X-Men #48: Cyclops and Marvel Girl

X-Men #48 follows up the adventures of Scott and Jean, who are based in New York now. There's a little inconsistency, as we find out that Hank and Bobby are in California, even though we saw then in New York in #47. Jean and Scott both set up secret identities, with fairly little hassle. Jean becomes a model. Scott becomes a radio journalist, and pretends to be Jean's jealous boyfriend. (As far as I can make out, they're still not actually in a relationship). I don't know why she just didn't go back to Metro College full time - but they appear to have just dropped that plot thread, just we've seen the last appearance of Zelda and Vera for some time.

They have a what would otherwise be a generic superhero story with robots trying to take over the world, saved by the small detail that they are very weird ritualistic robots. I approve of this.

We're promised that in the next issue, Beast and Iceman will fight "Metoxo, the Lava Man". This does not happen, implying that Arnold Drake abandons this new status quo for the X-Men quite suddenly. Twenty-six years later, in the Marvel Holiday Special 1994, there will be a sequel to this missing story. Comic Book Legends Revealed treats this in some detail...

X-Men #47: New Adventures of Beast and Iceman

They did it! They actually did it! X-Men has been transformed, by new writer Gary Friedrich, from a team title to an anthology title featuring different X-Men each week. You can see signs of this as far back as #42: each issue has been featuring very large character names on the cover, with the X-Men title relegated to an "The X-Men featuring". Last ish was a bit different, but it's resulted in a new status quo.

The X-Men may have split up, but you can't prise apart Bobby Drake and Hank McCoy so easily. X-Men #47 opens with them double-dating Zelda and Vera. They go see Maha Yogi at the East Village Theatre, who, in one of those Silver Age coincidences turns out to be Warlock/Merlin, back from the terrible fill-in issue #30. His new persona is that of a stage hypnotist and his evil plan is to hypnotise the audience to use as a private army at a later date. The issue looks for a moment like it might have something interesting to say about 1960s counterculture falling for cults dressed in exoticism (the name Maha Yogi didn't come out of nowhere, after all). But then it spoils that by going straight to a fight scene.

Twice in this issue Bobby and Hank skip out on Zelda and Vera. They notice both times, and don't believe their excuses. The game is going to be up soon, right?

There is a curious backup feature, which I shan't treat separately, in which Bobby explains how his powers work. I think this is the first appearance of the "it comes from the moisture in the air" rationale and the first instance of "what holds the ladder up?" question - the answer being imagination. We are left with the open issue of whether or not Iceman's powers would work in space, despite them working perfectly in #5.

I feel the need, the need to freeze

The backup Origins of the X-Men feature continues again from X-Men #44, with a story about Iceman's origin, running through to #46.

It's 1963 (apparently, the sliding timeline had not yet been invented, although Bobby only just turned 18 last year, I dunno), and Bobby Drake is a fun-loving teenager in a small town in Nassau County, New York. He knows he has ice powers, and his parents do too. On a date with Judy Harmon, he feels forced to defend himself against a bully. With his ice powers. This proves a mistake, as rumour quickly spreads, and he is arrested.

Xavier finds out about this from reading the paper, and sends Scott there. Scott breaks Bobby out of jail, which just escalates matters, as the townspeople form a lynch mob and declare the sheriff, who is protesting there must be due process, to be a "mutant lover". Xavier saves the day with mindwipes all round, including of Bobby's parents (as was typical back in the single digits), and signs Bobby up as the second student at his school.

There is no subtlety here. The X-Men, which started as a fairly innocent piece of science fantasy, is now an analogy for the civil rights struggle - not something that can be read into it, but the clear authorial intent. Gary Friedrich may only have had a short run on the title, but his influence is profound.

Forty-two years later, this story gets retold by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and Phil Noto as X-Men Origins: Iceman. It hews closely to the original. Plotwise it varies a little, as Xavier enters sooner, preventing the situation from escalating as badly as it otherwise had, but it presents those same events, down to an explanation for why they'd seen "West Side Story" that night. But it doesn't need to be changed to be a coming out narrative, as it already was one, back in 1968.

X-Men #46: The End

X-Men #46 starts with our team having some time to grieve for Professor X - something that they had not been allowed to by the return of Magneto (er, despite them having a funeral for him). Amos Duncan turns up. We'd met him way back in issue #2, as the X-Men's liaison with the government, but he'd been most recently reintroduced in that role in the Origin of Cyclops backup strip. His first name does seem to have changed from "Fred", though.

They retire to the school, only to find Foggy Nelson (Daredevil's law partner, and therefore lawyer to everyone in the Marvel universe) there, with Xavier's legal will. It sets up a trust to continue the work of the school, with Scott in charge, and his personal belongings are divided between the five.

He's also left a lot of science stuff to them, equipment and projects. One of these is the ongoing imprisonment of Juggernaut, which breaks down in his absence. The escaped Juggernaut vows revenge on his half-brother, and pledges to kill him. The X-Men tell him the bad news, which he wisely refuses to believe until he sees the actual gravestone (although this being the Marvel universe I'm not even sure what the point of that is). The day is saved by Jean, using the telepathy that she'd been taught in those last days, and Xavier's machine kicking in again to teleport Marko back to the Crimson Cosmos.

When all these interruptions have passed, Agent Duncan finally gets to spill why he's there. Now that Xavier is dead, he is ordering the X-Men to break up - they present too large a target otherwise, and can fight evil mutants more efficiently when dispersed. Hank points out how ridiculously unconstitutional this is, but Scott decides to go along with it, and he reckons that's what Xavier would have wanted (despite Xavier's will containing no such stuff). Again, we'll see how long that lasts...

X-Men: The Sophomore Years

Rumours have been floating around for a while that the sequel to Vaughn's X-Men: First Class would be called Days of Future Past, based on Claremont's classic 1981 story, and it's now been officially confirmed.

What can we expect from this film? Well, in the original storyline, Mystique's Brotherhood of Evil Mutants assassinates a senator, which results in a dystopian future in which mutants have been hunted down by Sentinels and killed or imprisoned. The now-adult Kitty Pryde sends a message to her past self, and the X-Men are able to prevent the assassination, avoiding that future.

So, first change: Magneto. He wasn't a part of Mystique's Brotherhood (the films basically have Mystique be Magneto's top minion, which the comics to my knowledge have never done), but they're not going to waste a chance to use Michael Fassbender. Perhaps he'll have found out the politician ultimately responsible for the "shoot" order at the end of First Class was JFK?

The temptation to have "the future" be 2014 will be very strong. We'll see a distorted version of today's world portrayed as a dystopia - mutants being rounded up and kept in camps. Think the early parts of District 9 for tone. And for the sentinels: I'm sorry, but we are not going to see giant humanoid robots with funny hats on film. Even if it weren't too silly, it's too similar to Transformers 4, which will be hitting screens less than a month before X-Men: Days of Future Past. Instead, I wonder if they'll resemble unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which is basically what they are. Maybe have them be called "sentinel drones".

The time travel in the original storyline is a mind transference, which will be too understated for a big-budget action movie. Although First Class is irreconcilable in many details with the original trilogy, they still kept a kind of loose continuity for the cast. This means Kitty Pryde is not going appear as a youngster in the 1960s era, and therefore probably won't appear as an adult in the 2014 segment, either. It might be any of our remaining cast of X-Men, but my money is on Rachel Summers coming - body and all - from the future. This makes it a personal story for Rachel's father, Alex Summers (Lucas Till). Yes. You know it makes sense.

Making Alex be Rachel's father is completely against the "canon", of course. But you know, so what? The film series has never attempted to recapitulate the original stories (the first one dealt neither with an attack on Cape Citadel nor the rescue of a previous set of X-Men from a living island), and it's often made massive changes to characters - look at Rogue, for example. And I do not think it's necessarily the worse for that, it's just different. X3 is rubbish because of its structural faults as a film, not because it failed to followed Claremont and Whedon closely enough.

Cyclops, how does he work?

X-Men #42 suspends the "Origin of the X-Men" backup briefly for a five-page feature which goes into rather a lot of detail about Cyclops's powers, in respond to readers' requests for information.

It provides a technobabble power source for the optic blasts (absorption of solar energy, likened to photosynthesis), which I think is new, emphasises that they are force beams, not heat (something that is forgotten by the writers half the time then and now - I suppose drawing them as red blasts doesn't help there), and explains how the visor works. For the first time the little buttons in his gloves that can open the visor without him reaching for it are made explicit.

It closes on a panel refusing to answer that perennial question: "could Cyclops beat Thor or the Hulk". Some questions really are eternal, although now they tend to be asked and answered on Tom Brevoort's formspring page rather than in the pages of comics magazines themselves...

All-in-all, it's an odd little feature. I hope their mailbags decreased in size for their trouble.

X-Men #43-#45, Avengers #53: The Return of Magneto

With the X-Men still reeling from Professor Xavier's death, it's a good time for Magneto to make a re-appearance. X-Men #43 starts with him watching the funeral, and calling out to Quicksilver, who it turns out has gone AWOL to attend it. I was a little puzzled at this point, because didn't Quicksilver leave Magneto in X-Men #11? The matter is cleared up with a footnote to the appropriate issue of Avengers.

Back at the mansion, we have the reading of the will - or at least a holographic recording that Xavier had made, shortly before going off to confront Grotesk. He reveals what he says was the real secret of X-Men #41-#42 - that he'd been training Jean in telepathy (she had been strictly telekinesis only until now).

We discover that Wanda has been depowered, and that Pietro and Wanda are hoping Magneto will be able to fix this. Magneto has also someone managed to sucker Toad into joining up, despite abandoning Toad on an alien planet. They've nearly got the whole gang back together again... But Magneto has a secret - he caused Wanda's depowerment in the first place!

The X-Men try to Trojan horse Magneto, but get captured, and all placed in custom prisons. Angel escapes, though, and goes away to New York City to fetch the Avengers, stopping off en route during issue #44 to have a side story with Red Raven, a Timely character from the 1940s. The Avengers team he meets is the Hawkeye/Black Panther/Giant-Man/Wasp line-up, just after Black Panther joined, and before they encountered The Vision.

Magneto has a plan. Firstly, as he has outlined, he wishes to create a "sanctuary... a separate country for mutants", on a small island. Scott sees "a lot of sense in what he's saying." But the rest of the plan, which sets the Avengers and X-Men against each other in a big fight, young Mr Summers is less keen on. Magneto is revealed to have let Warren escape, and planted a bug on him, leading to the Avengers believing the X-Men have betrayed them and joined the Brotherhood. Except, at the least moment, we discover that the Avengers have out-thought Magneto. We end Avengers #53 with the Avengers triumphant, and Pietro and Wanda running away on their own again...

All in all, this is very confused, with shifting motivations and no sense of who knows what when, and so therefore it's no surprise to learn that the writer changed during this, from Roy Thomas to Gary Friedrich. The X-Men have permanently lost Xavier, which ought to be opening new story pastures, but instead we get a story which is fundamentally quite regressive, with the artificial return of old Brotherhood line-up only to have Wanda and Pietro break away, a story that we have done pretty much exactly like that before. Additionally, Angel's side story jars, and I suspect it of being inventory material being worked into the ongoing plot somehow.