XMM #4: "Doppelganger!"

("And so we write finis to a very ugly story.")

Comments

OK, so remember how last time I was all up in this title's grill about putting a teenage girl with no mind of her own in a situation where she was almost raped?  Well, this issue kicks off with a half-naked teenage girl attacked by her formerly trustworthy teacher, who whilst crowing over his new access to pretty young playthings" which will be "easy pray to my insatiable lust", uses his "psychic fingertips" in a "sensual caress" until she collapses "in the throes of indescribable... pleasure", which then turns her evil.

I ask you, people of the internets; what the fuck am I possibly supposed to do with that?  Almost thirty years after this comic came out, there are still powerful forces in the US who want to ban gay people from teaching in schools, in case their gay suddenly surges up and gets all over the kids and they turn gay and sinful too.  I don't want to think how much worse public was in the mid '80s, and this is the plotline we're going with, here?  An evil teacher who orgasms his students into becoming evil like him?  Holy shit, but shut that down.

Horribly, there's still twenty-one more pages to get through after this. Though I guess if nothing else, a few pages of mediocre team-up action look a lot better in comparison to unbearably skeezy mind-rape.

When last we left our heroes, they'd escaped from their prison, not realising this was brought about by Baron Karza (still in Kitty Pryde's body) stabbing the entity apparently to death, which in turn Karza doesn't realise didn't really make any difference, now Xavier and the entity have swapped places. Karza tries to lever his apparent victory to his maximum advantage by trying to shoot Commander Rann with a sniper rifle, but Wolverine sounds the alarm in time and Colossus' armoured chest takes the shot instead.  Nightcrawler jaunts over to the sniper's nest, and is understandably astonished to see who's holding the rifle, but bigger problems appear when Karza's fleet arrives in orbit and begins trying to blow the entity's planet to bits.

This, at least, is an idea I love: swapping Kitty and Karza's minds around, but then put the X-Men under threat not from Karza, but Kitty herself, who's ordered the bombing without knowing her friends are below.  It doesn't last for long, though; the mortally wounder Professor manages to get through to her, and she beams down to the planet to rescue him, leaving explicit instructions with DeGrayde to cease the bombardment.  Naturally, he ignores her, having decided his lord's recent erratically empathic behaviour makes this the perfect opportunity to stage a coup, especially since the only action required on his part is to not press the button marked "Cancel bombing planet to dust".

Down on what she quickly realises is a still very much beleaguered planet, Kitty runs into Karza, and she finally has an opportunity to make a grab for her body.  Naturally, this is exactly when the X-Men and Micronauts arrive, having followed "Kitty's" trail, and a standard hilarious superhero misunderstanding seems wearyingly inevitable.  Fortunately, Claremont and Mantlo have it in them to at least spare us that, with Xavier very quickly explaining what's happened.  Of course, he's doing all this from inside the entity's body, so his "mind-swap" story has more than a slight ring of self-service to it. The X-Men buy it anyway, though, thanks to some rudimentary detective work from Wolverine. 

Of course, this just means they know who everyone is on this planet that's moments away from disintegration.  Our heroes call in their Bioship (who has been waiting all this time to be asked to help out, something which is either a nice idea about how sentient ships might not reason the same way we do, or just as stupid an idea as having him sing old American spirituals; I'm really not sure which), who whisks them away, just as the bombardment by Karza's fleet is joined by the entity's attempts to obliterate the entire Microverse!  It seems he's taken time out of his busy child raping plans in order to redesign Cerebro as a weapon of interstellar destruction.

(It always strikes my cold, dead academic mind as interesting when something like this happens, i.e. a character decides rather than raping a teenager they're going to kill billions of people and this comes a relief to the reader.  The human mind is a strange device.)

The entity quickly obliterates Karza's fleet (along with the luckless DeGrayde, which is a bit of a shame as he was kind of fun) along with an unknown number of frontier worlds, not all of them uninhabited.  If last time the X-Men's involvement in the mass slaughter made the whole affair seem horribly unsettling, this time round it's just entirely unaffecting.  Once you get above a certain level of off-hand destruction, it just stops having any effect, other than cheapening the story.  The old quote attributed to Stalin that "the death of one man is a tragedy; the death of one million is a statistic" might be deeply unpleasant and cynical, but in fiction at least, there's no doubt he was on to something.

Amidst all this pointless bloodshed - including the entirety of Karza's war machine, which as I understand it included vast numbers of conscripts across multiple inhabited world - the Micronauts realise the entity plans to destroy the "Enigma Force" that somehow maintains the Microverse.  With no way to battle their foe whilst still inside the Microverse, Fireflyte uses her connection with the Enigma Force to throw Bioship and his passengers out into our reality, and onto Xavier's lawn. Alas, by this point all of the New Mutants have been orgasmed into being evil, and they've more than happy to kick the heroes diminutive heinies back into the collapsing Microverse.  As it turns out, a half-dozen amateurs against two highly trained and experienced teams at one-twelfth scale is actually a surprisingly fair fight, though Magma's decision to start pouring lava into Bioship's breached hull doesn't look like it will end particularly well, and it hardly helps when Lockheed shows up and decides the best way to protect Kitty's mind is to destroy her foe, and so sets about trying to burn Kitty's body to cinders.

Really, though, the X-Men and the Micronauts are just buying time whilst Xavier's astral form searches the mansion for his adversary.  Finding his own body proves little challenge, but working his way through his co-opted mind (visualised as endless mirrors reflecting each other's images, which I freely admit is a really nice idea) is somewhat more challenging.  Fortunately, the entity is distracted, busy both directing the New Mutants in their attack, and trying to get Kitty and Karza to kill each other, as punishment for "deceiving him" (read: allowing him to almost rape a young girl with the mind of a fully-grown man - Gods I hate this series).  Ironically, the resulting stress of the situation ends up causing Karza to finally figure out how to phase, and by passing through his own body, the mind-swap is finally reversed.  Obviously, this makes absolutely no sense, but then there was no reason to expect that it would, and at least it's all finally sorted.

Meanwhile, Xavier's mind faces off against the entity, even while the damaged body he's stuck in evacuated from the dying Bioship by Nightcrawler.  With time fast running out for the Microverse, and more importantly with only three pages left, there's no time for subtlety, and Xavier simply causes his own brain to undergo an embolism that apparently obliterates his dark side, though induces a stroke at the same time.  With that wrapped up, there's just enough time for Bioship to use the last of his life-force to grow the X-Men back to their normal size, Fireflyte to sing the Micronauts back home, and for... Xavier to start talking?

Yes, gentle readers, we end on one final dose of the purest nonsense, as Xavier reveals he only pretended to give himself a stroke, so his dark side would flee and, finding his body destroyed, pass away.  How such a trick is supposed to have worked on someone actually in Xavier's brain at the time is not discussed, other than Xavier insisting that because the entity would know he was prepared to do it, he'd believe that he had done it.  You know, just like you can persuade someone you're so murderously angry you've actually shot them.

Anyway, that's how it all ends. And now that everything is back to normal (unless you're one of the inhabitants of a bare minimum of two sentient worlds now obliterated by the entity, of course), how does the whole series shape up?  Well, I've kind of shown my hand here already, so I'm basically just reiterating here: this is four issues of the most uninspired team-up-by-rote storytelling imaginable, spiced up with occasional moments of levity that I'll go so far as to call "interesting", but certainly won't stretch to "funny", and which is then inexplicably mixed with massively hyperbolic body-counts and at least three separate counts of really, really disturbing moments in which women/teenage girls are mixed with threatened rape/forced sexualising in ways that don't so much leave a bad taste in your mouth, as screw the bad taste to your soft palate and so your lips up on the way out.

I did quite like Bioship, though; even if he did look like a Gobot.  Also, he's dead now.

Clues

This story is confirmed to take place before Xavier once again learned to walk in NMU #14. It begins immediately after the previous issue's conclusion, and takes place over the course of several minutes.

Date

Tuesday 28^th December, 1983.

X-Date

X+5Y+303.

Contemporary Events

Standout Line

"I ain't so hot on the idea o' stayin' trapped at six inches, neither."
"You'll >tik< get usedta it."
"But will the frauleins?" - Logan, Bug and Kurt.

XMM #3: "Mine Eyes Have Seen The Gory!"

(The horrors we have witnessed.)

Comments

It's a bad day when a title like that isn't the most tasteless part of a comic book.  The first four pages of this issue are awash with alien blood as the X-Men and Micronauts - now all under the control of the malevolent entity - carve their way through one of Baron Karza's "outpost kennels". Thanks presumably to the link Xavier shares with their enemy, he witnesses the slaughter in a dream, and is suitably horrified, but that does little to alleviate what is a major problem here: each of the X-Men are now mass murderers (except Kitty, who we now learn is still trapped in Karza's body; I thought they'd swapped back at the end of last issue, but I must have been mistaken).  The peace-loving "soul of a poet" Piotr gets to crush people's skulls together.  Storm incinerates dog soldiers with bursts of lightning.  Wolverine, well, he's just acting like normal, I guess, just with no-one to stop him.

Making a character into a callous mass-murderer, even under mind control, is not something to do lightly. It's horribly uncomfortable to watch whilst it's happening, and the ramifications are deeply problematic: memory-wiping is cheap (almost as much as time-reversal), and rather suggests that the deaths of dozens of people is only a tragedy insofar as it upsets our heroes, and any other response tends to ring hollow, and/or pass far too quickly.  No writer who doesn't want to deal with the fall-out of their stories should be allowed to put pen to paper (I'm looking at you, Russell T Davies).

None of this, in short, is encouraging.

Xavier isn't enjoying seeing "dog soldiers scream and die in droves" either, but the entity now seems to have complete control, and even falling out of his bed in horrified terror doesn't seem capable of waking him up.  The New Mutants spring into action immediately, talking about how they're all worried, and they might have to do something about all this first thing in the morning, maybe.  Not too soon, though; this new wheeze of having everyone hypnotised is making splitting the writing duties in half much harder to detect.

The entity decides to leave one enemy soldier temporarily alive, so he can record events as the entity and his thralls leave, and then blow up the planet.  Kitty-as-Karza receives this rather upsetting youtube link, and makes DeGrayde suspicious when she first starts fretting about the battle's body-count, and then orders the dog soldier program shut down, to spare any further innocent civilians from receiving unwanted upgrades.  Fortunately for her, Karza's detachable rocket gloves are stray-thought-activated, meaning she's capable of remote pimp-slapping her truculent lick-spittle.  As he scurries away, Kitty tries to come to terms with what she's become.  She's so upset even the discovery that Karza can change shapes at will doesn't seem to cheer her up.

But all this death and misery must have finally gotten to the writers, because it's time for a radical change of tack: let's sexualise a fourteen year old girl!

Why is he calling her Ariel?
YES, THAT IS BOTHERING ME AS WELL!

Holy... cockgargling... Gods.  This is just horrible.  "Sybaritic lusts"? "Lascivious desires"? "My sole hope lies in diverting"?  Ladies and gentlemen, I present: the day Kitty Pryde's body got dressed up like Princess Leia, then almost got raped.  I may be physically sick.

And before anyone argues that the comic isn't condoning this, and that this is just to make clear how evil the entity is: bollocks to that.  We already know the entity is evil. We've seen him destroy two planet's worth of sentient creatures, and engage in brainwashing through unbearable torture.  Which means that whilst I agree there's no sense that the script is looking on this with anything but disgust, there's absolutely no need for the scene whatsoever.  If you don't need anything this vile, and you stick it in anyway, your hands are not as clean as you might want to think. "We should have Kitty threatened with rape because... er..."

We should also note that the entity wants to get hot and heavy with a teenage girl despite having access to the implausibly-proportioned Storm and Marionette, women who respectively have been repeatedly described as stunningly beautiful, and capable of holding the attention of a phantasmic (sic) crowd with their lewd dancing. I mean, Marionette hasn't even got a ridiculous hairstyle.

The absolutely most positive spin I can put on this is that the Entity targeting Kitty is specifically to make him seem even more evil.  Which, see above, but more than that, this is an example of what we shall call Baron Harkonnen Syndrome.  One of the many things about Dune that make it such a phenomenal work of fiction is the sheer number of factions in the novel that all have their own desires and philosophies, and how fascinating their intersection proves to be.  There is no-one in the book who could be considered an unalloyed hero (Duncan maybe the closest the novel comes, and he's killed off as soon as things get tough for the Atreides), and plenty of the characters we might consider villainous - the Emperor Shaddam IV, Gaius Helen Mohiam - are given their own believable motivations for acting the way they do.

The Baron Harkonnen, in contrast, fucks children.

Every time I read Dune, this sticks out like a sore and festering thumb. Making your villain a paedophile is functionally identical to writing WHO IS REALLY FUCKING EVIL FOR SERIOUS every time their name pops up in the text.  Shades of grey just disappear in their entirety.  Which is an appalling shame as regards Herbert's masterwork.  And whilst I'd obviously be utterly insane to suggest an '80s X-book should be held to the same standards as one of the greatest science-fiction novels ever written, it's still aggravating, because if there's one thing that doesn't improve lazy writing, it's associating it with the abuse of minors.

(If I wanted to really pile on, of course, I'd note that all of this is taking place whilst Kitty's mind is outside her body, that is, we're literally watching a male character attempting to sleep with a female character with no anima of her own. I think I've spent quite enough time discussing this wretched five panel scene, however.)

So, where was I? Ah, yes. Whilst Karza-as-Kitty is trying to talk his way out of an utterly horrendous situation, the other X-Men have been chucked into a dungeon, and left undominated, along with the Micronauts.  Wolverine decides to take this opportunity to off everyone before they're forced to carve up another army, but unsurprisingly he's heavily outvoted, with everyone else keen to attempt first escape and then vengeance.  Whilst our heroes wander the entity's domain, giving each other inspirational speeches whilst they try and find an exit, Xavier finds a way out of his coma by using Psyche as a stepping stone, and challenges the entity.  At first the battle goes well, with the professor gaining unexpected help when Karza stabs the entity's inert body whilst his mind is elsewhere. For a moment, it seems the good guys have this all wrapped up, but Xavier freaks out when he tears off the entity's psychic helmet and discovers what was entirely obvious to everyone else since the midpoint of XMM #1: the entity and Xavier are one and the same!

Yes, it's our old friend, the suppressed dark side.  Which has now killed the population of at least one civilised planet, along with a space fleet and two or more large armies. Mass murder and genocide; didn't that lead to the Marvel bigwigs demanding Jean Grey be taken out of circulation?  More to the point, after this horrendous explosion of diarrhetic bullshit, how could anyone get bent out of shape over Onslaught?

I digress. The resulting shock gives Dark Charles an opening, and the professor finds himself replaced by his negative image. Meanwhile, Karza decides to celebrate his apparent stabbing of the entity to death by finding a sniper rifle, and training it on our heroes...


Clues

This story takes place over the course of several hours, picking up soon after the previous issue ended and continuing into the following day.

Date

Monday 27^th to Tuesday 28^th December, 1983.

X-Date

X+5Y+302 to X+5Y+303.

Contemporary Events

Founding Beach Boy member Dennis Wilson passes away, aged just 39.

Standout Line

"I've become a rocket-powered centaur!"  - Kitty explores Karza's powers, and insists of being whiny about it.  Of course.

XMM #2: "Into The Abyss!"

(With friends like these, who needs their own series?)

Comments

Onto issue 2, and it turns out this comic is structured much as its predecessor was; eleven pages of the Micronauts getting into trouble, and eleven pages of the X-Men trying to figure out what's going on, whilst Karza is a jerk in the background.  It lends more credence to my theory that much of the series was written concurrently rather than collaboratively.  That said, some of the torments the Micronauts undergo seem very Claremontian in nature, though I'd like to think that even at his worst he wouldn't write a scene in which a strong female character is mind-controlled into dancing lasciviously for a baying crowd.

So, yeah, I'm not going to go into much detail again regarding the Micronauts' half of the action, but in brief; they're screwed. After being swallowed up by their foe's power last issue, they've found themselves in some kind of freaky alien world/mindscape, where each of them are subjected to various forms of individualised torture, until they're so mentally scarred they're only too happy for "the entity" to brainwash them.  Also, dress them up as the X-Men, for some reason. Presumably this is connected to the entity's own connection to Xavier - it turns out the invader of the Microverse can only operate at peak capacity when the professor is asleep, and not being disturbed by scantily clad teenagers fighting with towels (I never thought I'd see that much of Rahne's lower half; at least not until the '90s) - but if this series was indeed intended to reverse the flagging fortunes of the Micronaut's own title, having them pussy out, volunteer for brainwashing, and donning the costumes of much more famous, competent heroes seems a damn strange way to go about it.

On to the X-half of the issue, and our heroes have run into a bit of a moral conundrum. To whit: Baron Karza is clearly an intolerable mass-murdering turd, and the X-Men are apparently expected to fight alongside him, in order to ensure that the worlds he's stolen from their rightful rulers stay in his steel pockets. There's a limit to how far we can take this, because we're discussing such a hyperbolic example, but it might be worth spilling a little ink on the topic of international intervention.  Essentially, the X-Men are being asked to forcibly intervene in a military conflict taking place in a different reality.  The question of what gives them the right to do so is an interesting one, as is whether getting into bed with Baron Karza is necessarily the best idea. The Kosovans wanted us to bomb Serbia.  Iraqi insurgents wanted us to kick out Saddam Hussein.  Libyan rebels wanted the same treatment for Qaddafi, and forces in Syria still want our assistance in their own struggle for freedom, despite seeing the corrupt mess of Kosovo and Iraq we left behind, with Libya maybe not shaping up to be any better, even if we ignore the knock-on effect for Mali.

I'm not trying to make a political statement with that, by the way, just noting that a) international intervention is far from without cost to those areas intervened within and b) that doesn't seem to have stopped the requests from coming in. Nor, as here, are those requests uniformly from people we'd be happy to see retain or increase their own share of power.  How much contemporary and future damage are we willing to stomach, and who are we prepared to help out, in order to answer calls for help from those oppressed?

Like I said, we can't go too far with this, because the questions here are already pretty much answered by the construction of this situation. The idea that any amount of post-war fallout and domination by Karza is worth it in order to stop the Entity destroying every inhabited planet is so reasonable that it can't really be assailed.  There's some interest to be had in watching the X-Men work through to this conclusion, in watching them decide that they disgust at Karza's nature and deeds has to be put aside, but the correct conclusion is never really in doubt.  The heroes of this universe have already made that choice, so there's no way for the X-Men to choose differently without announcing that their earth-born morals take precedence over those who actually have a stake in this war.  That might also answer the question of what right the X-Men have to interfere (I'm not sure "the Entity is powered from earth" necessarily cuts it, any more than "the government is getting its weapons from Russia and China" does in this world); if we accept that heroes can legitimately represent the people they protect, then a request of assistance from the Micronauts is all the X-Men need.

(Whether that representation is legitimate is a bigger question, and one we'll return to years from now when we hit Civil War, if not earlier).

Once the X-Men agree to help out, Karza teleports his armour back to his base, and so keeps his body safe, at least - the X-Men won't let Kitty stay behind even though "she" asks to be. Frustrated, Karza projects his mind to check up on his armour, to find his chief scientist and minister DeGrayde gloating over his inert form, announcing loudly that "if my suspicions are correct -- and the armor is now merely an inanimate shell - then the moment of DeGrayde's triumph is at hand!"  You'd think DeGrayde would at least consider the possibility that the Baron is just having a nap, and not loudly announce his intention to start a coup right in front of his master's faceplate before running a few tests, but who knows how the scientific method works in the Microverse.  Fortunately for DeGrayde, Karza needs a fresh supply of genetically engineered soldiers rather more than he needs a rebellious minion squished underfoot.

Elsewhere in the Microverse, Bioship has found the planet where the Micronauts are being held, and ensures the quickest deployment for the X-Men possible by just slamming straight into the ground.  Efficient.  Nobody is particularly impressed by this display, but it turns out to not be Bioship's fault: he's been robbed of power. The link he used to find Commander Rann is reciprocal, and the Entity clearly knew they were coming. Not only has he set up the device that has now rendered Bioship inert, but he's built a replica of Xavier's mansion, a dozen times too big, for the X-Men to find, and when they get inside, he's taken Xavier's form, and throws the X-costumed Micronauts (also twelve times bigger than our heroes) at them. I'd say that this was the third big clue that the entity and Xavier are linked, except that Karza explicitly said that last issue, and nobody seemed that bothered. It may be that the X-Men rather deserve the pounding they take here. Once the mutants are knocked unconscious, "Xavier" reverts to the entity's conquistador form, and he gloats over his defeated foes.  Next step: to "shake the universe to its very foundations!".

Scary.

It's not all bad news, though.  Or at least, not bad news right now: Karza's been knocked out of Kitty's unconscious body and back into his own.  It's time for some murderous dictator payback!

Clues

The events of this issue apparently take place over a few hours, though it's impossible to tell how long the voyage aboard Bioship takes.

Date

Monday 27^th December, 1983.

X-Date

X+5Y+302.

Contemporary Events

The Grateful Dead play for three hours at the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco.  Whether they even realised they had an audience is open to debate.

Standout Line

"As the phantasmic (sic) crowd stare silently on... this strong-willed warrior-woman finds herself losing control -- until she performs a lewd dance for the edification of the mob..."

Ugh.  No.  No, thank you.

X-Men And The Micronauts #1: "First Encounter"

(Toy story.)

Comments

This is a curious one.  It practically screams "toy-line promotion", which certainly seems to check out (indeed Sam is kind enough to provide a lampshade by mentioning the Micronauts in his sister's collection). We here are Year X are not precious about the motivations behind a given comic, though, and since this both features the X-Men and was co-written by Claremont, it clearly falls under our remit.

It's also a pretty quick issue to run through, given it's been divided precisely in two, with the X-Men not showing up until the action switches to Earth at the top of page 12 (one wonders if the writing duties between Claremont and Mantlo were shared the same way; it's difficult to tell from the text, though the second half reads like standard Claremont and the first reads like him on the worst day of his life, which might just be Mantlo's style; I don't know).  I don't feel the need to dwell much on the first half, but in brief, there's these Micronauts, right, superheroes who fly around in "Bioship", which is a Gobot that sings Earth spiritual numbers in a possibly racist accent.  They live in the Microverse, a miniature universe which is being invaded by forces so overwhelmingly and horrifyingly powerful that they've been compelled to forge an alliance with their arch-nemesis Baron Karza (think Doctor Doom with more interest in helmets) in the hope they can defend themselves.  Their initial encounter - with what proves to be a vicious army led by an Earthling psyker dressed as a conquistador - goes horribly wrong, with the entire Micronauts team captured, save Bioship, who escapes with Karza, hoping to find aid elsewhere.

Screenwipe.  Over at the Xavier pad, it's a typical day.  The professor is training the New Mutants, Kitty is whining and complaining, Ororo is in her bikini to offer the lads some side-boob.  Business very much as usual.

Until Karza arrives, detachable fists flailing.  He's got it into his head that the monstrous invader of his own realms is linked directly to Xavier (did Claremont just accidentally create Onslaught?), and he doesn't think much of putting questions ahead of punching on his to-do list.  He carves his way through the New Mutants, but the senior team prove a bigger impediment; they hold him off until Bioship can follow Karza through whatever interdimensional rift they're using, and explain the situation.

It's all a big misunderstanding, it would seem, but at least no damage was done.  At least, that's what Karza wants everyone to think.  In fact, he's swapped minds with Kitty following her attempt to phase through him, a fact he's keen for no-one to glom onto.  Conveniently for him, Kitty has lapsed into unconsciousness due to the strain, so she's not able to contradict him.  Equally conveniently, he possesses sufficient psychic power to not only keep Xavier in the dark, but to animate his own armour (now housing Kitty) so as to seem still himself as he explains the situation.  The X-Men agree to help out, and so Bioship shrinks them all down to doll size so they can head over to the beleaguered Microverse, all save Xavier, apparently because the talking spaceship with the shrinking ray isn't able to slap together a miniature wheelchair, and because a shrink ray that can work on flesh, adamantium and clothing is helpless against wood ("What, it doesn't do wood?").  The issue ends with our heroes stepping into the Microverse.

So what can I say about all this? I mean, so far, it's just a replay of UXM Annual #3, only with toys and less padding.  That's a swap I'd be happy to make, true, but it doesn't really lend itself to in-depth analysis.  Let's just go with this: I expected little from this issue, and I was neither disappointed nor pleasantly surprised.

Clues

Xavier mentions that Magma is now a part of the New Mutants team.  He's also unable to walk, which handily puts this issue between NMU #13 and NMU #14.  Less handily, that's only a gap of a week (NMU #14), and yet apparently it's a fine warm day, despite it snowing a few days later (NMU#14 again).  I think we'll just have to assume Storm is in a bikini because it's bright, not necessarily warm (we know that her powers make her immune to cold, after all), and that when Kitty calls this a lovely day, she means considering the time of year. It's also possible Ororo's fiddling with the weather again, too.

The story itself (at least that part which takes place on Earth) lasts for a few hours at most.

Date

Monday 27^th December, 1983.

X-Date

X+5Y+302.

Contemporary Events

Pope John Paul II visits his would-be assassin Mehmet Ali Agca in Romes' Rebibbia prison, in order to forgive him.

Standout Line

"At last -- free of that accursed flying hand!" - Sunspot