There wasn’t any one particular transcendent moment, but X-MEN quietly settled into being one of those series that I really liked, that always delivered. Part of that was that the creative team of Chris Claremont and John Byrne was remarkably consistent, seldom missing an issue. And partly this was due to my not quite knowing what bits were new revelations and what bits had been established earlier about these characters. This was a weird situation in that it let me make the characters feel more well-rounded and fully established in my head, even if what was known about them was sketchy at best.
At this point in the run, we were in the midst of one of my favorite sequences in X-Men history, one that I’ve attempted to steal a couple of times over the years. The X-Men have been stranded halfway around the world after surviving their battle with Magneto five issues earlier, and they are forced to slowly make their way back home by assorted conventional means, because they don’t have a magic teleporter or a remote control rocket ship that they can summon. This led to the team having adventures across the globe and introducing new facets to them. Here, having been picked up by a ship after their makeshift boat was swamped in a hurricane, the X-Men make their first-ever stopover in Japan.
The artwork on this issue suffers just slightly the absence of regular inker Terry Austin, whose fine-line control was a part of the entire X-MEN package. Here, Ric Villamonte subs in competently, but without Terry’s tight touch and ability to embellish where necessary. None of it looks bad, but it’s just a little bit rough around the edges. Anyway, as the issue opens, the X-Men’s ship has arrived in Japan, only to find that the area is suffering the aftermath of a major earthquake–one that had neither pre-tremors or aftershocks. In what had become a running gag, we learn here that Wolverine speaks Japanese, another new tidbit about his past. It’s frankly astonishing that the X-Men have been living together for as long as they have, and they still only know this fellow as Wolverine (even if the readers learned he was called Logan some time back.) Wolverine wasn’t an ultra-popular headliner yet, but it was bits like this one that helped to increase his appeal.
Needing both a way to contact Professor X, who believes the X-Men to be dead (and who known to them has taken off for the stars with his paramour Lilandra) as well as a read on the situation, the X-Men head for the family estate of the Yoshida family, whose member Sunfire was an X-Man for a hot second. The team is caught trying to sneak in, and Sunfire proves himself as hot-headed and aggressive as ever, threatening to have them all shot. But detente is reached when Misty Knight appears. She and her partner Colleen Wing are here at the behest of Wing’s Uncle, who is a high-ranking official. They’re also characters that Claremont and Byrne had been working with for years in IRON FIST, and so even though they’d moved on to other hands in the new POWER MAN AND IRON FIST series, Chris continued to feature them as though they were his own. (He’d do so until new writer Jo Duffy told him to knock it off.)
It turns out that the name of the game here is extortion, as a mysterious terrorist threatened to destroy Agarashima, and it was. So somebody is behind this, it wasn’t a natural occurrence. Meanwhile, as he doesn’t speak Japanese and is little use as the players compare notes, Cyclops instead attempts to call home. But he finds all of the lines to the X-Mansion terminated, including the secure one to Cerebro. So there seems to be trouble at home as well. Elsewhere on the grounds, a stir-crazy Wolverine comes upon Sunfire’s cousin, Mariko Yashida. Claremont and Byrne were channeling a bit of the successful television limited series SHOGUN here. Eventually, Mariko would become Wolverine’s romantic interest, as well as, of course, the head of a crime syndicate. No Chris Claremont character was ever just a regular person.
ADDITIONAL: As Rob Liefeld correctly points out, the SHOGUN television limited series didn’t air for close to two years after this, so Chris and John were rather drawing upon the best-selling book by James Clavell.
Suddenly, the grounds are rocked by another localized earthquake, and simultaneously attacked by men in Mandroid armor, Neal Adams-designed suits equipped to take on the Avengers. The X-Men, though, take out these guys mostly without breaking a sweat. The sole exception is Colossus, who has been experiencing a crisis of faith at the moment. He’s been slipping up, making mistakes in combat–here, he misjudges a punch, failing to tag a Mandroid before the armored figure can repel him away with a magnetic charge. For all his strength, Piotr Rasputin is feeling like a bit of a failure.
But the issue is drawing to a close, and so it’s time to accelerate the plot into the wrap-up of the issue. After the Mandroids have been defeated, the X-Men and the officials are surprised when one of them manifests a hologram of the mastermind behind these attacks. It’s Moses Magnum, an international arms broker who had previously battled Spider-Man and the Punisher, among others. And he’s ready to give his ultimatum. Either he is made absolute ruler of Japan, or else he’ll use his technology to sink the island nation completely. To Be Continued!
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
The Mandroids generally perform so poorly in combat that I think they should have come with the caveat that the suits were meant for some other purpose and SHIELD decided to turn them into weapons. The cables are a distinctive part of their imposing design, but also seems like the exact thing you wouldn’t want sticking out on a battlefield.
This was an entertaining issue that I bought out of order….though I was buying X-men regularly as of 125. had to piece together the storyline where the X-men think Beast and Jean are dead and vice versa. Claremont was generally great with character bits and building drama, but Cyclops and the team running into Jean’s roommate and not mentioning that Jean is dead doesn’t seem like something that people do.
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Yeah, they can’t mention Jean and Hank’s death because if they do Misty would say, “Huh? I just saw her at Kennedy Airport last issue!” And over the rest of the arc, Scott clearly tells Colleen about it, because she goes from knowing he’s “spoken for” to giving him her phone number and apartment key. But Colleen apparently never tells Misty she’s sorry her roommate died, because, again, it’d disrupt the plot. This was the kind of thing that pushed me away from the series.
They don’t make a call to the Avengers, or to Jean’s parents, don’t try to make sure Magneto’s dead too…
The action-adventure stuff was a lot of fun, and there’s some terrific work in this era, but there’s also messy character plotting/scripting that drove me bananas.
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It works while they’re in the Savage Land where it’s tough to find a phone at least, but this plot ran for 8 months after they were back in the regular world. If I recall right… it’s all resolved by a phone call after they find Beast in the mansion and then call Jean at Muir Island. In hindsight the entire plot line seems pretty meta given Jean’s ongoing “is she alive or dead?” status.
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The stated explanation was that the Mandroids were designed to take down the Avengers and not prepared for the X-Men. Which would indicate really stupid design work by Stark Industries.
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Things like Misty not telling the X-Men Jean is alive is no different than in the Defenders when the Enchantress turning the Black Knight into a stone statue with a kiss and Doctor Strange after failing to transforming him back to normal not ever thinking of contacting Thor. As the son of Odin if he can’t order the Enchantress to turn the Black Knight back to normal then surely Odin can with his powers. I’m sure if given more time I can think of other doesn’t make sense plots.
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I don’t think so. Thor wasn’t the Black Knight’s roommate, and Thor’s best friend didn’t proceed to mack on the Black Knight’s girlfriend now that Dane was unavailable.
There are lots of times the superhero logic of a story is clunky, but when the human interpersonal stuff is that clunky in a book that’s praised for its interpersonal stuff, it bugs me a lot more than “We didn’t consult someone in another book.”
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I remember I loved this issue so much when it came out, I kept rerunning that battle between the X-men and the Mandroids in my head panel by panel, over and over, for days.
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I remember drooling over that top panel, this I saw it in the Handbooks. I’m sure I tried to draw it over and over too!
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I loved this issue because Sunfire was in it and I wished he had been kept with the team, but I loved the next issue better once I found out just who Moses Magnum was and how powerful ( I wished then that he was a good guy cause back then there was no heroes that powerful with my skin colour ).
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I have (had?) a copy of this issue signed by Chris — a mutual friends of Scott McCloud’s and mine had Chris sign issues of X-MEN at a con and asked him to sign them to “Kurt and Scott,” which must have seemed a little weird.
Anyway, this one was mine.
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(I’m having trouble leaving this comment, for some reason. Hopefully, it will work this time.) I remember I loved this issue so much when it came out, I kept rerunning that battle between the X-men and the Mandroids in my head panel by panel, over and over, for days.
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10-year-old me loved this run in general, including this issue. I was a little confused by both Sunfire and Misty Knight: the story treated them as people we ought to know, but never actually explained to us who they were, in the event that we hadn’t read the previous issues they were part of. (Claremont during this run was in general very bad at putting himself in the shoes of new readers.)
Adult me (who has studied Japanese a little) accepts Wolverine being able to speak the language, but read a newspaper that readily? No way. Claremont just had no idea what written Japanese is like.
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I’m just going to put this out there. There is no Agarashima in real life. Tezuka Osamu had a story (Astro Boy) where there is a similarly made-up isolated island called Aragashima — but I doubt John and Chris ever had a way to read this from Japanese before Dark Horse got around to translating Astro Boy. There is however an Aogashima island…to the south (not north) of the main island. By the way, there is no “Miyago” prefecture (there is Miyagi prefecture) — maybe John and Chris were thinking of “Mikado” (overused for the Emperor in English) or “Miyako” (= the Capital). Lastly, in all my years as a Japanese academic, I’ve never met a Japanese person with the surname “Yashida”. “Yoshida”? Yes. In the comic, perhaps because of the letterer’s mistake, at one point the Yoshida becomes Yashida — and we will still see the “Yashida” name pop up in comics. Yoshida, by the way, does not sound like any “clan” name with hundreds of years of history. p.s. I love X-Men 118 and 119.
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I love that climax (“By midnight tomorrow night — I will sink Japan!”) though Claremont said readers who’d seen Magnum in Luke Cage found the power boost ridiculous.
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Sunfire’s costume is presumably inspired by the bug-eyed ‘Ultraman’ characters, but I always found it hideous.
There was an actual Japanese disaster movie in 1973 called ‘Japan Sinks’ (Nihon Chinbotsu), which perhaps Claremont was aware of?
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Could be… though Sunfire is most likely a Don Heck design, and the bug eyes/goggles would put him in line with other Heck costume designs like Wonderman and Goliath.
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Heck’s said that if a character debuts on a Kirby cover with a clear shot of the costume, it usually means Kirby designed the character — that’d make Wonder Man and Goliath Kirby designs.
I love the way the Sunfire mask flares and ripples almost florally. But I like Cockrum’s simplification of it better than Don’s version, with the metallic lines worked in.
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And if you look at the cover to AVENGERS 30, it’s pretty clearly a Kirby presentation drawing with stuff added — John Romita’s even reworked the guy under Goliath’s arm to fit the current story.
AVENGERS 28’s cover might well be a Kirby design sketch with stuff added too.
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Oliver, you are correct. When I teach the comic, I talk about the influence (?) or overlap with SHOGUN and JAPAN SINKS. To my knowledge, JB and CC have never admitted that they read that classic classic Japan sf work (it was just adapted for film again a few years ago). My hypothesis is that CC read it. Most likely the Agarashima thing will pop up in JAPAN SINKS which would connect the dots for me and allow me to just leave 118 and 119 alone for the comic gems that they are. 🙂
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I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure I read a Heck interview where he took credit for Wonderman and Goliath’s costumes. Either in Alter Ego or “Don Heck: A work of art” by Twomorrows.
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Just checked “Don Heck: A Work of Art” page 55 and 56, interview by Will Murray:
Murray: Did you design the Wonderman costume?
Heck: Yes.
Murray: You did? Because that was a case where Kirby did the cover.
Heck: But that design, I did it.
Murray: Oh, the cover didn’t come first in that case.
Heck: I guess not.
Murray: Yeah, because it’s a Heck-looking design and not a Kirby-looking design.
Heck: You can definitely spot it. It’s sort of like handwriting.”
Murray: Somewhere along the line in your Avengers run, you brought back Giant-man and redesigned his costume. Now that’s another distinctly Heck costume if I’m not mistaken.
Heck: Yeah (laughs), there goes a (inaudible).
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Fair enough. If Don says they were his, he should know.
I still think issue 30 looks like a repurposed design sketch, but for all I know it could have been something like Kirby working out what Don’s design was, from the pages he’d been sent, and then Stan deciding it could be used as a cover.
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Likewise Avenger #19 and 21 both look KIrby presentation art of Swordsman and Powerman… but I wouldn’t be surprised if Don designed them as well…. especially Swordsman. For what it’s worth…Jack and Don apparently were friends and didn’t live far from each other. Kirby was by far more of the go-to guy then Don for covers… perhaps in the case of Don taking over Avengers… the Kirby covers came after? It’s not without precedent.
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“…perhaps in the case of Don taking over Avengers… the Kirby covers came after?”
I’d assume it varied, and wasn’t the same even from issue to issue.
It might be Don was speaking more of ASTONISH and SUSPENSE, and on AVENGERS he was trusted more to design characters. Or it might be that for some of AVENGERS he designed characters and for other issues he didn’t.
Sadly, in many cases we’ll never know.
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Love the opening page! Memory fails me on which Claremont/Byrne X-men comic we saw first. But I’m pretty sure it was just the one and sadly couldn’t find the title at our local stores again until way later. Probably when JrJr came on, is where we really started our X-men collection.
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“He’d do so until new writer Jo Duffy told him to knock it off”, I’d love to know the whole story behind this! Just because Duffy and Claremont were two of my favorite writers in the 80s, I really loved her Star Wars run and Chris was Chris.
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