UNCANNY X-MEN #131: Run For Your Life!

The X-Men go toe to toe with Emma Frost!

Originally Published March 1980

Kitty Pryde has been on the run all night from the Hellfire Club, who have successfully kidnapped X-Men Storm, Colossus, Wolverine and Professor X. She had managed to briefly contact Nightcrawler, who was in New York with Cyclops and Jean, but what were they going to do, fly halfway across the country on a supersonic jet?

Oh, right.

The X-Men try to demonstrate to Kitty that they are the good guys, but the panicked 13-year-old slips away with her ability to move through walls. Partly, that comes down to sending Nightcrawler to swoop her out of harm's way. Although a super nice guy once you get to know him, Kurt's appearance is not exactly the most reassuring.

Jean changes back into her Church clothes and uses her mental ability to scan the room and find the girl. Kitty is relieved to see someone who looks like a normal person and collapses, tearfully, into Jean's arms.

Scanning one of the goons' minds, Jean learns that her teammates were kidnapped by a telepathic Morgan Fairchild lookalike named Emma Frost, who is aligned with a sinister cabal of wealthy industrialists known as the Hellfire Club, who seek to increase their social, economic and political capital. Love a good cabal.

Jean recognizes the name of the Club, given it features prominently in her recent trashy romance-novel hypno-fantasies, along with the bemuttonchopped Jason Wyngarde, whose modern-day incarnation she met at Dazzler's show. Given this is all too much to be a coincidence, she reports everything to Cyclops so that he can help determine what to do.

Jk, lol. I'm sure it's nothing and Wyngarde is on the level.

Jean uses her powers to psychically puppet their captured Hellfire goons through the gates of the Frost Enterprises compound where the X-Men are being held. Frost notes that these particular goons had not been equipped to handle Cyclops, Jean and Nightcrawler, but hey, some people are just overachievers I guess. Nothing suspicious about this big wooden horse.

With Frost attending other matters, Kitty is able to walk through the walls into the main interrogation room where Wolverine and Colossus are being kept. She finds she can unlock the cages just by phasing her hand through them, which, sure why not.

Once inside, Cyclops, Nightcrawler and Dazzler bust some heads while Jean goes after the boss with a psychic duel. It does not go so well for the White Queen...

The building collapses, leaving our heroes unscathed but no sign of the White Queen.

Afterward, the Professor - who had somehow escaped under his own power - offers Dazzler a chance to join the team. Like any sane person (Madrox, Havok, Polaris) she declines, preferring to ride the coke-fuelled highs of the New York dance music scene in the early 1980s.

Mr. and Mrs. Pryde are initially fixing to give Professor X a piece of their mind for putting their little girl in mortal danger, letting her stay up all night, and nearly getting her kidnapped and/or inducted into a fetish club for rich weirdoes. But Jean proves that she has been paying attention to the Prof all these years and exerts a little psychic influence over Mr. Pryde.

The issue ends with Scott and Ororo pondering the changes to Jean's character, and wondering whether there is some outside influence at play here. I'm sure it's fine...

Further Thoughts:

We are seeing a delightfully subtle (as subtle as these comics get) emphasis on Jean now - her powers and her personality. After being sidelined, for the practical reason of being too powerful to credibly struggle against bad guys like Moses Magnum and Arcade, Jean came back to the fold during the Proteus Saga, and is very much at the forefront now.

I lament that this is the only time we get to see Dazzler's Roller Skates in action

Here, Phoenix far-outmatching the human threat of the Hellfire Club actually works and is important to the long-term direction of the story. Again and again in this story, she demonstrates how she is a one-woman wrecking crew for the X-Men: demolishing and reassembling cars, puppeteering evil henchmen, and handily vanquishing the supposedly formidable telepath Emma Frost. We have been told that there not many known limits to Jean's current abilities - but it's so satisfying to see that in action, and see it become an issue, rather than a quick fix to any problem.

Again and again, when they see it in action, the X-Men, particularly Cyclops, mark it was weird and wrong, especially with the change in attitude that goes along with it. When Jean destroys the Hellfire Goons' car, she growls, "These animals got no more than they deserved."

Reminder: she is speaking about a grisly car wreck that she caused.

If it were just a matter of the Jean we'd always known blithely exercising her powers in new, extreme ways to the X-Men's benefit, it would not be a sustainable way forward. But it's been pretty clear here that we are reading a story about the temptation and corruption that comes with limitless power., especially when one is being influenced by forces beyond their perception. The drama is slowly notching up, issue after issue, due to come to a head in, oh, a few months or so.

 

Also a hero in this story is young Kitty, who has a small but legit part to play as she becomes the first Kid X-Man, actively assisting in the rescue of the captured teammates, and taking notice of Piotr's bravery in subduing a Hellfire Goon who had fired on the group of them.