The Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Volume Four (2021)
Reprints Uncanny X-Men #176-193, X-Men Annual #8, Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #1-6, X-Men and Alpha Flight #1-2, and Marvel Fanfare #40
Written by Chris Claremont (w/Barry Windsor-Smith)
Art by John Romita, Jr, Al Milgrom, Paul Smith, Barry Windsor-Smith, Steve Leialoha, and Craig Hamilton
The Uncanny X-Men was approaching a period of massive changes. This collection ends with Claremont’s 100th issue on the title, and you can feel him searching for new threads to connect old ideas with fresh ones. Issue 176 sees two prologues, one to a story that just feels like treading water, and the other is something that will develop over the next few months.
In the first arc, the X-men will be entangled with the subterranean Morlocks again. The other introduces Valerie Cooper, the government liaison on mutants, with her assistant Raven Darkholme (Mystique in disguise), discussing plans and the mutant Forge. A big chunk of this one is taken up by Cyclops and Madelyn Pryor’s honeymoon, where he ends up having to fight a rather aggressive octopus. This continues Claremont’s pondering of how much he wants to involve Cyclops in a book where he’s not even a team member anymore.
This issue also has John Romita, Jr. onboard as the series regular penciler. Romita’s work is rough around the edges to start with, but as the issues go by, we can see him honing his craft, figuring out how to present these characters in ways that will not just simply copy what has been done by previous artists. Dan Green is also brought in as the inker and will contribute to 57 issues of the series, which puts his record above fan favorite John Byrne as an artist on the book. Green’s inking is the perfect complement to Romita’s pencils.
The following three issues play out what was set up. Mystique practices fighting the X-Men via Arcade and his robots on the team. A group from Xavier’s school is in the city to attend the Royal Ballet at Lincoln Center when the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants attack, leaving Colossus frozen in pain after his metallic body reacts to Pyro’s flame powers. Meanwhile, in a bid to get back at the X-Men, Callisto helps fake Kitty’s death and brings the girl down below, where she’s going to be forced to marry Caliban.
Of course, Caliban is the archetypal monster with a heart of gold and refuses to marry Kitty if she doesn’t love him in return. This story also introduces us to Leech, one of the mutant children the Morlock Annalee cares for. His power nullification ability will play a more prominent role in another collection, especially in the pages of X-Factor. More on them in a couple reviews.
There’s another break in the flow of stories with issue 180 as it serves as a lead-in to Secret Wars, Marvel’s first big crossover event (I don’t count Contest of Champions as it was self-contained). Kitty Pryde’s friendship with Doug Ramsey, which began in New Mutants, is developed more here, setting her up for a story arc in that book. Xavier’s new clone body is finally in decent shape, and he can be a more physically active member of the X-Men. Meanwhile, the X-Men come to the end of this issue by going through a portal that will have them take part in Secret Wars.
From what I can tell, that story took a whole year, but the characters who participated were only absent for a gap between issues. Both the writers of the participating characters and editor-in-chief Jim Shooter demanded changes that Secret Wars would help facilitate (see Spider-Man’s black costume, for instance). This was seen as an opportunity to nix the Colossus/Kitty Pryde relationship.
Even Claremont acknowledged that the romantic story arc between 19/20-year-old Colossus and 14/15-year-old Kitty was not a well-thought-out concept. The Days of Future Past story showed them as married adults, so he was trying to explain how that relationship would have developed over the years. I think waiting until she was older would have been a better idea, but Storm walked in on the two making out a few months earlier and announced how inappropriate it was. Colossus’ experiences in Secret Wars had him falling in love with someone else who died, so he no longer saw Kitty that way. Later, writers would rekindle this relationship when Kitty was no longer a minor. It’s weird, but they also aren’t that far apart in age; it’s just a period of human development where you separate the kids from the adults psychologically and emotionally.
The return from Secret Wars kicks off some stories that do not feed into any immediate arcs. Senator Kelly announces the Mutant Control Act. Rogue gets a solo story where she attracts the attention of SHIELD when she rescues one of Carol Danvers’ old colleagues. The payoff for that won’t happen for four years until 1988, another example of how Claremont sometimes plays the slow burn game to the point of absurdity.
The best of this trio of issues is #183, where Colossus finally pulls off the band-aid and ends things with Kitty. He goes to drown his sorrows at a bar with Wolverine and Nightcrawler. Juggernaut is there, and a brawl goes off. Claremont saw Juggernaut as less attractive as a villain of the month and tried to shift him into a jerk who occasionally clashed with the X-Men. This issue also marks the arrival of Ann Nocenti as the editor of the X-books, and she will profoundly influence the tone of where Claremont takes things for the next few years.
I want to note how female-centric so much of Claremont’s run is. For his first ten years on the book, I can only recall one “new” male member joining, and that was Angel for just a handful of issues. What stands out is how many women became a part of the team: Kitty Pryde, Rogue, Rachel Summers, Psylocke, and Dazzler. Issue #184 is the one where Rachel Summers returns after being briefly glimpsed in the Days of Future Past story. At first, I thought Terminator might have inspired this as both came out in 1984, but this predates that film by a few months. She immediately gets entangled with Selene, an ancient mutant whose powers make her an energy vampire.
The other plot in this issue has Val Cooper and Mystique arriving in Texas to meet with Forge. He’s an indigenous mutant with a gift for conceptualizing and building advanced technology. Forge has made a device that theoretically should nullify a mutant’s powers, but it is untested. That will play out in the coming issues. The X-Men don’t make much of an appearance here. That certainly stood out to me, and during this period, Claremont seemed interested in something other than telling big team stories. For the next eight months, the Uncanny X-Men will be less about the titular team and more about individual smaller stories.
Rogue goes, well, rogue, and Storm pursues. When we find Rogue, she’s swimming in a river for the first time the character has explicitly sexualized in the art. Until now, Rogue’s look reminded me of something between a punk and Pat Benetar. The objectified, sexualized depiction of Rogue would pop up from time to time, but by Jim Lee’s era, it was pretty cemented. This is unfortunate as Claremont’s notes to Michael Golden, who first drew Rogue in Avengers Annual #10, was that she should resemble Grace Jones. I wonder if Claremont intended the character to be a Black woman? The primary outcome of this story is Gyrich’s attack and Storm’s powers being nullified by Forge’s device.
In a 1979 interview, Claremont stated, “If I ever do a story in which Storm falls in love, it will be a signal event in her life.” And with issue 186, the first time Storm finds herself having those feelings, Claremont makes it a double-sized issue co-written by guest artist Barry Windsor-Smith. Windsor-Smith is a British artist who made his name by working on Conan the Barbarian at Marvel for four years. His art style is incredibly unique, especially for the era, to evoke the Romantic style of the late 18th century and more modern artists like Andrew Wyeth.
Including Windsor-Smith immediately propels the issue into a territory no X-Men book has ever felt like to me. Even Claremont’s writing feels more complex, and the character work is exquisite. I do not doubt that Claremont loved Storm, and he wrote her with such reverence that it felt revolutionary for a female comic character of the time. While Storm didn’t get her own solo mini-series during this time like many of her teammates, I feel this four-issue arc, with Romita returning after Windsor-Smith’s “Lifedeath” story, is the solo Storm story. Like many of Claremont’s plots, her relationship with Forge would be put on the back burner for 31 issues. The slow burn strikes again.
The strangeness continues with issue 189, where, once again, there are no X-Men; instead, Rachel Summers is sightseeing in New York City with the New Mutants’ Magma. As someone who has yet to do an extensive read of the New Mutants (perhaps in 2025?), making an issue of X-Men about these characters is so strange. They fight Selene, leading to a cliffhanger for one of Claremont’s oddest stories. Issue 190 opens in the middle of a larger story. You might wonder where you can go to read the rest, but this one and the next issue make up something that feels like a more significant arc.
This duo of issues serves as a sequel to the Claremont-penned Marvel Team-Up #79, where Spider-Man and Red Sonja took on the villain Kulan Gath. Gath has returned via a cursed necklace and has transformed part of New York into a recreation of Hyperborea. The X-Men and Avengers became trapped inside and have had their memories altered to reflect this world. If this story came out today, there would be a six-issue core mini-series and then a bunch of satellite minis spotlighting characters with stories that had little to no impact on the overarching one. I love how economical this is in comparison. Two issues, not even showing us the beginning, and it works splendidly.
The story ends with a prologue to another that will be drawn out into the following collection: The arrival of intelligent future Sentinel Nimrod.
We get another well-illustrated, slightly confusing one-off. Rogue, Colossus, and Nightcrawler face down Magus, the father of the New Mutants’ Warlock. Again, this feels like something other than a story that makes sense happening in X-Men. If all you have read is this title, you won’t know the deal with Warlock and the Technarchy. The moment where Rogue touches, absorbs, and becomes infected by Magus is a visually exciting sequence, but as far as a story that builds on previous plots, this one doesn’t really do it.
Annual #8 is next, having Magik tell a science fiction campfire story inspired by the bedtime tale Kitty shared with her years earlier. Then there’s the surprisingly engaging X-Men and Alpha Flight two-issue crossover. Paul Smith returns to handle art, which is even better than the last time we saw him on these characters. The story features some great moments for Rachel Summers and Madelyn Pryor primarily. The six-issue Kitty Pryde and Wolverine mini takes him back to Japan and establishes her as aging up a bit and their mentor/protege relationship. I was not a massive fan of the artwork on this one. It felt like a step backward.
Issue 193 makes one hundred issues of Claremont’s run, and he chooses to shake up the status quo. One of the things that stood out about the direction of the X-Men since their creation by Lee & Kirby was that they were in between humanity and more militant mutants. Their frequent foes called themselves the Brotherhood of *Evil* Mutants. If the X-Men were meant to be an allegory for civil rights of any kind, then they had become the moderates, the counterrevolutionaries creating the conditions under which humanity could ultimately oppress the mutants.
Claremont makes this story about James Proudstar, the brother of the original Thunderbird, operating under the same codename. James was a part of the Hellions at the time, Emma Frost’s prep school answer to Xavier’s New Mutants. He lures the X-Men to Cheyenne Mountain, where his brother was killed, while the team found Count Nefaria and his Ani-Men after they took over NORAD. This fight structurally changes the X-Men’s relationship with the U.S. government – now seen as enemies of the state – and shifts their philosophy on how they will approach other mutants. It’s no longer about “good and evil.”
Xavier chooses not to harshly punish James and his Hellion allies, returning them to Frost’s Massachusetts Institute. Nightcrawler explains when James is surprised that they aren’t making sure they’re locked up, “If society forces us to become a law unto ourselves, then it will be tempered with mercy.” Conceptually, this is the death of the Silver Age X-Men. They will not serve as “model minorities” anymore at the cost of their mutant brethren being victimized. This is the beginning of a period of revitalization in the title, Claremont moving closer towards that archetypal idea of what we see the X-Men as today, the outcasts of the Marvel universe.
PopCult Reviews 
One thought on “Comic Book Review – The Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Volume Four”