Uncanny X-Men #144: I always wanted to be a fisherman

Uncanny X-Men #143 had a brief few panels with Cyclops. He's left the X-Men, you will remember, after the death of Jean Grey, and has now decided to become a fisherman, on a ship captained by one Lee Forrester.

So, it turns out that Lee's dad, Jack, is suffering from terminal cancer (I dunno, this is about the time of the Death of Captain Marvel - I guess cancer just became un-taboo enough that comics are talking about it) and about to attempt normal suicide with a gun (which is pretty grim, even today).

Because the Marvel universe has what, about 50 people in it, this suicide cannot be allowed to proceed as normal but instead some sort of weird ghost thing called D'Spayre turns up, who - and I kid you not - feeds on despair. Or something. Anyway, Man-Thing also happens by and so does Cyclops and Lee and I don't even care any more. Defeated power of love, blah blah blah. During this we get our proper flashback to him and lil Alex falling out of a plane (and their ages - 6 and 10, rather older than I was expecting).

Back at the mansion, they're a bit shocked at the bill for leaving Kitty unattended for just a single issue (Danger Room and the Blackbird both wrecked), and Warren offers his chequebook for help for the first time.

The best bit of this issue is Cyclops cheating at pool with his optic blasts in a massive improbable way which implies he's has some kind of super-geometry power too.

Uncanny X-Men #143: Rite of Passage

Uncanny X-Men #143 turns its attention to the new girl. Ordinarily an issue doing this ought to be a good idea. However, this isn't just Kitty-centric, it's a solo story, with her fighting the monsters alone for page after page. At this point I'd rather be finding more about how she interacts with the team - but then I'm not reading this for the punching. The N'Garai demons aren't Claremont and Cockrums's best invention, either, and their appearance here is more or less random. I believe this is the first time that the Danger Room gets trashed, something that will become a staple.

This issue is the first to establish that Kitty is Jewish. I wonder if this was always the plan. "Katherine" is a saint name, but that's no impediment.

At the end we find out there have been some "gruesome murders" in Salem Center, which oddly appears to be a throwaway to delay the X-Men arriving back at the mansion, rather than a plot point worthy of investigation.

X-Men #141-#142: "It's 2013. Do you know what your children are?"

It's the distant future. The year 2013.¹ Yes, time has nearly caught up with Days of Future Past, the story that occupies X-Men #141 and Uncanny X-Men #142 (the series changed its formal title between issues, although we've had "Uncanny" on the covers for a good long while now).

2013 is a horrible dystopia in which Sentinels - giant robots with funny hats - have overthrown the U.S. government, and killed or put in camps all mutants and other superhumans, and spread through the rest of North America. In doing so, they've wrecked the place, - I love here the "express train" that Pryde takes, being a bus pulled by animals. Other nations aren't looking too kindly on the proposed sentinel invasion of the rest of the world, and a nuclear apocalypse is about to start.

Many of the heroes are dead or captured (as we see on the now-iconic cover: expect to see that as a movie poster in 2014), and only a few holdouts remain: Wolverine, Kate Pryde (who would be 46 by now), her husband Peter Rasputin (well, they moved quickly on hinting at that, didn't they, although this is the future and so no, I'm not putting it in the chart), Ororo (who is surely in her 60s, if we're still supposed to think she was orphaned by Suez), Franklin Richards, Rachel (surname carefully left unspecified), and Magneto (called Magnus - the first time we've got a "real" name for him). Together they have decided to do something about it, by sending Kate Pryde's consciousness back in time to 1980, to avert the assassination of Senator Kelly. The only problem is, they're not quite sure how time travel works in the Marvel universe (which is fair enough, neither do the writers). Will it change their timeline and they vanish, or just create a new one and they get to experience a fiery nuclear death anyhow? That giant robots are in charge and are treating even baseline humans badly undermines the "It Can't Happen Here" undertones a bit, but nonetheless the future it presents is quite stark.

Kelly was is going to be assassinated by Mystique, and her Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Mystique makes her first full appearance in X-Men here, having debuted as a character in Claremont's Ms. Marvel #17, 4 years ago. She's put together a team that consists of herself, her um-friend the blind precog Destiny, Pyro (described as a "Limey", which has got to hurt, considering we'll eventually learn he's supposed to be Australian) and Avalanche, all being introduced here for the first time. The Blob - who was given the name Fred J. Dukes in his prison-break scene in #140 - joins them.

Kate-as-Kitty quickly gets believed, and is sent to Washington to talk with Professor X. Now, this suffers from the a common problem with time travel stories, that Ryan North identifies in Back to the Future, in that why on Earth have they sent her back with so little time to spare? It's almost as if she's arrived close to the events in question as an artificial thing to induce drama... Oh.

So, there is a FIGHT and the X-MEN save SENATOR KELLY'S LIFE and they ALL LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER. Apart from the future-X-Men who die. Oh, and Kitty becomes herself again...

This, along with the Dark Phoenix Sage, is often pointed at as one of the highpoints of the Claremont/Byrne run, in a "you, go read that" sense. In this case, I agree. It's quick and mostly self-contained, and it has a point to it that still resonates today - this trope is by now well-worn but is usually used as disaster porn rather than politically. But apart from that, it's also a major turning point in Claremont's run of X-Men, and marks a decisive shift to a world where the X-Men are actively feared and hated.

Non-American readers may not know that the title (used as a campaign slogan by whoever won the '84 election here) is a play on the quite creepy It's 10pm. Do you know where your children are? public service announcements to be found on U.S. television. American readers may not know that the rest of world does not have such televised messages, and find them rather bizarre and unsettling. So I thought I'd mention that here.

So, this scenario, of people going back in time to stop a post-apocalyptic future where robots are hunting down and killing people? Remind you of anything? It anticipates the later Terminator films, without really appearing to be inspired by Ellison's work "Soldier [from Tomorrow]". Is it basically just "Day of the Daleks"? Well, I've not seen that, but from reading summaries, not really as similar as it is made out to be. Claremont Byrne does plenty of outright lifting from film and television, but they repay the favour from time to time, it seems. Of course, now that they're adapting this into a film (see my earlier post about is - shooting right now!), then they're going to have to be very careful to avoid comparisons to Terminator and for that matter to Transformers.

1. When I originally wrote this post I had dropped to a weekly schedule and this was going to post in 2013. But now I've boosted it to daily for September as well, so you'll just have to imagine it's 2013 and laugh.

X-Men #139-#140: "Welcome to the X-Men, Kitty Pryde"

X-Men #139 has Wolverine go north to Canada to try and resolve matters peacefully with the Hudsons and Alpha Flight. He takes Nightcrawler with him. They get into, with half of Flight, a fight with a Wendigo, win, and then hands are shook and Wolverine goes away a free man (and with Nightcrawler now knowing he's called "Logan"). Now why couldn't everyone have done that in the first place?

Back in New York, Kitty is given a codename: "Ariel" and becomes the first member of the X-Men to successfully challenge this, going with "Sprite" instead. She starts taking dance lessons with Stevie Hunter in Salem Center, which provokes strange feelings of jealousy in Storm. And Angel has rejoined the team permanently (after his guest turn in the Dark Phoenix saga), despite his concerns about Wolverine.

There's not much going on here, and I think it suffers from being sandwiched between two iconic stories. It's good that we've cleared up that looming threat of Alpha Flight, at least, and Kitty is sensibly kept out of combat - she is only 13½, after all, younger than even Bobby was to begin with.

X-Men Shag Chart #1: November 1980

So, I started it. Obviously I'll need to keep updating it as I go, but I think it's up to date as of November 1980.

Any corrections, let me know. I'm working on a master chart (up to date as of 2012), but obviously I'm just going to have to read all these issues in between to find out what's going on. Have I discovered the reason I'm doing this X-Marathon, at long last? (The longest chain I've found in that is Namor-Emma Frost-Cyclops-Lee Forrester-Magneto-Rogue-Gambit-Mystique-Iceman-Shadowcat-Colossus-Callisto. There is a cluster around Angel that doesn't seem to connect in, and neither do any of the New Mutants groupings.)

X-Men Annual #4: "Nightcrawler's Inferno"

X-Men has effectively been soft-relaunched. Scott has left the team, and has been replaced with Kitty Pryde, a new viewpoint character and somewhat a blank slate. (Perhaps Claremont could have used some of the other X-Men for this, but they've all been saddled with increasingly complicated backstories. Of which more anon.)

It's Nightcrawler's 21st birthday, and he's opening his presents. One of them is a statue of himself, which explodes and knocks him deadinto a hell dimension, which Doctor Strange, guest star for this issue, transports the rest of them to.

The hell dimension is consciously modelled after Dante's Inferno, and we, along with the X-Men, are taken on a tour of it. One of the funnier moments is when Colossus, surveying hell, proclaims that he is pleased that he was brought up as an atheist, if being a Christian means you have to accept the existence of what he's looking at.

What's this all about? Well, Nightcrawler, way back in Giant-Size #1 was being chased by a mob. But not (directly) because he looked weird. He'd been blamed for some murders, which were really the doing of his step-brother, who he later killed in self-defence. The hell has been the doing of his step-mother. And Amanda Sefton, the girl he's been dating for quite a while now, turns out to have been his step-sister, spying on him.

Eew.

This is where Kurt really shows his really-good side, as he's more than happy to forgive everyone involved, and isn't even mad at Amanda about the whole incest thing, and is in fact more than happy to continue it.

Which is strange, because Westermarck effect, so was how old was Kurt when he was adopted, anyway?

Otherdoors, Kitty is totally crushing on Peter, and I am thinking about making an X-Men Shag Chart.

Wolverine: First Class #1: How about "mute girl"?

Wolverine: First Class looks like one of the innumerable Wolverine spin-off titles of 2008, but is a little more distinctive, being a "Wolverine and Kitty Pryde" team-up book. Wolverine is nowadays known for his double-acts with young girls (Kitty Pryde herself, then Jubilee, then Armor, and now maybe Idie?), but in 1980, he was still a gruff loner, who hadn't even told his colleagues his real name.

The first issue (by Fred Van Lente and Andrea Di Vito) is set right between #138 and #139, and depicts Kitty's first mission. She's been sent by Xavier with Wolverine to investigate a new blip on Cerebro. Wolverine protests, and it's only by Xavier blackmailing him by threatening to withhold help in recovering Wolverine's suppressed memories (something that in fact had not been introduced into the comic yet) that he goes along with it. This is all bit arbitrary by Xavier, and while he is a bit of a reckless bastard at this point, I'm not sure I believe it.

The scenes on the plane journey are amusingly awkward. This is Kitty's first time in her costume, and she isn't sure whether to pick "Phantom Girl" or "Phase" as a codename. In West Virginia, they quickly track down Michelle, whose mutant ability had been causing trouble, and suggest that she could attend the school.

That's the problem with this story set here, of course. Michelle will get sent to Muir Island and pops up again in #6, but there she disappears from continuity entirely. Presumably she gets depowered on M-Day? Who knows?