Magneto is back with a secret weapon! Is it a sexy woman in a tube? Click to find out!
Originally Published December 1969
So the X-Men have arrived at the base of the mysterious Creator, who Ka-Zar believes has been disrupting the Savage Land scene by kidnapping the docile Water People for mysterious purposes. Angel, who is a big fan and supporter of the Creator, dating back to when he brought Angel back to life earlier today, flies out to greet his friends and discuss the issue. Ka-Zar feels more comfortable discussing Angel's face with his fists.
And while that may seem a bit rash, Ka-Zar's instincts are proven correct because immediately afterward, out come the Creator's gang of weirdo Savage Land mutants ready to busy heads, crowing that Angel's attempts at parley gave them the extra time they needed to muster their forces.
Guys, that bought you like nine seconds, tops. Well, it could have lasted longer, but you insisted on coming out immediately.
Along with a horde of Swamp Savages, the Creator's mutants take the fight to the X-Men and their fair-haired host. The whole gang is there: Amphibius, Barbarus, Gaza (the blind giant whom the Creator had taught to see telepathically) Crazy Carl, Lupo, Rodney and Pete Gas, everybody.
The X-Men fight their way into the lab, where the Creator has given up his charade and revealed himself as Magneto, since he is so very near victory. The team learns that Magneto has not been finding and recruiting mutants in the Savage Land... he's been mutating regular Savage Landians into his freaky mutant characters! Scandal!
And we are soon to learn the key to his impending victory...
A Sexy Dame!
Wait a second. Wait.Wait. Hold on. Give me a second here. Wait. Wait. Okay. Wait. I know I usually wait until the Further Thoughts section to carp on this stuff (although that regularly doesn't stop me) but... wasn't this exactly the same plan in the last Magneto story, with Lorna Dane?
Unlock Naive Woman's Powers -> ??? -> World domination?
I mean, he even names this one Lorelei. They might as well be the Gilmore Girls their names are so similar. So what happened? Was the Magneto-Bot programmed to carry out Magneto's pre-existing plan? Did Magneto hear about what his doppelganger was up to and decide he wanted to give that plot a try? Or - and this is my preferred theory - was the Magneto-Bot so well-programmed that its AI-simulation of Magneto's psyche generated the exact same plan that its creator/model came up with, independently, at a later time?
Or, and this is a pretty far reach here, maybe the writers just didn't have that many unique ideas, and didn't see this as being a copy of that previous story.
Lorelei puts all the X-Men-Men in thrall with her hypnotic sexy siren song, but Marvel Girl, being Extremely Heterosexual, is unaffected, leaving her the last X-Person standing between Magneto and world domination.
As cheesy as this premise is, it at least leads to a spotlight for Marvel Girl's telekinetic abilities, with the convenient advantage that Magneto has to dampen his own powers to not fry his sensitive equipment (hence the funky harness.)
However, as much as she tries to hurl debris around the room to destroy Magneto's machines, she can't seem to do enough damage, until she plays her ace in the hole...
How indeed?
Pretty sneaky, sis.
As usual, all it takes is one good blast to get the ball rolling and before you know it, the entire hideout starts collapsing. The X-Men get out in the nick of time and Cyclops reckons that Magneto surely couldn't have survived the explosion and having his base collapse on him, because I guess it's his first day on the job.
The Savage Land Mutants all begin to revert back to their humble Savage Land Human forms and the issue ends on a bittersweet note as Ka-Zar wonders how they could possibly be happier as normal humans, and the X-Men - those studly, world-saving action heroes - lament that some people would indeed be happier without the burden of awesome powers.
Personally, if I were Amphibius, I'd be happier as a frog. Yike.
Further Thoughts:
Although Magneto's masterplan (such as it was) was a bit familiar, this was a perfectly good issue, given mostly to the battle between the X-Men and the Savage Land mutants. It's actually a pretty cool battle as the henchmen have some pretty kooky abilities, all lovingly rendered by Mr. Adams. Adams is so good that he can make Amphibius, whose power is that he is a human-sized frog, look like a threat.
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| Beast, wishing he could be fighting eight frog-sized men. |
It was no epic, no emotional rollercoaster, like the battles with the Sentinels or Sauron. Nothing overly complicated or surprising happened once we knew that the Creator was Magneto all along. The main feature was that Jean got to shine and basically take out Magneto on her own, which is great, and if this is the bottom level of quality for the Roy Thomas/Neal Adams issues, it's a perfectly good, straightforward comic book story.
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