UNCANNY X-MEN #47: The Warlock Wears Three Faces!

With the X-Men set to disband, it's a perfect time for date night!

Originally published August 1968

With the X-Men forced to go their separate ways, the members are emotionally shaken to their core. Though there isn't much to be done about the new directive, Beast has a few logical counterpoints.

However, he tables those for the moment because its once again date night with Vera and Zelda, and our boys Bobby and Hank are trying to score tickets to the hottest show in town: the mysterious Maha Yogi.

Zelda is displeased.

It's just as well because we see the Yogi using his deadly powers to hypnotise the audience for the nebulous and cool-sounding purpose of turning them into "human time bombs."

I'm not sure if the Yogi is doing a magic act or a motivational speech or what, but this was mid-1968 and I guess Indian Spiritualism was a big trend, what with the Beatles going to Rishikesh and everything. So, sure, I'll buy into the idea that people are willing to pay money to see a guru onstage and that might conceivably be a big date spot for young folk.

While they wait to see if they can get standby tickets, Beast and Iceman take their ladyfriends out to the Coffee A-Go-Go where they run afoul of some hipster types who proceed to pick a fight. I don't know what kind of conservative bourgeois attitudes were informing the Marvel writing process that they needed to cast these Bohemian types as an aggro chain-wielding violence gang but hey, you've got to fill pages somehow.

Beast and Icey do eventually get tickets to see the Yogi and within seconds the crowd is hypnotized and the X-Duo have recognized him as their old foe The Warlock (not that this wasn't already revealed on the first page) aka the actual for-reals Merlin.

I'm not psyched about Merlin's co-opting of Indian culture for his latest scheme, but if all these people are happy to pay to see a white guy in a turban mumbling some mystical nonsense at them they maybe deserve to get hypnotised.

Beast and Iceman get into costume to attack, but Warlock uses some mind games on them, basically using Mastermind's hallucination powers.

Warlock manages to get them on the ropes and actually physically beats on Beast just because he's having so much fun. Iceman turns the tables, however, eventually defeating Merlin by... well, I'm not entirely sure how he does it but it involves stage lights and a hi-fi stereo on full blast.

Talk about going out like a chump.

Warlock is arrested for his crimes (although I suspect there's nothing in the legal code specifically barring mass hypnosis...) and as usual Hank and Bobby do their best to mop it up with Vera and Zelda.

Further Thoughts:

This was one of the weaker issues we've tackled of late, and not just because of the icky cultural appropriation in the Maha Yogi gimmick (it was "the times" as they say, but that doesn't make it okay.) Compared even with the last Warlock appearance, which was messy and strange but at least depicted him as a threat, this one was a bit flimsy. Maybe you can also chalk that up to the need to focus exclusively on Beast and Iceman and the fact that they were running B-stories at the time so they only had 15 pages to introduce and defeat the Warlock as Yogi.

You could have at least had all those people he was hypnotizing get involved somehow.

This issue was a handoff between writers Gary Friedrich, who had done the last few issues as Roy Thomas wound down his initial run on the book, and incoming writer Arnold Drake. Drake was a writer from DC Comics, known for creating the Doom Patrol (who bear many similarities to the X-Men including a brilliant wheelchair-using leader and in fact debuted the same month) and Deadman. To what degree each writer influenced the telling of this story, I can only speculate, but usually in Marvel comics Plot precedes art, which is followed b dialogue, so I'm guessing Drake mostly just wrote the captions and speech.

Which makes me think maybe Beast's soliloquy at the top of the issue, pointing out the flaws in the "split up the X-Men" plan, is Drake disagreeing with the direction of the book he inherited and suggesting he might ditch it at the first available opportunity. Stay tuned to see if that happens.