"Out With the Old"

[flint_marko]

This is from the back-up story in Classic X-Men #7, by Chris Claremont and John Bolton.

The story begins at the Hellfire Club's annual gala.



"...to disarm one's foe by pretending friendship prior to an attack."

Shaw contacts Emma, who is at Shaw's beach house. He asks about Colonel Rossi, who they had rescued after his plane crashed. Emma tells him that she telepathically scanned his memories, and that his aircraft had been attacked by sentinels after Rossi's meeting with Steven Lang.



Suddenly a sentinel attacks the beach house.



Once they arrive, the Sentinel starts to spray them with nerve gas. Shaw starts punching down the remaining walls so the wind will blow the gas away, and to absorb the energy from the punches to make him stronger.





Harry Leland uses his powers to increase the sentinel's mass, causing it to sink halfway into the ground and allowing Shaw to destroy it.

Comments

[auggie18]

Huh. So Emma has killed a fair number of people. Good to know.

[icon_uk]

I don't think she's ever denied it.

[auggie18]

In the post about Children's Crusade, there was a panel in which Wiccan was calling out the X-men on how many criminals and murderers they have on their team. At the time, a bunch of commenters were trying to get a solid grasp on Emma's body count. She's got quite a few people under her belt.


And a horse.


BUTTER RUM: NEVER FORGET.

[freezer]

It's pretty much the elephant in the room with the X-Books: At least half the current roster should be doing long stretches in prison.

[brooms]

i think they acknowledge said elephant somewhat often. recently, there was that show of hands prompted by ororo in the first issue of gillen's uncanny and hawkeye talked about it when the x-men stopped by avenger's academy.

[icon_uk]

That's some beautiful Bolton artwork, his backup strips on Classic X-Men were often gorgeous (I always loved the one with Wolverine challenging Nightcrawler to walk down the street without his image inducer, and IIRC the one about Kurt meeting a child in a hospital)

[pyynk]

Love the way that the clothing actually looks like it's made of cloth. Which does sound a bit redundant, but a lot of artists make clothing look airbrushed onto skin.

[icon_uk]

Complete agreement, love it when artists can give clothing a little depth to it, and cape-drape is always a winner.

[salinea]

Yeah, I love those.

[valismedsen]

Thanks for this, I knew Emma had done it, but as I had never read the story I didn't know it was in a kind of self-defence (even if cold-blooded). The way I see it they did as much as for mutantkind safety as for power and revenge, at least in their own minds. Agreed?

[icon_uk]

If you're taking out the people who have already deliberately unleashed a giant robot assassin on you, yes I think you're justified in some retaliation.

[wizardru]

I think that's true for a lot of the X-characters. Generally, the theme is 'we do bad things because if we don't, an uncaring world will do worse and more to us'.

While Claremont certainly didn't invent that idea, even on the X-Men, he certainly thrust it to the center and made it large. In the late 60s, Magneto was still a megalomaniac, but he was transitioning into more of a 'true believer'. Claremont turned him into the character we now know.

Most of the Claremont/Byrne created villains the X-men faced during the 1970s/1980s were more complex villains with believable (if often misguided or self-delusional) goals. And many of them did bad things, used the 'you don't have the right to judge me' clause and then eventually got pulled towards the light by the X-men (or went way darker). No other supergroup has the kind of track record the X-Men do of taking villains and reforming them (or taking great risks to TRY).

[salinea]

That's one of the thing I love about X-Men.

Always been a sucker for a good redemption story.

[crabby_lioness]

I wish Marvel would finish collecting the Claremont/Bolton backups. Those were some of the best stories ever.

[grazzt]

I loved this story and this entire incarnation of the Hellfire Club. I even miss Harry Leland.

Loved these

[capt_satellite]

As much as I disliked the editing, and new material they inserted into the reprint stories of Classic X-men, these backup features by Claremont and Bolton really got great mileage out of some of the untold stories behind the issues they accompanied. They filled holes in the stories without horribly clumsy and inept recons. Great post, Flint!

[eyz]

Back when, even Emma's costume looked sort of classy despite looking like this...all thanks to the classy art~~