Uncanny X-Men - Roy Thomas II.

X-Men v1 #55-66.

And they fought happily ever after....??

Roy Thomas returned to the X-Men for one final stretch of issues, starting with 55 (1969) and ending with 66 (1970). The only exception was the penultimate issue, 65, which was filled in by Dennis O'Neil. This was before he became famous, of course.

As for the art, issue 55 was drawn by good old Don Heck and Werner Roth, and issues 64 and 66 were done by, respectively, Don Heck alone and Sal Buscema, but most of the work, 56-63 and 65, was by the legendary Neal Adams. Adams was pretty much one of the best artists in the industry during the Bronze Age. Just a few years after his stint on X-Men, he and Dennis O'Neil did some very important work at DC which did a great deal to help them catch up to Marvel after the revolution of the sixties. This included redefining Batman, essentially making him the character he is today. Adams has also been one of the foremost advocates of creators' rights in the comics industry.

By the way, Stan Lee still received first billing as editor.


The back-up stories of the first two issues continue Angel's origin story, which establishes that Angel was the first of the X-Men to become a superhero – before being recruited to the team, he operated on his own as the Avenging Angel. Once Warren's origin was established, he would later bust out his Avenging Angel identity again in issues 60-62, because he was displeased with the team and wanted to work on his own.

On the whole, this stretch of issues shows a strong progression from previous X-Men stories, especially the Factor Three Saga, being now largely arc-based. Issues 55-63 consist of four loosely connected stories, the beginnings and endings of which lead directly into one another. The first two of the four are especially tightly interwoven. The last three issues, 64-66, are stand-alones, though again, the final issue continues directly from the penultimate one.

The first arc plays out in #55-56 and picks up right where the previous issue left off. Cyclops confronts the Living Pharaoh, but is beaten and captured. The Pharaoh takes him and his brother to Egypt (surprise!) and the rest of the X-Men give chase. Scott and Alex manage to escape in short order, and Alex is revealed to be a mutant as well. He can project blasts of cosmic rays from his body, and like Scott, he is unable to control his powers. This is in fact the first time in the franchise that mutant powers are triggered by a stressful situation. This idea will eventually become omnipresent. Puberty and danger are basically the two most common causes.

Fighting with the Pharaoh's goons ensues, but the villain ultimately manages to get away with an unconscious Alex and go through with his original plan, which was to use some kind of machine to drain cosmic energy from Alex. This boosts his own energy powers so much that he becomes the Living Monolith, a giant, uh, metal man. Actually, on the cover of #56, he looks shockingly similar to a DC character named Tyroc. See the comparison picture. The Monolith is defeated when Alex uses their connection to drain his energy right back, blowing up and what seems to to be the temples of Abu Simbel in the process! Hot damn. The Monolith went on to become a semi-recurring bad guy for the X-Men and other heroes.


Overall, this story is rather average, and leaves a number of awkward loose ends. For instance, you might be wondering how the Pharaoh found out about Alex in the first place, and knew he'd be useful to him? Well, you see, he used his “mutant instinct”. Uh huh. And by the way, remember how some policemen accused Cyclops of murder in #54? That matter will NEVER come up again.

Issues #57-59 tell what is probably the most important story of Roy Thomas's tenure on the title, and one of the highlights of the series before the All-New, All-Different revamp. It's very notable conceptually, deals directly with the “mutant problem” and shows us some actual debate over government countermeasures. It's a little jarring how these issues only seem to come only in stories directly relating to them, but it's good to see them addressed at all.

The Sentinels are reintroduced, now much cooler and more menacing (though still very much purple), and possessing the ability to adapt to various mutant powers, which will become a mainstay for all future models. Aside from them, the story's main antagonists are Judge Chalmers, a friend of the Sentinels' original creator Bolivar Trask, and Bolivar's son Larry, who believes the X-Men murdered his father and who wants revenge.

These characters were essentially prototypes for two very different kinds of enemies the X-Men would face in future stories. Larry Trask's style of fanatic, frothing-at-the-mouth racism would be continued in such future villains as Stephen Lang, Graydron Creed, William Stryker, etc. Judge Chalmers served as a precursor to Senator Robert Kelly: both are basically good people with genuine idealogical fears of the threat mutants pose to humanity, and importantly, both were also government officials. (By the way, the creation of Larry Trask proved to set a rather unfortunate precedent, since members of the Trask family will continue to crawl out of the woodwork whenever the plot demands for it over the years.)

Alex, wary of his powers, runs away from the team in Egypt and is snatched up by the Sentinels. He's taken back to the US, where Trask builds him a powersuit to contain his cosmic energy (for some reason). The rest of the team heads back home as well. Both Lorna and Iceman are also captured by the Sentinels in separate incidents – Bobby goes down fighting while giving Beast a chance to get away, but Lorna is a pushover, since her magnetic powers seem to be fading for some reason. This is the one and only time this plot thread is mentioned. While the three are in captivity together, we get the first hints of a love triangle forming between them. Later on, the Sentinels catch Angel as well.

We also see the Sentinels capturing all the X-Men's mutant villains: Toad, Mastermind, Unus, the Blob, Vanisher (whom they forgot about and slipped in later) and Mesmero. The Living Monolith is also among them, picked up from a conference with important-looking people who address him as “Professor Abdol”. Changeling is conspicuously absent. Magneto is not taken in either. The Sentinels destroy him on sight, revealing him to be a robotic copy of the real thing. It seems the Magneto that appeared in the previous story with Lorna Dane was a fake. The pointlessness of this plot twist is staggering. It only needlessly complicates things. It's possible that the real Magneto would have defeated the Sentinels too easily and had to be taken out of the game.

On the heroic side of things, Banshee, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch are also captured. If you're wondering why the Avengers didn't appear to save the latter two, well, unless I'm mistaken, they still hadn't rejoined the team at this point. In any case, these scenes do a good job ramping up the suspense and showing us the the scale of the story. Though the Sentinels never kill anybody (this is still the Silver Age, you know), the threat they pose is made presented credibly.


Meanwhile, the relationship between Judge Chalmers and Larry Trask is breaking down. Chalmers is worrying about the morality of their actions, and whether their treatment of captured mutants is humane. (Curiously, they only seem to be placed in suspended animation. I honestly don't see the problem.) Trask accuses him of being a mutant himself, and also uses the term “mutant-lover” for the first time in the series. This touch of paranoia was very effective in characterizing Trask, in my opinion.

Once their confrontation turns physical, Trask happens to lose the medallion he'd been wearing around his neck all this time. It turns out he himself had been a mutant all along, and that his father Bolivar had constructed the medallion as a device to mask his suppress his (precognitive) power and modify his memories. Chalmers knew this all along, but once it's all out in the open, the Sentinels no longer accept commands from Trask. And this just happens to take place right after he'd ordered them to kill all mutants. The contrivance is striking.

The final confrontation is really a bit messy as well. Cyclops, Beast and Marvel Girl battle their way through to Trask's prison complex base. They manage to beat the Sentinels' adaptation programming by masquerading as Quicksilver, Toad and Scarlet Witch respectively.

The fighting is pretty decent throughout the arc, but it's pretty obvious that the X-Men couldn't defeat the Sentinels simply by outfighting them. In the end, Trask's precognition powers, an injury to Judge Chalmers and the Sentinels' strict programming give Cyclops the clues necessary to think up a winning tactic. He defeats the Sentinels with a logic bomb, by convincing them to attack the source of all life, and by extension the source of all mutation.

And so all the Sentinels end up flying straight into the sun.


This is at once sort of ingenious and pretty damn stupid. The suddenness of the conclusion notwithstanding, it's actually not quite as anti-climactic as you might expect. The haphazard synchronicity of the final confrontation is sort of dramatic, and it helps that we're treated to a cliffhanger when Alex is injured in an explosion created from his overloading powers. Though, the three-panel teaser of the next villain feels a little out of place.

The next arc, told in #60-61, introduces Karl Lykos, a doctor and former associate of Xavier's, whom the team visits to get Alex medical attention. However, Lykos secretly has the ability to drain life energy from beings, and mutants are an especially nourishing source. He drains some energy from Alex and turns into the vampire dinosaur called Sauron. There's a few important things you need to know about Sauron. Firstly, he got his powers from being bitten by a group of Pteranodons as a child. You might think I'm joking, but I'm not. His father was giving a rich doctor a guide of the Tierra del Fuego in South America, and Karl happened to save the doctor's daughter from a monster attack. Secondly, yes, he's named after THE Sauron.


Lykos, as Sauron, gets into a fight with the X-Men (who don't recognize him, since... y'know), but finds he has to retreat, which he accomplishes by taking control of Angel's mind with his hypnosis powers. Bizarrely, he just wipes Angel's memory and sends him home when the get clear, instead of draining his energy or at least capturing him for future use.

Lykos is actually pretty decently developed as a villain. He and the girl whose life he saved as a child, Tanya, have a forbidden love thing going on, but her father won't allow a relationship because of class differences. His desire for riches led to him also becoming a doctor, and to committing robberies in his dinosaur form. He's also given something of a 'super-powered evil side', and this I have mixed feelings about, and not just because of what a cliché split personalities are. Literally dividing a character's personality into good and evil personas is a very simplistic, very lazy way to give them moral depth. In my opinion, Lykos would have been much improved if he'd simply been a morally bankrupt individual wrestling with his own conscience.


Lykos ambushes Lorna (who has asked to join the team by this point) at the Mansion and becomes Sauron once more. His attempt to murder Tanya's father is foiled by the X-Men, so he escapes, ashamed of what he's become. He makes his way back to the Tierra del Fuego (flying a distance of, oh, about 6,500 miles on his own power), depleting all his energy doing so (yeah, no kidding?). When Tanya comes looking for him, Lykos finds himself unable to resist the urge to feed on her, and chooses to kill himself to protect her. The X-Men arrive just in time to prevent Tanya from throwing herself down a cliff after him. This ending was a little too rushed and abrupt, but ultimately still worked as a convincingly tragic moment. However, Sauron would be back.

In the next story, told in #62-63, the X-Men find their way to the Savage Land (which they visited way back in issue #10) when Angel falls down a big hole after the confrontation with Sauron. It turns out those Pteranodons originated from the Savage Land as well. While the rest of the team teams up with their old buddy, the Tarzan-wannabe Ka-Zar (who is still a dick), to fight against a group of mutant-like savages, Angel is brought back from the dead and given a new costume by a mysterious old man who seems to be in charge of those mutants.

Although the story seems to pit Angel against the rest of the X-Men in a genuinely complex situation with no real right or wrong... it doesn't. Nothing comes of it. Although we're teased with the intriguing possibility that the old man is someone like Professor Xavier, who's come to the Savage Land to gather and educate mutants there, he is all too quickly revealed to be Magneto, the real Magneto, whom the reader had never before seen without his helmet on. Apparently, he'd escaped his seemingly fatal drop in Avengers #53 by burrowing into the earth with his powers.

Yes, he burrowed into the ocean floor to get underneath the Earth's crust. Why didn't this flood the Savage Land and the rest of the cave network down there? Shouldn't this have caused major geological problems for the planet? Since Magneto didn't know about the Savage Land beforehand, where exactly was he trying to get? And where did he get a spare helmet, since his old one was used to imply his death in his previous appearance?

In any case... Magneto's now created a machine that allows him to artificially turn natives into “Neo-Mutants”. He has plans to use his machine to create an army of mutants to conquer the Earth. Does this sound familiar to you? The same idea was used in the first X-Men movie; it's possible this very story was a direct influence on the script. The only difference in the film is Magneto's reason for using the machine – instead of creating an army, he wanted to spread and entrench homo superior around the world.

The X-Men fight through an army of swamp people and the Neo-Mutants and reach Magneto, but the latter reveals his secret weapon – a new creation called Lorelei who has the power to hypnotize men. She proves completely useless, as it takes Marvel Girl all of two pages to trick Magneto into destroying his own equipment. Magneto then seemingly dies yet again among the burning wreckage of his hideout, and the team muses that this time he surely must have been killed.

Although the Neo-Mutants seem to revert to their natural forms at the end, the group will eventually stage a return under the moniker of the “Savage Land mutates” and become recurring bad guys. Aside from Lorelei, the others were just nameless mooks at this point, but they'll remain prominent (as prominent as such minor characters could) in subsequent appearances.

The Neo-Mutants were notable because they were the first ever “mutants” who looked physically inhuman instead of completely normal, possibly because they weren't natural mutations. Their ranks included a frog man and a midget with a large head. The weirdest-looking characters so far had probably been the Blob, who was basically just very fat, and Toad, who looked odd more because he was intentionally drawn to evoke the Igor archetype than because of any actual disfigurement.

In any case, this story is a classic case of wasted potential. The main problem with it is how quickly it gives up on the idea of a mutant leader similar to Professor X. What if he'd stuck around? Handing over the mansion to a complete stranger and putting him in charge of the team would NOT have been the way to go, but he still had the potential to be an intriguing supporting character. This could have been very interesting even if it wasn't revealed that he was really Magneto... but that scenario might have been even cooler. Think about it. The team meets someone who reminds them of their dead mentor and they start working together. Over the course of several issues, they begin to trust him, until it turns out that it was Magneto all along! Shock! Horror! Drama. An arc of three or four issues would have done the trick.

(Note, however, that at this point, plans to bring back Xavier were certainly already drawn – see a few paragraphs down the line for more on that. Furthermore, it's quite likely that the title's fate was already uncertain at this point, and that longer storylines were out of the question.)

Of course, the X-Men will have to deal with infiltration numerous times later on, including infiltration by Magneto himself. Perhaps this idea isn't really that obvious, and it only strikes me due to hindsight. Who knows? But these alternatives would almost certainly have been better than a meaningless battle in the jungle.

Aside from all this, the Neo-Mutants were painfully under-developed, with Lorelei's especially brief appearance only underscoring her irrelevance. Ka-Zar doesn't really serve much of a purpose in the story either – in fact, it could have been set pretty much anywhere and it could have worked just as well. To top it all off, Magneto's death under burning wreckage (“Too late! Too late to do anything – but DIE!”) was pretty pathetic.


These problems aside though, this is something of a landmark story for Magneto. It gave him a face both literally and figuratively. Although he was still very obviously evil, just the lie of benevolently guiding new mutants like Xavier would shape future interpretations of him considerably. It planted the seeds that allowed him to grow beyond just being the arch-enemy and evil opposite of the X-Men to become an alternative to them, as well as Xavier's idealogical foil.

The next issue, #64, introduces another important secondary character, Sunfire. Take a wild guess what his powers are. Like Banshee, he is a mutant who isn't outright villainous, but doesn't become an X-Man either. Unlike Banshee, however, he never joins up later either (except for one lone occasion), because he's just too much of an asshole. Sunfire – Shiro Yamada – is the son of a Japanese ambassador, whose uncle has manipulated him into acting out against the United States, which wasn't difficult, since his mother was a Hiroshima survivor.


This story is just flat-out about chauvinism. It draws an interesting (though largely implicit) parallel between Shiro's hatred of America and Western culture and the condemnation of mutants by the public, the first of many such parallels. In the end, the ambassador gives an impassioned speech about peace and acceptance and is killed by his brother, whom Shiro kills in return. Despite his belligerent behavior, Sunfire is ultimately only misguided, nothing more. Of course, in subsequent appearances, he will not have mellowed one bit, and will often get into conflict with the X-Men.

Oh, and also – the issue includes a scene where Angel almost gets sucked into a jet engine. Wow.

Issue 65 is where things get difficult.

It's a very important issue, and unfortunately it's also extremely stupid and relatively bad.

Things are not up to a good start when Alex and Lorna confront the team at the front door and demand they get into uniform, because they have something to show them. The contrived argument that results almost leads to a fight. Once the team acquiesces, Havok lays out the details of an incoming alien invasion: a race of sociopathic conquerers called the Z'Nox are coming, and the gravity of their moving planet will tear the Earth apart. The Z'Nox themselves are incredibly vague and blandly evil enemies who aren't much elaborated upon, but the threat presented by their moving home world was novel and at least somewhat interesting.

When questioned as to how he knows all this, Alex throws out a bombshell:

Professor X is alive!


Yes, it turns out that Xavier learned of the coming invasion and faked his death to prepare for it. The terminally ill Changeling had taken his place out of a desire to do something good and sacrificed his life battling Grotesk. Jean was in on it all along, as well. (Xavier mentions “dividing some of his powers” between Changeling and Jean. Telepathy was a very loosely defined power back then. This will be ignored in the future, once it's established that Jean was a natural telepath from childhood.)

This was retarded for a number of reasons. First of all, Xavier's only motivation for this deception was so he could have time to prepare a counter-attack. Why he needed to be in hiding to come up with his grand plan was NEVER explained. To add insult to injury, he was apparently hiding out in the basement of the mansion all along! And the X-Men's reaction to all this? Are they outraged at this completely pointless charade? Are they mad at Jean for keeping it from them? No, they don't give a shit. They just accept it and move on. While it makes sense that they'd have been very happy over their mentor's return, it's also pretty obvious that if they had questioned this turn of events, the plot would have collapsed completely.

Make no mistake – this was a retcon. It was probably not Roy Thomas's original intention to kill off Xavier only to bring him back. It's pure serendipity that the circumstances of his death could so easily be reinterpreted to accommodate the idea that it was Changeling masquerading as him. Angel even mentioned in #42 that Xavier wasn't acting like himself. This was ostensibly because he'd been suffering from an illness he'd kept secret from everyone, but really, what more could you ask for? There's really no outstanding contradictions, so it could be said that things fit together remarkably well. It was certainly a lot more logical on the whole than many of the resurrections that would follow in the decades to come. On the other hand, this only emphasizes the fact that it MUST have been possible to come up with a reason for the plot that wasn't so moronic.

(In the short term, however, it's obvious that they had planned this in advance. In #60, when the X-Men release the mutant villains captured by the Sentinels, Changeling's absence was specifically remarked upon.)

And it doesn't help that Xavier's plan to defeat the Z'Nox is pretty damn lame.

After the team infiltrates the Z'Nox vessel, Xavier establishes a telepathic connection to all good people on the planet Earth and gathers up their compassionate thought patterns. He then transmits these thought patterns to Marvel Girl, who in turn forwards them to Havok, who “boosts them with his cosmic rays” and blasts them into Cyclops, who somehow transfers the energy into his optic blasts and fires it at the Z'Nox. Oh, and Iceman keeps Cyke from overheating with his ice powers. Since compassion is an anathema to the Z'Nox, they self-destruct so they wouldn't be subjected to it.

How does all this work? I don't know! I really don't know! It's a rather stupid scene that still manages to be kind of cool despite itself. Even worse, this issue was written by industry legend Denny O'Neil. His best works have dealt with the more down to earth heroes, so how he came up with this kind of sci-fi lameness is beyond me.


However, the transfer is such a strain for Xavier that he falls into a coma. The next issue, #66, deals with the team looking for a way to fix him up, which entails finding one of the “mind apparatuses” Xavier had created with Bruce Banner. Naturally, this involves getting into a fight with the Hulk. This issue also marks the occasion that Iceman has definitively shifted to being the odd one out in the love triangle between him, Lorna and Alex. It's a decent story, and a fitting epilogue for the the previous issue... but considering it might very well have been the final original X-Men story ever published, it falls rather flat overall.

In early 1969, the sales of X-Men had already dropped so far that the title was on the verge of cancellation. Thomas was brought back in an attempt to turn things around – and Adams apparently specifically asked to be put on the lowest-selling title when he came to work for Marvel.

In a modern context, the stories seem riddled with various structural flaws, shortcuts and missed opportunities – but the readership at the time didn't think so. The work put out by Thomas was just less dull than Friedrich's and Drake's. One of the bigger flaws of Thomas's previous run was the lack of good villains, and this is thankfully avoided here – he pulls off the Sentinels and Magneto very well, and Sauron was a pretty neat new baddie. Even though I can't call the writing unambiguously good, it's undeniable that the title was still very much enjoyable during this period.

Artistically, however, the book was top-notch, and anyone would be hard-pressed to find things to complain about it. If the writing didn't do it, then the art was surely the tipping point that made the book worthwhile. Neal Adams was just excellent. His pencils had some serious gravitas, with a lot of shadowed close-ups and interesting panel structures. His work had a bit more detail than others' at the time – combined with a generally darker coloring, this gave the book a somewhat mature look. It was ahead of its time in that regard.

It's obvious that the readership noticed the team's efforts: they cleared house at the 1969 Alley Awards, which were given out by fans. Thomas won Best Writer, Neal Adams and Tom Palmer won Best Pencil Artist and Best Inker respectively.

But it was all for nothing. The readers saw no reason to invest their 15 cents in X-Men. Eventually, Marvel decided to pull the plug. The decision was reached to stop the publication of new material. #66 marked the end of an era. However, the title itself was not canceled, and continued putting out reprints on a bimonthly schedule for the next twenty-seven issues. For the following five years, the X-Men were relegated to guest appearances. There were a few important developments for the characters during this period, and we'll look at some of them in the next article. For the most part though, the franchise was dead in the water. It would take a miracle to revive the book.

Coming up: one miracle.

Index of Happenings:

Costumes: Angel's outfit is updated twice, Havok and Lorna get their first ones.

(1) Warren briefly uses his Avenging Angel outfit, which was decent enough in principle: a red bodysuit with yellow shorts, a blue belt and assorted black elements. Unfortunately, the red was colored as pink more than half the time, which was enough to turn the costume into an impressive fashion catastrophe.


(2) Magneto gives Angel a wholly new costume, and it's a considerable improvement. In fact, it might just be the best among the team at the time. The new suit is a blue and white one-piece with a halo-symbol on the chest. The mask is also discarded in favor of a much smaller headpiece which would realistically do a very crappy job at hiding Warren's identity.


(3) Havok gets a specialized suit to contain his powers from Larry Trask (for some reason). The look is a mix of good and bad. It's mostly all-black, with a symbol on his chest evoking his plasma blasts that looks way too similar to a bullseye. It could have have looked quite cool, but unfortunately suffers from a rather silly three-pronged... thing... on his head. Nevertheless, Havok will wear this costume and variants for a long time.
(4) Lorna gets a very good-looking ensemble that's modeled after the outfit she wore while in the service of the fake Magneto. The only real differences are that the new costume is all dark green, without golden elements, and less evil-looking (no skull adornments). This look is essentially the classic appearance of Polaris, since most of the other costumes she'll wear over the years don't stack up at all. Also, Lorna becomes the first X-Man with a cape.


Deaths: 4. (1) Magneto's robot double is destroyed. Is that a valid example? Somewhat debatable. You can see how difficult it is to keep count of this. (2) The genuine article in the Savage Land also seemingly dies in a burning building.
(Magneto: 3 deaths.)
Resurrections: 3. (1) Magneto didn't die in the fall in Avengers #53, he burrowed into the Earth to escape. (2) Xavier faked his own death with the help of Changeling.
(Magneto: 2 resurrections.)
Professor X: 1 resurrection.)

Team: eight. Lorna and Alex become de facto members, though the former goes without a codename. Xavier returns.
Overall: nine.

Writers: 5.
Artists: 12.

Next time: we'll see what the X-Men were up to during the reprint period, and cover what might be the most important issue of the franchise ever – Giant Sized X-Men 1!