Comic Book Review – The Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Volume Two

The Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Volume Two (2020)
Reprints X-Men #132-141, X-Men Annual #4-5, Uncanny X-Men #142-153, Avengers Annual #10, Marvel Fanfare #1-4, Marvel Treasury Edition #26-27, Marvel Team-Up #100, Bizarre Adventures #27, Phoenix: The Untold Story
Written by Chris Claremont and John Byrne
Art by John Byrne & Dave Cockrum

In my last review, I held back on discussing two characters introduced in the previous couple of issues collected in that omnibus. I’ll talk about them now, as one proves to be a core element to the next phase of Claremont’s run. Emma Frost debuted as part of the Hellfire Club’s first volley to capture Jean Grey and bring her into the fold. I had read these issues years ago and didn’t remember that Emma gets taken off the board fairly quickly. This means when the X-Men finally meet the entire Hellfire Club, Emma is catatonic and not part of the action.

That same story also introduced readers to the teenage Kitty Pryde. Claremont clearly had plans to bring her into the book a little later. After helping the team against Emma Frost, Kitty returns home while the Phoenix arc continues. Once that is concluded, she is brought in as part of Claremont’s very slight reshuffling of the deck. I have a lot of thoughts on Kitty, but we’ll get more in-depth later.

132-137 – Hellfire Club./Dark Phoenix

Mastermind in the guise of Jason Wyndgarde has brought Jean to the Hellfire Club, where she becomes their Black Queen. We also get a better glimpse at Sebastian Shaw, Harry Leland, and Donald Pierce, the members who round out the secret society. The concept of a privileged inner circle of mutants who use their wealth & power to protect themselves and no one else is such a great idea. In the next omnibus, we’ll be introduced to the Morlocks, a sewer-dwelling underclass of mutant outcasts. As of this writing, I’m about halfway through Omnibus #4 and am wondering if there is ever a direct clash between the Hellfire Club and Morlocks because that’s just a fascinating concept to explore.

There’s a good back-and-forth struggle between the X-Men and the Hellfire Club, providing us with some iconic moments like Wolverine being left for dead only to fight back and rescue his team. This story also provides the chilling moment where Jean loses control of the Phoenix and takes on her darker persona. That moment brings us to a scene where, wholly consumed by her power, the Phoenix exterminates an entire planet of sentient aliens and then a Shi’ar vessel that observes the act. I think Claremont and Byrne do a terrific job presenting the horror of someone with such god-like power.

This leads into the classic showdown, the X-Men fighting to protect Jean while the Imperial Guard of the Shi’ar hunts her down on the moon’s blue spot. It’s a story where you can feel the inevitability of its ending, which makes the events all the more tragic. Jean breaks your heart as she realizes there isn’t any other way than to end her life. The Phoenix will eventually remove all traces of humanity from her, so in many ways, she is already dead, a ghost lingering in a body another entity has made its home.

There is a lot of controversy around this ending. Then editor-in-chief Jim Shooter made the call that Jean would be killed off in the issue, which was not necessarily what Claremont & Byrne had wanted. Included in this omnibus was the one-shot Phoenix: The Untold Story, which printed the version where Jean lives. That is included here and had me wondering what direction the comic would have gone without the death of Jean being such a massive element looming over everything for years to come.

With issue 138, we have a transition moment. The whole thing is a recap of the X-Men’s history from the perspective of a grieving Cyclops. He returns to the original five and retells how the team got to this point before exiting the book. 

Before the next chapter begins, we get Annual #4, the first significant spotlight on Nightcrawler. At this point, the “new” X-Men have been around for five years, but in that time, there has been very little individual character development among them except for Storm and a few stories about Wolverine. Colossus and Nightcrawler have developed as part of this found family, but their backgrounds had yet to be explored. 

A team-up with Doctor Strange leads the X-Men to discover that Nightcrawler’s girlfriend, Amanda Sefton, is the mutant’s childhood friend in a mystic disguise. Her mother, Margali Szardos, serves as the villain here and was the one who found the infant Nightcrawler abandoned on the side of the road in Germany. Claremont’s delivery here is not nearly smooth, and a lot of this feels like trying to pull stuff out of thin air. This won’t be the end of that with Nightcrawler. When Mystique shows up, we’ll begin a decades-long mystery that has been resolved only recently (November 2023). Like I said in the first review, Claremont was notorious for dropping plot threads as the book became tangled up in more and more of them.

The following two-part story arc officially brings Kitty Pryde into the X-Men ranks. It also sees Cyclops’ original member slot taken up by Angel. His tenure will only last nine issues and ends in one of the more awkwardly written issues of the book. We see the seeds of Storm & Kitty’s mentor/protege relationship begin and the development of Kitty as a formally trained dancer. 

The main story is Wolverine returning to Canada, bringing Nightcrawler along, and being forced to team up with Alpha Flight. This is a sequel to Wolverine’s first appearance in the pages of Incredible Hulk, where he and the jolly green giant fought against each other and against the Wendigo. It seems that a cannibalistic monster of myth has resurfaced, and a woman and her child are in harm’s way. This issue also begins something that will be ongoing through Claremont’s run (until the launch of X-Factor), which is that the characters have internal monologues about how much they grieve Jean’s passing and how it affects them. 

I also want to point out how incredible Byrne’s pencils and Terry Austin’s inks are through these issues. For me, this is peak X-Men (at least from what I have read so far). It feels more of the time, not as Silver Age-y as other artists like Dave Cockrum. However, these glory days weren’t going to last forever. Apparently, behind the scenes, there were clashes between Byrne and Claremont. It was pretty clear Marvel wouldn’t let go of the writer who made the book their crown jewel, but Byrne was no slouch either. They still had what I regard as one of the best X-Men stories ever made to come.

Days of Future Past is such an incredible two-part series with an opening that pulls the reader in immediately. In the early 21st century, New York City is patrolled by a new type of Sentinel. Mutants are rounded up and branded to identify them to the public. An adult, Kitty Pryde, works with the few mutants that haven’t been executed, like Wolverine, Storm, Cyclops, and Rachel Summers, to find a way to go back and prevent the events that led to this dark present. 

The process sees Kitty’s adult consciousness sent back into her teenage body. A scan by Professor X reveals that their newest recruit isn’t going mad but is genuinely who she claims to be. Kitty can explain that the inflection point was the assassination of Senator Robert Kelly, who is vocally opposed to mutants moving about freely in the States. It just so happens that the new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants is in Washington, D.C., right now, led by the shapeshifter Mystique with plans to carry out that assassination.

I cannot emphasize enough how damn good of a story this is. I love time travel when it’s done right, and this is it right here. It’s also a story that is not a good introduction to the X-Men. You really have to be invested in the characters to feel the emotional weight of that dark future. It will not be the only time Claremont plays with time travel or this potential timeline. He and Byrne are at the top of their game the whole way through. 

But all good things must end, and those disputes between creators came to a head with issue 143. We get a Christmas tale that serves as a spotlight on Kitty Pryde. If you notice, she has played a prominent role for the last five or so issues. And again, I remind you how much of a background character Wolverine is in so many of these stories. I’m a big believer that you take away the mystery that makes him cool by making him the main character, so he thrives as a supporting player.

Kitty stays behind at the mansion just as one of the N’Garai demons surfaces. Byrne has said the issue was meant to be an homage to Ridley Scott’s Alien, which I can see. It culminates in the place being trashed, but Kitty survives. It’s a fun issue, and not having Byrne’s art in the book after this is a letdown. By March of the following year, the artist would be drawing and writing Fantastic Four.

The next issue features a fill-in artist and catches the readers up on where Cyclops has been. He’s found a new love interest in pilot Lee Forrester. I found this one fairly meh, but it leads into the big reveal that Magneto is back. However, that storyline gets put on hold for the X-Men’s first face-off with Dr. Doom. It seems the monarch of Latveria has taken Arcade hostage after the master of Murderworld failed him. Miss Locke, Arcade’s second-in-command, kidnapped the X-Men’s loved ones to get them to stop Doom.

The decision is made to have a two-pronged assault. The X-Men travel to Doom’s castle to confront him while a covert group of former members break into Murderworld to rescue the hostages. That group consists of Banshee, Iceman, Havok, and Polaris. This is also a story where Jim Shooter intervenes and changes a critical element of the finale: The Doom they faced was a Doombot. Apparently, Claremont didn’t write this and wasn’t notified of that change. There’s a reason why the people who worked at Marvel this time don’t have much nice to say about Shooter’s tenure. This story arc also sees Dave Cockrum return as the series regular artist, with a few fill-in months by other artists here and there.

The next issue feels awkward. Parts of it are a story, but so much feels like bookkeeping. Angel unceremoniously quits as he disagrees with the Professor, allowing someone as violent as Wolverine on the team. Spider-Woman shows up as she and the X-Men had teamed up in her book. Also, Siryn Cassidy (who first appeared in Spider-Woman) meets her estranged pop, Banshee, for the first time. This story will not be continued any time soon in the pages of X-Men. 

What is significant about this issue is the introduction of Caliban. He’ll later be retconned into being a member of the Morlocks, but he serves as a reminder that many mutants could not hide in human communities and were driven underground. His name also connects to Ariel, one of Kitty Pryde’s brief attempts at a codename. That part of the comic is good, but this is a messy issue with too many loose ends.

The following two issues serve as a way to soft reboot Magneto. In reading the original run of comics last year, I found Magneto to be an incredibly dull character. He was just a pastiche of Doctor Doom when you look at it. The character needed the type of development that made him into something unique in the Marvel universe. Claremont begins planting those seeds here by building backstory elements for the villain. This is the comic that establishes Magneto as a Jewish man who was a child survivor of the Holocaust. That experience has informed what he does as a mutant, believing that radical violent resistance is the way for his kind to survive. This brilliant pivot immediately changed the character’s voice and perspective into something more interesting than just a megalomaniac. 

We get X-Men Annual #5, a Fantastic Four team-up against the alien Badoon. Nothing very memorable. Then there’s a two-parter with Kitty’s parents withdrawing her from Xavier’s school to attend the Massachusetts Academy. Well, wouldn’t you know it, the place is run by Emma Frost, building on the established rivalry between Kitty and Frost from the Phoenix Saga days. Storm also becomes involved, dropping Kitty off, only to have her consciousness swap places with Frost. Each of them struggles to harness the other’s powers. By the end, Kitty Pryde is back home with the X-Men.

The collection finishes the monthly issues with “Kitty’s Fairy Tale,” the famous bedtime story she tells Illyana, Colossus’ sister. Illyana was one of Miss Locke’s hostages from the Doom story, and after that, became a regular fixture around the mansion. There will be tremendous developments with her in the next volume. Kitty recasts each of her teammates in this story as part of an Arabian Nights-style adventure. The SR-71 Blackbird becomes a dragon named Lockheed, and that will come back again next time.

The remaining omnibus reprints include other bits and pieces Claremont wrote around this time. I was most impressed with Bizarre Adventures #27 because of how good Cockrum’s art looks. I’m not a massive fan of his style, but it worked for me there. Michael Golden’s art in the Avengers Annual (the first appearance of Rogue, who we will discuss in the following review) and Marvel Fanfare were extraordinary. I’d never read a story he’d drawn, but I’d definitely heard of him. Those pencils felt significantly ahead of the period.

In our following review, we’ll see the X-Men go interstellar against a hive full of enemies and come back down to Earth to meet a new teammate and face off against the sewer-dwelling Morlocks.