UNCANNY X-MEN #44: Red Raven, Red Raven...!

Red Raven, Red Raven, it's a totally random encounter I'm cravin'.

Originally published May 1968

Magneto has captured the X-Men and put them all in specially-designed shackles that curtail their mutant powers, which I feel like is the #2 most common thing to happen to the X-Men besides fighting a giant robot, and even then I'm starting to think this is becoming more commonplace than that.

Toad boasts that only Magneto has the foresight to engineer such escape-proof confines, but it proves no more effective than the prisons employed by the Sentinels, Factor Three, Count Nefaria or any of the other jamokers I'm forgetting who briefly got the drop on our heroes.

Angel, in this case, plays a deadly game of Operation, worming his hand out of his electrified birdcage and obtaining a laser-cutter that was left within arm's reach. Instead of freeing his teammates, he is instructed - by a captive Cyclops - to fly to New York and summon the Avengers, which seems tactically smart but not what you want from the team that is named on the cover of the book.

I don't know where Magneto's island is located (the Caribbean, I assume, just because that's where I'd want my island base to be) but it must be a ways away from New York (unless it turns out to be Cape Cod or something?) And Cyclops expects Angel to fly there under his own power. I mean Scotty, I knew you didn't always love working with the guy but damn, that's cold.

So Angel flies and flies and flies - briefly pursued by Quicksilver, who, it is revealed, has recently gained the power of flight. (This is noted to have happened in an issue of the Avengers, although Stan Lee, known for his faulty memory, couldn't cite exactly which one.) Fortunately, since flying is kind of Angel's only thing, he proves better at it, and escapes, and this is where things get amazing.

Angel finds himself on a mysterious island that rises out of the sea, where he is attacked by its lone inhabitant, the mysterious Red Raven. They scuffle for a bit, with Angel getting the better of the stranger, which prompts him to call for a time-out so he can tell his backstory, which he touts as a massive secret. And what a backstory it is.

As an infant, Red Raven was the survivor of a plane crash on a flying (!) island inhabited by Winged People. For some reason, it took until his twenty-first birthday, when he still didn't have any wings of his own, to realize he was one of the lowly surface people. Nevertheless, he was given a pair of artificial wings to wear, which I guess in that society would qualify as a prosthesis.

Eventually, as these things often go, the Winged People decided it was time to make war on the surface-dwellers. Raven, probably not wrongly, points out that the surface people have a lot of weapons too, and greater numbers, so they stand a distinct disadvantage in warfare. "Yeah maybe," says the President of the Sky People, "But maybe not."

Seeing no other option, Raven gasses his people's entire army (!!) into unconsciousness and sinks the entire island to the depths of the ocean. That's so Raven.

This was twenty years ago, and the sleeping gas is set to wear off any time now, so Raven plans to return his people to their watery living death. Or re-up it, rather. Angel makes a feeble argument for not simply gassing your problems away (insisting that, since the Sky People couldn't possibly pose a real threat, they should be allowed to at least try to obliterate mankind.) Raven won't hear of it; he stuns Angel and leaves him on some flotsam as the island sinks once more beneath the waves and all these technological marvels - whatever they may be - are lost.

 

To be... con...tin...ued?

Further Thoughts:

So obviously this is very strange. Angel fights a bad guy who isn't a bad guy but who kind of has a bad guy plan, whom he can't even deter, and none of this has any effect on whether he can get the Avengers and rescue his friends from Magneto.

I remember thinking, the first time I read this story, that it was just a weird, dumb, pointless distraction. And it is pretty much that, but I liked it better upon re-reading it, for a few reasons.

I kind of like the idea of a hero getting sidetracked into an entirely different adventure. In a more modern story, Angel's sidequest with Red Raven could have been more elaborate - perhaps the two winged heroes (is hero the right word for RR?) could team up to defeat some Sky People who had awakened and learned of Raven's treachery, and then maybe go back and fight Magneto together. As it is, the entire misadventure is an insane shaggy dog story with absolutely no relevance to the X-Men's predicament, but that does still have some entertainment value just because of how left-field it all is as Angel essentially stumbles into someone else's story.

Part of the appeal of the Red Raven side-story is its "where did that even come from?" factor and weirdly specific details. As it turns out, Red Raven is actually a very obscure 1940s Marvel hero who appeared only a couple of times before being dredged up here by consummate fan-turned-pro Roy Thomas. They had resurrected Ka-Zar, Namor, Captain America, and The Human Torch (after a fashion) in similar ways, although this effort to incorporate Red Raven is a little half-assed in comparison. Knowing they are paying homage to/stealing from a bygone era makes it more than just a weird random thing... it makes it a weird random thing with history.

Oh, and Red Raven's origin is pretty much exactly the same as the villain The Monarch from the Venture Bros., which may or may not be a coincidence on the part of that show's creators.