UNCANNY X-MEN #58: Mission: Murder!

The Sentinels take Iceman and Alex captive, and we learn what makes Larry Trask's evil heart tick.

Originally Published June 1969

 
I've drawn attention to Neal Adams' crazy layouts before and while at times they run a bit wild, when you need to really imbue a scene with larger-than-life drama or action, he has an incomparable talent. Witness the above two-page spread, which opens this issue with a heart-pounding depiction of Beast and Icemand struggling against the Sentinel, interspliced with Larry Trask giving the scoop on how, exactly, he has specifically designed these Sentinels with a mind to fighting the X-Men specifically.

He also explains that he has the ability to control the robots with a mental helmet. He also also explains that he doesn't believe the Sentinels ever turned on mankind, that only the X-Men's "trickery" made it appear so, and - listen. I would rather they had just not addressed that point because the X-Men's P.R. has never been that good. They have definitely never shown the ability to spin a story to their advantage, so my previous assumption was just that nobody knew anything about what happened that day. But whatever, I guess it's okay for Larry Trask to be a Sentinel truther.

After six rather intense pages, Iceman insists Beast make a getaway while he holds them off, essentially getting captured deliberately so he can find Lorna. Beast is appropriately conflicted about this, being the oldest X-Man and letting the youngest risk sacrificing himself. The way the friendship between these two has been built or years, I really liked that.

Beast warns he other X-Men via radio, and Angel, the hotheaded X-Man, decides to fly back on his own. At Sentinel HQ, Larry has a philosophical debate with Judge Chalmers over whether whether they had been misled - and in turn misled the public - about the danger of mutants of mass destruction.

Anticipating this, the media-savvy Trask goads Iceman into attacking him at the first available opportunity, recorded on hidden camera. Iceman, the hotheaded X-Man, falls for it. This is after Trask has put Iceman in a sauna designed to rob him of his mutant powers for four hours, no more no less.

Ah, to be one of those all-purpose comic book scientist inventors.

Iceman is deposited in a holding cell with his beloved Lorna and a very strangely-garbed Alex Summers.

For reasons not adequately explained, Trask has seen fit to design Alex Summers, who didn't himself know he had any powers until 12 hours ago, with a slick black catsuit that measures his energy output in abstract chest circles. Presumably this is monitored through the use of metallic headgear. Even less explanation is given as to why Trask decided he had to give Alex a codename.

The newly-christened Guy Called Havok has allowed himself to become Trask's pet mutant in order to spare Lorna from a similar fate, despite not knowing who she is. Bobby accuses Alex of taking the coward's way out by not fighting, but Alex points out that fighting isn't his "thing" and buddy, it's been a literal day since he got these powers. So it's hard to fault Alex there.

Trask embarks on an Ash Ketchum-like quest to capture all known mutants, beginning with The Living Pharaoh, who is in the midst of Monolithification (with Alex out of the picture) until the Sentinels deploy their special anti-mutant goo that neutralizes his cosmic ray absorbing powers.

Yuck. To think the guy we spent three months following as a world-conquering supervillain ends his career smothered in earwax. How undignified.

Next, he sends the Sentinels after Magneto and Mesmero, but the Master of Magnetism has a very special surprise...

You guys, Mesmero is so sad to find out his friend was really just a robot fake. I would be too.

Trask observes that yes, Magneto has given him the slip for the time being by replacing himself with a robot. Maybe he really is dead. That would explain how the Sentinels still can't find him. Or maybe he was really only a robot this entire time (nobody says this, it's just my theory.)

Judge Chalmers arrives for a tour of this somehow-Constitutional Mutant Internment Facility and begins to think maybe the Younger Trask is not quite as stable as his father, the original inventor of genocidal robots. They come to blows, and Chalmers rips the medallion from around Trask's neck, which he had just moments ago recalled, for our benefit, was given to him as a child by his father with the explicit instruction not to ever remove it, ever, under any circumstances, with no further explanation requested.

As it turns out, the Medallion was a kind of signal-blocker preventing the Sentinels from discovering that Larry was in fact a mutant himself! It worked so well that even Larry didn't know he was a mutant!

Yikes! To be continued!

Further Notes:

This is the first X-Men comic not to feature a 4-page backup story in months, and what a difference those four pages make: so much happens here I'm a little exhausted from going over it all. Trask is such a busy guy in this, I don't know where he found the time to set this all up (well, presumably he started immediately after his dad died years earlier.) A lot of time is devoted to Trask's anti-mutant histrionics, and to making sure the Sentinels are established as the premiere ready-for-anything unstoppable foes, to the point of laying it on a bit thick, I'd say. Its like, the mutants "killed" your father, we get it Lar, but he was a genocidal mad scientist sooooo...

The medallion is hard to believe, but the original Sentinel story ends with them being thwarted by a signal-disrupting crystal swung from a helicopter and that never stopped me from reading, so I will have to buy into just about anything.

Now, from a modern perspective, the "you are the thing you hate" twist is a little dicey. It has a certain amount of "shock value" but it has little to tell us about how to combat fanatacism and prejudice in the real world, which I feel could be the greatest attribute of a Sentinels story as opposed to, say, a Locust or Count Nefaria type story. Yes, sometimes the people in power do turn out to be hypocrites (that will happen when you profess hatred against a random group of people to gain political capital) but it's rare that they are unaware, deep down, of their own hypocrisy the way Larry is

My point is, in addition to harming the story's applicability, it basically just serves as a contrived reason for the Sentinels to turn on their creators. Again.

Although I chirp the in-story logic behind it, I find Havok to be one of the most visually distinctive designs for a character, especially for the era. With its black-and-white motif, his gear has a slickness that eschews the poppy bright-coloured look most comic book heroes favour, and the circle motif is cool, a non-obvious signature look. It ties into the new depiction of his power, a trail of overlapping circles that has a unique blend of explosive, chaotic "power overload" and crisp control to it. I'll credit Neal Adams with that unless corrected otherwise.

If only he didn't need to refer to it as a "monkey suit" or his codename as "corny." I don't get why the writers put words like that in characters' mouths when they are responsible for these looks and names.