It’s cancellation season again, the familiar result of Marvel’s practice of relaunching the whole line at once, and quietly planning to give the lesser titles twelve issues or so to see how they last.  Almost inevitably, the answer is “twelve issues or so, give or take”.  And so this is Sina Grace’s wrap-up issue, joined by Robert Gill on art, though with Grace himself drawing the flashbacks.

This is what you’d call a thematic wrap-up issue.  Bobby is out for lunch with Rictor when Bobby’s parents phone up to say that the old reclusive guy next door seems to be a mutant whose powers are going crazy.  Mr Poklemba seems to have been a harmless if paranoid eccentric, anxiously covering his house in drawings of mutants – “apocalyptic drawings and news clippings about X-Men”, to be precise.

Well… so we’re told.  The art does a decent job of conveying that it’s the house of an unstable obsessive, but the pictures are shown in far too small a scale to convey what they actually show.  Which means this rather important plot point has to be conveyed in dialogue.  And by the time it’s clearly explained, they’ve been in the house for seven pages.  And that is not good.  Anyway, the idea seems to be that Mr Poklemba’s paranoia and anxiety about mutants is linked to his denial of his own mutant powers, which is ultimately driving him mad.  So Iceman has to talk him down and persuade him that he’ll be happier by coming to terms with being a mutant.

All of this is interspersed with flashbacks, mostly to Bobby’s childhood, with him becoming increasingly anxious and paranoid about denying his own mutant powers in the face of the obvious alarm and disapproval of his parents.  And naturally enough, when he’s that worried about the mutant thing, he’s not even going to try to raise any other worries with his thoroughly unsympathetic family priest.  But the flashbacks go beyond that.  There’s a vignette of 1991-era Iceman tentatively trying to put himself forward in the X-Men, and getting overshadowed by his louder, cooler teammates.  (That one has perhaps the best line of dialogue in the series: “Can we talk later, Iceman?  Wolverine is angry.”)  And there’s an Iceman from the tail end of the Bendis run still stalling about actually doing anything in response to his younger self coming out.

The art style on the flashbacks varies widely; the idea is presumably to render them in era-appropriate styles.  This doesn’t altogether work.  It’s not a story that particularly cries out for meta to begin with, come to think of it, but you can see how a Kirby pastiche would work for a “simpler era on the surface” scene.  Grace’s Silver Age style isn’t bad; the early nineties is a bit of a mess; and the final couple of flashbacks just seem to drop the gimmick, which is a bit weird.

Obviously, this story reprises the traditional 1980s metaphor of mutant as minority group, with Bobby and Poklemba’s respective agonies over being mutants standing in for the coming out story.  Teenage mutants developing their powers were always a very serviceable metaphor for certain aspects of that experience, even if it’s less frequently invoked for that purpose in 2018, when the theme can be approached more directly.  Plainly, Iceman has been heavily invested in the whole subject of Bobby – effectively outed by his younger self in the Bendis run – coming to terms with his sexuality and trying to build a life around it.  In recent years, he had been defined largely as a second tier X-Man 24/7, who had no real outside social life to speak of and didn’t get much in the way of storylines either.

Clearly, any Iceman solo title had to foreground this sort of major event in the character’s life; it’s going to be the main thing on his mind.  So the bigger issue for this series was not so much to find a direction for the character – that was predetermined – but to find other dimensions to a character who has been quite bland for quite some time.  With Iceman himself, the book has done well.  There’s his relationship with his parents, a broader theme of him trying to reconnect with civilian life of any description, and a suggestion that his historically B-list status is tied in with his failure to come to terms with himself and realise his full potential.  All these things are closely linked to his sexuality, to be sure, but they’re still distinct.  It’s probably the most rounded that Bobby has been as a character in decades, before he slipped into being a familiar face who could round out the cast and make your X-Men comic look more X-Menny.

With the rest of the cast, though, the book’s record is more mixed.  Bobby’s parents have been well developed on the whole, but have suffered occasional lapses; Judah wound up as a generic boyfriend; and in this issue, Rictor is pretty much Another Character Who Also Likes Men.  I’m really not sure what else he’s bringing to this issue at all, unless you count providing Bobby with a sounding board for his exposition.

It’s possible this is a truncated ending – X-Men Gold #23 is written on the assumption that Iceman is coming back to New York to lead the stand-in X-Men team, as if he had relocated to Los Angeles last issue after all.  Still, while this has been a patchy title in some ways, it has succeeded in redefining a hazy character as a potential lead and telling a convincing story about him coming to terms with himself.  I would have liked to see that second year in LA.