The X-Men have disappeared on a mission, so Professor X hatches a brilliant scheme to keep throwing mutants at the problem until it goes away!
Originally Published May 1975
We begin in Germany - that is, the part of Germany that is still the setting of Brothers Grimm stories about angry simple village folk with torches and pitchforks. Admittedly, this village has something to be riot about, as they appear to be chasing a mysterious blue demon.
The demon's thoughts reveal that he is, in fact, a man named Kurt Wagner, a circus performer who happens to look demonic. Honestly I don't know what he did to get these people so riled up, but it probably wasn't much, which begs the question how poor Kurt even made it this far. Just as he is about to give himself over to the mob for to be murdered, he is saved by the one and only Professor Xavier, who explains that Kurt is a mutant with special gifts that could be used to aid mankind (the people who were about to rip him limb from limb.)
Professor X is a busy bee, visiting a yellow-clad Canadian special ops agent called Wolverine who respectfully resigns his post to join the Professor...
Man, if that's how he treats his superiors, you've got to wonder if he's going to be a bit of a hardcase who doesn't get along with others.
X also goes to see his old pal Banshee, catching him whilst trying to enjoy a George Jones concert...
And a woman being worshipped as a weather goddess in Africa...
He even pays a call on Sunfire, whom he must have heard about from the other X-Men as he was supposedly dead when they met.
Next, he crosses the Iron Curtain to speak to a young farmboy who can transform himself into steel....
Lastly on his tour, he visits an Apache reservation, speaking to young John Proudstar, who is seen running down a bison and bodyslamming it...
Proudstar is somewhat skeptical of the Professor's offer, probably justifiably.
He may prove to be something of a hardcase. Let's see if he has trouble getting along with others.
The Prof wins Proudstar over by... (checks notes) insinuating he and all of his people are little babies. That seems...
No, yeah, that's the Prof I know.
Having gathered as many new mutants as he can, Professor X brings them all back to the X-Mansion, where they are outfitted with some sweet new Dave Cockrum-designed threads.
Just as they're all figuring out which one of them is supposed to be the hardcase who doesn't get along with others, Cyclops walks in and informs them of their mission...
As he tells it, the X-Men flew off to the South Pacific island of Krakoa (nowhere near Java) to investigate the emergence of an extremely powerful new mutant.
However, just as they were deplaning from their souped up jet, they were blindsided. Cyclops awoke hours later, the plane programmed to automatically fly back to the States, unsure of his teammates' fate. His optic blasts were also super-charged in the process resulting in this bulkier, heavy-duty visor, which if nothing else, looks way rad.
So the task of this random assembly of international mutants - barge back to Krakoa and see if they can beat a mysterious super powerful foe the original, highly-trained X-Men were unable to even see let alone fight!
Sunfire, understandably, has some misgivings.
He's such a hardcase who doesn't play well with others.
The remaining crew decide they've got nothing more important going on this weekend and opt in for the Krakoa suicide mission. Sunfire even returns, literally moments after storming off in a huff.
I tell you, if there's one thing I hate more than a hardcase who doesn't play well with others, it's a hardcase who doesn't play well with others who also flipflops.
Cyclops divides the X-recruits into four teams to take the North, South, East and West quadrants of the Island. When Cyclops and his new best friend John ("Your name is Thunderbird now, get used to it!") Proudstar land in the jet, they find it has suddenly disappeared!
Cyclops and Proudstar make their way to a strange temple that has appeared at the island's center, which seems ungodly dangerous and like an obvious trap but also pretty much their only option. Along the way they are attacked by vines, and Cyclops more or less confirms that the only thing the X-Men learn duringtheir countless hours in the Danger Room is "smash the bad guy."
The rest of the team follows suit from their respecitve directions, encountering colourful obstacles of their own:
Frickin' love that Wolverine's first major foe as an X-Man is "Giant Monster Crabs." Someone needs to bring that back.
Once they rendezvous as the Temple of Obvious Traps, the X-Men make a startling(?) discovery about the fate of the original X-Men...
They're food now!
The X-Men are being drained of their succulent mutant energies as a way of feeding the hideous monster mutant...
Which is the entire island of Krakoa!!! Shock!!!
How do you fight an entire island? You can't, this comic is over, the X-Men are all dead.
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| It's just this for 400 more issues. |
Okay, okay, the X-Men pull the "All Our Powers Combined" trick to unmoor the island from the Earth's Crust and zap it into outer space.
Bet Wolverine came in real handy there.
Iceman finds a moment during this life-or-death battle to still be a possessive dick about Lorna, a woman who is most definitely not his girlfriend at this point:
Luckily, the X-Men's jet resurfaces, having not been on the island when it was flung into outer space, leaving Angel a moment to deliver the winking one-liner to sum up the adventure:
What indeed!
Further Thoughts:
Wow, where do you begin? This is a landmark issue for so many reasons - when was the last time so many iconic characters appeared for the first time? (And while this isn't Wolverine's first appearance, it's not like he was setting the world on fire as a onetime foe of the Hulk.)
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| A truly innocuous line that will provide fodder for decades of stories |
As a character created by white men, whose aggression against those men is probably more intended to mark him as "difficult" rather than rightly aggrieved and on a deep level culturally traumatized, he could probably never ring true, but that doesn't make him uninteresting to follow. But I'm sure we'll have many years with the character to unpack his nuance.
I can't imagine, as a reader, not being at least a little intrigued by this mix, but I do have the benefit of several decades of hindsight, so you have to respect the fact that at the time, people were skeptical of replacing Iceman, Angel, Beast and Marvel Girl, even though I can't honestly believe anyone would miss Warren or Bobby.
The MVP of the issue is Dave Cockrum, whose sketchbook provided the new characters (specifically Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler and, because editorial requested it, Thunderbird) and he clearly loved them more than Wolverine, Sunfire or Banshee. He depicts a bright, clean, lightly-paced action romp loaded with the appropriately Comic Booky level of interpersonal conflict. Len Wein's writing captures all of this attitude and executes the rescue mission effectively, if not superlatively - enough to make it a fine example of a comic book in 1975.
The book promises 64 pages, but 1/3 of that was reprints from the 60's. Still, the book uses its 38 pages of original content well, even if the climax is a little rushed. (Yes, they defeated a giant island monster rather quickly, but how do you depict fighting that for more than a few pages? Again, I feel Cockrum really rose to the task.)
What we're left with here is possibility and potential... there just seems to be one element missing... a mystery-aspect... an unknown quantity... there's a word for that, but I can't think of it now. A factor of some kind.
There are a lot of racial slurs thrown around in this issue.
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