Coming off an exciting issue 4, we'll continue the adventure of the X-Men as they battle The Brotherhood without their leader!
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Our Team this week:
Xavier is powerless. The team's morale is low. The Brotherhood might have the upper hand this issue.
The X-men bring Professor X back home to the mansion so he can get some much needed rest. However, their time to brood over what has happened to them is short lived, as Jean Grey remembers that her parents will be visiting the mansion today at the Professors request.
The team cleans up, dons their homo sapiens attire, and gracefully greets the Greys at the front door with Warren Worthington taking the lead and charming the parents. As they give a quick tour of the mansion to The Grey's, Cyclops gets locked in the Danger Room by accident and has to destroy many of the obstacles that were meant for The Beast's training with his optic blast.
Pleased with meeting everyone, The Grey's drive off toward their final destination. They don't notice the man cloaked in brown attire hiding just out of sight. Mastermind is looking for the X-Men's location...but isn't having any luck.
Frustrated, Magneto sends Quicksilver to pick him up in a rocket powered by his magnetism and bring him back to Asteroid M. This is the base for The Brotherhood. This space base is where Magneto and his team derive an ingenious plan to discover where the X-Men's base is. They plant Toad in a televised track and field race.
A disguised Toad leaps over all the runners in the race, and jump back into costume to go and speak to this new mutant. When they arrive at the field, the crowd is rioting against the mutant racer, and the X-Men intervene to save him. It isn't until they get a chance to speak to the racer, and pull off the mask that he is wearing, that they see he is really Toad, Magnetos right hand man.
The Brotherhood strike against the X-Men again with full force at the train station in hopes to not only reclaim their counterpart, but to also gain more intel on the X-Men...to their surprise they not only get the upper hand of the team, they actually kidnap Angel!
On Asteroid M, Magneto uses light and sound to torture Angel into giving information on the X-Men's base. Angel, not wanting to put anyone else in danger keeps his lips sealed.
On Earth, the X-men still have possession of Toad. Suddenly, he goes into an odd trance and mumbles to himself something about getting home. That's when the X-Men notice a transmitter on Toad's leg, and see the shuttle landing on the docks to transport Toad. The X-Men, noticing that Toad isn't aware of their actions, jump into the shuttle with Toad in an attempt to invade Asteroid M and save their friend.
The X-Men surprise everyone on Asteroid M, and a massive fight ensues between the two teams. Angel is rescued, but Cyclops is thrown out of the airlock into space as Asteroid M breaks apart all around them.
Iceman creates an ice tunnel to prevent Cyclops from floating off into space, and Angel soars through the tunnel to catch him. The team make it back to another escape pod as Asteroid M explodes, and land back on Earth safe and sound.
When they return back to the mansion to give Professor X a report. They find that he is in good health and good spirits. He explains that they need not report to him, as his was with them the entire time. Xavier had in fact never lost his powers at all, he merely faked his powerlessness to put his exemplary team through their final test.
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First off - dick move Xavier, real dick move. In issue 5 we establish that The Brotherhood is one of the most fearsome teams that pose the biggest threat to humankind, and he starts the feud which Magneto will never break...then he just totally abandons the team when things get tough??? With leadership like this, who needs enemies!
The X-Men were left defeated on many levels after issue 4, going into issue 5 they almost seemed hopeless. I am pretty sure Cyclops probably contemplating ending it all since he takes even lighthearted stuff so seriously. Then they find out that Xaiver was "joking" and we get a freeze frame sitcom ending from the 80s? Wow. I don't even know where to go with this other than just calling out that Xavier is a dick.
Also - what the hell was Magneto before he was a super villain? He can create all these crazy machines, he knows how to get nuclear weapons easily, and now he has a flipping asteroid?! Not only that, but if we look at the logic I mean he would have had to build all the facilities on that asteroid himself, as well as put in an artificial gravity system and oxygen network. I mean, this is pretty advanced stuff. I have a theory.
We don't currently know where or how Magneto gained his powers, but based off what we've learned about him from the couple of issues that he has been in, I think that Magneto is a former NASA employee.
At this point in the history of homo sapiens, NASA was originally working on Project Mercury at the time. This was NASA's first man-in-space program. They had objectives to orbit a manned spacecraft around Earth, to investigate man's ability to function in space, and to recover both man and spacecraft successfully.
So here is what I am thinking. Since work on this project started many years before, I believe that Magneto was an engineer at NASA working on Project Mercury. He most likely helped design the space craft, as well as worked on several ideas on what man would need in space to function properly. One of those things being gravity. Through his experiments he learned how to achieve artificial gravity...but NASA claimed his experiments were too risky to implement into Project Mercury.
At this point, we can assume that Magneto had his powers of magnetism. He was disgruntled, holding a massive grudge against homo sapiens, so he started to destroy them. His raid in issue one wasn't just to threaten humanity, but also to gather government quality supplies from the Cape. So in issue one I believe his attack against the Cape really was a red herring. Magneto had already taken all the supplies that he required to build his base on Asteroid M...the attack just covered up the fact that the supplies were missing.
So Magneto essentially made all of those "risky" theoretical experiments he needed reality, and is using them to fight the humans and the X-Men.
This again was another great issue from the Lee/Kirby team-up. X-men started rough...let's just hope we don't lose steam with some more flavor of the week villains over the next few issues.
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