Spoilers abound, dorks.
So this is the new tpb by Bendis. You might know there was a schism between Cyclops and his school, and Wolverine and his school, arising from Cyclops (possessed by Phoenix) killing Professor Xavier.
I have previously mentioned that I really like the chatty dialogue by Bendis. Compare this book to that slop bucket which is Uncanny Avengers, which has ye olde narrative panels describing the action. Here, you know what is happening from the dialogue and the art. You don't need a nanny to spoonfeed it out for you. The dialogue conveys stuttered confusion (Cyclops' students), under-the-breath contempt (Storm), frustrated anger (Iceman), honesty in fear (Cyclops), silent remorse (Cyclops), cold assessment (Tempus), and weary futility (Magneto). It is skilfully done. I haven't seen such good characterisation since, well, I guess, Chris Claremont when he was in his prime on X-Men in the early 90s, or Marv Wolfman in the 80s on New Teen Titans.
Time travel is clearly the bane of the Marvel Universe. The Beast used it to bring forward the X-men from the faux 60s when they were in their mid-teens, in order to shock Cyclops into abandoning his revolution. It earned him the withering contempt of The Watcher. And now Tempus (a kind of jailbait hot Australian mutant who controls time and seems to be of variable age - something is being set up in the plot and I suspect something non-linear is happening with her) uses it to bring forward a young Charles Xavier from what could be the 1970s to sort out an enormously powerful, god-like mutant named Michael Malloy.
Xavier has secretly been dealing with Malloy for a long time, keeping him out of danger and under control using psionic implants. But with Xavier's death, those plugs have eroded and finally failed.
Cyclops tries to turn Malloy into a force for mutant kind. He is succeeding in this. Magneto intervenes - he's been down this path and knows what happens. Malloy zaps him to Alaska. SHIELD work out where Malloy is. They're not going to take any crap from a god-like mutant who has already destroyed one of their helicarriers.
As they arrive, they learn that Cyclops and Magik have been killed in a SHIELD missile strike on Malloy, and that Emma Frost has been killed by Malloy. Malloy has learned that he can't bring people back to life. They're all DAID!
So, Tempus and Xavier go back into the past. Xavier uses his mental powers to prevent Malloy's parents from meeting at college. And so Malloy is never born. Cyclops, Magik and Emma Frost were never killed.
Its a classic "Would you go back in time and kill Hitler's grandparents?" moment. The ethics of it are intriguing. Xavier himself seems so torn by it that he erases his own memory of the event and of the future. No one else knows what has happened save for Tempus. And she tells Cyclops part of it and says she is going to keep an eye on him because she knows he is as bad as Magneto ever was on his worst day...
...and Cyclops silently accepts it. He closes his school and walks away.
Its really compelling stuff. I really recommend it.
