The X-Men storm Mesmero's cool desert base to rescue Lorna Dane and Iceman!
Originally Published November 1968
The X-Men track Mesmero to his lair in the futuristic "City of Mutants," which appears to be in the Alkalai flats outside Springfield. There he has brought Iceman as his captive and Lorna Dane, whom he will place in the Mutant Energy Stimulator, to awaken her "every latent power" so that she may take her place as Queen of Mutants.
I'll let Mesmero explain:
Couldn't be more simple.
Bobby, watching helplessly - physically restrained in a glass bubble even though Mesmero has a mental hold on him, wonders what effect the Mes-man might have on Lorna, who has otherwise shown herself to be a sweet kid.
When the X-Men arrive, they bust up some underlings, but "deliberately" get themselves captured so as to be taken to where Iceman and Lorna are. There, they witness her emergence from the Mutant Energy Stimulator...
The headline here is not that Lorna Dane has acquired a flowing green Princess of Mars getup, but in fact that she is the daughter of Magneto! Lorna is flush with her new power, the stirrings of her bloodline within her. What will she do?
She zaps Mesmero's guys instead, asserting herself as the same old Lorna she always was. If you're Mesmero, and your power is to mind-control people, you're probably feeling embarrassed that you couldn't get the Daughter of Magneto onto your side, but maybe he was thinking either a) she would naturally side with him or b) the Mutant Energy Stimulator was supposed to warp her brain somehow.
Embarrassing for you, Mesmero.
The Green Guy has one last ace in the hole however, pulling back the figurative curtain to reveal...
Wow! Talk about a quick recovery, huh?
Originally Published December 1968
Even though it would seem Lorna had already made her choice as to what side she was on, with Magneto's appearance all bets are off as he presents a pretty strong argument or going into the family business.
Iceman, who has taken a liking to Sweet Kid Lorna, objects vociferously.
The X-Men agree that if Iceman is going to pick a fight anyway, they might as well back him up, leading to this incredible panel:
Incidentally, nobody actually asks Lorna "Top Drawer Item" Dane what she wants to do.
So, they fight, and it's pretty exciting, and Magneto's/Mesmero's guys do the old "Anti-Cyclops Helmet" bit again, which has a predictable outcome...
The X-Men also encounter this supremely overqualified henchman:
I don't know what that means but it sounds dope and looks cool.
Eventually, the X-Men escape by collapsing the entire building around Magneto and his goons. The fact that they are inside the building when it happens doesn't seem to bug them.
Lorna is completely on the sidelines for all of this, but is revealed (off-panel) to have freed Magneto's legs from under some debris, leaving him temporarily unable to walk (nobody points out the irony of taking on the disability of his greatest rival.) Iceman figures it's not that she's a bad guy now, just that she has more character than to let her just-revealed father be crushed.
The X-Men regroup at their makeshift San Fran HQ, and Cyclops reveals that he doesn't want Iceman back in action because of his personal feelings for Lorna. Iceman takes it as well as could be expected.
Iceman storms off, feeling his oats and proud to be the Hot-Headed X-Man this week, but Cyclops reveals he has a plan. A cunning plan sure to defeat Magneto, and it's kept a secret from us, so you know it will work.
A few days later, a mysterious figure arrives at Magneto's stronghold. What could be his part in this?
Ho!! To Be Continued!
Further Thoughts:
Reading this whole Lorna Dane story is feeling like an entirely different book from the one I had been covering before. There's a great focus and feeling that it's going somewhere, and there's just a shade more sophistication to the proceedings.
Sure, Magneto was only dead for like, a month and a half, but bringing him back made for a pretty good reveal after invoking him so strongly.
The book does falter when characterizing Lorna - female figures in comics in the 1960's (most decades, really) tend to be under-realized - when some insight into her persona would be welcomed. Instead we get only speculation from the male X-Men about her emotional state. Why Magneto appearing makes a difference when she was pretty staunchly non-evil in the previous issues, the book is a little feeble in setting up. But the Iceman angle, with his objectivity being compromised due to his crush, leading to in-fighting, is pretty strong.
Jim Steranko was one of the first "superstar" artists to arrive around the time Jack Kirby was winding down his work for Marvel. Most of the artists they employed had orders to replicate Kirby's work, to greater or lesser degrees of quality. Steranko made his name utilizing experimental, psychedelic effects and progressive structures that pushed the boundaries of storytelling in the Nick Fury feature in Strange Tales, which he was also writing (making him the first writer-artist at Marvel in the 60's, a fact Kirby likely didn't appreciate.) Though these issues are short on formula-busting psychedelia, they're still action-packed and exciting.
Steranko's most important contribution to the X-Men legacy? The logo redesign that rebrands the X-Men from strange and marginal outsiders to bold, world-beating, block-letter adventurers. That logo would embody the X-Men until about 2001 - over thirty years.
Lastly, we are left with a pretty strong, and strange, cliffhanger. It would almost be enough for the X-Men to be left speculating about Lorna Dane's sympathies, along with Iceman walking out on the team in frustration, and Cyclops declaring intriguingly that he has a plan. To add this random appearance by a previously-unknown player in Erik the Red is a truly bizarre twist that breaks the formula just enough to really get the readers puzzling. At first I thought it was one layer too much, but I figured that a big enough deal is made about this guy that you can't help but be curious to see how he fits in.
Saying how great is Steranko's art is like raining in a wet place, but his art is so good that even tho I was only skimming the issue looking at the art I just HAD to read what was going on because the art was just that captivating. To my surprise it was very interesting.
ReplyDeleteThere are elements here that come back right at the beginning of Claremont's run, I wonder if it was so well regarded when it came out that they chose to come back to it into a new run.