Godel x Uzumeri #7: Debut of a Disco Dazzler (X-Men 125-131)
Uzumeri: Welcome back to Godel x Uzumeri’s irregular looks at Chris Claremont’s classic run on Uncanny X-Men! We’re here to take at #125-131, covering the classic four-issue Proteus arc – which I completely and totally misremembered, by the way – and the initial brouhaha with the Hellfire Club.
Godel: IN THESE ISSUES: The X-Men finally reunite on Muir Island to do battle with Moira’s evil, long-hinted son – the reality-warping, body-snatching MUTANT X, aka PROTEUS. They eke out a victory, but Banshee remains behind with Moira as the X-Men head home, where they find Professor X, returned from space early to check in on the Phoenix subplot. A tip from Cerebro sends them off to find two new mutants, suburban teenager KITTY PRYDE and New York disco hipster DAZZLER; this turns into a showdown with EMMA FROST of the HELLFIRE CLUB, who seem to have anticipated the X-Men’s every move!
SUBPLOT WATCH: Wyngarde continues his meddling with Phoenix, somehow making her believe she’s slipping back in time to the life of a Hellfire-themed 18th century ancestor. Jean’s powers (and her increasingly casual use of them), continue to plague everyone’s minds. Meanwhile, Colleen Wing quietly disappears from the comic.
So first up is the Proteus thing, which at four issues is probably the longest single coherent story we’ve seen to date. How’d it play for you?
Uzumeri: Loved it.
It’s a great four-part arc, gives Byrne a chance to get trippy as hell and fuck around with perceptions and dimensions, and it’s also the meanest story Claremont’s done on this book to date. I mean, this would be a dark story now, never mind back in 1980 or whenever.
Godel: Totally. Proteus is straight up creepy – his goals, his ghoulish disintegrating-body thing…plus the references to his father abusing Moira physically, it’s all pretty heavy.
Uzumeri: There’s one part where he seems to be threatening to rape his own mom!
Godel: It would have been great if he was like “Mutant X? No, I have a better name…I shall be… OEDIPUS.”
Uzumeri: Seriously, though…I mean, given that I kind of read it as that Proteus was a rape baby – he even talks about being born out of an act of hate and violence. It’s nothing Claremont could come out and say, but seriously, even just implied this is still super-dark material.
Godel: He practically does come out and say it though – like, Moira’s husband knows he left her in the hospital, but didn’t know she was pregnant.
Uzumeri: Oh man, yeah. And then there’s the entire thing about Moira trying to raise him kindly, but not being able to hold back the anger she had about the entire conception – this is all remarkably adult stuff.
Godel: Yeah, there’s a lot of unplumbed material in Moira’s raising of Proteus – – did she really just have him locked up in a cell that whole time? Moira’s dead now so I guess we’ll never see that story, but Claremont was clearly interested in the idea that Moira might have some ethical lapses as a scientist, witness his final storyline in Unadjectived X-Men 1-3.
That kind of stuff is why the arc works, I think. Okay, Proteus has fearsome powers and wants to conquer the world or something, but so did Garokk the Petrified Man. The difference is that Proteus inspires reactions in the characters we’ve come to care about – Moira obviously has a lot of mixed feelings, but it also opens up Colossus, Cyclops and Storm having to rethink their “no-kiling” stance, not to mention Wolverine getting just completely spooked.
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Uzumeri: That’s exactly it – this is the first remotely personal villain we’ve come across in this entire run.
Godel: Magneto came close – he really had it in for the X-Men, but that’s about it. Here Proteus gets a lot of screen time to establish how weird and disturbed his view of the world is. And at four issues we get tons of room for scenes that add to the scale and texture of the story, like Moira showing up to give a really unhelpful and vague warning to the father.
Uzumeri: There’s a very palpable feeling not only of danger but also of impending doom, like something really terrible is going to happen. And before the arc’s over, well, a few pretty terrible things happen.
Godel: The long “catching up with Proteus” sequence helps that, all get the scenes with them around the campfire trying to figure out what to do next…
Uzumeri: Is it just me, or is this the first time the X-Men really threw down with actual civilians at stake? They’ve usually just been defending themselves or getting caught up in other people’s business.
Godel: Well, Moses Magnum was threatening all of Japan, and ostensibly there were Savage Landers threatend by Garokk, but you’re right, the sense of consequence is bigger here.
Uzumeri: Well, on those missions the X-Men were just helping out someone else’s cause. And they never seemed to freak out about people dying. I really, really doubt nobody died during that entire Garokk clusterfuck.
Godel: Yeah, whereas here, a handful of people get killed and it’s a big deal. The dried-out corpses are horrifying, and when the X-Men finally catch up with Proteus, there’s a real urgency to their desperate attempts to save the civilians, like the whole thing with Storm and the bees.
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Uzumeri: Ororo Monroe, friend of bees.
Godel: That part’s amazing just for how labored the thought bubble is – like in the split seconds necessary to save these people she goes into a whole treatise on bee physiology. I guess she spends her downtime at the mansion reading National Geographic.
The bee thing reminds me, vis-a-vis the whole “reality-warping thing” – I love the whole sequence where Wolverine is really shaken up by Proteus, since Wolverine is really in touch with his senses and Proteus has cut him off from trusting them. It’s a really cool idea, and also reminds you that reality-warping villains didn’t used to be a dime a dozen.
Uzumeri: I think they WERE a dime a dozen by 1980, it’s just Claremont’s execution that makes this work so well. I mean, there’s even another reality shifter already in the comic.
Godel: That’s true, and also thematically important, since we’re supposed to feel some disease about Phoenix’s power. So in the same story we have Phoenix transforming her outfits (with Lorna pretending not to be concerned about it), and Proteus turning Moira into a stumpy elephant bat thing and it being really serious.
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Uzumeri: Claremont also cleverly keeps the Wyngarde plot going, and the fight with Proteus provides a convenient excuse for Jean not totally freaking out over her hallucinations.
Godel: Yeah! It’s amazing how well the Wyngarde thing works actually – we know all about Claremont and MIND CONTROL, but here he sells it as this long, painstaking project, slowly enveloping Jean in this illusionary world.
Uzumeri: The procedural aspect totally changes it, because it doesn’t feel cheap. There’s a real internal logic to it, one that kind of parallels Jean’s behavior in the real world and her growing comfort level with showing off her powers.
Godel: There’s also some cool visual foreshadowing – like how scary Jean looks during the tests Moira gives her, and the little sequence of Wyngarde conjuring up different Jean costumes, leading to actual Jean, spaced-out and evil-looking.
(Click for the full-size image.)
Uzumeri: He’s just sort of slowly worming his way inside and making her want to, well, be bad.
Godel: The flipside of that is a dodgy gendered narrative – like, the thing that’s supposed to concern us is that shy, humble Jean isn’t afraid of using her superpowers, which I think would usually be a positive character arc for a male superhero.
The slow burn here also pumps up the Hellfire Club as a threat… look how far ahead they have to be planning everything! Shadowy councils that plan for everything are also a dime a dozen, but I actually kind of buy this one, even if their meeting room with thrones behind a giant pedestal is a little over the top.
Uzumeri: “Over the top” is totally the Hellfire Club’s MO, though. Still, back to Proteus – so, I completely and totally have, for years, conflated this story with the version in Millar’s Ultimate X-Men.
Godel: Ha, really? I definitely read that but I can’t remember it, what was the deal there?
Uzumeri: It wasn’t all that different, except the twist was that Xavier was Proteus’s father.
Godel: Ahahah, wow!
Uzumeri: Yeah. Millar basically conflated Proteus and Legion.
Godel: I can sort of get that, given that Xavier’s past is suspiciously littered with these brilliant foreign women, but I like the existence of Gabrielle Haller as a second character. Plus you’d figure there would be lots of material in having Moira and Xavier bond over their screwed-up kids.
Anyway, I like Moira getting to be in the spotlight here. All her scenes are pure gold, especially when she almost manages to take Proteus out with a rifle shot before Cyclops intervenes.
Uzumeri: Moira’s a great character, and this early stuff is really making me miss her being around…but man, how obvious is it that Moira MacTaggart is really just Emma Peel?
Godel: Hahha, I’ve never made that connection, but I’ve never watched Avengers either.
Uzumeri: That said, the Scottish brogue is, like, the one accent Claremont DOES seem to have some real-life experience with, so it comes off way more authentic than, say, anything out of Colossus or Nightcrawler’s mouth.
Godel: Just wait ’til we get to Rogue, sugah!
Uzumeri: Can we just skip Rogue? Jesus. I don’t think anyone ever made me care for Rogue until Mike Carey.
I mean, I’m sure that Claremont’s take might actually draw me in… I just grew up on the Lobdell and Nicieza iteration, and the will-they-won’t-they with Gambit is generally how I mentally define her character.
Godel: And that really is a Lobdell/Nicieza plot – she has a good 100+ issues in the Claremont run where we’ll get to see her doing other things.
Uzumeri: Was the whole Magneto-banging episode during the Claremont run?
Godel: Ohhhhh yes. It happens in the SAVAGE LAND, too.
Uzumeri: I knew that – of course it would, she doesn’t have powers there!
Godel: Forget Lobdell – now you’re just reminding us of your roots in the animated series!
Uzumeri: Wait, what? The whole …I… wow, yeah, I hadn’t even considered that I’ve read like 50-60 stories about the Savage Land in the past few years and in none of them did anyone lose their mutant powers.
Godel: I think there actually used to be an entry in the Usenet X-Men FAQ about it – it’s a common enough misconception!
Meanwhile, the team is finally reunited, after being split up for a year’s worth of issues. It’s nice but kind of anticlimactic.
Uzumeri: They never once thought to… call Muir Island?
Godel: Well, Professor X also left for Outer Space without thinking to leave a note in case anybody came looking for him, so clearly there’s some real communication issues in this comic. I really wonder about that entire “we thought they were dead” storyline…you’d expect it to lead to something but it doesn’t. I wonder if they had some bigger plan for it.
Uzumeri: I like that they still ditch Beast almost immediately, thus beginning the pattern of rejection and exclusion that led to his finally leaving Utopia!
Godel: Haha!
Uzumeri: I’d love to see them just get into it, and it eventually gets to “YOU DITCHED ME WHEN YOU WENT TO MUIR ISLAND YOU DIIIIIIIIIICK”
Godel: “Wait, we did what?” “You don’t even remember! Christ! I was standing around at the X-Mansion like all afternoon wondering where you were!”
Uzumeri: It’s in a letter to Hope. “You think you can trust Scott, but one day, he’ll totally ditch you when on the way to save some hot chicks. THINK ABOUT IT.”
Godel: That could actually turn into a good storyline, really, like for a while Hope seeks out a third father figure because she isn’t certain of Scott anymore, and Hank mentors her or something.
Uzumeri: Generation Hope might be going there. It’s definitely on the table.
Godel: So, uh, that sort of covers Proteus. There’s a nice little epilogue with Sean saying goodbye, and Scott hopelessly trying to get the Muir Island supporting cast to fill the vacant slot.
Uzumeri: Alex and Lorna: With great power comes great ducking of responsibility.
Godel: I’d be annoyed if I actually wanted them to join the team, but since they’re so desperately boring it’s kind of a relief.
Uzumeri: Alex has never really offered anything past a cool codename, has he?
Godel: I actually think Claremont’s angle on him is interesting: he’s got all of Scott’s neurosis, but none of his talent, and no real drive to do anything anyway. Peter Allen David’s 1990s X-Factor run takes the inferiority complex and crosses it with him being made the leader of a team. It’s a cool idea; I haven’t read enough of that run to say what exactly he does with it.
Uzumeri: Yeah, and now that I’ve soured so hard on PAD I can’t imagine myself going back to that stuff.
Godel: Really? I still think nu-X-Factor is pretty good! Kind of irrelevant continuity-wise, but a consistently entertaining team book whose characters I’m attached to way more than most of the other current x-casts.
Uzumeri: I’ve straight up stopped reading it, it’s sooooooooo inconsistent, and Peter David being a dick in public has ruined so much of it.
Godel: I think I missed a lot of the public dickery, or just forgot it or something.
Uzumeri: Oh, just lots of dumb statements like “how come white people can’t say nigger but black people can” and telling complaining fans that “ants can’t condescend to eagles” – standard ignorant old white dude shit.
Godel: Wow, so did he join the John Byrne message board or what?
Uzumeri: I can only assume!
Godel: With #129, we start what I’ve chunked out as a three-parter dealing with Emma Frost, although it typically has been treated as part of the longer Hellfire Club/Dark Phoenix saga that immediately follows. This is a bit more episodic, though, as one issue deals with Kitty in Chicago, another with Dazzler in New York, and the third of course brings everybody together to escape Frost’s cages and take her down.
Uzumeri: It’s a pretty classically constructed story: the X-Men have to split up into two teams to meet these two new mutants that Cerebro found, and then the Hellfire Club decides to take advantage of the division to conquer. Of course, this is all Professor Xavier’s fault, since he’s an asshole.
Although, can I just say, I loved seeing him in space as Charles Xavier, Misunderstood Primitive.
Godel: Oh yeah, totally great seeing him as just an unwanted hanger-on. I think I’ve mentioned the Classic X-Men backup story that’s entirely him wandering around annoying the shit out of the Shi’ar, and pouting about it.
Uzumeri: Haha, you haven’t! That’s amazing!
Godel: Oh yeah, it’s great, he butts into a treaty negotiation or something and is like “I have a suggestion!” and everyone basically stares at him until he leaves in a huff.
Uzumeri: aaaaahahahahahahaha. I also LOLed at Xavier coming back from space and treating the X-Men like kids.
Godel: Maybe he was compensating for his inferiority complex with the Shi’ar. But I love that scene – it makes Cyclops 1000% more sympathetic by comparison, just by putting an even more uptight pain-in-the-ass in charge. That and the “breaking Wolverine out of his funk by picking a fight with him” scene do wonders for the plausibility of Scott as team leader.
Uzumeri: Scott really comes across as way more together than he has in previous arcs; he’s got a more humanistic tack to leading the team than Xavier does, probably because he isn’t an old bald dude trying to act like a schoolmaster to people in their twenties.
Or, in Wolverine’s case, their eighties.
Godel: Haha, true, which plays to the idea that he can lead them because he’s fought alongside them – and for that matter shown that he can basically beat them all single-handed. You can understand Wolverine getting a grudging respect for a guy like that.
But the real news in this story is, of course, the debut of a female mutant character who will have an enormous, decades-long impact on the entire line…
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… wait, let me check my notes here. Dazzler?
Uzumeri: Coming next year in direct-market-only, ongoing series form to a comic shop near you!
Godel: Dazzler doesn’t get much to do in this story, but it’s worth noting that she’s not a Claremont/Byrne creation, and I suspect they’re basically gritting their teeth and cramming her into this story to make editorial happy.
She was actually conceived as a cross-promotional scheme pitched to Marvel by Casablanca Records – she would be a comic character that was also an act releasing singles, sort of like the earlier Archies or the later Jem and the Holograms. The immediate inspiration was Marvel’s comics about KISS (featured of course in a poster on Kitty Pryde’s bedroom wall). At one point, I swear to god, Bo Derek was somehow attached to the real-life Dazzler role.
Uzumeri: …what.
Godel: It all completely fell through, so suddenly Marvel had this disco-themed character, who had been built up in a major title, but was orphaned from her big promotional scheme. She ended up getting her own, rather soapish book (which soldiered on for three or four years with moderate sales), and then, after a capstone graphic novel, got shunted back into Uncanny, where we’ll pick her up again in due time.
There was actually a pitch for a Dazzler movie that would have featured Cher, Donna Summer, KISS, the Village People, and Robin Williams. You can read more here – but I think for our purposes what you see in this comic is what you get.
Uzumeri: And what we see is… I mean, everything around Dazzler’s appearance is absolutely bizarre. First off, were seedy discos even a thing?
Mama TOLD ME NOT TO COME!
I love how Claremont tries to give every single location its own flavor. Whenever they visit a city, it’s not just a setpiece, and he always has to drop like a two-to-three-paragraph thing about the city’s culture and basic nature.
Godel: Yeah, like, even though Kitty Pryde lives in some cushy suburb, we get the Chicago establishing shot and a little side note about the pizza. He seems a little more comfortable doing the seamy underbelly of New York, but you’re right, something’s a little funny here. I gotta say Byrne’s art doesn’t quite convey the shocking filth and seediness that the dialogue is going for – it just makes Scott and Jean seem like total squares.
Uzumeri: Dude, look at the disco MC. He looks like he just fell out of Bust-A-Groove.
“Ladeez an’ gennelmen”?
But aside from him, it looks like she’s performing at a punk show! I thought discos were all, like, opulent beauty and heavy cocaine use, not just a bunch of dudes standing around in cut-off t-shirts with noserings.
Godel: I think there might have been discos this seedy – but yeah, there’s some confusion of musical underground ontologies. It totally should be a punk show, or a hip-hop show for that matter.
Uzumeri: And wasn’t disco a heavily-produced genre where you really recorded before you started performing live?
Godel: I’m really hoping we get a bunch of comments from people who know a more about disco and explain how wrong we are.
Uzumeri: Also, her costume is a hell of an outfit to prep for your first show at some club in the asshole end of NYC.
Godel: It all reminds me of how Rock ‘n’ Roll High School was originally conceived as Disco High before someone patiently explained to Roger Corman that disco wasn’t really the kind of rebellious music that would lead up to teenagers blowing up a high school, which was the only plot point he really cared about.
But boy, would it have been better to make Dazzler a rapper! She would have seemed cutting edge rather than instantly dated.
Uzumeri: Honestly, what would have been much better is if this Jim Shooter treatment actually got made. Robin Williams, KISS and Rodney Dangerfield? This sounds like an utterly nonsensical, and yet completely beautiful, pop-culture orgy.
Godel: Oh, totally – every comics nerd would be scrambling today for rare laserdiscs of that.
Anyway, Dazzler ends up being kind of a forgettable cipher here, aside from the fact that she wears roller skates on a commando raid of Emma’s base. It doesn’t help that, unlike Kitty’s, her story isn’t really told from her perspective, so we don’t have much to latch on to.
Uzumeri: Likely because Claremont and Byrne couldn’t find much to latch on to narratively with her – they just had to show her off, no long-term plan or anything. They could just as easily have introduced her in Avengers instead, and it’s crazy to think how different that would have been.
Godel: Well, the idea was that she was definitely a mutant, although I have no idea why that would really be important to Casablanca Records. Anyway, it actually does serve the story well to do the whole “splitting up teams” thing, so I guess it might as well be her as anybody else they find.
But, uh, maybe we should give a few minutes’ time to Kitty Pryde.
Uzumeri: She isn’t overwhelmingly obnoxious in this arc, so that’s nice. My lack of love for Kitty Pryde is no secret; I’ve long thought her to be a really generic dream nerd-girl for the reader to fawn over, rather than a character anyone could actually RELATE to. But her thirteen-year-old self here isn’t quite that way, largely because she’s as young as thirteen. Even though she’s already hitting on Colossus, which is creepy.
Godel: Well, it’s more like she has a crush on Colossus and, as a 13-year-old high achiever, sort of awkwardly chats him up, but I guess yeah.
I think this works because she comes off as a precocious teenager, not yet so super-competent that she becomes unrelateable. The scene with her and Storm at the diner is just really adorable, and also her collapsing into tears when she finally finds the X-Men, after this freaky, terrifying night on the run from Emma’s goons. Like, I basically believe that they’re trying to write a teenage character here, not a Mary Sue.
(Click for the full-size image.)
Uzumeri: That’s exactly it. It’ll be interesting, as we go on, to see where everything starts tipping the other way and Kitty gets less and less tolerable, but then again I imagine a lot of that character development takes place over in Excalibur anyways.
Godel: Well, she’ll join the team properly in a few issues, and stick around until the Mutant Massacre, so I think we’ll see most of her character-defining scenes. But I might be saying that because I never read much of Excalibur. We’ll definitely hit the things that get most referenced by later writers, like “Professor Xavier is a jerk!” and so on. But get those when the time comes.
Uzumeri: This is a side note, but I love that Claremont puts in Wolverine straight-up reading porn mags while hanging out with a 13-year-old girl at a diner.
Godel: And picking a fight with the malt shoppe owner about it! Wolverine is such an unpleasant roughneck, it’s great.
The other thing about this Kitty story – it really is the most economical treatment ever of the mutancy-as-puberty theme. In two pages we get the whole idea: you’re thirteen, your body is doing weird things that you’re anxiously hiding from your parents…you’re right to say that it’s reader-bait in a certain way, but why not use that when the whole premise of mutants is that they get their powers when they’re teenagers?
Uzumeri: That whole scene gets a…kind of a funny nod from Whedon later, since she does the same “phase through the bed” thing the first time she’s fucking Colossus’s brains out.
(Astonishing X-Men #14, 2006. Art by John Cassaday and Laura Martin.)
Godel Ahahahha, wow, I never made that connection, but you’re right, it’s the same sequence but with a totally different setup.
Uzumeri: Which sort of takes the puberty theme full circle.
Godel: Speaking of puberty, our other big debut here is, of course, the White Queen.
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Uzumeri: Emma’s so amazingly one-note here, just straight-up murderous with a side of “sexy schoolmistress” and a base sauce of bitch. Reading this character, it is absolutely bizarre to process that she is banging Cyclops on the reg and able to have conversations with Kitty Pryde that don’t always end in profanity and brandished knives.
Godel: I’m gonna go ahead and say “get used to that” – Claremont will never write her as anything other than straight up cold-blooded and villainous, even when she has her own students. That later gets retconned, somewhat convincingly, by Scott Lobdell as part of the setup for Generation X, but throughout her Uncanny and New Mutants appearances, Emma is just evil evil evil. It’s amazing to realize that she’s now been a hero for longer than she was a villain.
Uzumeri: It does really magnify the fact that the “Emma Frost” we read about now is really largely a Lobdell creation, I guess with Morrison building on it. Whedon referenced the events of this arc when he reintroduced Kitty in Astonishing X-Men #1, but other than that the entire Marvel Universe seems to have completely forgotten that Emma was, like, a supervillain.
Godel: Emma converting to good is in a weird way more plausible than Magneto doing the same, even though she was more consistently villainous with a shorter turnaround, just because less people would have known about the villainy. Kitty has a personal grudge, etc., but the general public has no reason not to trust the heroism of this acclaimed, high-society private school headmistress.
Uzumeri: True, meanwhile Magneto has committed numerous acts of mass murder in the name of terrorist jihads on live international television. But still, the Emma in #129-131 is someone who straight up murdered people, and who, as far as I’m aware, has never, ever paid their debt to society.
Godel: Nope, never – that’s a great point. She was in a coma for thirty issues, which is some sort of comic book purgatory in a meta sense, but in-story she just walked away from all that.
Uzumeri: Present-day Scott Summers has managed to turn both Emma Frost AND Magneto into his absolute biggest fans, and I mean, that’s so fucked up when you look at all this early material.
Godel: It’s crazy, but they both have storylines that more or less get them to that point. The Magneto thing is a major project for Claremont, after all, but we’re still a ways ahead of that. The only other thing I have to say about Emma in these issues is that Terry Austin has clearly found his calling, inking in all that bodice stitching.
Uzumeri: I also appreciate how blue-collar her Hellfire Club goons are.
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Godel: Yeah, one more thing that reminds me of that one Invisibles story. If they didn’t get all this “Mutie freak!” dialogue too, you’d feel bad for these schmoes who just signed up to be security guards at a goofy themed club and end up getting gored by Wolverine or whatever.
Anyway! Any last thoughts on this batch?
Uzumeri: Now things are really starting to feel like some classic X-Men shit. I’m really enjoying this project, and knowing that things are only gonna get crazier from here – Dark Phoenix, Days of Future Past, Return o’ Cockrum – is exciting.
Godel: Yeah, we’re definitely in the meat – these are the stories people remember and talk about when they talk about the “classic” run. It’s hard to look at them with really fresh takes, but I have to say they’re really damned entertaining superhero comics.
In our next x-chapter: No more fooling around, no more foreshadowing – it’s the DARK PHOENIX SAGA! But before that, we swing back to our Morrison project for a look at AZTEK: THE ULTIMATE MAN, possibly in as soon as one week’s time!
