X-Men #102-#103: "Maybe leprechauns don't believe in talking wolverines"

X-Men #102 has a great big superhero/supervillain fight, the sort we've not had in ages. You might expect (especially from the cover) Colossus/Juggernaut to be headlining this, but there's plenty of other action. Black Tom and Juggernaut ultimately subdue most of the X-Men, and we find out their plan - they've been hired by Erik the Red to take down the X-Men. Marko, of course, has the side-issue of wishing for revenge.

Storm is not much use in the fight, having started suffering an attack of claustrophobia in the end of #101. We get a long series of flashbacks for her. She was born in 1951 in Harlem, NY (making her supposed to be 25 at this point), to David Munroe, an African-American photo-journalist and N'Daré, a princess from Kenya. They move to Cairo when she was six months old, and then are killed in a plane crash related to the Suez crisis when she was five (unlike the other X-Men plane crash orphanings, this time they get hit by the plane rather than being in it). She survived, but the experience has scarred her. She then lived as a thief (becoming, we and the X-Men are told, the best thief in Cairo) until the age of 12, when she decided to walk south (by way of Sudan, I suppose) to the Serengeti (on the Kenya/Tanzania border), which she feels a strange attraction to.

Storm becomes therefore our first technical African-American X-Man (I think we end up having to wait for Cecilia Reyes for our first one who was actually brought up in contemporary America, which is shamefully late.)

Storm's discomfit is enough that Xavier can pick it up on the other side of the pond (interrupting an introduction to Jean's roommate, Misty Knight), but for some reason he thinks that sending Scott there immediately is going to help, like the battle will still be going on or something. Scott prefers to remain at Jean's bedside. In #101 he had started to re-evaluate life, realising that he'd got his priorities muddles, and Jean has to come before the X-Men. Xavier is unimpressed.

They didn't get Nightcrawler - he's a slippery customer - who is instead rescued by the Keep's leprechauns at the start of #103. Yes, leprechauns. Leprechauns that somehow know that Wolverine's name is "Mr. Logan", so they must be telepathic or well-informed! By this point, the Marvel Universe is taking the approach that all legends are true, especially the contradictory ones. Nightcrawler recovers and then goes on the offensive - using the image inducer to pretend to be Xavier and getting thrown through a wall for his trouble.

That gets Storm free to act, and so - round 2. This goes rather better for the X-Men, and we end with Black Tom taking a swim in the Atlantic, the Juggernaut going after him. We're told they look, but don't find any bodies.

Meanwhile, Erik the Red's been watching all this on a monitor, and reporting back to his boss. He means to kill Xavier and the X-Men before something (a ship?) can reach him, and this time they're going to pick an ally with a track record in failing to do that: Magneto! Is this all related to the dreams, perchance?

X-Men #101: Phoenix Rising

X-Men #101 is split into two halves. Firstly, it follows up the cliffhanger from #100. The shuttle crashes, but the X-Men (well, apart from Jean) are safe. Just as they are wondering where Jean is, a figure arises from the water, proclaiming herself to be no longer Marvel Girl, but the Phoenix ¹. She then immediately passes out, and has to be sent to the hospital.

We get here our first big hint that Wolverine is into her, but in a way that indicates Wolverine has never had a romantic interest before. Mind, his memory is probably a bit swiss-cheesed at this point.

Professor X can't be having with them crowding her bedside all the time, so sends them all (apart from himself, Moira, and Scott) on holiday. Fortunately, Banshee has just the right destination.

Now, we've seen already how X-Men is not great at non-U.S. cultures. Our new lineup from Giant-Size #1 were basically just stock characters, that Claremont has started to flesh out a little. We take a bit of a step backwards here. Banshee has inherited his ancestral home in County Mayo, on the Atlantic Coast (er, okay), which is great big castle built over a thousand years ago by Liam Cassidy to keep out Viking raiders. That dates it to Ireland's Second Viking Age, which works, just about. The keep is stone, which in itself dates it to the 12th century, but the panel admits it has been rebuilt over the years, so let's assume it's been upgraded.

The real problem is that Claremont here does not appear to realise that Ireland isn't just a version of England with different accents. We got a crown on the Irish Post Office logo in #99 (really Dave Cockrum's fault), and now we find Banshee has not just inherited the castle, but also the title of Lord Cassidy. The what now? This is Mayo in the Republic of Ireland. We can't very well read Banshee as part of the Anglo-Irish nobility who had themselves given titles in the "Peerage of Ireland". So that makes him part of the Gaelic nobility? The ones who were deprived of their lands and territories by the English and only got semi-recognised later on? Despite my surname (and lots of other Irish surnames in my family tree), I'm a 4th generation immigrant to England, so I am not entirely certain of my ground here, but it seems utterly ridiculous.

So, they spend a week in Dublin and go to Banshee's castle that he just inherited. Unfortunately, his cousin, Black Tom Cassidy is hiding there already, waiting for them, with the Juggernaut, and has set a trapdoor for them...

1. A decade later we'll find out that she wasn't kidding when she said she wasn't the woman they knew. But enough of that silliness when we get to it. Jean is Jean.

X-Men #100: Face Off

Our last issue had the X-Men make their way onto Lang's space station and defeat the Sentinels. The Sentinels were only the first wave, though, and in X-Men #100, we see the main plan, with a fight that pits the original line-up of X-Men against the new guys.

It's pretty clear something isn't quite right: the others might be brainwashed, but Beast is not very furry. After some fun fighting (including our very first Fastball Special) and quipping, their Marvel Girl is revealed as an android. Game over for Lang. And, unfortunately, for the space station. They are forced to use the space shuttle to get back down to Earth, but the solar storms (which have been foreshadowed in previous issues) means that most of the X-Men and Corbeau have to stay in a radiation shielded area, while Jean pilots the shuttle herself, keeping radiation at bay with her telekinesis, and having acquired piloting knowledge from a quick rifle through Corbaeu's brain. The issue ends on a cliffhanger as they re-enter the atmosphere...

I talked about why the Sentinels don't make much sense last post. There's another problem here: if it is possible to technologically duplicate Havok or Scott's powers, why are people still using guns? Wouldn't a mind-reading machine utterly change the legal system? It's an unanswerable question which exposes the lie that is at the heart of superhero universes. Technologies like these don't just stay confined to a few people and get used for wish-fulfillment, they'd profoundly affect societies.

X-Men #99: Space Oddities

X-Men #99 has our X-Men: Storm, Cyclops, Colossus, and Nightcrawler along with Dr. Corbeau, be able to quickly get access to a space shuttle to go to the U.N.'s space station Starcore One.

So far the X-Men have only been in space once, but it's been a common feature of the Marvel universe ever since Fantastic Four #1. It seems to be a more routine thing than in the real world - apart from Starcore One, there's Project: Armageddon's secret space station, which is a disused SHIELD base. But still, a short-notice launch is notable enough to get reported in the news.

This is the issue where Colossus's brother, Mikhael is first mentioned. He was one of "Russia's first cosmonauts", which is a bit of a coincidence, but no worse than usual. He died in a rocket explosion, which is making Colossus nervous (Colossus therefore gets himself added to the list of X-Men who have had relatives die in aviation incidents, alongside Alex, Scott and Lorna). Corbaeu can understand - he lost friends in the Apollo I fire.

The shuttle they're in (in 1976) is fairly similar to the actual ones that were being built (OV-101 was rolled out for testing only the next year). It's multi-stage to orbit. But there's another form of space travel in this arc. The sentinels themselves, which appear to be single-stage-to-orbit and are evidently capable of taking people up there as witnessed by them successfully kidnapping various mutants. Furthermore, the Sentinels can be built by one mad scientist, and it only took a billion dollars of black budget to do it (that figure, while it would certainly buy you a lot of comics and ramen, is chickenfeed by the standards of space programs). So why still have space shuttles? I suppose they must be much cheaper too? But more generally, why is Sentinel technology confined only to mutant eradication?

A clue comes in (and I'm skipping ahead here, but I don't care) #100. Trask's notes were essential for this project. That's the six years that was mentioned before - between 1969 and X-Men #57-#59 and 1975. Trask was a solo genius scientist who made an achievement that cannot be replicated properly by people acting from first principles... or perhaps the Sentinels are some kind of alien technology that they're finding it really hard to adapt? So maybe the Master-Mold is not something that was built by Bolivar Trask, but an artefact he found and has been trying to use.

Incidentally, I believe this issue has the first usage of the "Greymalkin Lane" address for the mansion.

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 #98: How the Sentinels stole Christmas

It's our first Christmas in X-Men #98! The gang are celebrating an unusual white Christmas in midtown New York (frankly I'd be rather suspicious of Storm, but she just says something about the snow and Kilimanjaro)

No sooner do Jean and Scott kiss (watched by no other than Stan Lee and Jack Kirby), but they are attacked by Sentinels, who've been tasked to bring them in. Storm has been very poorly briefed, and doesn't know what a Sentinel is. Despite some resistance, they manage to take Wolverine, Banshee and Jean alive.

Meanwhile, it turns out Xavier really is on holiday. Well, a boat, anyway, where he's seeing if he can't track down that binary system he's been dreaming about. Sentinels come for him, too. He's able to shut them down with his mental powers, but a second takes the more direct approach of destroying the boat. They take Xavier alive, but leave his mate Peter Corbeau to swim to shore.

The remaining X-Men regroup with Cerebro, but can't find any trace of the four captured mutants anywhere. Corbeau turns up (apparently knowing all about the X-Men) and tells them that's because they're in space!

#98 is a highly important issue in the development of Wolverine, as he calls someone "bub" for the first time, and gleefully shortens Jean's skirt. Er, sorry, I'll try that again, as he's seen outside of his costume, and it's shown that his claws are actually part of him (something new to the other X-Men as well as to us). And some question is raised by Lang's project as to whether he's really a mutant. It's been completely hazy as to what his actual power is so far (the idea that he heals quickly isn't yet present, let alone him healing contrary to the laws of thermodynamics or having bone claws). And although he's been called "Weapon X" already, there's no conception what that means.

X-Men #97: I'm Erik the Red, and so is my wife

X-Men #97 is a funny one.

Xavier's been having these dreams about fighting spaceships, it seems, and he's a bit worried if he tells his team they'll laugh at him. (This is a man who, you will remember, has already foiled at least two alien invasions: Lucifer's people, whoever they were, and the Z'Nox). He's able to tell Moira though, and you get a sense they have a real closeness as friends. He decides he needs a holiday.

At JFK Airport (or rather, Kennedy Airport, as they keep calling it) - the X-Men - that is Scott, Ororo, Kurt, Peter and Jean - are seeing the Professor off. Wolverine, Sean and Moira are back at the mansion - Wolverine doing the whole loner thing, and Sean and Moira possibly having the "coffee" that Sean had suggested in #96. There's no mention of the others, but at this point Hank was with the Avengers and Bobby and Warren have co-founded the Champions.

Alex and Lorna also turn up, at the last moment, having been mind-controlled by someone calling himself Erik the Red. (Apparently they've become a couple some time since we've last seen them, which is a bit of a surprise because I'd assumed they hooked up in the hiatus.) This new power - who has adopted Scott's cover identity from #49-#52, possibly just to mess with him - although god knows how he knew - is clearly intent on destroying Professor Xavier's plane, but they manage to stop him in time, without, unfortunately, breaking Alex and Lorna's conditioning. During this incident, Lorna gets a power-up - the ability to fly, and is bestowed with the name "Polaris" - meaning they are two for two in codenames not actually picked by themselves. Mind, Xavier picks most of the other ones, so it's not exactly as if mutant name selection is some kind of rite of passage.

Actually, the most surprising thing in this issue for me was nothing to do with the X-Men at all - it's that it has a Boeing 747 in there. It's been 36 years since the issue was published, and the 747 is still the default large airliner in fiction, and will be for a couple of decades more. That's longevity for you.