To Me, My X-Men Comics! - Uncanny X-Men Issue 111
In which there is mesmeric manspreading and worrisome facial blindness
PREVIOUSLY IN THE UNCANNY X-MEN: Baseball douchebags! Dangerous danger rooms! Snippy Jean!
The issue opens with Beast wandering around a circus, trying to work out whether or not the freaks he keeps bumping into are the New X-Men or not. He’s all ‘I guess that could be Nightcrawler, but I wouldn’t know’ and ‘Is that whatsisname? Wolverine? Maybe…’ This, despite the fact that a convenient flashback reveals he was specifically asked to track down the missing X-Men. Jesus, Beast, you’re an Avenger, for Stan Lee’s sake! Maybe do a little research before you go on a search and rescue. Anyway, it’s not until Beast happens to catch a glimpse of a certain uppity redhead missing a triple somersault trapeze jump and then telekinetically floating to the ground that he recognises her as Jean. “I’d recognise that telekinesis anywhere!” he declares to himself. Not “I’d recognise the woman I spent most of the Silver Age hanging out with anywhere” or “Boy, that scowl sure looks familiar”. Hank McCoy, good with mutant names and powers, really quite terrible indeed with mutant faces. Anyway, Beast follows Jean back to her tent, as a pair of Graysons plummet into the dirt behind him.
Back in the tent, Beast tries to convince Jean that she’s not a circus freak, but rather an Uncanny X-Person™! Jean doesn’t buy a word of it. And nor does Scott when he pokes his inevitable fool head into the conversation. As with any conversation involving more than two mutants, the whole thing escalates into a scuffle and eventually Beast ends up fleeing for his idiot furry blue life from a passing gang of circus toughs. Eventually they capture him and take him to villain of the issue, Mesmero, who is man-spreading like nobody’s business. Beast, dumbstruck by Mesmero’s overt crotchal display, falls immediately under his thrall. They don’t call him Mesmero for nothing, people.
Wolverine, however, growing more and more disturbed by the ever-increasing homoerotica of this issue, breaks out of his chains and heads off to do something manly and heterosexual. He settles for slapping Jean around, ostensibly in a bid to snap her out of the trance in which Mesmero’s crotch has placed her. Well, Logan, maybe you can slap Jean around, but there’s no way that Phoenix is putting up with that kind of faux-macho domestic violence bullshit. She blasts Wolverine away with a telekinetic mind zap. “I’d recognise that telekinesis mind zap anywhere!” thinks Beast and snaps out of his trance. And then the rest of the team also snap out of their trance and they defeat Mesmero and give him some much-needed pants to wear.
Oh, and then there’s a cliffhanger reveal on the last page. “Lenin’s Ghost!” says Colossus. “Um, no,” says Jean. “That’s Magneto. I’d recognise those magnetic powers anywhere.”
MVP: Hard to go past Mesmero. Really very, very hard.
Next Issue: Duh. Magneto!