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Post by rberman on Mar 11, 2019 14:24:58 GMT -5
Havok and Wolverine: Meltdown #2 “Tender Loving Lies!” (December 1988)I thought Alex Summers was a geology grad student at one point. I also don’t have any idea what Alex’s relationship with Polaris was like at this point in the late 80s, but in this story he has no such relationship it seems. During this time, Alex and Lorna were separated. Mainly because of Lorna being mind-controlled by Malice, and being forced to join the Marauders. He's cheating on her because she's mind controlled? Not cool! Probably a better approach is to see this Epic story as happening outside of regular Marvel continuity, what with Dracula hanging out in a Russian asylum, Wolverine's bizarre hair/helmet, etc. Still a cool Havok story, though. Wolverine's presence is just to boost sales. |
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Post by rberman on Mar 12, 2019 7:40:48 GMT -5
Havok and Wolverine: Meltdown #4 “Endgame” (Febuary 1989) The Story: Shaken by killing Logan, Alex is ready to leave the Carpathian castle, but Quark convinces him to look around. Hey, some blueprints! She plays dumb, allowing him to explain that it’s the layout of a nuclear power plant in India. Let’s go there! But first, to bury Logan, with Alex’s coat as a shroud. (seven pages)  Meltdown and Neutron are confident that all is going according to plan. But Wolverine awakens in his shallow grave and finds the Indian reactor blueprint in the pocket of Alex’s coat. Does this means Alex has figured out that he’s been played, and he’s left a trail for Logan to follow? (five pages) In India, the reactor has already been damaged when Havok and Quark arrive; it’s approaching meltdown. Also, Meltdown is approaching. He finds Havok in the reactor chamber, acting as a human damper to absorb the radiation and prevent an explosive chain reaction. Havok refuses to use full force on Meltdown until Meltdown gives him a motive by slaying Quark. Noooo! Havok’s full force gives Meltdown the startup energy he needs to become a self-propagating living nuclear reactor. (fifteen pages)  Wolverine arrives just then. Claws are useless against Meltdown, who just heals instantly. Wolvering instead chucks a dozen boron control rods through Metdown’s torso. This dampens his nuclear reaction, and he fades into nothing. Alex vents the extra energy into space, averting an explosion, and the activated damping rods begin to cool the nuclear pile. (sixteen pages)  Logan elects not to tell Alex that Quark was part of the evil plot; better to preserve her as pure in his memory. Dr. Neutron greets his new warden and prepares to draw her into his latest scheme… (three pages)  My Two Cents: A whiz bang ending! Not all the questions were answered, but the general gist is clear enough. The whole “psychiatrist/secret agent” thing didn’t make sense. Perhaps Dr. Neutron programmed Quark with spy powers somehow? In that case, she really was just his helpless dupe all along, and we should mourn her passing. Neutron has a whole drawer full of chess pieces decked out like Marvel characters, so who’s to say what games he may have in mind for the future? Given the Carpathian castle and the “Enter freely and of your own will,” perhaps we’re supposed to figure out that Neutron is really Dracula, playing Nuclear Age games from the comfort of his Russian asylum rather than going out in the sun. Dracula does have hypnosis powers too. Hmmm….  I love the creepy cover with Logan rising out of the lid of Havok’s noggin. Fun story! With all the drek that gets reprinted in trade volumes, this deserves to make the list. It was reprinted once as Wolverine: Meltdown, but its full title is being restored for a reprint due out in mid-2019.
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Post by rberman on Mar 31, 2019 15:11:53 GMT -5
X-Terminators #1 “Invasion of the Baby-Snatchers” (October 1988) Creative Team: Written by Louise Simonson. Penciled by Jon Bogdanove. Inked by Al Williamson and Al Milgrom. The Story: Following recent events in X-Factor, the team’s junior members are going their separate ways. Rusty Collins the pyrokinetic is headed to prison for deserting the Navy. Artie and Leech are being placed in a children’s home. Skids, Rictor, and Boom Boom are enrolled in boarding school at Exeter. I do not know why the snobby Exeter girl's skirt changes color for one panel.  Artie and Leech meet Takeshi Matsuya, a crippled, dyslexic boy genius who is just discovering a mutant ability to turn metal into functional gadgets just by his touch. He’s sullen at baseline and even more irate when Leech’s mutant-dampening power interferes with his work. But eventually he softens and befriends the two newcomers.  In Limbo, the demons S’ym and N’astirh are jockeying for power. N’astirh plays the lackey and agrees to procure 13 mutant babies from Earth to power a portal that will allow the demons of Limbo to invade. The junior demons are morons who think that all small bald people are babies; they kidnap Artie and Leech by mistake. Note that S’ym (a parody of Dave Sim’s character Cerebus) has his trademark cigar but lacks his black vest in this issue only.  Takeshi retrieves Skids, Rictor, and Boom Boom from their dorms at Exeter; then they bust Rusty out of prison in the most lighthearted prison break you’ve ever seen. Off to rescue Artie and Leech! Wherever they are.  My Two Cents: This four issue series has two roles. First, it’s a spin-off of the X-Men spin-off X-Factor, which had a much ballyhooed but disappointing debut in early 1986 from Bob Layton and Jackson Guice. After five issues, the writing reins were handed to Louise Simonson. In September 1987, she also began writing The New Mutants, replacing series creator Chris Claremont. Marvel was testing the limits of the buying public, seeing how many different X-series they could float simultaneously, just as they had flooded the market with monster mags in the 1970s. Our current series here is the beginning of Simonson's effort to align The New Mutants more closely with X-Factor rather than Uncanny X-Men, which was still under Chris Claremont's control at the time. Second, Marvel was continuing its experimentation with large events which crossed over between multiple books in the line. This issue inaugurates the Inferno event, which sought a spectacular grand finale for the Lovecraftian story of Illyana Rasputin which Chris Claremont had begun back in X-Men #160 (1982). In the Magik mini-series, Illyana had grown up in Limbo and killed Belasco, her demonic master. In his absence and with Illyana mostly on Earth, his servant S’ym had begun consolidating power in Limbo. A subsequent encounter with the techno-organic alien Magus infected S’ym with the Transmode Virus which allowed him to convert organic matter to electronic matter and then absorb its energy, as seen here in New Mutants #50:  A brief EC Comics homage appears to fit the story’s creepy theme, and N’astirh has enveloping wings in the spirit of Disney’s version of Chernobog from A Night on Bald Mountain. One of the premises of this story is that every human has “a demon within” just waiting to be freed. And check out the snarky Frederick Wertham gravestone, acknowledging that this material never would have passed Comics Code muster in the 1950s. I bet the guy’s T-shirt is a joke too, but I can’t make out what it says… “Mount something.”  Takeshi “Wiz Kid” Matsuya is the new character and also the focus character of this series. He starts this issue a socially awkward genius, then discovers his mutant power for remodeling mechanical and electronic devices. Basically the same powers as Madison Jeffries from John Byrne’s Alpha Flight. I’ve heard that Watchmen caused Marvel and DC to drop captions and thought balloons from their comic books. This issue supports that theory, though there is a surplus of “people talking out loud to nobody” a la Doctor Who instead.  Louise Simonson gives a surprisingly light touch to this story about demons kidnapping babies. Maybe not surprising for her in particular, but surprising for the subject matter. It has a distinctly Silver Age vibe in which even a prison break seems like a caper, with everybody shouting “Golly Gee!” instead of delivering long Claremontian diatribes about the ennui of existence. One suspects Jim Henson’s “goblins kidnap a baby” adventure film Labyrinth was in her VCR when she was writing this series.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Mar 31, 2019 20:50:30 GMT -5
I know it's not generally well thought of, but I've always liked Inferno... this mini is just on of the interesting things that it spawned that probably wouldn't have happened with out it.
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Post by rberman on Apr 1, 2019 4:58:04 GMT -5
X-Terminators #2 “Speed Demon” (November 1988) Creative Team: Written by Louise Simonson. Penciled by Jon Bogdanove. Inked by Al Milgrom. The Story: N’astirh informs his moronic demon minions that Artie and Leech are not infants suitable for his dark magicks. Artie uses his hologram projection power to give the heroes a vision of the graveyard which serves as N’astirh’s base. But which graveyard is it?  The good guys have some hijinks, first busting into a Pepsi machine to get quarters for the pay phone, then breaking into a clothing store to steal some very early 80s duds. In each case, Takeshi Matsuya uses his powers of mechanical control and trust fund to recompense the absent owners.  Flying demons kidnap various babies and also Takeshi.  My Two Cents: For some reason Simonson devotes three whole pages to some random couple whose baby is one of the abductees. I guess it helps to put a face on the human drama of baby-napping. Or maybe just to fill some space? The sequence in which the kids mess around with vending machines is pretty long too. It seems they needed some padding to justify four issues for this series.  Simonson does have one inspired pun in this issue, one which will drive the plot from this point onward: Takeshi overcomes his dyslexia by building a computer with a spell-checking feature in it. This would have been pretty new tech in the 1980s. The demons hear of his accomplishment and think that he’s talking about a computer that can check whether magic spells work correctly. Surprisingly enough, their misunderstanding turns out to be correct, as we shall see. 
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Post by chaykinstevens on Apr 1, 2019 15:53:33 GMT -5
A brief EC Comics homage appears to fit the story’s creepy theme, and N’astirh has enveloping wings in the spirit of Disney’s version of Chernobog from A Night on Bald Mountain. One of the premises of this story is that every human has “a demon within” just waiting to be freed. And check out the snarky Frederick Wertham gravestone, acknowledging that this material never would have passed Comics Code muster in the 1950s. I bet the guy’s T-shirt is a joke too, but I can’t make out what it says… “Mount something.” I think the t-shirt says "What, me worry?", a phrase associated with Mad magazine's Alfred E Neuman. The guy wearing the shirt looks like EC's publisher/editor, William M Gaines.  |
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Post by rberman on Apr 2, 2019 3:41:38 GMT -5
X-Terminators #3 “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” (December 1988) Creative Team: Written by Louise Simonson. Penciled by Jon Bogdanove. Inked by Al Milgrom. The Story: Two hapless policemen are hauled before N’astirh and stripped away to their demonic core. N’astirh threatens to harm Artie and Leech unless Takeshi builds him a spell-checking computer to check his magic spells. The demons are obliged to go shopping for diapers and yummy foods to keep their kidnapped babies in good health. Some of the babies appear to be more like three or four years old.  The heroes go to the main NYC library to research pictures of graveyards to find the one hosting the demons. (It’s in Queens.) The library comes to life and attacks them, in a scene out of Ghostbusters. In case you miss that allusion, the kids comment that this is just like a scene out of Ghostbusters.  There’s a lot of running around in the New York subway, then climbing out of the subway, then fighting some cartoonish bikers. Every encounter is just a couple of pages and is pretty low-intensity.  They finally arrive at the graveyard, where they lose a fight to the demon horde and are knocked unconscious. Nice try, kids! Finally N’astirh casts his spell (checked for accuracy by Takeshi’s computer) and opens a portal from Limbo to Times Square.  My Two Cents: As before, it feels like a romp even when demons are doing terrible things. The amusing point in this issue is that Times Square is “the most central source of negative energy in Manhattan.” I guess this was before Mayor Koch cleaned up all the dirty movies. Check out that picture of the line of motorcycles up there, and the surrounding buildings. That’s just a colorized stock photo, right? Not even an attempt at drawing it.
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Post by rberman on Apr 3, 2019 17:55:57 GMT -5
New Mutants #71 “Limbo” (January 1989) Creative Team: Written by Louise Simonson. Penciled by Bret Blevins. Inked by Al Williamson. The Story: The New Mutants have just arrived in Limbo and are immediately beset by S’ym and his demonic servants. Illyana’s armor and S’ym’s transmode infection make each impervious to the other’s attacks, but S’ym does take Illyana’s soulsword away from her. Illyana is unable to return herself and her friends to Earth, but she does teleport them to Belasco’s empty tower where she grew up. This provides her with an opportunity to give pages of exposition recapping the Magik: Storm and Illyana limited series. Her friends are horrified at the details of her demonic activities.  Teleporting elsewhere to avoid more demons, the tricky nature of Limbo allows them to see the abuse that Illyana as a child suffered at S’ym’s hands. This makes them more sympathetic to the demon she has become.   In an interlude back on Earth, the Inner Circle of the Hellfire Club (Shaw, Magneto, Selene, and Emma Frost) find the Empire State building coming alive under their feet and attacking a crowd of sightseers. An elevator full of passengers vomits out blood and skeletons in a scene borrowed from The Shining.   Illyana is able to teleport to Earth finally. She meets N’astirh, who offers her enough power to reclaim her soulsword from S’ym. She returns to Limbo and does this very thing but in the process is corrupted further, changing from silver armor into full-on Darkchilde. Worse, N’astirh is able to keep her stepping disc portal open, allowing his army to pour through upon Manhattan.  My Two Cents: The tone in the New Mutants issues of the Inferno event is quite a bit darker than in the X-Terminators issues, even though they were all written by Louise Simonson. Not only are demons taking over Manhattan; not only is Illyana expressing her demonic side fully; Simonson is also telling a story about abusive relationships, suggesting that the abuse which Illyana endured as a child has made her vulnerable to someone who claims he loves her. You’d think she wouldn’t fall for that line from a demon. But then again, you’d think people who have a string of abusive relationships in real life would stop falling for it at some point, but the pattern often sadly repeats.  Gossamyr and Magik wear unadorned white jump suits that make them look more or less nude. Dani Moonstar will get similar treatment upcoming, spending several issues as a naked Valkyrie crone. 
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Post by rberman on Apr 4, 2019 21:23:34 GMT -5
X-Terminators #4 “Finale!” (January 1989) Creative Team: Written by Louise Simonson. Penciled by Jon Bogdanove. Inked by Al Milgrom. The Story: Illyana is horrified that demons are pouring through the portal she opened between Earth and Limbo. Duh! Takeshi is prevented from destroying his spell-checking computer, but he does get Artie and Leech to pull the power plug for a few minutes, stemming the flow of demons temporarily.  The X-Terminators fall back through the portal to Earth, so Takeshi makes flying craft for them so that they can pluck the babies out of the giant sky-pentagram which powers the portal. The New Mutants arrive through the portal, flying in Warlock, and begin to do more of the same.  S’ym and N’astirh, overconfident of demonic victory, prematurely begin battling each other for dominance. Takeshi finally succeeds in exploding his computer, closing the portal to Limbo. N’astirh vanishes. This is fine with S’ym, who plans to conquer Earth with the forces he already has here. The X-Terminators and New Mutants gather around wounded Takeshi, rejoicing in the rescue of the mutant babies.  My Two Cents: Takeshi “Wiz Kid” Matsuya gets to be the hero of the day, closing out this mini-series, but he did not catch on as a continuing character. He disappears from the New Mutants book pretty quickly at this point. He’s only had about a dozen more appearances in the last thirty years in titles like Young Avengers and Avengers Academy.
Isn’t this just the cutest picture of S’ym you ever saw? 
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Post by rberman on Apr 5, 2019 14:47:50 GMT -5
New Mutants #72 “Demon Reign” (February 1989) Creative Team: Written by Louise Simonson. Penciled by Bret Blevins. Inked by Al Williamson. The Story: Much of this issue recaps X-Terminators #4 from the perspective of the New Mutants. S’ym jumps from Limbo to Earth and duels N’astirh. The New Mutants help rescue the babies from the pentagram that powers the portal to Limbo.  Illyana spends much of this issue getting tossed around by demons which have possessed different objects in the stores of Manhattan. She’s unwilling to fight back, fearful that killing anything will cement her transformation to Darkchilde. Finally she attacks a chair and undergoes further transformation; N’astirh appears to claim her as his bride.  Illyana regains enough composure to re-manifest her hero armor and drive N’astirh away, but S’ym is waiting in the wings… 
My Two Cents: For readers of X-Terminators, half of this issue is old material. The other half is an Illyana solo story that gives Bret Blevins a chance to go nuts with the demonic transformation of Manhattan. 
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Post by rberman on Apr 6, 2019 7:18:26 GMT -5
New Mutants #73 “The Gift” (March 1989) Creative Team: Written by Louise Simonson. Penciled by Bret Blevins. Inked by Al Williamson and Mike Manley. The Story: Illyana and S’ym have another inconclusive battle.  N’astirh offers an alliance to the Hellfire Club, which is fitting. The New Mutants overhear part of this discussion thanks to Rahne’s keen ears. They assume that the offer is accepted, which causes their erstwhile teacher Magneto to sink even lower in their esteem. Simonson is setting up a rift between the New Mutants and Magneto so that the New Mutants can hang out more with X-Factor, whose book she is also writing, rather than X-Men, which Claremont is still writing.  Colossus arrives, is briefly subdued by S’ym’s demons, but then rejoins the fight. He’s horrified to see his sister as Darkchilde. Illyana flees to Limbo, taking the New Mutants with her, and engages in a prolonged and fretful monologue about how it would be best if she just embraced her demonic destiny to rule Limbo; at least she could ensure that its demons never attack Earth. If she doesn’t take the job, someone worse will, probably S’ym or N’astirh.  Moonstar, Gossamyr, Rusty, and Skids defend a church containing the mutant babies from demonic attack. Moonstar has one of her Valkyrie visions of death; unusually, it causes her to collapse. This is the beginning of a big Asgard-centric story arc which comes next in this series.  Rahne uses one of Limbo’s permanent stepping discs to hop around in time and space until she finds young Illyana, then brings her before the Darkchilde for a confrontation. Though angered initially, Darkchilde finds a way out of her predicament. She allows the New Mutants to take young Illyana to Earth. This rewrites history: she was never a pupil of Belasco and never became Darkchilde. Colussus tears Illyana free from the Darkchilde armor, symbolically finding the child within the demon just as N’astirh has been finding the demon lurking within various humans.  This apparently does not reverse the whole Inferno event, though. Belasco is seemingly still dead, and S’ym and N’astirh are still scheming in a demonically transformed Manhattan. N’astirh abandons his interest in the now-depowered Illyana and resolves to make Maddie Pryor and young Nathan Summers the focus of his next power play. We don’t know what the outcome of his summit with the Hellfire Club was either.  My Two Cents: This was a solid double-sized issue. Plenty of action, good character work from Rahne, the most compassionate and Christian member of the team finding a way to restore lost innocence. You would think the erasure of teen Illyana from the timeline would have effects far beyond de-aging her to a kid, but I guess whoever writes the story gets to make that determination. It is difficult to make Rahne's actions work when compared to Magik #1, in which Belasco extracts a soulstone from young Illyana almost immediately upon her separation from the X-Men, beginning the process of her corruption.  Colossus is supposed to be playing dead, along with the rest of the X-Men, during their “Australian Outback” era. But he’s the core character for interaction with Illyana, so working him in here makes sense. Kitty Pryde could have been a part of the story too; she is running around Manhattan contending with demons in the simultaneous issues of Excalibur. She’s even wielding Illyana’s armor and sword as she contends with a Captain Britain who has been turned into an S&M maniac. Can you tell the page below was written by Chris Claremont? Anyway, if Kitty met Colossus, then the X-Men’s survival would be known, and for dumb reasons that can’t be. So Kitty can’t be in this “final Illyana story.” Too bad. 
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Post by rberman on Dec 13, 2019 20:02:27 GMT -5
X-Men: Blind Science (July 2010) Creative Team: Simon Spurrier writing. Paul Davidson and Francis Portela on art. What’s It All About? Just in case you haven’t been following recent X-Men lore, as I haven’t, I’ll fill you in. This story takes place in a period when the X-Men are operating Utopia, a sovereign state off the coast of San Francisco. The X-Men family includes four science-types who are not necessarily mutants themselves: First up, the star of the show is James “Doctor Nemesis” Bradley. He’s a true rarity for modern Marvel, a Golden Age character resurrected from the pulps. Here he is in Lightning Comics #6 (Ace Magazines, 1941).  Roy Thomas incorporated him as a Nazi villain in The Invaders Volume 2 (1993) along with the Golden Age likes of Spider Queen and the Human Meteor and gave him a new origin as one of the android Human Torch’s creators. He’s killed by another android creation, Volton.  But Matt Fraction didn’t want him dead. So he shows up in X-Men #504 (2009), once again a good guy, hunting Nazis in South America. Beast recruits him to join the X-Men in Utopia and form a science squad which has mainly played a supporting techie role but occasionally steps to the fore, as in this one-shot. Playing straight woman to Doctor Nemesis, Dr. Kavita Rao is one of the few parts of Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men run to get picked up by others. Under Whedon's pen, Rao was a dowdy but spunky matron geneticist who developed a mutant cure known as “Hope.”  She’s now portrayed as younger and svelte. Here she is with Madison Jeffries (see below, and looking more suave himself) and Doctor Nemesis.  Danger was another Whedon notion: The Shi’ar technology which turned the Danger Room into a holodeck was actually sentient. It eventually (i.e. during Whedon’s run) went berserk and tried to kill the X-Men but has since chilled out and, in a feminine android form, now helps the team.  Madison Jeffries debuted in John Byrne’s Alpha Flight #1 briefly but wasn’t properly introduced until #16, when he was shown to be a roughneck with technokinesis.  The Story: Nemesis, Rao, and Jeffries get sucked into the future by a future version of Hank McCoy, the last surviving mutant. Then follows lots of exposition about what happened in the past, i.e. the present-day of other X-Men comic books. The X-Men defeated their latest threat, Bastion the super-Sentinel. But Hope Summers (a young mutant raised in the future by Cable… and it’s not even a Claremont story!) lost control of her powers. All mutants found their powers slowly growing and their minds slowly melding into one super-organism known as “Hub.” McCoy took the mutant cure to avoid this fate, and he needs Dr. Rao to synthesize more to defeat Hub. She does so…  … but then, plot twist! The whole trip to the future was faked human allies of Bastion, a future Sentinel who has come back to deestroy the X-Men. They just wanted Dr. Rao to cook up some more mutant-cure serum to use against the X-Men.  Thankfully, Rao had already figured this out, and her “cure” is actually a chemical bomb that immolates the villain base, which is on an oil rig near Utopia. The three heroes end up floating safely in the ocean.  My Two Cents: Spurrier is playing with future timeline concepts borrowed from Chris Claremont’s run (“Days of Future Past” in which a few surviving mutants endure a hellish dystopia) and the Age of Apocalypse (in which a future world ruled by mutants is shown to be just as bad), tossed in a salad with a bit of Grant Morrison’s philosophizing about how all humans are just cells in a giant trans-dimensional super-being. The plot twist is a good surprise for readers who have read enough of these X-Men time travel stories (including Morrison’s “Here Comes Tomorrow”) to know that pretty much any future scenario is plausible. Spurrier is just feeling his way around the pompous Doctor Nemesis at this point. His personality is not far from the testy genius that Braniac-5 had become in the Threeboot era. This story is bogged down by continuity, but it gives a hint of better things to come.  
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Post by rberman on Dec 14, 2019 17:43:11 GMT -5
X-Club #1-5 “We Do Science!” (February 2012)Creative Team: Simon Spurrier writing. Paul Davidson pencils and inks.      Issue #1: in 1945, The Invaders sink the Nazi freighter Anfang. Something about it makes the android Human Torch feel woozy, but he gets the job done. Torch’s experience is said to be “Intercession #1.”  Off the coast of modern-day Brazil, a team of X-Men attends a StratoCorp press conference. Cyclops makes an awkward, defensive speech. Magneto lifts the satellite portion of the Stringstar space elevator from the ocean into Earth orbit, while Danger tends the machines fabricating an umbilical back down to Earth.  Atlanteans protest this environmental and spiritual intrusion on their… Turf? Surf? One of the Atlanteans mutates into a monster, then explodes. Other mutated sea creatures begin leaping from the waves, thanks to exposure to a Terrigen compound seeping from somewhere beneath the surface of the ocean.  Issue #2: In a Starro spoof, a mutated starfish adheres to Doctor Nemesis’ scalp and forces his every stray thought to be uttered aloud. Nemesis dons a diving suit and descends into the ocean, where he contends with a reality-warping anomaly.  On the ocean floor, he finds the wreck of the Nazi freighter Anfang, as well as the wreck of a StratoCorp submersible which tried to salvage the freighter but ended up spilling its contents, which explains the Terrigen effect on the local animal life.  Danger returns to the X-Men base of Utopia, possessed by some energy force she picked up in Brazil.  She has a flashback to Jocasta during an Avengers battle. This is “Intercession #2.”  Madison Jeffries is on board the orbital end of the Space Elevator. Holograph projectors on board give him a flashback to a battle at The Vault between Hellcat, Moondragon, and Awesome Andy, which is said to be “Intercession #3.”  Issue #3: Treacherous StratoCorp employees cut Doctor Nemesis’ umbilical, hoping his discovery will die with him deep beneath the ocean. Does that stop him? Hope; he improbably rides a mutated hammerhead shark back to the surface, cackling dialogue lifted from “The Wizard of Oz” and “What’s Opera, Doc?” as he homages the sunrise napalm scene from "Apocalypse Now."  “Incercession #4” is flashback to She-Hulk rending The Vision in two.  Illyana teleports Dr. Rao and a Terrigen-infected Atlantean woman to Utopia, where they make a surprising discovery: Danger is going to have a baby.  Fighting his way through the StratoCorp base, Dr. Nemesis finds out that the secret mastermind is a Nazi scientist named Dr. Frederick Heiden, code named Schrägesturm, which apparently means “slanted storm.”  Issue #4 Back on the satellite, the AI alternately seduces and attacks Madison Jeffries. He’s forced to cobble together a spacesuit and go EVA, but soon he’s falling into the Earth’s atmosphere. Danger flies up to rescues him and declares her love, sort of.   The X-Men at Utopia are given a mental glimpse of “Intercession #5,” which involves Machine Man. Is this scene of Machine Man getting beer from his fridge a reference to a specific issue?  Schrägesturm gives exposition about his own trapped-between-dimensions status due to a strange “Datagod” interdimensional life form which has now impregnated Danger, having previously failed to join with five other android life forms (Intercessions #1-5). Schrägesturm intends to weaponize the Space Elevator, somehow breaching dimensional barriers. Issue #5: Big finish time! The X-Men attack the StratoCorp base. The Atlantean woman is going all Tetsuo due to her previous Terrigen exposure.  Madison Jeffries prevails upon the imprisoned Datagod to help Danger “give birth” safely. Doctor Rao injects Doctor Nemesis with Terrigen, giving him the power to confront Schrägesturm on his own interdimensional turf before he rewrites human history. With the aid of the Datagod, Doctor Nemesis prevails. Doctor Rao has also figured out how to cure Terrigen before it kills Nemesis, so that’s good for him, but too late for the Atlantean victims. Will her Terrigen cure ever be seen again? Survey says, "Nope."   Danger announces that her child, dubbed Stringstar, has claimed the Space Elevator as a sovereign nation. Yay! The End.  My Two Cents: This is a fun adventure story, mostly an opportunity for Doctor Nemesis to do his vainglorious thing, with the Starro on his head showing us that the thoughts he censors are even worse than the outrageous things he says. The basic plot is “X-Men vs Inhumans.” Not the Inhuman royal family, but their Terrigen trope. The subtext here is that the X-Men were indeed under attack from the Inhumans in real life, as Marvel instructed its creative team to play up the Avengers and Inhumans as prep for cinematic glory, whereas X-Men movie rights resided with Fox. The X-Men (including X-Club) survive this story, but the birth and emancipation of Stringstar are ultimately a triumph for the Inhumans. The Jocasta scene comes from Avengers #182 (1979).  With a bit of effort, I tracked Intervention #3’s “Hellcat and Moondragon vs Awesome Android” scene to Avengers Spotlight #27 (1989).  That makes me think that the Invaders scene is also a flashback, but my knowledge of Marvel lore failed me to discover it. This is where editorial footnotes would have been very handy!
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