Post by rberman on Aug 18, 2018 6:30:35 GMT -5
#21: “Slumber Party” (November 1984)
Theme: The basic idea behind this double-sized issue is extremely simple: The girls host a sleepover, while the boys discover a “monster pet” in the form of Warlock the alien robot-man.
The Story: The sleepover is all about character development. Running through the various kids:
• Illyana determines to draw Rahne into the party by forcibly slathering her in make-up. It’s one of those assaults that in real life would be relationally catastrophic, but in fiction, it always turns out well.
• Dani, still wheelchair bound after her recent bear mauling, has to telepathically chill Rahne out so that she doesn’t go all lupine when the other girls pounce upon her with mascara and lipstick. During an attempted séance, Dani makes an illusory friendly spirit appear for all to see.
• Rahne is suitably appalled by the revelry. After enduring her Extreme Makeover, she’s so gussied up that Sam can’t even recognize her, despite her distinctive burr haircut. In Sam’s slight defense, Sienkiewicz draws Rahne’s hair longer than McLeod or Buscema did. Later, Rahne winces her way through the fake séance. Her conscience is pricked not only because the Bible warns against dabbling in the occult, but also because she’s fought actual demons and knows that they are nothing to play with.
• Diana from town still thinks Amara is from Rome, New York. Amara is embarrassed not to know American celebrities, but her elegant clothes and Roman jewelry make her the belle of the ball.
• Lockheed has apparently decided to stay with Illyana at the X-Mansion rather than go with Kitty to Chicago. I guess a dragon would be really hard for Kitty to explain back home.
• Outside in the yard, Sam reminisces about enjoying baseball with his deceased dad. This gets Bobby morose about his dead-to-him dad, who used to take him to soccer matches.
Then in a secondary plot, a visitor from beyond crashes the party literally:
Magneto’s orbital base Asteroid M is struck by “a celestial object dropping out of warp space.” His story continues in X-Men #188, when he’s fished out of the Caribbean on earth by Lee Forrester.
Bobby and Sam are walking home from (I guess) the bus stop, having watched the New York Yankees lose a baseball game in the twenty-seventh inning. The boys are barred from the house with a “See you in the morning.” Where were they supposed to sleep? What time of year is it, anyway? The last three issues involved a snowstorm, but this issue Sam goes skinny dipping. Yet Dani just got out of the hospital; that’s the occasion for the sleepover. How long did they keep her in the hospital after she got her Morlock healing? Everybody else who gets a Morlock healing seems to be back on his feet immediately.
Sam retrieves a suspicious meteorite (he saw it making a course correction) from the lake, and Roberto carries it (suspiciously cool for just having fallen from the sky) into the mansion, where they deposit it in the lab. Wait, weren’t they supposed to stay out of the house until the party was over? I guess the girls weren’t guarding the back door.
Warlock the techno-organic creature spawns/activates out of the inert meteorite and trips the mansion’s fuse box when he attempts to recharge from a wall socket. Lockheed flaps down to investigate and gives Warlock a face-full of flames to think about. In a lengthy battle, the boys and girls team up to drive Warlock from the house.
They eventually realize that Warlock is scared and means no harm, so Sam flies off to rouse Doug Ramsey from his house in the middle of the night, so Doug can use his mutant language ability to communicate with Warlock. I’m sure the appearance of towel-clad Sam at 2am at the Ramsey residence caused absolutely no weirdness.
Rahne, trusting soul that she is, dares to touch this strange creature, showing Warlock how to adapt his arm into an AC plug with which he can safely interface with the mansion’s electric system. He recharges, and when Xavier returns to the mansion later that night, they introduce him to Warlock. Illyana also shows up at the end, popping out of a stepping disc wearing some sort of Buck Rogers space suit (not her magic armor) with a bubble helmet. As far as I know, this is the first time Xavier has ever seen Illyana display any mutant or magic abilities, yet he seems more irritated than anything. Maybe a scene in X-Men already covered this ground?
My Two Cents: So much to say about this double sized issue, which has two plots that have difficulty co-existing: “Good kids have a harmless slumber party” and “While the parents are away, the kids must take in a needy and special stranger.” (This second plot is a little-known story sometimes called E.T. and sometimes Stranger Things.) Either one is a perfectly fine story, but since responsible parents don’t leave town when they have authorized a slumber party, the two elements collide with each other. You’ll just have to ignore the cognitive dissonance inherent in the set-up.
Chris Claremont had already made good on his desire to show the kids doing typical teenage stuff like meeting other kids at the mall, attending school dances, and having a crosstown rival school. But nothing in the previous twenty issues prepared us for the idea that nine townie girls would arrive en masse at the Xavier School (and, apparently, have to walk up the driveway rather than getting dropped off at the front door) for an unsupervised evening of teen girl party tropes like pillow fights and celebrity gossip.
This is the most chaste, tamest slumber party in the annals of slumber parties, far more Happy Days than Beverly Hills 90210. Nobody slips in illegal substances to provide Our Heroes with a moral test. No prank calls. No rolling the neighbors’ lawn. Roberto and Sam don’t spy on the girls, and the girls never know that the guys were skinny dipping in the lake right outside their window. Who authorized this party with no adults around? There is no way Xavier would let nine Muggles into the mansion overnight without adult supervision.
Illyana wants to go visit Dani’s parents’ “real ranch?!! With cowboys and buffalos and stuff like that?!” This resurrects all sorts of questions about Mr. and Mrs. Lonestar. When we first met Dani, she was a loner, basically living in the woods with the wild animals, tenuously connected to her grandfather who was nominally raising her after the disappearance of her parents. But now it appears that her parents were at the pinnacle of Cheyenne society, wealthy landowners, which makes Dani something of an Indian princess. How long were they presumed dead? Were their belongings put in a trust for Dani to inherit? If so, why was she living in the woods? Who managed the enterprise in their absence? Maybe Claremont has good answers for all these questions, but we never get them.
Illyana also calls Dani “chief,” which would definitely not fly in 2018, even if Dani is wearing her best Stands-With-A-Fist finery, including a tunic, a patterned blanket, and even a feather in her hair (mostly obscured by a word balloon here).
Speaking of hair, one of the townies has a shock of dyed red hair on top and “union suit” pajamas with a back flap less buttoned than I would have expected the Comics Code to allow. (Sam flashes his butt while skinny dipping also, for what it’s worth.) Also: Check out that projection TV! That was the best that the 1980s could do for large-scale television pictures.
The teen girl chatter involves a foursome of celebrities. How dated are the references? Right on target, it seems. I asked my wife what year this picture represented, and she correctly said, "1984." That year, Tom Selleck was in the middle of an eight year run as a hunky Hawaiian detective in short shorts on Magnum, P.I., so that checks out. John Travolta’s reprise of the role of Tony Manero in Staying Alive was from 1983, though I suspect he had more appeal to women several years younger than these girls who remembered him from 1977’s Saturday Night Fever. Sting? Yup, he was riding high in his band The Police that year. Michael Jackson’s Thriller 1982 album was still a big deal in early 1984, though by the end of the year, Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA was the album with buzz. Anyway, Sienkiewicz is great with realistic faces of actual people, and he’s done lots of rock music related work over the years, including a whole comic book about Jimi Hendrix.
I am a bit confused by the body of water in which Sam swims. It’s shaped irregularly, like a lake. Yet right by the shore, it’s at least three or four feet deep, so that he can stand with his hind end covered by water but his hands on the shore. That doesn’t seem like a natural lake, more like a concrete pool.
Also, in one panel Bobby declares that he’s not going to swim. But a few panels later, he’s in his Speedo. We never see him attempt to enter the water in between, though.
Sam declares himself a sci-fi buff, a trait of which we’ve never seen the slightest hint up until now in this impoverished rural kid who had to quit high school to work in the coal mine after his daddy died. He says his favorite Robert Heinlein story is “Door into Shadow,” a reference to the story actually entitled “Door into Summer.” This could be a mistake of Sam or a mistake of Claremont, but it’s probably just the usual off-branding of recognizable properties to avoid a trademark infringement lawsuit.
Warlock’s splash page stands still as one of the great character reveals in the history of comic books. I credit Keith Silva over at ComicsBulletin.com with the observation that Bill Sienkiewicz’ art is huge on abstract geometries, especially nested but non-concentric circles, which seem to owe much to the Russian painter Wassily Kandinksy.
Sienkiewicz loves circles. Especially halos. New Mutants have more halos than a gold-encrusted Gothic triptych.
The introduction of Warlock is, I believe, also the introduction of the word “techno-organic” into Marvel Comics. Chris Claremont will use this word approximately 86,235 times over the next twenty years, often with the words “virus” or “infection” appended. The story of his origin is bizarre; Newly decanted Warlocks are immediately dumped into a death-match with experienced, stronger, adults versions of themselves. What is the point of that? I could understand such a Darwininan (not to mention Freudian) confrontation once the newbies have learned and grown strong themselves, but letting l33t toons hunt newbies seems pointless. Warlock thought so too, hence his flight to Earth. But Magus (his dad) was hot on his trail in the previous three issues. Now he’s nowhere in sight, for the moment. I’m sure he’s lost and forgotten, and we’ll never see him again. Right…
At one point, Dani passes off Rahne as her pet wolf, and Marcie the townie reacts: “Hey, like in ElfQuest! That’s rad, Dani!” Would that ElfQuest really were the cultural touchstone of teenage girls in 1984, the world would have been a better place.
Doug Ramsey is a mutant? And Sam knows it, but Doug doesn’t? This is the first hint of this in a New Mutants comic book. The last time we saw him (issue #16), he was just a friend of Kitty who was sucked into the White Queen’s trap. In fact, the last time we saw Doug, he was on an interview tour at the Massachusetts Academy. I guess he rejected the scholarship at this prestigious private boarding school so that he could keep going to Westchester Middle School or whatever? Claremont liked to say that he wrote X-Men and New Mutants in such a way that reading just one or the other was possible, but important story beats like this show that it just ain’t so. X-Men/New Mutants was more of a single biweekly publication.
I wish we had seen the off-panel interaction in which Sam tells Doug that both of them are mutants, and an alien robot-child is running amuck at the mansion. Those kinds of pivotal moments deserve reader involvement. Was this double-sized issue originally two issues that for some reason had to be combined, thus losing moments like that? I mean, look how long this commentary is. There’s plenty of material here for two or maybe three issues of an 80s comic book, and a full six issue Trade Paperback in the modern decompressed style. The issue even ends with three excellent Sienkiewicz pin-ups (Cannonball, Magik, and Sunspot), and I am just now noticing for the first time that the image of Illyana facing a demon also incongruously features a bowl full of dog food.
Meanwhile in X-Men (#187): Part One of the X-Men battle with the Dire Wraiths in Manhattan, as part of a company-wide crossover climaxing the story of ROM. Some very cosmic things were happening in the skies of Earth in this issue, so there’s no way this is simultaneous with the business-as-usual slumber party. So once again we’re left wondering where all the adults were.
Theme: The basic idea behind this double-sized issue is extremely simple: The girls host a sleepover, while the boys discover a “monster pet” in the form of Warlock the alien robot-man.
The Story: The sleepover is all about character development. Running through the various kids:
• Illyana determines to draw Rahne into the party by forcibly slathering her in make-up. It’s one of those assaults that in real life would be relationally catastrophic, but in fiction, it always turns out well.
• Dani, still wheelchair bound after her recent bear mauling, has to telepathically chill Rahne out so that she doesn’t go all lupine when the other girls pounce upon her with mascara and lipstick. During an attempted séance, Dani makes an illusory friendly spirit appear for all to see.
• Rahne is suitably appalled by the revelry. After enduring her Extreme Makeover, she’s so gussied up that Sam can’t even recognize her, despite her distinctive burr haircut. In Sam’s slight defense, Sienkiewicz draws Rahne’s hair longer than McLeod or Buscema did. Later, Rahne winces her way through the fake séance. Her conscience is pricked not only because the Bible warns against dabbling in the occult, but also because she’s fought actual demons and knows that they are nothing to play with.
• Diana from town still thinks Amara is from Rome, New York. Amara is embarrassed not to know American celebrities, but her elegant clothes and Roman jewelry make her the belle of the ball.
• Lockheed has apparently decided to stay with Illyana at the X-Mansion rather than go with Kitty to Chicago. I guess a dragon would be really hard for Kitty to explain back home.
• Outside in the yard, Sam reminisces about enjoying baseball with his deceased dad. This gets Bobby morose about his dead-to-him dad, who used to take him to soccer matches.
Then in a secondary plot, a visitor from beyond crashes the party literally:
Magneto’s orbital base Asteroid M is struck by “a celestial object dropping out of warp space.” His story continues in X-Men #188, when he’s fished out of the Caribbean on earth by Lee Forrester.
Bobby and Sam are walking home from (I guess) the bus stop, having watched the New York Yankees lose a baseball game in the twenty-seventh inning. The boys are barred from the house with a “See you in the morning.” Where were they supposed to sleep? What time of year is it, anyway? The last three issues involved a snowstorm, but this issue Sam goes skinny dipping. Yet Dani just got out of the hospital; that’s the occasion for the sleepover. How long did they keep her in the hospital after she got her Morlock healing? Everybody else who gets a Morlock healing seems to be back on his feet immediately.
Sam retrieves a suspicious meteorite (he saw it making a course correction) from the lake, and Roberto carries it (suspiciously cool for just having fallen from the sky) into the mansion, where they deposit it in the lab. Wait, weren’t they supposed to stay out of the house until the party was over? I guess the girls weren’t guarding the back door.
Warlock the techno-organic creature spawns/activates out of the inert meteorite and trips the mansion’s fuse box when he attempts to recharge from a wall socket. Lockheed flaps down to investigate and gives Warlock a face-full of flames to think about. In a lengthy battle, the boys and girls team up to drive Warlock from the house.
They eventually realize that Warlock is scared and means no harm, so Sam flies off to rouse Doug Ramsey from his house in the middle of the night, so Doug can use his mutant language ability to communicate with Warlock. I’m sure the appearance of towel-clad Sam at 2am at the Ramsey residence caused absolutely no weirdness.
Rahne, trusting soul that she is, dares to touch this strange creature, showing Warlock how to adapt his arm into an AC plug with which he can safely interface with the mansion’s electric system. He recharges, and when Xavier returns to the mansion later that night, they introduce him to Warlock. Illyana also shows up at the end, popping out of a stepping disc wearing some sort of Buck Rogers space suit (not her magic armor) with a bubble helmet. As far as I know, this is the first time Xavier has ever seen Illyana display any mutant or magic abilities, yet he seems more irritated than anything. Maybe a scene in X-Men already covered this ground?
My Two Cents: So much to say about this double sized issue, which has two plots that have difficulty co-existing: “Good kids have a harmless slumber party” and “While the parents are away, the kids must take in a needy and special stranger.” (This second plot is a little-known story sometimes called E.T. and sometimes Stranger Things.) Either one is a perfectly fine story, but since responsible parents don’t leave town when they have authorized a slumber party, the two elements collide with each other. You’ll just have to ignore the cognitive dissonance inherent in the set-up.
Chris Claremont had already made good on his desire to show the kids doing typical teenage stuff like meeting other kids at the mall, attending school dances, and having a crosstown rival school. But nothing in the previous twenty issues prepared us for the idea that nine townie girls would arrive en masse at the Xavier School (and, apparently, have to walk up the driveway rather than getting dropped off at the front door) for an unsupervised evening of teen girl party tropes like pillow fights and celebrity gossip.
This is the most chaste, tamest slumber party in the annals of slumber parties, far more Happy Days than Beverly Hills 90210. Nobody slips in illegal substances to provide Our Heroes with a moral test. No prank calls. No rolling the neighbors’ lawn. Roberto and Sam don’t spy on the girls, and the girls never know that the guys were skinny dipping in the lake right outside their window. Who authorized this party with no adults around? There is no way Xavier would let nine Muggles into the mansion overnight without adult supervision.
Illyana wants to go visit Dani’s parents’ “real ranch?!! With cowboys and buffalos and stuff like that?!” This resurrects all sorts of questions about Mr. and Mrs. Lonestar. When we first met Dani, she was a loner, basically living in the woods with the wild animals, tenuously connected to her grandfather who was nominally raising her after the disappearance of her parents. But now it appears that her parents were at the pinnacle of Cheyenne society, wealthy landowners, which makes Dani something of an Indian princess. How long were they presumed dead? Were their belongings put in a trust for Dani to inherit? If so, why was she living in the woods? Who managed the enterprise in their absence? Maybe Claremont has good answers for all these questions, but we never get them.
Illyana also calls Dani “chief,” which would definitely not fly in 2018, even if Dani is wearing her best Stands-With-A-Fist finery, including a tunic, a patterned blanket, and even a feather in her hair (mostly obscured by a word balloon here).
Speaking of hair, one of the townies has a shock of dyed red hair on top and “union suit” pajamas with a back flap less buttoned than I would have expected the Comics Code to allow. (Sam flashes his butt while skinny dipping also, for what it’s worth.) Also: Check out that projection TV! That was the best that the 1980s could do for large-scale television pictures.
The teen girl chatter involves a foursome of celebrities. How dated are the references? Right on target, it seems. I asked my wife what year this picture represented, and she correctly said, "1984." That year, Tom Selleck was in the middle of an eight year run as a hunky Hawaiian detective in short shorts on Magnum, P.I., so that checks out. John Travolta’s reprise of the role of Tony Manero in Staying Alive was from 1983, though I suspect he had more appeal to women several years younger than these girls who remembered him from 1977’s Saturday Night Fever. Sting? Yup, he was riding high in his band The Police that year. Michael Jackson’s Thriller 1982 album was still a big deal in early 1984, though by the end of the year, Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA was the album with buzz. Anyway, Sienkiewicz is great with realistic faces of actual people, and he’s done lots of rock music related work over the years, including a whole comic book about Jimi Hendrix.
I am a bit confused by the body of water in which Sam swims. It’s shaped irregularly, like a lake. Yet right by the shore, it’s at least three or four feet deep, so that he can stand with his hind end covered by water but his hands on the shore. That doesn’t seem like a natural lake, more like a concrete pool.
Also, in one panel Bobby declares that he’s not going to swim. But a few panels later, he’s in his Speedo. We never see him attempt to enter the water in between, though.
Sam declares himself a sci-fi buff, a trait of which we’ve never seen the slightest hint up until now in this impoverished rural kid who had to quit high school to work in the coal mine after his daddy died. He says his favorite Robert Heinlein story is “Door into Shadow,” a reference to the story actually entitled “Door into Summer.” This could be a mistake of Sam or a mistake of Claremont, but it’s probably just the usual off-branding of recognizable properties to avoid a trademark infringement lawsuit.
Warlock’s splash page stands still as one of the great character reveals in the history of comic books. I credit Keith Silva over at ComicsBulletin.com with the observation that Bill Sienkiewicz’ art is huge on abstract geometries, especially nested but non-concentric circles, which seem to owe much to the Russian painter Wassily Kandinksy.
Sienkiewicz loves circles. Especially halos. New Mutants have more halos than a gold-encrusted Gothic triptych.
The introduction of Warlock is, I believe, also the introduction of the word “techno-organic” into Marvel Comics. Chris Claremont will use this word approximately 86,235 times over the next twenty years, often with the words “virus” or “infection” appended. The story of his origin is bizarre; Newly decanted Warlocks are immediately dumped into a death-match with experienced, stronger, adults versions of themselves. What is the point of that? I could understand such a Darwininan (not to mention Freudian) confrontation once the newbies have learned and grown strong themselves, but letting l33t toons hunt newbies seems pointless. Warlock thought so too, hence his flight to Earth. But Magus (his dad) was hot on his trail in the previous three issues. Now he’s nowhere in sight, for the moment. I’m sure he’s lost and forgotten, and we’ll never see him again. Right…
At one point, Dani passes off Rahne as her pet wolf, and Marcie the townie reacts: “Hey, like in ElfQuest! That’s rad, Dani!” Would that ElfQuest really were the cultural touchstone of teenage girls in 1984, the world would have been a better place.
Doug Ramsey is a mutant? And Sam knows it, but Doug doesn’t? This is the first hint of this in a New Mutants comic book. The last time we saw him (issue #16), he was just a friend of Kitty who was sucked into the White Queen’s trap. In fact, the last time we saw Doug, he was on an interview tour at the Massachusetts Academy. I guess he rejected the scholarship at this prestigious private boarding school so that he could keep going to Westchester Middle School or whatever? Claremont liked to say that he wrote X-Men and New Mutants in such a way that reading just one or the other was possible, but important story beats like this show that it just ain’t so. X-Men/New Mutants was more of a single biweekly publication.
I wish we had seen the off-panel interaction in which Sam tells Doug that both of them are mutants, and an alien robot-child is running amuck at the mansion. Those kinds of pivotal moments deserve reader involvement. Was this double-sized issue originally two issues that for some reason had to be combined, thus losing moments like that? I mean, look how long this commentary is. There’s plenty of material here for two or maybe three issues of an 80s comic book, and a full six issue Trade Paperback in the modern decompressed style. The issue even ends with three excellent Sienkiewicz pin-ups (Cannonball, Magik, and Sunspot), and I am just now noticing for the first time that the image of Illyana facing a demon also incongruously features a bowl full of dog food.
Meanwhile in X-Men (#187): Part One of the X-Men battle with the Dire Wraiths in Manhattan, as part of a company-wide crossover climaxing the story of ROM. Some very cosmic things were happening in the skies of Earth in this issue, so there’s no way this is simultaneous with the business-as-usual slumber party. So once again we’re left wondering where all the adults were.
