The X-Men encounter the Avengers while on the trail of the Professor's oldest foe!
Savagely written by: Stan Lee
Supremely drawn by: Jack Kirby
Superbly inked by: Chic Stone
Stoically lettered by: S. Rosen
Originally Published: January 1965
As we begin this month's adventure, the X-Men are aboard a passenger ship bound for Northern Europe when they receive their orders from Professor X, who has been off in the Balkans tracking down his oldest foe, Lucifer, whom he explains cost him the use of his legs many years ago. He doesn't have to look far, lowering himself into the appropriately-named "Cave of Lucifer," where he evades one (1) booby trap and is whisked via warp whistle tornado effect to the Control Room of Lucifer, where the villain vows he will finish the job he started years ago and finally kill Professor X.
The Prof, however, is prepared for this eventuality - pulling out a gun and opening fire on his foe.
Charles Xavier, ostensible pacifist.
Lucifer, though, has an ace up his sleeve: he's wired a thermonuclear bomb to his heartbeat (as Martin Keamy would call it, a Dead Man's Switch.) If he dies, the entire world will perish!
And that's bad.
While the X-Men await further instruction, they find out quickly they're not alone. Also hot on the trail of Some Unknown Evil Force is The Avengers! Iron Man, Captain America, Ant-Man, the Wasp and Thor have followed the magic hammer Mjolnir to Europe in search of the source of some kind of "evil impulses." The two teams have the requisite hero-fight, the kind that has defined Marvel Comics since forever, in an effort by the X-Men to stall the Avengers so that they don't find and accidentally kill Lucifer and doom the world.
The battle accomplishes no purpose except to eat up a few pages - it's surprisingly less interesting than one would think to see the vintage Avengers matched up against the original X-Men, and there being no real impetus for the fight eliminates any drama.
Marvel Girl, the most powerful X-Man, does manage to use her powers overcome the threat of a small hole in the terrain.
The Professor incapacitates Lucifer - who has been bragging all along that the two are pretty much equal in terms of power - fairly quickly with one of his patented Mental Roofies, leaving his heart beating long enough for the X-Men to come defuse his bomb once they have talked things out with the Avengers. Why they didn't invite the now-friendly Avengers, whose membership includes Arms-Manufacturing Tech genius Tony Stark, nobody can say.
With Teamwork, the X-Men are able to defuse the bomb and send Lucifer on his way, knowing full well he intends to murder to Professor someday. And thus - seriously - it ends.
Further Thoughts:
So, listen, it's easy enough to play Monday Morning Editor fifty-odd years later, but I feel like we wasted two potential stories here: the search and defeat of Professor X's oldest foe, who is responsible for leaving him wheelchair-bound and wants to destroy humankind, and the first meeting of the X-Men and the Avengers, with the latter as an officially-sanctioned superpowered team and the former as a wild card faction operating outside the law as part of a little-understood minority whose motives may be suspect. Those could have been separate stories, or combined into one very good story, instead of this not-very-good one.
We are left with a lot of questions about Lucifer, and not in the "What will be this dastardly villain's next move?" way, but a "Why did any of this happen?" way. A "What are we even doing here?" way.
But the more I think about it, the more intrigued I actually am, so maybe Stan Lee got it right after all. We know nothing about Lucifer, except that he wanted to blow up the world - only he didn't want to blow up the world, he only wanted to use that as protection against the very realistic possibility that Professor Xavier was going to shoot him to death with his handgun. What was Lucifer doing in the Cave of Lucifer? What was his plan, his goal, his motivation? Forget what he did to the Prof in the past - what did the Prof do to him???
The answers to these questions are destined to be not very satisfying, if they are even someday provided. So let's focus on a few more salient points about the issue.
In the opening scene, Cyclops uses a maximum-power blast to destroy an iceberg that nearly sinks their ship, which results in him being fatigued. Cyclops' power has always fascinated me a bit more than other X-Men's, because of its limitations, if any -- it's supposed to be completely uncontrollable except for his rube quartz visor, so how can he blast any more or less? I get opening the visor wider or narrower, depending on what's needed, but that shouldn't wear him out any more than usual... unless it's always firing on the lowest setting and he can just focus harder to make it harder, in which case it... runs out for a bit? Then he can take off his glasses for a little while? Sorry, I'm overthinking this, and you probably have better things to do, but you did come here, so I'm guessing you are at least a little interested.
More importantly, the book gives us every opportunity to gain insight into Jean's secret pining for Scott. Hopefully those two get together someday.
I, too, questioned Cyke's eyes. The way his powers are described, the beams are constantly going, just stopped or absorbed by the ruby quartz visor. So if you look to the side of his head, you can see the beams going and going. But then I quit worrying about it and got a popsicle. It was tasty.
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