UNCANNY X-MEN #147: Rogue Storm!

Storm plays the Statue Game... and she may never be the same!!

Originally Published July 1981

To begin with, Nightcrawler is getting high:

That is to say, in order to escape the featureless cube-room where he was being held prisoner, he took a gamble on himself and maxed out his abilities by teleporting as far straight up as he could. We have been repeatedly reminded throughout the series that for Best Practices, Kurt should really be able to see where he is teleporting, or else know the area very well, or else he could wind up inside a wall or something.

Kurt did some quick math and determined how far he would need to teleport to escape, and it paid off. This is all well and good because now he's free from his confinement, but the problem is, he's now falling to his death. And honestly, the X-Men fall to their likely deaths once every two or three months and it should get old (because they never actually die) but for some reason it never fails to excite me. He survives ny dint of some loopy skydiving moves and a convenient water landing.

Meanwhile, there is a powerful storm brewing. Doom considers whether Storm is the one responsible for this storm, but he rules it out based on the fact that he has Storm confined in the living-death prison of a skintight metal mold, and surely Storm's storm powers couldn't create a storm from in there.

Well whatever the source, it's got Phil and Tobe spooked:

As is like to happen, the X-Men wriggle out of their deathtraps. I particularly enjoyed Colossus's segment. You'll recall that he is trapped on an eroding rock in a whirlpool. He could swim down since he doesn't need to breathe when armored up. But in doing so he would trigger deadly lasers that might actually kill him (Doom's own preferred brand of laser had proven effective on him before.)

But, he discovers, if he de-armors back into the smaller Piotr Rasputin, the guns will not sense him and he can swim to safety; as long as he can hold his breath.

I love a good fairplay deathtrap.

Angel has to fly a set course through the laser guns that fire when he leaves his perch. Wolverine more or less escapes his zero-gravity bouncy castle through sheer force of violent will, recalling as he does way back during his days with the Canadian Military, unleashing his berserker rage on his best fiends/surrogate family the Hudsons. It's... a weird time to be reflecting on that, really.

Once free, Wolverine immediately tracks down Dr. Doom, and it comes to fisticuffs, where Doom outmatches the tenacious X-Man...

Soon, however, Colossus and Nightcrawler join the fray and overwhelm Doom by using their tried and true team combat tactics.

Damn, this really worked on Lucifer!

Well, eventually the X-Men do get the better of their foe, and, with very little prompting, he gives them a re-fleshifying orb to restore Storm to her normal state of being.

She awakens feeling refreshed and ready for the day. All she needs is her toothbrush.

In a moment that vividly recalls the Dark Phoenix Saga, Storm has cracked under the pressure of being turned into a barely-living, conscious, no-mouth-having-but-scream-needing statue person, and starts violently hurling weather around the room indiscriminately, as though she were an enemy of all living things and not the Earth-mother goddess type she had once been.

She even gets those thick, raggedy speech balloons of ultimate terror that we first saw with Phoenix.

For a moment it seriously looks like Storm is going to go full Phoenix all over her friends, but Colossus politely asks her not to. Storm, remembering her friend Jean, comes to her senses and disperses the killer weather she has called up.

With all that cleared up, the X-Men take Arcade into custody - they haven't heard from their friends on the B-Team, so they don't know yet how this hostage situation is playing out. Incredibly, the heroes manage to get Doom to let Arcade off with an apology (remember, this all started as a way of settling some kind of unspecified beef between the two, and also Arcade has been a bit of a dick to his host all night.)

It's a really flimsy way to tie off that adventure, but Arcade is basically a comedian and comedians to have a tendency to get away with offering flimsy apologies for acts of wrongdoing.

Even weirder, the X-Men accept an apology from Doom, who admits maybe he got a little carried away when the X-Men stormed his house and all. They agree to consider the slate clean, which is incredibly generous when you consider Doom recently turned Storm into a fully cognizant inanimate object cursed to be aware of her surroundings but unable to move, an experience that was so traumatizing it nearly caused her to be a world-threatening vengeful demoness of weather.

I shouldn't have to sum all that up for you again already - it just happened!

Well, whatever. Live your lives, X-Men.

Lastly, we check in on Cyclops and Lee, who are still canoodling on a sexy mysterious island.

It seems like a nice getaway, minus the fact that Scott calls Lee "Jean" and also might have to eventually explain the deadly red blasts of energy that emit from his face. But before he can get to any of that Lee, spots something off in the distance that pulls her attention:

Oh heck yes, a mysterious futuristic city has popped right out of the water! My kind of scene, baby!

Further Thoughts:

Let me start with the good parts: I actually think Doom and Storm make an interesting twosome. Doom is pure evil - conniving, underhanded, ambitious, cutthroat, violent, controlling, cruel, but also regal, dignified, gentlemanly and courteous (when it suits him). Storm is the caring, nurturing, understanding, compassionate, Goddess of the Earth and Sky who has sworn never to take a life. She should be able to recognize that Doom is no good, and yet either she sees the charm in him or she believes she does. And there is a part of her - the part that was a thief in Cairo, that we'll see much more of in future years - that knows how to get in touch with darkness, and maybe even likes it, and it is likely that Doom woild see that in her. I didn't find it odd or hard to believe at all that Storm would sit down to sup with him, or - after a fashion - part "neither as friends nor enemies," were it not for the flagrant actual torture Doom had visited upon her.

The end of the story - the part about Storm going "Rogue" - was not bad for itself, but this story definitely does not exist in a vacuum, and not only are we less than a year removed from Dark Phoenix, so the idea of an X-Man becoming overwhelmed by her own power fresh in our minds, but it is once again explicitly referenced in the dialogue (because how could it not be?) Giving the X-Men the baggage of losing Jean Grey was a blessing and a curse because it deepens them as characters, but also anchors them from moving forward with their adventures in a carefree way.

As it is, the way this plays out comes off like a Dinner Theatre version of Dark Phoenix with a cheaper ending, down to Doom playing Mastermind - and the idea of Doom being a poor man's anything, let alone Mastermind, is backwards.

It's one thing to have a theme, it's another to rely on a same outcome for every story when you want it to be major. And the idea of female characters like Jean and Ororo constantly being overwhelmed by their own powers bears some serious feminist analysis that I am sadly not equipped to provide.

And the less said about Arcade getting off with an apology, the better. Yeesh.