Does Mephisto Own Rogue’s Soul? 

In every installment of “If I Pass This Way Again,” we look at odd comic book plot points that were rarely (sometimes NEVER!) mentioned again after they were first introduced.

is an extremely bizarre miniseries by Al Milgrom and John Buscema. It almost reads like an excuse for John Buscema to get to draw a cool character like Mephisto.

Anyhow, the four-issue series had Mephisto facing off against a major Marvel team in each issue, from the Fantastic Four to X-Factor to the X-Men to the Avengers.

In the first issue, he screws with the Fantastic Four and, in the end, Invisible Woman agrees to trade her soul to Mephisto…

In the second issue, he then trades Invisible Woman’s soul for Jean Grey’s soul…

In the third issue, things get tricky. Mephisto encounters Rogue and gets her soul, but he also kisses her…

What she doesn’t realize is that she has absorbed Mephisto’s, for lack of a better term, “soul-getting” powers. So when she goes to absorb her teammates’ minds into herself to protect them, she is actually actively procuring their souls for Mephisto!!

At the end of the issue, Mephisto then gives up Jean Grey’s soul since he had Rogue and the X-Men now…

In the final issue, however, the souls of the other X-Men vanish. This is because Rogue’s absorbed powers eventually fade away. Mephisto knew this.

So later, he has Rogue use that “soul-getting” power she absorbed on Thor…

Note that he has not actually gotten Thor’s soul, so there is no trade here, so there is nothing saying that he has given up Rogue’s soul. He just let her go back to Earth.

So Mephisto keep trying to get Thor to give him his soul and Thor keeps saying no and eventually Rogue’s power wears off and Thor’s soul goes back to his body…

However, since he KNEW Thor’s soul would eventually return to his body, what was Mephisto’s game here? Well, as it turned out, this whole freakin’ SERIES was just about getting to the point where Thor would fight against giving up his soul – Mephisto was TRYING to get Thor to fight for his soul. Mephisto wanted that because if Thor was fighting so hard to not give up his soul to Mephisto when Mephisto was offering him a bunch of cool stuff, then that means that whenever Thor ends up in Hela’s Hel (which would be INvoluntary, unlike Mephisto’s offers), Thor will never give up hope and will fight against Hela. The thought of that eventually happening someday is enough to delight Mephisto…

Yes, this whole dumb thing was about EVENTUALLY screwing Hela over. So silly.

But anyhow, it sure doesn’t seem like Rogue was ever given her soul back. Obviously, we’ll just presume that she did, but it never actually happened in the comic, so I guess Mephisto might actually still have it. A future

Okay, that’s it for this installment! If anyone else has a suggestion of a plot point that was quickly ignored by everyone else, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!

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