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New Mutants 4 (June 1983)

Chris Claremont/Sal Buscema & Bob McLeod

The New Mutants are still feeling their way into the Marvel universe in this, which is in some ways their first "regular" issue: they talk with Xavier, now actually free of Brood parasite problems, who starts them on a training regime, and this issue they deal with a very mundane, one-issue kind of problem as they get into a rhythm.

That's not a criticism - this is a really enjoyable issue, one that feels low-stakes in an approachable way, and that showcases the New Mutants as a title aimed at slightly younger readers. The plot here, as noted, isn't important but it basically ends up as a PSA about child abuse, which, sure, fine. Charles Xavier, child abuse expert! In more ways than one, many readers would argue, but we won't get to that for a while.

Also, Charles Xavier: tickling victim and shagger.

But yes, this is a nice issue with lots of time for little character moments, both in downtime and during the action. The gang plays frisbee!

Roberto turns out to be handy with technology!

Sam learns how to turn! Love that for him.

And Sam recalls an ill-fated disco phase. I also love that for him, and the fact that he's telling this to his friend, a Scottish fundamentalist wolf. I love this stuff: it's all very Scooby-Doo, and that's great.

This issue also marks a welcome progression in that Bob McLeod is reduced to inking duty, with Sal Buscema coming aboard as penciller. Buscema has been knocking around all sorts of Marvel titles for years at this point, including many we've read, and he's not anything special but he's fine, and better than McLeod. He draws the next year or so of this book, so that's good news.

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X-Men Annual 6 (November 1982)

Chris Claremont/Bill Sienkewicz & Bob Wiacek

The X-Men annuals are reliably fantasy-themed and bizarre. What X-Men Annual 6 asks is, "what if they were really good, too?"

He's fucking back, bitches! This double-length story is effectively a straight sequel to Uncanny 159, right down to having the same artist, Bill Sienkewicz, who works in a wonderful style that's partly jagged and contemporary and partly a pastiche of 50s horror comics.

Because this is an annual, a story that's not really particularly fixed in the continuity, nothing canonically major can happen in it, which is why previous entries have generally involved the X-Men being spirited away to somewhere utterly bizarre for a hived-off adventure. This is sort of similar (and there's even a lengthy dream sequence, for extra inconsequentialness) but the art here, alongside the meaningful villain - it's Dracula, not some random space prince - makes it all much more impactful and enjoyable.

Via Ororo's backstory, we even get to dip into a different spooky-dooky setting for a while, on top of a crumbling European castle.

It all ends up, also, with an extremely (and half-intentionally) funny escape for Dracula, whom the X-Men and their ally, Rachel van Helsing, kill...

...but fail to fully destroy, because an ickle stone goes "BONK!" on Logan's head.

Extremely funny end to an extremely enjoyable annual.

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Uncanny X-Men 167 (March 1983)

Chris Claremont/Paul Smith & Bob Wiacek

I've said this before, but this time the Brood Saga finally is ending, thank god, in an issue which mainly serves to introduce the existing X-Men and the New Mutants to each other.

Thankfully, the "we have to fight on sight" bit doesn't last long as they team up to take on their real enemy, Charles Xavier.

I mean, yeah, sort of. He gets Broodified (Bred? Should we say Charles Xavier gets bred?) and then, obviously, the process is reversed. This process gives him a whole new body and teases us with the possibility that he might learn to walk, and also the possibility that he might have some kind of violent threesome with Lilandra and Moira, so there's a fic prompt if you need one.

Anyway, this issue is fine. I'm still getting used to the new art from Paul Smith, is my main feeling. Everyone is very elongated in a way that I don't entirely like, although one or two panels make great use of it.

Mostly it's sort of weird to immediately see the New Mutants in someone else's style, but honestly I like Smith's artwork a lot more than McLeod's and I like these kids, so, yeah, cool.

This is the first of a clutch of issues - annuals and specials and whatnot - that all fit at this point and serve to introduce the New Mutants to the existing team, so off we go.

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New Mutants 3 (May 1983)

Chris Claremont/Bob McLeod & Mike Gustovich

After being given some space to establish themselves, this is the issue where the New Mutants begin to be tied into the wider X-story, via the ongoing Brood Saga, a storyline I don't like in the other comics and don't particularly like here.

Before that, though, we get quite a bit of other stuff, including a lot of Dani, who is sort of emerging as a focus character (or authorial favourite?) even though Sam is the nominal leader. It's interesting, by the way, that they do all have codenames at this point, but I find myself naturally referring to them by their real names, as, largely, does the comic itself, in a nice indication of how character-driven it is.

The ongoing not-quite-integreation of Ilyana continues here too, via a very unexpected appearance from that old pipe-smoking fecker, Banshee!

He still wants to marry Moira, she still won't let him. Good call, Moira. Certainly not until he gets a new outfit.

You can definitely tell that I'm trying to talk about everything but the Brood, right. The story here, as mentioned, now takes us back to other X-Men titles, but mostly in order to integrate these new guys into the wider setting, so we'll be seeing plenty more of them.

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New Mutants 2 (April 1983)

Chris Claremont/ Bob McLeod & Mike Gustovich

Teenagers! They're just like us!

I'm almost sure these people in the foreground are cameos, but I don't know who. Any ideas? Anyway, the kids (and Stevie Hunter, whose long list of secondary appearances in Uncanny has led her to become an official employee of the school now, as a teacher/chaperone/coach for the New Mutants, which is kind of interesting since she's unpowered. She's always cool, though, we like her) went to the movies. They meet some other kids! They hang out! Chris Claremont teaches us how to pronounce Rahne! It's legitimately funny!

Then the feds try to fucking kill them!

I really love this issue. Proper character stuff, some jokes, scumbag villains - everyone hates feds in aviators - and then a showdown at the mall. This is the kind of thing Stranger Things or whatever is always doing in stuff that's set in the 80s but not made in the 80s, so it's sort of cool to see that, yes, the 80s was indeed all about hanging out at the mall. Oh, also, the Sentinels are back, in this absolutely fucking great spread.

Hell yes. I still don't really like McLeod's art but this is the first time we've seen him flex a bit with the layout and it's really, really good. The Sentinels are always a joy, of course, even if - as usual - the Ultimate Utterly Unstoppable Mutant-Destroying Robts are easily stopped by a bunch of kids. That's because bunches of kids are awesome. This issue was a riot.

Oh right also Xavier is a Brood puppet and this is all about to tie into mainline X-Men, did I mention that? It was fun while it lasted.

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mcleod's art can be... difficult to get through...

but once sienkiewicz starts drawing the new mutants it all becomes worth it (i think he starts around issue 18). his art is genuinely some of the best stylistic work ive seen.

Yeah. First, though, Sal Buscema takes over very soon - like in a couple of issues - who is boring but bearable. But I'm hyped to get to Sienkiewicz, though, although it's going to take like two months. I've just started reading the Dazzler issues where he did the covers (!) and even those are incredible (the covers, not the issues, the issues are terrible)

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New Mutants 1 (March 1983)

Chris Claremont/Bob McLeod & Mike Gustovich

What's new? Mutants, that's what.

After their introduction in the special double-length fancy-pants graphic novel, this is the first regular issue of the New Mutants series - although this also effectively serves as an introductory issue too, with lots of expositing about who everyone is and what they do. Fair enough, I guess, you gotta make sure people are ready to get onboard.

Also, let's be real, Claremont's characters talk like this every single issue, all the time. Anyway, I really like this issue, because it takes it slow. It introduces some action via a Danger Room issue, but it doesn't have my ongoing bugbear, a Pointless Villain Showdown: it just takes its time, introducing characters and their dynamics, doing fun stuff, reminding us that these are Teenagers With Teenage Issues. It's cute!

It does also set a number of hares running that will obviously become major plot points in the issues to come: like, hoo boy, this one.

That's Ilyana in the hat, by the way. I love the background detail of her coughing and spluttering at the cigarette, and she herself is being introduced here as a set-up for her eventual inclusion in her team. Plus, yeah, Xavier's son. This is the only mention of this in the next three issues, but now it's out there, so I'm sure that's gonna be A Whole Thing.

Also Going To Be A Whole Thing is Henry Peter Gyrish, the Flattop Fuckhead himself: but again, here is his entire appearance in this issue. Putting the pieces on the board, nice and slow. And it's always great to see a villain who's not just an evil mutant.

Mostly though it's stuff like the above: relationships getting established, people expositing. It's great. (Also, this is mostly just an artefact of this scan, but the colours are less eye-popping anf consequently the art is less hateful here.) I would have been so excited to pick this up as an early 80s teen, can you imagine?

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The New Mutants (November 1982)

Chris Claremont/Bob McLeod

What if you could just...do it again?

What if that? In 1982, Marvel decided to try and do exactly that. Chris Claremont, a man who simply never ran out of energy, had rebooted the X-Men with a new, diverse, interesting team and turned them into Marvel's most successful series, a series that was now beginning to be successful enough to demonstrate spin-offs, both as limited series like Magik and ongoing comics like Dazzler. These were all, though, focused on a single character. But what if you just made up a whole new team, like Claremont had for Giant-Size X-Men? What if you did it in a fancy new format called a 'graphic novel' so it could be extra-long and extra-expensive? You could call them...the New Mutants.

The New Mutants is weirdly both very ambitious and very unambitious. That is, it's attempting to do another X-Men, which is a big swing, but it's also just...attempting to do another X-Men, which isn't exactly wildly inventive. This graphic novel (effectively a double-length issue) was designed as the launch of a new ongoing title (which we're going to read right after this), and with it came five, uh, new mutants. I'm sure you know who they are but let's just tick 'em off quickly.

That's good ol' Moira MacTaggert finding the Scottish werewolf girl, Rahne Sinclair. Fun (note: not actually fun) fact: Rahne is not the only female New Mutant to appear naked in this debut issue.

There's Roberto da Costa, from Brazil, who absorbs and then emanates solar energy.

Kentucky coal miner Sam Guthrie, who can fire himself around like a projectile.

Dani Moonstar, a Cheyenne with animal telepathy and various other psychic powers (their limits here, and later on, are usually a bit vague).

And one we have seen before - "Shan" (these days more accurately rendered as Xuân), aka Karma, who has been kind of waiting around the Marvel universe since she first appeared in the very interesting Marvel Team-Up 100. By dint of being the only one we've seen before, and slightly older than the others, she gets to be a sort of team mom.

They all unite, in this issue, for a fairly throwaway plot in which a minor member of the Hellfire Club, Donald Pierce (he's the cyborg one) tries to fuck with them. None of that's really the point, of course: the point of this issue is introducing everyone, and I have to say I love this kind of stuff. Little montages where everyone is doing unspeakably stereotypical - like, say, a Brazilian playing football - are absolutely my jam, as is team-forming stuff in general. It's why I like the X-Men, basically, and it's always fun to see it happen again.

Those first few pages of Giant-Size are maybe the best X-Men pages ever, and these are a recapitulation of that: a very precise recapitulation, in some ways, right down to a pretty crashingly stereotypical Native American character and another one (Rainhe, this time, Kurt the first time) being chased by an angry Christian mob. You love (so to speak) to see it.

So yeah: this issue is absolutely picking up a very well-established formula and trying to reapply it. Parts of the formula, indeed, are older: they're original, 1960s parts, with the team having five members and them all being notably young: actual teenagers. Other parts of it, however, have developed further: this team is more diverse than the 70s team, which was more diverse than the 60s team. Here, we have an actual majority among the five both of women and of POC, which is pretty impressive. I just have one negative thing to say about this issue, though, but it is quite a big one: the art fucking sucks.

Look at Moira here. Her head is about 70% too big for her body, and her face is, in turn, too big for her head. Karma in the middle panel looks terrible too, like an ancient baby. The proportions and expressions throughout are terrible, as is the colouring, an unsettling mix of garish pastels.

The action sequences are fine, although nothing to write home about, but the entire comic appears to be populated by uncanny dolls. This is the first we've seen of Bob McLeod, who went on to draw the ongoing series that we're about to start reading, and it's dampening a lot of my excitement about it. And let's not even get started on Ranhe's half-wolf form.

Anyway, I am trying hard to maintain my excitement, because this is cool! New characters! New book! I love this kind of thing, like I say, and I'm hyped to read it. I'm just also hyped for them to find a new artist, jeez.

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Uncanny X-Men 166 (February 1983)

Chris Claremont/Paul Smith & Bob Wiacek

The Brood Saga comes to an end (more or less) in this double-length issue, which provides more space for a plot I simply do not care about. It's about space whales, in some way?

All this, and it all comes down to a deus ex machina about space whales. Weird, and disappointing. Paul Smith's art continues to throw some unexpectedly great punches, though.

Oh, and Kitty gets a dragon! The dragon is, I believe, controversial, or something. He isn't named in this issue so I guess a better explanation is forthcoming soon, but anyway, yeah, dragon.

I dunno, man, I have found enjoyable moments in these issues but I simply have not been able to engage with the Brood Saga overall. The aliens seem dated and cliched - perhaps evil insectile assimilation aliens were a fresher idea in the early 80s, before Tyranids and Starship Troopers and Phyrexians and whatnot. Seems kind of old hat now.

All the same, the X-Men are headed back to Earth, partly because they, you know, live there, and partly because they think Xavier maybe is also Brood-infected: but that's a semi-separate storyline, and we too are headed back to earth to read something I'm really excited about: it's finally time for New Mutants!

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Uncanny X-Men 165 (January 1983)

Chris Claremont/Paul Smith & Bob Wiacek

The Brood Saga trundles along in ways I largely don't care about: there's a lot of very well-worn "the X-Men don't kill...but maybe they should?" debating in this arc, and also the growing threat of the gang themselves turning into Brood aliens. Neither of these are compelling to me, but we should talk about the new guy, Paul Smith.

We've basically had two artists on this title since the reboot, Cockrum and Byrne, with fill-ins from a few others. Smith won't be a long-runner like those two, but he does draw Uncanny for about a year, starting now, and he's very different. His work is clean, downright stark in places, with a lot of use of expanses of pure black and pure white.

But he mixes that starkness with a certain amount of formal experimentation in the same mode, making for some extremely striking compositions.

None of this is exactly revolutionary - and no doubt they didn't want a revolutionary on what was now Marvel's biggest title - but it is refreshing and striking. It's going to take a little while to get used to stuff like the slightly different way he does faces - that uncanny "everyone's been recast" feeling that a new artist brings - but this issue is a strong opening statement, I think.

Oh, also, this issue, Piotr and Kitty don't bang.

There ya go. I mean...could have been handled worse!

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Uncanny X-Men 164 (December 1982)

Chris Claremont/Dave Cockrum & Bob Wiacek

Wonder what's happening in my favourite superhero comic today?

Oh, right. Yeah. The Brood Saga rattles on through space, pulling a major reinvention for Carol Danvers while it's at it: she absorbs a bunch of space powers in this issue and becomes...Binary? I like this panel as it implies that Earth is a planet of exclusively non-binary people who will viciously persecute binary types. If only.

So yeah, it's basically a space comic about Ms Marvel. Cool. To add insult to injury, her whole arc here is a recapulation of Jean's: go to space, gain godlike powers, become something unnervingly post-human, ???, genocide, profit. Or whathaveyou.

Claremont obviously liked Danvers and was interested in playing around with her as a character: in this issue she gets an offer to join the X-Men, but rejects it, and shortly Danvers-as-Binary will disappear off into Marvel's more directly space-focused comics for nearly a decade, which is fine by me, honestly.

Really the only part of this issue that caught my attention is the most X-Men-y bit of it. Some Xavier domesticity!

Poor old Charles is rattling around an empty mansion, feeling his age and making a big meal for the only other current inhabitant - Ilyana. This is, I believe, set-up for the shortly-to-launch New Mutants, and it's character-driven and mutant-themed and human-scaled and everything the rest of this arc isn't.

Anyway, the notable thing about this issue, actually, is that it's Dave Cockrum's last. He has mostly been a spectacularly good artist, legendary of course for the original long stretch of work (which ended, as it happens, with another pointless Corsair appearance) and for some great issues in his subsequent couple of irregular, on-off years on the title. Bye, Dave! Go write that sci-fi series you so obviously need to get out of your system!

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Uncanny X-Men 163 (November 1982)

Chris Claremont/Dave Cockrum & Bob Wiacek

The Brood Saga chugs along as the focus widens out from Wolverine in last issue to include the entire team, and a couple of frankly unnecessary extras, like fucking Corsair with his fucking magic gun-gloves. Why was this necessary.

Ok, anyway. The real action here is up in space as the gang starts to escape the Brood. Carol Danvers is here too, and Wolverine is looking weird because he healed with some Brood ...stuff... inside him, and also who the fuck is this dude?

I mean, contextually, it's Piotr. But it doesn't look a thing like him. The art team hasn't changed here, it's just a bafflingly bad panel (note also the relative sizes of Carol's face and hair). Meanwhile Kitty is doing what she is always doing at the moment: being menaced in a sexualised way.

This really is pretty tiresome, even leaving aside Kitty's age, and it's a lot of what she's called upon to do (or, rather, have done to her) at the moment. It's a shame, really, as are the various disorganised aspects of this issue.

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Uncanny X-Men 162 (October 1982)

Chris Claremont/Dave Cockrum & Bob Wiacek

Space: it's what's for bullshit.

This is the first issue - sort of - in what is sometimes called the Brood Saga. A long time was spent setting this up a few issues ago, with the insectoid alien Brood posing some sort of nebulous threat to humankind/the galaxy/my attention span, and this commences a run of issues that sees the conflict with them come fully out into the open (via the capturing of the gang in an attempt to turn them into Brood, a species that reproduces by inserting a parasite into other beings to transform them into more of themselves), and then be resolved.

All of this is Not My Kind Of Thing - the alien super-enemy who we don't have much reason to care about, the battle removed from locations where the X-Men have connections and where the stakes are clear and comprehensible - and I'm sort of not looking forward to the rest of this arc. But this issue? Pretty great, actually.

That's because this is a really formally interesting issue - it's a solo showcase for Wolverine, with the others barely featuring. It's basically a single long action sequence with a few flashbacks thrown in, and - crucially - it's all narrated by Logan. Not in thought bubbles, but in actual narration. This is not so unusual nowadays but I think this is the first time it's been done in X-Men, which seems sort of crazy, but there it is. It doesn't hurt, of course, that the art slaps.

The narration and the focusing on a solo hero (especially Wolverine) don't seem particularly revolutionary now, but at the time these were pretty interesting moves, and this issue really holds up. Maybe this whole storyline will positively surprise me!

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Uncanny X-Men 161 (September 1982)

Chris Claremont/Dave Cockrum & Bob Wiacek

Yo, remember the X-Men? They were pretty fun. We should find out what they've been up to for the past, like, year of Marvel publishing.

Yes, we're finally back to actual Uncanny X-Men issues, although in fact this one doesn't catch us up with the X-Men much at all, past a brief prologue which, as you can see, vaguely seems to tease that Scott/Ororo romance that is occasionally played with. Not to worry, though, because this issue is actually great.

That's Xavier and Magneto meeting! For the very first time! This is it! This is the beginning of the greatest love story in comics! This issue is a sequel of sorts to 117, picking up right after than one, with young Xavier moving on from Egypt to Israel, where he is doing a little psychiatric consulting and making a new friend. Also - naturally - fighting Nazis.

This issue is spectacular; it's an Indiana Jones pastiche with a deeply but enjoyably silly plot about secret Nazi gold, all wrapped up inside a character/relationship study of Charles and Erik (or Magnus, as he's calling himself at this stage), with fantastic art. It contains the seeds of their disagreements, and also establishes right from the beginning that Magneto was right - that is, there's a bit where he kills a bunch of fucking Nazis and Charles whines about it like a little bitch.

The comic doesn't take this position, to be clear - we're meant to think that Charles is right, obviously - but, hey, he isn't, and it's interesting to see how obvious this was right from the start. All this takes place against wonderful layouts like this one.

God, this is such a good issue. At the en of it Charles wakes up from his coma and sets up a return to Space Bullshit, which is regrettable, but this was fun while it lasted.

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Marvel Super Heroes Contest of Champions 3 (August 1982)

Mark Gruenwald/John Romita Jr & Pablo Marcos

This awful, awful miniseries comes to a merciful end. There's some actual X-Men content in this one, mind you, so I guess we should talk about it a bit.

Logan needs a cigarette. So do I.

Angel, meanwhile, meets an, 'ow you say, fanboy.

They don't really get on.

Storm is in this one too, up against a tastelessly named German, Blitzkrieg (his name was, unsurprisingly, changed in the German edition of this comic).

Thankfully, this all comes to an end with a very unsurprising twist about the identity of the mysterious hooded god-being who was controlling one of the teams.

Yeah, cool, whatever. Nothing much comes of this: Death and the Grandmaster come to some sort of further cosmic bargain and everyone gets sent home again.

This was a very easy series to clown on but sadly it sets the tone for many more such series - we're reading Secret Wars soon, which was the first really big, successful one of these, but was patterned pretty closely on Contest of Champions. There's a direct throughline that starts here and ends with non-stop exhausting Civil War-style stuff. Alas. Happily though, in the shorter term, we're finally going back to reading some mainline X-Men issues.

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Marvel Super Hero Contest of Champions 2 (July 1982)

Mark Gruenwald, Bill Mantlo & Steven Grant/John Romita Jr & Pablo Marcos

So, the general structure of the contest here - which I will explain once and then never mention again, because it's dumb - is that the heroes get split into sub-teams of three, and get pitched against each other in an attempt to capture fragments of a golden orb in different environments. So now you know.

I've said before, many, many times (so many times I can't be bothered to link to them) that I hate seeing contrived instances of heroes fighting each other. It's boring, it's awkward to set up, and it's just dick-measuring and trivia contests, of the "can the Flash outrun Superman" kind. Nobody cares. Unfortunately, that's what this whole comic is.

So we'll just have to focus instead on the insanely awkward, clunky, unintentionally hilarious stuff about different nationalities instead. Hey kids, you want to see comics tackle Big, Serious Issues? Are you sure?

Amazingly, they actually do learn a geopolitical lesson (albeit, again, I don't think the authors intended this): their real enemy is racist Brits.

Something we could all reflect on, perhaps.

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Marvel Super Hero Contest of Champions 1 (June 1982)

Mark Gruenwald, Steven Grant & Bill Mantlo/John Romita Jr & Pablo Marcos

Marvel Super Hero Contest of Champions (to give it its full, overlong title) is an extremely historically important miniseries which features several X-Men characters, hence our reading it. It's also fucking terrible.

Contest of Champions (as I'll now be calling it, for my sanity) was conceived in 1980, in very funny circumstances: the 1980 Olympics was coming up, in Moscow, and Marvel thought it would be fun to do a superhero Olympics comic. This explains the international focus of Contest of Champions, which (along with dozens of American heroes) features a number of extremely cringy heroes from countries around the world, many of them invented specifically for this comic and appearing here for the first time as they're whisked off to some mysterious location.

So why is this coming out in 1982, with no mention of the Olympics anywhere? Well, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the US decided to boycott the Moscow Olympics, sending no athletes and turning it (from the US perspective) into a huge damp squib that couldn't be used as a tie-in for a comic. So the whole idea sat in a drawer for a couple of years.

But - unfortunately - you can't keep a bad idea down, and a couple of years later Marvel dusted off the idea and rewrote it with a new framework, having the heroes be whisked off by two mysterious cosmic powers to become pawns in a struggle for yadda yadda yadda.

This, then, is how we got something that would go on to be commonplace: a massive, company-wide crossover event, where everyone is pulled together for a limited series that awkwardly tries to cram way too much plot and way too many characters into a big Event Comic that makes a nightmare of everyone's individual storylines. It all started with a failed attempt at a tie-in Olympics comic, and that's extremely funny.

Also, the two mysterious cosmic guys (one of them is fully unidentified at this stage, though it's very obvious who it's going to turn out to be) then each choose twelve heroes to be their champions, so the vast majority of the guys who were zapped up are then just not used. What was the point of this? Surely these cosmic gods could just have zapped up the twelve they each wanted and left everyone else alone? The international nature of the competition, meanwhile, ensures that of the chosen heroes, many of them are here to "represent" their country, which means they're total nobodies as far as Marvel is concerned. Can't wait to see *checks notes* Vanguard and Talisman face off!

We don't even get to any fighting in this issue, as it's all taken up with the selection process and the overall conceit. All that can be said for it is that it produces a few very funny character moments (mostly unintentionally), as when Captain Britain eyes Shamrock "suspiciously", in that he's absolutely checking out her ass. Also, if you thought Banshee was a one-dimensional representation of Irishness, hoo boy, welcome to Shamrock.

Mostly though it's just extremely normal, totally natural conversations like this.

Jesus christ. Thankfully this is only three issues long.