“WHO WILL STOP THE JUGGERNAUT”

Thoughts

This issue is mostly a rather generic rumble between the X-men and Juggernaut, that does at least have the interesting conclusion that the X-men are comprehensively beaten.

This issue, though, also has “the origin of Storm” in the sense that we get her backstory fleshed out over three pages. Often with comic book characters, their convoluted back stories stem from years of contradictory references and asides that a writer decides they want to pull together into a single, twisting narrative.

By contrast, Claremont seems to want to drop us an incredibly convoluted backstory right from the start. Born in New York to an American and an “African Princess”, her parents move to Cairo for his work. Where they are killed leaving her an orphan on the streets, where she becomes a skilled child sneak-thief for an underworld Fagin-type. Then she walks the Sahara to become a Goddess. It’s just a little bit insane.

It’s like they had three ideas for Storm. A New Yorker from 112th Street, a street urchin from an African city, and a Goddess from the Serengeti. And rather than pick one, decided to go for all of them.

Over time Claremont finds a use for all of them, although its more interesting that its her in-title development as a character that I find far more fascinating than any of this. And I think it is fair to argue that there is no reason why a character in a comic can’t have a complex background like some people in the real world do. But it really is a crazy three pages in here. Before we even get to setting up her crippling claustrophobia.

Fun Panel

This is how you get a convoluted backstory covered in three pages. Panels like this.

It was a Product of its Time

To be honest, the sequence where the British and French are shown bombing civilians in Cairo as part of the Suez crisis is way ahead of its time. Even if the elderly leader of the street urchins seems to come straight out of the Arabian Nights.

Mutant Mailbag Mayhem

A gushing, and deserved, mailbag of praise this issue. Truncated to make room for Howard The Duck stuff. A phenomenon that just seems mystifying to me now.