X-MEN ANNUAL #10: Performance

The X-Men are remade as performers in Mojo's twisted theatre -- and only the New Mutants can save them!

Originally Published 1986

We begin in the Danger Room, where the X-Men are engaged in a little training exercise with Magneto: a game of tag.

Magneto demonstrates his prowess by outfoxing  his new teammates at every turn. From up in the control room, New Mutants Sunspot and Cypher, along with ally Psylocke, are not altogether impressed by the supposed A-squad.

Psylocke - a telepathic mutant by the name of Betsy Braddock - is a recent newcomer to the X-Mansion, having encountered the New Mutants on their recent sojourn in Mojoworld, a dimension run by the monstrous TV producer Mojo, whose lieutenant, the six-armed dancing sorceress Spiral, we have met several times. That sentence, by the way, pretty much sums up where we're at 10 years into the Claremont Run of X-Men comics: Long, bizarre, complicated, and with many tangents.

Psylocke brings some interesting baggage to the team - a jetsetter and sister to Captain Britain Brian Braddock, Betsy was blinded until Mojo gave her a new set of eyes that function as cameras. Unwittingly, she is broadcasting all the proceedings back to Mojoworld now for a rabid audience.

Spurred by the X-Men's high Q rating, Mojo sets in motion a plan, I suppose to bring them into his prime time lineup. He pushes a button and opens a teleportation globe into the Danger Room, showering the X-Men with goo.

Out of the blob comes Longshot, a prettyboy with the Kajagoogoo hair, and as the cover promises, the "newest X-Man." Longshot was first introduced, alongside Spiral and Mojo, in his eponymous miniseries, where he was an amnesiac action star refugee from Mojoworld, trapped on Earth. He's very innocent and kind of goofy.

Also gooey.

The X-Men are briefly confused by all this goo, but before they can analyze it, it disappears. They don't really know what to make of any of it and have no choice but to just sort of... move on.

The next morning, however, it gradually becomes obvious there are some changes afoot.

Bioscans indicate that the X-Men have been de-aged, becoming at least as young as the New Mutants and frankly, having a pretty crummy attitude about it. The New Mutants want to help figure the situation out but the X-Men act petulantly, while the female X-Men fawn over amnesiac Longshot.

Psylocke uses her powers to determine that Mojo is responsible and the X-Men push their way past the New Mutants to go after him, over considerable protests from the younger team that they should probably stay where it's safe while they are in the process of babifying.

The increasingly childlike (and constantly squabbling) X-Men find their way to Central Park where Longshot identifies the glowing Delacorte Theater as "The Magic Place I Came From." There, they find Mojo who, in an extremely upstanding and trustworthy way, says he wants to play with these small children.

Back at the mansion, the New Mutants awaken and resolve to go after the X-Men. Knowing that the senior team may in fact be no more, they dig into the dressup box and pull out their graduation costumes, naming themselves at long last - The X-Men.

Now, I'm not here to play Joan Rivers, but these looks are... not my favourites. I mean for crying out loud, will someone give Dani some pants?

Illyana teleports the X-Men to the theatre, where Mojo, Spiral (in her main job as Mojo's lieutenant,) and the newly Mojo-ified X-Men are waiting, having themselves been made over into a set of fashion disasters.

Special mention must be made of the appalling choice to garb Magneto as a Nazi soldier.

As the action starts, the X-Babies begin to age up again, gradually regaining their powers.

The New Mutants, as potent as their powers are, struggle with the brainwashed elders.

While Mojo revels in his near-victory, Spiral succumbs to some of the jealousy and bitterness she feels toward Longshot -- since he stole her place as the star of Mojoworld, but also, like everyone else seems to, she fell in love with him.

Mojo punishes Spiral for going off-script, casting her down and reminding her who's running the show.

When the audience starts to get restless, Mojo sics the X-Men on them while every attempt the New Mutants make to fend off their comrades fails.

Wolverine corners Karma, brandishing his claws. As he approaches she pleads for him to see her as a friend and regain control of himself. And thanks to his super-hypnosis-resistance (revealed all the way back in Uncanny #111) he breaks free of Mojo's hold in spectacular fashion.

One by one, the X-Men break free - Psylocke motivated by the love she finds in Cypher's heart, and Shadowcat by her (ahem) friendship for Illyana.

Kitty phases through Mojo's chair, short-circuiting his hold on the X-Men.

Her mind restored, Rogue attempts to drain his essence but finds there is simply too much of him. 

Still, the team is able to mount a united attack, featuring Magneto's powers and Colossus' strength.

But before the X-Men can deliver any kind of final blow, the big bad teleports out, living to broadcast another day.

The X-Men coerce a still-captive Spiral to put everything as it should be, restoring the theatre and papering over the incident with false memories for the audience.

The next day, the team celebrates their hard-fought victory. The New Mutants reluctantly step back into the role of "Kid Squad," but Dani brightens the mood by pointing out that they were the difference makers and are heroes in their own right.

Storm, meanwhile, is back to being without her elemental powers, and so much the better -- the regained powers were a tainted gift from Mojo. Betsy wonders what this means for her eyes, which were also a gift from Mojo, and which she super does not want to give up.

Wolverine leaves us with a parting thought, to answer Psylocke's question about how the X-Men broke free of Mojo's hold. It's simple: They're heroes. There's something inside of them that makes them X-Men, and not merely superpowered mutants.

Mojo, for his part, watching from afar, is glad to be playing his role. After all, what are heroes without a nice, nasty villain to oppose?

Further Thoughts:

This may be the apex of X-Men annuals, which typically see the heroes going to strange new worlds, encountering bizarre outsiders, or engaging in high-concept hijinks that don't fit with the monthly series. Mojo and his cast of characters aren't longstanding Marvel stalwarts at this point like Asgard, or literary crossovers like Dracula or the Dante reference from the early annual. They're a whole mini-mythos introduced to the Marvel Universe by Ann Nocenti (editor of this book!) and Arthur Adams (the person who drew it!) in the 1985 Longshot miniseries. The entire concept could have been sealed off in a bubble for the kookiness it was, but the decision to bring them over to the X-Men's realm (joining Spiral, perhaps Chris Claremont's favourite new toy of 1986) helps canonize them. We also mark the arrival of Marvel UK Import Psylocke. It speaks to the kitchen-sink universe that Marvel comics - and Chris Claremont most of all - has long embraced for our heroes, where sorcery, technology, alien worlds, demons, time travel and more all menace our heroes in equal turn. (One need only look at the New Mutants, which features sorceress Illyana, refugee-from-a-secret-Roman-colony Magma, and alien robot Warlock, to see this at play.)

The result of bringing in this high concept cosmology (again, Mojo is an evil wizard mad scientist cyborg TV producer) is an issue - and this very rarely happens - where words don't necessarily do it justice. On the surface it is a fairly conventional "X-Men get brainwashed and fight their allies" story, but it's coloured by so much delightful weirdness, from the aesthetics of Mojoworld (the Spineless Ones, the technology, the Goo,) to the plot involving de-aging and re-aging the X-Men and promoting, then demoting the New Mutants, it can't help but charm. 

The issue also sees brief cameos from a group called Bratpack (who had appeared in the New Mutants Annual that introduced Psylocke to the team and set them against Mojo), Walt and Louise Simonson, and briefly, various talking frogs including Uncle Puddlegulp and Queen Greensong, all of whom are in attendance of the Shakespeare performance that Mojo crashes.

Yeah.

While all this would seem to make the issue impenetrable, it's actually no moreso than your usual X-Men comic and quite enjoyable for it -- it's a breeze to read compared to most of the previous annuals, with a fairly clear-cut villain with a concept and an admittedly insane scheme, which needs less embellishment and fewer tangents than any annual we're read so far. This is all helped by some incredibly splashy action courtesy of Adams.

Geddit? Splashy?

Notably, the New Mutants get a chance to shine, much like last time, and in this case even get to play dressup as full-fledged X-Men, although hopefully when the time comes for this squad to graduate, they won't be wearing those costumes.

Mojo, like Arcade, is a pretty out-there villain who manages to create a context for himself and in his own way be a major threat while also being very far outside the sort of conflict the X-Men usually deal with. It lends itself to a certain amount of satire and comedy, and while I wouldn't say it provides a lot of belly-laughs, it's fun, and not in an awkward forced-fun way. So much happens in this comic, and so quickly, that it would be hard to grow restless while reading it, yet it never feels padded and meandering. Easily the best annual we've had so far.