This issue the X-Men encounter their strangest villain to date! This issue they meet The Stranger!
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The X-Men receive an emergency alert from Professor X and they all rush to his call, only to be greeted with a strange radar beam coming from a massive machine. This is Xavier's second way to detect the presence of mutants, Cerebro is the first. This method is not as reliable as Cerebro though, because just as the radar beam is about to take the shape of a mutant, the image distorts and explodes.
Not far away from all this commotion in the mansion, an older looking gentlemen is about to rent a room from a very fast talking, no nonsense landlady. His odd appearance is quickly forgotten as he hands her a massive wad of money, and he ventures off to wander the city streets. He calls himself The Stranger.
After walking about a block he is amazed and annoyed at the fact that people wait so long to cross the street, so he decides to levitate and just walk right over it. When he sees all the astonished looks he gets from strangers, he high tails it down some streets, until he feels an odd calling to enter an apartment building by passing through it's outer brick wall. When he appears inside he is greeted by The Brotherhood.
The X-Men are out patrolling the city looking for this new mutant, but unsure of what they look like, so they resort to asking people around town. Cyclops overhears some police speaking about the odd occurrence of a man walking over a street, when suddenly the cops start to harass him for wearing sunglasses, stating that "only a guy on the lam wouldn't remove sunglasses". The police pull off his sunglasses and jump back as Cykes optic beam shoots out toward the ground. Thankfully Beast is there to grasp Cyclops by the shoulders and whisk him away into one of Iceman's ice tubes, and back toward the rest of the team.
The Brotherhood have asked The Stranger to join their cause, and are now flexing their mutant muscle and giving The Stranger a taste of their power. Magneto calls all metal objects from the room to wrap themselves around The Stranger, then Mastermind quickly makes The Stranger feel as if he is trapped at the bottom of the ocean, then standing beside an erupting volcano.
The Stranger doesn't like these games, so he decides to show The Brotherhood his power. He breaks through Mastermind's illusions, and then casts a power beam at him and turns Mastermind into stone! As the now stone Mastermind falls through the floor, a shopkeeper from below calls out for help. The X-Men hear his call and arrive on the scene.
There is a small skirmish between Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch, and the X-Men, which allows for The Stranger to transform into a whirlwind and take Magneto and Toad out of the apartment an off to another location.
The spat between the teams quickly ends with Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver expressing how tired they are of this debt they owe Magneto, and decide they have paid their debt and end their time in The Brotherhood. The X-Men offer them a spot on their team, but they decline, stating that they just want to go home back to central Europe.
The X-Men hop into their third helicopter, this time with Professor X, and Xavier guides them to the location of Magneto, Toad, and The Stranger. They land in a park, and find Magneto and Toad lying on the ground wrapped in an anti-magnetic membrane. Apparently these cocoons aren't just limiting their mutant powers.
The Stranger appears again and explains that he is a stranger from the stars. His people are greatly interested in mutants, and so The Stranger journeys from planet to planet looking for mutants to take back home to be studied. These cocoons he has placed around Magneto and Toad will prepare and protect them on the intergalactic journey they are about to embark on...never to return.
The Stranger, Magneto, and Toad then turn into forms of energy and rocket off into the galaxy.
Back at the mansion Professor X is updating his Cerebro alert board, removing the names of all The Brotherhood...then suddenly Cerebro starts to beep and Xavier knows that it has just picked up a reading from the strongest mutant the X-Men will ever face.
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Well, this sure was an issue. Though it wasn't the most exciting issue I've read (granted it was better than anything involving the blob, or last issue with Ka-Zar), it actually is a really important issue. This issue sets up the X-Men's cosmic universe.
Now to be clear, this is not the X-Men's first contact with a cosmic entity. If you will remember in issue 9, the X-Men encounter The Avengers. Thor is technically a cosmic power in my opinion. So first contact would have happened upon their meeting. This is something entirely different.
This expands the X-Men's villain threat. Before this incident, all the villains were Earthbound human mutants. Now, the X-Men realize that they will face threats that won't be from this planet, or even this galaxy, and there is the potential that they will be immensely under prepared for the power that they bring with them when they attack.
I'm also hoping that by introducing this cosmic character known as The Stranger, Stan and Jack both said "yeah, we need to change it up, The Brotherhood isn't as cool as we thought", so this was their way of essentially disbanding The Brotherhood. It tied everything up in a nice little bow, leaving no real questions unanswered, and now they can move on to bigger and apparently more powerful villains. That's a good thing too, because The Brotherhood really never did anything.
The conflict between the two teams was very reminiscent of cold war era tactics. These two super powers were constantly pushing each other. One team, normally the Brotherhood, making bold threats, and the X-Men retaliating and stopping those threats from happening. So after quite a bit of back and forth, I believe that everyone was looking forward to meeting some new threats against the X-Men...who knew they would be so bold as to add in cosmic strangers!
I wasn't a huge fan of this issue at first. Then as I thought about it, and I realized just how important this stranger was to shaping the X-Men book, I really enjoyed it a lot more. It's still not Stan or Jack's best in any way, but the significance of what this issue will play on future books I feel is big.
Till next issue!
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