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Marvel Fanfare 3 (July 1982)

Chris Claremont/Dave Cockrum

In this issue, Angel summons the gang to the Savage Land to take care of business: with Peter Parker out of the picture this becomes fully just another X-Men story for a bit, emphasised by the fact that Cockrum draws it. We open with them flying down to Antarctica and Colossus engaging in a highly uncharacteristic bit of perviness for no good reason.

Honestly I think that's the most interesting moment in this whole thing. The previous issues had Michael Golden's striking art, an unusual pairing and some interestinc call-backs, but this instead just feels like a b-list X-Men issue thrown together at short notice, with all the same Savage Land/Sauron/etc story beats being hit again.

It's...fine? But it certainly doesn't feel like the high-end, innovative storytelling this book was presumably supposed to be providing.

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Marvel Fanfare 2 (May 1982)

Chris Claremont/Michael Golden

Ah, fuck.

I knew this was coming as soon as the Savage Land reared its ugly dinosaur head; Ka-Zar, Tarzan rip-off and possibly my least favourite Marvel character. This man does not belong in these comics! Go write pulp stories in their own continuity! His re-appearance here also gets a lot more fanfare than that of Karl Lykos, the guy who the storyline is ostensibly about, who is just...fine, at Ka-Zar's village, presently human and fairly chill.

You know who's not presently human and fairly chill, though? Angel...

...and Spider-Man, thanks to the machinations of Magneto's former cronies and their mutation-inducing gizmo.

This is pretty great, actually. The Angel design not so much - he looks goofy - but the horrible swollen mutant arachnoid...thing, with those terrifying fat fang-claw-mandibles that tarantulas have, is a brilliant piece of design, made even more horrifying by the dark, scratchy art. It's sort of funny that this happens to Peter Parker in a minor X-Men story, I wonder if this ever comes up again in his own comics? It should! Peter outright begging for death rather than living like this is hardfuckingcore.

Inevitably, though, they don't stay like this for long, because Lykos drains them of the special power used to make them like this (stay with me here...) and retransforms into Sauron. Of course he does.

Then he just...flies away, and the story is resolved - for now - in a really funny way, with Tanya choosing to stay and try and redeem him (or does she just want more a chance to wear this incredible leopard skin outfit?), and our heroes going back to their world for a while to get better.

This then sets us up for the next two issues of this Fanfare arc, in which Angel comes back with his X-Men buddies.

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Marvel Fanfare 1 (March 1982)

Chris Claremont/Michael Golden

Marvel Fanfare was an 80s anthology comics series, designed as a kind of upscale, "serious" comic: double-length, printed on nicer paper, with a rotating set of stories, only available through specialist order. When it launched in 1982, it was with a four-issue main story starring Angel and Spider-Man, and written by Chris Claremont, presumably on the basis that he was then the most attention-grabbing talent they could put on a new title (and because Claremont simply couldn't stop writing stuff): Spider-Man, of course, was also the obvious character with which to launch a new book, though we obviously are reading it because of Angel. It fits in here with Angel having semi-recently quit the team to do his own thing, which turns out to be hanging out on his mega-ranch, making friends with bald eagles and making out with Candy Southern.

That absolutely stunning two-page spread, with panels running across both pages, is how this comic sets the scene. The art is by Michael Golden, the guy we recently saw doing Rogue's debut, and I had some negative stuff to say about his faces and figures then (alongside some nicer stuff about the rest of his work), but here I like his work much more. He also did his own colours, and those colours are spectacular - I really like his repeated trick of bright tones and shades of one colour for backgrounds and flashbacks.

As for what's actually happening in this issue? It's Karl Lykos, baby! I have a certain amount of affection for ol' Sauron, not because he's a good character, particularly - gifted psychiatrist turns psycho energy vampire turns pterodactyl is not, like, a particularly good story, and I hate the Savage Land, where he tends to hang out - but because his original story is from the brief golden age in which Neal Adams drew the pre-cancellation X-Men. We also saw him again in the Hidden Years series but I prefer not to think about that.

Right, that was a lot of preamble. Anyway, Lykos' old girlfriend - who he'd been forbidden to marry back in the day, triggering his spiral into rage and eventual disappearance into a hidden Antarctic kingdom of dinosaurs where he lives out his days as an evil pterodactyl, it could happen to the best of us - comes back and wants to find him again after [mumble] number of years, Angel agrees to help and J Jonah Jameson sends Peter Parker to take photographs of this process because Spider-Man on the cover sells books. It doesn't go great.

That's not Sauron, by the way, that's just a regular pterodactyl, like they have in the Savage Land. This is where this whole quite promising set-up goes south (cos they're in Antarctica, geddit) as I'm reminded that I hate the Savage Land and it's 30s pulp adventures vibes. This is also a story closely involved not just with the original Sauron issues but the other, more recent Savage Land visit (which Angel wasn't present for), in which Sauron was also incidentally involved.

Truthfully this is a very strange story with which to launch this book: it's extremelty closely entwined with some very specific and atypical X-Men backstory, much of it probably not easily available to readers at the time, and Spider-Man is very clearly wedged in there for no very good reason. It's absolutely gorgeous, though.

Eventually - god, this is a long post - Spidey winds up trapped, not by Sauron but by the coterie of mutants Magneto left behind when he abandoned his base here. Again, this is...difficult to care about but it looks stunning, and this stuff is very clearly a direct tribute to Neal Adam's style and mode.

So, that was a weird one. I believe this runs for three more issues, and I'm interested to see where it goes: but also, this is the Savage Land, and I'm grimly certain Ka-fucking-Zar is going to show up, so it's probably all downhill from here.

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have you gotten to the one where Kitty uses what happens on Wolverine’s birthday as blackmail to make hin take her to the Dazzler concert?

Yes! It rocked: https://keepsmagnetoaway.tumblr.com/post/770148773656707072/wolverine-first-class-2-june-2008

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Wolverine: First Class 15 (July 2009)

Peter David/Scott Koblish

I was hoping this series would refind its comedic, character-driven feet, and it totally did!

This is an absolutely great issue in which Kitty wants to meet Thor to impress some mean girls. This is what I want from comics!

It's got a silly fight with some trolls in a sewer!

The art still ain't great but it is at least embracing the goofiness.

And at the end Kitty gets to put one over on the mean girls! You love to see it!

Just as it gets back on track, though, we leave this series again for a whole slew of early 80s guest appearances and so on. We'll be back in a couple of weeks for - alas - the last few issues of this, though.

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Wolverine: First Class 14 (June 2009)

Peter David/Ronan Cliquet

The second part of this quite uninvolving two-parter.

Don't @ me but I just don't think ninjas are very interesting. Also all this red looks horrible.

Anyway, yeah. I hope this series gets back on its feet a bit.

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Wolverine: First Class 13 (May 2009)

Peter David/Ronan Cliquet

This very enjoyable series returns, although it has lots its excellent writer, Fred van Lente, replacing him with Peter David, who I'm vaguely aware was a big deal writer across multiple Marvel properites for a long time, but I don't think I've ever read any of his stuff.

Anyway, this is another of the "Kitty and Logan meet somebody else big" issues of this series, specifically a Daredevil one. I don't find Daredevil very interesting and I didn't find this issue very interesting: it has also, yet again, changed artists to another clunky, garish dude. Why they could never assign a decent artist to this book is a mystery to me.

Anyway, they battle some ninjas, Elektra shows up at the end, it's a two-parter, yadda yadda. There's none of the pizzazz that van Lente's writing has, but maybe David's just finding his feet. I hope so!

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X-Men Annual 5 (October 1981)

Chris Claremont/Brent Anderson

I don't mean to be relentlessly, crushingly negative, but this is comfortably one of the worst comics I have read for this project. See for yourself!

You want to know how long this goes on for? 12 pages. 12 pages of Fantastic Fucking Four content before we even see an X-Man in the X-Men annual.

The annuals are weird. Last time, we had one that was basically just a recap of Dante's Inferno, and the time before that it was a very strange high fantasy adventure, which this one revisits with some of the same characters and settings.

I guess the idea of these was that they were extra long and not really tied to precise story beats in the ongoing comic, so you could go ahead and do something offbeat, but sadly what people (that is, Chris Claremont) always seemed to decide to do with them was high fantasy with a side of space bullshit. I do not have the slightest clue what is happening in any of this.

Anyway, yeah, the X-Men are technically in it, along with the Fantastic Fucking Four and what seems like the entire casts of Conan the Barbarian and Flash Gordon. Stuff like...this happens, for page after page.

I have to imagine that annuals like this would get picked up a lot by excited kids who'd see it as a way in to comics? God, imagine how baffling and disappointing that must have been. 99% of readers would bounce right off this, and I wish I had too. Anyway, next up we're reading some more Wolverine: First Class and then, like, a bunch more bullshit of this kind - not mainline Uncanny issues but various other guest appearances and whatnot from 1981, so let's hope things improve, huh.

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Wolverine: First Class 12 (April 2009)

Fred van Lente/Scott Koblish

How's this for a seamless bit of continuity across a gap of nearly 30 years?

We're back with this series for a moment, with an issue that slots right in after Uncanny X-Men 150 and has instantly become one of my favourite X-Men stories. I had thought earlier that this very funny, very heartfelt series was slightly losing its way but this is a wonderful issue in which Kitty is teamed with the returned Cyclops, instead of Logan, to try out a different style of training.

The thing that lets this issue down - as with this whole series, frankly - is that the artist has changed again to another unmemorable and basically bad penciller whose work is then, again, slathered with way too much colour. It also relies on sudden white backgrounds much too much, as you can see below. The gulf between the art and the writing here is dizzying.

But anyway, the writing! I've yet to see how the actual Uncanny series handles the Scott/Kitty relationship, and it should indeed be a tricky and intereting one, but the way it's done here, and the additional light it throws on Logan as well, is perfect.

It's also, again, very funny.

Anyway, I'm going on about this at such length because this is, sadly, Fred van Lente's last issue of this series. It carries on, and I'm going to read the rest, but his writing on these dozen issues has been outstanding, and it was such a nice experience to go into another one of these ugly First Class series and be pleasantly surprised by it.

Next up, we will read more of this series, but first an outing to an annual.

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Uncanny X-Men 150 (October 1981)

Chris Claremont/Dave Cockrum, Joe Rubinstein, Bob Wiacek

Issue 150! It's a round(ish) number and Claremont turned the milestone into a double-length issue in which the X-Men confront Magneto for the first time in a while. Check out the lettering for "I, Magneto..."

This is an issue aimed squarely at anyone who enjoys Magneto doing what he does best, which is grandstanding and then fucking up. It starts with him directly calling out Reagan, Brezhnev, Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping and gets sillier from there.

All he wants - in this issue, at least - is nuclear disarmament. This is a big change which, along the revelation about his past later in the issue, marks the beginning of a new approach to Magneto in which he's not just a cackling supervillain but someone with comprehensible and even sometimes laudable ideas. This is obviously a good idea, in the long run, and happily he never stops also being ridiculously swaggy: see the champagne he has on ice for his inevitable victory.

To achieve this, of course, he does war crimes. Beautifully drawn war crimes, mind you (the text notes that he lets people evacuate the city first, but he also destroys a Soviet nuclear submarie and very much does not allow that to be evacuated first).

Forty pages of havoc later he is once again running for his life from a collapsing island base. Poor old Erik. This is a legendary issue and this is maybe mildly blasphemous but the action here is a bit overlong and overdone: I think these extra-length isusues often struggle with pacing, and for that reason I most like the moment of pause when Ororo finds Erik asleep. Obviously I like this primarily for Erik's sexy old man body - he sleeps nude bcause of course he does - and the crackling sexual tension between him and Storm here (Erik, Doom...why do I want to ship Storm with charismatic but evil old dudes? Unclear, but I do), but also for the change of pace.

I am then skipping over a bunch of actually quite uninvolving high adventure to get to the end, where we run into why this is an extremely important issue for Magneto, in terms of backstory: it's where his Holocaust experience was first mentioned. We of course have seen it extensively by reading comics set during that period, but at the time this was big news, and this issue is I guess the first step to his partial rehabilitation to anti-hero status.

Here, he believes he's killed Kitty, and flees still believing this, repenting for what he's done: there's then an unintentionally hilarious coda to say "oh by the way she wasn't dead, chill".

This is a famous and beloved issue but it's not, strictly speaking, a very good one: it doesn't earn its 40 pages, and the pacing is all over the place, with extensive back-and-forth about boring things like smashing up Magneto's computers taking up too much space, so that stuff like this climactic scene with Kitty, and then Magneto's escape, get compressed and done basically in narration. But it's an important one, partly for the Magneto stuff and partly because it reunites Cyclops with the rest of the team, presumably ending his brief retirement. So, good news and bad news, is what I'm saying.

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Uncanny X-Men 149 (September 1981)

Chris Claremont/Dave Cockrum & Joe Rubinstein

We return, at last, to the main Uncanny storyline for this very minor issue that mostly serves to set up a major, milestone issue next time. As we saw at the very end of 148, Magneto is back, baby, and this issue is all about reminding us what his deal is.

Of course, you read this here fine blog, so you need no reminding, but the effect of a mental archive binge of Xavier's own comics is a fun one.

That really is basically all that happens in this issue, though, which makes it a really fun one full of character moments instead - ones like this, featuring the hideous new costume that Kitty has designed for herself.

This stuff is goofy and great, and is followed by a totally inconsequential "intelligence gathering" trip to an old base of Magneto's, further setting up the oncoming confrontation: and then just in the last couple of pages we go back to the Big Man, who is keeping himself amused by putting Cyclops and his weird girlfriend in silly costumes.

Can't wait!

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Avengers Annual 10 (October 1981)

Chris Claremont/Michael Golden

This strange, extra-long Avengers issue isn't an X-Men story at all (obviously) but it has an important place in X-Men canon nevertheless: this is the debut of Rogue.

As is oddly common with X-Men, Rogue's first appearance is as a quasi-villain (there's probably some interesting reason for this but I can't be bothered to work out what it is), working for the resurgent Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, presently under the direction not of Magneto but of Mystique: the version of the gang that we last saw, that is, in Days of Future Past.

This gives us a chance to enjoy this sublime panel, which I am choosing to consider a tribute to the legendary Moira one.

Anyway, what the fuck is this comic even about? Well, I'm glad you asked, because I have no idea. Long story short, Rogue - who is basically a mystery with an outrageous Southern accent at this point - is going around absorbing the energy and powers of various Avengers. She overdid it with Carol Danvers, fully mindwiping her, and leading to lots of this kind of absolutely incomprehensible recap. I don't even want to begin to know what this is about.

More importantly, look how gorgeous that panel is! It's incredible: the colour, the machinery, the abstract background. The artist here is Michael Golden, and his work is...strange. The compositions are wonderful and the scratcht background detail, especially of machinery, is sublime, obviously in debt to Kirby in its intricacy but in a more tactile, intricate mode.

That's all great, but then our boy Michael starts drawing faces and things go a bit wrong. Here's Kitty...

...and Carol...

...and Xavier...

...and Rogue herself.

I know this is a very conscious style choice but these just don't work for me, I find them kind of uncanny and creepy. The huge, bulging eyes! They're like Margaret Keane paintings! It's a shame, because his wider stuff is so, so good, as with this climactic splash featuring Scarlet Witch.

That, by the way, is the end of the battle in which the Brotherhood is - temporarily, obviously - defeated, with Rogue vanishing for the time being, allowing the issue to end with a completely (and unintentionally) hilarious pool party sequence in which Michael Golden's genuinely terrifying nearly naked figures stand around trying to look human (and presumably also supposed to look hot? It ain't working for me).

It gets funnier when the rest of the Avengers show up, angry that they did not get the swimwear memo, or something.

That's the end - Carol quits the Avengers for a while, I guess, because of disagreements about pool party invitations or whatever - and this post is too long already but I can't let this go without also mentioning the strangest panel of all in this very strange issue, from near the beginning.

Maddy Prior! You know, like, the major X-Men character Maddy Prior, who debuts in a few years! Is this her! Apparently...not? Chris Claremont just liked the name (it's the name of Steeleye Span's singer, a very Chris Claremont thing to like), used it as a throwaway here, and then used it again for a major character later. But it's very weird that this background character feels the need to state her full name, so...I dunno? Seems like there is still debate about this. A weird element in a very weird issue.

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Wolverine: First Class 11 (March 2009)

Fred van Lente/Hugo Petrus

The conclusion to the slightly feeble werewolf arc of this series. I think this whole thing is losing its way a bit from the very fun early issues. Probably the constant chopping and changing of artists doesn't help. Still, some inadvertently very funny stuff in here now that the Omegaverse exists.

As it happens, this is where we hop back to read some more original 80s stuff again for a while, which is good, but we'll be back to this stuff a little later for more.

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Wolverine: First Class 10 (February 2009)

Fred van Lente/Francis Portella

As silly a complaint as this may sound, I feel like this series is getting too serious. There's still some gems here, like this moment.

But mostly this is part one of a werewolf arc. Is it just me or if "Wolverine + werewolves" not actually very interesting and a bit played-out?

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Wolverine: First Class 9 (January 2009)

Fred van Lente/Francis Portella

An almost Kitty-less issue of this series, this time, in which Logan has a battle of wits, koans and muscles with Shang-Chi. This is a minor point, but I believe this is the first time in our read that we've actually been to Madripoor, a central location for a bunch of 80s Wolverine stuff we haven't read yet.

Otherwise it's a lot of this kind of thing. It's pretty good, although it lacks the zing that the more Kitty-heavy, comedic issues of this series have.

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Wolverine: First Class 8 (December 2008)

Fred van Lente/Steven Cummings

This issue is like 80% Wolverine fighting a bunch of random Soviet heroes who are I think from a well-established Soviet Avengers equivalent but I don't really care. It's all stuff like this.

That said, kudos to this series for sticking with the Russia Piotr knows and loves, unlike some other series I could name. The timeframe of this whole thing is deliberately vague, but thank god they still stuck with these guys.

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Wolverine: First Class 7 (November 2008)

Fred van Lente/Steven Cummings

This series continues to be a wholly unexpected joy.

I've taled before - like, a bunch - about how dodgy the whole Kitty/Piotr thing feels, given the respective ages, but this series finds a way to work with it, by making it a teenage infatuation on Kitty's part and finding plotlines in that, rather than treating it as a legitimate romance. This issue is a case in point - Kitty catastrophically gets the wrong end of the stick about Piotr's "girlfriend" and hijinks ensue.

Piotr is, in fact, being essentially dragged back to Russia against his will to help with a crisis there, and Kitty's reaction is extremely funny.

As you can likely guess, Kitty then gets mixed up and also ends up in Russia, and Logan has to come and rescue her in the next issue, all of which is whatever, but the set-up for this is a delight.