It's early 1979 and big things are afoot. The most significant X-Men storyline of all is just around the corner, less than a year away, and another plotline has been teased for years now. But the X-Men have just returned from a madcap globe-trotting adventure, they're separated from some of their own and still believe the others to be dead. At this point, there's really no status quo to speak of. Moving right on to the next epic storyline would have been foolish, and if you think Claremont (and co-plotter Byrne) would have made that mistake, you haven't been paying attention.
The intervening three issues shift focus a bit, first with another breather issue and then a fairly fluffy supervillain attack with little drama (though that might not have been intentional).
A little interjection: shortly after their homecoming, Cyclops, Storm and Nightcrawler had a guest appearance in Power Man/Iron Fist #57, helping out the Heroes for Hire against the good old Living Monolith. Recall that Misty and Colleen are closely involved with the Heroes for Hire. This has some relevance here.
Issue #122 feels very light, in that it's a series of brief scenes that don't quite flow together into a cohesive whole. The most important of those scenes, as reflected by the cover, is about Colossus in the Danger Room. Yes, Claremont's pendulum of character focus has swung on Peter, and so his feelings of doubt over his effectiveness in the X-Men are coming to a head. He's having trouble holding apart a hydraulic press well below his weight class, while Cyclops and Wolverine discuss the situation in the control room. Logan decides to take matters into his own hands (though not before delivering an epic zinger to to Scott – pictured), by sabotaging the controls and stepping into the hydraulic press himself. Peter has to get over himself and move the press to save Logan's life – and he manages to do just that.Other things going on in this issue:
Banshee and Nightcrawler are fixing up the Blackbird and the rest of the Mansion, then help Wolverine repair the damage he did to the Danger Room.
Xavier has reached Imperial Center, the throneworld of the Shi'ar Empire (which will pick up the name “Chandilar” somewhere along the way). The newly crowned Lilandra seems to be very popular with her people.
Jean, out on town to buy supplies for Moira, meets a man called Jason Wyngarde, whom she immediately feels an attraction to. It's also established that Angus MacWhirter has been missing since his mystery encounter at the Muir Island research facility in #119.
Colleen and Scott go out on a date. At the end of the day, she gives him the key to his apartment, indicating the beginning of a long-term relationship. Well, psyche! Aside from her brief appearance in the next two issues, Colleen simply disappeared. Hers and Scott's blossoming relationship ended before it could even start. At this point, I have to wonder what the hell Claremont was thinking. He had to know that Scott and Jean would meet again in the span of a couple of issues, so really, what was the point? It could maybe have been milked for a bit of additional drama, but what we got could hardly be called a proper love triangle. Ultimately, this was a particularly grating example of a lost Chris Claremont subplot.
Incidentally, this might be the first time that the X-Men's connection to the town of Salem Center was pegged down. The fact that Xavier's mansion was located in Westchester County, NY had already been established. To be honest, it's really hard to spot these things when you're so used to just knowing about them... but whatever.
Logan spots Mariko Yashida in New York, but fails to make contact. They'll already be out on a date in the very next issue, so once again, I'm not sure what the point of that doorman barring his way was.
Ororo visits a run-down tenement building in Harlem where her parents lived and she spent her first years. I'm confused why she decided to make this trip at this particular point. It feels like it was included just to remind us of her backstory – and perhaps to raise a social issue. Ororo gets into a fight with some drugged-out teenagers, and Misty Knight and Luke Cage make a brief cameo appearance to provide her some assistance. (I can't help but notice that even then, Luke's superhero sobriquet, “Power Man” was so irrelevant that it wasn't even mentioned.)
Lastly, we get a brief stinger of Black Tom Cassidy and the Juggernaut (last seen in X-Men #103) hiring an assassin named Arcade to kill the X-Men.
Arcade makes his move in the following issues. He has a very interesting M.O. among hitmen: he kidnaps people, usually superheroes, and sticks them into Murderworld, his private amusement park of high-tech death. Arcade has a very odd sense of humor.
He snatches the X-Men, along with whatever love interests of theirs were around at the time. The X-Men get stuck in Murderworld while Collen and Betsy and Amanda (two girls Peter and Kurt were out with) are held as hostages. Curiously, he misses out on Mariko, whom Logan was meeting just moments before being caught. We must take this to mean that he learned the X-Men's secret identities from Cain and Black Tom, though he hasn't exactly used this information to its fullest potential over the years.
Although the cover proudly announces that Spider-Man is guest-starring, his actual role in the story is minimal. He has a short conversation with Colleen and Scott, and then witnesses their kidnapping. He tries to warn the other X-Men, but falls late. Spider-Man himself, along with Captain Britain, were trapped in Murderworld a short while earlier, in Marvel Team-Up #65-66 – the story that introduced Arcade. This story arc was also by Claremont and Byrne, incidentally.
The X-Men, separated in the funhouse, have to contend with various traps: a hall of mirrors spawning robotic duplicates, carnival cars with buzz-saws, a holographic dogfight with some real fighters, and so forth. Banshee, without his powers, has the most difficulties. But Arcade tries a very different approach with Colossus: using his homesickness and feelings of doubt as leverage, he's brainwashed to turn on his teammates and take on the identity of THE PROLETARIAN, Workers' Hero of the Soviet Union!
It's every bit as stupid as it sounds. Even in historical context, the Russian guy pulling on red overalls with Lenin's face on them is kind of ridiculous. Good gods, it's almost the 1980s! We should be over these kinds of things by this point. And this is supposed to be a turning point in Colossus's characterization, really?
And Peter's problems don't even particularly make sense. If he misses his home so much, well, can't he just visit it? I'm sure he could arrange monthly visits whenever he's not stuck in a prehistoric land. Is it really that impossible? And the worst part is – we don't even know his family. We only saw them for a few panels back in Giant Size X-Men #1. They don't even have names. That's not enough to establish to us, the readers, why he misses them so much, and why we should care.
Here's the heart of the matter: the focus on Peter makes it clear how unfortunately banal he is. His backstory is boring – he just developed his powers and then just lived his life, undisturbed. Whoop-de-doo! Every single one of his team mates had more interesting pasts. Peter is by no means a bad character, but he's clearly more of an everyman than any of the others, and thus gets lost among their colorful personalities – at least for now.
His desire to put his superhuman abilities into the service of the Soviet Union could been really interesting, but it never really went anywhere. The idea creates the obvious question: what would have happened if Peter had joined the Communist Party instead of the X-Men? Would he have been made a opressive super-soldier? An icon like Yuri Gagarin? This was, I feel, a major wasted opportunity. If you have a Soviet character in your ensemble, why not make use of it? Peter is obviously a good-natured and sweet guy, but even so, his different background could have been a fertile ground for all sorts of conflicts. Perhaps he could have held Western values to be corrupt and unpleasant? Perhaps the freedom of the United States could have taught him how closed and authoritarian his life in Russia was? And how does a farmboy who's spent every day of his life working in a collective feel about living in a mansion with nothing to do most of the time?
None of this was explored. And I for one find it disappointing that my imagination is topping Claremont's and Byrne's efforts. Some of these problems apply to the others as well, but they had other things to replace this absence with.
Anyway...
After some fighting, Ororo and Scott manage to talk Peter out of his brainwashing while he's choking them. Since the X-Men have destroyed most of Arcade's traps by this point, Arcade decides to give up. He releases the hostages and ejects everyone from his park in a manner that makes it impossible to find the hidden Murderworld again.
I'm actually quite fond of Arcade. His running commentary on the X-Men's progress throughout the issues, and his dialogue with his hostages – while never laugh-out-loud funny – is still highly entertaining. His backstory, which he relates to Colleen at the beginning of #134, is quite original as well: he was a spoiled rich kid who murdered his father after being cut off from his allowance, and found he really liked killing people. And his affable, bizarrely noble nature just makes him stand out further. All in all, these three issues weren't exactly bad – the problems in them are more based on an absence of particular qualities rather than the presence of real flaws. It doesn't help that these stories were placed right before two of Claremont's most celebrated X-Men stories. More on those next time...
Index of Happenings:
Deaths: 6.
Resurrections: 4.
Depowered: 1.
Revamps: 1.
Team: six. Jean is away and Professor X has left Earth with Lilandra.
Overall: sixteen.
Final word: Black Tom mentions that the Juggernaut has tried to kill the X-Men on six occasions. I can only name four (#12-13, #32-33, #46 and #101-103) and one very dubious example (a fight with Beast in Amazing Adventures #16). If you know what stories I'm missing, please tell me.
Next time: We make a short detour and take a look at the first real X-Men annual.
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