#95. Write a Review of Your Entire Comic Collection: (Uncanny) X-Men 19

#3. (Uncanny) X-Men #19
Written by Stan Lee
Art by Jay Gavin and Dick Ayers
"Lo! Now Shall Appear - The Mimic!"

The Short Form: The Mimic infiltrates the X-Men in order to steal their powers so he can gain access to a machine that will increase his own, but ends up losing his power instead.

The Cast:
Professor x / Charles Xavier - Super psychic bald school teacher.
Cyclops / Scott Summers - Love struck field leader of The X-Men.
Marvel Girl / Jean Grey - The original telepathic red headed knockout.
Beast / Hank McCoy - Brain and Brawn all rolled into one.
Iceman / Bobby Drake - Sub zero practical joker
Angel / Warren Worthington III - Rich kid with wings.
The Mimic / Calvin Rankin - Power Mimicry, Douchebaggery

The Long Form:

This is a blast from the past by X-Men and Marvel Universe creator Stan Lee written during the heart of the swingin' sixties and is it ever a product of that era - and that is not a bad thing. An entire vocabulary was being updated and discovered during this era and there is a freshness and energy that so many of today's comics lack. Stan Lee (along with Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and many talented others) essentially created the Marvel Universe as we know it during those years, totally changing the nature of the super hero comic. Sure - the dialogue is tremendously dated and hokey but man howdy do they pack a lot into one issue! We get the debut, origin, and ultimate defeat of new character The Mimic on top of the continuing Cyclops/Jean Grey love subplot. Beast and Bobby go on a double date, the whole gang gets a supposed vacation - only Angel is left without a lot to do.

And check out that title! "Lo! Now Shall Appear - The Mimic!" At their best, Super Hero comics are a tremendous blend of the absurd and the dramatic and while the formula wasn't perfected for the X-Men during this time period (that would be Chris Claremont in the 70s) these are the building blocks being laid. This is far from essential reading, but a lot of fun for what it is. And this is the first appearance of The Mimic (who is a total douche bag here) a character who would go on to have a really interesting run in Exiles many decades later, exploring his potential as a hero. There are no dropped ideas in comics, only those on hiatus.

I put the ( ) around Uncanny because at this point the title is still just X-Men, though this is the book that would become and stay Uncanny X-Men until now.

Who Should Read This: X-Men fans who are looking into their history, and those who love that kooky Silver Age.

#95. Write a Review of Your Entire Comic Collection: X-Men -1

2. X-Men #-1
Written by Scott Lobdell
Art by Carlos Pacheco and Art Thibert
Published by Marvel Comics
"I Had a Dream"

The Short Form: Xavier and Magneto meet up at the site of the concentration camp where Magneto was prisoner as a boy in order for Xavier to fruitlessly try and talk Magneto out of his Mutant vs. Human worldview.

The Cast:
* Professor X / Charles Xavier - MLK Jr. of the Mutant set
* Magneto / Erik 'Magnus' Lensherr - Malcolm X of the Mutant set
* Amelia Voght - Xavier's hot teleporting red head girlfriend
* Quicksilver / Pietro Maximoff - Arrogant mutant super speedster
* The Scarlet Witch / Wanda Maximoff - Crazy powerful chaos based mutant (and we do mean crazy)

The Long Form:

This is a better issue than the previous Flashback issue, because it's hooked into a much stronger central premise of the X-Men - Xavier and Magneto as former friends and leading mutant politicians and philosophers whose differing ideologies have broken their brotherhood and are leading their people into battle against each other. That's hard to totally screw up. Given how intrinsic this particular conflict is to the mythos of the X-Men at this point, and how stark the difference between the two men is, charting various points along their relationship is fodder for a lot of stories and comes with a greater amount of reader investment than Rachel Summers and Sanctity for example. Even non-fans know Xavier and Magneto, so there is a shorthand that allows for greater depth in a small package. Unfortunately, this is not that issue.

This issue is about as bare bones characterization and conflict as you can get - touching on a lot of areas without ever giving them nuance or a new spin. We've seen this conversation before, many times, where Xavier pleads on behalf of sanity and their old friendship for Magneto to abandon his crusade, only for Magneto to bitterly apologize about the need for conflict. We've also seen it done better. This feels less like a missing scene than a retread.

The concentration camp is used to try and give the story more weight and provide a parable for what Magneto could become - the phrase "a man who does not remember the sins of the past is destined to repeat them," is actually used as the end of the book, so subtlety and subtext is not the goal of this story. It takes a very skillful touch to integrate a real life tragedy like the Holocaust into a super-hero narrative and have it be compelling and meaningful and that is not the case here. This is a lot of exposition and posturing.

The most interesting aspect of the book is Amelia Voght's internal monologue about Xavier. The fact that she loves him but is also afraid of him, and has no problem saying so, is an interesting dynamic that really underscores why this relationship is effectively doomed from the start and how much Xavier's single minded philosophical goals will cost him in his personal life. It says something that his most successful (and I use that term very loosely) relationship was with an alien space princess and very long distance, and basically ended up destroying her empire too. His attempts at a solid earthbound relationship (and for a crippled bald man he's had a few shots) invariably fail and it's because Charles Xavier is not as fully developed a human being as he would like to be or think he is. His unyielding focus on his dream and intensity has cost him elements of his social skills that only become apparent in intimate relationships. Like most of us, the closer he gets to someone the more his flaws come out and it's important to realize that while Magneto is definitely the more aggressive and hostile of the two Xavier is far from a cuddly old man.

Who Should Read This: X-Men completists or HUGE fans of X-Men: First Class the movie, but really, there are better examples of this same story out there.

#95. Write a Review of Your Entire Comic Collection: Uncanny X-Men -1

I'm going to be reviewing the entirety of my comic book collection (single issues, graphic novels, and trade paperbacks) with the goal of analyzing the entire collection. I own thousands upon thousands of comics, so this should
A) Take awhile
and B) Provide a nice overview into the form, as well as the worlds and characters of the Big 2 (Marvel and DC) especially.
This is also exciting as I have, for the first time ever, a significant backlog of comics in my collection that I've never read. I'm writing for the non-expert, but the somewhat familiar, and hopefully if you're curious about comics one of these posts will inspire you to check them out. If you want to borrow something let me know.

I've decided to start with my X-Men collection and go from there - partly because I got a lot of new comics from Max recently, including a number of new X-Men issues I've never read. But mainly because this is the book I've collected and read most consistently over the course of my life and at a certain part of the run I can follow events of my life along with the issues.


1. UNCANNY X-MEN #-1
Written by Scott Lobdell
Art by Bryan Hitch and Paul Neary
Published by Marvel Comics
"The Boy Who Saw Tomorrow"

The Short Form: Rachel Summers goes back in time to stop a fellow time traveler from changing history by stopping the creation of the Sentinels, but instead accidentally causes the problem.

The Cast:
Rachel Summers - Time traveling continuity nightmare from the future.
Sanctity / Tanya Trask - Future Judas
Bolivar Trask - Creator of the Sentinels
Larry Trask - Time prescient mutant son of Bolivar Trask
Stan Lee - Former EIC of Marvel Comics and stand in for The Watcher

The Long Form:

This is an unfortunate issue to start off with as it is not very good. This is from a special month where the entire Marvel line did 'Minus 1' issues - flashback issues that told special 'previously untold' stories set before the series started, all narrated by Marvel comics architect and general spokesman Stan Lee - serving as an actual character in the book standing in for the role of The Watcher (a bald alien dude who tends to show up in Marvel comics whenever really bad shit is about to go down in order to, you know, watch). If I remember correctly not many of these issues were very good and that has partially to do with the Stan Lee huckster impersonation leading the proceedings. Stan IS a character unto himself, but he has a distinct voice and this does not quite capture it - and having him narrate really takes us out of it. Is this really the appropriate place to get meta textual?

The story is really pretty simple - Rachel Summers has traveled back in time (again) in order to stop a woman named Sanctity from preventing Bolivar Trask's creation of the Sentinels - Anti-Mutant hunting robots which will plague the X-men for forever. His own son is a mutant who can see the future (but can't remember his visions) and his daughter was a mutant too, only she and her mother are now dead. It turns out that Sanctity is actually Bolivar's daughter, is stopped by Rachel, has a private moment with her father that he's mind wiped to forget, and then the resultant trail of destruction the two ladies leave from their battle cause Larry to believe his father's anti-mutant beliefs and drive him to finish the Sentinels in the first place.
So, it's basically a monumental fuck up on Rachel's part by ignoring details like apparent property devastation just outside the house of the people who's past she is trying to avoid tampering with. I think they cover that in like Time Travel 103, and given how careful she is to mind wipe everybody in the vicinity this failure feels less like a character oversight and more a way to force the ending to feel like it has some relevance.

Beyond the cheapness of the ending ("in attempting to stop someone from mucking up the past, we actually caused what happened!") and the sudden reveal of Sanctity as Bolivar's daughter (which has less emotional impact than you'd like in a situation like this, mainly because I've never heard of Sanctity before, and Rachel Summers is a mess of a character history), there isn't much to hold an issue together here. There are a lot of references to consistent X-mystery and future storyline "The Twelve" which was in itself disappointing. Apparently Sanctity will one day betray Rachel, so that's good to know, I guess. A good portion of the issue is dedicated to recapping the history of the X-men, like they knew they couldn't fill an issue on the story alone. And since this issue can't really change anything that took place, several characters are mind-wiped - so the emotional pay off of the story is nullified.

Rachel Summers is also always a terrible place to start a book from because as a character her back story is so convoluted as to be almost toxic. Her easiest description would be "Cyclops' daughter from a possible post-apocalyptic future who returns to our time to make sure her world never comes to be" but even that ignores her becoming the Phoenix, getting lost in time, going to the future and raising Cable as Mother Askani (what?), somehow coming back to our time and more time travel. This issue seems to take place after she goes back to the future but before she raises Cable. Reading an out of context time travel story with her in it and trying to place exactly where in her personal timeline this story takes place is like working on a crossword puzzle with very vague clues. Rachel is much more effective when all the time travel junk is NOT the focus because it feels a little like watching the sausage being made.

It is interesting to see a not yet superstar Bryan Hitch on this book, beginning to develop his trademark style - but he's not there yet. You would not likely see him on a book like this today. And this our is first appearance of Nineties X-men architect Scott Lobdell as writer. Given that he unassumingly came to define an entire decade of comics in the line, we'll be seeing a lot more of him.

Who Should Read This: Rachel Summers completists only, and mainly if you're working on some sort of masochistic research project.