Uncanny X-Men #232-#234: The Temptation of Madelyne Pryor-Summers

Uncanny X-Men #232-#234 has as its main action plot a Brood infiltration of planet Earth, starting in Denver, which the X-Men must prevent. This is rather a delayed follow-up to Havok and Polaris finding a Starshark in #218, over a year ago now. You'll be unsurprised to learn that they defeat the Brood invasion. The Brood are an odd fit for this storyline: they're usually more for the mass eating rather than the deep cover work we would expect from Skrulls. This all intersects with William Connover, a reverend who they rescue from the Brood, and is depicted as sympathising with the mutants, throwing the entire weight of his church behind them. This mirrors contemporary religious attitudes towards LGBT issues, where the more progressive groups were starting to "come out", as it were.

Meanwhile, Madelyne has been left in Australia. She catches a news interview with Cyclops and Marvel Girl in X-Factor costumes. She recognises Scott immediately, and then realises who that other person must be. Suddenly it all clicks. In that instant she understands why Scott left her. But little Baby X is still a concern. Where is he? S'ym has an offer to make.

Incidentally, I refuse to believe that the use of the name Harry Palmer, coming in a year when a cinema depicted in London was showing "The IPCRESS File", is a coincidence.

New Mutants #3-#4 / Uncanny X-Men #167

New Mutants has been leading in to #167 (cover date March 1983), but there's a problem, in that #3, which finishes the sequence, was released two months later, in May 1983, and #167 started with the New Mutants all watching television, all unaware of the Brood in Xavier's head.

Any story actually dealing with the Brood (rather than having it as a background element of Weird Stuff) in New Mutants will therefore not only see our team fail to deal with the problem adequately, but end with them not even recognising one.

And so we get #3, where Dani becomes aware the a monster, nobody believes her, it manifests in all their presence and then... it is revealed to all be a dream (caused by Dani's fear powers, under an outside influence). They even get as far as hypothesising that Xavier is linked. And then they go and see some TV, the five of them.

So, that moment in #2 where Stevie realises the only person who could have run the advanced training problem in the Danger Room, is Xavier, is just plain wasted.

Couple of other bits in #3: Moira and Sean talking about having children again, with Moira moping about not having had a son by Xavier. And Illyana, who Sean catches doing some kind of ritual to do with Belasco. Whatever it is, that can't be good.

#167 itself starts quite hilariously. The X-Men, having concluded there is a Brood egg in the Professor in #166, go straight for the mansion (bypassing the Proto-Utopia island, I suppose, although maybe they went there first and that's why they're in such a hurry), and then attack the group of children in the common room. This is not your usual superhero misunderstanding - the X-Men know full well that the kids are new students of Xavier's. It's just that subduing them is going to take less time than explaining matters.

The New Mutants prove less of a pushover than Cyclops was expecting, but ultimately are defeated. Just in time for them to find Xavier in the final stages of Brood incubation and watch him turning into a Brood Queen. The Brood beats the boys (Cyclops, Wolverine, Colossus and Nightcrawler) to a standstill, but then the artillery arrives in the form of Warbird and Storm, and the Brood Queen is taken down.

Just as they are about to kill it, they discover that Xavier's personality still exists within, and spare its life. By an amazing coincidence, the Starjammers have the technology to clone Xavier's body, and then "transplant" the mind. This works very well, and even gives him shiny new legs. Until he tries to stand on them, they buckle underneath him, and he discovers his mind needs time to adjust.

And what are we to make of this notion that Xavier has drawn together the New Mutants specifically to lay eggs in, mentioned in #4? Well, if you examine what happened more closely, it doesn't make much sense. Xavier was depressed after the apparent loss of the X-Men and Lilandra, and the idea to train Karma was practically forced on him by Moira, who also provided Rahne. Psyche he got a letter about, and then he only picked up Cannonball and Sunspot because they got entangled in Pierce's schemes. So, at what point did the Brood's influence manifest? If we can blame anything on it, perhaps it's the reason Xavier has decided not to form another team of X-Men to go on missions, but instead to keep the tasty tasty children safe and close.

#167 is also the issue in which the issue of Scott and Alex's grandparents are raised. Turns out, they have some, which is complete news to Scott, as if he's never thought about the issue before. He's not a John Doe, he knew the name of his parents - it's never occurred to him to check? Why, for that matter, wasn't he placed with them instead of being put in an orphanage?

And finally, Lilandra was stranded too, with the X-Men. Gladiator turns up, wanting an audience with her. He declares Deathbird unfit to rule, and suggests a space rebellion! And sets us up for a bizarre page in which Lilandra goes and gives Reed a piece of her mind for refraining from killing Galactus, apparently intended as a bit of cheeky revenge at John Byrne, after Byrne retconned the Doom in #145-#147 as a Doombot.

Finally, coming to New Mutants #4, it's one of those unusual X-Men stories where the only superhero element is the good mutants themselves. The "villain" of the piece, who has been making harassing phone calls to Stevie, is, shockingly, the new character introduced on page 2. Edgy stuff.

New Mutants #1-#2: Read My Lips: No New X-Men

The New Mutants graphic novel apparently proved a success and so we get an ongoing series! This is the real start of the X-franchise, notwithstanding the Wolverine and Dazzler solo titles.

But first, a comic.

The first three issues of New Mutants lead up to the events of Uncanny X-Men #167, which is a bit odd because they were released several months after it, so we already know that Xavier is infected by the Brood and has brought the children there to infect too. How plausible that is we'll cover in a post's time, but for now I'll note this robs the end panel of #1 (where we see someone setting off the Danger Room, apparently trying to kill Dani - not enough to make a positive ID, but his sleeve matches the type that Xavier was wearing earlier in the issue) of its mystery.

This arc is the first serious look at the ethics of power use - and by that I don't mean the obligation to use them to help others, but whether some means are just tainted entirely, no matter the ends. Two of our new mutants have mind-based powers: Dani, who can make people see their fears; and Karma, who can mind-control people. Karma is upset when Dani (by accident, it seems), shows the group her trauma: her escape from Vietnam, her mother's death, and her attempt to protect her younger siblings (who are curiously absent - I wonder where they are living?). Dani is of course mortified, and spends much of the story running away, and then trying to prove herself.

Meanwhile, the other four (with Stevie - Moira and Illyana are in London, finding out that Xavier has an autistic, powered, son, by the Israeli ambassador, one Gabrielle Heller - which can go on the Chart now) go to the local mall. This is a ground-level view of the X-Men's small-town neighbours that we've never really seen before, and has something of the Broxton about it. They're being followed, by agents of Hank Gyrich (introduced a few years ago as a bureaucratic obstructionist character in Avengers), who is conspiring with Sebastian Shaw, mutant member of the Hellfire Club's Inner Circle. So, the attempt to wipe the information in #158 was a failure.

Shaw is using Gyrich. He doesn't want to see the New Mutants arrested or dead. He's willing to see them use giant mutant-killing robots - which he used before in the Ororo/Emma bodyswap story - to try and convince young mutants that it's a dangerous world and to sign up with him. For all that Magneto was evil, he's never staged a false flag operation, so far as we know. And although the guys (with Michael Rossi's help) take down the Sentinels and turn the day. Our issue of ethics comes up again, as Karma forces one of the goons to make a confession. It's all true, says, Rossi, but what's really going to happen here? The moment Karma breaks the control, he wakes up not knowing why he's been handcuffed. His masters will be able to spin this as an "evil mutants" thing quite easily and whisk him away from the local police department. The effect of this all has to be counted as a victory for Shaw, as he manages to sow mistrust on all sides.

The new holographic Danger Room is introduced in this issue. How it came to be holographic is not made clear, but certainly the mansion was rebuilt with the help of Shi'ar tech, so making it be of that origin is a natural fit. Oddly, the mansion has been rebuilt with the X-Men's rooms as they were (complete with mess!) and Storm's roof garden, where the plants are starting to get thirsty after several weeks of separation from their tender). That's some construction robots for you.

We get some ages of the team in #2. Rahne and Dani are 14. Bobby is 13. Xi'an is 19 (and is therefore older or a contemporary of Peter!). And Sam, as we already know from the graphic novel, is 16. And, they all get codenames: Dani is "Psyche", Rahne is "Wolfsbane", Sam is "Cannonball" (a word that had been used to describe him in the graphic novel), and Bobby is "Sunspot". Xi'an is already known as Karma. Where these names came from - whether they were self-endowed, or like previous codenames bestowed by Xavier - is left unstated.

Uncanny X-Men #162-#163: Feeling Broody

As we saw in the last post, Claremont and Miller have just written the definitive Wolverine miniseries. At more or less the same time (October 1982), that Wolverine makes his appearance narrating Uncanny X-Men #162 and #163.

Having been taken to space at the end of #161, they've been captured by the Brood and are revealed to have been implanted with eggs, showing our more Alien-like Brood. Wolverine had one, but happily if it's a legitimate Brood implantation, the mutant body has ways to try and shut that whole thing down. He sets to work rescuing the others. Some of them can see the situation for what it is: some can't, and it's getting through to them that's more important than punching. Which is not to say that the punching is worthless.

After they've got the team back together and going after the Brood, Cyclops and Wolverine have their largest argument so far. Wolverine wants to kill the Brood Queen, but Cyclops isn't having any of that: "X-Men don't kill", he says - a retcon if ever I heard one. It might help if Wolverine actually told the others about the eggs, but no, we have to have our melodrama.

Lilandra agrees with Wolverine, but the story cops out at that point, as the plan to send a forward detachment (Storm, Nightcrawler and Sprite) to Lilandra's yacht works, and they are teleported away. This sort of last-minute technical solution to a moral dilemma is something they've lifted straight from Star Trek, too, alongside the transporter they used to do it with.

Uncanny X-Men #154-#157: First Brood

Uncanny X-Men #154 starts with the mansion still mostly wrecked. Storm and Cyclops are still there (and Storm's still leader, although she asks Cyclops if he wants it back and he declines). The other X-Men have now moved to the island that had previously been Magneto's base in the Bermuda triangle, citing a wave of anti-mutant sentiment. Islands and mutants are a thing, evidently.

In space, Corsair is fleeing towards Earth, bringing with him a protracted four-issue story arc involving Lilandra and the Shi'ar and the Starjammers and the Imperial Guard and Deathbird (now seen in these pages for the first time, having debuted in Ms. Marvel #10 in October 1977). We also have the Brood, who display none of their later Alien-like traits, instead acting mostly as thinking minions of Deathbird, who of course, eventually turn on her.

Characterwise, the most important bit in this is Corsair revealing himself as Cyclops father. This makes the timeline rather wacky. Corsair has been gone for 20 years, it keeps repeating. And Scott was ten, wasn't he? So Cyclops is 30, now? That can't be right, can it? Corsair keeps referring to his wife as "Anne" for several issues before realising his mistake (she'd already been named "Katherine") and calling her "Katherine Ann".

#157 teases the return of Phoenix on the cover, which is way sooner than I'd expected. Turns out to be Kitty dressed up in costume. This is a good moment for her (as is the bit where she phases into space), and she's rapidly becoming actually competent. She's 14 now, we're told in the next issue, and Peter is 18. And so far there's no actual indication that he's acting on any attraction that may or exist, so this is staying firmly off the Chart. The age of consent in New York is 17, by the way. I do not know what it is in Shi'ar space, but I would guess that the Starjammer counts as a U.S.-flagged vessel.

We end up with Lilandra restored to that throne, but Professor X in a coma. Oh dear...