The Birth of Phoenix, Part 3: X-Men 99

X-Men #99 (June 1976)
"Deathstar, Rising" 
Chris Claremont-Dave Cockrum/Frank Chiaramonte

Doug: Welcome back, as we wind our way through the first epic in the All-New, All-Different X-Men. Let's get right into this installment, in which the team discovers that all is not what they thought with Dr. Steven Lang and his Sentinels!

Karen: I remember when this issue came out how annoyed I was with the color errors on pages 1, 16, and 17 - what should have been red was purple, what should have been yellow was blue, and so on. The worst thing though was that X-Men was still bimonthly! I would re-read issues a dozen times over before the next one came out!

Doug: Banshee's face on the splash page is just vintage Cockrum. We've said before that Dave's work was very distinctive, yet somewhat hard to put a finger on as to why. For me it's always the faces.

Karen: There's something about his style that is very rounded, graceful; and yet, he pulls off the technical stuff, like the space shuttle, very well.

Doug: I'll have to admit that I had to read page 2 twice. Call me dense, but the columnar lay-out got me the first time. Made a heck of a lot more sense once I figured out the panel order. And hey, I've always been one of those readers who thought the directional arrows some artists use are insulting to my intelligence. Joke was on me here, though!

Doug: But anyway, can any of you physics experts out there explain to me why our three heroes weren't sucked inside out by the vacuum of space? Unless I missed it, when they burst through the hull of the carrier in the last issue they were not wearing any transuits (that's in the Legion, right?) force fields, etc. So by the time the Sentinels got out there to envelop them in the bubbles it should have been too late.
Karen: Yes, even as a kid I knew better. I guess we just have to suppose that the sentinels got there pretty darn fast. And a good thing too, because I would hate to see inside-out mutants!

Doug: How about Geraldo Rivera turning up in this story?? He was a muckraker from the very beginning...

Karen: Yes, that panel was hilarious. Dig that groovy hair!

Doug: Karen, you mentioned the intricate (too much?) backstories that Claremont devised for these characters. It's in this issue that we learn that Petr's brother Mikhail was one of the USSR's first cosmonauts. But, wouldn't that have made him much older than Colossus?

Karen: Sure seems like it. Gagarin went up in 1961, 15 years prior to this issue. But even beyond that, how does a poor peasant from a tiny obscure village just happen to have a brother who was a cosmonaut? To make matters worse, his sister later become a demon-child! It's just a lot of unnecessary junk that Claremont always lays onto characters.

Doug: As the story goes, Corbeau commandeers a space shuttle and the earth-bound X-Men head to the carrier to rescue their mates. There's a funny scene with Colossus getting airsick. The shuttle is attacked by space-faring Sentinels (as I said last time, it's revealed that this version of the giant robots was inferior to their predecessors -- these guys don't seem to have too much trouble navigating the cosmos, however), and the progression of the battle necessitates Corbeau ramming the shuttle right into the side of the carrier. But again, no vacuum of space. I wonder if Claremont had done any reading on this issue at all, because he writes this like a 1950's DC rather than a Bronze Age Marvel...

Karen: It's almost as if he couldn't be bothered to come up with a reasonable way to get the team on the station because he was in such a hurry to move the story forward. Although, for all we know,Cockrum may have been the one to bring these elements into the story. In any case, your description is apt.

Doug: Three pages of full-on battle ensue, and Claremont and Cockrum manage to work in some characterization that will stick with these characters for year's to come. Of note would be their depictions of Nightcrawler's and Colossus's personalities.

Karen: Colossus flips out over Storm's safety. It seems that they might have been planning for those two to become a couple, or at least have Colossus be interested in Storm. In later issues, we see both Nightrawler and Colossus show romantic inclinations towards her, although Storm seems uninterested in either of them. I'm glad they never explored these ideas further! I thought the panel of Storm and Colossus in profile was a nice example of Cockrum's skill with faces, as you have mentioned Doug.Doug: Cyclops leaves the team so he can rescue Jean and the Professor from Lang. Once he finds them, Cyke cuts loose with his fists, not his optic blasts, and beats Lang to a pulp. Jean stops him before he kills Lang. You know, Scott Summers has always been an edgy character, but Claremont was really putting him through the wringer in these early issues. I think what we see here is the stress and frustration of leading the new team, the death of Thunderbird, and his growing love for Jean Grey all manifesting itself in a Wolverine-like berserker rage.

Karen: This is the Cyclops I used to love, not that screwed up joke they have over at Marvel now. Here was a guy who had kept so much bottled up inside -both his eye beams and his emotions - and Claremont was showing how he was finally, through his relationship with Jean, beginning to allow himself to feel. His love for her and his sense of responsibility for the team made him a compelling character. Now he just seems to be a jerk who's into telepathic chicks.

Doug: The last page is a full splash to remember -- the new team rounds a corner to come face-to-face with the original five. And the originals ain't happy!