Issue(s): Uncanny X-Men #269
Cover Date: Oct 90
Title: "Rogue redux"
Credits:
Chris Claremont - Writer
Jim Lee - Penciler
Art Thibert - Inker
Bob Harras - Editor

Review/plot:
The final X-Men issue before X-Tinction Agenda has Rogue feeling just as ripped off about the Siege Perilous as i do.

She's rematerialized in the X-Men's former Australian base, unaware that it's been taken over by the Reavers. She hears on the news that both Destiny and Mystique are dead, and raises the alarm, and then jumps out her window, expecting to fly.

Instead she crashes to the ground and finds the Reavers.

Then we found out why she couldn't fly: her Ms. Marvel persona has come out of the Siege Perilous separately.

Rogue makes a run for it. She goes to Gateway, asking him to teleport her away. He won't, but she still has her innate power absorption ability, so she takes his power and teleports herself away. When she does that, she also learns that Gateway is under a geas binding himself to the Reavers.

We then cut away to deep space, where you might think we would check in with Binary, Carol Danvers' current form. The idea that Danvers exists as a persona in Rogue's head while simultaneously living on separately is interesting to me, and i wondered if the emergence of Danvers as a physical entity might in some way affect real Carol. But that's not what this scene is. The scene instead is Lila Cheney fleeing a Shi'ar "Strike Lord".

She does manage to get away.

Ms. Marvel chased Rogue through the teleportation matrix, but they wound up in separate locations. Rogue is in the Savage Land, and Ms. Marvel is at Muir Island, where the situation is a mess.

The Shadow King takes control of Ms. Marvel and sends her after Rogue.

At this point both Rogue and Ms. Marvel are decaying.

They both wind up passing out. Rogue wakes up, with both selves reintegrated by Magneto.

The tiny text at the bottom that you probably can't read informs us that next issue won't be dealing with Magneto and instead starts off a crossover with the New Mutants "and a whole bunch o' other folks". That feels like a case of Crossover Interruptus to me since i'm interested in the situation with Rogue and Magneto finding her. But it is interesting how Claremont uses Rogue's return to jump around to a bunch of the things that have been going on in the book: the Reavers, the seeming death of Mystique, Muir Island, even a return to the Savage Land. So i suspect that things are more tightly integrated than they appear. And Jim Lee's art is really nice. That Magneto pin-up at the end is great.

Quality Rating: B+

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: N/A

References:

• Rogue went into the Siege Perilous in Uncanny X-Men #247.
  
• The last we saw Mystique, it seemed like she was about to be shot by Val Cooper, in Uncanny X-Men #266.
  
• Destiny died in Uncanny X-Men #255.
  
• The X-Men were there when the Savage Land was restored in Uncanny X-Men annual #12.

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

Savage Land Rogue: The issue that birthed a thousand pervy fan art commissions.

Lila Cheney's outfit is just embarrassing.

Marvel should have had the guts to remove Ms Marvel's powers entirely from Rogue and shown a scene where Binary got all the emotional attachment to her memories back after "Ms Marvel" was defeated.

Note that Rogue clearly appears on Magneto's monitors. This is important because this issue came out one week before the scene in Wolverine 32 where Wolverine was photographed- this was the first time that one of the X-Men was clearly visible to mechanical devices. But there's no explanation and Claremont doesn't even have the characters wonder about it. Claremont later claimed it was later writers that got rid of the X-Men's invisibility but that's contradicted by this issue.
Why did Rogue's skin turn dark upon absorbing Gateway? She's absorbed blacks without turning black before, Asians without turning Asian before, etc.

I suspect the plot here is a salvage of something different Claremont may have had in mind. The issue reads as very jumpy and time-compressed. Supposedly quite a bit of time passes with Carol on Muir Island getting brainwashed by the Shadow King while Rogue is playing with dinosaurs for days or weeks. But the art covers all of this in about two pages! It feels badly off.

There's also the fact that a Rogue/Carol rematch isn't just a reminder of Avengers Annual #10, it also revisits the cancelled Hellfire Club story from Ms. Marvel's own title. In that story, Carol was supposed get seduced by evil and "kill" Rogue.

My guess is that Claremont intended this plot to appear much earlier--right after Dazzler's return, when Claremont was systematically showing what happened to each if the X-Men. This plot, maybe spread over a doule of issues, would have nicely kept the Reavers in circulation and clued readers in about what was happening on Muir Island. What's more, given that Rogue eventually appears on Muir Island anyway, without much explanation, in #278, i suspect Claremont's original plan was to have an SK-controlled Carol actually succeed in killing Rogue and remaining on SK's Muir Island team, which needed some extra muscle if it was going to be a threat to the reunited X-Men.

No doubt Rogue would have returned eventually, but if I'm right, this would have been a more satisfying conclusion to the Carol arc that had been building since the Genosha issues, and it might even have included Wolverine's imaginary Carol playing a role--maybe she (i.e. Wolvie's memories of Carol) would have broken SK's hold on her near the climax of the story or something.

Magneto's appearance here is probably all thanks to Jim Lee, who badly wanted to draw the character. The issue where this syoryline picks up, #274, is notable for being solely credited to Lee as plotter (Claremont is script only). Claremont has completely lost control of the book to Harras and Lee by this point, if not months before.

Walter, if you're correct, #269 was Claremont's last real issue. That was probably his last chance to address the Rogue/Ms. Marvel issue.

It still doesn't make any sense whatsoever that the Ms. Marvel series was canceled as it was, and then followed by the badly-conceived Avengers #200.

There's a very slight change in the inks on the last page - it looks to be Scott Williams inking. Magneto does look fantastic in his original costume.

I mentioned it in while commenting an earlier issue, but I never really understood how the Siege Perilous was supposed to work, and this issue just made thing more confusing. If the Siege was supposed to (as Roma said) judge the person who enters it and give her a new life, why does Rogue get to keep her memories, while the others who went through the Siege lost them? (And what kind of a "new life" is waking somewhere with an amnesia anyway? Everyone else still remembers the X-Men even if they themselves don't, so it's not like they're given a proper clean slate or anything.) Why does the Siege's judgment involve giving the Carol persona in Rogue's head a different body? Wouldn't it have been more benevolent and just for the Siege to transfer Carol's memories that Rogue got to the real Carol, who at the time couldn't properly remember her old life? And if the Siege felt it was a fit judgment to give the Carol persona a body of her own, why does it then start decaying?

None of it makes any sense. It seems Claremont really wanted to do a dramatic cliffhanger in #251 where it seems like all the X-Men except Wolverine are dead (or at least have exited this plane of existence), but then he realized there was no easy way to bring them back, so he had to resort to a series cop-outs to return to status quo.

And to be fair, Jim Lee draws a magnificent Magneto. After the truly awful Magneto we all to endure from Blevins, this is just a welcome relief (yes, Byrne does an awesome Magneto in between, but those weren't in the X-books).

Walter, I think you're way off, except in that this is a salvage work by Claremont. It's most obvious becaus it's dealing with one of his old characters [Carol] one of his newer characters [Rogue] and the title he's stuck with through thick and thin. This is trying to salvage the problem in the same way he salvaged Madelyne Pryor [or Jean Grey] in that the editors have taken him so far away from where he wanted his characters to be that it's really just throwing things together in the hope that it will work out. Which it didn't.

Claremont was always good at working with his artists, but now we're entering the period where the artists called all the shots, as long as editorial approved. I suspect he was fine with Jim Lee's creative contributions, except that it became a generational problem where Lee wanted to draw the X-Men as he knew them as a kid [returning Wolverine to that horrible yellow costume] and Claremont was the guy who'd moved Logan far away from that point. He wrote an early Wildcats story [if I remember correctly] and was trying to work through Wildstorm. Whatever bad things to say about Jim Lee, Claremont clearly didn't have many problems with him.

[Not that you said anything about that, I'm just riffing here.]

I think the fact that Rogue remembered everything and was basically just transported [naked] back to Australia was a direct result of the Ms. Marvel personality. This wasn't how Claremont intended it, it was just the way he had to deal with Bob Harras' support for Jim Lee. I've never heard about Jim Lee's interest in Magneto, but this is Claremont trying to accommodate all the changes.

I would agree that this issue is a pivotal moment in Claremont's "X-Men," but I couldn't say that this is where he lost control, or his last good moment before losing control. There is still that wonderful issue where literally everybody is staying at the X-Mansion. Maybe it's the last gasp of the Chris Claremont who wrote Marvel Comics that weren't about mutants. He used to do that, you know, once upon a time.

@Tuomas- I seem to remember Silvestri claiming that Claremont decided to keep Dazzler alive after he suggested the "Dazzler gets involved with her old movie after going through the Siege" idea. That would seem to suggest the X-Men being amnesiac was always the plan.

This is definitely where the art became "exploitative". I'm sexist, and I firmly believe that comic books should have plenty of cheesecake, and I certainly liked this art when I was in puberty, but despite all that everything about it is just repulsive. It all reads like a movie scene just before the hot chick reveals that she's been on the evil side all along.

Just look at the scans included here. Fnord didn't show the two-page spread of Rogue naked, but couldn't recap this story without her wearing nothing but panties and a t-shirt. The single panel of Mystique gives her large breasts and no bra. Rogue's legs are wide open as she fails to fly. An ass shot that only Jim Lee can draw. Carol's legs are open as she threatens Rogue. Rogue has no bra after she takes Gateway's powers. Lila, Moira, Amanda and Lorna, they all look like ideal porn stars. Carol punches Rogue, and then Rogue punches Carol, and both times their breasts are very prominent. Rogue chained to Magneto's altar. And this is just from the scans Fnord included. I'm willing to bet I could grab my... er, look at the relevant "Essential X-Men" volume and find more examples from this issue alone. And we're just getting started.

Combine that with the fact that every single issue around this time had some weird fetish thing going on (Was rereading recently and noticed this one has the Shadow King dominating folks, next we have Genosha and the S&M mutates, then Worm in the Savage Land, then everyone getting stripped naked and thrown into a tentacle machine in the space issues, then more Shadow King, then Magneto brainwashing the team, etc) and you have a book that read like bad erotic fanfic for the next year. Kind of weird for a company that still marketed to kids.

Claremont was definitely screwed by Harras when he was shoved off the book to please Lee, but he was really pretty much out of it as a writer by this point and need to bow out. Unfortunately, Marvel had no post-Claremont plan after Lee bailed after getting the keys, and we got years of aimless mutants by committee until Morrison comes along.

I did skip 2-3 pages of Rogue luxuriously throwing her hair back while wearing scraps of clothes in the Savage Land.

I don't really see how the art here is any worse than Inferno- we had Maddie's and Meggan's costumes, Peter sketching Betsy in the buff, the X-Women's costumes changing to become "sexier", Maddie chained up by Sinister, etc.

The art was still in service to the story during "Inferno." If there's a good reason not to show off Betsy/Ali/Maddie/etc's assets, the artist took that option more often than not. They're all sexy chicks in revealing skintight outfits, I'm fine with that. They could be cleaning out toilets and still be sexy chicks in revealing skintight outfits.

Madelyne's costume is the only thing which really crosses a line of the examples you cite, and even there we have the excuse of "Inferno" plus how her character had been degraded all along. Meggan was always sexy and drawn by Alan Davis. Betsy was at least posed in a coy manner which left more to the imagination, and it was the situation she was in which made it questionable. A few issues later, she was taking a bath when Storm crashed in on her. She wasn't even showing anything, but there were all sorts of implications, and it was funny. If Jim Lee had drawn that scene, it would have completely failed.

With the resolution of the Ms. Marvel subplot, this is where the female characters become about gigantic breasts and showing off their curves in every panel. And they maybe do mutant superhero stuff too, if necessary.

I think the solution is not LESS sexual exploitation of women but MORE of men. :D

When it comes to this old debate, I defer to Hank Hill: "Don't knock it — we got the long end of the stick on that one."

This is definitely the issue were Rogue becomes sexified at least. I mean seriously, think back to Rogue's 1st appearance. And look at her now! Even with "artist interpretation" she looks a lot hotter than she did back then.

I suspect that the resolution of the "Ms Marvel-in-Rogue" subplot happened as it did, because Rogue (or more tellingly, Lee and Harras) wanted to get rid of it once and for all. Keep in mind the Siege Perilous has been giving its inhabitants a twisted reflection of their greatest desires. Rogue has mentioned a few times that she wanted to be rid of the "Carol" personality, even asking for it to be erased from her head (and notice that neither she, nor Magneto, feel any remorse for effectively "killing" off the memories and personality of Ms. Marvel.) And for Lee and Harras all that existential drama was getting in the way of Rogie seductively posing in her jungle-kini.

I think the implication has always been that the Carol-in-Rogue's head was more than just memories and was a life that was trapped in the body of her "rapist". That was why she was always the most solid of the impressions of the hundreds of people Rogue has touched and could hijack Rogue's body. Carol wasn't limited to Rogue's damage and could actively turn off Rogue's powers and touch others.

Nathan, I always though THAT was more the manifestation of the guilt and self-loathing Rogue felt more than anything else, mixed in with the "Carol" persona she absorbed. (By the way, am I the only one who never thought that Carol-in-Rogue acted that much like the "real" Ms. Marvel? At least after reading earlier and later depictions of her.)

The idea that this version of Carol was a "real" person becomes diluted by the fact that there's ANOTHER version of her wandering around simultaneously. (Make that THREE versions, since concurrent issues featuring Wolverine is doing the same schtick.)

Obviously both Rogue and Magneto don't consider the mental representation of Ms. Marvel to be a "genuine" lifeform in any case, as a long-running subplot is killed off and given barely a shrug.

Just saying, Wolverine is clearly hallucinating. That may or may not be the 'real' Carol compared to Rogue or Binary, but she's explicitly just a figment of Wolverine's imagination.

That said, I was always bothered too by the fact that Carol-as-Rogue was so casually killed off and nobody even mentions it again. At least you could understand Magneto's reasoning, but I've long said that Rogue is one of the greatest characters in superhero comics, and that dual personality is a large part of what makes her so awesome. At the very least, she'd be enormously relieved at having her head to herself again for the first time in ages. Or she'd be worried about what happened to Carol.

Here's my speculative theory on where Claremont was going with Carol. First, recall that elements of the Dark Phoenix Saga were originally intended as Ms. Marvel plots. The abortive story at the end of her series would have had her going to Hong Kong, getting mixed up in a Hellfire Club vs. Mystique conflict, getting seduced and turned evil, and killing Rogue.

Claremont clearly had this arc on his mind in 1989, since Lady Mandarin is a variation on the theme: Psylocke goes to Hong Kong and gets turned evil. Note that the Hand is based in Emil Vachon's volcano lair with the antigrav platforms, and in the version if Ms. Marvel 24 that got published in Marvel Super Heroes in 1992, the vision in which Carol gets seduced is set on what appear to be the antigravity platforms.

Claremont also clearly was building to something with Carol's personality resurfacing in Genosha, continuing to pop up until 269, and with Wolverine's hallucinatory Carol (and Nick) persisting over several issues.

269 is like a high-speed riff on Claremont's Ms. Marvel story: Carol gets corrupted, turns evil, goes to kill Rogue, but Magneto's intervention saves her. Claremont has said that Magneto's inclusion in this era's stories was Lee's idea more than his own.

So what would have happened if Magneto hadn't intervened and Claremont had told the Dark Carol story at his own leisurely pace? My guess is that this time, Carol would have "killed" Rogue, as she was always supposed to do, and as Destiny had predicted.

Dark Carol would have added some much-needed muscle to the Shadow King's Muir Island X-Men. Note that Rogue does wind up under SK's control in 278, without a good explanation. I think Claremont intended for Carol/Rogue to wind up on his side all along, but in a more logical way: SK offered Carol life by killing Rogue, her own killer. Great tale of corruption, plausible motives.

And what about hallucination-Carol? There's a clear logic there as well: SK pits his Carol-Rogue (who I'm guessing has Rogue's powers as well as Carol's) against Wolverine. But when she steals his memories, she gets his memories of her as well, and the uncorrupted hallucination-Carol gets into her head. This turns Carol/Rogue back to the good side, and maybe contributes to SK's undoing, as his most powerful pawn is turned against him. Probably at the end of it all, Carol's psyche is heroically redeemed and destroyed, and Rogue gets her mind and body back.

That seems, at least, like a straightforward way to resolve the plot threads Claremont had laid down--Carol's return in Rogue's head and Wolvie's--using the same basic story frameworks Claremont had come up with for the cancelled Ms. Marvel series. That kind of self-referencing is distinctly Claremontian. But this is all just a guess.

I think you're over-complicating things, other than the point about Claremontian self-referencing, which I agree with.

Lady Mandarin is just another version of X-people potentially turning evil. Jean Grey did it, Wolverine did it in the "Kitty Pryde" miniseries, Illyana did it, we were teased with the notion of Storm doing it during the "Dr. Doom/Arcade" series, Loki brainwashed the X-Men in Annual #9, Mojo did it in Annual #10, Dracula had seduced Storm in Annual #6. Farouk and the White Queen both had their turn with the New Mutants. Claremont was not unfamiliar with the concept.

I agree that Claremont had a deeper connection to Ms. Marvel than most of the other characters, but I think this plot is where he first realized that he was writing a parody of himself, leading to the point where he resigned. Madelyne was set up to be potentially-evil, and then it turned out to be the truth.

The use of Mystique and Destiny were just how he rationalized that it was still his overall storyline - and note how Mystique was set up in the ultimate Shadow King plot, and as soon as he returned to the mutant titles he seized on Destiny's notebooks - but Carol and Rogue were always going to stay on the good side, exceptions duly noted.

It's when Gambit starts killing Wolverine ["Bang, you dead"] that reveals Claremont's ultimate intentions. I don't think there's any doubt that this scene was intended to climax the Muir Island storyline, and lead to his further plans, as he made them up on the fly to accomodate his writer and artist. He had probably given thought to Carol and Rogue, but by this point he was just trying to hang on.

@Walter: Have you or ChrisW considered the reason Rogue ends up on Muir Island after absorbing Gateway’s power in Uncanny X-Men #269 is due to the fact Donald Pierce had a geas on the mutant aborigine, and since Pierce himself was under the control of the Shadow King, and Muir Island was where SK had anchored himself in our reality (using Lorna), this was obviously Claremont dropping a major clue that the geas placed upon Gateway/ his ancestors was done so by the Shadow King?

So at last Claremont slyly lays bare what was told to readers from the day of Gateway's introduction in the letters page of Uncanny X-Men #229 where we are told "the full truth won’t be known about Gateway for quite some time – which just might cost the X-Men dearly!"

@ChrisW- Maddie WASN'T set up to be potentially evil. The entire point of her introductory arc was that she was like Kurt- a gentle soul that looked like a monster. Her turning evil was so contrived (she becomes evil after a magical dream, and Gateway allows it for no real reason) that it was obviously decided at the last minute.
And Claremont never realized he was turning into a parody of himself- he only quit because Harras wouldn't let him do his Dark Wolverine story.

@Michael: Now that we know the Shadow King was responsible for Gateway's geas, was it by his will that Madelyne ended up corrupted? Her transformation into "Goblin Queen" seemed somewhat similar to "Shadow Queen"!

Michael, I'm just being a bit glib about Madelyne. Considering everybody was worried that she was Dark Phoenix reborn when she first appeared - up to and including her turning into Dark Phoenix and blasting Scott - it's kinda strange that that's exactly who she turned out to be.

I'm also being [less] glib about Claremont becoming a parody of himself. I've seen transcripts of convention panels where he jokes about how awful it is when writers leave important storylines dangling for years. The self-referential jokes in the "Invasion" parody and the "Cross-Time Caper" showed that he was pretty sure of what he was doing, and face it, he must have known himself as a writer after fifteen years on the most important comics series at the time.

He was able to look on the bright side of life [I've just quoted Monty Python, somebody shoot me now] which is where we got diversions like the X-Babies (the real ones, not the New Mutants) and Excalibur, meta concepts like Mojo. If 'turning into a parody of himself' isn't literally correct, I think it's close enough in terms of describing what this issue represented for him. He admitted that he could have kept doing the job - filling in dialogue for whatever the artist/editor wanted - and I think losing the Dark Wolverine story was just *a* factor. He went so far out of his way to give the editor what he wanted, and the editor only cared about what higher-ups wanted, and the artist who keeps breaking sales records just wanted to put Wolverine back in that stupid yellow costume.

Sure, Claremont could have continued to do it, but he would have just been making fun of his own run.

Nathan, I always assumed Rogue went back to Muir Isle because she had nowhere else to go. And, honestly, everybody always goes back to Muir Isle. That's what it's there for. Xavier only met Magneto and Farouk after leaving Muir Isle, or Moira specifically.

I recall seeing a preview blurb for 269 (or maybe 268?) somewhere--probabably the Marvel Requirer or Marvel Age rather than the Bullpen Bulletins checklist--that said Loki would appear in this issue. Anyone else remember that?

A commenter here says Jim Lee once gave an interview in which he claimed Claremont intended Loki to show up in this issue, not Magneto: http://www.therealgentlemenofleisure.com/2015/08/x-amining-uncanny-x-men-269.html?showComment=1440775703505&m=1#c8189184551172821066

And here's a commenter who gives us Lee's own quote: http://geoffklock.blogspot.com/2008/06/jason-powell-on-uncanny-x-men-135.html?showComment=1213417980000&m=1#c4841697591443932936

In the quote i took from Sean Howe's book that i put in the entry for Uncanny X-Men #273-277, it's said that Harras wasn't happy about "Claremont's stories about aliens and magic". "Aliens" refers to the Warskrull plot. I wasn't sure if "magic" referred to anything in particular; i thought maybe Harras felt like the Shadow King was basically "magic", which i wouldn't disagree with. But the fact that there was an abandoned Loki plot makes even more sense.

This might also help explain the anomaly of Lee being the sole plotter on 274, the next installment of the Rogue/Magneto story. Lee might have pitched his idea for where this would go when he (presumably) got Harras's sign-off to use Magneto rather than Loki.

I agree with Jon Dubya that we have definitely entered the "sexy Rogue" era. Part of that is probably just Jim Lee - he draws almost every female character to be ridiculously hot. But part of it has been heading that way for a while and it actually started pretty early on. She looked a bit creepy when first drawn by Golden. In her next two appearances, Sal Buscema and Cockrum draw her to look much older than she is later portrayed as being. When she joins the X-Men in #171, Simonson isn't exactly drawing her to be cute. But, next issue, when Paul Smith takes over, she is definitely already headed in that direction. But it's really here, and not just with the lack of clothing, but also the way Lee draws her body, she's entered "one of the hotter Marvel characters" territory.

I think Rogue became hotter as she basically became younger. In her first few appearances, she looked to be middle aged. She certainly wasn't a teenager. When she joined the X-Men, it seemed like Paul Smith intentionally de-aged her and now she was just a few years older than Kitty Pryde.

In any event, at least Rogue becoming hotter was a long progression and not an overnight deal.

I agree. I wouldn't say Rogue looked middle-aged, but she was clearly an adult woman, and not an attractive one. When she's able to get far enough into the Pentagon and randomly run into Carol Danvers, also infiltrating the Pentagon with enough rank that it's kinda believable, that's not something a 19-year old could do.

Turning her into a large-breasted sexy teenager who shows off as much skin as possible even though her skin is a potential danger to those around her is just detrimental to the character we originally met. I've long noted that, of the X-Men most opposed to Rogue joining the team, Wolverine gave her a kiss in thanks for saving Mariko, Storm lost her powers trying to give her a reason to be happy, and to save her, Kitty became a living ghost protecting her from the Marauders. And Scott had to catch up on her powers and personality profile to use her while saving the team from his fiancée.

Rogue's a great character. We can just be thankful she wasn't given the Psylocke treatment, and writing that sentence maybe gives a clue to what Claremont intended with Mojo. But he could have done that without her becoming, well, the large-breasted teenager who shows off as much skin as possible.

Rogue was ALWAYS supposed to be a teenager. Her first appearance was supposed to be in Ms. Marvel 25 but the story was published in Marvel Super Heroes 11- Rogue was, according to Carol, "barely more than a child". The problem is that Ms. Marvel 25 was never published and Michael Golden and Dave Cockrum thought she was supposed to be an adult. (She was supposed to be in the Pentagon because she was Raven's daughter.)

Is she "barely more than a child" because of her physical age, or because she has not been able to physically touch anybody since the day she got her first kiss, and literally cannot do anything that would make her more "adult"?

And you don't get access into secure areas just because you're a child of someone who has access. A teenager trying to get access to secure areas would be a huge red flag. Mystique-as-Nick-Fury could walk up and demand Rogue be allowed in, and the guards would be entirely within their rights to say "Sorry, Sir, not until she shows proof."

Never mind the problems Carol would have faced infiltrating the Pentagon. Never mind the continuity problems of Wolverine asking if her rank was real [it wasn't, but Claremont didn't know that] when he's supposed to have this long history with her, and been a military/secret agent himself, so he should know.

There are a lot of problems with the "X-Men invade the Pentagon" issue. The fact that Rogue looks like an ugly adult woman is actually the least of them. She's a villain, doing what a villain does. It's not until #172-173 when she's helping Wolvie that she looks like the character that she really is. I'm not a huge fan of Paul Smith, but those are some of the Best Rogue Pictures Ever.

Carol says "barely more than a child" before learning how Rogue's powers work, so yeah, it's based on her physical age.

The sad thing on my end regarding Rogue is that I didn't know about her until the Fox animated series, prior to knowing of all the backstory aspects. When this is what's presented in her image, you don't get to see the evolution: seeing her as what appears to be a "middle-aged woman" in Avengers Annual 10, seeing her as her cute but still maturish circa the Smith issues in '83. Marvel (or what Marvel wanted to throw via pop culture) wanted us to see the Jim Lee version of Rogue in the same way they wanted to make us believe Psylocke was always a purple-haired ninja without knowing about her huge backstory and the fact that this wasn't her body and that she was the sister of Captain Britain. Unfortunately its just something that's always happening and why people should dig for story matters and evolution to make their own conclusion...lest they get manipulated by what the company wants you to believe or what pop culture elements outside make claims of and that ultimately become the truth when there was nothing to support it prior.

Michael, I know that you really do keep track of Marvel Continuity, but we're also talking about Chris Claremont, who regularly lost track of continuity. I don't trust a lost story published roughly a decade after Rogue joined the X-Men to tell the truth, nor do I think a teenage girl could infiltrate the Pentagon, even with Mystique covering for her.

No disrespect intended, but the Rogue we met as a member of the X-Men is not the Rogue that first appeared in other Claremont books. I will admit that I haven't read Rogue's appearances prior to her appearances in "X-Men," but nothing I've seen [mostly on this site] suggests her being the teenager, sexy that she became. Claremont messed her up, but that's only fair because Rogue is messed-up herself.

tl;dr, let's just agree to disagree. Except that Rogue is cool.

The geas was definitely a sign that the Shadow King was involved, as Pierce and his Reavers weren't mystics so they couldn't have placed it on Gateway.

There's something temporal about the Siege Perilous. Rogue was the first one sucked into it and the last one spit out some twenty-one issues later. And I believe Psylocke was the last one in and the first one out.

"definitely"

On the subject of Rogue's age, Brian Cronin recently did a feature on this:
http://www.cbr.com/comic-legends-was-rogue-originally-meant-to-be-middle-aged/
Rogue was always supposed to be a teenager. Interestingly, he points that in ROM 31-32, Rogue is referred to as the "youngest of the Brotherhood".

Claremont intended Loki to appear at the end? That actually makes a lot of sense, and not just because he likes to mess with the X-Men when he has nothing else to do. Getting rid of a split personality created by Rogue's powers sounds like something that needs a mystic, or at least mental/telepathic intervention. Magneto's abilities don't really fit that magic-like babble. As much as a like Erik (and he's one of my favorite characters ever) I wouldn't shoehorn him in a plot he barely fits out of fanboyism.

I meant "as I like". Weirdest typo so far.

Also: "Why did Rogue's skin turn dark upon absorbing Gateway? She's absorbed blacks without turning black before, Asians without turning Asian before, etc."

I assume it's because he's a mutant, so he's allowed to lend his look to Rogue when absorbed. Much like how she turned blue when she kissed Nightcrawler. (Now the question is why didn't she become blond-haired when she kissed Havok)

Rogue's form only changes when the powers she absorbed directly affects her physical form. Presumably she has Nightcrawler's form not so much because of the teleporation, but because of his gymnastic abilities.

I don't take the coloring of that panel to mean Rogue now looks aboriginal, but that it is supposed to be shadowing based as Gateways' teleportation disk blocks out the sun. But I could be wrong.

I'd say it's pretty clear that Rogue is black for this brief moment. It looks like Claremont said 'draw Storm and then give her Rogue's features.' The shadow makes it look dramatic, but that's all it is.

Has Rogue ever taken someone's physical form before outside of superheroics? Nightcrawler's fur, Colossus' steel, Spiral's arms, etc.

A tiny example, but in UXM #185, Storm shares her powers with Rogue for a moment while relaxing on the riverside. She clearly has the glowing white thunder eyes. The rest of her body looks unaffected, though.

I thought Rogue's powers had an implicit meta pattern around the lines of "allowed to take a mutant or mutate's physical form because it looks cooler and distinguishes them from the normal people she absorbs" but then again she doesn't change when their body looks normal.

"Thunder eyes." I love that description of Ororo using her powers. But that's still part of the superheroic stuff.

Maybe it's just the angle Lee drew her at in that panel, but Rogue looks a lot taller in addition to being black. And the way she's spinning the bull-roarer looks a lot like Thor spinning his hammer. Storm had a brief moment as the Goddess of Thunder, and the final page was intended to reveal Loki as the villain.

There are times when you really want to read a few good issues of "What If?"