The X-Men battle nefarious alien sex offenders on the planet of the Techno-Conans!
Originally Published October 1981
We begin not with the X-Men, but with the Fantastic Four, who are, as usual, bickering.
The reason for this fussing is that the Invisible Girl (not yet a woman) has prepared a nice home-cooked dinner for the boys of the house, and they're all off tinkering with Mr. Fantastic's latest experiment like a bunch of ungrateful ingrates.
This kind of domestic non-conflict is pretty much standard for an opening scene depicting the Fantastic Four at home, very much their shtick, but it's warm and welcoming so far as it goes. Hey, we're reading an X-Men comic here - there's a chance we don't know about the very Sheldon-and-Amy relationship Reed and Sue Richards have.
Sue gets an alert concerning a random alien running around Manhattan, shooting at cops et cetera. The Four all agree to go investigate, thus finding a legitimate reason to avoid eating Sue's dinner.
The alien turns out to be a Shi'ar agent named D'Syndri, who is actually not shooting indiscriminately at human cops, but fending off a squad invisible aliens called the Badoon. (The cops merely happen to be in the way.) Remember, the Shi'ar - at least under Empress Lilandra - are friends of the X-Men and thus of the Earth. Except for the time they sentenced Jean Grey to death. Water off a duck's back though.
The invisible Badoon manage to silence D'Syndri before she can properly explain herself, only managing to mutter incoherently a series of words pertaining to Arkon, the Badoon, and warning Xavier. Before anything else can be explained, the aliens also manage to teleport the Male members of the Fantastic Four away, with Susan evading capture by way of her invisible powers.
Speaking of Arkon, Storm has been having nightmares lately about being caught up in a heated battle, fighting by the chesty alien barbarian's side against hordes of unknown lizardlike foes. Storm awakes wondering what it could all mean and at that very second Sue arrives to inquire about this Shi'ar-Arkon-Badoon thing.
The X-Men don't know from Badoon, but they do know that they are friends to both Lilandra and Arkon, so any enemy of theirs is also an enemy of the X-Men. The team, plus Susan, agrees to zap over to Arkon's homeworld (which you'll all recall is called Polemachus) and intervene, but not before Kitty unveils her latest self-designed outfit.
Oy, with this kid.
Once on Polemachus, the X-Men encounter Sashia, the Grand Vizier's Junior Associate Vizier, who explains that it was she who transmitted those visions of battle into Storm's unconscious to inspire her to come - because there's no better way to convince someone to help than by telling them it will involve a bloody struggle for your life in a series of vivid, ambiguous dreams.
As to how the Shi'ar are involved, Sashia says "You know what, they've got their own problems with the Badoon and that's unrelated to this, so I don't really know, but I'm glad it all brought you here."
Sashia also brings the X-Men up to speed on how the inhabitants of Polemachus finally decided to quit their warlike ways, and had about a week and a half of peace before the alien Badoon arrived and overwhelmed them (thus, I suppose, vindicating them for being ready for war at a moments notice before.)
Cyclops devises a plan where they split into three squads to infiltrate and take down the Badoon headquarters, which involves Storm and Invisible Girl dressing as sex slaves because the Badoon have icky gender politics and don't allow any women into their citadel except for the purposes of satiating their nasty alien reptile sexual appetites.
The plan is threefold: Liberate the Fantastic Four and Arkon, destroy the energy generator that powers the Badoon's weaponry, and punch as many Badoon as they can manage. Nightcrawler and Wolverine have one of their classic conversations about what it means to take a life, and the field leader of the army of Polemachus rolls his eyes, saying that on his planet, Wolverine would be a total hero, role model, and paragon of virtue, end of discussion. Y'all humans be complicating things with ethics and shit.
Got to admit, Kurt keeps coming up short in these debates.
The battle is long, but it at least gives us Colossus slugging it out with THE MONSTER OF BADOON.
What is that? Why is that? It is never explained and yet it doesn't need to be.
Once the FF and Arkon are freed, the X-Men and Fantastic Four team up and combine all their powers like a game of Gobliiins to destroy the thing and leave the invaders hopeless, and mostly dead.
The Polemachusians join the battle, killing thousands of Badoon between scenes, including their leader on the planet, Brother Royal (with cheese.)
For about three seconds it seems like Nightcrawler might die of injuries sustained in the battle, but I hope it doesn't ruin the suspense for you if I tell you he does not.
There's a big feast, and Colossus and the Thing spend all night arm-wrestling, only for Piotr to be too distracted by Kitty's latest wardrobe change.
Storm and Arkon also have a chat, acknowledging they definitely have feelings for each other, but belong to different worlds. I don't exactly ship them, but pairing them up wouldn't be any worse than your average 90 Day Fiancé couple.
Everyone goes home, and the story ends.
Further Thoughts:
I like these annuals less when they are really just very long comics. We've already seen Arkon and the Imperions and everything before, and there's really nothing more interesting to say about them, and the Badoon aren't exactly exciting antagonists either. I like annuals that really take us to strange new places, throw on some weird high concept, feature a villain who is trult unique, a plot that is very involved, features a significant development in the lives of our heroes, or introduces some dynamic new character that ends up being important in the long run.
With that in mind, I've been hearing a lot about Avengers Annual #10 and how Ms. Marvel lost her powers there. Being that she shows up in the X-Men comics not long after, I'm starting to wonder if that might be somewhat relevant to our work here...
We begin with a woman falling off the Golden Gate Bridge, plummeting to her death, only to be rescued by local superheroine Spider-Woman and her Amazing Thighs.
Spidey-Womany brings this parachute-less basejumper to a hospital where they determine she is utterly mindless. That is to say, she has the mental capacity of an infant, with no memory or sense of self. The Doctors try reaching out to see if any long-term care facilities have had any patients go missing lately, since it's likely this semengly grown woman has never even been able to feed herself.
Lt. Sabrina Morrel, SFPD, tells them not to bother - the woman in question is no average patient, she is Major Carol Danvers of the U.S. Air Force. She rattles off Danvers' impressive milirary and civilian resumé, including her time as Editor for "Woman" magazine, noting that Danvers' last known residence was in New York, and that she's been missing for six months.
What Spider-Woman knows, and you and I know, but the rest of the world doesn't know, is that Major Danvers was not merely yoir typical magazine-editing ex-Air Force Hand-to-Hand Combat Expert NASA Security Director. She was also the high flying superheroine and Avenger known as Ms. Marvel. Sensing that this lack of mental facility was not caused by a mere bump on the noggin, Spider-Woman calls up Professor Xavier, who may be able to use his psychic powers to diagnose the source of the Major's impairment.
Xavier travels all the way from New York to confirm that yes, Danvers' mind has been completely erased. But there is hope - there is some stuff floating around in Carol's melon that the Prof may be able to coax back to the surface, to help Carol return to normal. In the meantime, he has picked up the residual psychic image of her assailant - a rangy young woman with a flat top and heavy eyeshadow named "Rogue."
Well that solves that mystery!
We soon see Rogue standing over a beaten and broken Captain America, boasting that she has used her mutant power to absorb Ms. Marvel's powers and memories. This happens when she makes flesh-to-flesh contact with anyone, which, being that she is a seductive villainess, she prefers to do by giving a sexy evil kiss, like so:
It's not specified whether this same move was performed on Carol - Mr. Claremont will be leaving that up to individual interpretation.
The power transfer leaves the victim incapacitated for a span of time, leaving Captain America down and out for the duration.
Rogue makes her statement by throwing the unconscious Cap through the window of the Avengers mansion. Disturbed, the Avengers (Beast, Scarlet Witch, Vision, Jocasta, Hawkeye and Wonder Man) put in a call to Iron Man. Tony Stark is not in costume when he answers, so he does a deepfake and projects Iron Man's helmet over his face.
Wait, wait, wait, wait. The other Avengers don't know who is inside the Iron Man suit? Old comics seem crazy to me now.
Iron Man soon has some trouble of his own, as he gets a visit from Janet Pym. Janet wants to see Stark, but Tony suits up as Iron Man and says Tony was called away. Apparently Janet also doesn't know that Tony is Iron Man, but Tony thinks it's okay to meet with her in costume since I guess both know Janet independently, and he knows that she's the Wasp and her Husband is Yellowjacket -- I really don't get what the rules are here.
But it doesn't really matter anyway since it turns out to be a ruse!
Janet was, in fact, the evil Shapeshifter Mystique, the leader of the new Brotherhood of Eeeeevil Mutants! And she's just put a techno-whammy on Iron Man, so now he, too, is down for the count!
Don't ask how Mystique knew to ask for Tony and get Iron Man.
To treat Cap, the Avengers call on the medical expertise of Donald Blake, the alter-ego of Thor (I guess they're allowed to know who he really is?) but before he can arrive, he is knocked out by Rogue. Spider-Woman intervenes, and Rogue is stymied by her inability to use her powers on Spider-Woman because her whole body is covered up by her costume.
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| Foiled by sleeves! |
I don't even want to dig into that one.
Blake transforms into Thor, but unfortunately his need to keep his glorious biceps on display leaves him prone for Rogue steal his power too.
Now she has triple Avenger power! She's basically unstoppable!
The Avengers arrive on the scene, and none too soon because it's happening on their doorstep.
Unfortunately, Rogue cannot absorb any more of their powers, since Vision is a robot, Wonder Man is a being of pure energy, and Hawkeye is just some schmoe. So she settles for beating them up and running them off.
Back at the Avengers mansion (aka, right here) Spider-Woman informs them of Rogue's connection to Ms. Marvel's assault. This causes all the Avengers to lament that Ms. Marvel was only an Avenger for a really short time, but she was a great character, and people just needed to give her a chance and get to know her and see what she could do, rather than rejecting her because they don't believe in seeing representations of strong, powerful women.
Surely there's nothing to read into here, right? This is just one fictional character talking about another fictional character purely in terms of in-universe reality, no deeper implications from former Ms. Marvel writer Chris Claremont, right?
The Avengers recount, for our benefit, the last time they say Carol, in a story where a being from an alternate dimension by the name of Marcus impregnated her with his own essence so that he could be birthed into our universe. Carol then decided she loved Marcus - in a romantic sorta way - and ran off with him to start a new life.
Personally, I hope they decide to skip that when adapting into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yike.
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| Talk about babymama drama. |
Back in the world of things I comprehend, Mystique and Rogue free the other members of the Brotherhood (Blob, Pyro, Avalanche and Destiny) by dropping Iron Man from a plane onto the prison where they are being held, like a metal slammer on a stack of POGs.
The Brotherhood and the Avengers fight...
And the tide turns when Iron Man is able to get the thingy off his back and start fighting Rogue, whose extra bonus powers are fading (except for Ms. Marvel's.)
Mystique and Rogue beat a retreat, leaving Pyro, Blob and Avalanche to get smacked down by the heroes and presumably re-arrested:
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| 02_-_MouseRat_-_The_Pit.mp3 |
By the way, have you met Jocasta? She's a robot with boobs.
With that sealed up, we jump forward a few weeks. Carol is convalescing at the X-Mansion, bits and pieces of her memory and identity having returned thanks to intensive work from Charles Xavier. She's a person again, even if she may never truly be herself.
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| Doing well for someone who had the mental capacity of a toddler not that long ago. They're even letting her swim! |
The Avengers arrive to check in on her, and when she tells them Marcus is dead, a victim of his rapid aging in our dimension, they offer their condolences, but she offers a shocking revelation:
As it turns out, Carol does not reflect positively on her time with Marcus. Seems he was using time traveller technology to nudge her opinions of him to coerce her into loving him and wanting to be with him. And where I come from, that's not considered the act of an upstanding young man.
Carol calls them out on basically not treating her with personal respect when she found herself with a an unwanted pregnancy, worried more about the baby and taking Marcus' words at face value - those of the mysterious time travelling entity who had just violated her body - than hers.
She closes with a message about how there's more to being a hero than just punching The Blob so hard he falls into a pit or whatever, which comics has been grappling with for generations since.
The Avengers fly off in their jet, leaving Carol to her treatments and Scarlet Witch thinking there but for the grace of God go we.
Further Further Thoughts:
This is some heavy stuff to drop into a comic that previously had been a fun caper about the Avengers getting their powers stolen, and when I decided to pivot to this particular story, to cover off the story of Carol Danvers, I didn't expect quite all of this.
What happened with Carol - in issues of Avengers written by Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter with David Michelinie and Bob Layton - does sound like quite a mess. It was intended to be a send-off for the character, whose story (and ongoing series) was ending, but having her walk off into the sunset with the enigmatic time traveller who violated her very physical being to give himself life and then used time-magic to make her love him feels tone deaf even for the bygone days of the 1980's. (Not to mention insanely convoluted.) What may have been intended as an impossible star-crossed romance overcoming all odds actually reads as a sexual assault where the victim's friends turn a blind eye while the victim feels she has no choice but to give her to give her rapist another chance, even s he freely admits he has coerced and groomed her against her will.
It was important to Chris Claremont that Ms. Marvel be treated with dignity, since he had written her series and tried to bring a true depth of character to her, so it can't have been good for him to see her dismissed this way. In this comic, he is able to reckon with some of the baggage that that story would have left in the character, as well as wagging a finger of shame - implicitly, but borderline literally - at the people who allowed it to happen (with the Avengers standing in for writers like Shooter and Michelinie.)
Rogue, despite coming out of this responsible for a fresh load of Carol's baggage, ends up as weirdly secondary to the whole story, despite being the big new character introduction.
Comics don't always have to be about real issues and they don't always have to mirror real life exactly - these are not documentaries or even serious dramas. But if they aspire to be really good stories, they owe it to themselves to practice verisimilitude and do their best to reckon with the implications of the stories they depict. Bad stories sweep real humanity under the rug for cheapo plots and tidy endings, and the men who had written Carol's exit from the Avengers didn't take the time to think about what, exactly, they were writing.
This issue puts in a lot work to correct that - and while one's opinion may very of whether it's good writing or a clunky attempt to patch up a poor story, this is what I'd call an Annual.
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