Operation: Zero Tolerance - 25 Years Later part 5: Creed for America

Bastion, Bastion, Bastion. It's always about Bastion. Or at least it's supposed to be. The guy is soon to be the major villain in a big X event. And yet who is generating the intrigue and danger? Graydon Creed.

X-Men has never shied away from a political component to their stories, so an anti-mutant presidential candidate makes a lot of sense. On its own this storyline probably wouldn't have any more punch than the average Senator Kelly screed. But combined with the promise of genocide (Creed actually uses the term "final solution" at one point) it takes on greater import. Alternate timelines have depicted horrible fates for mutants many times but at long last the threat is real.

The following includes major spoilers for Uncanny X-Men 338-341, X-Men 58-60, and X-Factor 127-128 & 130.

Uncanny X-Men 338

Truth

Kicking into high gear beginning in Uncanny X-Men 338, the Creed campaign storyline weaves together a number of threads both big and small. One of the most significant is the continued involvement of J. Jonah Jameson who's digging into Graydon Creed's past. His subplot only appears in two episodes, but they're both significant.

The first is in Uncanny X-Men 338 when he attends a Creed rally and ends up talking to an undercover Bobby Drake (more on that later). Jameson rips into Bobby over Creed taking advantage of people's fear and running on a relentless anti-mutant platform. For a man who's fostered irrational fear himself, he's surprisingly direct as he talks to Bobby. He extols the value of free speech while lamenting that a consequence of it is the ease with which people can be manipulated--instead of people making up their own minds leaders take advantage of their emotions and lead them to bad ends. This is one of those moments that proves people who think comic books shouldn't tackle serious issues are dead wrong. Lobdell delivers one of Jameson's finest moments. The scene is short--just one page--but it's one of the best distillations of the anti-Creed message.

Jameson's second appearance doesn't carry the weight of his first but it is more significant as a plot point. He has a contact in London who's uncovered the most devastating information possible about Creed: that he's Sabretooth and Mystique's son. Unfortunately Jameson never receives the information because Bastion, in perhaps his most significant cameo during these prologue issues, intercepts the editor's contact and kills him. Bastion laments killing the man, but considering his plan to wipe out an entire town in X-Men Unlimited 11 his regret rings hollow.

Misguided Revenge

To this point Graydon Creed's campaign has been seen in small bits here and there. Every now and then he'll pop up in person, but mostly he's seen in TV appearances. For the most part we understand Creed's campaign via people talking about it.

That changes in Uncanny X-Men 338 when Sam and Bobby, who were watching Creed TV appearances in X-Men 57, infiltrate Creed's campaign. Bobby takes a volunteer position while Sam manages to get in as Creed's personal assistant. Bobby's position gives us a small behind the scenes perspective on Creed's media appearances, but the real insight comes via Sam.

Uncanny X-Men 340

Creed's hatred is somehow more intense in private than when he's on stage. He alludes to his father in multiple conversations with Sam--even going so far as to call him the inspiration for his campaign. The scenes with Sam examine Creed in a new way. They don't make him more sympathetic--just the opposite, in fact. When Creed asks Sam about his father and gets an answer about how much he loved Sam and his brothers and sisters, all he can respond with is deep resentment for a father that didn't do the same. Creed is a man settling a score with a sociopath father who didn't know he existed and a terrorist mother who gave him up because he wasn't a mutant. And to settle that score he'll take out as many mutants as he possibly can. It's also reasonable to read a certain level of self-hatred into Creed when he talks about his father. The X-Men, of course, know about Creed's parentage. Sam considers at one point how easy it would be to reveal the secret to derail Creed's campaign. But he knows all it would do is fan further distrust; the point is not to defeat Creed by peddling the same kind of bigotry he traffics in but stay true to Charles Xavier's dream and win people over with the idea of equality.

There is an additional scene of note in X-Men 59. Sam walks into Creed's hotel room to bring him down for a speech and interrupts a clandestine discussion Creed is having in the back room. Creed ends the call immediately and doesn't reveal the identity of the caller. In the context of the ongoing story the natural assumption is that Creed was talking to Bastion (more and more Bastion seems to be exerting control over Creed's campaign--one such scene happens between Creed and Harper in X-Factor 127). In fact this was setting up a story that was never developed because Lobdell left the X-Men books almost immediately after "Operation: Zero Tolerance".

Uncanny X-Men 340

Fathers and Sons

Bobby Drake received a significant amount of ongoing character development for several years in the mid-nineties. Emma Frost helped push him to strengthen his powers. An evening with Rogue shined a light on his fraught relationship with his father. And a shopping trip with Jean Grey saw Bobby all but admit he was gay in an exchange of dialogue with possibly the most blunt bit of subtext in X-Men history. Writing Bobby into the Creed campaign storyline provided another outstanding moment for him.

Creed is making an appearance on Trish Tilby's news show (Tilby, who is in a relationship with Hank McCoy, is the reporter who broke the story that the Legacy Virus had infected Moira MacTaggert in X-Men Prime). In the middle of Creed's anti-mutant boilerplate a man in the audience stands up and starts shouting him down. He yells about the slippery slope--once mutants are gone, who is society going to go after next. And, shockingly, he points out that every mutant Creed wants to get rid of is part of someone's family. I say shockingly because the man is Bobby's father who we last saw having an awkward, angry dinner with his son in Uncanny X-Men 319 and who disapproves of his son--not supporting him as an X-Man or even as an out mutant.

Uncanny X-Men 340

Creed's people eventually find Bobby's father and discover their connection. Creed has Bobby's father beaten and left for dead in the woods, later dropping Bobby off to find him. Bobby ultimately leaves the X-Men to go home to his parents once his father is out of the hospital. But while his father is in the hospital he asks a question that fits almost exactly with what a disapproving parent might ask his gay child (it's hard to argue that Lobdell didn't have a direction in mind when it came to Bobby). For plot purposes this sets up Bobby's presence in "Operation: Zero Tolerance" where he takes charge of a group of reluctant mutants. As a personal story it's a counterpoint to that dinner scene in Uncanny X-Men 319 as both men turn toward each other, ultimately finding understanding and acceptance (Bobby's father goes so far as to encourage his son in fighting back against Bastion's forces).

X-Factor 127

The Inevitable

A martyr can sometimes command more power than a president (that was, after all, a major component of "Days of Future Past"), so the end of Creed's storyline was in some ways a foregone conclusion. This plot thread kicks off in X-Factor 127 with Destiny's grandson getting beaten by members of the Friends of Humanity and Mystique swearing revenge. From there Mystique tracks Creed and X-Factor tracks her. The story thread comes to an end in X-Factor 130 when Mystique is apprehended. In a twist, Mystique reveals that she was trying to save Creed from the real assassin. Pyro (who made cryptic and seemingly contradictory appearances in Uncanny X-Men 338 and X-Factor 129 where it was strongly suggested he and Mystique were going to kill Creed) is supposed to be Mystique's back-up and he also fails. In the end X-Factor is too late to finish what Mystique and Pyro started and Creed is vaporized by an unseen shooter.

Creed's assassination plays into the mutant/human tension leading toward "Operation: Zero Tolerance", but it also kicks off a mystery storyline where the assassin was to be hunted down and eventually caught. But X-Factor's focus begins to change after this issue and the team leaves the government to become an underground operation. The mystery storyline fizzles out with no resolution. As the series enters its final issues, which would lead to the new Mutant X series, the creative team announced that the assassin would be revealed in X-Factor 150. But there was never going to be an X-Factor 150; the series ended with issue 149. Several years later the mini-series X-Men Forever reveals that a future version of Mystique killed Creed in retaliation for the attack on Destiny's grandson that started this whole storyline.

X-Factor 130

X-Factor 127 also features a somewhat bizarre scene with Bastion. He is standing in shadows watching X-Factor get debriefed. After the team is excused, Bastion makes a menacing statement about how X-Factor (which he calls his "mutant militia") has a difficult road ahead. He asks Valerie Cooper for cooperation and she says she'll give it. This scene is never explained and it will not be followed up on (X-Factor isn't even included in "Operation: Zero Tolerance"). And given Bastion's opinion of mutants and his homicidal tendencies where they're concerned, it makes no sense for him to employ a team of them. What Mackie was going for in this issue is beyond me, and I wonder how much coordination there was with Lobdell who was the driving force behind the upcoming event.

Boldly Going

Following Creed's assassination, Uncanny X-Men 341 begins a new storyline when Gladiator, the praetorian of the Shi'ar Imperial Guard, arrives on Earth to recruit the X-Men for a mission to help the Shi'ar Empire. This is the issue featuring the memorable Cannonball/Gladiator fight (that Cannonball wins). Immediately after that fight Gladiator teleports Gambit, Rogue, Joseph, Beast, Bishop, and Trish Tilby to outer space. This Shi'ar storyline occupies this group of X-Men until after "Operation: Zero Tolerance" ends and keeps Uncanny X-Men essentially out of the event. While this does open the possibility of including new characters, the absence of half of the X-Men as they get caught up in a space opera while momentous things are happening on Earth is conspicuous.

Uncanny X-Men 341

The Graydon Creed story occupies relatively little space in the issues that feature it, but it's by far the most effective in building up to "Operation: Zero Tolerance". We learn just enough about Creed to make him more than a fully two-dimensional villain, and we get some solid character nuggets for Sam and Bobby. Stacked up against this storyline Bastion's minor appearances are ineffective and irrelevant, and it might have been more effective keeping him mostly out of circulation until Creed is assassinated.

~~~

For an index of the entries in this "Operation: Zero Tolerance" retrospective, jump back to the landing page here. And for an issue-by-issue commentary check out Twitter @theroncouch #CompleteOZT.

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