To Me, My X-Men Comics! - Uncanny X-Men Issue 115
In which there is hypnotic dinosaur portmanteaus and a flashback to a much less interesting comic book
PREVIOUSLY IN THE UNCANNY X-MEN: Fred Savage confusion! Moustache memories! Tolkien lawsuits!
We ended last issue with a ptalking pterodactyl named, uh, Sauron, confronting those X-Men who had so foolishly found their way to the Savage Land, holding the prone body of Storm in a full-page cliffhanger. Great stuff. And, of course, enough to get this issue kicked off with Wolverine all riled up and attacking Sauron. But, uh-oh, what’s this? Sauron has some kind of hypnotic gaze that enables him to mind-control Logan. A fine excuse, as if any were needed, to indulge in some Cyclops-on-Wolverine fisticuffs (or clawticuffs/eyebeamticuffs).
They all then fight for about eight pages until Sauron suddenly runs out of juice and turns back into a human improbably named Karl Lykos. Because it turns out Sauron is not merely a mesmeric pterodactyl - a mesmerodactyl if you will - but a were-mesmerodactyl. Anyway, before Logan can gut the human version of him, some other buffoon from a completely different comic book (Ka-Zar, Lord of the Savage Land, if you can believe it) pops in and whips everybody back to his hut for a tedious flashback.
None of it is particularly interesting - you’d be disappointed if a tedious flashback was, to be fair - and it also goes on for way too many pages, introducing a whole heap of characters from that different, duller comic book that none of us care about. ‘See Ka-Zar issue 20’ suggests editor Roger Stern, at one point. “No, thank you,” responds Scott, on behalf of all of us. And then patiently explains to the rest of the team who want to help Ka-Zar that they need to leave the Savage Land immediately so that they can, uh, get back to, um, Professor X, and, yes, Professor X, that’s the ticket, to help him, uh, defeat, maybe, Magneto? The others all sigh and start trudging out of the Savage Land, only for a snowstorm to lock them in. “A snowstorm in Antarctica?” says Ka-Zar. “Now I’ve seen everything.” Kind of a weird dude.
MVP: It’s Banshee. In the battle against Sauron, Banshee expresses confusion that a were-dinosaur from a lost underground land isolated from the rest of the planet might not have heard of him. So somebody’s rather full of himself. Luckily, Banshee redeems this absurd pomposity by immediately thinking to himself that he needs to get ‘up-sun’ of him. Which is a splendid directional term.
Next issue: The very real prospect of having to deal with that more boring comic! Plus, more Banshee self-importance!