“Shadow of the Gun!”

MS. MARVEL — Issue no. 17, February 1978

Book: Ms. Marvel

Issue No.: 17

Published: February 7, 1978

Title: “Shadow of the Gun!”

Cover Price: 35¢

In the premiere Marvel Time Warp post, I wrote about my first comic book and how it made such a huge impression on me. I read a lot of comics after that, but the next one that made a similar impression on me was Uncanny X-Men no. 171 in 1983. I remember what I was doing the day I got X-Men 171 — my parents had driven me to the big city (we lived in a very rural part of Alabama) for a computer class (learning BASIC on an Apple II+!). We stopped at a convenience store on the way home for a snack or gas or something, and I grabbed the X-Men book of the comics rack. (I really miss random stores selling inexpensive comic books.) I can’t recall what it was about the cover that got my attention. I had seen X-Men comics before, and some of the X-Men characters had made cameos on my beloved Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends Saturday morning cartoons, but this was the first time I bought an X-Men book. And I absolutely loved the story inside. So much so that I ended up reading Uncanny X-Men every month for a few years. Spider-Man is probably still my favorite comic book character, but Uncanny X-Men is probably my all-time favorite comic book.

What does all of this X-Men stuff have to do with Ms. Marvel no. 17? Chris Claremont, the writer who famously revitalized the X-Men a few years before I started reading them in ’83, wrote this issue of Ms. Marvel. Based on clues I picked up from the fan-mail column, Claremont had only been on board a few issues at this point. This story isn’t as gripping as his best X-Men work, but it’s still solid. Ms. Marvel (AKA Carol Danvers — you might know her from recent Marvel movies where she goes by “Captain Marvel”) is a solo hero, but Claremont still works some team dynamics (and witty banter) into the story via Carol’s day job. She’s the editor-in-chief of Woman magazine where she has several co-workers to bounce off of. There might even be some inter-office romance brewing with Woman reporter Frank Gianelli.

This issue features a lot of Carol and not much Ms. Marvel. The main action plot involves someone called “Raven” donning a Nick Fury disguise to infiltrate a flying SHIELD heli-carrier so they can steal some kind of super-gun. Raven mentions they’ll use that super-gun to kill Ms. Marvel, a murder that Ms. Marvel herself has foreseen in a nightmare. The book ends on a heck of a cliffhanger, with Ms. Marvel in the crosshairs of the super-gun and a tease of the title of issue no. 18 — “The St. Valentine’s Day (Avengers) Massacre.”

Thanks to 40+ years of hindsight, I suspect the Raven character is the shape-shifter Mystique, a member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, arch-enemies of the X-Men. (Another X-Men tie-in for this story!) Maybe we’ll find out Raven’s identity for sure next issue.

One more fun thing — reading (almost) all of the Marvel books in order is already starting to pay off. There is a subtle reference to Marvel’s Godzilla comic on page 10, when one of the SHIELD guys mentions that Dum-Dum Dugan and some other SHIELD folks are “on the coast chasin’ big lizards.” I doubt I would have caught that if I hadn’t read Godzilla no. 10 a few days ago.

Next time — Everybody is kung fu fighting, especially kung fu master Shang-Chi!