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.
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.
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.
