Okay, so after talking about Days of Future Past, this is where I wanted to get into Days of Future Present, because having those two close together in a conversation brings up a lot more than just the names being similar.
With the original, you have a clear emergency. There is an assassination the X-Men need to prevent, and we've been shown the future that makes it so urgent. With this one, it takes a while to understand what the emergency even is. People are showing up who shouldn't be there. Places aren't what they're supposed to be. The people trying to help don't have the same information. And at the center of all of it is Franklin Richards.
This is the 1990 annual crossover. The story runs through Fantastic Four Annual #23, New Mutants Annual #6, X-Factor Annual #5 and X-Men Annual #14, which you'll also see called Uncanny X-Men Annual #14. I'm mentioning the order because the middle chapters have a numbering issue, and some lists put them the other way around. New Mutants goes before X-Factor for the story itself.
Again, spoilers. I'm getting into the ending, because you can't really talk about what Franklin is doing here without talking about what is eventually revealed about him.
An adult Franklin appears in the present, and there is already a young Franklin living here. So before you get into anything else, you have Reed and Sue dealing with a grown version of their son while the child they are actually raising is right there in the same situation.
That is a lot to put on a family. They're trying to work out who this person is, what has happened to him and what he is going to do. At the same time, they still have a child to protect. You can't just turn all of that into a technical question about whether time travel is possible and call it settled.
The first big sign that something is wrong is their home. Four Freedoms Plaza has been replaced by the old Baxter Building. Inside, there are versions of the earlier Fantastic Four. The family comes back expecting the place where they live and finds something from an earlier part of their own lives instead.
That is a very specific kind of wrong. If an unfamiliar building suddenly appeared there, everybody would know they were dealing with an outside intrusion. But this is something they recognize. It's their history, standing where their present is supposed to be.
And Franklin is reaching for that familiar history. He has an idea of where home should be and what the people around him should be like. When the present doesn't match, his power lets him do something about it.
Now, on a personal level, you can understand why somebody would want that. If you have come from the future we've been talking about, why wouldn't you want to see your family and your home the way you remember them before everything went wrong? That desire doesn't need much explaining.
The problem is that the people already here have their own lives. They have moved on from that earlier version of things. They've experienced changes Franklin hasn't accounted for. A familiar-looking reconstruction isn't a harmless comfort when it is replacing what other people are actually living in.
That's what makes his powers so difficult to deal with in this story. He isn't limited to saying something doesn't feel right. He can change it. And the speed with which he can do that is very different from the time it would take somebody to sit down with him and work out why he feels that way.
You get more of it when the story moves into the New Mutants' part of the world. Franklin recreates his version of Xavier's school, along with people from his memory of it. There is an older Banshee, and a group of students who don't simply match the people standing there in the present.
For the New Mutants, that turns a place connected with their own lives into somebody else's version of it. The school carries a lot of meaning for these characters already. Franklin arrives with another set of memories attached to it, and his power gives those memories a physical presence.
That is something I want to spend a little time on, because otherwise it can sound like the usual reality-warping business where everything gets strange until somebody stops the person responsible. Here, the things changing are personal. A home. A school. People you knew. Versions of people who may not be around anymore.
Those are exactly the things that could make it tempting to let him keep going. If somebody could bring back something you lost, would you immediately want to stop and ask how they did it? Or would you want a minute with it first? And if it looked convincing enough, how long would it take before you started defending the version you wanted to believe in?
The story puts the people around Franklin in that uncomfortable space. They need to help him, but helping him can't mean agreeing that whatever makes him feel better is allowed to become everybody else's reality.
Then you have Rachel.
With most of the people Franklin encounters, there is a gap between what he remembers and what they know. Rachel comes from that future too. They have a shared history. She isn't just listening to somebody describe a place she has never been. He belongs to the life she remembers, including the people she has lost.
That should make the reunion easier, right? Here is somebody who understands where you came from. Somebody you don't have to explain the whole world to before they can understand why it mattered.
But it doesn't stay that simple. Franklin is reaching for the Rachel he remembers, and Rachel has had experiences beyond that. She has become somebody he can't just fit back into the position she occupied in his memory.
Her power is part of that. He is confronted with abilities she has now that don't match what he expects, and she can feel that something is wrong with what is happening between them. The familiarity doesn't make the encounter safe.
That is an uncomfortable thing to put into a reunion, but it makes sense for these characters. You can recognize someone and still not be prepared for who they have become. You can want a person back and discover that part of what you wanted was the version of them that existed before everything changed.
And Rachel has already had too much of her life controlled by other people for that to be a small issue. Being loved doesn't help very much if the person doing the loving can only accept you on the condition that you become the person they remember.
Then the story brings Jean into it, and that opens up a whole other problem.
Rachel tells Jean she is her daughter. For Rachel, that relationship already has a history. For Jean, this is a grown woman standing in front of her, using the Phoenix effect, saying something that carries enormous implications for her life.
They aren't starting the conversation at the same place. Rachel has memories and needs connected with her mother. Jean hasn't lived those memories with her. There is no way to fill that gap with one explanation about alternate futures.
I think that is where it would be easy to talk about the scene too quickly. You could say Jean should just accept her, because Rachel has obviously been through enough. You could also say Rachel should understand that this is overwhelming for Jean. But neither of those observations makes the actual situation less painful for the person on the other end of it.
Rachel needs recognition. Jean needs time to understand something that has suddenly been placed in front of her. Unfortunately, the person needing recognition doesn't experience that delay as a neutral thing. She is reaching out to somebody who means the world to her and not getting the response she needs.
And for Jean, the Phoenix imagery makes the encounter even harder to separate from her own history. Rachel isn't arriving as a simple piece of good news about the future. She brings questions about identity, family and power that Jean is already struggling to live with.
That is a lot more interesting to talk about than treating “daughter from the future” as if it automatically creates an ordinary mother-daughter relationship. The biological connection doesn't supply the years they haven't shared. Rachel's feelings are real, but this Jean didn't get to arrive at them alongside her.
Scott has to confront it too, and Nathan Christopher being part of his life makes Franklin's expectations even more dangerous. Franklin believes Rachel is the child who belongs in that family. Nathan doesn't fit what he remembers.
So now a baby becomes something Franklin thinks is wrong with the world.
That is the point where his attempt to restore familiar things becomes impossible to excuse just because we understand why he is upset. Nathan has a life. Scott loves him. He doesn't stop mattering because somebody from another future doesn't know where to put him.
Franklin removes him, and the story has to deal with that. It isn't just another building looking different in the background. He has reached into a family and acted as though his memory gives him the authority to decide who should exist in it.
This is also why young Franklin matters so much. It would be easy to let the adult version take over the entire conversation, because he is the one causing the spectacular problems. But the child living in the present shouldn't become a spare version of him. He is a person with a future that hasn't been lived yet.
The New Mutants chapter has the adult Franklin work with the younger one to neutralize the child's powers. That decision is tied up with his insistence on preserving the course of events he knows. Once again, someone else's possibilities are being restricted to fit his idea of what must happen.
It makes the question of protecting the future pretty uncomfortable. Which future? Whose understanding of it? How much does the person making that decision actually know? And what are the people in the present supposed to do when they are being asked to give up part of their lives on the strength of somebody else's certainty?
Meanwhile, Ahab is there to make all of this worse.
He comes with a much more openly vicious relationship to other people's freedom. The Hounds are people turned into tools for hunting others. Rachel knows what that means because it happened to her. His presence brings that part of her life back into the immediate danger around her.
The original Days of Future Past showed the prison camps and the dead heroes. Ahab gives you a closer look at what a person can be put through inside that world. You can survive and still have your powers used against the people you might otherwise have helped. Survival doesn't necessarily mean anyone has allowed you to remain yourself.
That's important when talking about Rachel, because the Hound history can't be treated as something she willingly chose and simply regretted later. It involves coercion and control. The fact that her abilities were used doesn't turn the people directing her into innocent bystanders.
And in this story, Ahab doesn't remain a problem safely contained in Rachel's memories. By the finale, he has made Hounds of Scott and Sue. Rachel's father and Franklin's mother become part of the hunt.
Think about what that does to the family side of the story. The people who should be protecting their children are being forced into roles that put those children in danger. It gives the characters around them an immediate experience of how that system works, rather than leaving Rachel as the only one who understands it personally.
There are enough heroes involved that you might expect the solution to come down to somebody finally hitting hard enough. But stopping Ahab and sorting out Franklin aren't the same job. Ahab is dangerous for reasons everybody can recognize. Franklin is dangerous while also being somebody the people around him desperately want to help.
You can't apply one response to both and expect it to work.
Then comes the revelation about the adult Franklin. He is a dream manifestation of the future Franklin who died. His existence here is being sustained through the power of Rachel and young Franklin. The person trying to recover his life hasn't accepted that his life ended.
That is the piece that makes the earlier scenes read differently. He has been trying to reconstruct the world he remembers while refusing the most fundamental fact about his own place in it.
It also explains why describing him as a normal time traveler coming back to change things would miss something crucial. The problem isn't solved by putting him in the right year or finding a place where he can settle down. Keeping this manifestation going is costing the people who are still alive.
And that is an awful position for Rachel. Somebody connected with a life she lost is in front of her again. There is real feeling attached to him. But holding on to that reunion can't be the answer if it means continuing the harm around it.
She has to say goodbye.
There isn't a version of that where somebody explains the mechanics so well that it stops being a loss. Understanding why something has to end doesn't make it feel like you never wanted it. That is why the final revelation needs all the earlier family material. Without it, you could reduce the ending to identifying an unusual psychic phenomenon and shutting it down. With it, there is a person Rachel has to lose again.
The story also leaves her need for Jean unresolved. She doesn't come out of this with everything replaced by a better relationship in the present. She reaches toward Jean and still doesn't get the help and acceptance she is looking for.
That is a hard ending to give her. Ahab's immediate threat has been dealt with, Franklin's manifestation is gone, and the people affected can begin getting back to themselves. But Rachel can't simply pack up the emotional side of it and leave that behind with the rest of the crisis.
There is another piece in the annual that I don't want to skip over: The Fundamental Things, the backup with Wolverine, Rachel, Franklin and baby Nathan.
The scene brings Nathan back and has Logan confront what Franklin and Rachel are doing. It puts the responsibility for all that power into a conversation between people, which is exactly what this story needs after so much of the trouble has come from Franklin deciding things for everyone else.
If you believe the future could be terrible, you can talk yourself into doing a lot of terrible things to prevent it. But the people being affected right now still count. A child can't become disposable because he doesn't fit your prediction.
And Franklin can't claim that wanting something good makes every choice he takes on the way there acceptable. He has to consider what he is leaving behind for other people, not just whether it matches the future in his own head.
That's the part of Days of Future Present that makes the whole crossover worth a longer conversation. There is a lot of superhero activity around it, and there are enough people involved that it can feel crowded. But underneath that, you have a family trying to understand a son, a woman reaching for a mother who doesn't share her memories, and a man trying to hold on to a life he has already lost.
The powers make those problems dangerous on a scale ordinary people don't have to deal with. They don't make the problems themselves impossible to recognize.
So when I put this next to Days of Future Past, I don't just see the same kind of story with more characters added. The first one shows you a future that has gone horribly wrong and gives the X-Men a chance to prevent a crucial event. This one asks you to spend time with the people who have that future inside them, even when the world around them is still going on normally.
That is why I wanted to talk about both rather than just mention the crossover and move on. Rachel and Franklin make the connection personal, and the difference between what they remember and what everyone else is living creates problems that a simple victory over Ahab can't resolve.
Okay, so after talking about Days of Future Past, this is where I wanted to get into Days of Future Present, because having those two close together in a conversation brings up…
· Comics / Marvel / X-Men