X-Men #107-#108: "Where No X-Man Has Gone Before"

It's been four whole months since the X-Men went into that star-gate in X-Men #105. They arrive in X-Men #107 to find themselves in a double-page spread, prominently featuring a very large crystal, and a number of aliens in brightly coloured costumes, called the Imperial Guard. These are all apparently Legion of Superheroes expies, but the only one I spotted myself was Gladiator being Superman. I suppose that tells you how much I know about DC.

They are somehow able to communicate with the X-Men (I suppose aliens really do all speak English after all?), and quickly compare notes. Gladiator, who appears to be lead alien-in-costume, refuses to give up Lilandra, who is a traitor to the empire. Rather than try and find out more information (how do they know what Lilandra is saying is true, after all?), they are met with defiance and a large optic blast.

This lasts a few pages, before we find that D'Ken and Shakari are forcing Lilandra to watch this. D'Ken is doing a typical evil villain gloat, as well. X-Men get Lilandra free, and we finally get the infodump we've been waiting for. Lilandra's brother wants to unleash the force in the M'Kraan Crystal, the "deadliest weapon in history", and tried to have Lilandra executed for opposing it. She escaped, and then established a telepathic rapport with Xavier because of the events of X-Men #65, where he beamed altruism into space. D'Ken found this out, contacted the local agent, Devan Shakari (not an exile, then?). The crystal opens a gate, that can can be accessed every million years.

Gladiator is there, politely waiting for Lilandra to finish expositing, and when she's done, the punching starts again. Then suddenly the Starjammers, a motley collection of aliens led by a bloke with a moustache called Corsair (and including a catwoman protesting she's not called Hepzibah), who we'd met on the last page of #104, turn up too, and start shooting at the Imperial Guard. At this point the story gives up and just has everyone speaking English explicitly, apparently having been taught it by Corsair, who is very definitely American. Jean mindscans him, and is shocked by finding out it is someone significant to do with Scott. But it's too late. The gate opens! And reality itself may cease to exist!

What I don't understand is why Lilandra has been even brought here in the first place. She'd run away to get the X-Men's help, but her ship had been destroyed. If it hadn't been for Shakari taking her back in the star-gate, then the X-Men would not be here to try and stop this. Has D'Ken really had her brought here solely so he can gloat? That would be very supervillain, wouldn't it.

Well, OK. So it's a universe-threatening thing, this M'Kraan crystal. And for once the response to the threat seems big enough, as our our friends Starcore, the Fantastic Four and the Avengers all get involved. Oh, wait, no, they all wash their hands of the matter and leave it to the X-Men and Starjammers.

Jean manifests as a giant fiery bird and fixes it. She uses the power of Phoenix, aided by Storm and Corsair, and the medium of long narrative captions.

After this happens they go back home. Lilandra comes too.

Some little character notes: Nightcrawler teleports carrying someone. He's never done that before, he says. Banshee worries about never telling Moira he [loves] her when he thinks he's about to die. Hepzibah says she's feline not mephitidae right there in her first appearance. Through Jean, we learn some things about Corsair. He answers to "Major Summers", and he had a wife, Kate, and that something terrible happened to her. Oh, and he's Scott's dad. She tells Corsair that but not Scott, which will surely lead to trouble. So, Summers finally falls prey to Claremont's "must have improbable backstory" tic. What are the odds of your father turning out to be a space rebel against your teacher's new girlfriend's space empire? Quite good, apparently.

And most importantly, X-Men #108 has Beast say "oh my stars and garters" for the first time in an X-Men comic! I am very happy to have made this discovery. I assume this means he's been saying it in Avengers for a little while now.

X-Men #106: didn't we just do this

X-Men #106 wraps up the cliffhanger from the last issue pretty quickly, with Firelord abruptly accepting Xavier's explanation as to what happened, before Xavier slips into another dream.

This dream is apparently a flashback, to shortly after issue #96. The old X-Men appear and fight with the new X-Men. Which we saw in #100. Since this is set before that it only makes them look stupider in #100 for failing to immediately recognise that they were impostors. Rather than the holodeckdanger room malfunctioning or it being robots, it's instead Xavier's dark side gone wrong, and intriguing hint at what will become Onslaught.

What's going on here? Well, the clue is in the pencilling credit: Dave Cockrum and Bob Brown. It's a fill-in issue, originally created as inventory in case of this eventuality, but in a really momentum-draining position. And the title was bi-monthly at this point. Ouch.

X-Men #105: These Are The Voyages

X-Men #105 opens with our team arriving back at the Mansion in a hurry, to find Erik the Red, who has come for Xavier. He's out, though, and he didn't even leave a note. Now, I'm not sure what's happening here. They've realised Erik is after Xavier, so they flew back on the Blackbird... without phoning ahead?

In space we finally meet the Shi'ar properly. Lilandra, who was formerly Grand Admiral, is fleeing in her ship from an Imperial Cruiser. It is weird quite how Star Trek it is. The bridge and transporters are a ringer for the Enterprise's, they report to each other in Star Trek ways (Earth is a "Class M" planet, which is Starfleet jargon for Earth-like, there's a "ship's log", an "imperial date"), and a science officer called "Mr. S'lar". Weirdly, there's talk of a Shi'ar Prime Directive, as if a galactic empire can have some kind of doctrine of non-interference (given later information I'd suspect the Shi'ar's real prime directive would be "destroy all people manifesting powers associated with fiery birds"). The Shi'ar ship shoots its "photon torpodoes" at Lilandra's ship, destroying it, and then skidaddles off, having excreted bricks when they've looked at the "Encounters with Galactus" section on Earth's Wikipedia article.

So, Lilandra beams down to Xavier's location. He's visiting Jean and Misty. We just got the backstory as to how they moved in together: they said it's utter coincidence, they were both attending the same viewing. But that might not be reliable, as Jean's parents are there, too. Anyway, Xavier telepathically flash-teaches Lilandra English (in a relatively unusual acknowledgement that aliens are unlikely to speak English), which is the first time this has been used in quite that way (Jean, of course, sucked m4d p1l0t1ng sk1llz out of Corbeau's head in #100). Thinking about it, I wonder if he did the same thing for Colossus? How likely is a young lad who has never left the collective farm to speak good enough English to quickly join an assault force?

Anyway, Erik the Red and Firelord, turn up. Jean manifests as Phoenix and attacks Firelord, while Erik the Red explains his backstory - he's really Shakari, and has been exiled to Earth by Lilandra. Erik sets up his portable stargate (which he didn't use to escape his exile because I don't know), grabs Lilandra, and goes. Jean then clumsily explains Lilandra's backstory by telling Xavier something he already knows because he dumped it into her brain off-panel earlier that issue. Her brother is going to destroy the universe, and she wants help. Phoenix powers open the gate, and the X-Men depart, leaving Firelord for Xavier and Misty to deal with.

One of the nicer touches of the issue is Jean's parents, who are continually boggling at the crazy shit going on around them, in exactly the way real people would. It can be read as them not knowing about any superhero stuff, or just as them being surprised at the manifestation as Phoenix.

The oddest thing is the way that Alex and Lorna were casually killed in a flashback, by Firelord. At least that's what Erik thinks... Say it ain't so...

X-Men #104: Magneto vs the New X-Men

X-Men #104 follows on from #103, with our Away Team still in Europe. They've gone to Scotland, to what will later be called Muir Island, which is where their housekeeper keeps her secret mutant genetic research facility.

Claremont seems determined not to have his characters be normal people troubled by mutant concerns. Banshee has his massive baronial castle. Storm is now actual royalty. Colossus is brother of one of earliest Russian astronauts. And now Moira MacTaggert is not only a professor at the University of Edinburgh (presumably actually U.S. professor = lecturer, but who knows). I suppose at least, there was something strange going on with Moira from day one, but I'm left wondering if there's anyone in these Isles who doesn't own a castle or something? Still, at least there doesn't seem to be anything special about that Canadian dude, beyond his mutant powers, whatever on Earth those are. And that lad with the eye beams, he seems to be a perfectly normal orphan.

As we saw last issue, Magneto is plotting something, and he duly lays an ambush for the X-Men (of which they are warned by young James Madrox). We haven't seen Magneto in these pages since before the hiatus, and the last book I covered with him was Avengers #110-#111. I'd have been perfectly happy for his reappearance to be unexplained. But that wouldn't work: the last time he'd popped up was Defenders #15-#16, which left him regressed to a baby. (?) So, he gets better.

The fight is quite well thought out, as Magneto takes down the new X-Men in turn, before being bested by Banshee, whose "sonic screams" (who thought that up, eh? what other type of scream is there?) disable him. Eventually they realise it is just a trap - Erik the Red has been behind all this, and he's after Xavier, not them, Magneto is just to distract them. So, in an uncharacteristic display of good sense, they just skip out, getting back to New York to meet a recovered Jean Grey, her parents, and her roommate Misty Knight (who happens to be a superhero, but it's not quite clear whether she and Jean have swapped notes yet).

Magneto flies here. I don't remember him doing that before, though I could be wrong. He has long dialogue about how, so I'm assuming he hadn't. My theory was always that he uses the helmet to fly, by basically just dangling from it. His neck must be quite sore, and it's an embarrassing answer to give, which is why we get all this mumbo jumbo about force fields instead.

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?