Desolation

THE UNCANNY X-MEN — Issue no. 114, July 1978

Book: The Uncanny X-Men

Issue No.: 114

Published: July 18, 1978

Title: “Desolation”

Cover Price: 35¢

Format: Digital scan

The folks at Marvel Comics love their adjectives. The Hulk is Incredible and Spider-Man is both Amazing and Spectacular. And, of course, Marvel’s very first Silver Age comic book series was The Fantastic Four.

Marvel’s most famous team of mutants, the X-Men, were Uncanny when I read their books in the early 1980s. But their comic book was adjective-less for years, just The X-Men. Then, after the book was relaunched with a younger set of heroes (including Wolverine, Storm, and Nightcrawler), the book was touted on the cover as “The All-New All-Different X-Men” for a while.

I mention all of this because it is this issue of the X-Men’s book, no. 114, when the X-Men officially became “Uncanny.” Well, I guess it still wasn’t official, because if you look at the indicia on page one of this book, the title is still, technically, just X-Men. “Uncanny” wouldn’t become officially official (AKA appear on the indicia) until the early 1980s with issue no. 142 (which happened to be the second issue of the book’s now-famous “Days of Future Past” two-issue story arc).

But I tend to judge a book by its cover when it comes to its title, and “Uncanny” is on the cover, so this book is The Uncanny X-Men as far as I’m concerned.

The creator I (and probably most other X-Men fans) associate with The Uncanny X-Men is writer Chris Claremont, who picked up the book at the start of its All-New All-Different era and wrote the Uncanny era for many years. The other creator I most associate with Uncanny is letterer Tom Orzechowski (you know I love the letterers). Like Claremont, Orzechowski worked on the book for many years. But Orzechowski is absent this issue (the lettering here is courtesy of Jean Simek). I peeked ahead and, for whatever reason, Orzechowski was apparently off-and-on Uncanny over the course of the next few issues.

So what happens in the X-Men’s first Uncanny outing? It starts off bleak, with Beast and Phoenix barely escaping from X-Men arch-villain Magneto’s Antarctic underground hideout, with the other X-folks (Banshee, Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Wolverine, and Cyclops) presumed dead. But! They’re not dead, they managed to escape to the Savage Land, a lost (and temperate) world of dinosaurs and whatnot that is hidden away in Marvel’s Antartica. (Magneto building his secret, allegedly inescapable, Antarctic base so close to the Savage Land seems like a serious tactical error. Sometimes these megalomaniacal super-villains don’t think things through.)

After a run-in with a flying dinosaur, the X-Men’s visit to the Savage Land is pretty chill. They find a local village of friendly humans, and the group spends some time resting and recovering from their escape from Magneto. This give Claremont time to drop in some nice character moments, the big one being Cyclops doing some self-reflection and gaining some insight into his mysterious past.

But! (That’s right — this is a two-”but!” Marvel Time Warp post. In fairness, this issue of X-Men features three splash pages, so you know it’s pretty darned dynamic and dramatic.) Storm is attacked by Sauron, who (from what I can tell) is a dude who absorbs other people’s life-energy and turns into a dinosaur. Which I guess kind of makes him a vampire/were-dinosaur? It’s a another terrific cliffhanger ending to another top-notch effort from Claremont and company.

Next time — I’ll be back next week with another July 1978 Marvel book!