Excalibur #4-#5: Excalibur Meet Arcade

Excalibur #4-#5 features Arcade, and despite not being any different to normal, he's understated in it. This is because he has hired Wimbledon F.C. as minions. I think I've got that right, anyway. Arcade's plan is the usual: capture a loved one (in this case Courtney Ross, as Brian's actual girlfriend, Meggan, is powered), and set traps waiting for the heroes to arrive. In this case he's doing it for revenge rather than cash. And he's doing it as a disused steelworks in Strangeways in northern England.

They go stumbling in and there's a new element in an Arcade story as his minions bodyswap with Excalibur. Ray is taken out of action by possession, lest she break the story. (There's some linkage with Inferno setup there, but it's not clear to me what's going on. Interesting fact: she thinks Baby X is called Nathan. She should know, since she was with the team around the time he was born.) Kitty remains free, and is able to convey to Courtney the information necessary to bodyswap everyone back.

And... in the soap opera bits: Meggan nearly manages to seduce Nightcrawler (I'm going to need to carefully examine their next appearances); Saturnyne swaps places with Courtney; and Brian takes some flowers to !Courtney. Kissing happens. Chart might need updating.

Issue #4 wins my prize for best cover yet:

Alan Davis writes about it here, and spoils the mystery. It was just a cheap gag because the first issue was all setup.

BritWatch

Well. Chris Claremont takes several hundred Brit points by having it be a plot point in #4 that Marks and Spencers refused to take credit card payments (that's why Kitty had to use cash to pay, which was subsequently found to be bogus).

I almost forgive him for having Captain Britain say "strewth". Curiously urbandictionary makes the same mistake, and perhaps for the same reason Claremont did. Yes, it does appear in episode 1 of Monty Python's Flying Circus, said by a man from Guildford. But it is put in the mouth of a man who is called "Bruce Foster" and has, for that one syllable he utters, a bad Australian accent.

It is clarified that the lighthouse is on the western coast of England. This consists of two distinct stretches from the Solway Firth to the River Dee; and then from the the Severn Estuary down to Cornwall. My guess would be that it is on this second, south-western stretch, because that would be more Celtic; but somewhere in Cumbria is always an option. It appears to be not that far from a major town. Kitty calls it the "middle of nowhere", but then she is a Chicago girl who spent much of the last year in suburban New York.

There is a real Strangeways, in Manchester, better known as the location of HMP Manchester, and immortalised in the album by the Smiths. But Manchester has never been known for its steel.

Uncanny X-Men #177-#178: Get Rogue

The cover of Uncanny X-Men #177 must have been quite shocking at the time. It portrays Wolverine standing over the prone body of Kitty Pryde, claws besnikt. Wolverine, although I think I've shown he was never as much a monster as he was later supposed to have been, was still a dangerous man. Has he finally flipped?

The answer to that is provided by the first word in the first panel of the first page. "MYSTIQUE:". She's only the second named character to narrate Uncanny, and a villain, at that! Still, it gets it out of the way quickly, and Kitty Pryde is lying on the floor, bleeding with a fake-Wolverine standing over her on the third page. The other X-Men attack, one by one (Colossus, Cyclops, Storm, Rogue and Nightcrawler), and Mystique is defeated. She then wakes up in her apartment, as another rug is pulled from under us: all of that was a fake-out, a Murderworld simulation. Mystique wants to get Rogue, who she basically considers her daughter, back. And she's pulling her blows against Nightcrawler, for some reason. At this point Mystique's narration abruptly stops, because of the point-of-view shift to the X-Men.

'Crawler is concerned about his relationship to her, on account of both being blue and him being a foundling. Ask Margali Szardos (his adoptive mother), she said. [Did this actually happen in a comic - I suppose Days of Future Past or the one in the Pentagon?] Mystique and the Brotherhood set an ambush for a few of the X-Men, who are attending a ballet.

The ambush - of Kitty and Peter and Kurt and Amanda is a bit of a disaster for everyone involved, and Kitty gets word out to Xavier, who sends Storm and Wolverine, but leaves Rogue on the bench. Peter is taken out of action by supercooling. Reed Richards might be able to help but is out, so she just goes and breaks into (or rather, phases through) the Baxter Building, and nicks a bit of equipment to restore Colossus back to normal. The X-Men quickly take down Pyro, Avalanche, Blob and... oh that's it. Crap.

Meanwhile, back at the mansion, Mystique shoots Professor Xavier, and tries to talk Rogue into coming back with her. She's convinced that she only left because of Xavier's mindcontrol - which is half-right - it was Mastermind. This relationship with Mystique, who took in a young Rogue before she became a mutant, is at the heart of the issue, and it can more than withstand the weight.

Mystique offers a truce, and an exchange of prisoners, which has never happened before and suggests an interesting new course, never really taken, of her Brotherhood and the X-Men having a more ambiguous relationship. But in all this confusion, Kitty Pryde has been lost, and is found having fallen from a building, with the technogadget smashed to bits.

Uncanny X-Men #145-#147: One does not simply walk out of Murderworld

Uncanny X-Men #145-#147 features Arcade again, I'm afraid. But it's worth talking about anyway.

I've had to go over it several times now and I still can't quite make sense of the plot.

It sees the X-Men be blackmailed through threats to their families and friends (the Greys, Colossus's sister, who we saw in Giant-Size #1 but now gets a name - Illyana, Amanda Sefton, Stevie Hunter, and Moira) by Miss Locke into helping rescue Arcade from the clutches of DOOM, who finally (after 18 years!) makes an appearance in these pages. It's serious business, even moreso than the loss of the team on Krakoa, as Xavier goes around summoning stray X-Men: he declines the help of the Avengers but contacts Beast, and calls on Alex and Lorna, and Bobby (who is doing some kind of economics course at university now), and tries to get hold of Scott. Banshee is already on the way on Concorde.

I'm going to digress for a moment now to talk about travel arrangements, if only to avoid talking about Arcade for a little bit longer. Let's assume Banshee is on Muir Island when he realises Moira has been kidnapped. If they are popping over to Stornoway as often as they do, it seems to be fairly close to Lewis, but it's definitely stated as being off the north coast, north of Cape Wrath. So, it's probably near Durness. We could pretend it's Eilean Hoan. Now, we know Banshee drives, so once he's got to the mainland, it's two and a half hour's journey to Inverness, where he'll probably fly direct to Heathrow, and then transfer onto the Concorde to JFK. During this epic journey, he at no point thinks to pick up the phone. He just knows he has to be in New York as soon as possible. Why should he assume that Moira has even been taken to the US (faster than he was?) Never mind that mobile phones break horror stories, landlines break 1980s X-Men.

With the X-Men assembled (so to speak), they are divided into two squads. Ororo, Peter, Kurt and Logan go and assault DOOM's medieval castle in upstate New York. That had been constructed by DOOM but had been recently sublet or squatted by Toad as an amusement park, in Marvel Two-in-One #68, we are helpfully informed. Whatever. Storm is sent in as a decoy to try and chat to Doom and distract him, while the others infiltrate. This plan doesn't go so well, and Arcade turns out to be in league with Doom rather than a prisoner! (Or maybe not?) They all end up trapped in custom-designed puzzle prisons. Oddly, we're told that DOOM is the one responsible for these, not Arcade, which smells a bit like a late dialogue change or miscommunication in plotting? It's never made clear what Arcade actually did against DOOM, and he's eventually happy to let him go with an apology. This doesn't sound like DOOM to me, nor to John Byrne, who will later retcon this as being a DOOMbot.

The X-Men imprisoned at DOOM's Murderworld escape cleverly. Nightcrawler is first, using gravity and momentum and updrafts in an unusual outbreak of actual physics. As Logan escapes, we are reminded of his berserker rages, something we were told of in #96, but not really seen since (justified by him saying that he's not really had them since joining the X-Men but is slipping). Warren and Peter also break free, leaving only Ororo, who's been trapped in a steel form not unlike Colossus, only without the ability to move. The weather is getting worse, and when she's freed she goes, well, a bit Dark Phoenix. In a way that's not merely reminiscent of that, but explicitly mentioned in the text. She's able to control it, eventually. This gives us some strikingly similar imagery: compare these three covers of #50, #101 and now #147.

There's clearly a thing here, about powerful women and whether or not they are able to control the forces of nature that are unleashed through them, or whether their poor branes might overheat from all of the raw energy. Even the very words on the cover: "Rogue Storm", "Dark Phoenix". What's next - "Stray Polaris"? Now, I can't point to any specific instance of this and say "that one, that's sexist". But there's a pattern, and it's an unfortunate one. You can do this trope with men, it's just that... well, the X-Men hasn't, not yet. Well, not until September 2012, anyway. On the other hand, issue #145 thoroughly passes the Bechdel test, as it begins with Stevie and Ororo having a conservation about the ballet they are attending. (There had been an earlier pass, when Misty and Jean talked about Misty's trip to Japan, and studiously avoided talking about boys because that would break the plot).

What happened to the other guys? Well, the B-team - Alex, Lorna, Sean and Bobby, went to the Murderworld to free the hostages directly. There, they are a confronted by a series of custom-made traps and stop me if you've heard this one before.

X-Men #123-#124: that was your first mistake

The last couple of pages of X-Men #122 sets up our threat for #123. Tom Cassidy has grown tired of his and Juggernaut's own inability to kill the X-Men and have decided to hire a specialist assassin called Arcade.

This is their first mistake. Well, like, their twentieth or something. Arcade is a notoriously useless assassin, even by the standards of the Marvel Universe, and I detest the character with an unrivalled ferocity. Arcade's plan is to capture the X-Men and rather than killing them place them into his "Murderworld", a converted building or something filled with a number of deadly traps which shall surely kill them. However, the X-Men unite and use teamwork to defeat the traps, going after Arcade, who just manages to escape.

I wrote that paragraph before I read the story, because you don't actually need to read an Arcade story to know what happens in it. Somehow I eventually forced myself to read it anyway, just for the sake of completeness, and would you believe it, I'm not wrong. I was rewarded by one mildly redeeming feature - the Soviet-themed hero that Arcade brainwashes Colossus into being: "The Proletarian - workers' hero of the Soviet Union" - complete with boiler suit bearing a hammer and sickle and picture of Lenin - who forms the cover of #125.

Meanwhile, Logan has dinner with Mariko in New York and then returns her to the Japanese embassy. Something is stirring in the Wolverine. The phone is now working - we know that because Spider-Man calls to warn them about Arcade, but Cyclops still doesn't appear to have picked up the phone to call Moira, the twit. This is very soapy generic superhero stuff, and I hope it picks up again soon. It's been ages since we had anything strictly mutant - and we haven't had a new mutant ally since the relaunch.