Marvel Masterworks: Uncanny X-Men Vol. 1

Reprints  X-Men #94-100 and Giant-Size X-Men #1
Written by Chris Claremont, Len Wein and Bill Mantlo.
Penciled by Dave Cockrum.
Inked by Sam Grainger, Bob McLeod, Frank Chiaramonte and Dave Cockrum.

(Note:This review contains a few more SPOILERS than usual, albeit 40-year-old spoilers!)

Summary:
The mutant superheroes known as the X-Men fly to the island of Krakoa in search of a very powerful mutant. Unfortunately, they're captured and imprisoned on the island by an unseen foe. Cyclops makes it back to the X-Mansion and discovers that his mutant power, shooting optic blasts, has disappeared.  When Professor Xavier hears Cyclops' story, he decides to recruit a new team of X-Men to rescue the old one.

Xavier travels all over the world to recruit a new team, which consists of:
Nightcrawler: Kurt Wagner, a German circus acrobat, who is gifted with super-agility and the power of teleportation!

Wolverine: Logan, a Canadian intelligence agent, gifted with an amazing ability to heal and a skeleton laced with unbreakable adamantium steel!

Storm: Ororo Munroe from Kenya, she possesses the power to fly and control the weather!
Sunfire: Shiro Yashida, from Osaka, Japan, who is able to fly and generate nuclear firebolts from his fingertips!

Colossus: Peter Rasputin from the Soviet Union, who can transform his skin to "organic steel" armor!

Thunderbird: John Proudstar, who hails from an Apache reservation, a skilled tracker who also possesses super-strength!

Banshee: Sean Cassidy, originally from Ireland, master of the "Sonic Scream"!

The All-New, All-Different X-Men are born!

They are brought to Xavier's mansion headquarters and given costumes made of unstable molecules.  Cyclops (who has regained his optic blasts) briefs them on their mission. They will fly to Krakoa and free the other X-Men.

But when they arrive at Krokoa, the new X-men are shocked when they learn the identity of the being that captured the old X-men.

Can the new X-men learn to operate like a team and rescue their predecessors? And what is the mystery of the mutant that lives on the island of Krakoa?

When the team returns to the mansion, there are now thirteen members of the X-Men! Sunfire walks out immediately. Jean Grey says that she and the other original X-Men were kids when they arrived at Xavier's school, but they are now grown up. She says they have their own lives to lead and will be leaving the team. Cyclops loves Jean, but he's not sure if he's ready to quit the X-Men.

The next day he decides to stay, while Jean and the others depart. Scott loves Jean, but he doesn't feel that his optic blasts allow him to lead a "normal" life.

For the next several weeks, Cyclops puts the new team through a rigorous training regimen in the Danger Room. He wants them to function as a team when they're in battle. The new X-Men are all loners from different cultures, but Scott is determined to get them to act as a unit. Thunderbird feels Cyclops has been pushing him harder than the others and even threatens to punch Scott at one point. 

Across the country, in Colorado's Mount Valhalla, the X-Men's old foe Count Nefaria leads an attack on the headquarters of North American Air Defense Command (NORAD). Nefaria leads a team of super-villains called the Ani-Men, who take out any resistance in their way.

Nefaria wants ransom money from all the nations of the world. If he doesn't receive the ransom money within three hours, Nefaria will activate NORAD's Doomsmith Command System, which will launch the U.S. military's entire inventory of nuclear missiles.

The military tries to contact the Avengers, but they're not available, so it's up to the New X-Men to save the world!

The X-Men succeed in defeating Nefaria and the Ani-Men, but it costs Thunderbird his life in the process. The team is crushed and Cyclops is wracked with guilt. During a walk in the woods, he shoots his optic blasts in anger and accidentally opens a cairn that releases a demon into the world.

The demon attacks the X-Men and tells them he is Kierrok The Damned, of the N'Garai. The X-Men are able to subdue Kierrok and Wolverine slices the demon to ribbons, believing he has killed Kierrok. But appearances are deceiving as Kierrok recovers and the battle continues.

Cyclops deduces that the only way to stop the demon is to close the cairn. Xavier sends Storm to close up the cairn, but if Ororo wants to defeat Kierrok, she will first need to defeat some of her own personal demons.

While the new team struggles to coalesce, their leader Prof. Xavier is haunted by bizarre recurring dreams of battles in outer space, which causes many sleepless nights.

When Xavier decides to fly away for a vacation to help him deal with these nightmares, the X-Men see him off at JFK airport. As the team is leaving the airport, they're attacked by Cyclop's brother Alex, AKA Havok, and his girlfriend Lorna Dane, who has taken on the code name Polaris, Mistress of Magnetism!

The X-Men are shocked that their friends would attack them. They learn that Alex and Lorna are being mind-controlled by a mysterious new villain named Eric The Red. Cyclops is especially confused, since Eric the Red was an alias he once used.

What is the mystery behind Eric The Red, and why did he attack the X-Men?

Sometime later, all of the X-Men are celebrating Christmas Eve in New York. Scott and Jean break off from the others for a romantic dinner at Rockefeller Center.

 As soon as Jean and Scott sit down for dinner, they're attacked by the mutant-hunting robots known as the Sentinels! Jean is captured and Cyclops is left hanging on for dear life at the top of 30 Rock. Thankfully, Storm, Wolverine, and Banshee arrive and save Scott from the Sentinels. After a brief fight, the Sentinels fly away with Banshee and Wolverine.

At the same time, Prof. Xavier is vacationing on a boat owned by his friend Dr. Peter Corbeau. The boat is destroyed by a Sentinel and Professor X is captured.

We learn that the Sentinels took their captive mutants to their secret base. The robots are being controlled by Dr. Steven Lang, who plans to wipe out all mutants. Wolverine breaks loose and frees Jean and Banshee. The heroes think they're home free, but they're shocked to learn that the Sentinels' base is actually a space station!

Back on Earth, Peter Corbeau contacts the other X-Men and tells them that he can fly them to the Sentinel's space base in a space shuttle. When the heroes arrive, they have little trouble disposing of the Sentinels. The X-Men wonder why the killer robots were so easy to defeat.

When victory seems in sight, the New X-Men are attacked by...the Old X-Men? They're actually X-Sentinels, created by Steven Lang to destroy the X-Men once and for all.

Can the X-Men defeat the X-Sentinels? Even if they do, they will have to go through extremely dangerous solar storms in order to get back to Earth!

Review:
The All-New, All-Different X-Men featured some of the best stories and most popular characters of the Bronze Age. The team's early adventures show that they were interesting from the beginning.

Story:
Len Wein wrote the opening tale that reprints Giant-Size X-Men #1 and it's a great "origin story" for the New X-Men. Xavier's globetrotting and the fight with Krakoa are very entertaining. While the characters were still evolving, it's interesting to see them interact with one another. They're a bit hostile to each other at times, especially Wolverine.

Chris Claremont takes over writing with the Nefaria/Ani-Men story. Thunderbird's death is sad, even though he's not around long enough for us to invest in him emotionally. Claremont does a good job showing how such a death would impact Proudstar's teammates, especially Cyclops.

While re-reading these stories, it's interesting to see how often Claremont is planting bits and hints that take a few issues (or in this case a few issues worth of reprinted pages) to amount to anything. For instance, we see Steven Lang talking about his plans for wiping out mutants 36 pages before the Sentinels attack the X-Men. Eric The Red's identity isn't revealed in the tales reprinted in this volume. This truly makes these stories feel like a "graphic novel" in every sense of the term.

Claremont slowly gives us more information about these new X-Men. During the battle with Kierrok, we see two panels of Storm flashing back to her childhood.  When Wolverine's claws pop out of his bare knuckles, Banshee is shocked to learn the claws are part of him. It's a clever way of slowly revealing their backstories.

These stories also feature Claremont's trademark narrative captions. Sometimes Claremont's narrator seems to be yelling at the X-Men. And sometimes, the X-Men even talk back to this narrator, as we see in these pages from the Kierrok story:

I love it!

We also get the beginnings of a supporting cast for the X-Men. Moira MacTaggert and Peter Corbeau (who was co-created by Claremont in a Hulk story) would be recurring characters for years to come. Moira makes quite an impression during the Kierrok fight when she attacks the demon with a machine gun!

There are a few "WTH" moments in these stories. When Eric The Red takes off with Havok and Polaris, Cyclops let's them go rather than blasting them. Not very super-heroic of the X-Men's leader. When Nefaria realizes the X-Men are in the plane approaching Valhalla, he refers to them as his "greatest foes." It's a bit odd, since he only battled the X-Men once, after debuting in an Avengers story and facing Iron Man twice. When Banshee and Wolverine are captured by Sentinels, it happens off panel. That shouldn't happen in a visual medium

The other problem is that the villains the X-Men face aren't very interesting. Kierrok is a generic monster adversary. Nefaria would later gain superpowers, but at this point he's a B-grade megalomaniac, and his Ani-Men were C-grade baddies (even if they were given superpowers by Nefaria). Eric The Red is...well, we don't find out who he is in these tales. Things improve when the Sentinels, classic X-Men villains from the Silver Age, battle the X-Men in the three-parter that finishes the book.

In spite of these issues, the stories featured in Marvel Masterworks: Uncanny X-Men Vol. 1 are still mostly very good.

Art:
Dave Cockrum pencils every page and provides great art the whole time. He gives us lots of memorable images, such as Krakoa revealing its true self. These stories contain some of Cockrum's finest work. Throughout Marvel Masterworks: Uncanny X-Men Vol. 1, he pencils lots of two-page spreads, such as this space battle that haunts Xavier's dreams:

Cockrum also draws plenty of great fight scenes, like this one below:

And Cockrum ends the book with this great image on the last page reprinted in Marvel Masterworks: Uncanny X-Men Vol. 1:

Great work from Cockrum. I should mention that he's embellished by several inkers in these stories. He served as his own inker in the first and last issues (Giant-Size X-Men #1 and X-Men #100), which contain the best art in the book.

How does it look?:
Here's are two pages 2 and 3 of Giant-Size X-Men #1:

This is how the same pages look in Marvel Masterworks: Uncanny X-Men Vol. 1:

Extras:
Claremont wrote an introduction for a 1993 edition of Marvel Masterworks: Uncanny X-Men Vol. 1 and it's included here. We also get several pages of Cockrum's original art and character design sheets.

Rating:
Marvel Masterworks: Uncanny X-Men Vol. 1 contains stories that are historically significant in comics history and the book features excellent art. It's recommended, but the story criticisms I mentioned earlier keep me from giving it my highest rating.

J.A. Morris' rating:

.5

3 and a half Sals.

Invincible Iron Man Omnibus

Reprints Iron Man #115-157
Written by David Michelinie, Bob Layton, Bill Mantlo, Jim Shooter, Roger Stern, Peter John Palmer and Alan Kupperberg.
Penciled by John Romita Jr., John Byrne, Carmine Infantino, Bob Layton. 
Inked by Bob Layton, Dan Green, Tom Palmer, 

Over 800 pages of Bronze Age Iron Man action!

Highlights include:

Tony Stark is ambushed by the Ani-Men before he has a chance to put on his Iron Man armor! He's even more shocked when he learns the brains behind the attack is his girlfriend Whitney Frost, AKA Madam Masque. She orders Stark to help restore the health of her dying father, Count Nefaria...or else!

Stark has to put on his armor in front of the Ani-Men!

Pressure mounts on Stark when he learns that SHIELD has been secretly buying up stock in his company, Stark International. This depresses Stark and he develops a drinking problem. At the same time, a crooked billionaire named Justin Hammer has a device that allows him to take control of Iron Man's armor. Hammer uses the this to make Iron Man kill a foreign diplomat.

Stark will have to stop Hammer and his army of super-villains if he wants to prove Iron Man's innocence.

  

But dealing with Hammer is only part of Stark's problem. He's hit rock bottom. His drinking gets completely out of control. His drunken, cruel behavior causes his longtime butler Edwin Jarvis to resign. But Stark's girlfriend Bethany "Beth" Cabe helps him kick booze. Beth's ex-husband had a drinking problem that cost him his life, she doesn't want to lose someone else to the bottle.

Tony Stark asks Beth to help him deal with his alcoholism.

The Hulk arrives in New York City. His alter ego, Bruce Banner seeks help from Stark, hoping he can cure Banner of the Hulk for good.

Hulk and a new friend play with Micronauts toys!

Unfortunately it doesn't work and Shellhead finds himself in a battle that nearly costs him his life. It's up to Scott Lang, better known as to the world as Ant-Man, to save Iron Man.

Iron Man's old foe Titanium Man attacks New York. He's fallen out of favor with his former bosses in the Soviet Union and believes trashing Iron Man will win back their good graces. Titanium Man and the Golden Avenger duel at the ice rink at Rockefeller Center.

Whiplash get's a power upgrade and takes the name Blacklash. He goes after Stark's chief of security.  In the process, Stark International is set on fire!


Stark learns that Doctor Doom is trying to acquire equipment from Stark International. Iron Man pays a visit to Doom in Latveria and a battle ensues. Iron Man and Doctor Doom wind up sent back in time to the kingdom of Camelot. They find themselves on opposite sides of a war between King Arthur and Morgan Le Fey.

Review:
It's difficult to review a book this long, but I'll do my best cover the high and low points. This review contains a few 30-year old spoilers.

Story:

Back in 2012, I reviewed a book called Iron Man: Demon In A Bottle. I wrote that "One problem with Iron Man is that I've always felt he's too damn powerful for most villains and that most of his top foes are just other guys in armor." That happens far too much in this book as well. In addition to that, we get quite a few gangs of generic gunmen and terrorists that Iron Man easily dispatches. 

Not only are many of the villains easy outs, they're not particularly compelling either. There are two stories that feature Dreadnoughts as the villain. Dreadnoughts are basically just generic killer robots and not very interesting.

An unmasked Stark faces off against Madame Masque and her Dreadnoughts.

There's also a moment that indicates (in my opinion) that Michelinie was tiring of a major plot thread. At the height of Stark's alcoholism, SHIELD secretly purchased stock in his company to gain a controlling interest. After Stark is rude to Jarvis, the butler sells his stock, allowing SHIELD to take over. This is a crushing blow to Stark.

But then he tells off Nick Fury and easily gains back control of Stark International in two pages! It sort of undermines major elements of the "Demon In A Bottle" storyline.  

We get not one, but two stories where Madame Masque is allowed to escape. She may be Stark's ex-girlfriend, but she's also a leader of the Maggia crime syndicate and a dangerous criminal. I'm thinking an Avenger would've at least tried to bring her to justice.

But there are some good, solid enjoyable stories here.

A three-part guest appearance by the Hulk features a great battle between Iron Man and Ol' Greenskin.  Michelinie also makes good use of Ant-Man in that story. Scott Lang saves Iron Man by shrinking to ant-size and fixing Stark's armor. This is sort of a homage to an earlier story where the original Ant-Man (Henry Pym) crawled inside the Vision, but it's still a cool sequence. 

James "Rhodey" Rhodes made his first appearance in stories that are reprinted in this book. Rhodey became a major character in comics, first as Stark's right-hand man, later wearing the Iron Man armor himself, finally becoming War Machine.

Rhodey's first appearance.

And of course Rhodey has shown up in the Iron Man animated series and movies, so Michelinie deserves credit for creating a supporting character with staying power.

Speaking of new characters, Bethany Cabe makes a great love interest for Stark. She runs her own security company and is proficient in hand-to-hand combat, more than capable when attacked by bad guys. But the storyline involving her husband is soap opera level silly. I won't spoil it beyond that.

Beth helps Iron Man tackle Hammer's hired villains.

 

The fight against Blacklash is pretty good, as the former Whiplash's new powers make him much more dangerous.

I've been a fan of the Titanium Man story since it was brand new back in 1980.    

The alcoholism storyline and the Doctor Doom time-travel tale have been reprinted in smaller books, but they'also high points of Iron Man Omnibus.

Romita and Layton also make Justin Hammer look like actor Peter Cushing, which is a nice touch.

Art:
The art in this book is fantastic.

The vast majority of Invincible Iron Man Omnibus is penciled by John Romita Jr. and inked by Layton.  These stories are some of Romita's earliest work and look nothing like the art he later produced as a fan favorite. That's due to Layton's heavy inking. But they make a great art team. In later stories (such as the Doctor Doom two-parter), we see Romita asserting himself a little more.

Doom shoots rubble out of his fingertips!

A few other pencilers and inkers take over for an issue's worth of pages, but Layton inks almost everything here, so the "look" of the art consistent throughout. John Byrne guest-penciled one issue reprinted here, he and Layton are a good combination.

Stark is thrown from the Heli-Carrier and changes to Iron Man in mid-air! 
Nice art from Byrne & Layton.

Carmine Infantino pencils the re-telling of Iron Man's origin.

Tony Stark flashes back to his creation of the Iron Man armor.

How does it look?:
This scan was taken from Iron Man #129:

And here's how the same pages look in this book:

Looks good to me.

Extras:
This book contains a boatload of bonus features.

We get the detailed back-story of Jarvis' resignation letter, early drafts of several covers drawn by Layton, two diagrams of Iron Mans armor that were originally published in The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe and thirteen pages of original art.

In the book's final story, Iron Man battles a giant space spore!

Invincible Iron Man Omnibus contains some good stories, and a bunch of stories that weren't very interesting. Unless you're a diehard fan of Iron Man and/or the creative team, the price tag will scare away many readers. I would recommend that the "casual" fan of Iron Man would be better served by picking up the Demon In A Bottle and Doomquest reprint books instead of this omnibus. But the artwork adds a half-Sal to its grade.

J.A. Morris' rating:

  

.5



2 and a half Sals.