Godel x Uzumeri #5: Savagin’ A Savage Land (X-Men 114-119)
Uzumeri: Hey, X-Fans! After our double shot of Grant Morrison’s Animal Man to finish off that bad boy, we’re here with the first of two consecutive installments in our look at Chris Claremont’s franchise-defining run on the X-Men. I’m David Uzumeri, and this is Addison Godel, and we’re taking a look at issues 114 to 119 this week.
Godel: IN THESE ISSUES: The X-Men have been separated into two groups in their escape from Magneto’s base; each group thinks the other died in the process. The larger group, unable to get a message home, battles SAURON and GAROKK THE PETRIFIED MAN in the Savage Land, then hitches it to Japan just in time to face down MOSES MAGNUM.
The smaller group – Beast and Phoenix – make it home to tell Professor X about the “dead” X-Men, BUMMING HIM OUT. In the following days, Xavier goes on to recount the tale of his first encounter with an evil mutant, before leaving with Lilandra for OUTER SPACE.
SUBPLOT WATCH: Cyclops comes close to figuring out that Corsair is his father. Meanwhile, even as Phoenix makes her way to Muir Island for a vacation, a SINISTER PRESENCE is at work there, ambushing the crusty SEA CAPTAIN from #104.
ACCENT WATCH: All Japanese people, given the slightest provocation, will shout something about Amaterasu.
Uzumeri: #114-116 kick this off with the first Savage Land arc of the run. And, well, honestly, I don’t have much to say other than “that sure was a Savage Land arc.” I guess they emerged there after a base was destroyed rather than crash-landing there in the Blackbird, that’s something.
Godel: It’s amazing how much the Savage Land always bores me – outside of the Marvel Universe, I really like the idea of LOST WORLDS where dinosaurs still roam and so on. It seems like a can’t-miss idea, and yet it fails.
Uzumeri: It’s because there is almost nothing savage about the Savage Land. They keep talking about how it’s AWAY FROM CIVILIZATION, but Ka-Zar basically runs it like a modern society, they just have less technology I guess. It’s basically totally tamed, especially for the purposes of the X-Men who are best buds with Ka-Zar.
The savage look in her eye / gave me a tropical contact high…
Godel: Yeah, these days the X-Men seem to use it as their mountain cabin getaway. Except for the passing pterosaurs and petrified men, it’s a pretty safe place to be.
Uzumeri: And Petrified Man-style shit happens to them all the time even in civilization. Right after this they go to Tokyo and Moses Magnum is sinking it into the ocean.
Godel: Also, I think that lost-world things kind of don’t work in a world with superheroes. It’s a big deal in Jurassic Park, when it’s a bunch of normal people that have to reckon with dinosaurs walking around. Or in the first Tomb Raider game, when the T-Rex appears and you’re terrified because you’re just an archaeologist with a couple of highly polygonal pistols to defend yourself. If you’ve got optic beams and just beat Magneto, who cares?
Uzumeri: There’s also no mystery behind it – it’s just there.
Godel: Yeah! Once it’s a known part of the geography it loses its charm. You can only get away with it once, unless it’s like K’un-L’un, and you can only reach it through secret paths at certain times.
Uzumeri: It’s not like “wow, what happened to make this magical place?” We don’t really remember, or care, WHY the Savage Land exists. It’s just That Place With The Dinosaurs. The X-Men drop their airship there to grind and gain mad XP.
Godel: OTM! And frankly, it’s a really arbitrary thing for the X-Men. They keep going there because it so happened that the Savage Land debuted in their Silver Age issues. But I think we can agree it was only a matter of time before Stan Lee did a lost-world dinosaur place in some Marvel comic… it just happened to be this one.
Uzumeri: AND Kirby, let’s be fair here, I imagine no lack of his imagination went into this. Honestly, Ka-Zar’s always felt like a less-realized, less-interesting version of Kamandi.
Godel: Uh, well, I hate to break it to you but there was also this guy called “Tar-Zan.”
Uzumeri: Well, yeah, no shit. 😦
Godel: It also turns out, doing my homework, that Ka-Zar was a Golden Age Tarzan type character, that they’d brushed off and crammed together with the Savage Land thing.
I did like the first issue of this storyline, which is mostly the X-Men lounging around and working on the character subplots, and I guess grieving for Beast and Phoenix although they don’t really seem that bent out of shape about it.
Uzumeri: Cyclops is totally bent out of shape about the fact that he isn’t bent out of shape. Which, I mean, is about as self-pitying and pointless as I expect from Scott at this point.
Godel: Cyclops is awful in these issues. He cold refuses to help Ka-Zar save the Savage Land from Garokk, and don’t forget that he loses track of his self-pity trip by looking at his reflection and going “Hey, I look pretty smooth with a mustache.” (He doesn’t.)
Uzumeri: And then loses track of his “oh hey, Corsair is my dad!” trip with … someone talking to him.
Seriously, he’s hilariously obnoxious and incompetent here. My favorite panel totally comes at the end of this arc, where Cyclops is about to die, and he’s just completely resigned to it at this point.
Down I go…
Godel: Haha, yeah. “Wellllp, I’m falling to my death….huh.”
Uzumeri: “At least I’m saving readers the trouble of having to read about me, I guess!”
The entire thing is an inane detour. When Scott is like “hey, uh, actually, fuck you guys, we got our own shit to do,” that was the only time in this chunk I agreed with him.
Godel: Yeah, but where was that when he was like, “Okay, guys, three more days of R&R and then we go!” Like, supposedly it’s REALLY URGENT that they get home to warn Professor X that Magneto is on the loose. But they knew Magneto was on the loose even before the last story, and anyway if Magneto was going to do something, he’s probably done it by now given how long he had the X-Men captive in robot diapers.
Uzumeri: This run is filled with urgent things that everyone forgets about for fifteen to twenty issues. But the Savage Land thing is a totally generic superhero story with some X-Men in it.
Godel: Agreed, sadly. Garokk was, I guess, a Ka-Zar villain, and the X-Men seem to have just been guilt-tripped into finishing up a Ka-Zar story. There’s some nice character bits, like Wolverine befriending Zabu the jungle cat, and some great art IMO (if you ignore the shameless Storm cheesecake), but…not too much to really get excited about.
Uzumeri: Oh, and the impossibly boring Sauron.
Godel: I never thought I’d say this, but Sauron could be way worse. At least he’s got the Curt Conners gimmick, you know, wanting to resist his transformation into this evil monster. It’s more than most of the villains we’ve been seeing.
Uzumeri: You mean the Hulk gimmick.
Godel: Sorry, I meant to say Doctor Jekyll. Also, Sauron can do MIND CONTROL!
Uzumeri: There was not one original part of this story.
Godel: I also really hate how, supposedly, Garokk has transformed the society of the Savage Land into this dystopia, but the comic can’t really be bothered to show any of that. Everyone’s casting aspersions on what he’s done, there are tens of thousands of Savages filling Garokk’s arena, but it never feels real at all.
Uzumeri: The more I think about and try to talk about this arc, the less I like it. Garokk’s powers make no sense and, as you say, this is really just finishing up what seemed to be a longstanding Ka-Zar plotline. Nothing really happens to the characters here, other than the dumb Corsair thing, “Wolverine continues surprising people” and “Colossus maybe gets laid.”
Godel: Spoiler alert: Colossus does get laid. Or at least, later stories establish through extremely obvious hints and innuendo that one of these Savages has his baby. And then they never spoke of this again.
Uzumeri: HA! Doesn’t Wolverine have a kid down there too somehow? Ridiculous.
Godel: Yes – but that kid can be dismissed from continuity even more easily, since it’s all contained in the Wolverine: The Jungle Adventure one-shot by Walt Simonson and Mike Mignola.
Uzumeri: Damn, that is a dope creative team.
Godel: The Savage Land, ladies and gentlemen.
Uzumeri: Maybe it’s populated entirely by the bastard children of every major figure in the history of the Marvel Universe.
Godel: Now that would be a good way to use the Savage Land!
I do have one somewhat more serious suggestion: nobody should ever go to the Savage Land, except rookie superhero teams. It could be a sort of Outward Bound thing, you go down there for a week, build your own shelter, start a fire by rubbing two sticks together, and also beat a tyrannosaur and destroy Garokk’s evil city.
Uzumeri: Dude, I don’t want the Marvel Universe turned into a series of MUD quests. “Welcome to the Newbie Area! Meet your friendly Savage Land Tour Guide today!”
Godel: ahahhaahhahahaha
Uzumeri: I think the real takeaway here is that it’s really difficult to talk about the Savage Land without making some sort of videogame-based metaphor.
Godel: I think that’s because the concept is something that everybody but Marvel has managed to make fun. But we should move on to “Psi War!,” the Professor X flashback issue.
Uzumeri: Yeah, this is a one-off introducing Amahl Farouk, a character I recognize as eventually becoming the Shadow King.
Godel: Exactly right, although he won’t take that name until, I think, Claremont’s final big storyline in 1990.
Uzumeri: This was a really nice change of pace, partially because it was a story that was dealing with actual X-Men shit at this point – actually, the only issue in this bunch that isn’t finishing up plots from another book.
Godel: And it also seems like an important thing – whatever the details, we’re seeing Professor X’s first encounter with an “evil mutant,” and thus the figure who in some way inspired him to start the X-Men, so that the good mutants could set the agenda.
Uzumeri: It’s an important issue to be sure, although I’m not sure how the memory convinces Chuck that it’s totally okay to bail on Earth on the space bangbus.
Godel: Yeah, that made no sense to me either. I would buy him going “My X-Men are dead, there’s nothing for me here, let’s go,” and then telling this story over drinks on the spaceship or something. That might have also spared us the absurd sight of Lilandra, a member of intergalactic royalty, fussing dopily over her boyfriend’s coffee.
Uzumeri: Ha, yeah, the entire coffee scene was ridiculous, right down to the entire “how does one brew this earth beverage?!?” thing going on.
Godel: Maybe she’s just trying to live up to her predecessor as the housemaid, who turned out to be an internationally celebrated geneticist with her own top-secret super-base.
Uzumeri: Still, the flashback story itself works really well – for one thing, Byrne acquits himself with the weird way better here than he did at the end of the Shi’ar arc.
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Godel: I’ll admit: it’s still not great weird. But it’s sort of a passable version of a bizarre Astral Plane battle. I mostly really loved Byrne’s art through all these issues – but again the Arab caricatures are really depressing.
Uzumeri: It’s a hot time in da ol’ town tonight, an’ das’a’fac!
Pre-final cover for #116. (Note: John Byrne claims to be unsure of the artist responsible.)
Godel: Yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, we were going to have to touch on that one sooner or later.
Uzumeri: John Byrne: kind of totally racist. Or, if not a racist, clueless to the point of being indistinguishable from one.
Godel: I’m going to say this now so I don’t have to say it for the next however many months: whenever I compliment John Byrne’s art, which I love, I am definitely not endorsing John Byrne the person, who seems totally gross and terrible and indefensible in a lot of ways.
Uzumeri: Let’s just go to WikiQuote, shall we?
There are lots of people who call black people “niggers.” Are both terms “right”? You seem to have missed the rather important point that my response indicated roughly the same percentage of fans and pros use the improper terms for various elements of what we do—but that percentage does not approach a balance. It is not that roughly half say “balloon” and half say “bubble.” It is that some say “bubble” and they are wrong.
Godel: aaaaaaaaarrrrgh
Uzumeri: The Onion lost all credibility for me a while back when they did a “story” on the Hudson River cleanup GE was forced to do. As some of you may recall, one of my neighbors is a GE veep, and he was directly in charge of this, so from him I found out all kinds of details the press did not bother to pass along to the public. Since The Onion apparently gets its info from other papers, the story was full of inaccuracies.
Godel: Make it stop!
Uzumeri: Okay, time for me to rain on this parade. I didn’t know he had kids. Young kids. This alters the mix considerably. This makes him an asshole. Cops and firemen, to name but two, place their lives on the line every day to protect others. There was nothing Steve Irwin was doing that he could not have done […] without putting his life at risk. This takes this from tragedy to stupidity, and, worse, irresponsibility. [29] I am glad this asshole is dead. Sorry for his wife and kids, but relieved they are in no further danger from his lunacy! […] Asshole is too good a word.
Godel: Asshole is, indeed, too good a word.
Uzumeri: It’s kind of difficult to put into words why I don’t like Bob Laytons’s inking. […] I actually feel physically ill when I look at Bob’s stuff. I really do. It’s like everything is greasy and slimy. […] And all his men are queer. They have these bouffant hairdos and heavy eye make-up and an upper lip with a little shadow in the corner which to me says lipstick. Even the Hulk. I will never forgive him for what he did to the Hulk’s face in the annual that we did together. A lot of the other stuff I liked, but the Hulk’s face, the Angel’s face, the Angel, God! […] There’s a shot of the Angel standing there with his hands on his hips saying hello to somebody and my father said, “Well this guy’s queer.” No, he didn’t look queer in the pencils Dad.
Godel: goddddddddddddddd what a creep!
Uzumeri: OK, I’m done.
Godel: I think that needed to be done though.
So! As for Farouk, he’s another rather one-dimensional PURE EVIL kind of villain, but the story’s really about Professor X as a rookie nearly getting completely killed in his first battle with another psychic.
Uzumeri: Yeah, but the thing is that you can tell Claremont is still setting up the eventual return, especially talking about the slow, painful psionic death. It’s about that, yeah, but it’s also him planting the seeds for a big telepath villain for Xavier.
Godel: Oddly, it takes until 1990 to actually get that story. Claremont will basically almost never do the “telepath vs telepath” thing with Professor X, no matter what telepaths he actually throws into the book.
Uzumeri: It’s funny, since it seems like such a time-worn X-Men trope to me, but that might just be because of the ’90s run where he got into psychic duel after duel.
Godel: I might just be blanking, but I really don’t recall it happening much at all, setting aside the first Legion story….but we’ll cross that bridge if we come to it.
Finally, we have the Japan story with Moses Magnum, a guy whose prior claim to fame was that he fought the Avengers once, and then appeared in a Power Man Annual by Chris Claremont, which I guess is why he’s here.
Uzumeri: Man, the more we break this down, the less of a fan I am of this entire chunk, since this two-parter was pretty boring too. It felt like a rehash of earlier stuff in a lot of ways, and is like the third out-of-nowhere villain in a row.
Godel: It’s funny, from page to page as I was reading this I basically enjoyed it, but somehow it’s coming out as my least favorite batch so far. Maybe I just chunked it out funny. I’m usually a fan of the “X-Men go globetrotting” setup, but it works better in later stories when it’s “X-Men on the run,” which plays to their paranoia schtick. Here they’re just taking a really, really long way home. I’m curious what you mean about the rehash though.
Uzumeri: Here’s a villain, here’s his evil plan, here’s his evil base and evil minions, now you take them on, oh no you’re going to die, victory from the jaws of defeat … I realize this is a LOT of superhero comics, but it just feels especially rote here.
Godel: And again: it’s nothing to do with the X-Men. Sure, yeah, they’re superheroes, they’re allowed to step in and help in a crisis, but their only personal stake in this thing is that they’re really desperate for someone to let them borrow a phone, and also Sunfire is here. And still being a total prick, I might add.
Plus, in a really unlikely coincidence, Misty Knight is also assigned to the case….just as her roommate Jean goes on a vacation without leaving her any kind of contact information. I love all these pre-cell-phone plots that would just never work at all today.
Uzumeri: Oh, totally. “Hey, Jean! We’re alive!” I mean, they’ve been out of the Savage Land for SIX WEEKS, and for a reason that’s *never* explained, the boat the rescued them is too official to use radio channels.
Godel: Yeah, I was really expecting that to turn out to be important to the plot, like they had gotten picked up by some smugglers or top secret spies or something and….no, it’s an ordinary boat, except they never use their radio. Weak.
This might really be Claremont/Byrne struggling to deal with Jean’s cosmic-level powers. She has to be separated from the team so she won’t just make mincemeat of everybody they fight. Before, they were doing the thing where her powers would sort of fail on her at unexpected moments.
Uzumeri: Well, that gets really old really quick – I mean, I’ll be ecstatic if I never see Spider-Man run out of webbing at juuuuuuuuuust the right time ever again.
Godel: At least they’re signposting it as a troubling mystery, which makes it clear that the whole Phoenix thing isn’t just flicking the power upgrade switch, they have a story in mind.
The other big thing in the Japan story is the further development of Wolverine. He meets Mariko for the first time and gets several scenes revolving around her, plus there’s the whole thing of him speaking Japanese. It’s like he read your commentary and was like “Shit, I need some character development, stat!”
Uzumeri: I love the steadily increasing number of things Logan does that shocks the shit out of everyone. Reading Japanese, talking to Zabu…
Godel: Don’t forget the whole like, “I LOVE HUNTING….but i don’t kill the animals, jeez guys, way to judge me” a few issues back.
Uzumeri: He’s like Schwarzenegger in Commando.
Godel: hahhaha, man, but i wish there was more of JOHN MATRIX in wolverine’s character
Uzumeri: Oh God, I forgot about his name. John Matrix, the first great Jeph Loeb creation.
Godel: I had no idea Jeph Loeb wrote Commando! That’s great!
Uzumeri: Oh dude, he wanted it to star Nick Nolte and he wouldn’t kill anybody. Commando is the best example of studio interference ever.
Godel: Dude, if Jeph Loeb came up with “LET OFF SOME STEAM” it sort of balances out half of the rest of his career.
Uzumeri: HEY SULLY, REMEMBER WHEN I SAID I’D KILL YOU LAST? …I LIED
Seriously, Commando is THE perfect drunk 2am action movie.
Godel: I mean, I’m gonna have to go Die Hard, but Commando probably does beat it on quantity of explosions and gunfire, and, well, of action generally I guess.
Uh, anyway, I feel like we’re suddenly a lot closer to the “classic” Wolverine you’ve been talking about.
Uzumeri: Yeah, at this point we’re WAY closer, and I can tell that, as much as I hate to admit it, a lot of that has to be John Byrne.
Godel: It’s interesting how the emphasis is swinging around with the different pencillers. Dave Cockrum loved Nightcrawler, so he got all the good lines during that run – but now that panel space is going to Wolverine.
Uzumeri: I presume they were actually working Marvel style at this point, which makes a lot of sense.
Godel: And again, Byrne is officially co-plotter.
Uzumeri: Yeah, true – this is a purely collaborative book at this point, I assume the most collaborative the book will ever get.
Godel: To me the different artist periods all have really different flavors/preoccupations… I imagine it probably holds true for long-term collaborations in general – if you’re working with an artist month after month, and they’re telling you “Man, Chris, I just really hate drawing the Banshee,” you’ll eventually cave and find a way to write him out.
Uzumeri: And speaking of, Banshee loses his vocal chords in a completely nonsensical match against Moses Magnum, essentially writing him out of the book at the end of this arc. Or so it seems – I doubt he’s actually gone.
Godel: Yeah, table that one and we’ll see where it goes. Agreed that the match with Magnum made no sense, but Magnum’s powers/plan also basically made no sense across the board so I just sort of said “whatever” and looked at the pretty pictures. I guess his earthquakes used a….frequency? And Banshee used …another frequency? And sliced a mountain in half and saved Japan.
Uzumeri: It seems like 90% of dumb comic book science is based on half-assed frequencies and wavelengths.
Godel: I love the panels where the narration desperately tries to explain how Magnum survived his last appearance and why he has different powers now. “The laser beam, the exotic weaponry of his combat suit, the elemental force of the quake itself ….had all combined within him in some mad, arcane fashion to give him the power primal – – the ability to focus an infinite amount of energy anywhere on earth, in any manner he chose…In this case, to create an earthquake.”
Like…what?
Uzumeri: “My name is Chris Claremont and I want this guy to be able to make earthquakes. The end.”
But yeah, overall, other than “hey, we’re finally back to something resembling a plot about the characters for an issue,” this batch … I mean, I enjoyed it enough, but it didn’t do a whole lot for me.
Godel: The bottom line for me: these are competent Bronze Age superheroics, and let’s not forget that half the Marvel comics from this period would have been basically a random fight with Villain X. Partly we’re judging these through present-day expectations that the X-Men universe has its own cast of villains and its own distinctive vibe…. but also we’re responding to the previous arcs in this run, which did have more of that vibe. I get what they were going for with a lot of this, they just don’t come together as classic stories.
Uzumeri: That’s very true, it’s difficult to remember that this was a sort of well-liked niche book, not a cornerstone of the universe like it is today. Still, I can read bronze age superheroics anywhere, as you said, but something like “Psi War” is wholly unique to the characters for the most part.
Godel: It’s sort of a challenge for our little project. Like, a bad Morrison issue would still leave a lot to discuss with the themes and the ambitions of what he’s TRYING to do. With Claremont, I think, the goal is almost always “tell a good adventurous yarn,” and we’re looking more at craft and technique, how he succeeds…and this time, maybe how he fails.
Uzumeri: Yeah, these were just really really bland, generic Marvel books of the age.
Godel: It’s weird – they finally get to go monthly, they have all this room to expand, and suddenly half the character stuff that had been packed into the bimonthly issues gets lost in the shuffle. Obviously they’d also be dealing with tighter deadlines, but still.
Hopefully there’s more to love about our next chunk, although I think it’ll split the difference on the same basic point – we’re looking, on the one hand, at a battle with pinball-themed Spider-Man villain ARCADE, plus an annual featuring extra-dimensional Avengers foe ARKON!
Uzumeri: George Perez draws the annual, right? That’s always reason to celebrate.
Godel: Wow, good call! I didn’t realize that.
On the other side of the equation, we’ll also get the debut of ALPHA FLIGHT, continuing the “Wolverine’s mysterious Canadian past” thread from the Weapon Alpha story a while back. So, look forward to that, NEXT WEEK!
Yeah, whatever, dude. Nice collar.