Warning: contains spoilers for Weapon X-Men #4!As a new era of X-Men looms in Marvel Comics, the publisher just shocked readers by introducing the franchise’s most powerful hero of all time. In X-Men lore, the most powerful mutants are known as Omega-level beings, with only a handful of characters ever ascending beyond Omega level. Now, even they are forced to stand aside by the arrival of a hero so powerful, they just changed the face of Marvel’s multiverse.
In Weapon X-Men #4, fans meet the new, heroic Onslaught. The series has seen a group of alternate-universe Wolverines assemble to hunt a new version of the villainous Onslaught. The team are led by an older, alternate-reality Jean Grey (aka Old Lady Phoenix), whose mission is to stop Onslaught consuming the multiverse itself. However, when Old Lady Phoenix is forced to hand over her Phoenix Force powers to Onslaught, the villain is reborn as an unfathomably powerful force for good.
This Onslaught is a combination of the dying psionic essences of Magneto and Jean Grey, made up of their combined power but also their fear and rage at the point of death. In contrast, Weapon X-Men‘s Old Lady Phoenix has come to accept her Phoenix Force as a force of light and life. Absorbing this version of the Phoenix Force heals Onslaught’s mind, resulting in a new form that is instantly remorseful for the worlds it has incinerated in the series so far. The issue ends with the new Onslaught-Phoenix vowing to explore the multiverse as a force of good.
Weapon X-Men continues the story of 2023’s The Original X-Men (by Gage and Greg Land) and sees Onslaught finally defeated… by giving it exactly what it wants. This Onslaught was created on a world where a rage-filled Jean Grey destroyed Magneto’s mind, combining the two at the moment of death. This created a villain with Jean Grey’s psychic power, Magneto’s control over magnetism, and a dark version of the all-powerful Phoenix Force. Drained by the events of The Original X-Men, Onslaught has been hopping from reality to reality, attempting to consume the psionic energy of enough mutants to regain its godlike status and steal Old Lady Phoenix’s power.
However, in Weapon X-Men #4, Jean is seemingly betrayed by one of her all-Wolverine team. Now lacking the strength to defeat Onslaught, she’s forced to hand over her powers, elevating the villain beyond godhood while also purging it of its former evil. It turns out this was Wolverine’s plan all along, and Onslaught grants Jean the power to send each of the team’s members to their preferred reality as reward for a job well done.
It’s difficult to quantify how powerful this new Onslaught is. In The Original X-Men, it claimed that it was lesser only than “the truly cosmic forces of the universe,” aka the Universal Abstracts like Death, the Living Tribunal, and Eternity. Onslaught backed up this claim by destroying multiple versions of Earth as it moved between realities. However, even that was before it claimed Jean’s Phoenix Force. Prior to taking Jean’s power, Onslaught states that, “with the power of the Phoenix added to my own, I’ll be able to do anything.” Now, that’s the case, but thankfully this apparently omnipotent being finds itself a friend of Marvel’s mutants.
As a character, Onslaught has been around since the ’90s, and is one of the most powerful villains the Marvel Universe has ever faced. The original Onslaught was created when Xavier shut down Magneto’s mind, combining the worst and most powerful elements of their personalities and powers. Onslaught made its debut by effortlessly beating the Juggernaut, then went on to fight the X-Men, Fantastic Four, Avengers, and Hulk at the same time, with the heroes only surviving because reality-warper Franklin Richards created an alternate universe for them to hide in (leading to a period where Marvel’s most iconic heroes were all presumed dead.) That Onslaught has returned several times, always as a threat to Marvel’s entire reality. Most recently, fans saw the entity in Simon Spurrier and Bob Quinn’s X-Men: The Onslaught Revelation, where the psionic being took control of almost every mutant on the planet.
Marvel’s new Onslaught isn’t this original villain, but an even more powerful version from an alternate reality, where Jean Grey’s Phoenix took the place of Xavier in facing down Magneto. It’s worth keeping in mind that so far in X-Men lore, the Phoenix has proven all but unbeatable even by the cosmic force of the Marvel Universe, with hints that at its full power, the Phoenix is more potent than even the Living Tribunal. The new Onslaught was already godlike before it claimed Jean’s Phoenix, making it an unprecedented force in the multiverse – one which was casually destroying entire worlds even in its weakened state.
The creation of the new Onslaught has been an unusual story from Marvel, connecting the one-shot Original X-Men and now the four-part Weapon X-Men. While this story ends with Onslaught as a force for good, touring the multiverse to witness creation rather than conquer it, that doesn’t mean the story is over. Indeed, the X-Men just got the most powerful ally they’ve ever had, albeit one whose focus is on the multiversal level.
Marvel can keep coming back to the new Onslaught to tell stories disconnected from its mainline X-Men titles – a great tool to have, given how fun it’s been seeing so many alternate realities where X-Men’s most iconic stories took a very different turn. It can also be a major force for good – prior to its redemption, Wolverine convinced Onslaught to tackle the multiverse’s ‘evil’ realities first – a promise it may still be inclined to keep. Onslaught can be a huge advantage to Marvel’s X-Men titles just in the variety of stories prompted by its existence.
That’s especially true as X-Men reaches the end of its 2019-2024 Krakoan Era, and the upcoming From the Ashes era once again returns mutantkind to their usual status quo of being hunted and feared as they’re forced to hide among humanity. Currently, the X-Men fanbase are split on this change, with some seeing it as a welcome return to form and others as an abandonment of the big, ambitious ideas of the Krakoan Era. Further Onslaught stories can help bridge this divide, offering up ambitious X-Men stories that don’t need to be connected to any other ongoing series.
Weapon X-Men showed fans a world where Cyclops and Wolverine died fighting an alien invasion side by side and another where they became family following the marriage of their kids. That sense of variety is hugely useful to the X-Men franchise, and hopefully Marvel will use its new god-tier X-Men hero to keep telling these kinds of creative, self-contained stories.
Weapon X-Men #4 is available now from Marvel Comics.