To Me, My X-Men Comics! - Uncanny X-Men Issue 114
In which there is comical mistaken grieving and a series of endless trademark disputes
PREVIOUSLY IN THE UNCANNY X-MEN: Unjustified BBC respect! French maid robots! Baby locksmith skills!
In the aftermath of the previous issue’s battle with Magneto, Jean and Beast have escaped up and out of his lava-encased Antarctic lair into the icy terrain above, where they’re rescued by a passing helicopter owned by, I dunno, Ozymandias henchmen? They’re picked up and return to the mansion, where Jean harshes Professor X’s previously upbeat honeymooning-with-an-alien-princess mood by telling him that everybody else is dead. The Professor nods gravely. “Those poor dud mutants,” he intones. “No, no,” clarifies Jean. “The interesting ones too.”
But, of course, both the dud (Banshee, Colossus) and interesting (Cyclops, Logan, Storm) mutants survived, along with those who teleport back and forth (Nightcrawler) between those two settings. Unlike Jean and Beast, this X-subset escaped down and out of Magneto’s lair into a mysterious subterranean prehistoric jungle known as The Savage Land. “What? After The Wonder Years star, Fred Savage?” asks Nightcrawler. “Zip it, buddy,” says Scott. This is exactly why Kurt’s never quite been consistently top-tier material.
Needless to say, after a brief battle with a passing pterodactyl, in which Wolverine slices it into winged smithereens, the group join a small village of native Savage Landers. The remnants of the team are still comically grieving the wrongly assumed deaths of Jean and Beast, but Winnie Cooper pops in to talk some sense into them. Look, it’s a great little slice-of-life dramedy, the modern streaming rights for which are fatally compromised by the 60s soundtrack that gave it so much of its original character, but which are now too cost prohibitive to sensibly renegotiate. Frankly, even calling this issue ‘The Day The X-Men Died’ is just asking for some Don McLean trouble.
Oblivious to all this is Storm, who in a final page reveal is assaulted by some kind of talking pterosaur - presumably unrelated to the previous, less chatty, one - who declares his name to be ‘Sauron’! “What, we’re taking on the Tolkien estate too?” complains Nightcrawler.
MVP: Scott. Somehow while shaving in a local river, Scott notices the moustache that has grown on his face over the last week, and how it resembles Corsair (from issue 109, maybe?), and therefore starts to remember that Corsair is his father but then also forgets when Storm interrupts him. Nutty stuff, but it’d make for one hell of an episode of Maury Povich, if we could once again just sort out the rights.
Next issue: Another pterodactyl fight! Plus, Colossus finds the One True Ring!