"The 198" My Butt!

Went to bed feeling kind of down last night. Two reasons:

1) Anthony Reyes got shelled by the Diamondbacks last night. Reyes was the ray of hope for Cardinals fans that maybe, just maybe, we wouldn't see Jason #$%^ing Marquis in our postseason rotation. But if Reyes doesn't demonstrate his superiority, there's no way the rookie gets the nod from Tony Bleeping LaRussa over the vet.

2) I'd already seen the House episode on USA last night. Hermaphroditic models, oh boy.

All in all, not a stellar Friday. Ah well, that's life, etc., etc. On to the main gist of the post.

I don't know whether this is technically a post inspired by X-Factor #10. I mean, the idea's been rising to the forefront of my consciousness off and on for awhile now, but yesterday's post kind of made me feel like it's time to deal with it.

Wanda supposedly left only 198 mutants still powered (going by Len's suggestion that Wanda's blocked the genes of the other mutants from expressing themselves). Which is all very well and good, except that it was immediately undercut by Iceman regaining his powers through some sort of medical mumbo-jumbo b.s. I didn't understand and don't care to try and find. So that's 199.

Nobody living (besides Xavier) knew about the existence of Vulcan or Darwin, so that's 201.

Apocalypse has showed up (202), and he seems to have repowered Sunfire and Polaris. I don't know whether they're considered mutants or not, though. Who was Pestilence? Were they a depowered mutant? Wasn't War that chimp on the space station? So that might be one more. Either way, Chamber also got the benefit of the Supercool Apocalypse Blood Treatment (Patent Pending, because not even Apocalypse can make the bureaucracy of the Patent Office move faster), so potentially 205. Maybe 206.

Magneto's back on the block (come on, we all know he didn't die in a helicopter explosion of all things), so that's at least 206, and anybody know if that Michael guy was a known mutant prior to the New Avengers story?

Then there's the question of whether Pietro and all the people's he's repowered are mutants or something more akin to Inhumans. Looking through New Avengers #16 (I'm waiting until after my "Year in Review" posts are done to toss it in the garbage), Commander Hill says 'All of the sudden the mutant gene doesn't exist in millions of people where it once had.' That would suggest depowered mutants aren't mutants at all anymore, as they no longer have the genetics for it.

But I'm loathe to take anything Bendis wrote in that damn "Collective" story at face value, so for the sake of argument lets throw all of them in as well. They had powers before, and now they have powers that are very similar, if not exactly the same, so they count. Let's see, there were about five people on Genosha (Callisto and Unus the Untouchable among them, right?) and one more fellow there at the end of Son of M, so that's 211.

And we all know it's just a matter of time until Jean Grey hits the scene again, so that's 212. Who else have I missed?

So yeah, Marvel did a real great job holding to that 198 thing. Honestly, I wonder why 198? Did they think it would resonate better than 200?

If it were me, I would've gone with 300, and not just because I could restore Stacy X. I could do that just by leaving Iceman as the depowered schmuck he ought to be. 300 evokes thoughts of the 300 Spartans at Thermopyle, a small force, fighting against a seemingly overwhelming number of people with hostile intentions towards them. Granted, that ignores the 600 or so slaves and servants the Spartans had, that died alongside the warriors (hat tip to Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe, Vol. 1), but I'm not sure what the equivalent of them would be for Marvel's band of Melancholy Mutants (I'd say they haven't been "merry" in quite some time).