Blogathon 18: Uncanny X-Men #399

Warren Worthington (Archangel) figures out that his company, Worthington Industries has invested in a mutant brothel in Nevada called the X-Ranch. Perfectly legal, but somehow, this gets him all upset. I understand Nightcrawler being agap, because he's a priest, but playboy millionaire? What a fucking prude!

Cut to: Nevada where some rich dude shows up at the X-Ranch and discovers his hooker is a 500-pound woman and kind of freaks out, but she assures him he'll love what she does and she uses telepathy to go to town on him, blowing his mind literally.

Bobby Drake goes undercover, because Worthington can't just show and say, "Yeah, I own this place, let me see what's what." I'm still not sure what the problem is. So, a bunch of mutants opened up a brothel in Nevada where it's legal. Problem?

Anyway, Drake gets into a room with a girl, the soon-to-be-X-Man Stacy-X (originally meant to be called XStacy, but apparently that was bad or something). He opens up the door to the balcony so Archangel can come in and ask if he can talk to Stacy, so she attacks him.

And then members of the Church of Humanity (who backed Mr. Clean) show up and kill people before running away from the X-Men. Stacy joins the team and has all kinds of attitude.

The X-Men continue to act as the moral mutant authorities, seeing something involving mutants that they don't like and jumping in whether they have cause or not. The X-Ranch is a cool idea that never really goes anywhere. And Stacy fits perfectly into reusing old ideas as once again, the X-Men squad we're following has a member with a questionable past and bad attitude. Nothing is really done with her here.

I wonder, by having the X-Trio act as moral mutant authorities, was Casey playing with the idea of these guys being the old generation that feels they have to tell the younger mutants what to do? Is Casey playing with the same theme as Morrison in making mutation a metaphor for youth?

In "Poptopia," they tell Chamber not to fuck a pop star. Here, they tell women not to use their powers to get men off even though not actual sex is had--but is that better or worse). In the X-Corps arc, they'll tell Banshee to do it their way or there's the highway. Kind of presumptuous lot, eh?