Count Nefaria is back -- hell yeah!
Originally Published August 1975
Having come together to vanquish Krakoa (the Island that Walks LIKE A MAN!) the new and old X-Men alike must decide their fate as a group.
The first mutant of either faction to bail on the opportunity to fight for Professor Xavier's cause is Sunfire, who insists that his only cause is Sunfire, and the glory of Japan. We will never find out exactly what were his reasons for coming back to fight Krakoa in the first place but presumably they applied solely to the cause of fighting Krakoa and Sunfire will not be convinced otherwise.
Colossus, Wolverine, Storm, Nightcrawler and Thunderbird are in, however, since they generally had nothing going on (well, Storm did have her goddess status, but otherwise.) Banshee is reticent since he's a touch older than the rest of the group (as far as he knows) but Professor Xavier counters his arguments the way only a true intellectual can...
Yes, just like he did Thunderbird, Prof pulls the old "Guess you're just a chicken..." argument.
I'd also like to point out that Cockrum, as of Giant-Size, has changed Banshee from a leprechaun-esque caricature to a more dashing Irish rogue... this is undeniably for the best since I always found the original depiction oddly hard to look at.
So Banshee is on board, but you know who's not? All the old X-Men. They've decided they've had enough X-Manning for a lifetime... and having just been abducted and made into a sumptuous meal for a mutant island, who can blame them?
They also seem wary of being crowded out by these newcomers and decide just to cut bait already. Except for Cyclops, who plays like he's on the fence about it, but we know what really comes first in his life, and it's not a redhead.
Cyclops' persona within the new X-Men dynamic is immediately and completely established: he's someone who identifies primarily as The Leader Of The X-Men and he really would not know what to do with himself if that were not the case - something that would come up in big ways over the years.
Maybe I'm projecting but the decisive way the original X-Men are ushered out feels like a way of saying "Don't like it? Well you should have bought the book when they were the stars, then!" So much the better as we have all these exciting new characters to explore and you don't want to have to service that and play like Iceman and Angel are also worthwhile characters.
So, Cyclops proceeds to drill his new recruits to use their powers and act like a team, and we are treated to a montage of Danger Room training sessions, as the new X-Men grapple with killer robots (set to non-lethal) and laser blasts.
As the X-Men struggle to really pull together as a unit, a lot of focus is placed on that hard case Thunderbird not being able to play well with others.
John even gets a thought bubble where he muses to himself that his hot temper is causing him to blow this potentially good thing, which I think is an intriguing character beat that will hopefully bear out over the many years of Thunderbird stories to come.
Meanwhile, in the depths of Valhalla Mountain, the headquarters of NORAD...
These fetching individuals are the Ani-Men, and they have come at the behest of none other than...
Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Of all the medium-level villains from the original 60's run, Wein and Cockrum have dragged my personal fave Count Nefaria out of the mothballs with a scheme to commandeer the United States' Missile Defense stockpile to ransom the world. I fucking love this guy!!
So let's recap: after the failure his scheme to recruit five random C-list superpowered thugs to put a dome over Washington, D.C. (beating The Simpsons and Stephen King to it by decades,) Nefaria escaped to his vaguely-defined Central European Stronghold and used crime-science to mutate five randos into horrifying human-animal hybrids, on the premise that, if they are successful, he will restore their humanity.
If there's a flaw in this strategy, I for one can't see it.
The best part is that he gains access to Valhalla, this presumably heavily-secured national security base, by tricking a hapless staffer into pushing a button that opens the portal in with this irresistible lure:
Tell me you wouldn't.
All this is explained to the X-Men by now-Avenger Beast, who reacts to the news that all his friends have quit and been replaced by a bunch of newbies with a truly great "Uh... okay."
The X-Men, including injured-in-training Thunderbird, zip over in their jet. Nefaria is delighted to get a second crack at his foes, and starts throwing missiles at them.
The jet is destroyed, but they are able to detach the front capsule and ride around in that for a minute before it is destroyed by Valhalla's disintegration ray, leaving the X-Men to fall to certain doom.
To be continued!
Chris Claremont ends up using all of the original X-Men in places throughout his run...except for Iceman. Except for one Murderworld issue, Claremont only uses Iceman when he's forced to by crossover. I thought it was weird when I was a kid, but then Claremont came back in 2000 and used pretty much all of the X-Men EXCEPT for Iceman! I guess he just hated the character.
ReplyDeleteI probably haven't made it very secret that I thought Iceman and Angel were not such interesting characters during the book's initial run, and history mostly bears that out.
ReplyDeleteOccasionally, when Claremont brought Angel around he did a good job with the "suave playboy" characterization, and probably his best moment under Claremont was being a damsel-in-distress with the Morlocks... and he was unconscious for most of that!
Iceman had that whole playful youngster thing, but that really wears itself out when you have a new generation, even if the ANAD X-Men were still meant to be older than him. In CLASSIC X-MEN #1, Claremont shows what happened the night after the events of Giant-Size, and Iceman tries on some angsty hotheadedness, and it doesn't really fit well. I wouldn't put it on Claremont though because in 50 years I can't think of a moment where I was really interested in Iceman (or Angel) as characters.
I do think he would have loved to write Beast more - Nightcrawler filled that slot a lot of the time with his swashbuckling attitude, but there was no tech junkie in the ANAD crew (until, I suppose, Kitty, and sometimes Kurt.) He even had Hank snatched out from under him by Morrison in the 2000's, from X-Treme!