Thoughts

The Marvel Fanfare run ends with Paul Smith’s first X-men adventure. It’s great to see his first take on the characters, given his future brief but highly influential run as main artist.

Ka Zar returns from an impossibly convoluted absence (it gets explained in this issue but I still don’t really understand it) and helps the X-men defeat Not-The-Tolkien-One Sauron. Angel once again gets more to do than at any time while actually getting his face on the top left box of the X-men front covers.

One big disappointment with this issue is that after the first two issues set up the fact that the Bag Guys have an Evil Laser that can turn you into a Monster appropriate to your powers, and with the last issue ending with Colossus being transformed by that Evil Laser, there is virtually none of that in this issue.

There’s so much visual and storytelling fun that could be had with Evil Mutated versions of Colossus, Nightcrawler, Storm and Wolverine on the loose. Maybe taking on Angel, who’d finally get to be centre of a heroic story. Instead we learn they are being mutated, only for Sauron (Not-The-Tolkien-One) to restore them to normal as a food source. And then the normal X-men escape. And win.

Karl Lykos gets cured of being Sauron (although that’s obviously not going to last) and we get a happy ending to a pretty inconsequential four issue story.

Fun Panel

A brief glimpse of cool monster Nightcrawler.

That Don’t Make A Lick of Sense

Sauron (Not-The Tolkien-One) is going to increase his power geometrically. How exactly is that going to work? He’s going to be better at geomatry? Super shapes?

It was a Product of its Time

There’s something dodgily colonial in the presentation of “ignorant swamp savages” and the way the text wants us to hate them. As if White Saviour Ka Zar wasn’t bad enough.