To Die Anew!

 

At the end of its run in the fall of 1998, X-Factor lost its leader, Alex Summers (aka Havok, the brother of the X-Man Cyclops), presumed dead from an explosion of the airborne ship he had boarded in an attempt to stabilize its systems. Yet the following month, a new series began that took advantage of the ruptured craft having space-time properties to merge Alex's essence with the body of his counterpart in an alternate reality, a man who had just met his own death at the hands of the Sentinels--and subsequently, Alex fell in with the Havok-led group of mutants named The Six, whose history and whose world were dramatically different from his own.

The first issue of the new series has already received its due in the PPC--yet now we jump ahead over 2½ years to its final issue, the one story missing from my collection of Mutant X which I'm now going to take a look at for the first time. Writer Howard Mackie has helmed this series from beginning to end--and we arrive at a time of crisis for this world, for its heroes, and certainly for Alex Summers, who doesn't appear free from the capricious whims of whatever fate brought him to an Earth for which he alone holds the key to its survival.

As far as world-ending threats go, who or what could be responsible for such a doomsday scenario on a global scale? How about this universe's version of the Beyonder--who has broken free of his imprisonment at the Earth's core thanks to a battle with a mutated version of Captain America, and who takes a crash course in getting up to speed with current events before setting his sights on one person in particular. [Images taken from the third and final Mutant X Annual.]

Yet the Beyonder isn't the only threat to worry about. There's also Dracula, who catches Havok and his group off-guard at the tail end of the penultimate issue of Mutant X and makes Alex his own before anyone can make a move. But even Dracula is taken aback by the forceful and mentally seismic presence of the Beyonder.

Dracula, who has become fixated on taking the blood of powered humans, decides to approach and offer a bargain to the Beyonder: Dracula will lead him to Havok, in exchange for being permitted to drain the blood of any and all super-powered foes whom the Beyonder crushes. As to what the Beyonder wants with Havok, Dracula realizes that the Beyonder now wishes to put an end to everything, across the realities--and that the Beyonder believes that Havok, who unknowingly has become the nexus of all realities, is the key.  (I would think the Beyonder could create and access his own realities nexus, but what do I know.)  Dracula, as it happens, also wishes to claim Havok for himself, in order to have sole control over the nexus.  

Meanwhile, Dr. Strange has entered the picture with allies of his own, when it becomes clear that Havok wants to confront the Beyonder at the behest of Bloodstorm (our Storm, who in this reality succumbed to Dracula but nevertheless spurned him), though she has misinterpreted Strange's words as to why Alex is so important to the Beyonder.

As for what the Beyonder is doing in the meantime, the final Mutant X Annual did a fairly impressive job of having him deal with wave after wave of hero attacks, before a final grouping led by Victor Von Doom intercepts both him and Dracula following a devastating assault on the nation's capital. Granted, the plethora of Infinity books released during the early '90s had likely desensitized many of us to such lopsided battle scenes which mostly serve to demonstrate how inadequate the powers of even the strongest of heroes were against this kind of all-powerful threat--but just as with the Ultimate books which would hit the stands in a year's time, how riveting such scenes would be to Mutant X readers would depend on how vested they had become in the various characters presented over the span of this series.

Needless to say, Von Doom's group wouldn't fare any better than those who came before them.

As for Havok, it's high time he discovered his importance here, in order to prepare him for the confrontation to come--as well as to understand the dual nature of the Beyonder, now merged with the essence of none other than the Goblin Queen. (And you thought the Avengers Forever series was convoluted.)

And so finally, a plan is formed that involves Strange and his group sequestering themselves in a chamber, in order to assist Havok behind the scenes as he finally faces off against the Beyonder--or, rather, the persona who is really in the driver's seat here.

The way the story's final page is presented, it's clear that Alex is at peace, one way or the other--in death, or, more likely, finding himself traveling across realities once more to arrive back in his native one, where he would become involved with the X-Men in the "Rise And Fall of the Shi'ar Empire" arc (highly recommended). As for Dracula, who had his own plans for Alex, he had breached the chamber where Strange and the others were trance-like and helpless, only to find himself taken by surprise by a swift stake from Bloodstorm. What goes around, comes around, Vlad.