X1C #7: "Who Wants To Date A Millionaire?"

("Never was there a tale of more Wanda.")

Comments

Aw.  Such a sweet little love story.  Nice to see at least one super-power romance (albeit a brief one) that ends not because of some cosmic battle or supernatural alteration or divided loyalty, but simply because two people who find each other very attractive turn out to be ill-suited for one another.

Indeed, considering Wanda's mature (off-panel) decision to break up with Warren, it's surely by no means coincidence that the childish battle between Angel and Quicksilver that starts moments later takes place in a playground.  It's two young men fighting over a woman who neither of them have any right to.  Of course, the playground metaphor works for much of superhero fiction, actually (as has been noted many times before).  It's summed up by one angry woman's response to Pietro and Warren agreeing to a truce: "Well how great that you super-teens have settled your differences.  But the playground is ruined!"

Returning to Pietro for a moment, Wanda's appraisal of her relationship with her brother is quite interesting, and adds nuance to something that was painfully one-note when it originally appeared.  It makes some sense that she would place her trust in the hands of her stronger, more capable brother.  Of course, Jean's point that Pietro's domineering attitude will either drive Wanda away or destroy her free will is entirely correct.

Jean has a pretty good time of it this issue, actually - she's clearly far ahead of Cyclops and Iceman when it comes to deductive powers.  From now on, Jean should be in charge of all investigations, at least when Beast is probably implicated somehow.  

All in all, it's a really pleasant issue, which ends on a lovely note as Iceman once again saves the day, this time by creating a new playground out of ice and snow for the kids to play on. "Stand aside, lame ones" indeed.

Clues

A-ha!  This is it, folks!  Proof positive that the issues of this title are not in chronological order! (Man, I can't believe this is exciting for me...)  Issue #4, as we've discussed, cannot have happened prior to issue #33, but the petrified Mastermind in the hallway this issue means Warren and Wanda's tryst cannot have taken place after UXM #37.  Of course, every issue in-between those two books described Xavier as having been kidnapped by Factor Three.

Since his absence in this issue is explicitly referred to as a vacation (forcing the team to travel by mini-van, apparently - what happened to the rolls?), there's nothing for it but to set this issue before X1C #4.

Mastermind was cursed by the Stranger in UXM #11, and the exchange between the X-Men and the Maximoff siblings referred to in this story took place in the same issue.  The implication is that several weeks have passed since then, which given the run of uninterrupted stories between UXM #11 and UXM #18 puts us at around the same time-frame as X1C #1-3.  Let's assume that Xavier becoming trapped inside Cerebro convinced him that his last vacation didn't do the job, and has headed off into the wild blue yonder again (this explains why Jean is leery about creeping around inside Cerebro's frontal lobe).

We can therefore place this story the just after X1C #3, which happily also means it really has been several weeks since the X-Men last saw Wanda and Pietro, as well as making Cyclops comment about blasting Warren out of the sky an ironic comment rather than a joke in exceptionally poor taste.  Since it's unlikely Hank and Warren would have snuck in to Cerebro whilst Xavier was still around, we'll assume that the professor has been gone for the "couple of weeks" Hank mentioned.

This story takes place over a single day.

Date

Sunday 1^st October, 1978.

X-Date

X+184.

Contemporary Events

Vietnam attacks Cambodia.

Tuvalu gains independence from the UK.

Standout Line

"GO WARREN!"
"Iceman!"
"Oh, sorry.  GO ANGEL!"