Secret Wars on Infinite Earths: The Comic Book Fight Club

PRIME SENTINELS versus X-MEN

First Blood - Operation: Zero Tolerance Prologue (Marvel)
Where: X-Men #65 When: June 1997
Why: Scott Lobdell How: Carlos Pacheco

The Story So Far...
En route from a mission to wrest the cure for the Legacy Virus from the clutches of both Sebastian Shaw and The Kingpin -- the X-Men find themselves under assault from yet another lurking threat!

Operation: Zero Tolerance has stoked the fires of anti-mutant sentiment in the wake of the devastating attack by Onslaught that seemingly cost the lives of Earth's Mightiest Heroes - The Avengers and Fantastic Four!

The X-Men are primed to become public enemies once again as they find their plane under attack from Operation: Zero Tolerance -- with TV cameras capturing the battle -- and Henry Peter Gyrich on hand to brand it an act of terrorists.

Tale of the Tape...
Strength: Wolverine 3 (Athlete)
Intelligence: Cyclops 4 (Tactician)
Speed: Cannonball 5 (Super-Human)
Stamina: Wolverine 6 (Generator)
Agility: Storm 3 (Acrobat)
Fighting: Wolverine 6 (Warrior)
Energy: Cyclops 5 (Lasers)
Total: Wolverine 26 (Metahuman)

The Prime Sentinels are a unique breed of cybernetic soldiers created by Bastion for Operation: Zero Tolerance.

Unlike traditional Sentinel robots; Prime models are actually human sleeper agents outfitted with nanotech implants, which can be activated remotely to turn them into heavily armed, armored attack agents.

They possess greatly enhanced strength & durability, concussive force blasts, flight, and some ability to impede mutant powers, with the added benefits of being able to blend in with humans when not activated.

The X-Men are: Cyclops, Storm, Phoenix, Wolverine, and Cannonball.

All of these X-Men are well versed in battling mutant-hunting Sentinels. We saw Cyclops and Phoenix do some damage during a Christmas attack, with Storm making a vital save when things got a little out of hand.

Cannonball, who is a still recent call-up from X-Force, fought the Sentinels as a member of the New Mutants. His invincible blast-shield generated while in flight makes him a good hand against the classic robots, and he's still riding the high of a proving-moment against Gladiator shortly before this issue.

We don't have any of those moments recorded at time of writing, but we have seen Cannonball join X-Force against the armored Iron Man during the second Contest of Champions. Results were mixed.

Sentinels have a bit of a mixed history when it comes to combat: The Tri-Sentinel super-charged by Loki was no match for a cosmically powered Spider-Man, but when a malfunctioning model sprung out of a scrapyard -- Falcon was caught by surprise!

In an alternate future, we saw scrapped Sentinels become instruments of death for Magneto, and yet another possible future produced the deadly Nimrod: a time-travelling Sentinel that forced the X-Men and Juggernaut to team-up, and later resurfaced to overwhelm both the X-Men and Hellfire Club!

How will the X-Men fare in their first encounter with the Prime Sentinels? Let's find out!

The Tape: X-Men Ranking: Wolverine (#5)

What Went Down...

Over a previously undisturbed wooded Colorado valley -- a sophisticated Operation: Zero Tolerance aircraft is more than a match for the loaner jet it unleashes its hi-tech weaponry upon!

A direct impact blasts open the cabin, and snaps one of the passengers -- Jean Grey, aka; Phoenix -- out of an unexpected psychic episode that briefly communed her with the believed-dead, sub-dimensionally lost hero: Iron Man!

It seems Operation: Zero Tolerance's weapons have had an unexpected effect on Phoenix's telepathic abilities, making it even more difficult for her to assist the X-Men as Storm battles rapid decompression with her command of the winds.

Things are going from bad to worse as Cyclops discovers the controls of the plane almost completely unresponsive. It's up to Phoenix & Storm to keep them aloft!

In desperate need of a clean landing and facing further assault from two fast-moving aircraft -- Cannonball leaps from the cabin to take them on!

His kinetic forcefield keeps him safe as he rips through the outer hull of the attacking vessels, but from within springs two human-shaped bogeys!

Cannonball finds himself joined in the air by three strange, man-sized Sentinels!

The young X-Man is so startled by their unusual appearance -- he doesn't even realise they're steering him towards an attack from one of the airships! 

Fortunately, he has Wolverine and Cyclops watching his back! Cyclops unleashes an optic blast -- nailing the aircraft before it can attack!

Unfortunately, there's nobody to save Cyclops when the jet is hit from another aircraft and he's thrown from the opening in the cabin!

The irony of ironies is that Cyclops' life is saved by the Prime Sentinels that catch him unconscious in mid-air, to be flown to future internment.

Wolverine can see the X-Men are being picked off, one by one.

This time Storm takes the initiative, leaping from the plane to take the fight to the Sentinels, but she was expecting more energy blasts -- and completely failed to anticipate the deployment of a rapidly expanding polymer!

The substance slowly twists its way along Storm's body until she's completely encased in the translucent substance -- helpless in a grip of claustrophobia and the inescapable encasement!

With the situation growing increasingly desperate -- Wolverine steers the shaking jet towards the trees and mountains below, urging the Operation: Zero Tolerance aircraft to follow as he takes Phoenix by the hand and plays for a hasty exit.

A holographic display shows the spectacular explosion of the crashing plane to Bastion, who relishes "... the X-Men's final flight from justice..."

While the Prime Sentinels carry a polymer-encased Storm back to their craft, more of their agents discover Cannonball unconscious in the nearby river, while others clasp a hi-tech cradle over Cyclops' head & eyes, and descend to retrieve Wolverine and Phoenix from rubble near the crash site.

The Hammer...

A shocking defeat for the X-Men as Operation: Zero Tolerance kicks off the full scale threat of Bastion and his Prime Sentinels!

As you might have noticed at the top of this entry -- we're back in 1997. A year I generally look back upon very fondly, and has come into vogue again thanks to the just-concluded first season of Disney's X-Men 97 animated series -- a revival of the classic X-Men cartoon.

I was still buying occasional X-Men issues from the newsstands around this time, and probably rewatching Season 1 videotapes of the cartoon as well, but the presumed grind of constant X-over events meant I was a little less focused on what was going on around this time. The end of the cartoon likely contributed.

It was probably another year or so before I really started to feel like X-Men's time had passed, and questioned their enduring place at the top of the monthly sales charts, but after the blockbuster of Onslaught, my focus was already transferred to the Heroes Reborn titles, most enduringly Fantastic Four - a perennial fave.

In 1997, the return to a meandering Sentinel-based danger, and purple-clad arch-villain, felt a little bit passe and "samey", but in hindsight, I think I'd be much more complimentary now. It was easy to be flippantly disinterested back then -- there were exciting things going on across pop culture, competing for time & dollars. There was a disposable exchange and we didn't always get it right.

Looking back on Operation: Zero Tolerance now -- it strikes me that it's a vibrant return to classic X-Men. A welcome centering after a couple of years of disruption, most notably with 1995's Age of Apocalypse, that moved things forward well after the drawn out mystery of Onslaught, and consequences of Heroes Reborn.

Artists like Carlos Pacheco and Salvador Larroca were giving tremendous energy to pencils amid the exit of Joe Madureira, and I'm also inclined to compliment the computer-assisted colours of Chris Lichtner, Aron Lusen, and Liquid!, however those duties might be divided. This work really pushes the nineties style to its apex, and is still very appealing.

The nano-tech twist on the classic Sentinels formula is also a fresh and topical of-the-time detail I overlooked. It would come back into focus brilliantly when Grant Morrison breathed new life into the whole thing with his 2001 New X-Men -- a welcome evolution of the X-Men that, at least as far as Nano-Sentinels are concerned, also further validates what was done here. A similar idea also consumed DC in 2006 with Project OMAC. If only I'd paid more attention in '97!

Then, and now, I have mixed feelings about the technology and concepts bridging the gap to Nimrod. At the time, the vague techno-connection was played up as a bit of a bigger deal than it really wound up being. A symptom of another push for a mystery identity ala Onslaught, with the trickiness of moving us closer to a future that was always presented as a bit more distant.

Here in 2024, that time crunch has been concluded, with Nimrod playing a big role in the recent Fall of X that has once again given us a re-centering moment, after a few years of the very niche Krakoa era. A moment that seems to have been rapidly overtaken by a slightly nostalgic revival, led by X-Men 97, and the influx of related merchandise into a market starved by Marvel Entertainment execs.

I have some slight misgivings about nostalgia, these days. It's been a steady few decades of inescapable, often vacuous, retreads of eighties and nineties pop culture icons in multiple mediums. We're starved for genuinely enjoyable, exciting, enduring things, but some of that comes from the tedium of post-millennial movements away from vibrant, colourful, enduring icons. In comics, this type of centered reset has felt overdue amidst the many deaths and distractions.

Whatever may come next -- I'm having a great time digging out those old X-Men back issues that have notoriously been neglected here on Secret Wars on Infinite Earths. The To Do List is always longer than the road, but I do feel like I especially left my X-Men fandom out in the cold for far too long.

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Winners: Prime Sentinels
#368 (new) Prime Sentinels
#162 (-2) Jean Grey
#5 (--) Wolverine
#36 (--) Storm
#92 (--) Cyclops
#160 (-1) Cannonball