X-Men Part 19
The X-Men #40–42, 1968, by Roy Thomas and Dan Atkins/Werner Roth/Ross Andru/Don Heck
X-Men: Marvels Snapshots one-shot, 2020, by Jay Edidin and Tom Reilly
We ended our last discussion on a little bit of a cliffhanger due to the Cyclops origin story that was playing out as a back-up feature in the issues we covered. And that will be resolved today. But we’re going to look at the main stories in these issues first, because the second thing we’re going to talk about today, the Cyclops one-shot from 2020 brought to us by Jay Edidin and Tom Reilly, pairs perfectly with the Cyclops back-up story. So, without further ado, let’s talk about the X-Men fighting Frankenstein’s monster and how ridiculous that is.
This issue is fun, in a totally bonkers way, but it’s also very frustrating for one main reason that we’ll get into. To begin, let’s talk about how this mess gets started. The X-Men are training in the Danger Room, which is always a fun way to open an issue since it allows the team (or in this case, just Beast and Iceman) to show the readers what their powers are without the need for a ton of exposition. This practice session is interrupted just as it’s getting interesting, because the Professor has discovered that the monster from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein has been discovered encased in ice in the arctic and is being taken to a museum in New York City. There’s several questionable things here right off the bat. First, Xavier’s explanation for knowing about the situation at all is: “Just now, I was engaged in some, uh, mental experiments…when I accidentally intercepted a radio message from near New York Harbor.” What kind of mental experiments are we talking about here? The kind a telepath should be embarrassed about? Xavier has openly and proudly done some pretty questionable things with his powers in past issues, so what is it that even gives him pause? Also, when did telepathy start picking up radio signals? Did Cerebro suddenly start working the way it’s supposed to, so we needed something else to pick up radio signals (other than a radio, which would be too obvious)? In addition to those issues, I have to question Xavier’s leap to Frankenstein’s monster. This is a world in which World War 2 hero Captain America was found frozen and alive in the ice. So, this could be literally anyone. Why is our first thought that it would be a character from what we’ve always thought was a work of fiction?
Not only does Xavier immediately suspect that this frozen giant is the monster from Shelly’s novel, he also explains that he has always theorized that the monster was not just real, but a super android created by a Victorian era mutant. If you’re counting, that’s three gigantic assumptions with absolutely no evidence to support them. The fact that two of them turn out to be true is very convenient for Xavier, but in no way makes his hypothesis any less ridiculous.
The X-Men visit the museum where the giant is being kept, and get there just in time for him to wake up and kick everyone’s ass. He’s momentarily slowed down by Bobby’s ice, and seems genuinely scared of it, but nothing else even fazes him. After a brief recovery, the team catches up with the “monster” on a cargo ship about to leave the harbor. And following another very unsuccessful fight, Bobby finally covers him in enough ice that he has to really strain to escape. But instead of escaping, he explodes. And that’s the end of Frankenstein’s monster.
Xavier is able to glean some information from the android’s robot brain right before it explodes, and this finally gives us an origin for this character that we will never see again. How is he able to use telepathy on a computer? I wish I had an answer for that, or better yet, I wish I didn’t need one because I wish this didn’t happen. It’s so frustrating every time it does. Anyway, we learn that the monster was not created by a mutant, but was instead sent to Earth by an advanced alien race to test whether or not humanity was ready to welcome creatures that were unlike themselves. This is a perfect opportunity to tie this story into the larger ongoing narrative and the mutant metaphor. Humanity was obviously not ready to welcome this eight foot tall behemoth, just like they’re still not ready to welcome mutants. But no. Roy Thomas totally ignores this obvious next step and informs us that the android was damaged on his arrival and went berserk, thus justifying humanity’s fear of the unknown and different. This story beat literally made me stop reading and say, “Oh, come on!” out loud. It’s not just an obvious missed opportunity, it’s a plot point that actively hurts the message of the ongoing narrative. Plus, Roy Thomas informs us that the android came to Earth from “a far off tropical planet — which passed near our world 150 years ago.” WHAT? Planets don’t just roam through the galaxy, and if they did, they certainly wouldn’t be tropical. They’d be frozen wastelands. What a frustrating ending.
Issues #41–42 bring us the tale of Grotesk the Sub-Human, a forgettable villain who won’t appear in another X-Men book until 2009. Essentially, he is the sole survivor of a warlike underground civilization that is destroyed by earthquakes and radiation from humanity’s nuclear weapon tests. It would be tragic if they hadn’t been literally on the eve of an invasion of the surface world when disaster struck. Prince Gor-Tok was mutated into Grotesk the Sub-Human (it’s left very unclear why he is the only person that mutated rather than dying), and is determined to get his revenge by destroying the entire planet.
That’s the set up for these issues, and most of the action spins out of the team attempting to stop Grotesk, but it’s not what grabbed my attention. My interest was held by two other things. First, the means by which Grotesk plans on getting his revenge. A certain Dr. Hunt at New York’s Archer College has invented a machine that he calls a Nuclear Oscillotron for the express purpose of creating “earth tremors”. We meet Dr. Hunt just as he’s about to demonstrate his new machine to his skeptical colleagues, one of whom actually says, “If you can’t produce a mild earth tremor, you’re to stop discussing your far-fetched theories in your classes!” Well, Dr. Hunt proves them all wrong by creating a small earthquake, which both shocks and appalls the other professors, one of whom questions whether it’s safe to have a machine that could potentially destroy the whole planet through a series of chain reactions. Dr. Hunt’s response is, “Ridiculous, Mr. Chalmers! My invention is to be used only to benefit mankind… in ways we cannot yet dream of!”
He’s not wrong. I can’t think of a single benefit a machine that creates earthquakes could bring to mankind. Hundreds of destructive uses come to mind immediately, but any beneficial uses are eluding me. This is an insane thing to have invented, and it’s even more insane that the other scientists in the room are treating Dr. Hunt as anything other than a mad scientist.
The second thing of interest in this story is the way Professor Xavier is acting. He’s suddenly back in coach-that-has-nothing-else-in-his life mode and treating these young adults like they were recruits for his little league team. He’s forcing them to run drills and go through training exercises like they had a scheduled game against the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants coming up next week. He’s yelling at them, berating them, and also clearly keeping something a secret from all of them except for Jean. Now, it’s become very clear over the last forty issues that Jean is the only sensible person on the team, so I understand his reasons for trusting her. But we’ve also clearly seen that when the team is divided they don’t succeed at anything. Once the rest of the team notices that Xavier and Jean are obviously keeping something from them, it distracts them and severely hampers their ability to defeat Grotesk. In fact, we even get a panel of Scott wondering if the Professor is actually in love with Jean, in an unfortunate callback to X-Men #3 and the time that Xavier admitted to himself that he was in love with his teenage student.
For most of the story it seems like Xavier is just making a plan and not telling anyone besides Jean what he’s going to do. Maybe he’ll dress up like a hobo and talk some sense into Grotesk like he did with the Locust. And he does this to an extent, pretending to be Dr. Hunt and luring Grotesk to him with the machine. This doesn’t seem like the wisest move since Grotesk immediately turns the machine on as he’s fending off Xavier’s “mental bolts”. But it turns out that Xavier actually has a horrible disease and he’s dying. I guess his horrible behavior and all his mental abuse throughout the story were just him trying to make sure the team would be ready to move on without him. Who knows? We end the tale of Grotesk with a tearful Angel carrying the deceased Xavier away from the rubble while the rest of the team slowly and sadly follows. It’s a moving image, even for someone like me that thinks Xavier is a pretty horrible person. And while it’s obvious with almost sixty years in between us and the publication of this issue that he won’t stay dead, I’m excited for this first stretch of watching the team do their thing without him hovering in the background.
On that tragic note, we leave the ongoing adventures of the X-Men and jump over to the origin story of Cyclops that was being told in the backup feature of these same issues. When we left our young hero, he was on the run after inciting a mob by saving all of their lives using his mutant power to blast some falling construction material. He had just been robbed by some hobos and after running into a forest, he felt compelled to enter a shack where he was greeted by a man who told him that they were both mutants, and they were destined to rule.
This mutant turns out to be a man named Jack Winters aka Jack O’Diamonds aka The Living Diamond. And for a man with so many names, he has a shockingly small number of appearances. After this flashback story, written in 1968, he won’t show up again until a 1991 two issue story in Sensational She-Hulk. And there’s a good reason for that. He’s pretty lame. Once, a simple lab worker with a penchant for a crime, Jack accidentally exploded some radioactive isotopes that he was trying to steal all over himself. Is there an actual market for radioactive isotopes? I’m super curious who he was going to sell this stuff to. Regardless, thanks to the radiation, the go-to explanation for mutation at this time, he now has mild telepathy, the ability to teleport himself and others by breaking their atoms down to nothing and then reconstructing them somewhere else, and hands made out of “solid, flexible diamond”. Why we didn’t go with a set of powers that relate to one another in some way or another, I’ll never understand. But this is what we have to work with, so we’ll press on.
Jack has now decided that he would like to have his entire body made out of the flexible diamond material that his hands are made from, so he ropes scared, impressionable Scott Summers into helping him break back into the lab where the original accident occurred. Luckily for Scott, Professor Xavier has finally tracked him down and attempts to stop Jack. To make a long story short, Jack does turn his entire body into “solid, flexible diamond”, but he’s not flexible enough once Xavier has Scott point a “vibration-inducer” at him. Which of course causes him to explode, thus beginning the long series of horrific things Xavier makes the children entrusted to him do. Scott then goes home with the Professor, becoming the first X-Man and leaving the orphanage he grew up in behind him. We’ll later find out what a horrific place this orphanage was, but for now, we just know that he was very happy to leave.
This brings us to the 2020 one-shot that we’re placing here in the reading order. X-Men: Marvel Snaphots goes back a little further in time, and gives us a glimpse into the daily life of Scott Summers while he lived at the orphanage. There are a ton of interesting details here: Scott’s partial memories of the death of his parents and the existence of his younger brother Alex (despite everyone else insisting he’s an only child), his growing obsession with The Art of War, his incredibly painful headaches that lead up to his mutant power manifesting, the cure for those headaches being the ruby quartz glasses, and the moment his powers did finally appear and the destruction that went along with it.
This issue essentially leads directly into the back-up stories we just finished. And it does a great job of capturing what’s best about Scott Summers: his absolute obsession with being prepared for every situation. We get to watch him as he sees super-heroes on TV for the first time, his awe at the way they are able to help and save so many people at the same time. And when he finally sees them in person as they battle an insane scientist on a giant praying mantis, we see the Scott that we know crystalize for the first time.
This issue is beautiful. It takes a story that’s hinted at in earlier material and makes something truly special. Jay Edidin, of Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men fame, was at the helm here, writing about his favorite character. And the love he has for this troubled and frustrating young man is clear. He shows us why so many people love Cyclops, and he does it in a way that’s pretty hard to ignore. In the future, when we get to some of the stories where Cyclops does some things that are really upsetting, this will be a nice story to come back to and remember what’s at the core of this character.
