X-Men Part 16

The X-Men #27–29, 1966–1967, by Roy Thomas and Werner Roth

We’re back in New York after our trip to Mexico to stop an ancient, but fairly disappointing, god. And perhaps sensing that the previous adventure wasn’t very exciting, Roy Thomas pivots pretty hard, focusing the three issues we’ll be looking at on a previous foe of the X-Men. Calvin Rankin, more popularly known as the Mimic, has regained his memories and the use of his mimicking powers due to an explosion in the chemistry lab at Metro College. How did the explosion accomplish these two things, especially when it specifically says he only inhaled a little smoke? We will never know the answer to that question. But ultimately it doesn’t matter because the result is the return of a really fun character.

At the same time as Calvin’s ultimately doomed chemistry class, we’re treated to some ongoing soap opera. Jean is watching her new human love interest Ted Roberts compete at a track meet. He wins his race, sets a new school record in pole-vaulting, and insists on swimming a few laps in the pool before going out with Jean. This series of athletic overachievements clues both us and Jean in that there’s more to Ted than we first thought. After some flirtatious nudging, Ted starts to confide something about his older brother being wayyyyy better than him at just a about everything, when the previously mentioned chemistry class suffers a minor explosion, and Jean promptly forgets all about Ted’s inferiority complex when she sees that Calvin has recognized her.

While these dramatic events are going on at Metro College, Cyclops is drowning in guilt back at the mansion due to accidentally injuring Angel in the last issue. Angel no longer thinks he did it on purpose, and seems to actually feel bad about accusing him of that in the first place. But this is Scott Summers we’re talking about. If there’s an opportunity to allow guilt and regret to control his every thought, he’s going to take it. Especially after the team is informed that Angel will be out of action for some time, and there’s a new mutant threat being detected by Cerebro.

At the same time as both of these scenes, the Puppet Master is making a model of Professor Xavier. He doesn’t know who he is, but he does know that this man he’s building a tiny replica of is the leader of the X-Men. If you don’t know who the Puppet Master is, that’s fine. He’s a fairly unexciting villain that usually fights the Fantastic Four by building models of people that then allow him to control them. Aren’t you glad that we’re not reading through all of the Fantastic Four right now? In this case, he wants to use the X-Men to defeat the Fantastic Four, but Xavier’s mental powers protect him from the model’s bizarre effects.

The action of this issue is mostly the Puppet Master building a doll of Mimic and having him fight the X-Men all at once to see how he performs. The X-Men then track the Puppet Master and fight both his gigantic android and Mimic. And that’s all pretty fun, but the most interesting parts of this issue are the non-action scenes. For instance, Professor Xavier is so worried about the new threat Cerebro has detected that he is inviting just about anyone the X-Men have ever encountered to join the team, since Angel is unable to fly. He travels to Europe in his astral form to telepathically ask Wanda and Pietro to become X-Men, but they turn him down as they have both joined the Avengers after leaving Magneto’s service. He next has Hank and Bobby see if Spider-Man is interested after they run into him while stopping a bank robbery. Spider-Man feels that he’s meant to work alone, despite secretly wishing that he could be on a team with some other teenagers. And finally, Xavier visits Metro College, hoping that he will just run into the Human Torch. It’s a weird plan, but at least he’s not telepathically calling him into service and then wiping all his memories, like he did when they faced the Juggernaut.

All of these failed recruitments lead to Calvin confronting the team while they’re on the campus of Metro College. He wants to learn how to retain their powers once he’s gained them, and to do this he wants to join the team. And perhaps due to his fear of the unknown mutant danger, Professor Xavier not only accepts him onto the team, he makes him the deputy leader when Cyclops says he doesn’t want the position anymore after injuring Angel. This is pretty huge. Mimic is now the first new member of the team since the series started. He’s also the first non-mutant to be a part of the team. He then immediately becomes team leader. And he mostly gets away with it by threatening them all. It definitely feels like a strange series of decisions on Xavier’s part. But maybe he’s trying to make up for wiping Calvin’s mind of both his memories and his ability to use his powers the last time they were in the same place.

Speaking of Mimic’s powers, there is an interesting detail in the scene where Puppet Master first has Mimic attack the rest of the team. At one point, Calvin uses the telepathy that he’s getting from the Professor to tell the team to stop attacking. Bobby and Jean are fooled, but Scott sees through the trick immediately. This begs the question, what does it sound like when someone talks to you telepathically? I had always assumed that your telepathic voice would sound the same as your normal voice. But does that mean that Mimic was mentally doing an imitation of Professor Xavier’s voice? And would it be easier or harder to imitate someone mentally rather than out loud? Is this why Professor Xavier telepathically identified himself to the team in the opening of issue #1? In the future, the team will have conversations where both Jean and Xavier are talking to people telepathically, and that would seem to indicate that there is some difference in the way they “sound” even though the listener is not physically hearing them. But that doesn’t seem to be the way Roy Thomas thought of it at this point.

The only other thing to note in this issue is that the team gets updated costumes thanks to Jean. She used some of her free time at college to sew them all some new, but only slightly, looks. It’s not a huge change, but having Jean go from a full head covering to a small face mask is a huge improvement.

Issue #28 introduces a character that will become a very important presence later in the series, Sean Cassidy, the Banshee. And while he’s fun right away, despite initially appearing to be a villain, Werner Roth’s illustrations of him leave a lot to be desired. There were a lot of racist stereotypes of the Irish earlier in American history that we don’t think about too much today, and Banshee’s appearance in this issue wraps a lot of them up into one horrible package. He’s only saved thanks to the writing of Roy Thomas. In fact, I think the credit for him being a character that continued to show up after this issue, even under other writers, goes solely to Thomas. If it was based on his appearance, which it frequently is with comic book characters, no one would have wanted to touch this character again. And that’s a huge shame.

Anyway, Banshee is teamed up with a man called the Ogre, who doesn’t seem to have any powers, just a lot of gadgets. They are both working for a mysterious organization called Factor Three, which is apparently the huge threat that Professor Xavier has been so worried about. And they are desperately trying to kidnap Professor Xavier on behalf of this organization. We will find out as the issue progresses that Banshee is working for Factor Three unwillingly, thanks to an explosive headband the Ogre has forced him to wear. The threat from the headband keeps him from switching sides and helping the X-Men, but it doesn’t stop him from going rogue long enough to steal a painting and some tobacco for his pipe. This feels very out of character with the Banshee we will get to know later in the series, as he is a former agent of Interpol and a man with a strong sense of morals. At this time none of that had been established though, so it’s something that we have to overlook.

Banshee’s powers are interesting in his introduction. He has what is described as a “sonic scream”. And in this issue, he uses that scream to: fly, cut through metal, and hypnotize large groups of people. How screaming, even of the sonic kind, can allow someone to fly is completely beyond me. Destroying things, like cutting through metal, and hypnotizing people seems more like something that sound could do at certain levels. But sound emitting from a person’s mouth doesn’t seem like it would allow flight. If anything, I would guess that it would push the screamer backwards, or possibly levitate them if they were looking straight at the ground. But Banshee is able to fly in whatever direction he wants simply by screaming. It’s very bizarre and a little ridiculous, but once you accept it and move on, it’s kind of awesome.

Eventually, the X-Men are able to overcome Banshee and the Ogre thanks to the Mimic being able to add Banshee’s powers to the ones he has already absorbed from the X-Men. This is after he has driven most of his teammates crazy with his arrogance and absolute refusal to work with the team. And while we know that the X-Men usually fail spectacularly when they don’t work as a team, Mimic has proved that he doesn’t need them to win. And it’s pretty understandable that he doesn’t want to be a team player after the whole mind-wiping thing. Sure, Professor Xavier has been helping him to extend the range of his copying powers, but that doesn’t mean he won’t change his mind. If we’ve learned anything from the last 28 issues it’s that the Professor is a huge jerk, and Mimic has obviously learned the same thing.

There are two other things I want to mention before moving on to the next issue. First, we are introduced to a mystery in this issue. There is a huge, fancy, almost medieval, wooden door in the basement of the mansion. Scott notices it when he goes down to get something and thinks that it’s weird that the Professor hasn’t told them why it’s locked all the time. He doesn’t mention that it’s also very weird that it’s there at all. It doesn’t fit any of the other architecture in the mansion, and it’s completely out of place in the basement. It’s basically screaming, “Look at me! I’m going to be an important plot point soon! We’re setting that up RIGHT NOW! Make sure you notice me!”

Finally, there is a very unfortunate scene where the team is installing some new defense systems. Jean telepathically hands Hank a screwdriver while saying, “Here are your pliers, Hank.” And Hank responds, “You’re a credit to your gender, Jeanie!” At best, this was a pretty sexist scene made worse by an art error. But to take it as is, Jean comes off looking like a complete idiot and Hank’s response makes him a huge asshole. Which he frequently is, but this seems a little egregious. Even without the mistake, Hank’s response is sexist, but with the mistake it’s even more so. The whole thing is very unfortunate.

The last issue we’ll be looking at today opens with most of the team going ice skating together. This kind of an opening will become a staple within the X-Men books. The story will have them ice skating or playing baseball or warming up in the Danger Room, and this serves the narrative function of showing any new readers that may have picked up this issue on a whim who each of the characters are and what their personalities and powers are. It also gives the writer a little room to develop the interplay between the characters. In this case, we see Hank and Bobby continuing to develop their friendship, Warren trying to steal Jean’s interest away from Scott, Calvin Rankin confused that his new teammates want to do something as mundane as ice skating, and Scott going off on his own to brood and try to develop some sort of control over his optic blasts. Of course, that dream isn’t in the cards for Cyclops, and he ends up starting a rock slide after letting loose his full power in frustration over what he sees as his inability to safely be with Jean.

This brings us to our villain for this issue, the Super Adaptoid. The Super Adaptoid is an Avengers villain, but he’s apparently been hiding out in some old tunnels that just happen to be very close to the Xavier mansion. He is an android developed by the villainous scientific collective known as AIM (Advanced Idea Mechanics), and he’s pretty much the Avengers’ version of Mimic. He can absorb (or in his case “adapt”) the powers of the super-beings he comes into contact with. The biggest difference between Mimic and the Super Adaptoid is that the android can do the one thing that Mimic desires more than anything else. He permanently keeps the powers that he “adapts”. In addition, he can apparently “adapt” weapons as well as abilities. At this point he has Captain America’s agility and shield, Hawkeye’s marksmanship and trick arrows, Wasp’s wings, and Goliath’s strength and size. The other big difference is that Mimic wants to master his own powers, while the Super Adaptoid wants to transform other super-beings into additional Adaptoids and take over the world.

Of course, the Adaptoid decides to start his plan with the X-Men, after seeing Bobby using his powers while ice skating. Unfortunately for the team, Mimic has left by the time the Super Adaptoid attacks. After another confrontation with the rest of the team due to his arrogance and refusal to actually act like a member of the team, Xavier finally asked him to leave, despite knowing that he would have been a huge help in the fight against Factor Three. Roy Thomas is really trying his best to make Factor Three a big deal. And in a way it is. X-Men comics will become famous for dangling plot threads and storylines that take dozens of issues to conclude. And this is the first example we have of that. It’s going to take us until issue #39 before we get to the bottom of Factor Three. Unfortunately, a lot of the buildup isn’t very interesting. But it’s still the start of something that will become a defining characteristic in these comics.

Back to the issue at hand, the Mimic returns right before the X-Men are transformed into Adaptoids and volunteers for the procedure himself. He’s sick of homo sapiens and homo superior, and he’s ready to be something beyond all of them. And he’s going to actually go through with it, allow himself to be turned into an emotionless android, but Cyclops begs him to not give up his own humanity, and the true leader of the X-Men finally seems to have made an impact on Calvin Rankin. Turning on the Adaptoid at the mention of killing all of the other X-Men, Calvin Rankin begins a battle with someone who is actually his equal for once. And they honestly do seem pretty evenly matched. The fight moves from the ground into the sky, and finally ends with the Adaptoid deciding to copy the Mimic’s powers, thus giving himself all the powers of the X-Men at once. This turns out to be a terrible idea as the powers of the Mimic are too similar to his own and cause an electrical feedback loop that robs them both of their abilities and sends them careening toward the earth. Interestingly, we discover that the idea was put into the Adaptoid’s head by Mimic himself, using Professor Xavier’s telepathy, because he suspected this would be the result and was the only way to stop the mad android.

Unsurprisingly, the X-Men have recovered at this point, and Angel prevents Calvin from plummeting to his death. The Mimic has finally learned what it means to be a man, at the cost of his own powers, and he leaves the team on good terms. I’ve thought quite a bit about why Roy Thomas decided to write Mimic out of the book after only three issues. He brings back an interesting character from the Stan Lee run, has him join the team as the first new member in the book’s history, and then writes him out almost immediately. It seemed very puzzling to me. But I think the key is that he is so evenly matched with the Super Adpatoid. One of the most important story elements for an X-Men comic is that the team has to work together or they can’t win. None of them are strong enough on their own to overcome whatever obstacle they’re encountering in that month’s issue. But Calvin is the opposite of that. He is the entire team working together, all on his own. And that breaks the book in a way. Sure, he’s a super fun character, and I love it when he shows up, but he doesn’t work as a member of the team.

So, with that, we say goodbye to Calvin Rankin, the Mimic. He wasn’t a member of the team for long, but he sure was memorable. And yes, it’s very weird that the first new member of the team isn’t a mutant, and I think the whole thing probably would have worked better if Stan Lee had just made him a mutant to begin with. It’s super bizarre that he’s not. But this is what we have, and there’s no changing it.

The last thing to mention from this issue is that we see the mysterious, giant wooden door again. But this time we see it from Xavier’s perspective and see that it holds his greatest secret and his most tragic failure. How mysterious! It’s also worth pointing out that Xavier is experimenting in front of that door for the entire fight with the Super Adaptoid, and he misses the entire thing.

Roy Thomas is really going all in on setting up future storylines in these issues. We get the introduction of the Factor Three plot, this mysterious wooden door, and the teasing of Ted Robert’s difficult relationship with his older and more successful brother. All of those story seeds will bear fruit in the coming issues, but whether that fruit will actually be enjoyable will be up for debate.