A PRICE HIKE?! X-Men now costs 15 CENTS?!! And the children of 1969 get a cruel, abrupt lesson in purchasing power in the face of inflation. "But, DAAAAAAAAAAAD! Comics cost two cents MORE now!" "Bah! Join the army, you hippie! Maybe if you didn't spend it all on DOPE, you'd be able to afford the X-Men!"
(Why is Past Dad always a jerk?!)
Well, for two more of my hard-earned cents, this issue better be worth it!
SUMMARY!
And it's immediately worth it, because, literally, the first third of the book is a fight between Iceman, Beast, and a Sentinel. After some epic panels, Bobby holds off the Sentinel and tells The Beast to escape and contact the others. Beast is like, "You sure? You ARE only Iceman..." Then immediately feels guilty.
When the rest of the gang hears what's going on, Angel kinda gets really worked up about it.
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| And then you GRAB them, like THIS... FIRST. Before they can grab YOU there. HEED MY WORDS! THEY WILL GRAB! (Angel makes "squeezing" motions.) |
So worked up, in fact, that he starts calling himself "The Avenging Angel" (which is what you would know he called himself during his vigilante times when he first got his mutant powers and before he joined the X-Men, had I cared to thoroughly recap those origins stories that I told you were not worth reading. Ugh! Guess THAT'S come back to bite me in the tuchus, huh?)
Back at Sentinel HQ: Bobby, who apparently (not surprisingly) lost the fight against the giant robot, has been captured. Not only captured, but bathed in a "special steam" which will strip him of his powers for four hours.
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| Do you know how long it took me to formulate it to be EXACTLY four hours?! Well, only about four hours. |
Then he is thrown in a cell with Lorna and Alex. Somewhere along the way, Trask took a break form his "kill all mutants with robots" plan to sew a ridiculous costume for Alex:
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| The chest circles will focus and refine your cosmic rays. The head-dress will prevent women from being attracted to you. |
Trask also told him he would, from here on out, be called "Havok" (It's spelled with a "k" so that it can be trademarked. Like when SciFi changed their name to "Syfy".) So, unlike the rest of the mutants, Havok is not "neutralized" because he and Trask have some kind of deal ... except that they don't? Then Trask turns off his powers. Yes. It's as confusing as I've made it sound. WORD PICTURES.
The next couple of pages are a montage of The Sentinels rounding up The Living Pharaoh, Angel, and Mesmero and Magneto ... except teeeWIST! MAGNETO WAS A ROBOT ALL ALONG! Well, not ALL all along, but at least recently? Or ... who knows? No matter the case, the look on love-lorn Mesmero's face is PRICELESS:
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| Close your mouth, Mesmero! We are NOT a cod-fish. |
So, the federal jurist R. C. Chalmers (who has been helping Larry Trask by trying to pass legislation against mutants) arrives at the Sentinel Cave for a visit. He sees the way the mutants are caged and has doubts about this whole "exterminate an entire race" thing. Voicing those doubts, Trask flips out on him and then orders all of the mutants destroyed immediately. Somehow, while doing this, he tells about how his dad told him to wear this funky-fresh medallion ALWAYS and never ever ever take it off.
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| "Not even when showering, Papa?" "ESPECIALLY not when showering, son!" "That's weird, dad." "Is it? IS IT?!?!" |
The judge, hoping to punch his madness out of him, hits Junior Trask. And in what is surely the quickest foreshadowing-to-turn-around twist, Chalmers grabs that medallion - that we were JUST talking about - from around Trask's neck. Immediately, The Sentinels grab young Trask because HE is a mutant and the medallion was cloaking him from the killer robots. Also: They are gonna kill him to death.
ADDITIONAL BONUS JUNK!
This month's bonus? That there IS no bonus! I feel both happy and sad. Happy, because I hate these things, but sad, too, because in the late 60s, women even got deprived of their origin stories!
ADDED TO AUTO CORRECT!
Havok. Yes, THAT won't lead to complicated misspellings when I try to quote Shakespeare from my phone. [OK. OK, I mean "quoting Star Trek VI"] "Cry Havok, and let slip the dogs of war!" Bark!
READ IT YOURSELF!
Follow along by picking up X-Men - Volume 2 Omnibus (Marvel Omnibus)
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