Uncanny X-Men #199: The Writing on the Wall

Mystique can see the writing on the wall: it reads "MUTIES". She's gone to Val Cooper and given herself and her Brotherhood up. See, I'd read a summary of Uncanny X-Men #199, but summaries are only good at saying what happened. They're no good at pointing out what doesn't happen.

In this issue, what doesn't happen is that Mystique blows her cover identity - Raven Darkholme, assisant to Val Cooper. The incident is therefore much easier to read as Mystique being typically tricksy, and much less a shocking moment for her character than I had thought it would be. Having said that, the idea of Mystique-as-betrayer doesn't really exist yet, does it? She's just a perfectly ordinary evil shapeshifter, not a perfidious one.

Val Cooper agrees for an amnesty for Mystique's team - to be renamed "Freedom Force" - if they are able to bring in the Mutant Enemy No. 1: Joss Whedon. Er, no, I mean, Magneto.

Magneto, Lee Forrester and Kitty Pryde are at a holocaust event in New York. Kitty's great-aunt died in it, and Magneto himself, as we've discussed, is a survivor. Kitty wonders aloud about her great-aunt, and it just so happens that another set of Holocaust survivors attending had heard of her. Someone also recognises Magneto, and therefore presumably know his real name, or at least the one he was using in the 1940s, but at no point refer to him by it. Coincidence is just how superhero comics work, but I think it's worth a special mention here: this is woeful plotting for something which is trying to make a point out of how large in scale the Holocaust was.

So, while they're there, who should arrive on the scene but Freedom Force! Or rather, Lee Forrester reveals herself to be Mystique really. It's not entirely obvious when the switch was made: but it seems likely Mystique has been delaying the confrontation specifically to do it in the Holocaust museum, so that she can score some extra points.

There's a little bit of fighting (during which Pyro calls someone "cobber" - so he's Australian now, or possibly just Claremont doesn't clearly distinguish different types of Commonwealth slang), and ultimately Magneto realises he can't win and more to the point, shouldn't. He gracefully gives himself up for trial.

While this is all happening, Rachel Summers is visiting the Greys in Annandale-on-Hudson (well, creepily trespassing in their house, anyway). She finds the memory crystal thing that had been left there in #136, and laments the fact that she'll never exist in this universe. Scott is about to has a child, certainly, but with Madelyne Pryor, and not her mother.

Oh, and she declares herself to be Phoenix, and makes herself a new costume. This will be awkward to explain to Scott, who still isn't aware of her connection with the Greys, and with him. There's something about Scott Summers and people not wanting to admit to his face about being his relative.

New Mutants #29-#34: Bad Karma

The next run of issues in New Mutants is the first to be seriously derailed by a crossover. I'm going to try to ignore the existence of Secret Wars II and the Beyonder, and focus on the latter pair of issues.

In #29, Bobby and Amara are kidnapped by the Gladiators, a kind of evil. Sam and Illyana team up with Lila Cheney and Dazzler to rescue them. In #30 they are joined by Rachel and Kitty. In #31 it is revealed who the mastermind behind all this is: Xi'an - it looks like her uncle took her up on that promise. She flees.

In #4, the New Mutants proper (Dani, now going by "Mirage"; Sam, Bobby, Amara, Rahne, Illyana and Doug and Warlock - minus Rachel and Kitty) track Karma down in Madripoor (making its first appearance here). If Madripoor is Mos Eisley, it has to be said that Karma now bears a striking resemblance to Jabba the Hutt. The attack does not go well, and Karma takes slaves. Dani and Illyana prove resistant to mind control and follow her to Cairo, while Warlock tracks down Storm and gets her to meet them there.

We discover that something evil is possessing Karma - although it is not yet named as the Shadow King, it is the same thing possessing Amahl Farouk that Xavier found in Cairo in the flashback for #117 (when he met Storm for the first time). Illyana is eventually able to break the psychic control by sending everyone to Limbo, while Warlock provides a distraction by pretending to be her. A liberated Karma herself banishes the force.

I find this a bit of a let-down, as it seems rather a mundane possession story. I was hoping for emotional pay-off of the deal between her and her uncle, but that was just teased and then seemingly forgotten about. Maybe to be revisited at a later date?

New Mutants #22/Uncanny X-Men #189: Young Females Desire Simply Revenge. Failing That, Amusement.

I remember reading Uncanny X-Men #189 before. It actually makes sense this time, particularly in the context of New Mutants #22. At this stage, the interlinkings between the two have become so close that reading just Uncanny makes no sense. In fairness, it does have captions to explain the characters it needs here, so one can get the sense of it, but it didn't have any emotional resonance for me the first time.

A team-up story with Amara and Rachel, and the X-Men only the background is a pretty radical thing to be trying at this stage. Claremont is nine years into his run, and he's still shaking things up. New Mutants has become the home of the more trad stuff, and meanwhile every issue of Uncanny since Scott left has been off-format in some respect.

At the mansion, everyone is quiet and training. Rahne is trapped in her perpetual self-loathing interspersed with moments of loathing other people. Nightcrawler is her target here, and he sadly doesn't try and talk to her in terms she might understand. Moira and the Professor, who might be able to help, are busy trying to figure out how Warlock works.

Cutting away, Selene arrives in New York city, and finds her local High Priest, Friedrich von Roehm (is she supposed to be an actual Olympian at this point or is there another Selene wandering around the Marvel universe?), who suggests she join the Hellfire Club's, and presents her as a candidate.

Going on to the issue of Uncanny, Rachel and Amara - two fish-out-of-water - have a date in New York City. Rachel is from the future, and recently in #188 found out that her mother is dead, which means she's not going to exist in this timeline. Amara is from some colony of the Roman Republic that was set up 2000 years ago, during Julius Caesar's time.

The issue contains large swathes of Rachel's future dystopia, and one can't help but shudder at the panel where she remembers seeing the Twin Towers fall. But more personally moving is her experiences as a hound, seeking mutants, and the tale of how the mansion fell (flashbacked from New Mutants #18). They watch in the distance the boat that Storm is about to leave for Africa on.

Rachel takes them to the MoMA where the architecture reminds Amara of home. As they bond, they detect Selene (who Rachel notes they both faced as an enemy. Amara reacts almost violently against this intrusion into her thoughts (something that she was also very firm on with Xavier), and Rachel apologises.

They agree to follow Selene and take revenge, and track her to the Hellfire Club, where (as shown in New Mutants recently), she's being put forward as the new Black Queen - or rather, more or less blackmailing them. Rachel and Amara infiltrate the place with fishnets and maid outfits, get captured, and have expository flashbacks.

Never fear, Nightcrawler is here to save the day, along with Colossus. Shaw suggests a truce - Rachel and Amara had started it, after all - and they accept. Rachel uses Phoenix's old trick of molecularly manipulating their clothes back into street clothes, and they're away. From Selene's point of view the events here appear to take place between New Mutants #22 and #23, but the ending doesn't quite match up. The internet would be very upset.

Uncanny X-Men #185: Powerless

Uncanny X-Men #185 continues our thread with Mystique/Gyrich/Cooper thread. Somehow, Gyrich has got hold of the neutralizer gun, and plans to test it... on Rogue!

Mystique, for all that she's estranged from Rogue, is horrified by this, and very nearly breaks her cover by vehemently demanding that no such thing be done. Back with Destiny, in their secret base (which they've had the cheek to build under the Pentagon... she'd good!), they discuss what to do.

Meanwhile, Rogue has picked the worst possible time to take an unplanned holiday - to the fictional Caldecott County in Mississippi. They'd thought she was doing better, and then #182 happened. Storm catches up with her (Mystique tells her where to find her off-panel, or rather in Marvel Fanfare - so Gyrich's accusation that the X-Men and Brotherhood are working together isn't far from the truth), has a civilised conversation in which she explains her origin story for the first time (she'd kissed Cody Robbins, which put him in a coma, oops). Storm has repented from her judgemental stance as of #171, and offers herself willingly to Rogue.

Just at that moment, the government attack. After some confusion, Storm ends up taking a full-strength shot meant for Rogue, and is depowered. Forge is as aghast at this as Mystique was earlier. Storm has bottomed out.

Rachel phones Cyclops. I like the panel layouts here - the separation between the panels with Cyclops on the left and Rachel on the right, make the curled coil of a telephone cable. He answers, but she doesn't say anything, even though he's her daddy (dramatic noise! even though it's obvs Wolverine.)

New Mutants #21: Party at Xavier's

So, I'd called that Starjammers appearance a couple of issues back wrong. Something is coming, and it lands in New Mutants #21.

That something is Warlock, who arrives at the X-Mansion (a coincidence? or not? there has been a lot of alien activity around there, maybe he picked something up) in the middle of the a party at Xavier's. Rahne, Dani and Amara have invited a couple of their local friends over, with Xavier's permission (perhaps he's trying to forestall the rising tide of prejudice, win the neighbours over before they start with the pitchforks). In a running gag, people keep assuming Amara is from Rome, New York, and expect her to act like it.

Our new character, Warlock, is a techno-organic creature, from a distant world. He feeds on lifeforce, rendering organic creatures inert masses, but can also subsist on electricity. He's unable to communicate with the humans: the breakthrough is supplied by Doug Ramsey, Kitty's friend, who has the mutant ability of hyper-communication. To involve him means outing themselves - and the school.

When Xavier gets back, they have present a new candidate for admission to the school: Warlock, who is a mutant of sorts and can now speak a kind of English. I don't know if they're actually going to admit the thing about Doug - they offer to tell the whole story to Xavier but he brushes them aside.

Uncanny X-Men #177-#178: Get Rogue

The cover of Uncanny X-Men #177 must have been quite shocking at the time. It portrays Wolverine standing over the prone body of Kitty Pryde, claws besnikt. Wolverine, although I think I've shown he was never as much a monster as he was later supposed to have been, was still a dangerous man. Has he finally flipped?

The answer to that is provided by the first word in the first panel of the first page. "MYSTIQUE:". She's only the second named character to narrate Uncanny, and a villain, at that! Still, it gets it out of the way quickly, and Kitty Pryde is lying on the floor, bleeding with a fake-Wolverine standing over her on the third page. The other X-Men attack, one by one (Colossus, Cyclops, Storm, Rogue and Nightcrawler), and Mystique is defeated. She then wakes up in her apartment, as another rug is pulled from under us: all of that was a fake-out, a Murderworld simulation. Mystique wants to get Rogue, who she basically considers her daughter, back. And she's pulling her blows against Nightcrawler, for some reason. At this point Mystique's narration abruptly stops, because of the point-of-view shift to the X-Men.

'Crawler is concerned about his relationship to her, on account of both being blue and him being a foundling. Ask Margali Szardos (his adoptive mother), she said. [Did this actually happen in a comic - I suppose Days of Future Past or the one in the Pentagon?] Mystique and the Brotherhood set an ambush for a few of the X-Men, who are attending a ballet.

The ambush - of Kitty and Peter and Kurt and Amanda is a bit of a disaster for everyone involved, and Kitty gets word out to Xavier, who sends Storm and Wolverine, but leaves Rogue on the bench. Peter is taken out of action by supercooling. Reed Richards might be able to help but is out, so she just goes and breaks into (or rather, phases through) the Baxter Building, and nicks a bit of equipment to restore Colossus back to normal. The X-Men quickly take down Pyro, Avalanche, Blob and... oh that's it. Crap.

Meanwhile, back at the mansion, Mystique shoots Professor Xavier, and tries to talk Rogue into coming back with her. She's convinced that she only left because of Xavier's mindcontrol - which is half-right - it was Mastermind. This relationship with Mystique, who took in a young Rogue before she became a mutant, is at the heart of the issue, and it can more than withstand the weight.

Mystique offers a truce, and an exchange of prisoners, which has never happened before and suggests an interesting new course, never really taken, of her Brotherhood and the X-Men having a more ambiguous relationship. But in all this confusion, Kitty Pryde has been lost, and is found having fallen from a building, with the technogadget smashed to bits.

Uncanny X-Men #151-#152: Loss of Pryde

Uncanny X-Men #151-#152 is another momentous little story arc, setting up the Hellfire Club, Emma Frost and Sebastian Shaw as recurring villains.

Emma's evil plan is: persuade Kitty's parents to withdraw her from the Xavier School and send her to the Massachusetts Academy instead, and then hope that Storm drives her there. This works, and she body-swaps with Storm, drives back to the X-Men, finds that Shaw is already attacking them with Sentinel-derived technology, defeats them. Storm manages to escape from her cell, persuades Kitty of her identity, drives back, liberates the X-Men, and leads them to victory against the Hellfire Club.

Where this body-swapping gun came from is never explained. Such a technology would be very scary: Whedon's Dollhouse begins to explore the possibilities. X-Men again picks up an idea, uses it, and then discards it just as easily without considering the deeper implications.

It came as a surprise to Storm that Frost is still alive, which implies that the X-Men have not been watching the Hellfire Club too closely. Xavier ought surely to have known, if he'd been monitoring them. And the plot only works because he's had a sudden case of ethics - the old Professor X would have short-circuited this by just changing Kitty's parents' minds.

Uncanny X-Men #150: "I, Magneto"

Uncanny X-Men #150 is a special double-size issue, wherein momentous stuff happens and in which is made possibly the single greatest retcon in the history of comics. †

Magneto has set up shop on an island in the Bermuda Triangle that he's caused to be risen from the depths, and has taken Cyclops (Scott Summers), who has temporarily taken up being a fisherman, and his captain (Lee Forrester, who is a romantic interest for him) prisoner after they were shipwrecked.

Magneto tries to blackmail all the world's leaders (we get a nice selection here - Reagan, Thatcher, Brezhnev, Deng, King Abdul, and Moi) into making him King of the World. He wants to scrap the world defence budget (which he says is trillions - in real life that'd be a massive overestimate in 1981 - it's not even 2 trillion today. maybe he's including the Sentinels). Instead, he will lead H. sapiens to a glorious golden age, planning to eliminate "hunger, disease, poverty", damn the cost (hmm!), and providing Bobby Kennedy with a retort. He chews the fat with Scott, catches up on the news about Jean, expresses his sympathy, reveals that he has an inhibitor field which is shutting off Scott's optic blasts, casually destroys some nuclear warheads that have been launched at the island, destroys the Soviet submarine that had launched them, opens up a volcano in a fictional place out of Doctor Zhivago and threatens to do the same in Moscow.

The X-Men have finally got their finger out and started looking for Scott - they've tracked him and Lee to a shipwreck in the Bermuda Triangle and are looking for it alongside Dr. Corbeau (the X-Men's go-to man if they need a boat, it seems, as well as being the official provider of space shuttles), and a random Ms. Marvel (Carol Danvers), who might as well not be in this issue (except that she provides our first indication that Wolverine has a long and distinguished past in the superhero community - as he confirms that he used to work with her on special ops stuff).

We then get to the punching bit. They have to take down Magneto powerless, due to the inhibitor (which affects non-anatomy related powers - Kurt is still blue and has a tail, but can't 'port, Logan's claws still work but his senses are gone, and Peter shifts out of his steel form entering the zone). Can't work in these conditions, so they look to take it out.

It's a big issue for Storm - she has a moment to take down Magneto, but has sworn off killing people. She's there at the final confrontation with Magneto, where he comes close to killing Kitty, and then has a real change of heart, and well, let's quote it:

            MAGNETO
        She -- she is a child!

        What have I done?

        Why did you resist?  Why did you not understand?!
        Magda -- my beloved wife -- did not understand.
        When she saw me use my powers, she ran from me in
        terror.  It did not matter that I was defending her...

        ...that I was avenging our murdered daughter.

        I swore then that I would not rest 'til I had created
        a world where my kind -- mutants -- could live free
        and safe and unafraid.  Where such as you, little one,
        could be happy.

        Instead, I have slain you.

        I remember my own childhood - the gas chambers at 
        Auschwitz, the guards joking as they herded my family
        to their death.  As our lives were nothing to them,
        so human lives became to me.

            STORM
          (arriving)
        Magneto!  Goddess -- no!

        If you have a deity, butcher, pray to it!

            MAGNETO
        As a boy, I believed.  As a boy, I turned my back
        on god forever.

        Kill me if you wish, wind-rider.  I will not stop you.

            STORM
        Is this some kind of trick?

            MAGNETO
        Yes.  Only it has been played on me.  I believed
        so much in my own personal vision, that I was prepared
        to pay any price, make any sacrifice to achieve it.
        But I forgot the innocents who would suffer in the
        process.  Can you not appreciate the irony, Ororo?

        In my zeal to remake the world, I have become much like
        those I have always hated and despised.

We learned about Magda running away in #125 and the contemporaneous Avengers #186, but most of this new information. Magneto's dialogue here is structured to pack as much punch as it can, by telling us what we know already and then, almost as an afterthought, revealing the new tidbit about a murdered daughte, and then going for the big thing. It must have been utterly shocking at the time for readers. This moustache-twirling villain has a motivation and not just one but two sets of personal tragedies (when Claremont comes to write Magneto's actual origin story six years from now, a third, less well-judged one will be added). Magneto is laid bare. How much of this does Storm actually overhear? Does Xavier find out about it? The idea that Magneto and Xavier are old friends is not yet present. These questions will never be answered: this is not treated as a dramatic revelation in-universe, and in fifty issues time it will be considered general knowledge.

This would seem to be Kitty's first Official Mission, although it's possible that she's stowed-away on this one, too. She's still in that multicoloured abomination of an outfit. As soon as she finds Scott, he sends her on a dangerous mission to mess up Magneto's computers, despite him realising that she's a child who really ought to be protected from that sort of thing. She succeeds, too, destroying a lot of his data (he should have had off-site backups!)

† other candidates in X-Men include the "Magneto/Professor X are old friends" bit, and my personal favourite "'Weapon X': It's pronounced 'ten'. Did we not mention that?" moment.

Uncanny X-Men #148: Featuring Dazzler and Spider-Woman!

There was once a time that comics would feature gratuitous Spider-Woman, promoted on the cover. Who knew? That time was August 1981, and that comic was Uncanny X-Men #148.

It's an issue of two halves. Some domestic stuff, some superhero stuff. First we get a few pages of Scott and Lee's continuing adventures in what I can only assume is the formerly sunken city of R'lyeh, but we'll come to that if something finally actually happens. A thing they're doing here is having Scott be separated from his glasses for a protracted time, and having to wear a blindfold, which is pretty cool and I'm surprised it's taken them this long to do.

It then picks up the aftermath of #147. Angel angrily quits the X-Men in protest at Wolverine being on the team. The idea of Wolverine being a kind of murderous rampager got a boost in the last issue, when he had to stop himself going berserk but then beheaded an android duplicate of yon Storm. Angel wasn't in the room at the time, so he must be relying on the account of either Arcade, DOOM, Storm, or Wolverine himself. Anyway, Angel leaves, not wanting to be part of any team that has Logan on it. (Little does Angel know that one day he'll be helping Wolverine cover up his little unsanctioned death squad.)

Spider-Woman (Jessica Drew) is visiting after the events of Spider-Woman #38, which introduced young Theresa Rourke, Banshee's daughter by his dead wife that he didn't know he had. Moira, who's over from Muir, is a bit jealous (she and Sean have discussed having kids already! - but she daren't, not with Kevin having turned out the way he did). Little Illyana is still at the mansion, they're wondering whether she might be a mutant, too.

This is then followed by a sequence at a nightclub, where Jessica, Stevie, Ororo and Kitty (because 13½ year olds are totally allowed clubbing in NYC), to watch Dazzler perform. This bit manages to pass the Bechdel test incredibly well, as FOUR WOMEN have a GROUP DISCUSSION about LOTS OF STUFF.

We then get our action bit, in the form of Caliban, who can smell mutants, but only wants a friend, having lived underground alone. He eventually runs off, declining their offer for him to join up. The fight sequence is fairly well thought out, although of course it has to be contrived so that Dazzler can actually help. Turns out that Kitty can walk on air (i.e. fly, really rubbishly), which is a perfectly sensible corollary of her being able to phase and not fall through stuff.

Uncanny X-Men #145-#147: One does not simply walk out of Murderworld

Uncanny X-Men #145-#147 features Arcade again, I'm afraid. But it's worth talking about anyway.

I've had to go over it several times now and I still can't quite make sense of the plot.

It sees the X-Men be blackmailed through threats to their families and friends (the Greys, Colossus's sister, who we saw in Giant-Size #1 but now gets a name - Illyana, Amanda Sefton, Stevie Hunter, and Moira) by Miss Locke into helping rescue Arcade from the clutches of DOOM, who finally (after 18 years!) makes an appearance in these pages. It's serious business, even moreso than the loss of the team on Krakoa, as Xavier goes around summoning stray X-Men: he declines the help of the Avengers but contacts Beast, and calls on Alex and Lorna, and Bobby (who is doing some kind of economics course at university now), and tries to get hold of Scott. Banshee is already on the way on Concorde.

I'm going to digress for a moment now to talk about travel arrangements, if only to avoid talking about Arcade for a little bit longer. Let's assume Banshee is on Muir Island when he realises Moira has been kidnapped. If they are popping over to Stornoway as often as they do, it seems to be fairly close to Lewis, but it's definitely stated as being off the north coast, north of Cape Wrath. So, it's probably near Durness. We could pretend it's Eilean Hoan. Now, we know Banshee drives, so once he's got to the mainland, it's two and a half hour's journey to Inverness, where he'll probably fly direct to Heathrow, and then transfer onto the Concorde to JFK. During this epic journey, he at no point thinks to pick up the phone. He just knows he has to be in New York as soon as possible. Why should he assume that Moira has even been taken to the US (faster than he was?) Never mind that mobile phones break horror stories, landlines break 1980s X-Men.

With the X-Men assembled (so to speak), they are divided into two squads. Ororo, Peter, Kurt and Logan go and assault DOOM's medieval castle in upstate New York. That had been constructed by DOOM but had been recently sublet or squatted by Toad as an amusement park, in Marvel Two-in-One #68, we are helpfully informed. Whatever. Storm is sent in as a decoy to try and chat to Doom and distract him, while the others infiltrate. This plan doesn't go so well, and Arcade turns out to be in league with Doom rather than a prisoner! (Or maybe not?) They all end up trapped in custom-designed puzzle prisons. Oddly, we're told that DOOM is the one responsible for these, not Arcade, which smells a bit like a late dialogue change or miscommunication in plotting? It's never made clear what Arcade actually did against DOOM, and he's eventually happy to let him go with an apology. This doesn't sound like DOOM to me, nor to John Byrne, who will later retcon this as being a DOOMbot.

The X-Men imprisoned at DOOM's Murderworld escape cleverly. Nightcrawler is first, using gravity and momentum and updrafts in an unusual outbreak of actual physics. As Logan escapes, we are reminded of his berserker rages, something we were told of in #96, but not really seen since (justified by him saying that he's not really had them since joining the X-Men but is slipping). Warren and Peter also break free, leaving only Ororo, who's been trapped in a steel form not unlike Colossus, only without the ability to move. The weather is getting worse, and when she's freed she goes, well, a bit Dark Phoenix. In a way that's not merely reminiscent of that, but explicitly mentioned in the text. She's able to control it, eventually. This gives us some strikingly similar imagery: compare these three covers of #50, #101 and now #147.

There's clearly a thing here, about powerful women and whether or not they are able to control the forces of nature that are unleashed through them, or whether their poor branes might overheat from all of the raw energy. Even the very words on the cover: "Rogue Storm", "Dark Phoenix". What's next - "Stray Polaris"? Now, I can't point to any specific instance of this and say "that one, that's sexist". But there's a pattern, and it's an unfortunate one. You can do this trope with men, it's just that... well, the X-Men hasn't, not yet. Well, not until September 2012, anyway. On the other hand, issue #145 thoroughly passes the Bechdel test, as it begins with Stevie and Ororo having a conservation about the ballet they are attending. (There had been an earlier pass, when Misty and Jean talked about Misty's trip to Japan, and studiously avoided talking about boys because that would break the plot).

What happened to the other guys? Well, the B-team - Alex, Lorna, Sean and Bobby, went to the Murderworld to free the hostages directly. There, they are a confronted by a series of custom-made traps and stop me if you've heard this one before.

X-Men #118: ...and breathe...

The X-Men escaped from the Savage Land last issue, and now find themselves in the Drake Passage on a rubbishy little boat as X-Men #118 opens. They are rescued by a ship, which just happens to be on a secret mission for the Japanese government. The X-Men immediately ask to contact base, thankfully, but the ship is maintaining radio science and the X-Men are taken below as "guests". That's it for the X-Men this issue.

Back at Westchester, Jean is leaving the mansion (possibly for the last time), while Lilandra tries to figure out how to make coffee and bagels for Xavier, who has done his usual thing when he loses a team of X-Men and sunk into a depressive funk. Before we know it, Xavier has launched into a flashback, where he gives us a good chunk of his life story, or at least bits we'd not seen before.

First up, we get the full skinny between him and Moira. They'd met when he was doing his doctorate, and quickly fell in love. They became engaged, but then Xavier was drafted, and spent three years serving (during which the stuff with his step-brother happened, but it elides mention of that). When he was convalescing from wounds, she broke off things by letter, and returned to Scotland. He then went travelling in the Med, first to Kirinos and then to Cairo, where he'd been pickpocketed by a young Storm. Chasing her, he encounted his first Evil Mutant - Amahl Farouk (the Shadow King) and defeated him. He omits his trip to Israel (because Claremont hasn't yet invented it), and then mentions his journey east to defeat Lucifer. He then formed the X-Men, and after a number of adventures in which he nearly got them killed, has got them killed.

Rather than be supportive and suggest they might not be dead, or even that young mutants still need support and training, Lilandra instead begs Xavier to go back with her to Shi'ar space, which he assents to.

On our last page, Jean is at JFK airport, and bumps into Misty Knight (they are no longer roomies, unless the comic is using the Whovian usage of the word "erstwhile"), who is taking a flight to, by a strange coincidence, Japan, to help out Colleen Wing. So, I've got a good idea what's going to be happening in #119. Misty doesn't know the X-Men are missing, and Jean doesn't tell her, which will provide no end of complaints for me in subsequent entries.

Classic X-Men #2: First Friends

As noted previously, in X-Men #94-#95, we saw the team become less diverse ethnically. We also saw it become more male. There were 2 female X-Men in the pre-Giant Size #1 team, but both Lorna and Jean leave, leaving only Ororo. She could therefore be seen as doing double duty as the token woman and the token non-white character; and it means that it's not going to idly pass the Bechdel test without trying...

The backup feature in Classic X-Men #2 sorts this out by giving Jean and Ororo some interaction. Ororo visits Jean's new apartment (which she's sharing with Misty Knight, who by a strange coincidence is also a superhero - we'll come to that later).

Jean immediately takes Storm shopping. Because of course she didn't think to bring any civilian clothes, only her superhero costume (?).

Among the things that Storm does not properly understand are large metropolitan areas and the nudity taboo. I'm not sure I buy much of these, given her later backstory. You don't grow up in Cairo and then be massively astonished at the size of New York City. Not even Cairo in 1975. The wealth of it all, perhaps... And the clothes thing, just honestly...

We get a nice comparison between Jean's telepathy and how she can feel with all those voices, versus Ororo's claustrophobia. But I'm not sure it makes sense to dump that to us several issues early... Obviously there's a limit to what they can do in these backup strips, but still, it's a bit of a waste of a dramatic revelation later. Having said that, it looks like it's structured to assume you already know? Neither one thing nor another, these.