Godel x Uzumeri #3: X-Men 102-108 (or, Carefree, Cavalier, Claremont-Cockrum Conviviality)
Uzumeri: Welcome to the third edition of our look at Chris Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men run. I’m David Uzumeri and this is Addison Godel – he knows all this material and has read it before; I haven’t. This episode we take a look at issues 102 to 108, which comprise an Irish adventure, a fight with Magneto and two totally insane cosmic issues that introduce the Shi’ar.
Godel: SPECIFICALLY: While trying to recover from the big Sentinel showdown (see previous entry), the X-Men battle Juggernaut, Black Tom Cassidy, Magneto, and Firelord, all of whom turn out to be basically pawns of Erik the Red, finally revealed as a henchman of the aliens Professor X has been dreaming about. The refugee lady alien, Lilandra, lands on Earth and immediately gets kidnapped back to outer space by Erik. The now-cosmic-level Phoenix is able to get the X-Men across the galaxy, where they fight a whole bunch of people, and Phoenix successfully prevents Lilandra’s mad brother from using a magic crystal thingamajig to destroy the universe.
SUBPLOT WATCH! In the battle with Magneto, two cells at Moira’s science lab on Muir Island get affected: one containing a MUTANT X, which we’ll come back to in a goodly while, and the other containing Dragonfly from Count Nefaria’s Ani-Men, which will never go anywhere because it’s setup for a Dave Cockrum book that was never green-lit.
This also is the end of the first Dave Cockrum run; #108 introduces what is, to some, the classic X-Men creative team: Claremont writing, John Byrne penciling (later officially co-plotting) and Terry Austin on inks.
Uzumeri: Let’s never forget Tom Orzechowski. That dude deserves some commendation, because he fits a SHITLOAD of lettering onto those pages without obscuring the art. I mean, it’s no secret that Claremont is wordy. I wonder what would happen if you Photoshopped out all of the descriptive word balloons in fight scenes.
Godel: Yeah, some of the fight chatter is just silly…and at the same time, it’s almost what makes the book, since the plotting is often so ropey and Silver Age, and the villains are extremely one-dimensional. So the fact that, like, in the middle of a battle for their lives with Juggernaut, Wolverine starts picking a fight with Colossus for no reason, is really entertaining.
Uzumeri: No, really: what would Claremont’s X-Men look like without the unnecessary exposition? Damn, now I want to try this.
Godel: That’d be great to see, or just the original art I guess. It makes a little more sense in 108, where what he’s writing is actually not easy to draw or convey, like, “I’m repairing the matrix of the energy web at the subatomic level!” or whatever.
Like, duh, Phoenix. Everybody knows how to do THAT.
Uzumeri: He could have at least drawn an actual sephiroth, too, considering it was really really obviously what Claremont was going for. I love cosmic freak-out comix, so I was a big fan of #108. Although — what the fuck is a neutron galaxy?
Godel: God, who knows? Apparently it has a “darksome majesty” that is, this may surprise you, “beyond comprehension.” I think we were off-mic a few weeks ago when you introduced your idea that the X-Men plots were an equal mix of “mutants fighting to defend a world that hates and fears them” and “whatever movie Chris Claremont caugh at the matinee yesterday.”
Uzumeri: The Shi’ar space explorers are clearly Star Trek, right down to having the Prime Directive. It’s almost comical.
Godel: When the characters themselves have to say “It looks like that Star Trek transporter effect!” something is amiss.
Uzumeri: This is also a pretty classic example of Claremontian bad dude hierarchies. That dude loves recursive evil masterminds.
Godel: Yeah, meet Juggernaut, under-henchman to the assistant dupe to the local district henchman to the Emperor. The other classic Claremont plot here is the thing where the X-Men get completely beaten, except one man who the villains discount. Just when all seems lost, he’s able to slip in, reverse their fortunes, and the tide turns. When it’s set up well it’s got a great sense of payoff and he’ll keep coming back to it.
Uzumeri: Yeah, we definitely get that with Nightcrawler here, and the most classic example is later in the Dark Phoenix Saga with Wolverine.
The recursive evil masterminds also make the scope of the arc get absolutely ridiculous as it goes on, from “someone is hiring villains to fight us” to “repairing the energy lattice holding a neutron star in an alien crystal to prevent it from destroying the universe” And this is in, like, four or five issues.
Godel: Yeah, and that goes hand in hand with this whole thing of making Jean a cosmic-level character. Jim Shooter would later claim to have been suspicious of it, since it goes against the whole underdog weirdo quality of the X-Men, but he gave it the go-ahead on the grounds of, “well, no one’s done this before,” and also it was promised that Jean would eventually turn into a villain, for which you sort of want someone who outclasses the rest of the cast. In the meantime, though, it sets you up for a world of storytelling problems.
Uzumeri: But first — Black Tom and Juggernaut. This is Black Tom’s first appearance, right?
Godel: Yes. He’ll go on to be a perennial nuisance in most Banshee stories, and nearly all Juggernaut stories. Frankly I’ve never warmed up to him, and there’s not much to love here, as he’s just a cackling villain with no personal stake in the scheme to lure Xavier in and kill him. He’s just glad to take on his cousin Banshee and make a few bucks. Nice character design though.
Uzumeri: I’ve never understood the character’s appeal, and there’s none of what’s going on with Banshee – where Claremont’s really turning me around. I never gave a fuck about Banshee before, but you know what, he’s pretty damn cool.
Godel: I know, right? Like I sort of forget to think about him as a character at all, but he’s pretty charming in this.
Uzumeri: He’s basically playing the modern-day Scott role here, the grizzled old vet and tactician. But Black Tom is just uninteresting, and Juggernaut isn’t much better. And then, I mean, then leprechauns show up.
Yes - leprechauns. (Click for the full-size image.)
Godel: Yeah, I really don’t know how to take that whole story. I mean, it feels a lot like last time, when there were these aimless issues with Kierrok and Erik the Red, and then the B-story about Sentinels finally moved to the front burner and it felt like an epic coming together. Here again, there’s a few issues of miscellaneous battle before the Shi’ar thing moves to the forefront.
But I’m sort of okay with the miscellaneous battle, insofar as the X-Men themselves are pretty entertaining, particularly Nightcrawler. God, I love that guy in these issues.
Uzumeri: His idea of using the image inducer to look like Xavier was really inspired, I’ve got to say that. I enjoyed that.
Godel: You can tell Cockrum is just having a ball drawing Xavier doing acrobatic flips and stuff. Cockrum loved Nightcrawler in general – he wrote, drew, and inked the four-issue Nightcrawler series in 1985, with his wife Paty doing the coloring.
Uzumeri: When does the whole religious aspect enter Nightcrawler’s character?
Godel: It starts coming gradually in Claremont’s run – I think first in this awesome annual where he thinks he’s been sent to Hell and he’s all like “I DESERVE THIS FOR MY SINS” or something. Can’t wait for that one. The priesthood isn’t until the 2000s, somewhere in the interstices of Claremont’s “Revolution” period and Joe Casey’s Uncanny run. It’s Chuck Austen, of course, who really runs it into the ground.
Uzumeri: Hahahahaha, yeah, with the poison communion wafers! I mean, here he’s just this funloving skirt-chasing dude, and it’s pretty cool.
Godel: Yeah, they’re really playing up these references to him being a former circus performer. Which is a great thing to have on a team that also has, y’know, Wolverine the homicidal maniac.
Uzumeri: I can’t get over what a totally different character Logan is in these issues.
It was this, or one of the eight times he calls Storm “that dumb broad.”
Godel: It’s almost bizarre to read all the letters going on about how much they love him – I’m finding him more obnoxious with each passing issue, although he seems more in his element once it’s just, “we are way outnumbered by these space aliens, won’t somebody just start beating the crap out of them?”
Uzumeri: Man, what else happens in that arc? Moira starts wearing that hilarious mod outfit, for one thing.
Godel: Well, we get the big Storm flashback to explain her claustrophobia. And it turns out it also makes her timeline even more difficult to resolve, since it’s explicitly pinned to the Suez Crisis of all things. After which she has an awesome full-page Cockrum montage where she wanders the world as a thief and a goddess, etc.
(Click for the full-size image.)
Uzumeri: I really, really have to wonder where the Storm ideas came from. I mean, I guess a lot of it could have been from whatever notes Wein left.
Godel: Yeah, it’s a surprisingly convoluted origin. Like, if all you had to work on was “She was living as a fake goddess in Kenya,” why would you then double back and say “daughter of an African-American journalist, and a Kenyan princess, who were living in Cairo for some reason”?
Uzumeri: Because you’re Chris Claremont and you’re totally in love with her and you clearly put the most time into thinking about her.
Godel: But, at least with the thief thing, it opens up possibilities for later stories, which she hints at here with an “I’ll tell you all about it later” bit. So I guess they’re making an effort to flesh her out a little. She gets a nice fan letter in 103 from one Marilyn Brogdon, a self-described “young black woman” pleased to see the international and interracial team, but worried about Storm being too strong and thus feeding the stereotype of the “domineering and super-strong black woman.”
Uzumeri: Oh, hey, that is a pretty cool letter. It’s pretty much where she’s ended up going, to a certain degree.
Godel: Yeah, I thought that was nice. Given how backwards superhero books often are on politics, it’s sort of embarassing that it took until the late 70s to get some strong black female characters, like Storm and Misty Knight. But credit to Claremont for pushing both of them heavily.
By the way, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but the reason Misty Knight shows up as Jean Grey’s roommate here, aside from the in-story explanation that they were both viewing apartments at the same time and just happened to hit it off: Chris Claremont was the writer for her usual book, Iron Fist. Pencils by…John Byrne!
Uzumeri: Yeah, I knew he was also writing these characters – it makes more sense, for sure. Man, Misty Knight deserves to be in way better comics than she’s in right now.
Godel: Back on the letters page, Claremont’s other big love interest this time around is, uh, Jo Duffy. #104 prints her quirky fan-letter (which suggests the cranky guy from last time must be “from the Twilight Zone”) and gets a babbling, vaguely flirtatious response written from the perspective of the “X-Men Armadillo.”
By #108 she has an associate editor credit at Marvel, so maybe she was already on her way in the door and this is all an in-joke among friends, but it’s still weird.
Settle down there, fella. (Click for full-size.)
Uzumeri: I think we need to get to the totally bizarre fill-in issue #106 at some point.
Godel: Oh, yeah! The deal with that is, around the time of X-Men #94, the new editor-in-chief, Marv Wolfman, instituted a policy to end the chronic deadline-missing that had been going on. The idea was that every book would have at least one fill-in issue in the can at all times, waiting for a deadline to slip. There’ll be another one of these at #110, by the way.
Uzumeri: This one was totally weird. It was drawn by Bob Brown, and Bob Brown passed away, so they published it and dedicated it to him, with Cockrum adding a framing sequence.
Godel: The whole “warehouse story” idea makes a lot of sense when you’re doing episodic stories, but for a soap opera book like Claremont’s X-Men, the filler stories can’t just slot in anywhere, hence the need for the awkward framing segment. And, yeah, there might have been a desire to go ahead and publish this out of respect for Bob Brown, one of these great old guys who’d been doing comics since at least, I think the 40s.
Uzumeri: But then the plot is basically a prelude to Onslaught, featuring a sort of Dark Xavier being triggered by Lilandra’s dreams that tortures the New X-Men physically and emotionally.
Actually, if Onslaught had looked like this, we might remember him more fondly.
Godel: It’s pretty weak sauce: Claremont and Mantlo have the New X-Men fight the Old X-Men, only it’s not really the Old X-Men. Which we just had as the plot of #100. Here it turns out it’s all an illusion created by Xavier’s subconscious, but same diff. Claremont puts everybody through their major character points, has yet another squabble between Cyclops and Wolverine, and calls it a day.
The real highlight is the insane EVIL GREEN PROFESSOR X, although I kind of like Brown’s handling of the cast generally. He really was an old-school illustrator; apparently he resented editors trying to get him to draw more like the hip young kids.
Uzumeri: It made no sense, to be totally honest with you, and it dragged down the story kind of. Almost every single element in the book feels redundant in comparison with earlier stories.
Godel: Yeah, I think nowadays if you did inventory issues you’d try to have them be, like, little character spotlights on recent villains or the supporting cast or something, not just a villain-of-the-week thing in the Danger Room – – – like, this plays exactly like a Silver Age issue of X-Men.
Uzumeri: I honestly thought it was going to be the Danger Room that was doing it; the Xavier thing seemed almost totally unconnected until the end.
Godel: Well, remember, the Danger Room doesn’t yet have all the Holodeck stuff – it’s just a gym with some booby traps and maybe a robot or two.
But, if I can get on a soapbox for a second, I think one of the interesting things about the success of the All-New X-Men is the relationship between it and the Silver Age generally. Claremont, Byrne, Austin and Cockrum are all, generationally, of the age where they came at superhero comics as teenage fans of the Silver Age. (Cockrum’s a little older but not really of a different generation.) They had fan-letters printed in Marvel books in the 60s. So they do love that stuff, of course, and their readers, a lot of them, are also that once-teenage Marvel generation, people that really did read the old X-Men and were excited to see it back on the shelves. You can imagine a kind of creator-audience connection there.
So on the one hand, you get things like Magneto, later one of Claremont’s most important character reinventions, but here basically acting like straight up Silver Age Magneto, no personality beyond boasting about his incredible power.
And on the other hand, the overall vibe of the book is so much more “grown up” and Bronze Age that things like the fill-in issue feel really dated and elementary.
Uzumeri: It’s also from a less cynical age, I guess, or at least an age without the Internet, since you don’t have the usual immediate reaction from the fans that there’s no way this new guy could get it right. There’s something about ’60s and ’70s Marvel community where it really didn’t feel like the fans were very far separated from the creators. I dunno if that’s a good thing or not – it probably had both benefits and detriments.
Godel: Yeah, there’s probably a benefit to getting quicker feedback from readers, but the basic…autonomy of the creative team is part of why investigating a long-term run like the Claremont Years is so great. He gets to really pursue ridiculously drawn-out plots. Like, Phoenix shows up in 101; as of 105 we’re already hinting that there’s this dark side that wants to kill Firelord, but the Dark Phoenix Saga is literally years away. So for the reader this is a major, major committment.
Speaking of Phoenix, what’d you think of our big space epic?
Uzumeri: Man, that I loved. I finally get the appeal of all of those characters and concepts I’ve been hating for years. There are so many details like — the Starjammers actually seem like individuals here instead of Random Space Guys Who All Act The Same.
Starrrrr-jammin’, across the universe! (Click for full-size image.)
Godel: Yeah, the Imperial Guard, the Starjammers, and the Shi’ar feel, in 2010, like baggage that was arbitrarily attached to the X-Men because, again, of some movie Claremont saw the night before. They don’t really connect closely to anything about mutation or prejudice or anything. But it’s all so over-the-top and entertaining here that I don’t care.
And, god, what a tour de force for Cockrum as character designer. There are like twenty new characters in #107!
Uzumeri: John Byrne is a fine comic artist, but Dave Cockrum is an illustrator, and that was a sequence that required a great deal of illustration. Byrne doesn’t have Cockrum’s flair with the weird.
Godel: That’s really on the money. I love Byrne’s art, which I think maybe we can get into more next time when he’s really in center stage, but he definitely doesn’t do as well with that Cockrum standby, SIGHTS NO MAN WAS MEANT TO SEE.
Uzumeri: Yeah, Byrne’s a totally fine superhero artist, but Cockrum really taps into that Kirbyesque vibe here in a really good way.
Godel: My only complaint with the Shi’ar thing, and this is ironic given how much I complained about Brubaker’s “Rise and Fall of the Shi’ar Empire,” but this is not long enough. The sheer amount of plot in 107-108 is staggering, and that has some consequences, like really marginalizing Lilandra as a damsel-in-distress, and making totally awkward the revelation that Corsair is Scott’s father, which just feels shoehorned in. I had it in my head that this whole Shi’ar, M’Kraan, Imperial Guard, Starjammers thing was, like four or five issues. It’s two!
Uzumeri: Yeah, it moves beyond breakneck. I wonder – do you think this arc was cut short prematurely because of Byrne?
Godel: Wow, that’s an interesting idea…like Cockrum is trying to get it to the climax so he can introduce his Starjammer designs before he leaves the book.
Uzumeri: I mean, it runs completely counter to Claremont’s usual storytelling style. We should have had like six pages of Lilandra’s coup.
Godel: I wish I had a clearer sense of why Cockrum left the book. I think maybe they just wanted to put him on other things, but it does kind of chop this arc off weirdly.
In a couple of years he dramatically quit his staff position at Marvel, with his resignation snuck into an issue of Iron Man (!). But he still stuck around doing covers for lots of things. His X-Men departure can’t have been too acrimonious, because he returns to the title in the 140s.
Uzumeri: Yessss! I’m really, really looking forward to his second run. It’s interesting about Uncanny how everyone thinks of its history in terms of artists, not writers, since it was always Claremont but the tone and team really did switch up with the art runs.
Godel: His second run, and I don’t think this is a spoiler, but it will heavily feature the Starjammers and the Shi’ar. And outer space.
Uzumeri: I’m looking forward to it, man, I really am, but obviously we first have to get through the entire Dark Phoenix Saga, the only part of this run I HAVE read before. It’ll make way more sense in this context, though.
Godel: So: favorite/least favorite moments from this batch?
Uzumeri: Least favorite: That fill-in issue, for sure. Byrne kind of shitting the bed on that cosmic surgery scene.
Godel: Ouch. I really didn’t think it was so bad…I like how he draws the Phoenix raptor.
Uzumeri: Oh, and the leprechauns were just dumb.
Godel: The leprechauns should have been awesomely dumb, but you get the sense Cockrum really did not want to draw them that much and sort of brushed past the whole thing.
Uzumeri: I really enjoyed almost everything else about it, though. I’m seriously going to miss Dave Cockrum, I really came to love his art over this run.
Godel: Cockrum grew on me, too. When I first read this material, I had done like you, reading the later stuff first, so I was very used to Byrne’s and Paul Smith’s takes on the characters. Cockrum felt somehow very old-fashioned to me. But reading a bunch of issues in succession, I really like the guy.
Uzumeri: Meanwhile, you can tell Claremont just loves writing random regional dialogue. Like, I always thought it was just him trying to express the internationality of the new team, but no, Claremont just really, really writes writing in accents. A lot.
Godel: Speaking of people with accents, I love the scene where the X-Men go to rent sea transport from a grizzled old Scottish sea captain. He has retained for them… a hovercraft.
Uzumeri: Which Colossus straight up steals.
Godel: “An’ as for yuir money – – consider it forfeit, as penalty for tyin’ up mah hovercraft with yuir fradulent reservation!”
Uzumeri: I also love those games Claremont plays with the captions and the characters, where he chides them in second person, especially when Ororo’s parents die after her dad says he’ll keep them safe, and then the next panel has a caption that says “LIAR!”
(Click for the full-size image.)
Godel: The “LIAR!” caption should be a meme, I would love to start Photoshopping that into all kinds of really serious moments, or scenes where someone is lying but we’re not supposed to know. “My name is…Xorn.” (LIAR!)
Uzumeri: I just imagine that Henry Rollins took over.
But I can totally see why this was a critical hit at the time, you know? This book was, like, The Order or something. Like, here’s this team book with all-new characters set in the Marvel Universe that sort of retweaks an old concept and has a clear creative vision. I can see how this book stood out against stories about, like, Kang.
Godel: Totally! I keep having to remind myself that this was a breath of fresh air at the time. And nothing against Kang! But yeah, this is almost, not quite, but almost like the way Silver Age Marvel stood out against DC. This is chattier, funnier, more pop-culture hip because it’s written by younger creators, etc. By the end of the Byrne run X-Men was Marvel’s top-selling book if my sources are accurate, and DC would launch a strikingly similar product with the New Teen Titans.
Uzumeri: The book actually had a major competitor in that market at DC already, man, and it was Paul Levitz’s Legion of Super-Heroes. That book was huge in this era, and easily X-Men’s big competitor before New Teen Titans hit.
Godel: A ha ha, and who was drawing Legion of Super-Heroes a couple years earlier?
Uzumeri: You got it – Dave Cockrum.
Godel: Incidentally, his Starjammers and Imperial Guard designs (maybe even some of the X-Men!) are, I think, largely unused LOSH designs and/or parodies of actual Legion members.
Uzumeri: This really makes me want to check those stories out, since I imagine LOSH must have been a playground for him, since it’s basically page after page of new character designs, wacky aliens and SIGHTS NO MAN IS MEANT TO SEE, at least when done right.
This was also definitely an era when people wanted younger, hipper characters, you know? That’s what LOSH and Teen Titans and Uncanny were all about. Those three books really perfected the superhero soap opera. Equal amounts angst and asskicking.
Godel: Younger and hipper, but, notably, not teenage.
Uzumeri: At least, not yet. Colossus is pretty young, Wolverine ACTS pretty young and seems it too. But yeah, it’s true, but that’s because the mutant metaphor allows the characters to operate as youth.
Godel: That’s interesting – I read this the other direction. By the 80s the X-Men readership is more teenage Generation X for sure, but I think at this point it’s significant that we have, y’know, the X-Men in their 20s basically, renting cool apartments in Manhattan and dealing with hospital drama and stuff like that. Like, there’s a demographic bubble where you’re still selling this to baby boomers who grew up with comics, and are in their 30s now and still think of themselves as pretty with-it.
Uzumeri: Jean and Misty’s place is fucking huge, by the way.
Godel: I can only assume NYC rent-control is involved in this storyline somehow because I’m pretty sure Misty’s income as a private detective isn’t going to cut it. Maybe if Jean’s still modeling.
No, really - how DID you find this place?!
Uzumeri: You know, something I don’t think we’ve touched on: Claremont’s working as if the X-Men were operating in real time. Like, it has been exactly five or six years or whatever since the last issue of 1960’s X-Men, and they had a bunch of offscreen adventures, and Scott and Jean are basically in their twenties.
Godel: There was also a line in #98 that established the new team had been together for a year, which is accurate in terms of the publication schedule vis-a-vis Giant Size, but totally wrong in terms of the character dynamics. I think they give this up pretty soon, for obvious reasons.
Uzumeri: Back on the “youth” thing: I’m thinking of the whole “society just doesn’t understand!” aspect of adolescence that NTT and LOSH really milked, X-Men gets that same thematic resonance through the mutancy thing. Outsider heroes. This would have been the perfect time for a Doom Patrol reboot. I guess that’s arguably what Uncanny X-Men was, though.
Godel: Given that the 60s X-Men and Doom Patrol have the same exact setup, yeah. One thing we should both track as X-Men goes on is how exactly the “society just doesn’t understand!” thing gets played out. Because sometimes it’s about prejudice, other times it’s about adolescence. And eventually, I would argue, both of those are jettisoned and it’s really just a way of staging an ambience of paranoia: the X-Men as outlaws on the run from everybody.
But we’re, uh, a good hundred issues away from that… so, let’s wrap for now. Unless you have anything to add?
Uzumeri: I’m done, man. Great comics.
Godel: NEXT TIME: John Byrne does Canada proud by introducing A-list superhero all-stars ALPHA FLIGHT! Plus, the return of MAGNETO, even as the X-Men join a CIRCUS!
