UNCANNY X-MEN #95: WARHUNT!

One of the X-Men pays the ultimate sacrifice to defeat Count Nefaria once and for all.

Originally Published October 1975

When we last left the All-New, All-Different X-Men, they were plummeting to their deaths. Which is sort of a rite of passage for X-Men, as one or more X-Men would be seen plummeting to certain doom in nearly every issue when Neal Adams was drawing the book.

Cyclops plans to have Storm and Banshee each fly two X-Men down with their powers, while Nightcrawler can teleport down safely. Kurt indicates a flaw in that plan - in surprising detail given the urgency of their predicament.

 They adjust quickly, with Colossus opting to find his own way down...

Banshee can only carry Thunderbird, leaving Cyclops to wait for rescue as he falls. Luckily, Banshee does make it back, saving his bacon at the absolute last second.

Once down, they send Nightcrawler in to unlock the mountain for them. Now, in the future, Nightcrawler's teleportation is limited to line-of-sight or in a pinch, into a structure whose layout he knows - otherwise he risks materializing into a solid object. Given the lecture we got about Kurt's powers pages earlier, it's a strange oversight, but this is early days so what are you gonna do?

Inside the mountain, Nightcrawler encounters one of the much-ballyhooed Ani-Men...

While pummelling him, Nightcrawler repeatedly refers to him as "Herr Frosch" which I think means he's either a Frog or in his first year of college. Considering his foe's insistence that he is not a mutant or an animal, but a man, the name-calling is a little harsh, but I guess when two people are trying to pummel each other into oblivion anything goes.

Besides, we find out later that Herr Frog goes by Croaker, which still seems like rubbing it in.

The X-Men venture inside and overcome knockout gas and hypnotized soldiers to make it to the command center, where they duke it out with the Ani-Men. In the course of fighting, Thunderbird and Banshee are knocked out and have to be left behind.

However, the new team manages to overcome the odds (five on five) and rout the Ani-Men.

Outside, Thunderbird and Banshee come to and see Nefaria running off in his jet to let the mountain's self-destruct protocols take care of the trash, and John resolves to do something about it.

It's very hard to say what John Proudstar's plan is but it seems to involve jumping on the plane and beating it up. Banshee advises against, but there's no getting through to this guy.

The Professor mentally calls in to tell John what a bad idea he's had, but he won't listen. He then calls in to Cyclops and the others to tell them that he's mentally disabled the self-destruct and that they should probably go after Thunderbird because that guy is up to some stuff.

But it's too late, as the borderline-mocking narration informs us all too direly.

Further Thoughts:

RIP Thunderbird. I can't help but feel bad about the situation. On the one hand, he was the New X-Man who had the least thought put into his creation, a Native American with a chip on his shoulder whose powers basically amounted to being very strong and fast, dressed in an outfit that was both tacky and culturally insensitive - he was created as an afterthought with the basic intention of killing him almost from the very start.

Maybe he could have been good - you can tell there were attempts to use him well during his brief tenure and try to imbue some layers and lend some significance to his demise and make him not just a stereotype, but there's not a lot of time so it doesn't take.

They certainly didn't do him any favours by having his death be a completely avoidable, foolhardy move that accomplished nothing. It comes off almost as a joke as everyone is telling him to stop doing what he's doing, but uh, we're not left laughing. Not deliberately anyhow.

Admittedly, the story here is overall pretty damn flimsy, although there's nothing wrong with it since it's all action. The X-Men we're meant to like all get some star time, particularly Cockrum-fave Nightcrawler. This two-parter represents the first credits of Chris Claremont on the series, scripting here over the pencils Cockrum had drawn from Len Wein's plot. That self-serious narration is the most purely Claremont thing here, over an otherwise zippy adventure, although the final panels were going to be stark and dramatic either way.