I'm not familiar with it. Do the kids fit it better than Cockrum's Starjammers? Or maybe both?

Longshot #5 “Deadly Lies” (January 1986)



Creative Team: Ann Nocenti writing. Art Adams penciling. Whilce Portacio and Scott Williams inking.

Theme: realism vs idealism

The Story: Longshot protects the Star Slammer kids from Pup, but Pup makes him doubt the righteousness of his cause. When he loses his “purity of motive” (to quote T.S. Eliot, as Longshot does), his luck turns against him, and he gets his tail kicked by Pup. This demoralizes the kids who were idolizing him moments before.





Quark, the Ram-headed beast soldier seen in two previous issues, comes to Longshot’s defense; this is the first definitive action we’ve seen from him, after numerous previous scenes of lurking in the shadows. He stayed behind on purpose when the other beasts returned to their homeworld. The kids’ loyalty shifts to this new champion. Quark has the same glowing eye ability as Longshot, marking him as a member of the secret society which can draw upon the power of luck.




Longshot means that he is the bad guy. While Quark and Pup spar, Longshot wanders away, dejected. He has a four page flashback to a meeting with his creator Arize, a hermit genetic designer. Arize reveals himself as a Prometheus figure who made all the sentient beings on his world, but the creatures descended from spineless spiders seized power and forced Arize to make a slave class, Longshot and his people.



This memory awakens in Longshot a desire to return home and help free his people from the Spineless Ones. He returns to Ricochet Rita’s home, where Dr. Strange has arrived to investigate the mystical disturbance caused there by Mojo’s presence last issue, when he kidnapped Rita. Longshot wants to rescue Rita immediately, but Dr. Strange convinces him that they must deal with Pup first. After several pages of fighting, Pup is dead, filled to bursting with magic by Dr. Strange and then popped by Longshot’s knife.



Mojo tortures Ricochet Rita for information about Longshot, but she’s not inclined to talk and doesn’t know anything anyway. Mojo and Spiral take Rita to a pirate ship floating through some inter-dimensional void, lash her to its prow, and argue amongst themselves as she goes insane from seeing Things No Mortal Should See all around her.




My Two Cents: Longshot is distressed to learn from Pup that although he looks human, he’s not from this dimension. Pup also claims that Longshot has a wife and kids back home, and that only Pup can help him regain the memories he needs to be with them again. Burdened by this information, Longshot longs for amnesia again. This is the first time we’ve really seen him sad and defeatist, but it’s a credible scenario to bring about the “hero’s darkest hour” which is supposed to arrive at the 75% mark of a traditionally structured story, and here we are, right around 75%.

Pup comments at one point that he and Longshot are equal and opposite, and their journeys in this issue reflect that, since both are brought low by the thing they were seeking – knowledge in the case of Longshot, and absorbed magic in the case of Pup. Longshot is snapped out of his funk by the thought of saving his people from the Spineless Ones, rejecting the “Deadly Lies” of Pup that encouraged him to think of his own interests first. (“Deadly Lies” is the issue’s title.)



Even Dr. Strange notices that Longshot has a “Messiah Complex.” Quark calls him “miraculous.” The Christ-figure runs strong in this one!



Spark tells that the “luck superpower” originates in some sort of communion with a higher being who intervenes supernaturally to change reality, making the improbable happen. Dr. Strange raises the possibility that this is a zero-sum game, so that Longshot’s good luck is balances elsewhere in the universe by someone experiencing bad luck. (Maybe Jinx from issue #3?) Or perhaps it’s just accumulating a debit which will have to be paid eventually by Longshot himself experiencing a string of bad luck. Why is Dr. Strange’s eye glowing in the bottom panel? That is a little confusing in a book where that glint has a particular meaning, especially when that meaning is under discussion. It’s the wrong eye, though.



Spiral is surprisingly seditious in her speech, but Mojo takes it all in stride. He’s so cocky that he can’t imagine any rebellion actually succeeding against himself.



Mojo has the Nietzschean Will to Power that selfless Longshot lacks, so that his values (in this case, death) automatically become reality around him, as Dr. Strange discusses here:



Nocenti engages in a bit of sexual politics regarding the contents of Rita’s home. Dr. Strange automatically equates Rita’s interest in sports and fitness as masculine, while (in an image from issue #4) Rita herself laments how her interests drive a wedge in her relationships that they wouldn’t if she were a man. It’s not hard to hear the voice of Ann Nocenti leaking through here, working as she does in the male-dominated world of comic book writing and editing.



Easter Eggs and Eye Candy: A fairy that guides Longshot to Arize. This panel was only ¼ of a page in width and has amazing detail for the size. This whole series could use not only a recoloring job but an oversized release to let these details be seen.



Arize’s junkyard includes a giant Bozo the Clown head.



More cool little critters from Arize’s junkyard. The little spiders are the evolutionary progenitors of Mojo and the other Spineless Ones.



Spiral straps Rita to the mast, which already had DC hero Blue Devil riding on it.



Longshot dumps out the souvenirs he’s been collecting throughout his adventures. Arthur Adams lovingly renders the whole lot: The baby doll from issue #1, an Acroyear figure (complete with sword and shield), baseball, tennis ball, a small X-Wing (must be one of the die cast models), a couple dozen polyhedral dice, A used tube of AquaFresh toothpaste,a cassette tape of the 1983 Eurythmics album Touch, Hershey’s Kisses, golf ball, Chap Stick, a Donald Duck toy, a tape dispenser, hammer, razor, Xacto knife, and yes, a Gumby figure.

If you needed more evidence of Art Adams’ appreciation for Michael Golden’s work on Micronauts, here’s a pin-up of Longshot as Space Glider:



This is a gorgeous pillar of faces from the mystic realm into which Dr. Strange is staring.

Longshot #6 “A Snake Coils…” (February 1986)




Creative Team: Ann Nocenti writing. Art Adams penciling. Whilce Portacio and Scott Williams inking.

Theme: optimism and pessimism

The Story: Double sized finale! Having failed to learn Longshot’s whereabouts from Richochet Rita, Mojo decides to make himself a target that can’t be ignored. He arrives in a small town on Sunday morning and brainwashes a churchgoing crowd to remodel their facility into a Mojo shrine. (6 pages)



Longshot, Quark, and Dr. Strange return to Rita’s house after killing Pup and find her there, catatonic from her exposure to the inter-dimensional void. Dr. Strange promises to try to heal Rita. (7 pages)



Longshot and Quark run and run and run and run from Rita’s house to Mojo’s new shrine, talk talk talking all the way. (4 pages)

Then comes a two page fight with Mojo and Spiral, who realize that Mojo’s magic is too weak so far from his shrine, so they teleport back there. Longshot phones Rita at Dr. Strange’s home, and the sound of his voice awakens her. (3 pages)





Longshot and Quark set out to destroy Mojo’s “Tower of Babble,” an “antenna to the gods” through which Mojo is transmitting signals to hypnotize everyone on Earth into his thralls. Our heroes make a crate full of Molotov cocktails, and Longshot recalls another conversation with Arize, the creator of his race, about how he bred Longshot’s species to resist subjugation. And also to ride robotic horses. (4 pages)



Mojo derives power from his worshipers, but right now he’s spent his power upgrading his infrastructure and is vulnerable until it pays dividends through increased attendance at his shrine. He has some amusingly insane banter with Spiral and notices Longshot hang-gliding in to drop his homemade incendiaries atop the shrine. (4 pages)



Quark and Longshot battle Mojo and Spiral, with Dr. Strange and a restored Rita flying in (Rita has her jetpack again) to assist. Their combined efforts drive Mojo and Spiral back through a portal to their own dimension.



Quark, Rita, and Longshot go in hot pursuit, determined to free Longshot’s people and end the menace of Mojo. (11 pages) Longshot intends to lead his people to the promised land of Earth.



My Two Cents: The ending of this issue shows how this series was intended as an origin tale, setting up Longshot and his two friends for a series of adventures back in what would soon be known as the Mojoverse. The hoped-for sequel series never arrived, and Nocenti would fold Longshot into the X-Men starting with X-Men Annual #10 (Jan 1987). Later appearances of Mojo would de-emphasize the religious and mystical aspects, casting him as a media baron who will do anything to keep the numbers high, satirizing Marvel Comics’ obsession with numbers at the expense of quality, and the fan base’s willingness to be distracted by shiny things. Literally; the foil and holographic covers would soon be appearing.

Longshot and Rita and Quark are OK as heroes, but Spiral and Mojo totally steal the show with their memorable character designs and screwball antagonistic banter. If they were the heroes, we’d be rooting for them to get married. But they’re the villains, and I don’t know that I’m supposed to be thinking that the series should continue so I can see more of them instead of more of the heroes.





Spiral vehemently denies that she once had a thing for Longshot, thereby confirming that she once had a thing for Longshot. Not shocking; every character in the series comments on how attractive he is.



This is the “getting to know Quark” issue. He has 3x more dialogue here than in the previous five issues together. Longshot and Quark both have the luck power that comes from “purity of motive,” but Longshot is an inveterate optimist, whereas Quark is a nonstop stream of pessimism. “Let‘s just get this over with and die,” he proposes as they race to fight Mojo. Later when discussing his luck powers, he says, “Maybe I’ll get lucky and die trying.” Awfully downbeat for a guy who shares Longshot’s luck power, and has the ability to become incorporeal besides! Too bad they couldn’t work Jinx back into the story, maybe attending church with his family and doing some small, redemptive thing to influence the course of the super-battle.



Quark recalls the time that Longshot was “betrayed by a comrade” and “almost crucified” for being a hero. Christ-symbolism! Later Quark comments that Longshot was “made in man’s image,” which is incarnational language. The Christ-figure symbolism, after all the set-up, never got the big payoff. That is, there would have been a moment in which Longshot wins by sacrificing himself, by surrendering somehow, and ends up on top. Maybe embracing a string of catastrophically bad luck so that one of his comrades could do something incredibly improbable to save the world. Although Rita is the one who gets literally crucified on the prow of Mojo’s ship, she’s more a helpless damsel kidnapped by monsters at that point, regaining her combat mojo just in time for the big battle against big Mojo.



Quark also says that “Mojo rules our dimension – one guy ruling millions!” This is at odds with Major Domo’s previous report that Mojo only owned 43% of the new batch of slaves. Evidently Mojo has a plurality but also substantial competition from his own kind.

Ann Nocenti integrates Dr. Strange far more into these final two issues than she did She-Hulk and Spider-Man into #4. He functions as sage and powerhouse, delivering wise exposition and providing the ultimate solution to the defeat of both Pup and Mojo. Many fantasy mythoi involve the idea of gods whose power waxes and wanes according to the number and fervency of their adherents. Kurt Busiek’s heroine Winged Victory works the same way. Mojo does as well, with an additional overlay of TV broadcasting metaphors; he’s like a cable channel competing for ratings.

As I mentioned, this series has a lot of monochrome panels. I contacted Christie Scheele via internet, and she was kind enough to tell me that the extensive use of monochrome in Longshot was an artistic choice on her part, not an exigency forced upon her by deadlines. She said that she prefers the use of color to indicate mood rather than the literal color of the scene being depicted. So now we know. Below is one of her own pastels to show how her minimalism looks as part of her own fine art career. Thanks for responding, Christie!



Cover was originally drawn: September 13, 1985.

Easter Eggs and Eye Candy: The crowd wending their way to church includes Clark Kent (sans glasses but quite bulky under his suit), Lois Lane, and their son Jimmy Olsen.



Olive Oyl is one of the churchgoers as well, matching with Popeye who appeared back in issue #2 on the film set.



Arthur Adams does draw a fine Dr. Strange, but I can’t make heads or tails of this panel. Longshot and Quark are far in the foreground yet are tiny compared to Dr. Strange.

X-Men/Alpha Flight #2 “The Gift, part 2” (January 1986)



Creative Team: Chris Claremont writing. Paul Smith penciling. Bob Wiacek inking.

Theme: The needs of the few

The Story: Kitty and Talisman console Rachel, who was upset over alternate timeline drama last issue. They discover (after some filler involving a subterranean Viking village and a cave-in) that Talisman has the power to cancel out the column of energy at the center of the fortress, which means its power is magic-based rather than technological.



Wolverine returns from his unsuccessful tracking mission to find Snowbird, and his memory appears to have been erased by the two mutant-hating hunters who accompanied him. Wolverine tries again without them and is obliged to defend Snowbird against them.



The transformation of the airplane passengers into ubermenschen has come at a cost of creative spark, as Talisman discovers when thumbing through the architect’s sketchbook. Earth magic is fading as well, which is why Shaman and Snowbird are deathly ill.



This leads to an argument and then a battle as to whether the fire-fountain should be destroyed before it can turn the Earth into a magic-free paradise. When confronted with evidence that the fire-fountain will end all human creativity, the transformed humans want to reject their new powers. Loki shows up just in time for them to tell him so, and he’s quite indignant at their ingratitude.



For the last act of the story, Loki spitefully summons a horde of snow giants to pound all the heroes into submission. The heroes win, but Sam the Archivist is fatally wounded. Madelyn, faced with the loss of the healing powers she has rejected, agrees to accept them back and aid Loki’s cause if she’s allowed to heal Sam.



Not so fast, say We Who Live Above in Shadow, arriving late on the scene. Loki was supposed to get humanity to freely accept his gift, not twist their arm with threats to their loved ones. The elder gods deny whatever boon they were going to grant Loki and command him to leave the heroes alone “in this sphere or any other.” The reset button is hit on all the good and bad effects of this series, and everybody goes home.



My Two Cents: There’s a lot going on here, and not just because it’s a double-sized issue. Claremont has several moral issues in play, with heroes able to articulate both sides of the dilemma. Scott and Madelyn figure heavily in this story as beneficiaries of the fire-fountain transformation. This gives them a stake in the outcome and a genuine moral issue with which to wrestle. One of the best things about this story: No mind control plot device was needed to generate conflict between heroes.

One could parse the moral of this story two ways. One is a humanistic message that a page with both good and bad (i.e. an imperfect human life) is better than a blank page (a life that never happened), and the attempt to remove suffering from the human equation ends up making us less than human; suffering is part of what forces us to improve rather than ossify. This moral message undergirds numerous episodes of Star Trek, including the execrable fifth movie, “The Final Frontier.”

Another potential read on this story is that when superior forces try to “help you be better,” their meddling actually makes things worse, and the creative flow of the artisans turns to a trickle of derivative and amateur juvenilia, copying the works of others. This calls to mind the Marvel Bullpen of the mid 80s, when strongly opinionated writers like Chris Claremont and John Byrne took umbrage at the manner in which Jim Shooter imposed order on their sometimes chaotic work environment. In this story, Claremont makes Loki (i.e. Shooter) accountable to management higher upstairs, getting his comeuppance for interfering with creative types who would have been better left alone. Don’t tinker with the goose that is laying golden eggs!



At one point Heather expresses her belief that human conflict is intrinsically external, the result of scarcity bringing out the worst in people. So if everybody was super, problem solved! But that’s not so, and of all people Chris Claremont, the author of Dark Phoenix, should know that powers (i.e. resources) can cause as many problems as they cure, getting people accustomed to living at a higher standard and desirous of a still higher one. Furthermore, Northstar shows that some people will just never be content, no matter their situation. As singer David Wilcox says, “There’s a break in the cup that holds love inside us all.” However, Claremont opts for a more optimistic moral at the end of his own tale, the hope that humanity can indeed create “paradise on Earth.”





There’s more! Claremont also plays the “needs of the many/few” card. Let’s say that the magic fire-fountain really can make the world into a utopia, at the cost of killing animistic-themed characters like Shaman and Snowbird. Is it worth it? Peter Rasputin gets a rare chance to articulate a Soviet collectivist mentality totally in keeping with his background, while Logan the pragmatist is surprisingly the one to say, “No way. Not a single innocent may die to make things better.” (Kitty taking Logan's side is less surprising; she should have been the one to say what Logan said. This is one of the few worldview arguments I can recall between Kitty and Peter ever.)



But in the real world, politicians do make decisions knowing that some will be harmed for the good of all. Land is seized by eminent domain to build roads or reservoirs or airports. Policies cause some jobs or locations to be favored and others to atrophy. We need leaders with foresight, wisdom, and moral fiber to do what must be done and then mitigate the damage caused to the few. But what if we sacrifice the lives of others too flippantly? I’m reminded of Stephen Moffat’s 2010 Doctor Who episode “The Beast Below,” which allegorized Britain as a spaceship riding on the back of a giant creature whose torture makes possible a high standard of living, and whose existence the population repeatedly chooses to forget, even when reminded.

Madelyn on the other hand makes a disturbing if realistic choice. Faced with the death of one person she knows personally or the loss of creativity from the whole human race, she chooses to save the one person to the clear detriment of the whole. Humans are really like this: We are wired to be driven by anecdote, by personal experience, even when the statistical, rational choice would lead elsewhere.  (Notice how Kitty denigrates "the rational transaction" in the panels above.) This why some people avoid vaccines when the science is so clearly pro-vaccine. It doesn’t matter. They are obliged to build a worldview which is impervious to the data, in order to preserve their pre-constructed narrative of health.



Of all the arguments against accepting Loki’s plan, nobody stops to say, “Who are we to decide these things for the entire Earth anyway, Loki? Put the brakes on this sucker and take a worldwide plebiscite.” Throughout all of this high moral drama, Xavier is surprisingly silent, making little difference in the story either in his mentor role or with his overpowered telepathy. They should have found a reason to keep him home rather than have him present and oddly inactive.

The transformed humans all have regular names as well as codenames (Anodyne, Cornucopia, etc.), but there are just so many of them, and their names are so infrequently used, that it’s not worth the effort to remember them. They are collectively known as “Berzerkers,” though I can’t recall exactly where in the story that name is used, if at all, and it doesn’t really fit their thoughtful utopian aspirations. What kind of berserkers have a librarian, a medic, and a chef among their number? In fact, the only time I recall the word “berserker” being used is when Kitty and Logan discuss whether his rages are a vital part of his usefulness to the team. (Their discussion covers events in the Kitty and Wolverine mini-series which I think I'm going to have to write about soon after all.)



Rogue wonders at one point whether she can absorb the power of a Norse God, though Claremont has already written her doing that very thing in Avengers Annual #10:





Rachel shows sensitivity to Scott, choosing not to upset his marriage by introducing herself as the daughter of Jean Grey from an alternate future. This sensitivity will proved short-lived; in the sequel to this story (X-Men Annual #9), Rachel wears a variant on the Phoenix costume and tells Scott that she doesn’t care what he thinks, and he quit the X-Men anyway so his opinion doesn’t matter. Not cool!

Talisman takes a moment to editorialize about impractical superhero costumes:

Nightcrawler #1 “How Much Is That Boggie in the Window?” (November 1985)



Theme: Kurt Wagner in “The Gods of Mars”



The Story: Kitty Pryde somehow manages to use the Danger Room’s holographic abilities to generate a working replica of the Well at the Center of Time. It sucks Nightcrawler through, dumping him in the clutches of a Cthulhu-faced floating gasbag creature. He escapes to an airborne pirate ship and is accepted as one of the crew but then is horrified a few days later when the pirates begin practicing actual piracy against another ship. He foils the pirates with the old “point the deck cannon at your own ship” trick from Return of the Jedi, then teleports to the royal barge he just rescued.



But he’s only allowed a glimpse of the princess, even when the ship reaches port. After wandering around a local bazaar, wondering why everyone keeps calling him a “Boggie,” he’s kidnapped by minions of a shark-wizard named Shagreen.



My Two Cents: Dave Cockrum recalls the origin of Nightcrawler:




The Nightcrawler mini-series serves as a sequel to two previous Dave Cockrum works, one being Kitty’s Fairy Tale. The other one is Bizarre Adventures #27, which was a non-Comics Code, prestige B&W publication on its last legs in 1981. It contained a story written by Bob Layton and Mary Jo Duffy about Nightcrawler and the Vanisher getting sucked into another dimension and living it up with some sexy warrior babes.



This issue mixes a dollop of that tale with a healthy dose of “The Gods of Mars,” the second book in Edgar Rice Borough’s Barsoom series, in which the hero John Carter gets mixed up with some sky pirates looking to capture a princess’ vessel.



How does Dave Cockrum fare as a plotter and scripter? I must say it’s all very silly, more Silver Age Batman than character-driven Bronze Age Claremont/ Byrne/ Miller/ Moore/ Levitz/ Wolfman. The Danger Room plot device is convenient but unlikely; it would have been better to show Nightcrawler falling into a dimensional portal while helping Dr. Strange or something. Ooh! Or send him on this adventure at the end of the Kulan Gath story in X-Men 190-91, when Dr. Strange and Illyana were resetting reality anyway.



But OK, it’s Bowdlerized fun, suitable for me to read to my six year old son, which indeed I am doing this very week. Cockrum left X-Men to work on covers when the grind of a monthly book became too much. But he missed his favorite X-Man, and Jim Shooter in 1984-6 was clearly inclined to green-light any X-Man spinoff series that presented itself, so a harmless Barsoomian romp probably seemed like a nice change of pace compared to the Byzantine story about Nimrod and Rachel that Claremont was spinning in the main X-Man book.



Lockheed is called a “frumious Bandersnitch” who is too small to be a true “Bandersnatch.” This name comes from Lewis Carroll’s poem “The Jabberwocky,” which is a linguistic experiment full of nonsense words whose meaning must be inferred from context and from their onomatopoetic effect:


Cockrum gets away with a pin-up on the wall behind a pirate poker game.



Just in case anyone here doesn’t know the Patti Page song which this issue’s title lampoons: You’re welcome.

I don't think I've ever seen Paty Cockrum credited with her full name in a comic.

Xavier can teach teenagers how to use their powers, but he can't teach them how to do laundry.