UNCANNY X-MEN #123: Listen -- Stop Me If You've Heard It -- But This One Will KILL You!

The X-Men are at it again - "it" being getting kidnapped, brainwashed, and stuck in deathtraps. But this time there's a giant pinball machine!

Originally Published July 1979

We open with, of course, the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, swinging through the streets of Manhattan, thinking about Just Spidey Tingz like how he has a date and no money, when he spots a few familiar faces: namely, X-Men leader Cyclops and Colleen Wing - canoodling!

Now, the last time we saw Spider-Man in this blog, he was fighting the X-Men over a ha-larious spider-related miscommunication back during the days of Factor Three. You might even recall  famous line about a soggy conclusion to their fight. But they've made up since then.

The webslinger does a little stop and chat, then advises Cyclops not to do anything he wouldn't do before swinging off into the night, but no sooner does he turn his back than a sinister garbage truck emerges and drops a tube of kidnapping on the young lovers with a mighty "Sflanng." Spidey happens to recognize that as the sound that gets made by the trademark kidnapping-tubes favoured by his recent foe Arcade, with whom the wallcrawler tangled in the pages of Marvel Team-Up (in this case, teaming with Captain Britain.) MTU also happens to be a Claremont-Byrne joint, where Spider-Man has teamed up with both Cyclops and Colleen Wing/Misty Knight/Iron First/Luke Cage in recent months.

Spider-Man, immediately sensing trouble afoot, gets himself to a pay phone to warn the X-Men, but it appears to be too late: Colossus and Nightcrawler get got while on a double-date with Amanda and Betsy at the Opera (well la-dee-dah, Herr Wagner) while Wolverine gets sneak-attacked while seeing Mariko home from an outing, and Banshee and Storm are the victims of a good old fashioned home invasion.

For those of you not following along with any Marvel Team-Up Recap Blogs, Arcade's "deal" is that he runs Murderworld, a theme park designed as a giant deathtrap: hence his unique fashion sense. He begins by encasing the X-Men in giant Lucite pinballs, which he directs from his own console to their specially-designed fun-house-themed deaths.

Cyclops lands in the "Lady-or-the-Tiger" room: choose the wrong door and get pulverized by the hydraulic battering ram. (For our benefit, Arcade clarifies - behind each door is a concrete wall. There is a way out, but Cyclops will never find it by taking Arcade's word at face value.)

For my money, Wolverine gets the coolest deathtrap - "instant androids" generated out of funhouse mirrors, causing the Cancucklehead to do battle with distorted version of his own self. Nightcrawler is trapped in a bowl-shaped room dodging deadly bumper cars, Banshee is taken to a World War II fantasy "(reminiscent of) the painted back of a pinball machine" (kind of a stretch) and Storm is trapped in a watery trapdoor room, where her attempts to use her powers to blast her way out backfire on her.

Most strangely, Colossus' fate is only to be locked in a dark room with an ominous man claiming to be a representative of the KGB, who interrogates the Russian as to why he has defected to the hated capitalist United States of America.

Facing an imminent smooshing, Cyclops makes a command decision to think outside the box and not zap any of the supposed-doors. Will it pay off?

Blasting his way into Wolverine's mirror-hall nightmare, the X-Men begin to even up the odds, showing the kind of cunning, guile and grit necessary to survive these fairplay death traps. But just as the X-Men's Leader and Resident Cool Violent Loner regroup, they are interrupted by a surprising foe:

Piotr Rasputin, who has rechristened himself The Proletarian, adorned with the Hammer, Sickle, and likeness of Lenin himself!

Arcade cackles to himself at the relatively rapid success of his brainwashing regimen, his true dastardly deed being to pit the X-Men against one of their own! How will they ever get out of this one?

Also, all the women have been taken hostage in giant Hershey's Kisses, just in case Arcade should need some extra leverage I guess. To be continued!

Further Thoughts:

Looks like Arcade really did his research. Not only does he taunt Storm about her claustrophobia - something she was reticent to acknowledge to her own teammates until it became important - he also knew to exploit the self-doubts Colossus had been feeling in order to break his mental fortitude. The guy is good.

As far as Arcade goes, I'm a fan. I love a killer with panache. Maybe overly-elaborate deathtraps call up the campy 1960's TV incarnation of Batman for you - and maybe for you that's a bad thing - but Byrne and Claremont take the premise beyond plausibility into a cartoonish overdrive where you have to appreciate the inventiveness, dedication, and ultimately, the action. You can buy into the dichotomy of Arcade truly wanting to commit a series of violent homicides but also that he's driven to do so with real stylistic flair that gives us something colourful to read about. A balance is struck here that enables the reader to suspend disbelief and ignore the fact that they know intuitively that none of the X-Men is going to get killed by an evil pinball machine, but how will they get out of this one??

The whole scenario enables Byrne to flex his design and layout muscles to devise these settings, and depict the X-Men as being in genuine danger. Just as I feel like the X-Men need the occasional tango with a vampiric dinosaur to keep things interesting, getting a Pinball-obsessed clown-guy in the mix enables the book to revel in comicbookiness without overly compromising the grounded emotional reality that has been established. Plus it's been a couple of months since one of the X-Men got brainwashed, so we have that to look forward to as added flavour.