X-Men #27: Welcome to the X-Men, Mimic. Hope you survive the - actually no

X-Men #27 continues the plot thread from the previous story, with Jean Grey's having met new co-student, Calvin Rankin (AKA Mimic), who is sure he's seen Jean before. It starts with a four page flash-forward of a powered Mimic defeating the X-Men (minus Warren), and then goes back to the end of the last issue, taking a full nine pages to bring the story to Mimic's attack.

Mimic is being manipulated by the Pupper Master, in some sort of scheme to get revenge on the Fantastic Four. There are small cameos from Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch and Spider-Man, who all decline to team up with the X-Men. And then we are told that the apparent defeat at the start of the issue was a fake-out on Xavier's part. Structurally this is surprisingly sophisticated stuff.

Jean is still at college, although she gets involved in fighting in the issue. She here completes the hat trick - having previously been the only X-Man to have cooked, and having acted as nurse, she's now made new costumes for the team. O-kay!

Continuity notes

First appearance of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and the Puppet Master in X-Men. Mimic joins the X-Men.

X-Men #25-#26: on the other hand, they save some orphans

X-Men #25-#26 is the first X-Men story I have a real problem with. Like the previous issue, it is inessential, with X-Men taking the role of generic superheroes fighting a menace completely unrelated to mutantkind. Jean is still gone from the team - she appears briefly, used to research the main plot. In her absence, the Jean/Scott/Warren triangle does see a bit of development, with Warren and Scott actually coming to conflict, and Scott resolving to do something about it.

But the real problem is the primary story, which features a GuatemalanSan Rican explorer by the name of "El Tigre" finding a pendant which gives him mind-control powers. He travels to New York to find the other part of his pendant, and with his lazily-stereotyped minions (one of whom blows poison darts!) takes down the X-Men one by one. When he unites the two parts of the pendant he becomes the god Kukulkan, and goes all supervillain. I was about to be all sarcastic about how he was the first villain that X-Men has introduced that it has never used again. But then I looked it up and it turns out he was in some issues of Ka-Zar, which I think says more than I could manage.

Continuity notes

First appearance of Le Tigre. Mimic re-appears as a student at Metro College.

X-Men #24: "The Plague of the Locust"

X-Men #24 dangles the prospect of a status quo change before us again, as Jean is withdrawn from the school by her parents (they did, after all, formally graduate from it as a high school over a dozen issues ago now), and send her to Metro College.

In her absence, the X-Men investigate a plague of giant locusts. This is caused by August Hopper, developer of a powerful insecticide, who wants to take credit for wiping them out. It just so happens that Jean gets told about this at Metro College, and then comes back to the mansion at the weekend to provide the needed exposition. Armed with this information, the X-Men confront and defeat Hopper, who has dressed himself up in a locust suit and is calling himself "the Locust", for unclear reasons. (I mean, like, Monsanto don't need to do that to sell pesticide, right? Or did I not get the memo?)

I was expecting Jean to have found some reason to move back to the school by the end of the issue, but that's not yet happened. Maybe she's really off to college? And how long before the others follow?

Continuity notes

Jean leaves the school to go to Metro College, returns for X-Men stuff at the weekend. Introduction of the Locust.

X-Men #22-#23: "taste the irresistible might of my power horn"

X-Men #22 sees the X-Men team up to defeat a practice robot in the Danger Room, then go on vacation - their last one being rudely interrupted by Mimic in issue #19. Warren, Jean and Scott go off together. There's been, for quite a while now, a triangle developing between these characters. It's the sort of situation that can happen to anyone - Warren likes Jean, but Jean likes Scott. Scott likes Jean, but is afraid of his deadly mutant powers and dare not get close to anyone.

Meanwhile, Hank and Bobby are double-dating Zelda and Vera in Greenwich Village, and not for the first time, Hank's actions lead me to question his supposed hetereosexuality.

Soon, the plot cranks up, and Jean, investigating a supposed sighting of a flying X-Men, but knowing it can't be her or Warren, gets captured by a villain bearing the unlikely name of Plantman, who is acting as a minion for Count Nefaria, introduced the previous year (1965) in Avengers. The rest of the team are picked off one by one by the other members of Nefaria's gang, namely Scarecrow, the Porcupine, the Eel and the Unicorn. At this point Scott finally snaps and decides to hang a lampshade on it. "This must be homecoming week for obscure villains! We never heard of you, either!"

Nefaria wishes the X-Men to ally with him, an offer that would have been better made before he decided to hang them from the wall in chains. He is shocked they turn him down, and then outlines his real plan - to hold Washington D.C. to ransom for ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS! by encasing it in a giant dome. Fortunately the X-Men are able to work together (Jean using her telekinesis to open Scott's visor) to break free. Unfortunately, Nefaria is seen to get away with the money, and his plan, which framed the X-Men, trashes any remaining reputation they had. The X-Men have swapped in a ringer for the cash, and told the coast guard. Obviously this will vastly improve the mutants standing in the community and restore broken trust.

Continuity notes

First appearance of Count Nefaria in X-Men. Bobby uses the alias "Bobby Blake". Xavier has developed an exoskeleton that allows him to walk.

X-Men #20-#21: The Return of Lucifer

X-Men #20 - the first to be written by Roy Thomas - further plays with the problem of secret identities by having the Blob and Unus (who have teamed up after meeting at a circus) rob a bank while dressed as X-Men. The X-Men's attempt at distinguishing the real X-Men from the impostors is not entirely succesful. Unus and Blob are being manipulated behind the scenes by Lucifer, who has recovered from his apperance in issue #11, and we are now shown in flashback how he caused Xavier's paraplegia. Lucifer has a larger plan - he wants to subjugate the Earth's population using a machine, Dominus. After his defeat by the X-Men he is exiled to the so-called "Nameless Dimension" by his bosses.

Meanwhile, Cyclops - perhaps inspired by his encounter with Mimic's machine in the previous issue - briefly tries to leave the X-Men to seek out a doctor to help him control his optic blasts. At this point his powers are actively dangerous - #11 had him be unable to control his optic blasts when his glasses are removed - he couldn't even close his eyes to stop it. This plot thread gets forgotten by the end of the story, with Cyclops forced by events to team up with the rest of the X-Men.

Continuity

There's a new Cerebro after Magneto destroyed the first one in #18. Lucifer is identified as an alien, using the name "Agent One" with his people. New jet appears, apparently having been purchased before the Sentinel arc but not used yet.

X-Men #19: "No power on Earth will be able to stop me!"

X-Men #19 has the kids out socialising when they just happen to bump in to a person with power mimicry powers (our first meta-power), who after tracking them back to the school, kidnaps Jean. The series could easily pass this off as a coincidence, but instead it reveals that he had tracked them intentionally. Mimic is frustrated by the nature of his power-copying - which is proximity-related - and plans to use a machine to permanently fix the X-Men's powers to himself. Turns out the machine does no such thing - it was constructed by his father to remove powers, without Mimic's knowledge or consent. After events run their course, Xavier gives him a windwipe and sends him on his merry way.

We have here the idea of a mutant "cure" touched on for the first time, although Mimic is explicitly not a mutant - he's given a science-experiment backstory, and everything. This is perhaps in order to sidestep the issue of whether or not the X-Men who have expressed a desire to become "normal" could use it, too.

Continuity notes

First appearance of Mimic (Calvin Rankin). First used of term "mutie".

X-Men #17-#18: "You'll have to get down, Angel. That's against hospital regulations"

X-Men #17 picks up immediately from the fight with the Sentinels in #16, with the Beast and Jean injured and Iceman in a coma. The first order of business is keeping Xavier's secret identity while he visits the X-Men in hospital. We see now why he has previously been so anxious about not being seen with the X-Men in public - he is a recognised media pundit. Xavier stresses the importance of keeping the X-Men's parents safe. He really shouldn't think things like this, as the situation degenerates and by the middle of issue #18, Magneto (for he has returned!) has all the X-Men bar Iceman in a gondola, control of the school, and a plan to use the body cells of Angel's parents (who are captive in a room upstairs) to create an army of mutants, with which he will take over the world. It's not immediately clear how Magneto knew the X-Men were based at the school. Certainly in issue #5 he had minions snooping around there, and this foreshadows the later information that he had a pre-existing relationship with Xavier.

After several pages, we are told story of how Magneto escaped from the Stranger, by Xavier mindreading him for our benefit. (The Stranger had made the schoolboy error of leaving him unsupervised on a planet with lots of metal spaceships). Rather capriciously, he'd left Toad behind. Back at the action, Magneto starts his machine, which turns out to actually create mutants from whole cloth, rather than mutate existing humans. Iceman arrives on the scene to distract him, and then the X-Men break free and join in the fight.

This story, along with the preceding Sentinel three-parter start to consider what the X-Men's secret identies actually mean, and how they keep their cover story of school going. Turns out a telepath with an ethics problem can keep a pretty good cover.

Continuity notes

Magneto returns from space. Jean's power is getting stronger - she's able to levitate herself down from a third-floor window now. Bobby is the youngest X-Man. "Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters" is used as a name.

X-Men #14-#16: The Mutant Menace

So, we've now finished the original Lee/Kirby run on X-Men, and although Kirby will continue doing layouts for a little longer (and thus contributing towards the storytelling, under the Marvel method), he has been replaced as penciller by Werner Roth (as Jay Gavin). In this run the X-Men have been introduced and mostly got their personalities, Scott has become field leader, we've met some villains, and the characters are starting to interact with the larger Marvel universe. We're even getting a bit of queer subtext peeking through. We're missing something, though. What this comic needs is a really long story about giant robots!

X-Men #14, #15 and #16 happily oblige, with the new character of Bolivar Task predicting the extinction of mankind at the hands of the mutants, just as the X-Men go on their first vacation. Xavier turns out to have a civilian identity as, if you will believe it, "one of the greatest authorities in the field of education", and goes on the tellybox to debate Trask. After a brief back-and-forth, Trask unveils his giant robots, the Sentinels, who then of course immediately malfunction and turn on him. Xavier telepathically summons the X-Men, interrupting their holiday. They intervene but the Sentinels take Trask away to their base, and plot to defeat all of humanity. At least until the X-Men save them, aided by the belated heroic self-sacrifice of Trask.

Trask casts a shadow to the present day, not only for his creation of the Sentinels (who play an important part in X-Men history right up to Schism and beyond), but his real legacy is his fearmongering about mutants. Before, the X-Men were just another superhero team, held in suspicion by the general populace just like Spider-Man or the Avengers, but now, mutants are seen as a global menace, and the tragedy of the X-Men is finally expressed by Xavier: that they risk their lives for the same human race which hates and fears them. We are shown that Daily Globe newspaper article that will go on to become so important to Grant Morrison's run, complete with the Mutant overlord costume that will be worn provacatively by Quentin Quire.

After Professor X's history was revealed last time, it's almost as if a dam has burst open, and we get a partial backstory for Warren (his wings started growing when he was at military school, which he then quit to avoid a physical at), and then the Beast goes in to quite some detail about his background. His father was a worker at an atomic project, and he believes this is the source of the mutation. Something from Children of the Atom is definitely leaking through now. His body was always shaped as it was, but he realised his agility one day when he was being bullied - later a newspaper article calling attention to his sporting prowess tipped Xavier off to his existence. These backstories, showing that our original team of six had to hide their true selves as children, provides a context for Trask's rhetoric to exist in. This is the first true X-Men comic - the first book really to live up to the name Essential X-Men.

Continuity notes

Introduction of Warren and Beast's parents. Warren has a Mustang, possibly the first hint at his wealth. Coffee-A-Go-Go in Greenwich Village is given a name. Also, my first sighting of the phrase "optic-blast".

There's a little nod at Superman's supposed habit of changing in phone booths, as Beast says "I somehow feel unfaithful to the super hero code when I change in an alley. A phone booth seems to be the accepted place."