onslaught was suspect because he was the source of information.  That's not so much an explanation as a disguised admission of failure.

As if this incoherent mess wasn't bad enough, it was at around this point that Marvel entered into the Heroes Reborn deal.  This involved handing over control of four main titles - Avengers, Fantastic Four, Iron Man and Captain America - to Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld.  It was decided that the four titles should be moved into a pocket universe while all this was going on.  An excuse was needed to achieve this.  Marvel latched onto Onslaught and decided he could be turned into a device to get Heroes Reborn set up.  A character who should have been an epic X-Men plot suddenly found himself as a set-up and a plot device in a story concerning a whole load of characters he had no connection with at all.

Worse yet, nobody ever seemed to work out a sensible plot for the crossover.  Onslaught's motivations and aims are totally oblique. Foreshadowing from even a couple of months before fails to lock into the actual story in any way.  Shortly after the storyline was published, Marvel released Road To Onslaught, a "behind the scenes" guide which contained a plot summary that not only bore almost no resemblance to what had seen print, but was a thousand times better than the published version.  As in, it made sense.  It almost looked as if every writer had assumed somebody else was going to do the major job of explaining what Onslaught was up to. None of them did.

Scott Lobdell later described Onslaught as "a work in progress."  Of course, it isn't. It's a published, finished work.  And while there are some decent issues in there - mainly in fringe titles which didn't carry the burden of advancing the bemusing plot - the story as a whole fails totally.

FEATURE CHARACTERS
Archangel (next in Excalibur #100, then in X-Men vol 2 #55, then in flashback in Avengers '99, then in issue #337)
Bishop and Iceman (both last in Onslaught: X-Men; both next in Avengers vol 1 #401, then in Fantastic Four #415, then in X-Men vol 2 #55)
Cannonball II (last in Onslaught: X-Men; next in Excalibur #100, then in X-Men vol 2 #55, then behind the scenes in issue #337)
Cyclops, Phoenix III (both last in Onslaught: X-Men) and Psylocke (all next in Excalibur #100, then in X-Men vol 2 #55)
Gambit (last in Onslaught: X-Men; next in Avengers vol 1 #401, then in X-Men vol 2 #55)
Professor X (last in Onslaught: X-Men; next in Fantastic Four #415, then in X-Men vol 2 #55)
Storm (last in Onslaught: X-Men; next in Cable #34, then in Incredible Hulk vol 2 #444)
Wolverine (last in Onslaught: X-Men; next in Wolverine vol 2 #104-105, then in flashback in Onslaught: Marvel Universe, then in issue #337)

GUEST STARS
The Avengers: Captain America I, Iron Man III, the Scarlet Witch, Thor, the Vision (all last in Onslaught: X-Men) and Quicksilver (last in Avengers vol 1 #400; all next in Avengers vol 1 #401)
Nate Grey (between Onslaught: X-Men and X-Man #18)

VILLAINS
Apocalypse (between Cable #19 and Fantastic Four #415)
The Dark Beast (between Onslaught: X-Men and X-Factor #125)
Onslaught (last in Onslaught: X-Men; next behind the scenes in Cable #34)
Ozymandias (between Wolverine vol 2 #101 and X-Men vol 2 #55)

GUEST APPEARANCES
Excalibur: Colossus, Meggan, Nightcrawler, Shadowcat and Pete Wisdom (all between Excalibur #99-100)
X-Force: Domino II (last in Cable #33), Siryn (last in X-Force #54) and Sunspot (last in issue #331; all next in X-Man #18)
Moira MacTaggert (between Excalibur #98 and #100)
Uatu the Watcher (between Fantastic Four #400 and #415)

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