X-MEN vol 7 #34
“Mark of Cain”
Writer: Jed MacKay
Penciller: Greg Land
Inker: Jay Leisten
Colourist: Fer Sifuentes-Sujo
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Editor: Tom Brevoort

COVER: The Juggernaut looks contemplatively at his helmet.

THE X-MEN: 

The Juggernaut. This is a Juggernaut spotlight issue, in which he shows up in the “sleepy” town of Juniper, Pennsylvania to destroy a controversial statue of hometown boy Bolivar Trask which has mysteriously appeared. The statue turns out to be protected by a force field, and the issue consists of Juggernaut persistently attempting to bludgeon his way through, while having conversations with assorted people.

He believes that he’s not a fundamentally good person, and that he needs the X-Men to provide him with a moral compass – without which, he believes that he always degenerates into being a B-list supervillain. He has no faith in his own judgment and absolute confidence in Scott Summers.

Local campaigner Chris Coleman, who opposes the statue, sees Juggernaut as trying to prove himself as a reformed villain, and tries to draw a parallel with his town not wanting to be overshadowed by its past connection with Trask. Juggernaut is completely unimpressed by this argument, since about half the town seem to be entirely happy with the statue. He seems to regard this as wishful thinking and a denial of responsibility; the real-world parallel would seem to be insisting that Donald Trump doesn’t represent America.

The spokesman for the pro-statue campaigners, Angie Harmon, believes that war between humans and mutants is inevitable, and points out that this is basically Magneto’s worldview (or at least was, before his mid-1980s face turn). She sees Juggernaut as a sucker and race traitor who is deluding himself into thinking that he’s truly accepted by the X-Men; he finds that very upsetting.

His final conversation, which seems to be a hallucination of the statue talking, suggests that fundamentally Cain has impostor syndrome: he believes that he doesn’t truly belong on the X-Men, and that he’s running away from his past rather than truly atoning for it. On some level, he believes that the X-Men will eventually see through him and kick him out.

In the middle of the statue’s speech, there’s a passing line about Cain fearing that “she sees what a terrible surrogate brother you are” – the “she” isn’t identified, but based on previous issues, it seems to be Magik.

The idea of calling in the X-Men to say that there’s more to this statue than meets the eye never seems to occur to him. He’s accepted a mission to destroy it, and so destroy it he must. But the idea seems to be that destroying this symbol of past evils is serving as a metaphor for his attempts to bury his own history.

Cyclops and Magik eventually show up to check on him – the implication is that nobody but Cain really regarded this as a very important mission at all, and Scott seems to have thought that it was the sort of “simple” task that Cain would get some satisfaction from handling on his own. They both regard the force field as a curious puzzle to be investigated further, and naturally pick up on the fact that someone who’s been punching a force field for six hours might be a bit mentally fragile. Scott offers Cain the reassuring interpretation of the issue, that he’s proven his dedication and gone above and beyond. Illyana seems genuinely mystified about why Cain feels so strongly about this. There’s a definite suggestion that Scott understands Cain’s reaction better than she does.

VILLAINS:

Bolivar Trask doesn’t appear in this story, except as a statue. He was the creator of the original Sentinels back in X-Men #14 (1965), and died two issues later. (We can leave aside his later resurrection as part of the Phalanx.) He’s presented here as a controversial figure. In the original stories, Trask had become convinced that mutants would take over the world and enslave humanity, and built the Sentinels to control mutants. The Sentinels then go rogue and form their own ideas about how to protect humanity – it’s a fairly standard “dumb robot takes instructions literally” plot, which in 2026 terms happens to match the “nonaligned AI” trope. Trask himself dies semi-heroically in trying to stop his own creations, but his earlier propaganda can reasonably be seen as a turning point in anti-mutant sentiment in the Marvel Universe.

Agent Lundqvist. Frank Bohannon is so unimpressed with Lundqvist’s performance against the X-Men in the series to date that he’s packed him off to Juniper to stand around and watch the protests without any real resources to enable him to do anything about it. He makes a token attempt to talk Cain out of attacking  the statue, on the reasonable enough grounds that it’ll only heighten the situation – in fact, his interaction with Cain in this story is reasonably civil until Cain smashes up his car.

When Cain ignores him, Lundqvist doesn’t bother pretending that he can do anything about it. Cain’s suggestion that they are both bad people who need a leader to provide them with a moral compass seems to hit home.