To defeat Kulan Gath and free Manhattan from his spell, the X-Men and Avengers must team up with... Selene?!?! The evil mutant vampire witch they are constantly fighting?? That Selene??
Originally Published March 1985
We begin with... torture!
Acting on the orders of their new master and benefactor, the evil wizard Kulan Gath, the New Mutants have kidnapped their boss' hated foe - that is, the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, who remains one of the few inhabitants of Manhattan to not be under a spell that makes them think it's Conan-Times.
This puts Spidey at a distinct disadvantage, not the least because he doesn't even speak the Barbarian language, and so can't really correct anyone when they keep getting his name wrong.
And if you think that's bad, you should see what Kulan Gath does to Selene, whom he also has captive:
Yes, Gath is really feeling his oats at this time, but he hasn't obtained total victory yet. The outlaw heroes - the combined forces of the X-Men and most of the Avengers, still elude him, and we see it is really chapping his nerves considering he punishes his captains Sunder and Moonstar for their failure by turning them into dust - and then turning them back because we can't very well have our blood sacrificing evil wizard villain actually kill anyone.
His Turducken Xavier/Caliban Creature can't seem to locate the rebels, which by process of elimination means they are probably in the Morlock Catacombs, the one place his/their mutant-seeking psychic powers wouldn't be able to reach.
Which was the case, but they've actually emerged to execute the first phase of their plan, to gather intel on Kulan Gath and learn how to defeat him once and for all. And where better to conduct research than at their local library?
In this case, the New York Public Library has become a "temple" and its "chief archivist"/librarian Arilynn is the sole survivor of a massacre carried out at the hands of Gath's forces. As the heroes attempt to establish their bona fides (and explain the presence of previously Gath-aligned Callisto) the real bad guys burst in, including Avengers Vision and Scarlet Witch, who are Bad Now In This One.
In the scuffle, Rogue somehow loses her powers, becomes vulnerable and is immediately stabbed and killed.
Seeing Rogue die causes Ororo to unleash her fury on the guards, which enables the rest of the Squad to hide via an Illyana cloaking spell. But just as it looks like Storm will be overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the Gath-iacs, she is rescued by...
Warlock! The Wacky-Tacky Techno-Organic Alien from the New Mutants, who is also one of the few beings in this story not caught up in the fantastical spell!
Unfortunately, he has a hard time imparting all this to Ororo, with the language barrier and all, but he does his best with Pictionary.
After conferring with archivist Arilynn about the nature of Kulan Gath (he's a brilliant wizard, but cocky and maybe not as detail-oriented as he should be) the remaining heroes sneak into Gath's stronghold using Rachel's psychic trickery.
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| This completely original ploy really gives our heroes A New Hope. |
Inside, however. the heroes encounter an ambush and must fight their way through to Gath.
They make a good showing, with Callisto unfortunately having to kill her former comrade Sunder, but when they arrive at Gath's throneroom, he's ready with more reinforcements. Vision self-destructs, killing Colossus and Captain America, while Scarlet Witch - an actual conjurer in the Gathverse - turns Callisto, Illyana, Arilynn and Nightcrawler into stone.
Spider-Man, who has been watching from nearby where he has been crucified, powers his way out and attempts to make one last rally, crying out that Kulan's vulnerability is his necklace... only for, once again, nobody to understand what he's talking about since he doesn't speak Gath-ese, and with that, the weakened wall-crawler is easily disposed of.
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| Forget what I said about Gath not managing to kill anyone. He actually kills pretty much everyone. |
Luckily, however, someone who can understand is within earshot, as Warlock and Storm hide in the rafters. Warlock uses charades to convey to his partner-in-insurrection that the necklace is Kulan's weakness and the two swoop down in tandem and retrieve it from him, defeating him once and for all.
*Record scratch!* What is happening, who could this be??
That's right - Selene was never captured at all, she had disguised herself and exchanged places with Amara, and now having snagged the necklace from Storm's hands, is on the cusp of total victory.
You've really got to hand it to her -- unless you're Amara, in which case you actually don't have any hands to do so. Thanks to Selene.
Seemingly just out of pettiness, Selene opens up a volcano beneath the stronghold and the place starts to go up in flames. In a last ditch effort, the dying Warlock merges with Ororo to create a super Techno-Organic Storm.
Stormlock then uses her new alien robot powers to drain the life out of Selene, which frees Illyana, which enables her to restore Dr. Strange, who helps her whip up an Everything Back How It Was spell.
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Couldn't be more simple.
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With that, the X-Men and Avengers find themselves in Dr. Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum, dressed in their regular 80's clothes, with their regular 80's mindsets, with the clock set back to moments before all this nonsense happened, but with some added twist in the timeline that causes all of this never to go down in the first place.
Strange sums up the fine details:
- Nobody who "died" in Barbarianverse is actually dead now, because it never happened
- People inside this room will remember it, but nobody else will
- Someone needs to keep an eye on that Illyana girl.
Storm laments the fact that, as usual, the X-Men save the day but nobody gets to hear about it, and they remain at the top of the world's shitlist.
Meanwhile, about that little glitch in the timeline that caused Kulan Gath's spell to never happen, we go back to Jaime Rodriguez waiting for his subway...
As you were probably expecting, a robot from the future teleports in and halts the crime in progress, summarily executing the perpetrator without any kind of warning or trial.
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Nimrod is a cop.
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I don't know much about this Nimrod, this hulking machine from the future with the magenta and white color-scheme of an 80s Casio Keyboard from Radio Shack and a mandate to destroy mutants wherever and whenever he finds them, but when he speaks aloud he sure does sound folksy - the kind of genocidal robot you could grab a beer with.
Further Thoughts:
First off, I regret to inform you, contrary to what I had asserted on Twitter, this issue does offer proof that, at least in Barbarian mode, Illyana Rasputin is in fact racist against Indigenous people.
I'm as disappointed as you are. I hope she's grown since then.
This issue sets a pretty blistering pace: mostly action, almost to a chaotic degree, a befitting the whole barbarian action fantasy flick setup - nearly justifying the IndianacJones shoutout on the title.
I'm not the kind of reader who likes to get ahead of a narrative and think too hard about where it's going, so I enjoy a fairplay twist like Selene's here, especially because in the end it ties together multiple threads that had been set up throughout the story, with Spider-Man, Warlock, and Amara-Selene: at one point, Illyana chastises "Amara" for not using her Magma powers in the fight.
I feel like every few years, Claremont likes to let off steam by depicting huge swaths of characters dying violently in a scenario that ends up being undone or not officially true - whether it be in the future, in an alternate Limbo timeline, or here. Because comic characters essentially get to live forever, especially marketable ones, this sort of thing has become a real staple of the genre.
In theory, it might not be overly satisfying to end the story with a big reset, instead of anyone having to reckon with the consequences of what they did in barbarian-world, but the "reset" is presented as the start of a ripple that brings Nimrod - our next big heavy for the X-Men, it would seem - onstage, so it has purpose.
Similarly, the reset enables Selene to slip away unscathed, ready for yet another clash with the X-Men, surely in the not too distant future. I know that it can be tough not getting closure on villains, time after time, but in a long-running serial medium like this it's kind of expected.
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