Wolverine #3 “Loss” (November 1982)



The Story: Wolverine gets drunk, passes out, and dreams about Mariko rejecting him. Five assassins of The Hand come to punish Yukio for not killing Logan as Lord Shingen commanded; she kills them all. Yukio sneaks into Logan’s apartment for some reason and kills Logan’s Japenese cop buddy Asano when he comes looking for Logan. Yuko and Logan fight each other, than work together against a dozen Hand assassins.



My Two Cents: This was a relatively weak issue. The fight scenes were cool, but Yukio’s behavior seems unmotivated. Why does she go to Logan’s apartment after he makes her made by calling Mariko’s name in delirium? Why does she kill the cop and then hang around for Logan to get mad at her? Claremont tries to bring the ending around to an epiphany in which Logan comes to inner peace and determines not to go berserker, but even that is not well motivated.



Wolverine speaks of his “love” for Yukio, whom he just met. Seems like a pretty strong word for someone he just met, and I am not sure he knows what it means, but at least Yukio is more of a kindred spirit to him than Mariko.

Uncanny X-Men #172 “Scarlet in Glory” (August 1983)



Creative Team: Written by Chris Claremont. Penciled by Paul Smith. Inked by Bob Wiacek.

The Story: Five days before Logan’s wedding to Mariko, her estranged half-brother the Silver Samurai spies on the arrival of the X-Men in Mariko’s luxury apartment in a Tokyo high-rise. Yukio in turn is spying on the Samurai, and a fight breaks out between them. Storm saves Yukio from a nasty fall and is intrigued by the wild woman.



Silver Samurai’s partner Viper poisons the tea of the X-Men, incapacitating everyone except Storm. When Mariko is summoned to a showdown with her brother, Storm and Yukio intervene and have an inconclusive fight with Viper and Silver Samurai which leaves everyone various degrees of injured. And Nabatone Yokuse, the broker of the showdown, seems to be running some game of his own.

At the hospital, Logan and Rogue recover sufficiently from the poisoned drinks to set out in search of Viper and Silver Samurai.

My Two Cents: The Wolverine limited series was released the same months as X-Men issues in which the team were fighting the Brood in space. Fans were left wondering how the continuity-obsessive writer Chris Claremont was going to shoehorn the miniseries into his ongoing soap opera. His solution was to show Wolverine departing for an outdoors trip in the Rockies in X-Men #168 (“Professor Xavier Is a Jerk!” April 1983), missing the issues in which Angel is rescued from the Morlocks and Rogue joins the X-Men. So it’s almost a year of reading time between the first issue of the mini-series and the first issue of X-Men whose plot follows the mini-series.

Like the mini-series, this issue is narrated by Logan. But its story is far superior, with a larger cast of characters who have all sorts of different things to say to each other. Logan is hostile toward Rogue, while Mariko is gracious. Another great moment is when Kitty falsely assumes that Logan’s story of defeating Shingen means that Shingen is in police custody rather than deceased.

There are also two pages related to the ongoing “Is Madelyne Pryor the return of Phoenix?” plot. One page is a conversation in Alaska between Scott and Alex Summers about how Madelyne was the sole survivor of an airplane crash at the exact moment that Jean died on the moon. As far as I’m concerned, this puts the nail in the coffin of any theory that Maddie was just a random woman who happened to look exactly like Jean Grey, though Claremont always protested otherwise. The other moment was when a Phoenix raptor effect appeared above the warehouse where Storm and Yukio were fighting Viper and Silver Samurai. I know within the plot how the raptor appeared, since next issue we find out that Mastermind is hanging around Tokyo. But I don’t know why he did it, since nobody thinks that Phoenix is in Tokyo. It’s really just for the benefit of readers so Claremont can keep “Phoenix” related material in play, but it doesn’t really fit with what’s going on in this issue.

Paul Smith is in the middle of his short but sweet run as X-Man penciler, with Bob Wiacek on ink. I love the results, with clean, uncluttered but expressive lines.

When Rogue first appeared in Avengers Annual #10, she was supposed to be a late teen protégé of Mystique. But the two white streaks on her temples (bleached according to the OHofMU) caused Michael Golden to interpret her as a middle-aged woman. She looked similarly old in her first X-Men appearance (#158, June 19892), fighting Logan and Carol Danvers at the Pentagon in X-Men #158. Likewise in her appearences in Dazzler #22-24 and #28 shortly thereafter. In #171, she’s looking younger, still with the two white stripes in her hair. But as of this issue, and forevermore, she has a single stripe near the midline and looks closer to 18 than 35.

I keep doing that, don't I! My brain is mis-wired.

I just don't know what Mastermind would have wanted to suggest to Storm in Tokyo at a time that Maddie is known to be in Alaska, if he's trying to amp everybody up to think that Maddie is Phoenix.

I could have lived with "My new girlfriend is the one-in-a-billion chance who looks just like my dead girlfriend."  But when compounded with "My new girlfriend is the one-in-a-billion sole survivor of an airplane crash" and "My new girlfriend's airplane crash just happened to be at the exact instant that my old girlfriend was dying," I'd say we're well beyond, "What an interesting set of coincidences" into "Chekhov's Law is being invoked with all the subtlety of a Mjolnir blow." At that point he might as well have named her Green Jey or something. Why not? It's all just one of life's funny happenstances...

Uncanny X-Men #173 “To Have and Have Not” (September 1983)



Creative Team: Written by Chris Claremont. Penciled by Paul Smith. Inked by Bob Wiacek.

The Story: Storm’s elemental powers are unreliable and out of control following her fight with Silver Samurai. She and Yukio are fugitives, hunted by roving gangs of punks who apparently work for Nabatone, the broker of the Mariko-Silver Samurai meeting last issue. Storm says this is the first time she has used her lightning to deliberately inflict pain, which seems odd. Surely every time she uses her lightning on a villain, incapacitating them through pain is the intent? Perhaps she means that she’s taking sadistic pleasure in the pain aspect.

Logan plays Rorshach, beating up enough guys in enough bars until he learns where Nabatone’s estate is. But they find Nabatone inside, long-dead. Hightailing it back to the hospital where the X-Men lie incapacitated, Rogue and Logan arrive just in time to confront Viper and Samurai. Logan and Samurai engage in a wordless battle which homages the several similar scenes in the Wolverine mini-series. After Logan wins that duel, Rogue blocks a blaster shot aimed by Viper at Logan and Mariko, suffering a serious wound in the process. Viper and Silver Samurai flee.



A week later, everyone is better in time for Logan and Mariko’s wedding. Storm shows up in her new Mohawk and leather look, shocking everyone. (What has she been doing for a week?) Suddenly Mariko cancels the wedding, apparently due to something Mastermind has done, but we have no idea what.

My Two Cents: This two-issue run of X-Men takes the kinetic ballet of fighting that Frank Miller brought to Daredevil and the Wolverine mini, and weds it to actual character development. Storm embraces the wild side of nature while Logan tries to act civilized. Kitty feels betrayed by her surrogate mom; Scott is worried about his new girlfriend’s similarity to his old girlfriend; Rogue feels ostracized by her new friends (check out all the panels where everyone is crowding around the couch, leaving her out in the cold); Madelyn is flummoxed by all these weirdos. Every single character has an individually appropriate reaction to the super-dangers and super-fights revolving around Mariko and her half-brother.



The Mastermind plot doesn’t fare as well. He seems to be traveling awfully quickly between New York, Alaska, and Tokyo. How exactly did he get Mariko to decide once again that Logan is not worthy? In a few issues more, he will somehow simulate the powers of Phoenix, including dropping Cyclops out of the sky above the X-mansion! 

Where is Xavier at this wedding? He leaves the New Mutants alone all the time, so that’s not the reason he stayed home. And where are James and Heather Hudson? (In Canada, eh?)

From a 2016 interview with Claremont in the Mississippi Clarion-Ledger:

'Claremont’s only advice to Golden was that the musician and actress Grace Jones should inspire Rogue and that she have white streaks in her hair. The only problem was that Golden had never heard of Jones — this was years before her appearance in the second "Conan the Barbarian" movie or the James Bond film “A View To Kill." “Michael came up with a really wicked visual. I took one look at her and thought, ‘Michael nailed it,'” Claremont said, adding that future artists would mistake the white streaks as a sign of age in the teenage character....

'Rogue’s arc is intrinsically linked to the shape-shifting character Mystique, who recruited the confused teen into the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants shortly after discovering her abilities. Claremont made the decision to have Mystique turn the mentally anguished Rogue over to her adversary, X-Men leader Charles Xavier, because she knew he would do what was best for Rogue. Claremont said that had he not left Marvel in 1991, Mystique would have turned out to be Rogue’s mother. It’s a storyline that appeared in a 2009 run of the series X-Men Forever. “Rogue and Nightcrawler are siblings, children of Mystique. Mississippi is very Gothic and antebellum in that regard,” Claremont said. “That storyline is shades of Dickens.”'

www.clarionledger.com/story/magnolia/entertainment/2016/06/23/x-mens-rogue-mississippi-and-proud/86179080/

Kitty Pryde and Wolverine #1 “Lies” (November 1984)



The Story: Kitty Pryde returns home to Chicagoland to get over getting dumped by Peter Rasputin. She walks intp a bank to find Ogun, an agent of the new Japanese owner, manhandling her father Carmen, an executive. Kitty wants to go with her father to Japan to meet Ogun’s boss Shigematsu; instead he gives her money to return to Xavier’s school immediately. Ah, the days when a fourteen year old with a wad of cash was expected to order a cab from a business to her house to the airport to buy a ticket from Chicago to NYC! But instead she stows away on a flight from Chicago to Tokyo, is caught by the janitor when she sneaks into Shigematsu’s building, is chased by the cops after stealing money from an ATM, is washed down the sewer and catches a cold, hangs up on Logan when she calls the X-mansion for help, and finally sees her dad make a deal to launder Yakuza money for Shigematsu.



My Two Cents: This series has not garnered much appreciation in the years since its publication, but it starts off well enough. A teen girl alone in a big city is going to have a lot of problems, even if she has super powers, and we certainly see plenty of problems here that don’t even involve getting attacked by criminals. Just the dangers of exposure and infectious disease and hunger are plenty.



The opening idea of "Japanese company buys American company" marks this as an early 80s story. There was much concern at the time that Japan was going to own the whole country. Apparently this was in part America's doing; America had helped rebuild Japan after World War II, which meant that their factories were more modern than those of their American competition, leading to an industrial resurgence in Japan. In 2018 it seems to be more likely China or Germany doing this sort of thing.

Claremont often put Kitty at the center of X-Men stories, and he clearly had plenty of plot ideas involving her, so giving her a mini-series showcase makes plenty of sense. The public’s rising demand for Wolverine got pushback from Claremont, who didn’t want Wolverine diluted by an ongoing series, though in 1988 one would finally arrive. To stave off that day as long as possible, Wolverine gets a role in this mini-series and his name in the title, though all he does in this issue is answer the telephone. But his presence likely influenced the ninja-centric direction that this mini-series will take. It was expanded from four to six issues during production; judge for yourself whether Al Milgrom’s art deteriorates along the way as a result. He draws Kitty’s hair wavy like Paul Smith rather than frizzy like John Byrne. He also ignores the substantial haircut that John Romita, Jr. gave Kitty in X-Men #183, though as we shall see, she still has a haircut coming.

This story says that it begins one week after Peter broke up with Kitty (X-Men #183, July 1984), yet there’s snow everywhere in Deerfield, and the rain in Tokyo is very cold, contributing to Kitty getting sick. This is probably Claremont nodding at the Cask of Ancient Winters plot currently running in Thor. Two later issues of this series will footnote that story explicitly, with Logan commenting at one point, “This is supposed to be summer!” Yet in this issue, Kitty shows no surprise at the snow at all.

Kitty says that she learned Japanese from Xavier prior to her previous trip to Japan for Logan’s wedding. So I guess Emma Frost teaching Cyclops instant Mandarin during Grant Morrison’s run wasn’t such a new trick after all. It’s a plot contrivance needed for this story to move forward, much like how the TARDIS provides translation services for every alien language on Doctor Who.

On the last page, Kitty enters a building on ground floor and says of the empty office inside, “This is Shigematsu’s executive suite. Sooner or later, Dad should show up here.” Is the executive suite going to be on the ground floor of a skyscraper? Seems unlikely. Earlier in the issue she was inside this same building way up on the umpteenth floor. Next issue we’ll see that she is indeed high in the skyscraper, not on the ground floor as implied here.