UNCANNY X-MEN #113: Showdown!

The X-Men need to grow up.

Originally Published September 1978

The X-Men have been kidnapped by Magneto to his underground volcano lair. There, he has strapped them into chairs that not only neutralize their powers, but also cause them to regress to the physical - but not mental - state of six-month-old children. They are being cared for by a menacing-looking robotic Nanny who feeds them strained peas, wipes their drool, and though we don't see it on panel, presumably changes their diapers. It's got to be one of the less dignified plots a villain has ever hatched on his enemies.

Storm, however, has a secret: at six months old she already had total control of her motor skills (supported by the fact that several months ago we learned she remembered being such a young age.) Though she finds it difficult to muster the strength to do so, she does manage to extricate a lockpick from her headdress and begin the complex work of freeing herself using only her mouth, as she was trained to do during her time as a pickpocketing street-urchin.

Unfortunately, just before the sequence can be completed, the pick drops from Storm's mouth to where she can't reach. Nanny arrives to re-affix Storm's headgear and the infantilized mutant can only cry at her failure.

Meanwhile John Cheever for BBC News (presumably not the American short story writer and novelist) reports Magneto is out there terrorizing the human population with no X-Men to keep him in check. We also see he's even used his recent surge of power - courtesy of Eric the Red - to rebuild his rad asteroid base.

Professor X, out touring the Greek isles with Lilandra, frets over losing his psychic connection with the X-Men, but there isn't much to be done about that now.

Magneto returns to his rad volcano base to check on his captives, only to find Nanny destroyed. The X-Men have been liberated: seems Storm's second attempt, off-panel, was more successful. They appear to be suffering no negative after-effects of sitting in a chair and pooping themselves for days on end, and are utterly spoiling for a fight.

This time, the X-Men use teamwork to overcome Magneto, finally learning the lesson that they should have picked up on long ago.

Pictured: Teamwork?

Unfortunately, the wild battle causes them to destroy the console that keeps the sub-volcano lair from filling with molten hot magma and all parties scatter in retreat. We see Magneto make his escape of course, living to continue menacing mankind and contemplating his total victory over his foes, whom he assumes to be thoroughly melted.

Lava: a famously splashy substance

Topside, we only see Beast and Phoenix escape into the cold icy reaches of Tierra del Fuego. Could the other X-Men be dead?? It only stands to reason.

To be continued...

Further Thoughts:

While there's not a ton to pick apart with this issue - it was a fine conclusion to the Magneto story, which spun out of the Mesmero Circus and leaves us hanging for another month (or week in our time) as to the fate of the X-Men, emphasizing the serialized, rather than episodic nature of these comics since the All New All Different X-Men came around. Things are drawn out, but at a manageable pace and I would say you get a strong unit of story with each 22-page installment.

It was also nice to check in with Prof and Lilandra, considering we'd heard neither hide nor feather of them since Lil announced she was staying on Earth for a while. You would think this would have produced at least a few amusing aside scenes since then, but no.

What's really interesting is what's going on behind the scenes. For the first time, we see Chris Claremont and John Byrne getting their shared credit rather than the standard writer-artist delineation we had seen. Byrne is nothing if not a strong-willed individual increasingly reluctant to devote his energy to a comic in which he didn't feel a creative stake.

Besides what both men have said, I can only make an educated guess as to who generated which ideas during their collaboration, so unless I have particular insight as to whom wanted a thing to happen, I will try to attribute it fairly to both (and if I make a mistake, I'm sure Mr. Byrne will find out and scold me on his famously crotchety forum.)

I have a lot of thoughts on the collaboration between Byrne and Claremont - an all-too-brief but legendary time in comics and for the X-Men in particular. Some of them will come out in these blogs, but mainly I definitely think they have a  "better than the sum of their parts" Lennon-McCartney thing going on. While the two could still stand to work together, the balanced out each other's impulses and created stuff that was better than pretty much anything they'd do elsewhere.

Pictured: Byrne and Claremont?

Lastly, another key figure, indeed another controversial one, has joined the group: Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter has come aboard. Shooter may be one of the least-liked figures in Marvel History, but the evil that men do lives after them and the good is oft interred with their bones, so I'm sure there's some good there (and also he's not dead.)