As Professor Xavier worries he's losing his bananas, Cyclops and the X-Men are attacked by an unexpected enemy... Scott's brother, Havok!
Originally Published February 1976
As we begin our story, Professor X is being tormented by some unusual - and glorious - dreams, visions of a far-off space battle in a binary-star system where a sole plucky scout ship narrowly escapes some kind of giant impressive fleet of star fighters.
As Xavier struggles with his inability to reach out for help from others with his personal issues, we look in on Lorna Dane and Alex Summers, who have moved to the Southwest to work a desolate-looking ranch in the shadow of the mesas - or buttes, I'm still not sure which.
But as she sends Alex on his way for the day's work -- kissing him so we can be absolutely sure they are definitely 100% together now -- she is zapped by an unknown foe... one she strangely seems to recognize...
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| Feel free to keep a running count of how many times Claremont's narration implores a character not to take a bet. |
Hearing some kind of scuffle, Alex rushes back, only to see Lorna perfectly okay, hanging up a strange new costume - that of Polaris - Mistress of Magnetism! She zaps him, and the mystery foe, who we still have not glimpsed, says that Alex will be useful in their main goal - killing Charles Xavier!
We catch up with Xavier and some of the X-Men, including recent X-quitter Jean Grey, as they see him off on his vacation. Jean reminds Charles to stay out of the sun (he burns easily), a very considerate reminder that he responds to sarcastically, saying he'll also eat properly and watch out for sharks. Fine, be that way, but your mental powers won't protect from melanoma.
Cyclops, Colossus and Storm are there, as is Nightcrawler, who is using an "image inducer" (which I suppose is a device that induces images) to look like a "1930's movie star."
Just as Xavier has boarded the plane, Havok and Polaris arrive in costume and before anyone knows what's what, they start wrecking the joint.
Alex manages to break past the five other mutants, and aim one of his blasts at the Prof's jet (emblazoned with the logo for Project Starcore,) but Nightcrawler tackles him in the nick of time and causes him to destroy a much larger 747 instead. Xavier's plane manages to take off and get away.
With his master plan foiled, the evil genius responsible for this caper makes himself known, and it has Cyclops
That's right, Erik the Red is back! Which is strange because he never existed in the first place... he was just Cyclops dressed in some red bondage gear designed to show off his superior thighs. This was in order to gain Magneto's confidence, a ruse he managed to keep up for about ten pages. Also it wasn't the real Magneto, but an incredibly lifelike robot duplicate apparently acting of its own volition, but that's neither here nor there.
This is definitely one of the stranger things to happen in the comics thus far, and it's up to us, the reader, to decide if this is a cool twist, or just a bunch of nonsense.
Havok struggles against the mind control, barely able to resist the urge to fight his own brother. Polaris, for her part, usually embraces mind control as a way of life, battling it out with Storm and Jean in the skies, while Erik holds his own against Colossus and Nightcrawler.
There's a moment when Storm zaps Polaris with lightning to take her out of commission, prompting Alex to lose it on Cyclops, seemingly ready to blast his own brother into oblivion for the woman he loves. But just then, reinforcements arrive in the form of Banshee and Wolverine. Erik realizes that the numbers really aren't on his side at this point, so he scoops up his proteges and flies away.
Wolverine chastises Cyclops for not blasting them out of the sky with one of his trademarked optic blasts, and Cyclops agrees to take this suggestion under advisement.
He's a little stressed.
As the X-Men consider what has even just happened, we pull back to reveal that they are being watched from afar... by none other than Sentinel fanboy Stephen Lang...
Who himself is being watched by an even more mysterious figure from even further afar!
Further Thoughts:
So this is the way stories are built now: something totally inexplicable happens, and we are teased with finding out the reason for it later. It definitely works to pique fan interest, let's see if it delivers on the follow-through. Between Xavier's freaky space dream, the mysterious appearance of "Erik the Red", the imminent threat of Stephen Land and the mysterious hand watching Lang, we've got a lot of teases to follow-up on. Chris Claremont has really wasted no time in, well, being Chris Claremont.
It's only a few pages but really, the highlight of this issue is Xavier's dream. One thing that I feel defines Claremont's work is that he's up for tailoring his stories to whatever the artist wanted to draw. Was anyone excited by the stories with Count Nefaria and the surprisingly talkative demon? Perhaps not, but give Cockrum some spacey stuff to draw and watch him f l e x. And this was over a year before Star Wars.
What we're seeing is a slowly gathering momentum of inspiration and talent. Things are happening here.
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