Issue(s): X-Factor #13
Cover Date: Feb 87
Title: "Ghosts!"
Credits:
Louise Simonson - Writer
Walt Simonson - Penciler
Dan Green - Inker
Bobbie Chase - Assistant Editor
Bob Harras - Editor

Review/plot:
Last issue Scott finally resolved to go back to Alaska to check on Maddie, and this issue he actually does it. Surprisingly, considering the bomb blast at Jean Grey's sister's house, Cyclops is going alone. Granted X-Factor have their hands full at the moment. Jean obviously shouldn't be the one to go; you don't want to bring your old returned-from-the-dead girlfriend to meet your wife that you ran away from. And she's watching over Angel at the moment anyway. And Beast is trying to hold down the fort now that the group has brought in a large cast of Morlocks and other "rescue" mutants.

But perhaps Iceman could have been spared, in case there were more mutant bombers waiting at his old house. Or maybe a giant sentinel.

Before he leaves, Scott says his goodbyes, and Caliban recognizes a kindred hopeless lover in him.

He also swings by the hospital to say goodbye to Jean and Warren. He looks at this photograph in the taxi on the way over. It looks very familiar to me but i can't remember where it was originally used. Maybe in a lettercol? Update: Thanks to Clyde for noting it's the image from Uncanny X-Men #174.

Warren is busy in the hospital room dropping hints that he's going to commit suicide...

...but when Scott peeks in he decides that they "seemed happy up there" so he leaves without saying anything. But Jean sees him leaving the hospital and telekinetically holds his cab so she can give him a rather passionate goodbye kiss.

Later, Scott arrives in Alaska to find that his house has been completely emptied out and put up for sale, and according to the real estate office, he's the one who listed it. He also finds that he can't find any record of Madelyne Pryor ever having existed.

Scott also tries to contact his grandparents and others working at the airline Madeylne worked at. But Scott was supposedly making phone calls to friends and relatives in earlier issues, trying to find Maddie. As Michael said in the comments on X-Factor #7, who was he calling? Does Scott remember talking to his grandparents recently?

Like me, the police aren't sure whether to feel sorry for Scott or think that he's crazy.

But this turn of events is certainly driving him crazy. He starts to worry that if the Phoenix force hid Jean for so long, it might be hiding Madelyne now. So he runs back to his home and has some vivid hallucinations, with Madelyne noting how convenient it is for her to have disappeared now that Jean is back.

During his hallucination, he lets loose his optic blast, and that uncovers a rattle that fell behind a radiator, proving that his wife and child did really exist.

Meanwhile, that giant sentinel i mentioned, the Master Mold, which had fallen out of the sky some time ago and was rusting away in the ocean, detects Scott using his powers, and identifies him as one of "The Twelve". Who are the Twelve? Well here the Master Mold defines them as "One of the strong!" (Sounds like Apocalypse!) "A pivotal mutant around whom others will gather!". It's worth noting that Nimrod also counted twelve X-Men during his recent battle in Central Park. But the concept of The Twelve is one that will be teased for a number of years but not resolved until Chris Claremont and Alan Davis' X-Men run circa the year 2000.

For now, though, the Master Mold sets about repairing himself...

...and violently blasting away a group of human office workers so that he can connect to the internet (or its 1987 proto-equivalent of networked mainframes) and download the necessary knowledge.

Even after the Mutant Massacre, i am surprised to see that much violence directly on panel. Ordinary people disintegrated before our eyes!

Cyclops and Master Mold won't meet until next issue. This issue is just build-up. We also have the possible corpse of Madelyne discovered by the police (of course there was also the scene in Uncanny X-Men #206).

In isolation, this is a good build up. But considering it takes until Inferno for all of this to get resolved, it's hard to not look at this with dread. We're beginning a period where there's a lot of build up but it's not clear that the creators know where they are going (and/or there are editorial or inter-title concerns to deal with).

Quality Rating: B+

Historical Significance Rating: 1

Chronological Placement Considerations: This has to take place after Jean gets back from Mephisto's dimension in Mephisto vs... #3. Masque doesn't actually appear in this issue but the Beast tells Cyclops over the phone that he's "execrable".

References:

• Steven Lang's orbital platform was destroyed and Master Mold fell to Earth in Hulk annual #7.
  
• Caliban hopelessly loved Kitty Pryde circa Uncanny X-Men #179.
  
• Angel was hurt fighting the Marauders in X-Factor #10.
  
• Scott finds that his grandparents' business has been sold, that Madelyne Pryor never apparently worked there, and that Sam Ross, the loadmaster for the business that also appeared in X-Men/Alpha Flight #1-2 (where he was tranformed into Lorelord; no footnote) recently died in a boating accident.
  
• While looking for newspaper articles on the crash that Madelyne Pryor supposedly was in, he comes across an article on the Starcore 1 crash from Uncanny X-Men #101 that happened on the same day.

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

Mastermind showed it to Cyclops in Uncanny x-men 174-175 -
I'm linking to your entry there.
http://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronocomic/entries/uncanny_x-men_174-176.shtml

Scott doesn't find any evidence that his son was born in Alaska, which isn't surprising considering that his son was born in the mansion.
Similarly, Scott is surprised that he doesn't find any evidence that Maddie's plane crashed in Los Angeles, even though she told him her plane crashed in San Francisco.
We never do get a satisfactory explanation as to why Sinister felt the need to erase all evidence of Maddie's existence, even the ones from after she met Scott, and then plant a dead body.
Simonson tries to make Scott look better by establishing that he tried to send Maddie child support checks but it doesn't work because it should have raised Scott's suspicions when the checks were returned.
Scott's behavior in waiting so long to report Maddie missing was despicable. In real life, if a parent doesn't report a child missing, and something happens to their kid, they don't the kid back until they prove they can be responsible:
http://everydaylife.globalpost.com/happens-parents-fail-report-minor-children-missing-4453.html
Scott's apologists claim that he genuinely had no idea Maddie and the baby were in danger but in this issue, he thinks that he wishes Maddie didn't exist and in issue 15, Scott says that he almost wished Maddie was dead. It's hard to give Scott the benefit of the doubt when he wanted to be rid of her. These issues destroyed the idea that Scott loved Maddie more than Layton's issues. (And thanks, fnord, for putting this entry up so we can finally discuss it at the actual entry.)

Thanks, Clyde! I know it's just a nod to the other image, but it is kind of weird that Scott's go-to picture of Jean is one that Mastermind gave him while he was manipulating him. Getting to Michael's points, it does show that Scott has been put through the emotional wringer for a long time.

Michael, at the end of last issue, in one of the scans i have up, Scott says that until the bomb at Sara Grey's, he really believed that Madelyne as just avoiding him. Maybe he thought she told her friends (whoever he tried to call) that she didn't want to talk to him. And i think the situation with the checks could be explained, too; for example he could have told Hodge to auto-deduct a percentage of his pay. So i agree that Scott's actions have been atrocious - leaving Maddie in the first place, wishing she never existed or dead, and doing a truly lackluster job of trying to reconnect - but i don't know that my opinion of him is quite as bad as yours. He's been utterly irresponsible in terms of his relationships and as a parent, but i don't know that he even subconsciously suspected that his child was actually missing or in any danger.

I think what makes it worse is why Scott left to join X-Factor. It wasn't so much to be with his old team again as it was to be with the one true love of his life. If Dazzler had joined instead of Jean, I don't think he would have left his family.

As far as the picture, I doubt he had any other pictures of her. I would think he got rid of them when he married Madelyne.

Fnord, I think the larger point is that Scott knew there was a chance Maddie was in danger. The dialogue makes it clear that Scott's letters were being returned unopened- that should have raised his suspicions. Scott knew that Mastermind and Loki knew about Maddie and that Maddie had been in two plane crashes since she met him. Scott might have assumed that Maddie's friends were lying to him but that was a highly convenient assumption. Besides which, if Scott called multiple friends of Maddie, it's highly unlikely that they'd all tell him they don't know where she was. (And from what little we see of his conversation in issue 7, he's not acting like someone who thinks he's being lied to about his wife's whereabouts.)
The larger point is that Scott waited so long to report Maddie missing that if she and the baby were in danger, statistically speaking, they'd likely be dead. And as a result, Maddie lost everything that she owned and was put in a coma. It's impossible to separate Scott's recklessness from his wish that Maddie never existed- a good analogy would be a racist cop failing to aggresively investigate a report about a black person missing. No matter how many times he claims that he didn't think the victim was in danger, his bigotry makes it impossible to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I'm still not getting the "Scott waiting so long to report Maddie & the baby missing" thing. Up until this issue, he had nothing to report to any kind of authority. She told him she'd leave him if he left so he believed she must have. He couldn't reach her by phone and his letters and cheques were being returned could just be her pissed off at him an not wanting anything to do with him. She's been shown to have a temper and in fact punched him in the face for asking if she was really Jean. Same with the people he managed to get a hold of. They could have just been stonewalling him at her request or some women genuinely cut ties with friends so they don't have anything to tell the ex. All reasonable explanations.

So yea, he could have tried harder but there is a lot of shame he's dealing with. I'm not surprised he started losing his mind here.

Also, we're dealing with Marvel Time here. We saw how shell shocked he was when he thought Jean (Phoenix) died vs Magneto in the Savage Land, then again when she killed herself in front of him on the Moon. We saw what kind of drunken wreck he became when he discovered she was alive after all in X-Factor #1. He's been barely holding things together this whole time as Artie discovers when he reads Scott's mind in X-Factor #4. It's not surprising Scott starts losing it completely here.

Also, she's a pilot, she could have gotten a new job elsewhere and decided to become completely independent which would have made her difficult to reach as well.

"She's been shown to have a temper and in fact punched him in the face for asking if she was really Jean". She's also been shown to incredibly forgiving- she forgive Lilandra for coming after her with a lightsaber and Storm for almost drowning her.
As for the people Scott called- not many women break off all ties with their friends so their husbands can't find them, unless the husband is genuinely abusive. As for the idea that they were lying to him at her request- assuming Scott called multiple people, that would be highly unlikely. Usually in such a situation people say, "She left but didn't tell us where." not "She just disappeared without telling us she was leaving." And some of the people that Scott called would have probably said, "Are you sure Maddie's not missing?", which is highly unlikely if they were stonewalling him.
More to the point, is it possible that Maddie left him, from Scott's perspective? Yes. But there's also reasonable explanations for a situation where Maddie and the baby were in danger. And Scott can find out if Maddie left of her own free will easily- all he has to do is call the airline where she worked and ask if she quit or disappeared without explanation. When he does that, in X-Factor 13, the guy tells her that Maddie never worked there and Scott instantly realizes Maddie is in danger. If he had done that months ago, he could have gone to the authorities.
More to the point, in this series, Scott has a habit of coming to conclusions that make things easier for him. He convinced himself that the X-Factor ads wouldn't result in anyone dying- tell that to Larry Bodine's parents. In issue 15, he convinces himself his son is dead without evidence. There's a difference between what Scott believes and the consequences that a reasonable man would consider. I'm sure that many parents that don't report their children missing convince themselves that they're okay but it's better to be safe than sorry. That's why some people want to make it illegal not to report kids missing even if the parent is convinced the kid is missing.

I want to say this is being over analyzed, but given the nature of my own posts...pot, kettle, black...

Two pieces of context, though. First, how long has it been for Scott since he left Maddie? My guess would be at most a month, in-story time. Keep in mind that by the time baby Natan is whisked off to the Apocalyptic future in real-life 1991, he's still not old enough to walk. Even apart from the "sliding timescale," there has to be some serious compression here.

Second, Scott's behavior is so unsocial because he's been badly socialized, as later arcs will emphasize somewhat. No parents after a pretty young age, an orphanage where Kid Sinister was his best for enemy, then his Oliver Twist time with Jack of Diamonds, followed by Xavier's school, where he had a total of four friends his own age and knew one girl. Caliban's right to see him as a kindered spirit.

Walter- in X-Men 223, Maddie says that she was in a coma for "months"- that's probably about how long it was between Scott leaving Maddie and him coming home.

If you look at the time that passes in the Marvel Universe, it was maybe about 2 months at the most.

I think the point is that Claremont's intentions per Michael's "months" quote and Simonson's intentions since multiple letters had been returned and multiple checks had not been cashed, the writers were treating this as if more time had passed. That's a typical problem even not taking into account the Marvel sliding timescale. Writers often slip into writing in "realtime" (it's been a year since issue #1) even though, for example, we know issues #8-11 all took place on a single day.

I'm not weighing in on the larger topic here; just wanted to address the time issue so we're not talking past each other. I agree that with Marvel Time, Scott was away from Maddie for barely an hour. ;-)

We'll see more about Scott's unsocial behavior / unusual upbringing re: Professor X and how Simonson may see that as a mitigating factor next issue...

Every time I think of this point in Scott's life I can't help but see the men behind the curtains.

It is just so obvious that writers and editorial need Scott to be away from Maddie and from the X-Men, characterization be darned. There is really no other way to explain the incredibly convoluted situation of early X-Factor issues. The contradictory and unexplained scenes involving Madelyne's supposed cadaver are just further evidence.

This is, after all, a point in time where a lot of the focus of the X-Books was directed towards creating crossovers that somehow involved the then-three books while symultaneously teasing yet failing to deliver some very needed meetings. All three books showed a remarkable lack of plot resolution at this time.

Scott's character was just a casualty among so many others.

Come to think of it, the only reason for the whole "all records of Maddie's existence are erased" plot was to prevent Scott from finding out Maddie was alive. Under ordinary circumstances, if Scott filed a missing persons report or declared Maddie dead, he would have been contacted about Maddie five minutes after she woke up from her coma. The only reason for erasing the records was to prevent that from happening.

The 12 wasn't made clear until the 2000s? Thank God I gave up reading in the early 90's.

There are a couple of things, continuity wise, that bother me about this issue. The first is the picture - Mastermind gave it to him, which seemed to indicate that it was a use of Mastermind's power and otherwise wasn't a real picture of Jean. Why would he still have it and why would it still show Jean? That always bothered me.

The corpse at the end also bothered me. We've already seen Maddie wheeled into a hospital in San Francisco. Why have this corpse in Alaska? Sinister wouldn't have planted it there - he wanted her existence erased, not some corpse to make it seem like she was dead. And we know it's not really Maddie. So where the hell does it come from? That was never really explained very well.

As a big Cyclops fan, I was very disappointed with how he was written during this stretch. I don't fully agree with clyde's comments, but it does indicate some severe problems. Granted, this is nothing compared to his affair with Emma or, god help me, Avengers vs X-Men. After all that I am surprised there are any Scott fans like myself left.

Erik, I always assumed that the picture of Jean in X-Men 174 was a real picture of Jean that Mastermind took while he was spying on Jean during her vacation in Kirinos. But it is weird for Scott to keep the picture- who keeps a picture of your former girlfriend in a bikini taken by a man who was stalking her and kidnapped your wife and kissed her against her will?

Is it possible that the computer virus the X-Men used in the Pentagon erased all of Maddie's files? It included the legendary soldier Cable without his knowledge or consent, it could probably handle some female airline pilot. Sure, Genosha had those records, but they were still erased anyway. And a naked redhead corpse was pulled out of the water, so that obviously solves everything.

Seriously, everything has been explained. Why are you still asking questions? Do you need an inferno to burn everything down?

The problem is (a) Sinister claimed to have erased all records of Maddie's existence, and (b) Logan was surprised that all records of Maddie's existence were erased, which is kind of odd if they were erased due to a virus the X-Men planted.
As for the corpse, Jean concludes that Sinister planted it there, but no, it's not clear why Sinister would do so.

Re:Erik The picture was taken by Mastermind in his disguise as Jean's Greek guide, see Classic X-Men back story circa Uncanny X-Men #118. The picture was real, although he didn't take it secretly, since Scott recognized it, probably from Jean's print. Sadly, the picture implies Jean was a smoker, which has always been my problem with it(My personal bias only. Being the 70's, it was probably an in character beat.)

The cigarettes probably belonged to Wyngarde.