At the heart of the X-Men spin-off series created by Scott Lobdell and Chris Bachalo was a mystery about M, Emplate and Penance that somehow ended up more convoluted than intended when new writers took over and also ignored several other subplots left by Lobdell.
In the 1994 Generation X Collectors’ Preview, it was reported that Uncanny X-Men writer Scott Lobdell got tasked with writing a New Mutants one-shot or mini-series so Marvel could maintain the copyright, but as he came up with ideas, it developed into a brand-new series titled Generation X. Instead of having Professor X in charge of a new team of new mutants in the mansion where the X-Men lived, he decided to have Banshee in charge along with Emma Frost at her Massachusetts Academy where she had taught the now deceased Hellions. Besides Jubilee coming in from the X-Men books, Lobdell created a brand-new batch of students along with artist Chris Bachalo: Chamber, Husk, M, Skin, Synch, Penance and Mondo.
Lobdell told Comics Creators On X-Men that he wanted “to move away from the Ken and Barbie elements that we had also seen in New Mutants, where you had Danielle Moonstar, Sam Guthrie and Roberto Da Costa as all these young, goodlooking things who threw on their jumpsuits and went off and saved the day.” Yet most of the female characters in Generation X also looked like Barbie dolls with only most of the men not being Ken dolls. “I was always looking to replace Banshee with Beast after the first two years – just temporarily,” Scott Lobdell revealed in an interview with Sugarbombs, which would have made beauty even more uneven between the girls and the guys.
In the Generation X Collectors’ Preview, it said that Lobdell would have liked to see the original Generation X class progress from freshman to sophomore and so on, with new classes coming and going like a real school, and eventually they would graduate. However, Lobdell already left Generation X after #28 in 1997 long before such ideas could be realized. He wanted to focus on writing both Uncanny X-Men and X-Men vol. 2. “I thought it was time to leave Gen X,” he told Sugarbombs. “I like CREATING new things and handing them off to others. It’s a way to keep growing in life.”
What was the plan for Chevy, the handyman?
Scott Lobdell left behind an unresolved subplot about a human named Chevy seeking employment as a handyman at the Massachusetts school. He got hired by Skin in Generation X #16 and was told to come back the next day. When he came back in Generation X #18, no one greeted him and it was revealed he had participated in the mutant bashing murder depicted in X-Men Prime from 1995. The heat was on as it was reported on TV that another suspect had been arrested in the murder case. Chevy’s father had sent Chevy to get the job at the school so he could get away and lay low for a while. In Generation X #20, Chevy met with his father and told him no one had been at the school when he went there. The father’s identity remained a secret, but he knew Sean Cassidy, but apparently not that Sean Cassidy was the mutant Banshee and that the school he was now running was a school for mutants. Chevy’s father told him to go back to the school, but it seems Chevy never did.
“Since we weren’t allowed to bring in human students, the idea was to give the kids a human handy guy from whom they would have to hide their identity – unaware that he himself had his own secret to hide as one of the killers of Dennis Hogan of X-Men Prime,” Lobdell told Sugarbombs. “It would have been a story of redemption and teen suicide.”
More abandoned plots by Lobdell
In the Bullpen Bulletins checklist in Uncanny X-Men #337, it was announced that Generation X #20 would feature: “Operation: Zero Tolerance hits America, and Generation X is forced to flee overseas to escape the mutant-hating agenda of Bastion!”
However, the Generation X kids did not flee overseas, remaining at the school until Generation X #25 where Emma Frost talked on the phone with Tores, a character from Skin’s background in Los Angeles who thought he was dead. Apparently Tores wanted to change a deal she had made with Emma Frost, but its nature wasn’t revealed. James Robinson who wrote Generation X Minus 1 and 29 to 31, revealed Tores to also be a mutant in Generation X #29, though, and she wanted revenge on Skin for some undisclosed wrong upon learning he was alive.
Wolverine writer Larry Hama moved to Generation X with #33 and solved some of the mysteries left by Lobdell, like revealing in #34 that Skin had faked his death after being involved in a drive-by shooting with Tores so his past wouldn’t catch up with him at the school. In Uncanny X-Men #342, the Bullpen Bulletins featured a spotlight on Generation X #25 that said: “In addition, we hear this issue has the coolest Penance scene yet, as we finally learn her secret.” But her secret wouldn’t be revealed until #40 by Larry Hama.
The plot for Generation X #25 about Black Tom Cassidy seeking to steal the Generation X kids away from Banshee had initially been announced for #23 in the Bullpen Bulletins checklist in Uncanny X-Men #339. Instead, Generation X #23 had Chamber turn down Husk’s romantic advances, but when Lobdell left, both James Robinson and Larry Hama wrote Chamber and Husk as being romantically involved. Scott Lobdell had intended Chamber to be interested in Emma Frost, though. “On his twentieth birthday… Jono and Emma!”, he revealed to Sugarbombs. “You have to figure; we’ve already seen his fondness for blondes. And bad girl Emma wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation of dating someone way younger. In her defense, though, she would feel that she is genuinely, for the first time in her life, attracted to someone for his mind! Trust me – it would have been amazing, unexpected, yet totally believable at the time!”
Lobdell getting better ideas at the last minute
In the Bullpen Bulletins checklist in Uncanny X-Men #341, it was announced about Generation X #24 that: “Monet gets a special Christmas gift: A trip back to her family’s estate! But you know what they say, ‘Home is where the HURT is!’ By Scott Lobdell and Mitch Byrd.” Instead, the issue would be mostly penciled by Rick Leonardi and feature the Generation X girls sharing tales of their mutant powers manifesting.
All this shuffling around of content in Lobdell’s final issues of Generation X was sort of explained by him in Comics Creators On X-Men: “Fabian Nicieza, who was writing the X-Men title during my spell on Uncanny, was always frustrated with me because whereas he had maybe the next three years planned out, I often didn’t know what was going to happen next issue. I’d be like, ‘If you’ve already written the stories, how interesting can they be to you? It’s almost like you’re telling stories that you’ve already told.’ I was more interested in experiencing the new story along with the reader.”
So, like Chris Claremont explaining his plot danglers with “I got a better idea” to the audience at his Bookforum appearance in Copenhagen on 4 November 2023, these changes from Generation X solicitations to the finished product is likely attributable to Scott Lobdell also getting a better idea. Like, in the Bullpen Bulletins checklist in Uncanny X-Men #343, it said about Generation X #26: “The runaway kids of Gen X find themselves in big trouble when their plane is shot down over the Atlantic Ocean. Hope they survive the experience!”
In the actual issue, they didn’t get shot down in a plane, but they were in the Atlantic Ocean where they got stranded at the end of #25 when Black Tom was defeated.
In the Bullpen Bulletins checklist in Uncanny X-Men #344, it said about Generation X #27: “The Gen X kids find themselves stuck on board a nuclear submarine with its arsenal aimed right at Europe! What can a handful of teenage mutants do to halt a holocaust?” Instead, the issue featured a story about Jubilee as a captive of Bastion while the Gen X kids lost at sea after Generation X #25 would get rescued by the Incredible Hulk character Glorian in Generation X #28. No nuclear submarines appeared.
Abandoned plans for Mondo and Penance
In Generation X #25, it was revealed that Mondo was a “vegatron” creation of Black Tom Cassidy and was killed off. “We met the original (Mondo), but the kids never did,” Scott Lobdell stated in the Sugarbombs interview. “I was going to do a scene at the end of Operation: Zero Tolerance where Sean was going to go to Mondo’s island and get the real Mondo. But he was going to see Mondo alive and happy in that Mondo way of his and make a decision not to involve poor Mondo in the horror of life off the island. It was going to be poignant.”
Eventually, the real Mondo did show up, though, in Generation X #61 written by Jay Faerber.
Lobdell’s plans for Penance and M also turned out differently from what he had intended. “It would ultimately have been revealed that (Penance’s) name was Yvette and that she was a sixteen-year-old survivor of the warring in Yugoslavia,” Lobdell revealed to Sugarbombs. “She was deaf since birth which explained her childlike naivete as well as her inability to communicate with others. She was supposed to be the first deaf mutant. I think it is kind of sad that she was never allowed to be who she is.”
Instead, Larry Hama revealed in Generation X #40 that Penance was the real M whom her brother Emplate had transformed into Penance with a spell. In Generation X #46, Larry Hama had M say she was born in Sarajevo when that was the capital of the now dissolved Yugoslavian republic while her parents were there on holiday, though, and one of her middle names was Yvette.
The M that had been a member of Generation X from the first issue was the real M’s younger siblings, the eight-year-old twins Nicole and Claudette who had merged to become M to stand in for the real M. “As far as (their father) knew, (the twins) had disappeared – unaware they were actually M,” Lobdell told Sugarbombs.
Abandoned plans for the twins making up M
The twins’ impersonation of M was revealed at the end of Chris Bachalo’s last issue drawing the series, Generation X #31 written by James Robinson, when a house fell on M and she split into the twins.
“Well, it unfolded pretty much the way I wanted it to up until the moment that M split,” Lobdell commented in the Sugarbombs interview. “From BEFORE her first appearance, the plan was to have her split after that wall fell on her - they would go through the wreckage and find the twins! After that, Emma and Sean were going to be forced to make a truly difficult decision: Do you allow the twins to stay together as the superpowered M - thereby putting their lives in constant danger - or do you force them to stay apart and live relatively normal lives, except that would mean the autistic one (of the twins) would never know the freedom she enjoyed as M? Ahhhh, the tragedy.”
Instead, Larry Hama had the twins replace the real M as Penance in Generation X #40 until they could get Emplate to undo his Penance spell. “As you can see, they strayed as FAR away from the original idea as possible,” Lobdell concluded to Sugarbombs.
Before the twins merged to become Penance in Generation X #40, it had been revealed by Larry Hama since their split as M in #31 that they had the ability to also merge with their brother Emplate, becoming M-plate. Chris Bachalo, who left to draw Uncanny X-Men instead, had originally envisioned a wider scope for their merging-powers, though - that they could merge with anybody. “I had the idea of somebody like Jubilee merged with M and becoming an incredible superhero. Jubilee always whined and complained that she could only shoot sparks, and I thought, ‘Well, if she merged with M, she could do so much more. She’d be practically invincible.’ A really neat aspect of the M character is that when people merge with her, they don’t want to un-merge because the power is so attractive to them.”
The end of Generation X?
The biosphere at the Massachusetts school, the “Danger Grotto” where Generation X used to train and which housed a Token, disappeared in a spacetime flux in Generation X #44, taking with it Emma Frost’s enemy Bianca LaNiege and her cohorts. In Larry Hama’s last issue, Generation X #47, Banshee said the biosphere was originally a part of Krakoa, the mutant island, and guest-star Forge speculated that Krakoa needed to be whole again. How a part of Krakoa became the biosphere was never explained although Krakoa would show up again, but Bianca LaNiege and her cohorts were never seen again.
Generation X ended with #75 in 2001 after Synch had been killed in #70. Emma Frost joined Grant Morrison’s New X-Men and Chamber was picked up by writer Joe Casey for Uncanny X-Men, joining after an affair with a popstar in #395-398. Banshee also showed up in Casey’s Uncanny X-Men #401-406, running X-Corp in Paris where Chamber had a reunion with former classmates Husk, M and Jubilee in #403. The girls were now with X-Corp. When Chuck Austen took over writing Uncanny X-Men with #410, Chamber was immediately off the team again, though, having left to go to college. Instead, Austen brought in Husk in Uncanny X-Men #413 where it was revealed that she was attracted to Angel.
When Husk joined the X-Men on a mission in #417-420, a romance started to develop between her and Angel that would blossom in subsequent issues. Austen would face criticism for the relationship because of the age difference with Husk being nineteen years old and Angel a mature man. Chamber showed up in Uncanny X-Men #422 to walk in on an intimate moment between Husk and Angel, and he was around for Uncanny X-Men #423 where Skin died after an attack by the Church of Humanity which Jubilee survived. Husk and Jubilee said their goodbyes and got Skin cremated in Uncanny X-Men #427. When Austen left in 2004, the next writers didn’t include Angel and Husk on their X-teams.
Now imagine the controversy if Chamber and Emma Frost had happened in Generation X.
Sources:
?: Generation X Interview with Scott Lobdell, Sugarbombs, 1999
Tom DeFalco, Comics Creators On X-Men, Titan Books, April 2006
Anya Martin: Scott Lobdell And the Genesis of Generation X, Generation X Collectors’ Preview, Marvel Comics, October 1994
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