TWTYTW: 1985

Like all years, 1985 was stuffed to the metaphorical chrono-gizzards with beginnings and endings.  Let's start, as we more or less have to, with Claremont.  I mentioned last time that 1984 saw him at the peak of his time on the X-books, in the sense that never again would he have such total control over the franchise he had inherited during its first uncertain post-relaunch steps and forged into an apparently unstoppable force. I stand by that assessment, but it's worth noting how little sign there was of impending change there actually was in 1985 itself.  As my chart shows, Claremont's output in '85 eclipsed even his staggeringly prolific previous year. Two miniseries (albeit one that kicked off in '84), two ongoings, multiple annuals and special editions - this was still very much a man in charge.

As I've argued before, though, Claremont here is about to become the victim of his own success.  The problem with making a franchise so lucrative is that sooner or later people are going to want to expand it, and they're not likely to be all that concerned about how you feel about that. It seems almost a law of nature that any halfway successful franchise will either shrink to nothing or rampage out of control. Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the only way the falcon doesn't get too far from the falconer to hear him is if it falls dead from the sky.  At this point in the story of the X-books, the hawk isn't quite out of range just yet, but it's certainly realised it'll have to leave the aggravating shouty mammal behind if it's to get a chance at the tastiest rodents.

(Here tasty rodents are standing in for money. Metaphors are fun!)

The actual zero hour for Claremont having to share his toys hasn't yet quite arrived. Bob Layton's X-Factor #1 won't be released until the early days of 1986. But the change is in the air for those who can see it. A child doesn't get to wait until a new baby actually shakes loose before it finds its world adapting to support the new arrival. Parents with foresight will want to start more fiercely promoting the importance of sharing before the first meeting of siblings across the battlefield of enchanting toys. We see this here as Claremont eases Cyclops out of the retirement/happy ending he had planned, so that he could be reinvented as a colossal douche in the early issues of X-Factor. Given how universally this move was panned, it might be tempting to argue that Claremont should have been left in charge indefinitely of the X-books (and it arguably took six years to find another writer who matched him in terms of reputation and importance). That would be a mistake, of course. Sooner or later Claremont needed to be left behind as surely as Cyclops did (not that we've seemingly learned either lesson). Not just because no-one can remain at the peak of their creative powers indefinitely, or that sooner or later the best of us start to run out of ideas about what to do with the same franchise, but also because - again as with Cyclops - if no-one ever gets to retire, there's steadily less and less space for others to shine.

Which neatly brings me on to Ann Nocenti. I was rather down on her Beauty and the Beast mini which straddled '84 and '85, but her Longshot series, the majority of which came out in this year, was a genuine revelation. A coherent overall theme explored in its various facets each issue? This was the face of the future.  As soon as this arrived, Claremont's approach of endlessly repeated emotional beats against a randomly shifting backdrop looked dated in comparison. Somehow whatever was destined to replace the Modern Age in comics (which of course we've not settled on a name for yet) found itself being born at the same time as the Modern Age itself. Alas, some combination of growing '80s cynicism and veneration of the sacred cash-cow would smother the Nocenti approach of postmodern dissection in favour of dragging us into the darkness of the 1990s, where forests of dead trees displayed forests of dead bodies, and - if I may enrage Yeat's shade twice in one post -everywhere the ceremony of innocence was drowned in stale coffee and crocodile tears.

Speaking of death, despite there being two Dazzler issuea with an '86 cover date, this post seems the right place in which to mark that title's passing. Dazzler was always going to be a hard sell; a single lead in a franchise defined by team books, and a female protagonist in a male-dominated landscape without the benefit of legacy, history (Dazzler made only three or so appearances before DAZ #1 was released) or, if we're being honest, a particularly interesting power set.

For all of that, though, Dazzler in its early days was frequently a pleasant surprise. In some ways it was a twisted mirror of the Spiderman titles, in that it focussed on how superpowers would likely regularly interfere with one's attempts to find love or get a career off the ground. Whilst Spiderman thoroughly mined out his famous power/responsibility formulation, though, Dazzler replaced those words with "uniqueness" and "tribulations", respectively. Issue by issue, it probably did a better job of exploring the mutant metaphor than even Claremont's UXM, and no small part of that stems from how often the comic focussed on the small scale. "Microaggressions"is the term. In this regard, Dazzler was no less refreshing than Nocenti's Longshot mini, and just as destined to be buried beneath the detritus in the coming storm of bullets and boob-socks.

But never mind. Sometimes an idea needs to be exposed to the light more than once before it starts to grow. 1985 was a fascinating year in the margins, but the (bad) writing was on the wall. The X-Books have been noticed. The strip-mining must now begin. And if there's something that's inevitable about mining, it is this: there is no way to go but down.

SW2 #6: "Life Rules!"

(Death takes a holiday.)

Comments

As with the preceding issue, I'm giving SW2 #6 its own post, despite the fact that not a single identifiable mutant appears in the entire book.  This is therefore the first issue in the three and a half year history of this blog which I shall dissect in detail even though it has no direct link to the X-Universe.

Or at least, it had no direct link to the X-Universe when it was printed.  One of the big advantages of looking at these books from twenty years further down the train tracks of history is the number of connections you can make between then and now, links that couldn't possibly have been intended at the time but which ultimately dovetail quite nicely. I've mentioned more than once already how much of the basic DNA of almost all of Marvel's crossover events can be traced back to Shooter's two Secret Wars series (how appropriate that I should be writing this as we're gearing up for what should clearly be being called Secret Wars III). This issue continues that trend, and rather focuses it. Along with everything else this miniseries gave birth to, via SW2 #6 it becomes a direct ancestor of Avengers Vs X-Men.

I say this because the two stories, three decades apart, share very similar concerns (as did X-Men & Alpha Flight, actually) namely what superheroism involves when you reach power levels that can rework not just the social order of Earth, but the natural order too. In XAA and AvX, these super-superpowers were granted to mutants via gods.  Here the god themselves - the Beyonder - decides to give the hero gig a whirl. And whilst in theory there should be some fundamental difference in approach between a hero who becomes a god and a god who becomes a hero, in practice the Beyonder takes a rather similar path to both Loki's unwitting stooges and the Phoenix Five; he starts off with street-level small potatoes but rapidly ramps up to larger concerns. As so often seems to happen in these stories (almost invariably written by straight white guys as they are), the idea of major overhauls of the way the world works is presented as something to be resisted. Here, just as with AvX, these essentially conservative concerns are given voice by Captain America, who is none too delighted by the proposed new world order (he's accompanied here by Reed Richards to demonstrate  that the Beyonder's activities are unnerving TO SCIENCE).

This is quite useful, actually, because is allows us to disentangle some of the problems with Captain America's stance in AvX.  I took two distinct issues with Steve Rogers' stance in that crossover. The first was over whether his fear of the Phoenix Five losing control/going too far was in any way reasonable, the second was the fact we were watching a straight white guy with plenty of money (or at least the capacity to raise same without any real problem, I'd imagine) telling an oppressed minority that now they've finally gained the power to shape the world in the way they want rather than live in it rather than suffer it in the shape their oppressors have chosen, they had no right to exercise that power. And really, that second problem was so fundamental it rather overshadowed the first.

Here the issues stemming from ordering a minority around aren't present, so we can focus entirely on whether Rogers (and Richards) are on solid ground fretting about someone announcing it's time to change the world. To which the answer is "sort of". Which sounds like I'm sitting on the fence, so let's dig deeper.  It's at least true that Rogers is right to be nervous - that's just basic prudence - but the key question is whether he's right to be planning an assault on the Beyonder if everything goes to hell (we'll bypass the fact that such an attack would be useless at best and disastrously counter-productive at worst).  It's here that it gets hard to come down on one side or the other of Captain America's stance, because I'm pretty sure he's right for completely the wrong reasons.

Because the thing is, even once you don't have to directly confront the mutant issue, Rogers' argument that the Beyonder's actions could rob people of freedom and that freedom is our most precious possession practically begs for someone to shout "what do you mean 'our', white boy?". I'm sure there's no group of people for which freedom isn't important, but the kind of people who insist that theoretical unspecified curtailements of their choices are their greatest concern also tend to be the kind of affluent white men who don't have to worry about actual ongoing curtailments to their rights, their bodies, or even their lives (see Paul, Rand, or really just about any self-described "libertarian"). We arrive once more a the same point: the people who fret the most about massive change are those who gain the most from the status quo.  The Molecule Man demonstrates this quite clearly here when he lays into the Beyonder for ending death, complaining that there's now no point to eating anything.  As if that's something that would matter to those who were starving to death.  Indeed the total cluelessness of the almost godlike Molecule Man is instructive here: of course the ludicrously powerful straight white guy is furious that major changes are afoot. Of course he puts forward an argument that boils down to "creatures should die to keep me alive because that's what I'm used to". The fact that Owen Reece is obviously capable of an alternative lifesyle - the dude could make a bacon sandwich from a 50 Cent CD if he wanted - just makes the point more clear: plenty of us (myself included) could switch to a less destructive lifestyle without great difficulty, if only we had the will.

But if those who are suffering tremendously are a powerful counter to the position of Rogers, Richards and Reece (now there's a law firm that would make great TV, though the fact no-one involved has a law degree might make gaining clients somewhat tricky), they also work against the Beyonder as well, because an inability to die does not translate into an inability to feel pain, or imply that the paralysed can suddenly move. A coma, presumably, is still a coma. And now anyone hoping for an assisted suicide is entirely out of luck, which strikes me as a pretty intolerable state of affairs. The Beyonder's established problems with forseeing the consequences of his actions doesn't really instill one with faith that this newest plan will be pulled off without some pretty messy hitches.

So it's a wash, then, right? Well no, not really, and not just because the miraculous recovery of Marsha's flowers suggests Death's death promises renewal rather than stasis. Yes, the Beyonder's initial fix comes with its own problems. Every fix does.  That doesn't have to mean you can't take action.  If we wait until every angle has been hashed out, we may well have missed our chance to act in any case. This too, this ridiculous idea that entirely hypothetical constructions of future problems should invalidate pushes for an immediate good, is a conservative construction beloved of those who'd rather everything stayed the same because they're on top. And whilst you can obviously argue about just how immediate a good it is for everyone to no longer be able to die, what made stories like Torchwood's Miracle Day so bleak was there was no hope for a second miracle, in which everyone is young again, and free of pain and disease, and and run and walk and, hell, even fly. With the Beyonder provably capable of doing all that, starting the process by keeping everyone alive to buy the necessary time doesn't seem like all that bad of an idea from humanity's perspective. [1]

We'll never know, ultimately. As soon as the Beyonder's chief of staff realises he's never going to get his hands on another meat feast pizza he flips out and demands to become the next Death. The Beyonder agrees, and the Grim Reaper is back from her short vacation.  Thousands are dead within the next twenty minutes. McDonalds gets back to selling 75 burgers a second.   Somehow this is all supposed to feel like a victory.

Still, I'll give the issue this. I might profoundly disagree with what it's saying (and recognise that it's been said plenty of times before), but at least it's said something.  This is almost certainly the best issue of the series so far, notwithstanding the almost actionable degree to which the cover fails to remotely match up with the contents. I can't say I'm excited for the final third of this mini's run, but at least at this point I'm not dreading it as much as it looked like I was going to.

[1] I am of course ignoring the elephant floating through the cosmos here; it's possible - likely, actually - that the Beyonder has stopped Death on a galactic, universal or even multiversal scale, which carries its own problems.  I don't want to get into that, though. Without clear boundaries on the Beyonder's abilities I've no way to know whether to worry that this far greater scale would actually be a problem, and whilst it's easy to imagine alien cultures for which removing death might genuinely be intolerable, imagining how fictional races might hypothetically view things isn't really helpful when parsing how we as humans should feel about specific ideas.

Clues

This story takes place over three days.  There's no indication as to when it starts, so we'll take our usual tack and kick it off the day after the previous issue ended.

Date

Friday 26^th to Sunday 28^th January, 1985.

X-Date

X+6Y+331 to X+6Y+333.

Contemporary Events

Apparently Playboy announces it will no longer be stapling centrefolds.  A major slice of history right there, folks.

Standout Line

"You lie... of course! Clearly, he plans to take from me that which is most precious to me! But  if you'd told me that, you knew I'd have you flayed! I forgive you for lying, wretch! I like lies!
"But you shall have your mouth washed out with boiling bowl for uttering the word "jesting"!"

Mephisto demonstrates his HR approach whilst plotting the Beyonder's downfall.

NGT #2: "A Boggie Day In L'Un Dun-T'wn"

(Nightcrawler > The Fonz)

Comments

I was quite down on the first issue of this mini, arguing it was all over the place, a riot of colour and ill-matching designs in search of a plot.  In truth, the plot here isn't much stronger, but it is at least far more focused, which actually removes a lot of the problems.

It's once again desperately simple fare. Here Nightcrawler must defeat the sorcerer and rescue the princess, all with rather unexpected help from his piratical former buddies, who aren't about to let some bad blood stop them gaining the princess for themselves. That's as far from original as Nightcrawler is from home right now. That means the story has to rely on two alternative planks, focusing on how Kurt getting through a pulp fantasy tale works differently to how any other hero might attempt it, and ramping up the weirdness so at least the issue can plausibly make the case that its unique specifics make up for its tired generalities.

And in fact Cockrum at least makes a fist at both of these. Kurt's acrobatics allows him to lead Shagreen's gigantic rock-snake-worm guardian to its bosses own sanctum (never rely on a killer monster your own doors can't stop), and the concluding sabre-duel beneath and ultimately atop a gigantic flying squid employ both Kurt's love of swashbuckling and his skills at it.  However many final duels you've seen before, very few of them will involve the hero wielding three blades simultaneously, or define victory by stabbing a shark in the face [1]. It's a shame Kurt has to give up his bonus swords so quickly, actually; did Cockrum simply fail to realise how bad-ass this approach was?

Glorious weirdness is thick on the ground, as well.  Not the randomly-generated lunatic chic of last issue, but playful off-kilter stuff.  Quite aside from a four-armed shark-faced antagonist, the early pages of the issue are infested with the Boggies Kurt spent all of the last instalment being mistaken for; naked two-foot creatures with miniature bat-wings between their arms and bodies, but dead-ringers for Nightcrawler beyond that, even before you factor in their teleportation skills. Considering their cutesy appearances and sarcastic, odd speech patterns, I suspect these creatures put us in Marmite territory, but personally I rather like them. From this point forward I shall never refer to Lockheed as anything other than "Snappyface Toymonster", and the Boggies' general approach of lambasting Kurt for his total cluelessness is a nice counterpoint to our favourite teleporter's effortless heroics. Each one is a Yoda with a better sense of humour and less interest in trousers.  What's not to love?

Which is really all there is to say about this issue. Well, I suppose I could delve into the aggravating nature of the "hero selves helpless princess" motif employed here, but honestly this iteration is so utterly devoid of originality there's a low ceiling on what ripping it up could possibly achieve (Cockrum does shake things up a wee bit by adding some horniness to his innocent princess; reasonable people can disagree over whether that's in any way an improvement). A cliche can be harmful, of course, but at its 15, 232, 155th iteration doesn't strike me as a fruitful place to begin the hammering. It feels more sensible to just confess that there's not a great deal to be said about this book, which isn't to say it's bad, just that its positives are obvious and uncomplicated and its negatives so well-trodden that further bitching seems redundant.

Besides, with this issue ending with Nightcrawler being teleported to a new dimension, there might well be plenty of things to complain about next time around. On this occasion, I'll simply stop here.

[1] Not that Nightcrawler would do that. His X-Men honour would never allow him.  Shark-Dude has to accidentally fall off the squid instead, as is traditional.  The accidental death-by-gravity that absolves the hero from blame, I mean. Not toppling off a floating gas-filled cephalopod.

Clues

The continuing effects of the time differential between dimensions means that technically, this is all still happening on the same day as NGT #1.

Date

Saturday 22^nd December, 1984

X-Date

X+6Y+295.

Contemporary Events

White man Bernard Goetz shoots four black teenages in a New York subway, after they surround him and ask for five dollars (they will later be described as muggers; muggers being well known for a) showing no weapons, b) asking for money rather than demanding it, and c) setting their own exceptionally low bar on their score rather than aiming for everything their mark is carrying. All but one recovers (the fourth is paralysed). Goetz is ultimately found not guilty of any charge other than a single illegal firearms possesion count.

Standout Line

"He's going to sacrifice her? Kill her?"
"Of course kill her, stupid! Not gain bigmagic power by nicemaking kissykiss!"

SW2 #5: "Despair!"

(Despair is right.)

Comments

We'll cover this issue on its own. Not because it's any good - it isn't, though I suppose in this ongoing train wreck this is one of the ones that most avoids damaging houses or knocking over pensioners.  But it's worth running though this one on its own, partially because it sets up a fairly major shift in the story which will take us through into the final third of this benighted series, and partially because this is by some distance the most mutant-heavy issue of this title so far.

It's also, relatedly, the debut of Tabitha Smith, AKA Time Bomb, AKA Boom-Boom, AKA Boomer, AKA Meltdown. As one of very few 20th century X-folks who've survived in general rotation without either Stan Lee or Chris Claremont having any hand in their creation, Tabitha Smith generates interest through rarity if nothing else.

And that isn't all there is. Tabitha, we learn, has run away after her father learned she was a mutant and responded by punching her in the face. Now she's on a mission to find the school she's heard about that functions as a haven for mutants. X-folks have had problems with their families before (Iceman is the most obvious example, though in truth we didn't actually learn that until soon before he and his father made up in any case), and they've been threatened with exclusion and even violence before (see Nightcrawler's introduction). But the explicit mentioning of a young mutant suffering physical abuse from a parent simply for being who they are is new.

This is clearly a logical step in continuing the build the mutant metaphor. Which isn't to say it can't be problematic as well. It's a brave step to take. Domestic abuse is always a difficult topic to write about without seeming crass, and it's a particularly uneasy fit in a genre where punching people at the slightest provocation seems to be generally regarded as a spiffing idea. Shooter's tack here is to compare the Beyonder's loneliness over Dazzler's rejection (and, implicitly, his status as the only one of his kind) to similar feelings in Tabitha stemming from her father's abuse. Which is perhaps an interesting comparison, in theory, but the problem here is obvious: being rejected by a girl is a common problem for the intended audience of this comic. Being a young girl beaten by her father most definitely isn't. You can't push this parallel without being entirely unequivocal that implying anything but the most skin-deep similarities is thoroughly awful.

Which might well be what Shooter is trying, in truth. There's certainly no lack of indications that the Beyonder is exactly that sort of solipsistic arsehole. He sulks about how his infinite power doesn't help persuade a woman to love him; a fairly transparent iteration of the disgracefully rich man whining that they're only 95% immune from the constant unbearable shitstorm of reality. Even more damning, he accompanies Tabitha to Xavier's mansion even though he knows the X-Men are leery of him, and when they inevitably attack (apparently having learned nothing from his previous admonitions about mutants having good reasons to be a little less knee-jerk about who they consider threats) he simply yawns and disappears. This has the direct effect of forcing Tabitha to flee from the only people she knew of who could maybe have helped her sort out the damage her father and wider society have done to her life. And throughout all of Tabitha's genuinely upsetting confessions and knock backs, the Beyonder remains utterly uninterested, using her as nothing but a sounding board for his solipsistic mooching.  Later in the issue he prepares to obliterate the universe just to force a reaction from the Celestials, sparking a battle that wrecks an alien city and which very plausibly kills people too. Literally the best thing you can say about his behaviour in the first two thirds of this issue is that he doesn't allow her to commit suicide after he prevents her speaking to the people she's travelled so many miles to find.

But if the idea is to skewer the Beyonder for his self-involvement, Shooter takes a tremendously anaemic approach to it. Tabitha doesn't blame the Beyonder for the damage he causes, instead begging him to come back when he leaves, setting the time bomb that would have killed her if not for his intervention. We return to the fundamental problem of this entire mini: the Beyonder expands to fill everything, denying any other character the time they need to respond satisfactorily.  And of course this is particularly problematic here. It's one thing for the Beyonder to wave his hand and give Power Man a massive pile of gold.  It's another for him to wave his hand and remove Tabitha's black eye. It's not that we should want this thirteen year old kid to keep the marks of her abuse. It's that they need to be healed, not just be waved away to demonstrate the protagonist's good will.

Actually, I'm being a little unfair here.  The one part of this issue that I think works is Tabitha's insistence that whilst she's perfectly happy for the Beyonder to remove her bruise, he's not to remove her mutant power. He can heal the damage, but he is determined to remain who she is.  This, at least, is how things should be, I think - a separation between wanting to be rid of the effects of bigotry and wanting to be rid of the slices of your identity that sets the bigots off. It's also interesting that the Beyonder neither offers nor Tabitha asks him to remove the memory of her father beating her. I'm not in any position at all to speculate on whether survivors of domestic abuse might wish for their memories of what they've suffered to be wiped, but on balance I think it was the right choice not to try it here. If you want to introduce such heavy and difficult subject matter, it needs to be processed, not waved away.

Except ultimately that's what Shooter does, as Tabitha finally gets sick of the Beyonder's pointless acts of destruction and insults him enough for him to teleport her from the ruins of the city below the Celestials and back to Earth. Ultimately this is what rankles most of all; it's time for the Beyonder's interminable, joyless story to continue, so the determined, lonely little girl running from a father who hit her for no good damn reason at all has to be set aside. Well, OK, she's still in the final pages, phoning the Avengers to explain how terrifying the Beyonder is and then helping to set up a trap for her new acquaintance so the Avengers can beat the crap out of him (they stop when he refuses to resist, which is odd since their entire plan revolved around attacking him before he could resist because any resistance and they'd all be dead), but that's just plot mechanics; it could have been anyone who made the call.

All of which is to say that there's no longer the merest scrap of doubt; this is a book about things that happen to the Beyonder, and absolutely nothing else. An already thin idea stretched past the point of all reason has become as self-involved and dull as it's own protagonist. I'd rather read the worst five issues of X-Men: The Hidden Years than revisit this series up to now.

But change is in the suffocating, humid air! Next issue begins the career of the Beyonder, superhero!  Can that finally turn around this wagon and offer us something better? And dear Gods, can it possibly get any worse?

Clues

This story takes place in approximately real time.

Date

Friday 25^th January, 1985.

X-Date

X+6Y+330.

Contemporary Events

Pretty much nothing.

Standout Line

"I should've put a bigger time bomb in his lasagna."

Never mess with Tabitha Smith. Not if you want to ever eat dinner without fear again.

LGS #4: "You Can't Give It All Away!"

(Won't somebody think of the children?)

Comments

I've been very complimentary of this series, and the good news is that isn't really going to change here. As I've been saying, each issue puts effort into deconstructing superhero comics, and occasionally fiction more generally. LGS #4 most certainly maintains this approach, though here the specifics are a little harder to untangle.

So let's start with what's obvious. The central scene in this issue involves a group of children playing at being interstellar buccaneers (views differ on whether this imaginary outfit are the "Starslammers" or the "Star-rammers"). The boisterousness of this play-acting results in an argument between the parents of some of the children over how their little ones should play most appropriately.  The mother wants them to avoid introducing violent elements into their games, and fears television is corrupting their innocent little minds. The father, in contrast, thinks an awareness of the uses of violence is a basic part of any child's development - no-one will mess with your person if you walk down the street with an assault rifle, or mess with your country if you seed your deserts with ICBM silos. His worry is that they read too many comic books, with all that fantasy nonsense and such.

Stating the obvious, then, we're being invited to pick a side here. The only question in any doubt is whether we're to pick from the two options given to us, or generate a third by rejecting both. And it's clear we're never going to be down with Dad. Complaints comic books are just fantastical nonsense? In a comic book? 98% of the audience are going to hotly deny the charge, and the other 2% are going to say "Sometimes, and isn't that just wonderful?".  But of course it's his stance on weaponry that's the real problem here. Walk down the street with a gun and no-one will mess with you? Good job his kids are white, right? But even for white folks, walking down the street with a gun may end up with you shooting someone. With you shooting yourself.  Who in their right mind talks in public about nuclear missiles being "good etiquette"? This is a man from whom children are learning? A guy who thinks the world is safer for the advent of nukes?

So obviously, we're meant to realise this man is an idiot. That's not the same thing as immediately dismissing him, however. As imbecilic as his position is, it's desperately common, so we need some kind of coherent statement against it. Which, of course, is what Nocenti gives us. The father opines his children need a dose of reality from time to time, and that's exactly what happens; the kids see Longshot's increasingly monstrous companion Pup and decide to track him down, just like heroes would do. Which might be entirely fine, except they go get hold of a gun to do it. Because that's what Pa says heroes need.

The problem here is not that fantasy is bleeding into the kid's fantasies, it's the other way round. Kids are supposed to act out what look to adults like incomprehensibly weird ideas. They're not supposed to know how to use a firearm, something we're seemingly reminded of a weekly basis in the US news. A bit of light demon-chasing has now become something genuinely dangerous. And yes, looking at it from a certain angle, it's questionable as to whether hunting Pup without a weapon is actually any less dangerous than doing it with one, but that too is letting reality intrude. Narrative convention is pretty clear on these matters, a gang of kids chasing a demon will get scared but end up safe. A gang of kids chasing a demon whilst packing heat is in real trouble.

Reading this as a clash of two narratives is, of course, entirely the point. The father's definition of "reality" is utterly ridiculous. It is no less a fantasy than the kids' dreams of fighting amongst the stars. This idea of colliding narratives is being played out on a larger canvas, too, as Mojo breaks through from his own world into the main Marvel Universe, to start causing all kinds of hideous trouble.

(We should pause on that for a moment, actually.  In his later, Claremontian years I don't particularly care for Mojo; in his hands he becomes the kind of teeth-grinding "zany" character Claremont seems so endlessly fond of. But the Nocenti original, it turns out, is generally unsettling, a delusional unbalanced murderer, what you might expect the Joker to be like if he traded in his spine for magic powers and a TV network.  One minute Mojo is demanding everyone wear his face so they're no longer ugly, the next he's setting people on fire for wearing Mojo masks and thus breaching copyright. It's properly unnerving.  And it only gets worse...)

Which brings us rather neatly to the mother's position, and her criticism of television. A broadside against the potential problems of TV contained in a comic book is interesting considering how much of a beating comics themselves have taken from the busybodies and witterers of the world, but I guess at least comics can help you read, so there could plausibly be at least some members of the "choose an entire medium and call it awful" brigade who'll rate the idiot box below the funny pages. And at a surface level, it looks like Nocenti counts herself amongst them. After all, what is Mojo but the ultimate end product spewed from the vicious process of network television evolution? Mojo is a network president who literally lacks the spine to resist the lowest common denominator of ultra-violent spectacle. Indeed, he revels in it, and the power he gains from his viewing figures. Everything they see is his, a truism he has twisted into a physical law: if he sees it, he owns it.

But let's credit Nocenti with more intelligence than to write a comic lamenting the violence of television whilst including two different punch-ups between her titular character and other Marvel heroes (first She-Hulk, then Spider-Man, both after Longshot for the diamond theft last issue). The complaint here isn't quite so simple as "television is too violent", rather that television focuses on violence for the wrong reasons. You can see Spider-Man and She-Hulk attacking Longshot over a misunderstanding and see entirely superfluous punching, or you can see it as people trying to be the most moral and useful people they can be. We can focus on the how of the struggle, or we can focus on the why. Nocenti's earlier issues have already made it clear where she stands on that subject. The punching is no more important the explanation of super-powers ; they're all just mechanisms to generate the central point: being a moral person is important.

But then, just because violence can serve this purpose doesn't mean it can't have other effects, nor that there's no limit to how much you can pepper your story with punching before you begin to undermine your underlying message.  Marvel demonstrated this all too well themselves in the '90s, of course. Whether the television of the mid-'80s deserves to be criticised on such grounds, I'm not sure - a quick scan of the most popular US shows of the time reveal nothing more violent than shows like Street Hawk. But whilst it's not clear how much TV deserves to be held up as a villain here, nor is it clear how much that's the intent.

So let's concentrate on what we do know, which is this. We have a choice as to whether we want to focus on how violence is applied, or the reasons it was employed to begin with.  Those that insist most forcefully that we must live in the real world are those most ill-equipped to recognise what reality actually is (indeed the final panel of the issue has Pup staring straight at the reader, vocally daring us to deny that he isn't real). We have to realise what stories are and what they do. With Richochet Rita now in Mojo's hands, and Pup preparing to tear Longshot up into the world's luckiest steak tartare, it's probably best to remember what we're in this for.

Because things are about to get very unpleasant.

Clues

This story takes place over a single day. Timing is tricky, since the news reports at the beginning imply it's only been a day, perhaps two at most since Longshot broke in to the power station and made off with his swag - any longer and it's not clear why it would still be on the news. On the other hand, Rita mentions that he disappeared from set (ostensibly to the hospital) "last week". I suppose we could work off the pleasingly cynical idea that the power company has been leaning on the media to keep reporting the crime until they get their diamonds back, and if we move the action forward by three days we get to Saturday and could maybe say the previous Wednesday constitutes "last week".

So, er, that thing. We'll do that.

Date

Saturday 2^nd February, 1985.

X-Date

X+6Y+338.

Contemporary Events


 
Standout Line

"My dad says nukes are the best weapons... let's get some of those first!"

ALF #29: "Cut Bait And Run!"

(Fishing for compliments.)

Comments

It's time for a changing of the guards at Alpha Flight, though that cliché hardly does the situation justice.  John Byrne wasn't just the first guy kicking it in the security hut; he was the original king. Sure, it wasn't exactly an untroubled reign, but it was certainly a popular one. So what do we get from the heir to the kingdom?

Fresh voices and fingers are nothing new for comic series, obviously. What's interesting is the evolution of the approach taken with them. Back in the '60s, they were underplayed, at least in the X-Books; everything was "STAN LEE PRESENTS!" irrespective of what he actually had to do with a book, and in-continuity changes tended to be rather small-bore, at least just after kick-off. As time went on, it seems like new arrivals became more feted, but that's a dubious conclusion to draw since of course from 1975 through almost all of 1985, the only X-Book to see a change in writer was Dazzler. That makes it hard to tell whether incoming talent was being celebrated due to changes in the fundamentals, or just because trying to revive interest in a flagging book necessarily requires a different approach to that of not rocking the boat when a successful talent decides they've had enough.

Either way, we moved from trying to keep changes on the down-low both in and out of the fictional universe to boldly announcing new talent and new directions. ALF #29, however, takes it a step further in a way we haven't seen before: the simultaneous replacement of writer and artist (I couldn't pull a Mike Mignola page out of a stack of Byrne's output, but Mantlo is far too verbose to pass for Byrne even if he had a better handle on the characters' voices than he does) is used as a springboard to have the characters themselves debate whether it's worth carrying on, or whether their best days are behind them. That's a great idea, and hard as I've been on Bill Mantlo in the past, I give him full credit for introducing it to the X-Books.

So, some background. ALF #28 and #29 form the first and last third of a three-issue story, with Incredible Hulk #313 slotted in between. ALF #28 dealt with Walter Langkowski's soul being sent into another dimension by Roger Bochs so Walt could snag himself a new body, only for the returning figure to prove to be the Hulk. I've decided not to do a post on the Hulk book - Langkowski only shows up at the very end, so the connection to the X-Universe is pretty tenuous, and it would cause chronology problems as well - so to summarise it, Walt realises Bruce Banner's mind is still trapped inside the Hulk's body, and so chooses to let himself fade into nothingness rather then evict his old roommate, despite Banner actually being desperate for Langkowski to take up residence so he doesn't have to suffer any more.

Which is all kinds of depressing and powerful, but we're not looking at that today. We're looking at what happens when Hulk gets home and doesn't think much of Vancouver. Smashing, inevitably, ensues.

This immediately sets up Hulk here as a force of entropy. Ostensibly, he's trashing Boch's lab and the surrounding Vancouver real estate because he wants to return to his desert home, or failing that level the city until it looks as close to a desert as possible.  In practice, though, he's reducing complicated structures to their constituent elements.  This is important here. If all Mantlo wanted was to have Alpha Flight overcome a villain and thus demonstrate their continued relevance, than any misanthrope with a pulse and criminal tendencies could have done the job. The Hulk has the added advantage of representing thoughtless, omnidirectional chaos, the gradual (or not so gradual) grinding down which threatens to break everything apart, sooner or later. In that sense, the team are not fighting a supervillain (well, super-antihero) so much as they are fact of life.

Which connects, of course, with the state Byrne has left Alpha Flight in. Heather is still panicking about whether she has any business leading a superhero team when the closest thing she has to a power is above-average typing chops (the closest this issue comes to ringing my gender politics alarm bell, which comes as a great relief, as I'm sure you can understand). Aurora is distraught over the loss of her partner Sasquatch, and Northstar is finally ready to admit being crushed on her behalf. Shaman has lost his self-belief and with it his powers, on account of having needed himself a bit of deus ex in dealing with his own bizarre machina so as to rescue his formerly estranged - and re-estranged like you wouldn't believe - daughter. Oh, and the first thing Hulk does when he arrives is to smash a gigantic hole in Boch's robot chest, which doesn't go down too well at all. Not because it kills him - being bonded to the machine saves him from death in some way - but because he immediately panics that the wound will prove fatal eventually.

To recap, then. A force of (roughly speaking) nature arrives, and proceeds to tear everything down. And even though the facts on the ground demonstrate that the team is now more or less functionally equivalent to the team that was, everyone panics and assumes it's time to launch their towel on whatever trajectory will stop the pummelling quickest. As a metaphor for a popular book undergoing a seismic change in creative team, I'd say that's pretty damn apt.  Clever, even.

But there is a problem here. Mantlo does a solid job of selling us on the existential crisis dragging the team down, but there's no real move anywhere to explain why this worrying is unnecessary. The most pat way to do this would be to have the team defeat the Hulk. To his credit, Mantlo doesn't settle for that, having Alpha maybe help a bit in directing Hulk outside of Canada a wee bit quicker. But if that isn't going to be the reason to keep the team going, there needs to be something else. All we get here is the newly-reintroduced Snowbird giving everyone a lecture on how Alpha Flight was important therefore still is, before Gary Cody arrives to announce Alpha Flight can have funding again.

Which, if we're going to treat the rest of the issue as a metaphor for the people behind the book casting around for a reason to continue - and I want to do that, because otherwise this is just about a big green guy punching things out of homesickness - then what are we to take from the conclusion? ALF should keep going because it used to be great and also there's money in it?  Pass.

I realise all that seems like it falls somewhere between damning with faint praise and completely unleavened damning. But I don't want to sell this issue short. We're still early enough into the history of the X-Books that metaphors of any kind are desperately thin on the ground.  I will take this one, and be glad, especially since even the most confused and self-defeating metaphor constitutes an improvement on the sexist bilge this title has dealt in until now.

Unless it's a confused and self-defeating sexist metaphor, obviously. On this occasion, it isn't.  There is most certainly still time for one to slouch into view.

Clues

This issue follows on directly from ALF #28, and takes place over the course of several minutes.

Date
Sunday 24^th June 1984.

X-Date

X+6Y+115.

Contemporary Events

There was nothing on this day last time I checked, so it'd be rather strange if that had changed.

Standout Line

"I have a hole where my heart should be."

Box gets poetic. As well as, you know, horribly damaged.

UXM #200: "The Trial Of Magneto!"

("The whole freaking system is out of order!")

Comments

A trial, of course, is the last thing this is.  Diagetically, at least. A trial implies a ruling; a decision as to how much punishment you actions warrant, if any.  And here, that's precisely what we don't get.  The judges of the UN Security Council get no opportunity to comment decisively on Magneto's innocence or otherwise. But of course this hardly matters, because the aim here isn't to demonstrate Magneto's innocence to the court, but to demonstrate to us his viability as a hero.

With hindsight, and I presume to anyone at the time keeping an eye on the solicitations, this must have been an obviously necessary step.  Magneto is about to take charge of the New Mutants, with the "dying Xavier" storyline coming to an end here (with Corsair and Lilandra whisking Charles off for a bit of space healing). That means some effort has to go into persuading the audience that the new status quo makes at least a little sense.

The issue attempts this in two ways.  By far the less interesting of these is the inclusion of Andrea and Andreas, AKA Fenris, AKA the twin children of Baron Strucker.  Magneto's arrest and trial has at last pinned him down for long enough for the malevolent siblings to take a break from shooting random Africans in Kenya and slap together a plan for revenge.  The thing is, though, that said plan makes very little sense.  Committing acts of terrorism and claiming them as acts of support for Magneto might help sway the judges against him, but even if it looked like those judges needed any help in disliking the defendant, Fenris' aim isn't to get him locked up, but to find and assassinate him.  What good does a bombing campaign do for them?  The only advantage is has is that they ultimately use a fake attack to distract the X-Men whilst they try to finish of Magneto, but it's only the bombing campaign (which the terrorists have made to look like attacks by our heroes) that actually means the X-Men need distracting in the first place. It's like warning someone they're going to be robbed so you can distract them with a fake robbery whilst you rob them [1]; it's just a mad closed circle.

But all that only really matters if we're supposed to be concentrating on what Fenris is up to.  We're not.  We're just supposed to be remembering that there are far worse villains out in the Marvel Universe than Magneto, and some of them are his sworn enemies. It's an attempt to redeem Magneto in part through the "bigger asshole theory", and whilst there's almost no rhetorical heft in the "at least he hates the Nazis" in general, it does at least remind us that Magneto's history and motivations have always (well, since UXM #150, anyway) been more complicated than the label "villain" would suggest.

Which brings us to the second method for selling Magneto to us: the trial itself.  There's no doubt on who's side Claremont is here, resulting in the entire process being used to justify and exculpate Magneto, whilst chief prosecutor James Jaspers (the UK's attorney general, which I didn't know we had one of) reveals himself as an unhinged racist.  This deck-stacking is obvious almost from the first.  Jasper's opening statement is actually pretty good. I mean, it's awful from a progressive perspective - all about how oppression doesn't exist if it isn't codified into law and the oppressed have an obligation to work within the system to clear whatever hurdles that system has placed in their way, exactly the sort of shit the US Supreme Court has been spouting recently, and which the events in Ferguson these last weeks have brought the lie to once again - but at least it lines up with the opinions of an awful lot of people who we could legitimately call well-intentioned.  "You should do it like MLK did it" is both a bad thing for the oppressors to tell the oppressed, and tends to rather smooth the edges off what MLK was up to in any case, but it can genuinely come from people who wish to be of help, especially in the context of a legal case, which by it's very nature is concerned with the application of authority as it currently exists, rather than how we might wish it did.

With that nod towards fair-and-balanced dealt with, though, things quickly slew in one direction. The opening gambit of Gabrielle Haller, as defense counsel, is to move that all Magneto's crimes committed before his forced rejuvenation at the hands of Mutant Alpha be stricken from the record.  In legal terms, this is an utterly absurd suggestion. OK, it's clearly true that we lack the technology-  at present - to physically regress an adult back to childhood.  But in the Marvel Universe such a procedure is far less unthinkable. Reed Richards could probably knock up a machine for the job in his lunch hour. The idea that, in such an environment, a person need only get to their rejuvenation machine to have all previous crimes expunged is flatly ridiculous, though I guess the fact that only the richest people could afford such tech would guarantee them at least four votes on the current US Supreme Court. But we don't need to dabble in hypothetical technological breakthroughs here. Current case law does the job for us, with only minimal tweaking. You can't, for instance, escape a trial on the grounds of amnesia; you don't have to remember a crime to be punished for it. And Magneto remembers his past life just fine. Indeed, his entire identity relies upon it. Haller herself is smart enough to realise this, demonstrating that Magneto has been de-aged specifically by referencing his youth in Auschwitz, a fairly blatant attempt to solicit sympathy. Indeed, had Jaspers been more savvy, he might have let this insane suggestion go unchallenged, since the inevitable consequence of holding Magneto's pre-reversion life null and void is that no-one gets to care anymore about his unimaginably horrific childhood.

But that doesn't occur to him. And somehow, the court allows this ridiculous interpretation to pass. Now, it's true that a few years watching the Roberts court piss all over precedent, the Constitution and basic common fucking sense has led me to conclude that there is basically no legal theory sufficiently unmoored from reality for it not to get the thumbs up from someone in a robe, it seems pretty much unarguable that you wouldn't see five humans dismiss dozens of entries on a defendant's list of crimes (including murder; I flat-out refuse to believe Magneto's conquering of San Marco was achieved without a body count) because of an absurd reading of what constitutes culpability. There cannot be a single actual human being in existence who thinks that, for example, the US would forgive a man for trying to steal their nuclear missiles if he briefly became a baby before you managed to arrest him.

All that said, though, it's inescapably obvious as to why Claremont pulls this trick; it's the only way to make use of Magneto from this moment forwards. The murderous, petty douchebag that haunted UXM from its first issue had to be put to rest so that the new improved Magneto, all grey areas and tortured desperation, can take flight. And whilst the specifics of Claremont's action on this matter leave something to be desired, I'm far from convinced any other approach wouldn't have seemed entirely arbitrary, which means we're faced with the choice of either accepting an unconvincing break from the past, or not using Magneto as anything other than that dude who invaded that place pizzas come from one time. If a plausible argument for taking the latter path exists, then I have yet to see it.

With the opening statements having so successfully washed away the majority of Magneto's sins, the trial boils down to the sinking of the Leningrad and the destruction of the city of Varykino. Frankly, both of these seem like slam dunks for the prosecution.  As I mentioned fifty issues back when Magneto did the deed, there's simply no plausible legal theory under which destroying the Leningrad can be claimed as self-defence; it's only self-defence if a failure to act might actually cause you harm. The intent of your attacker is irrelevant, only their capacity. If a madman concludes you are a vampire and tries to kill you with a Super-Soaker filled with holy water, you don't get to kill them and claim they started it. That rather obliterates Magneto's argument in the criminal terms this trial is running on, but even if we looked at it from the rules of war Magneto wants to frame his actions in terms of, the Leningrad was helpless against him and fully under his control, making her crew POWs by any reasonable definition, and we tend to frown on the mass execution of such people.

All of which James Jaspers could have easily pointed out. Instead, he begins screaming at the defendant, demanding he admit his actions were the opening moves in a plan to take control of the world. Which, even if that were true, isn't the smart direction to take this. The point is that whether Magneto is a wannabe dictator or not,  Leningrad is just as lost. Varykino is no less destroyed (and as always the comments on no-one having been killed when the city fell strike me as highly implausible and rather skips over the fact that being a refugee in Siberia isn't something everyone is going to get out of with their fingers and toes intact). Forcing Magneto and Haller into defending the human cost of his actions would be a thread with some real bite to it. Instead, Jaspers' outburst shifts tracks into the field of international politics, which is where Magneto can make his strongest case. Take a look:

 By what right do those self-same great powers hold me hostage, with their nuclear arsenals?! I am a citizen of neither the United States nor the Soviet Union... yet they possess the capability to slay me and mine. I live, I prosper, solely because two men on opposite sides of the globe choose to keep the peace.  I can just as easily, arbitrarily, be condemned.

Unlike others, however, I have the power to do something about it. I thought, mistakenly, those nations would best understand their own language of violence.  Unfortunately, force begat force -- and, as always, innocents paid the price,  A price -- I discovered too late -- that was too high.

What Magneto is saying here is not without weight, of course. No-one needs to hear the five permanent UN Security Council members hectoring others about believing they have the right to endanger the lives of people who have neither quarrel with nor influence upon them. I'd conservatively guess something like 90% of statements of condemnation from nuclear states boil down to "How dare you do what we do!". That said, though, tu quoque is pretty much the automatic go-to defence for pretty much any dictator who ends up at the pointy end of a tribunal. No-one's hands are clean, not at this level. Which means the only two options is to let criminals punish criminals, or let everyone go free once they reach the point where they're playing with the big boys. Neither choice is palatable, but I know which one I'd rather choke down.

All of which Attorney General Sir Shoutypants might have thought to point out, had he not been so busy pretending he was in a drunken spat at the Bullingdon Club. And alas, the moment is soon wasted, as Fenris attacks, Charles departs and Magneto melts away in the confusion, deciding that Lady Justice isn't someone he wants to dance with after all. But again, justice was never the point. Persuading us we're better off with Magneto out and on our side is. It's one more iteration of that charmingly American idea that redemption is more important than state justice, so long as we get something out of the deal.

And as far as that goes, it's a decent stab, though it does it by making everyone else seem worse than Magneto rather than making him seem all that much more heroic. We can just about consider this job done. And it's certainly a job worth doing for the sake of future stories. And it's probably entirely safe to say that had Magneto's trial reached its conclusion, things would have gotten very bloody and complicated in a way Marvel comics just weren't equipped to handle in the 1980s, and maybe still aren't today. Even so, I can't help wishing the 200th issue of The Uncanny X-Men worked better in its own right, rather than stumbling along in the process of setting later stories up. An awful lot of Marvel Universe traditions have their roots in Claremont's writing. This is not one of my favourite examples.

[1] Which admittedly is most of the plot of The Lies of Locke Lamora, but Scott Lynch has rather more panache on his side than Claremont can claim.

Clues

From a comment made by Madelyne, we know that the X-Men spend just over a week back on Earth before Xavier is whisked away into space, so we can reasonably put the time-span of this issue at eight days.

When it actually begins in relation to Magneto's arrest in UXM #199 is a bit trickier, because we have to think about how quickly a criminal trial featuring a team of judges from the UN Security Council can feasibly be put together. It took the UN War Crimes Tribunal for Slobodan Milošević almost eight months to start following his extradition, for example. I don't think it would take quite so long in Magneto's case - when the US and Russia want to nail your balls to the wall, I'd imagine things start moving rather faster - and the fact Maddie was so close to giving birth in previous issues prevents us from moving too far ahead in any case. Nevertheless, I'm going to assume a full month has passed between the last issue and this, and I'm going to move UXM Annual #9 forwards as well as a result.

Which means it's been seven in-universe years exactly since Magneto first tangled with the X-Men, which seems rather fitting, all things considered.

Date

Friday 22^nd February to Saturday 2^nd March, 1985.

X-Date

X+6Y+358 to X+7Y+1.

Compression Constant

1 Marvel year = 3.18 standard years.

(Beast is 33 years old)

Contemporary Events

Julio Maria Sanguinetti is signed in as the first democratically-elected President of Uruguay after a twelve-year dictatorship

Standout Line

I'm not sure anything here is going to beat Magneto's little speech, but Colossus reacting to being hit with an energy beam with "As usual, only my costume suffered" is legitimately chucklesome.

UXM Annual #9: "There's No Place Like Home"

(Now featuring 100% more everything ever.)

Comments

One of the basic rules of annuals as far as I'm concerned is this: they should never kick off, continue, or conclude a story featuring in the parent title. The obvious reason for this rule is that not everyone can afford to shell out for the larger annual, and not everyone can find it (back when I was visiting a now-defunct Middlesbrough comic shop in the years before Forbidden Planet, the stockist had terrible problems remembering to even order annuals in in the first place). People with a subscription to, say, UXM have a legitimate reason to be aggrieved if the story they're following suddenly gets wrapped up somewhere else. It's like buying a video game and finding the final act is DLC for which you have to pay; it's awful (which isn't to say it wasn't common; indeed it was a wearyingly ubiquitous Marvel UK scam in the early '90s, as any Transformers fan can tell you.)

There's also another argument to be made here, though. Annuals are different beasts to their parent titles. They're much longer, and often feature different artists to those working regularly on the associated ongoing. Their size, cost and annual nature (it's right there in the name, guys!) all suggest something out of the ordinary. Not only is treating them as the thirteenth and fourteenth issue to come out in a given year rather underusing the premise, it's failing to recognise that 22 pages per month is a very different beast to a 22 page and a 48 page within four weeks of each other. Pacing issues both within the annual and between the annual and its parent title rear their head if you're not careful.

Up until now, Claremont has shown every sign of understanding this.  Whilst I'm not a great fan of his annuals in general, that's because he uses them as vehicles for sides to his muse I've never been fond of.  I can still recognise that stories like "Nightcrawler's Inferno" or "Treasure-Hunt" are proper stand-alone stories with radically different approaches to the monthly title.

UXM Annual #9 is different.  Yes, it manages to more or less entirely avoid treading on the ongoing's toes (a reference to the X-Men being returned from Asgard as UXM #200 kicks off is about the only reference in the main strip), but that's only because Claremont was too busy cramming as many New Mutants references in here as is possible.

Which is basically breaking the above rule in the worst possible way. Instead of needing the annual to understand UXM, you need NMU Special Edition #1 to understand the annual.  Worse, you really need at least some working knowledge of NMU in general to understand the special edition. What this boils down to is that this annual is acting as a capper to at best 64 and at worst 196 pages of New Mutants storylines. The barriers here are becoming more than a little blurred, and the heavy nature of these final instalments (NMU SE#1 was 64 pages, this is 40) create a feeling of bloat which is hardly helpful either.

The obvious retort here would be to argue that yes, this annual is following on from the New Mutant's decision to remain in Asgard at least until they can rescue Storm from Loki, but that the focus changes from the younger team to the older one, justifying this story as an X-Men annual and offering a different perspective on the younger team, which has been operating without back-up since Roberto and Amara were kidnapped back in NMU #29.  The problem with this argument is that there's too much time spent furthering the New Mutants plot strands for any shift in perspective to be evident. We spend six pages on Magma and Cannonball alone, for instance, as she frets about her new elf-form and their friends the dwarves create the magic hammer Loki has blackmailed out of them.

But with the X-Men and New Mutants sharing top billing, not only is there no clear explanation as to why this story is hopping from title to title (other than Claremont becoming increasingly disinterested in compartmentalising), but the whole thing is horribly overbalanced by the number of characters.  Other characters or teams making guest appearances is the kind of nod to the wider continuity comic book obsessives like me really enjoy, but actually giving them equal billing pretty much guarantees no-one will be particularly well served.  Seventeen characters are shown on the opening page; that is is simply too many, even over forty-eight pages, to create any kind of coherent statement.  All you can do is messily develop bits and pieces as your plot sputters forward, which indeed is essentially what we get here.

Which isn't to say that none of the individual strands in here aren't interesting. This may be a mess, but it's not a completely dull one. The basic plot is fairly, well, basic, so we'll deal with that first: the X-Men travel to Asgard, meet the New Mutants and Hrimhari, and together plan to rescue Storm, currently mind-controlled by Loki because of course she is. Things go off-track when half the team are discovered by Loki who then mind-controls Illyana into acting as guard (because of course he does) and further mind-controls the wolves (because of course he fucking does) to seek out the other mutants, along with sundry monsters and ne'er-do-wells. They ambush the free mutants but are quickly beaten back, though Wolverine is fatally poisoned from a dragon bite in the process. The captured team manage to release Illyana and escape, and everyone converges at a ceremony Loki is holding in Asgard to present Storm with the hammer he extorted from the dwarves which will restore her powers (under the guise of honouring her as a hero who fought in the recent Surtwar, which is a nice touch). There Wolverine confronts Storm, and convinces her she has been lied to by the rather extreme method of letting her murder him. With Storm no longer under Loki's influence and a dozen plus mutants available to dissuade Hela from actually claiming Wolverine's soul (which somehow let's him survive the dragon's poison; Norse metaphysics is a tricky business), the God of Lies is rather on the back foot, and Shadowcat ties things up nicely by pointing out there are now seventeen mutants abroad in Asgard, all of whom will happily spill the beans about Loki's latest power grab if they're not all allowed to leave in one piece.

Which if nothing else is a nice way to end this, a sensible and unexpected solution to the question of how one can possibly defeat a god (this is maybe weakened by the teams doing exactly that to Hela a couple of pages earlier, but then as is mentioned, she does have more important things to do than swipe Wolverine). There are interesting things are happening in the margins, too. Rachel Summers is getting ever more into her self-appointed role as the New Phoenix, having now chosen not just that codename but a costume that directly references the flaming bird. In doing so she honours her mother's past, but of course Cyclops takes it pretty hard. It's a weird and strong dynamic: Rachel wants the past to be remembered but doesn't care if anyone remembers it in a different way to her, and Scott would rather not be reminded of that past despite the fact his wife looks identical to the dead woman Rachel claims to be honouring. Questions about what we retain from the past, what we leave behind, and what it might be wise or otherwise to replicate are fascinating ones, and as with all the best drama, both sides here have completely understandable positions; though I can't help feeling Rachel is being somewhat unreasonable in her expectations of Cyclops' responses. She's chosen not to explain why she's so fixated on Jean Grey, denying Scott the context that would give him any real hope of processing what's going on (though he learns the truth later from Hela, of all people), and telling someone in front of their new wife that they've got no reason to be upset about their dead former lover is a supreme dick move regardless of context. Wanting to be Phoenix whilst refusing to consider other people's feelings doesn't strike me as a tremendously healthy path to start heading down.

Of course, heading fown darker paths is very much the theme for young female mutants. Illyana briefly acquires the Enchantress' grimoires and seems very much unconcerned that reading them is driving her every further into becoming a dark sorceress/cruel arsehole. Mirage finds every Asgardian who sees her (and Warlock too) is now terrified of her link to the Valkyrie. Even Wolfsbane has to deal with her new found desire to shift into wolf form and sniff her love interest's backside. It's worth noting at this point just how often Claremont alters the status quo of his female characters like this, compared to his male ones. Illyana was turned from a innocent child into a dark magician. Xian became a morbidly obese mind-slave. Ororo was depowered, and Jean Grey died. Sprite became Shadowcat, and Psyche first Mirage, and then a valkyrie, the latter in the same adventure as Amara became an elf.

What is there for the Y chromosome that matches up? Wolverine has become a fraction less rough around the edges? Cyclops got to retire? I guess you've got Professor Xavier oscillating between wheelchair-bound, walking and dead, but I think there's a clear imbalance here, and it's not at all obvious to me why that is. I'm certainly not trying to paint a picture of Claremont as having issues with women - one could even colour an argument that says the imbalance stems from him having more interest in and willingness to tinker with female characters whilst the males just stand around saying the same old stuff. I don't really have any coherent take on the phenomenon, I just wanted to note that it's there.

What else? Well, there's a smattering of very brief but nice moments here.  Doug offering part of his lifeforce to keep Warlock alive after being shot by Loki is very sweet, and also manages to foreshadow Douglock's creation almost a decade later.  It's also hard not to smile when later in the issue they arrive to reinforce the X-Men by shifting into the USS Enterprise and firing all phasers.  There's an interesting conversation between Logan and Roberto, with the former pouring scorn on Sunspot's insistence that Asgard is a better place to live than Earth because so much more glory is on offer for beating up villains. And, for those interested in such things, Rogue demonstrates a new twist to her powers that I think is never mentioned again, when Nightcrawler grabs her and Cyclops simultaneously and thereby allows her to absorb both of their powers.

So yes, there's plenty to appreciate.  In the end though it never had any hope of gelling. It's not so much that it's less than the sum of its parts so much as that that sum is so big there's no way to sensibly process the number. These sprawling Claremontian epics are getting completely out of hand. Time now to move on to his UXM #200, which is, inevitably, 40 pages long. I shall have to count up how many pages Claremont produced in 1985. If I ever reach the end of the year, that is...

Clues

As with NMU Special Edition #1, much of the action here happens in Asgard, which makes the timing difficult.  We do at least know Shadowcat's nightmare must take place between UXM #199 and #200, so we'll place the beginning of this story the day after Magneto surrendered to the authorities, and the rest of it Odin only knows where.

Date

Wednesday 23^rd January, 1985.

X-Date

X+6Y+328.

Contemporary Events

Britain sees its first televised House of Lords debate.

Standout Line

"We had better things to do in Brazil, than read Viking stories."

Good on you, Sunspot. A few less Norse tales might do us all a bit of good.

NMU Special Edition #1: "Home Is Where The Heart Is"

(Nine realms, nine tales.)

Comments

New Mutants Special Edition was, to say the least, an interesting choice as a follow-up to the six part "Shadow Karma" storyline.  After wading through that story over six months, two phases, and three continents, the question of "what next" was one worth thinking about, and this is something of an unexpected result, at least in part. Swapping out the overwrought melodrama for something a little more frothy certainly seems like a solid move, but 64 pages? After six full issues battling Karma/Farouk, do we really need essentially three more on the team's travails in Thor's homeland? Couldn't we just, you know, chill?

One interesting difference between this story and its predecessor is that our team is rapidly separated and forced to deal with their situation individually.  The set-up for this is fairly brief: Loki, like apparently every other major supervillain in the MU, wants Storm as a concubine/love object and, due to the events of the X-Men/Alpha Flight crossover a little way back, wants the rest of the X-Men tortured to death. Both tasks are given the Enchantress to carry out.  Unfortunately for the New Mutants, their proximity to Storm leads the Enchantress to assume they are the team Loki mentioned, and so all are kidnapped. Ororo is delivered to Loki for some mind-control (because Odin knows there hasn't been enough of that in New Mutants lately...) and a last-minute attempt at escape by Magik leaves her alone with the Enchantress whilst her friends are scattered randomly across Asgard and Hel.

This in effect reduces forty or so pages into nine vignettes as we follow the protagonists through a wide variety of situations. The overall effect is beneficial in some ways, since it prevents any one section or idea from dragging on for too long. On the other hand, creating a satisfactory four or five page comic strip isn't actually a trivial task, and having to do it nine times (ten times if we include Storm's story here of "be controlled by Loki and get turned into a bird") is a real stretch. Claremont's approach here is entirely unsurprising, he just finds eight backwaters of Norse myths (the ninth story being Illyana's tribulations in the hands of the Enchantress) for a bit of whimsy. By now my feelings on this approach have been exhaustively detailed, but I wonder whether even those much happier than I to read Claremont in this mode feel enthused by the idea of so many minor variations on it in one book.

Still, at least this approach lets me talk about the story in a different manner to usual.  Here, ordered in ascending degree of how much they annoyed me, are the nine subplots of NMU Special Edition:

Wolfsbane

Definitely my favourite story of the group. If you're going to just throw things together to see what works you can do far worse than werewolves and giants. Especially if the wolves then fall in love. Via wolf prince Hrimhari we get to see Rahne enjoying herself more than usual, as well as growing as a character, and her dilemma between staying with him and finding her possibly endangered friends makes for a nice change from the usual fretting over life not matching up to her ultra-strict Protestant upbringing.

In fact, this is one the few story strands in this issue that I really wish had been stretched out.  There's a whole issue here about young lycanthropes in love, but instead Rahne just gets a page of two of dithering before Illyana's evil made manifest (we'll get to this in a moment) abducts her.

Magik

Illyana's story is the engine driving this entire plot.  It's also pretty grim, featuring as it does the Enchantress tearing out the elements of Magik's Darkchilde persona and cobbling into a vicious servant. Which would be bad enough, but in addition any damage incurred by the simulacrum instead affects Illyana. It's all quite vicious, a sprinkling of sharp spice in an otherwise mostly bland dish. For the rest of the book, the Illyana-shade stalks the land possessing people, and each hit she takes in the process we know is being directed somewhere else. The most cynical amongst us might see this as poetic justice for her throwing Ororo, Rahne and Dani to the Shadow King recently, but personally I'm far too busy squirming at Illyana's agony to want to approach that argument.

Sunspot

Some people get all the luck. Berto finds himself in an Asgardian hostelry, and quickly makes a name for himself by punching letches through the nearest available wall. This earns him the thanks of the innkeeper and, rather more importantly, no small number of the local womenfolk, which basically lands him the gig of bouncer/chief lady-seducer. 

Which is basically the stereotypical hormone-charged adolescent boy's dream. Show up somewhere where you have super-powers which you can use to beat up people who harass hot women, and by doing so impress hot women. Hell, given the culture he's been dropped in, they'll probably be happy to pay him in mead. Everything's coming up Sunspot!

This kind of wish fulfilment quickly gets boring, of course, but for a few short pages it's a nice way to essentially take the fact that superhero comic books are male wish-fulfilment anyway (every man has super powers and a ludicrous mega-titted sassy hourglass to grind against - there's even a joke here about how Sunspot is even more strong here because he reacts to Valhalla's sunlight the way Superman reacts to Earth's) and take it to the extreme.  Especially since here the extreme involves Volstagg, by far the most awesome character Marvel's Asgard has thus far offered. Observe his glory as he challenges Sunspot to pick him off the ground:

Hah! "Hast thou begun yet lad?", indeed! Of course the nature of this section as "Roberto's daydream" means that ultimately Sunspot succeeds (though he knackers his back in the process), but this is still my single favourite moment amongst these 64 pages.  Just imagine what hilarious scrapes DaCosta could get up to following the Warriors Three around.

Instead, alas, the Illyana-shade arrives and takes over his mind.  Because mind-control isn't something we ever see in New Mutants stories, obviously...

Cannonball

This feels a little like a wasted opportunity, actually. Sam finds himself in the tunnels of a group of dwarves, but not once does Claremont link this to Sam's own experiences in the mine-shafts of Kentucky following his father's death.  There's such a rich vein (pun very much intended) of material that could be used here; Sam's conflicted view of mining as the manner by which his town survived but his dad was killed.  The fact that whilst underground his power essentially lets him create tunnels, but always with a risk of collapse. Sam is the potential rewards and dangers of mining,

So bringing him in contact with delving dwarves - who actually go so far as to ask him to help out - only for him to end up battling trolls and dark elves seems like a tremendous waste of potential.  It's not that we get a bad story here - I'm putting it above Cypher's because at least here our protagonist gets something to do - it's just so far short of what it obviously could have been.  Admittedly, as with Rahne's tale, you'd need far more space than is offered here, but that just underlines the problem with this issue, you have two stories that could have easily supported an issue each, and seven more that are somewhere between mildly diverting and utterly throwaway.

Sam's tale ends when Loki makes a brief appearance to cause trouble (along with Storm, who he's transformed into a hawk to hide her from the dwarves - why he didn't just not bring her is left unexplained), annoying the head dwarf enough that he tells Sam where to find his friends, hoping the New Mutants can upset the God of Mischief with a little chaos of their own.

Cypher

Our resident translator finds himself in a Viking mead hall surrounded by drunken warriors.  Not particularly where a scraggly teenager wants to be, though Doug comforts himself with the knowledge that at least his abilities mean language is no barrier.  This is actually pretty funny, since precisely zero of his friends have any problem understanding the natives either - well, that dragon might've been telling Warlock she came in peace, I guess - which rather underlines the fact that Doug's power set is rather rendered impotent by basic narrative convention.

Which may or may not be why no matter how good he is with the Viking subjunctive clause, his unwilling hosts make him into their mead-bitch when he demonstrates he can't even beat up a woman. This unfortunate state of affairs lasts until Illyana's demonic twin arrives to kidnap him, only for Doug to be saved at the last minute by Warlock.

Which isn't really much of a story. It does function as a mirror to Sunspot's tale, though; offering us the flip-side to waking up surrounded by legendary warriors; this time without the strength to get your own way. One hesitates under the circumstances to call this the "realistic" option, but it's certainly a reminder of how far short of our daydreams life invariably proves to be. There's an alternate universe version of this pairing in which this would be the better, more interesting story, actually, but in Claremont's hands it just functions as an impediment to the jolly muckarounds he likes to write.

Still, Doug doesn't let that stop him shoving a Viking for being a dick, which I suppose is cathartic for all those of us who spent our adolescence being bullied by ale-swigging Scandinavian brawlers.

Warlock

Warlock meets a dragon who he eats, since he's running on fumes, and then meets Hela, who he runs from because a) he needs to find his friends and b) he's not an idiot.

So ends the saga of Warlock. For the rest of the story he's just a literal vehicle for gathering characters for the final showdown. Which I guess someone had to do, but that doesn't make this thread any more interesting.

(There is at least a fourth wall-breaking sight-gag here, whereby Warlock shifts into the form of Longshot - because that's what finding his friends is - despite the two never having met.  Instead the link between them is that this issue was pencilled by Arthur Adams, who co-created Longshot and drew the Longshot mini that was running whilst this was released. I wouldn't call it a funny joke, still less a clever one, but as a nod to those behind the curtain it's certainly preferable to, say, the X-Men invading Marvel HQ on a scavenger hunt.)

Magma

I've complained already about Claremont relying on the "mental control" plot twice in a row with respect to the Illyana-shade taking people over. Magma's story manages to be even more irritating by taking this mind-control plot following directly on from another mind-control plot and putting a mind-control plot inside it. Come to think of it, the last time Claremont took our heroes and threw them into what's basically a fantasy role-playing adventure, everyone had their minds wiped by Kulan Gath.

In short, this is all getting desperately tiring. Moreover, Magma is tremendously badly served here.  She wakes up, accepts food and drink from the locals, and finds herself immediately taken over by villainous dark elves.  She's then moulded to look like her captors and pressed into their war against the dwarves looking after Cannonball, which means Amara's own storyline is entirely subsumed within Sam's, with her becoming a mere background character to be saved and then cared for when she's finally freed of elven influence. When Warlock left his plot line (along with Magik, only he and Magma don't see a return to their stories in this issue; everyone else is checked in with at least twice) he at least got to operate as the wheels. Magma and Magik just have to wait for someone else to rescue them.

Dissatisfying!

Karma

This is about as simple as stories can get whilst maintaining a non-trivial page count: Karma finds herself in a desert, wants to lay down and die (because of how horribly Farouk has altered her body), but finds a small girl wandering alone and resolves to see her to safety.  The trip is just long and arduous enough for Shan to get her figure back, and concludes with the girl turning out to have been an agent of the Norns, who presumably have some reason to want Karma alive and/or svelte.

There's a very strong argument to be made that this is an amazingly weak wrapping-up of Karma's time as a morbidly obese survivor of abuse.  Which is a fair point, but frankly this plot strand is unpleasant enough that any ending has to be considered a mercy. Becoming morbidly obese makes you want to kill yourself? As though we didn't have enough problems with superhero comics conflating overweight people with the useless and the malevolent (something we're still having to deal with today, remember when Amanda Waller looked like this?). Even if you wanted to ignore the arguable link here between Karma becoming a hero again with her shrinking waistline (which is probably a stretch), the fact that no-one sees fit to make the obvious point that heavy does not equal worthless is a major problem for me.

I don't want to oversell this, of course. My chunky status is pretty much my only window into anything even remotely approaching the world of those hated on simply for who they are (well, that and my rapidly growing bald spot). Nothing is worse than straight cis white guys complaining that they have it tough because they're chubby, or strawberry blonde, or whatever. Then again, the real damage that gets done by the anti-weight brigade is aimed at women like Karma, so I can safely be annoyed on their behalf.  Especially since, as I've said, Karma's extreme weight gain was an outward manifestation of some very real and unpleasant trauma which is in danger of being swept under the carpet as quickly as her new BMI was.  Again though, it's not so much that I wish Claremont would explore the angle (I'm not sure how good he could possibly do there) so much as this underlines how problematic the Shadow Karma arc was to begin with.

Ultimately Karma gets found by Warlock and Cypher, and it's off to the final battle.

Mirage

Oh no. No, this won't do at all.  Mirage's tale involves her finding a winged horse in a trap. Saving it, she makes the acquaintance of the Valkyrie, who ride similar steeds.  Dani returns home with them, which works out just fine for a while, until she ultimately discovers that her bond with her horse means she has been chosen as a Valkyrie herself.

Which, as I've argued before, is a terrible development. The problem with overwriting - even just in part - a Native American's identity with something from European culture should be horribly obvious, but somehow that's exactly what's been begun here. One of the most obvious trapdoors white writers have to be wary of when including characters from other cultures is to avoid writing them as basically white characters with different skin colours and reference points.  This has never been a strong suit of Claremont's, whose dialogue relies on various surface differences to disguise what are actually pretty similar voices, which of course here means pretty similarly white.  Mirage's treatment here is a particularly unfortunate extension of this policy of starting with varied characters and then treating their developments as completely interchangeable.

In any case, Mirage is for now attempting to resist her fate, and she flies off to join her friends once she learns the truth. Which brings us at long last to the grand finale.

Endgame

Once everyone is assembled, either under Nega-Illyana's sway or in opposition to her, things work out pretty fast. Karma gets to show everyone how useful she is by taking over their enemy, which immediately breaks the hold on our captured heroes.  Within a few pages the Enchantress' castle has been stormed, Illyana's dark soul returned to her (which immediately heals her for absolutely no reason at all) and Xian has produced the goods once more by possessing the Enchantress just long enough for Illyana to teleport her to Limbo and hand her over to S'ym.

So all's well that ends well, except for two things.  First, Storm is still Loki's prisoner. Second, Bobby and Dani are too happy, Amara too scared, Shan too curious, and Rahne too in love to actually want to leave Asgard. Both problems have the same solution, of course; time for the New Mutants to pay Loki a visit...

Clues 

This story picks up with the New Mutants on the island of Kirinos, a destination suggested by Storm at the end of NMU #34. From the sound of things they've had at least a couple of days to settle in, which together with the time needed to travel from Egypt to Greece (how did they even get hold of their passports? Or did Illyana finally manage a decent group teleport?) makes me inclined to start this story three days after the Shadow King's defeat.

When it ends is impossible to judge right now, since the script is explicit that our heroes have ended up in slightly different time periods across Asgard.  We'll just have to come back to this after UXM Annual #9.

Date

Friday 25^th January, 1985.

X-Date

X+6Y+332.

Contemporary Events

Norway launches a four-stage sounding rocket to study the Aurora Borealis over Svalbard, almost causing the Russians to launch a nuclear strike when the rocket is mistaken for an ICBM.

Standout Line

Absolutely nothing's going to beat "Hast thou begun yet lad?", I'm afraid.