Uncanny X-Men #254: New New New X-Men

The X-Men are dead. Long live the X-Men. Uncanny X-Men proclaims what's going to happen with the costumed team on the cover.

Our New New New X-Men (counting the O5, the All-New, and then the post-Massacre team as our first three teams) assembles at Muir Isle, as was inevitable. They don't form with a plan, but because of an attack by the Reavers (who have presumably got sick of waiting for Wolverine to arrive back from his solo adventure... now Uncanny is twice a month that might be quite a while...)

The ad-hoc team here created consists of Banshee (who has healed), Lorna Dane (now), Amanda Sefton (who seems a more powerful sorceress than Magik ever let herself be), Sandy (who can wield a gun), Sunder (who dies), Moira (who keeps looking more glam than usual, huh, but still knows how to use a machine gun), Sharon and Tom, and kinda sorta Legion. (Callisto is back in the States, on a special mission involving the mansion, but is sidetracked into a subplot involving Masque, some kind of unhappy family reunion.)

They all don the training uniforms, after a brief incident in which Sefton inadvertently clothes them with a different set of X-Men uniforms, ones with just the blue X straps, forgetting any of the yellow bits. I can't get why people say that Claremont likes to use bondage as a story element all. There is FIGHTING, and the Reavers are definitely on top. With a bit of training in how to work together, they might do fine, but they haven't had that luxury. Things are not great. But Val Cooper has a plan! She's decided to sent Freedom Force and Forge to intervene. Keeps the British government, and W.H.O. on-side, I suppose.

Marvel Comics Presents #38-#50

Marvel Comics Presents ran a Wolverine feature from issues #38 to #47, named "Black Shadow, White Shadow". This was written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by John Buscema. It offers a fairly simple story about monochromatic monsters that turn out to be manifestations of some guy's mind, and emphasises the idea of Wolverine as a someone who is by temperament a family man, but has been prevented from such from fate and his own decisions. I like how Logan starts wearing the Wolverine costume half-way through, and people call him "Patch" (with scare quotes, in dialogue).

#48-#50 runs another story, "Life's End", by Erik Larsen. This is one of the first Wolverine/Spider-Man team-up stories (the first was I believe Marvel Team-Up #117 from 1982). It's a combination that will later form (with Luke Cage) the core of the New Avengers, and I kind of like their chemistry here. The comedy aspect might be a bit too much for some, though: the story is a fairly simple team up to defeat a villain, but with added fourth-wall breaking. In particular: Spider-Man has become aware of how amazingly improbable his life is, and how all his supervillains turn out to be people that Peter Parker happens to know, even though so far as he knows his secret ID is solid. What gives? Having set this up, it then delivers a payoff by having one of the minions of Critical Mass be... Peter Parker's... dentist. Hah. Well-played, Mr. Larsen. Well-played.

Uncanny X-Men #253: It Never Rains

Uncanny X-Men #253 gives us a clear direction as to how the band will get back together again. The Reavers predict Wolverine's next moves and rule out Madripoor and Japan. Instead, he'll take sanctuary at Muir Island, just as Lorna Dane is attempting to. Moira's there, as is Banshee, who is just about recovered from his long-running injuries. Magneto is visiting, to resign as teacher of the school. Rather oddly, Moira berates him for giving up his responsibility rather than saying "about time too", which would be my reaction.

Wonder who else might be found on Muir Island? I think Jamie and Terry are still with the Fallen Angels. There's Legion, of course. Tom and Sharon, presumably.

We check-in with other X-men characters over the world. Forge is ruminating. Amanda Sefton visits the Excalibur lighthouse (implied by a caption to be in northern England, by the way), only to find that Kurt and Kitty are missing. She's met by Alysande (like, how confusing must it have been in the Stuart household growing up? Sibling names should be clearly phonetically distinct, I feel.)

In Cairo, IL (not to be confused with Cairo), a young Storm is in a hospital bed. We know she's Storm because she has that multinational face (I think this is the first time that gets mentioned in text?) and more importantly she fails to show up on electronic equipment. Which is a bit of a bummer. You can't even fax her fingerprints. Not unreasonably, they conclude that she is a mutant and this is her mutant power.

And that's about it, apart from a brief check-up on Forge, who is still ruminating. The X-Men are dead. Long live the X-Men.

New Mutants #81: Of Gods and Mutants 2

New Mutants 81 gives me cause to revisit Of Gods and Mutants, the post I made three months ago about how it was probably, on balance, a good thing that Dani's Cheyenne gods did not walk on page.

What I didn't note was that there was another member of the New Mutants who worshipped gods that definitely have been part of the Marvel universe. Amara, a.k.a. Magma (for her lava powers), is from a lost Roman colony in Amazonas. I called the story that she was introduced in profoundly offensive racist garbage, and I continue to stand by that. This story, while working with elements previously introduced, sort of understands what's gone wrong with them and seems to make amends. Claremont (for it is he, this is a fill-in issue set before Amara left the New Mutants, but with a hastily added extra three pages to make it a flashback) in the first page acknowledges the atrocities of actual European colonialism done in the name of Rome.

Magma, for all that she's supposed to be a product of a Rome/Incan hybrid culture, has instead been essentially treated as a time-displaced person from Ancient Rome. This story goes definitely takes that line, being about about what happens when someone comes face-to-face with one of their gods: it needs to be Hercules she believes in, not some syncretised version. She doesn't believe Hercules - who comes to her when she prays - to be him. It could just be a superhuman pretending to be a god, after all. Especially as Zeus plays the role of trolldad, by refusing to allow them to go to Olympus to show off. Amara eventually recognises Hercules. And although it's mostly played for laughs, Amara's underlying faith in her gods is treated with a profound respect, something that it would be easy not to.

Uncanny X-Men #251-#252: Needlessly Messianic

Uncanny X-Men #251-#252 sees the X-Men reduced even further: to Wolverine and Jubilee.

Wolverine was out when the Reavers originally came, and they've since watched a variety of supervillain attacks on the X-Men do some severe damage. They'd better move soon, before it's too late.

Wolverine arrives back to find the team gone through the Siege Perilous. He is tortured by the Reavers, and nailed to a cross (a saltire, of course). They make the very basic mistake of leaving him for dead, something you should never do to people you are crucifying, and certainly not to Wolverine. Wolverine and Jubilee (finally revealing herself, and proving herself to be a regular Valley Girl in her dialogue) team up and escape.

So Uncanny X-Men lasted as a team title for 26 years, from 1963 to 1989, when, after a series of disastrous reorganisations it ended. Odd coincidence of timing, that. Circumstances are different, though: Uncanny is doing a provocative move at the height of its popularity. And other books are busy doing the X-Men team thing better than Uncanny has been for a while: it'll be good to see what this series is like removed from the shackles of the team structure.

Uncanny X-Men #249-250: Polaris

Uncanny X-Men #249 asks us to believe that Storm genuinely is dead. The Reavers still are holding off, due to lack of Wolverine. There's another mutant lurking in the abandoned town, Jubilee, but she's not yet made her presence known, although did helpfully take a message from Lorna, who claims to be devoid of the influence of Malice and has been calling Alex (how the hell did she get the phone number?)

They backtrace the call to Chile, visit, and get involved in a plot regarding the Savage Land Mutates and Zaladane, a villain first introduced in Astonishing Tales #3. She claims, on the basis of her name, that she is the sister of Lorna Dane.

#250 uses the word "katabatic". That's a good word. I like it. Shame about the rest of the issue, which consists of an old-school team-up between the X-Men and Kazar to kick Zaladane's ass and save Lorna. This series has completely lost its way now, which is possibly meant as a kind of metaphor because so have the X-Men, but still.

Oops!

Apologies for the missing post today. This caught me by surprise just now when I checked to see what ran today. I have plenty still in the queue; it's just I'd apparently forgotten that March had a 25th day. We resume tomorrow with a post about Uncanny.

Meanwhile, I might as well post an update. I had a fun weekend engaging in some other fannish and geeky behaviours: I went to Big Finish Day 3 in Barking on Saturday and on Sunday we played our sixth, seventh and eighth games of Risk Legacy, the last of which involved opening the two big boxes. I wrote about the fifth game in a carefully spoiler-free way here, but I think it probably impossible to talk about what happened yesterday like that. And while I don't usually care about exposure to spoilers, Risk Legacy is different - I've been studiously avoiding them, because I've assumed knowing would change my strategy during the game. Maybe when we're done...

I am up in Bradford this coming weekend for Eight Squared Con, the 64th EasterCon. I am making my programme début, on the What's On Webcomics panel. It would be bad if I chose Pokey the Penguin as my favourite, wouldn't it?