Guest Penciler: Rick Leonardi
Guest Inker: Whilce Portacio
Review: Will Dubbeld
Gather ‘round, all, and harken back to the days of yore. Days comprised of kinetic adventure, flowing prose, and orgies of teamwork. Back when Chris Claremont reigned supreme in all things X-Men. Back when the X-Men comics weren’t altogether sucky.
I’m not speaking purely as a jaded old nerd who’s knocking on the door of middle age. I’m speaking based on empirical evidence gathered by my tightly-knit circle of fellow jaded old nerds.
Granted, Claremont slipped off the rails at some point during his X-treme X-Men run, but I’ll take the worst bit of Vargas killing Psylocke over the X-Men getting bested by the Hellfire After-School Club. Or AVX (with The Phoenix Five!). Or present day Beast going back in time to abduct the past X-Men as teenagers to convince Cyclops to not be a dick…
Wait…
What now?
Anyway, eff all that garbage. Gimmie the 1980s garbage any day.
So, speaking of Cyclops being a dick…
X-Men #201 is somewhat of a classic issue in the series for several reasons. It takes place shortly after Professor X fucks off back to space to tear-ass around with Lilandra and the Star Jammers, completely neglecting his X-Men and leaving the New Mutants in the charge of Magneto. It also, in a roundabout sort of way, is the first appearance of Cable as baby Nathan Summers first appears in this issue. He was just li’l ol’ Nathan Christopher Charles Summers here, long before he was Nathan Charles Christopher Summers Dayspring Askani’son…
Take that, Game of Thrones dragon-lady…
Finally, and possibly one of my favorite X-moments, this issue features the legendary duel between Storm and Cyclops for leadership of the team.
Storm who had recently lost her powers, mind you…
30-year old spoiler alert: Storm wins.
Overly verbose scripting aside, this is a prime example of how well-crafted the old-school X-books were. Claremont juggles several plot elements and character studies without dropping any balls.
And speaking of balls, we even are treated to a perennial favorite: The X-Men baseball game. A little slice of Marvel fun second perhaps only to the floating Marvel poker game.
We see one of the first appearances (that I can recall) of Dickhead Cyclops, who is like regular Cyclops only he’s a giant sack of dicks. Like the guy who would choose tooling around with the X-Men over his wife and newborn child. Consequently, he’s also the guy who gets his ass handed to him by a powerless Storm and sent on his way.
He’ll get the last laugh, though, as he’ll drop Maddie like a hot potato as soon as Jean Grey comes back to life…
This is an A+ issue. The art is on-point, representing the cream of the 1980s crop, and the story is forever locked in my legend-canon. Extra points awarded for heavy focus on punk rock mohawk-Storm, who is the best Storm.
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