Champions #1-#3: Whatever happened to the X-Men?

Scott's stayed with the X-Men. Jean is lurking around as a member of the supporting cast. Hank is in the Avengers. What's happened to Warren and Bobby?

Marvel launched a new series, called Champions in 1975. It opens with Warren and Bobby at UCLA. They're wandering around, talking about how they miss the super-hero action, when suddenly and for no obvious reason a portal opens up in front of them, and harpies come out of it demanding the return of Venus. In the ensuing fight, Warren makes the decision to go public with his identity as Angel.

Meanwhile, at campus that day also are Natasha Romanoff (Black Widow), Victoria Starr (Venus), Johnny Blaze (Ghost Rider), and the incredible Hercules. There's a lot going on here, but it's mostly different sorts of punching. Eventually our six characters get together, and Venus admits who she really is. And then Pluto turns up, seeking to force our Olympians to wed Ares and Hippolyta. The story feels completely forced. There's no organic growth of the the team - they all happen to be in a particular location when the attacks happen, and then they end up deciding to team up. This is intentional mimickry of Avengers #1, but it doesn't really work here. Isabella's original plan was Angel and Iceman with new character Black Goliath, and that could have worked better. As it is Angel and Iceman are very under-served, especially in this Olympian first arc.

We are to suppose here that Venus here is the actual goddess Venus/Aphrodite. However, her history is more than a little complicated. Briefly: there was a Timely Comics character called Venus, who took the identity of Vicky Starr, and starred in her own "Venus" comics, and would later be retconned as being part of the Agents of Atlas (set during the Atlas era). This, then, would appear to be an incorporation of the Timely character into modern Marvel continuity, no different from bringing in Namor or Red Raven.

Eventually this one is revealed to be not the real Venus, but a siren. There is a "real" Aprodite/Venus who pops up in Parker and Pak's stuff, and is angry at the Timely Venus for stealing her name. But in this storyline, there's no question that this Venus is real: plenty of other Olympians meet her and would surely have called her out. So, why has she adopted the "Victoria Starr" identity which her impostor used?

X-Men #96: Demon in an Obelisk

X-Men #96 is very character-heavy, and manages to get about halfway through before any superheroics happen.

In the wake of Thunderbird's death, Cyclops is moping. This time he really cuts loose with his powers in frustration, destroying what my colleague Alexa, in her post on this issue, points out is an "odd-looking obelisk that would never actually exist in upstate New York".

Back at the mansion, we have a training session where we get to know the new X-Men a bit better. Xavier takes Banshee aside for a bit to discuss his concerns about Scott's melancholy, before the new housekeeper, Moira MacTaggert, turns up, to cover for Xavier on his holiday. The intrusion of staff into the life of the X-Mansion is not entirely unprecedented - there was mention of a cook in X-Men #6, but they've remained off-panel and presumably unaware of it being anything other than a prep school. (Although, it has to be said, a prep school for "gifted youngsters", with a headmaster who is goes on the telly as a talking head talking about genetic mutation. It's not rocket science.) MacTaggert, though, is immediately let in on the secret. Banshee is smitten with her, telling her (and us, finally) his name: Sean Cassidy.

While they're all getting to know each other (and Xavier casually ignores the fact that Wolverine is carving a tic-tac-toe game into one of his tables), they wonder where Scott is. At this point he makes a quick entrance through the wall, courtsey of Kierrok the Damned, who he appears to have awoken by destroying the obelisk.

During the fight we see inside Wolverine's head a bit. He's a killer, and not proud of it. He gets a speech bubble "ten years o' psycho-training, o' hypnotism. o' drug therapy, ten years o' praying'... an' I cut him to pieces without a thought". We have here a reformed Wolverine lapsing back into killing - not for his own safety's sake - but to protect his new team-mates, who he's grown very attached to already in this short time. It doesn't work, admittedly, and we get several more frenzied pages of fighting, including Moira's admirable response of just shooting at the blasted thing with a machine gun. The problem is ultimately solved by Storm destroying the cairn, which vanishes the demon.

At the start of the issue, Scott was worried about whether these new people would be able to work as a team under his leadership. By the end we see they can act together already.

As a plot tease, we meet Dr Lang, who has been working on "Project: Armageddon" for six years, which appears to be some kind of government black project (a billion dollar budget), based in northern New York state, near the Canadian border. Lang reckons that both Bolivar Trask and his son have been murdered by the X-Men. But he's got a better plan (which I'm willing to bet involves more giant robots and fixing the specific problem that went wrong last time), even if he has to kill Michael Rossi (introduced here) to make it happen.

X-Men #94-#95: Four of these X-Men Will DIE!!!1

X-Men #94 (August 1975) is the first issue to be written by Chris Claremont. We'll be covering Claremont's work for a while, and we'll have plenty of time to discuss his stuff. Here though, he's been handed a new set-up of X-Men by Wein and Cockrum, and has to make it work.

First thing he does is write out Sunfire, who had the least reason to be there. Sunfire, in this and in the previous issue, was treated with considerably less depth than in #65, and is quickly disposed of. Then go the old X-Men (apart from Cyclops). This is done fairly casually, without the introspection we often get in Claremont's copious narrative panels (something that Giant-Size X-Men #1 was using extensively, too). The self-examination here is largely reserved for Scott, who is unsure in his role as leader of this team of new X-Men. It seems that Jean, Warren, Bobby, Alex, and Lorna had all conferred about their decision to leave before meeting Xavier, but didn't share their conversation with Scott, who's left surprised. That's got to be hurting him - his good friends, including his girlfriend and his brother - walking out just like that.

Our plot is Count Nefaria (we met him in X-Men #22-#23) attacking NORAD. The Avengers are away doing something. (The Marvel Chronology project places Beast's appearance between next summer's Avengers #146-#150). I wonder why didn't Xavier contact Beast when he was putting the Krakoa rescue team together? If Beast feels able to call on the X-Men's help, surely Xavier could have asked him. If I were him, I might feel a bit aggrieved to be left out.

Proudstar came into conflict with Cyclops in a Danger Room sequence in #94, where he demonstrated a wilfulness that endangered himself. That's his come-uppance in #95. Determined to stop Nefaria getting away, he destroys the escape plane, causing it to explode, taking himself out with it. He's killed by his own pride. Ouch. That's two of the three non-white characters introduced in Giant-Size written out, already... And so it's gone straight from having a very WASPish cast, to a Star Trek-like diverse international cast which is nevertheless still largely white, and anyone with darker skin must be foreign.

Giant-Size X-Men #1: All-New, All-Different

And then suddenly it is 1975. In five short years - the same length of time I've had my current job - we've gone from the end of the Beatles to the start of the Sex Pistols and Iron Maiden; from Love Story and Airport being the biggest two films of the year, to Jaws and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

The Comics Code was revised in 1971 to allow more supernatural stuff (enabling The Tomb of Dracula), as well as more realistic attitudes to morality and authority. Gwen Stacey has died. Character debuts include Blade, Howard the Duck, Iron Fist, Killraven, Luke Cage, Moon Knight, Punisher, and Wolverine. The Atlas-era Captain America has been re-evaluated and revealed to have been a crazed anti-communist McCarthyite, while our Cap became disillusioned with his identity after Secret Empire and became Nomad for a while. The world is a lot more complicated a place.

Len Wein, 27, and Dave Cockrum, 32, have been tasked with relaunching the X-Men as Giant-Size X-Men #1. Wisely, it doesn't attempt to pick up the narrative from the cancellation. The story is divided into four parts. In brief:

Xavier travels the world recruiting for the X-Men. He won't say why, other than that it's important. He finds a blue teleporter named Kurt Wagner, in Winzeldorf, Bavaria, Germany who has run away from the carnival, and saves him from a mob; a fighting mutant named only "Wolverine" in the employ of the Canadian government; Banshee; Ororo, a weather-control mutant in Kenya; Sunfire; and a Peter Rasputin in the Ust-Ordynski Collective Farm near Lake Baikal, Siberia, who has a super-strong metal form. Finally, he goes to John Proudstar, a Native American generally superhuman mutant, who is perhaps the most reluctant to join. Xavier goads him into it.

With them all assembled and in their new costumes, they finally ask why they've been brought together. Cyclops arrives just in time to brief them. Cerebro had detected a new powerful new mutant on the island of Krakoa in the south Pacific. The X-Men (including Alex - now going by the name of Havok properly and Lorna - who still lacks a name, but excluding Beast, who will be instead joining the Avengers in a couple of months) go and investigate in their strato-jet. It all goes Pete Tong, and Cyclops woke up on the jet alone, with his optic blasts gone. He returned back to Xavier and trained while Xavier put together a team.

On the way to Krakoa, we are told their new code names that have been assigned to them by Professor X: Peter is 'Colossus'; Ororo is 'Storm'; Banshee, Wolverine and Sunfire get to keep their existing names. Kurt gets 'Nightcrawler', and John gets 'Thunderbird'. This latter one seems unfortunate, being an arbitrary name from Native American mythology assigned to a Native American by an outsider. Upon landing, they fight their way through the jungle and find the captured X-Men, who have been hooked up to something feeding on them. They release them, and then come to a realisation about the mutant that had been detected: it's the island itself!

We get an explanation as to how Cyclops escaped - Krakoa had let him, in the hope that he'd bring more food. Tasty tasty X-Men. While they battle, Xavier devises a plan and outlines it to them. It has Storm provide the energy to allow Lorna to expel the island into space.

So, All-New, All-Different X-Men. Does exactly what it says on the tin. A global cast and the start of something great. But if it hadn't been for Claremont's run, we wouldn't be looking at this and saying it was some lost masterpiece that should surely have heralded in a new age of excellent for X-Men.

What we have here is a kind of lazy internationalism which happily uses stock characters - the inscrutable Asian, the powerful African woman worshipped as a goddess, the humble and loyal Soviet worker, the proud Apache and the irascible Irishman. The Russian even has the name 'Rasputin' (c.f. the other prominent Russian Marvel hero from this era, who is called 'Romanoff' - I'll be talking about Russian names for some length later in the blog). This is impressive not because it is particularly good at it, but because of the sheer paucity of non-American cultures being represented in this context.