An X-men classic - Storm vs. Callisto

[angelophile]

For Black History Week.

Back in Uncanny X-men #170, Angel had been kidnapped by the Morlocks to be their leader, Callisto's, love slave (hey thar Claremont) and Kitty is dangerously ill, thanks to the Morlock Plague. Which leaves the X-men with no choice - the only way to save their friends is to claim the right of leadership over the Morlocks and the only way to do that is by defeating Callisto. Step forward... Nightcrawler! But apparently the leader of the X-men has other ideas...











Lesson #1 in Don't Fuck With Storm class.

Comments

[cleome45]

Paul Smith's stuff didn't do it for me. It was technically nice, but it always felt so... hollow. I could admire it up to a point, but I never warmed to it.

I also remember, at the time, being once again irritated about the whole "ugly"-people (especially women) are evil and bad-- again. I suppose as she got to be more sympathetic, Callisto got more conventionally attractive, right?

[zenbro]

Yes. Same thing happened to Marrow as well. She went from skull-with- female-features to a button-nosed fairy princess with cute horns.

[angelophile]

Yeah, that element does tend to be rather grating. I did like Morrison's X-men in terms of him taking the "ugly" characters out of the underground and sticking them in the school with everyone else, although there was still that element of segregation, it did muddy the waters as far as the "ugly mutant = evil / attractive mutant = good" equation went.

[jlbarnett]

the most evil mutants are usually pretty attractive. Usually the ugly mutants are just kind of thuggish. The pretty ones want to conquer and enslave. The ugly one are just stand-offish and short tempered.

[icon_uk]

Before Morrison came along, we'd had Marrow, Skin, Penance and Chamber as students/X-Men, which perhaps wasn't a massive step in the right direction, but seems to have been at least a start.

IIRC around the time the story above came out, Claremont had plans to make Caliban a resident of the X-Mansion, replacing Cerebro as "handy mutant tracker", but changed his mind.

[icon_uk]

I think it's the other way round in this case, for at least some of the characters. Whilst some of the Morlocks were the "non-pretty mutant" kind, a lot of them were normal looking but let Masque alter them so they weren't normal looking as a sort of gang initiation.

[tpsreports]

You see I love Smith's work but maybe it's because these are the X-men I grew up with.