Marvel 1978 Week--Uncanny X-Men #116

You can tell the youngsters all about rotary telephones, 8-track tapes, full service gas stations, and having only 3 or 4 channels available on television, and they'll believe you. It may take some explanation, and they look at you with incredulity, but eventually they'll buy it.

But just try to explain to them that the X-Men once weren't popular. That, they won't believe.

It's one of the more incredible transitions in comic book history. As we discussed back during Marvel 1968 week, the X-Men early on not only weren't popular...there was actually a 5 year period when they were downgraded to a bi-monthly reprint book!!

Now, of course, the X-Empire is so large that if Marvel were to spin it off into its own company, it would outsell Dark Horse, Image and Wildstorm combined (note--I didn't do any math, just roll with me here). Wolverine alone has more titles being published than Batman. Scrolling the the X portion of Marvel's solicits every month takes hours.

What happened? How, exactly, did the X-Men transition from being the sad sack franchise that even Lee & Kirby and Thomas & Adams couldn't make successful, to the unstoppable juggernaut it is today? Was it just that the comic public was more receptive to the idea in the late 70's than it was in the late 60's? Was Chris Claremont just that much better at tapping into the zeitgeist of a mutant book than Stan and Roy? Were the X costumes of the 1960's so godawful that they physically drove readers away (hint: YES)? Were Cockrum and Byrne & Austin that amazing? Was it just "right place, right time," or was there something more?

Which brings us to:

The time was December, 1978. The Uncanny X-Men had only leapt from bi-monthly to monthly a few months earlier. Phoenix wasn't yet Dark, and was still Jean Grey; there was only one team, and no Factor, Young, or New; Scott Summers didn't have 8 or 10 real and/or hypothetical future children running around, and the X-Men didn't yet have 6 or 7 members from various alternate futures or various sundered What If? universes hanging around; Magneto was still a bad guy, as opposed to a good guy turned bad guy reformed into good guy than turned bad guy again and then...; there was no Brood or Mojoverse; no four-issue miniseries or spin-offs or sprawling and interminable crossovers. In short, it was a simpler time.

How simple?

Hee hee. Tying the X-Men (and Ka-Zar!!) to a stake. How quaint.

There's no need to introduce them, but here are our creators:

This team, usually together with letterer Orzechowski and colorist Wein, strode the Earth like a behemoth for what seemed like eons, simultaneously creating and riding the growing tsunami of X-popularity. It was a strong, confident, ridiculously ambitious run, meticulously planned, rarely mis-stepping. So what's going on this issue?

To set the scene: our mutant heroes escaped from a deadly battle in Magneto's Antarctic fortress and ended up in the Savage Land, where they found that Garokk (which is also spelled Garrok on occasion this issue!!) , the Petrified Man, was setting himself up as the Sun God who will unify the Savage Land (and destroy it, in the process, of course). Which leads immediately to a patented Byrne/Austin two-page spread:

Whereupon our heroes are set upon by primitives riding pterodactyls...



...and several homo so-called superior get captured by cavemen. Brilliant.

A lot of this issue's little focus moments are for Wolverine. Again, this is going to be hard for you kiddies to understand, but in the early days of the All-New, All-Different X-Men, fans HATED Wolverine. Really--Wolverine was unpopular. He was a rude little jerk who didn't play well with their clean, squeaky heroes. Byrne has said that one of his goals when he came on board was to make the fans like Logan, without softening his character. Here we can see some of the work to that effect.




Rapport with savage beasts, check. Vicious killer (as vicious as you could be as a hero in a Code book, at least), check. Tough badass? Check! And all of that was in the space of 3 pages, so Project: Make Wolverine Ridiculously Popular was well under way.

So our heroes reach the arena where the others are to be sacrificed. Question: how do you execute a man made of living metal?

Fortunately, Nightcrawler frees Cyclops before things go too far.



This last panel encapsulates, in part, why Byrne/Austin worked so well--they know how to draw team action. Yeah, there's not much background in this panel, but everybody is doing something: Nightcrawler is wrestling with a goon, Cyclops is using a precision shot to free Banshee, Colossus is burst free with Kirby-like power. They always had a lot of things happening in their panels, even if it was just showing various people's various reactions. Without making the art overly busy or cluttered, they managed to give a "three-dimensional" feeling to their art. This was fairly unique to team books of the day, which all too often just focused on one character acting, while everyone else stood flat-footed and watched.

Anyway, Garrok takes off:
Why? To "re energize himself" from the city's power grid, of course!

But Scott can't let that happen:

Which of course results in:



Sean rescues Scott...

But Ororo is less successful rescuing Garrok:


And there you have the best and worst of Claremont in a nutshell. There was definitely a deeper level of characterization at work in the X-Men than was being seen in most contemporary comics books, even at Marvel. But there was also a...shall we say, lack of subtlety in applying it...a hammerhead approach, as if he didn't trust his audience to follow what he was doing, or the artist to explain it. You could never have Storm feeling claustrophobic without Claremont having to explain, in detail, her childhood trauma, again and again. You could never have an emotional scene without one of his characters serving as a narrator, pontificating to the audience on what emotion we were seeing and what it meant. At times it could feel very condescending to the reader, particularly the older ones whom the good characterization was attracting.

Well, the X-Men pack up and leave the Savage Land...in a wooden boat. Not smart.

So Storm's ability to sense weather works like Deanna Troi's ability to sense emotions: state the freakin' obvious. And isn't the point of having a "weather goddess" around her ability to control things like that??!?

That's the end of our issue. It's not the greatest story by any means. Garrok is really a crap villain, who doesn't do much...Ka-Zar is not really used at all. Claremont and Byrne were not quite at their peak yet. But they were getting there.

The X-Men globe trot a bit next, to Japan and Canada, make it home, deal with Arcade, go to Scotland to fight Proteus, face off with the Hellfire Club, deal with the Dark Phoenix saga....

Did you notice anything about that list of stories? There's not a ton of "human vs. mutant" angst stories, are there? Yes, earlier they had had a Sentinel story, and of course Byrne would leave the X-Men with Day of Future Past. But there wasn't the over-arching obsession with "us versus them" stories, of "our persecuted species" tales. It was still there, in the background of many stories...but it didn't dominate. The X-Men were mutants, but that wasn't their exclusive concern. We weren't constantly deluged with "humans are going to wipe us out" stories, with an increasingly bleak world view. We weren't getting visitors from 17 alternate futures telling us how much life was going to suck for mutants, or the constant dread of genocide. I mean, I got the metaphor, you're preaching to the choir, bro. Can't we just fight a super-villain once in awhile??

Unless, of course, that super-villain is the evil clone of the son you had with a demonically transformed clone of your dead lover. Oh, too late.

ELSEWHERE IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE:

You know, I never got into Ghost Rider...just not my cup of tea, I guess. But when I see this cover...check out this synopsis (from GCD):

Johnny is trapped in a ghost town when he is confronted by a prospector with amazing powers and the two are captured by a giant ship spouting motorcycle riding robots.

Wait a minute--a cover shout-out to Close Encounters, with a giant space ship spewing out motorcycle riding robots? AND prospectors with amazing powers??

Hmmm, I'd better find this book...