UXM #124: "He Only Laughs When I Hurt!"

(Unconventional is unprofessional.)

Comments

Hang on a second.  Black Tom and Juggy paid Arcade six million dollars to do in the X-Men?  Where did those two bozos score that kind of scratch?  More to the point, why aren't they keeping it?  Revenge has always been the default villainous motivation in superhero comics (seriously, you would not believe the shit people are prepared to swear blood oaths over in these things), but I simply refuse to believe that those two wouldn't want to do the job themselves, after blowing the six thousand grand on booze and hookers.

Of course, none of this is particularly surprising given the ridiculous nature of this story.  Arcade's origin - lose stipend from wealthy father, kill wealthy father, become international assassin - manages to both be horribly cliche and totally idiotic, and his traps have devolved into silly pop-culture references (Battlestarwars: 1999 ?).  By the time Cyclops and Storm break Colossus' mental conditioning by the power of love, I would have found it easier to believe that someone would scrape together $6,000,000 to kill Chris Claremont.

And what happens to all that money now Arcade has let the X-Men go out of some twisted concept of logic?  Do Tom and Marko just get it back?  Are we supposed to believe he's really so much better than any other assassin out there that people pay him to murder their foes so long as he feels like it?  How the fuck is that supposed to work as a business model?

Clues

This issue follows on directly from the last one, and continues into dawn of the following day.

Date

Monday 14^th to Tuesday 15^th of September, 1982.

X-Date

X+4Y+168 to X+4Y+169.

Compression Constant

1 Marvel year = 3.57 standard years.

(Storm is 35 years old.)


"Must remember my training --
stay in control, stay alive!"

Contemporary Events

The President-elect of Lebanon, Bachir Gemayel, is assassinated by a member of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, who claimed Gemayel had "sold the country to Israel".

Standout Line

"He aims and fires with barely a conscious thought... trusting to a unique, inborn talent for spatial geometry -- honed by months of practice in the Danger Room -- that makes him aware of every car in the room... and tells him exactly what firing angle will enable him to destroy them all with a single optic blast."

Fuck.  Off.