STORY: "The Ghost and the Darkness" (22 pages)  The Savage Land tribesmen have mistakenly sent Marvel Girl to their Land of the Dead - actually an industrial city run by Magneto.  The other X-Men head after her.

What you need to know:
Not surprisingly, Marvel Girl turns out to be alive.  The locals just decided that she was terminally injured, and packed her off to the "Place of Passage" for transport to their supposed Land of the Dead.  The Land of the Dead turns out to be a city, presently ruled by Magneto, where your wounds are healed and you live out your life in a slave workforce.  It's an industrial hellhole, basically.  The city's healing properties are given a pseudo-scientific explanation in issue #4, but suffice to say it's just the way things work down there.

The actual population of the city are a race of pterodactyl people who pose as masked priests when they're dealing with the gullible Savage Land tribesmen.  They're called the Nhu'Ghari, as we discover next issue.  This is so similar to "N'Garai", the name of a race of demons who the X-Men fought several times in Claremont stories, that it can't be a coincidence.  It's never explained, so presumably Byrne was planning to come back to it.  The Nhu'Ghari's origin story - or at least, the version they believe - is given in issue #3.

In a regular theme for this series, the X-Men split up even further, as Angel tries flying into the Land of the Dead, while Cyclops and Beast try the normal route down a river.  Angel duly gets caught up in a high wind and crashes into a mountainside, where he's rescued by a girl who'll be named next issue as Avia.  She's a bird-woman hybrid, and apparently a Nhu'Ghari mutant.  Unlike Angel, she's got wings instead of arms.  She'll be sticking around for a good long time to come.  Oh, and she's mute.

Marvel Girl spends the whole issue asleep on a table.  Magneto doesn't want to wake her up.

After storming out on the X-Men, Iceman has spent the night on the couch at the flat shared by Zelda (his occasional Silver Age girlfriend) and Vera Cantor.  It takes him until the next morning to get around to mentioning that he got into a fight over another girl.  Since he never actually got around to dumping Zelda, she's not wildly amused by this.

Meanwhile, Professor X evidently notices that he's lost contact with the X-Men and summons Alex and Lorna to help.  He must be panicking, because Iceman senses it all the way off in New York (which he attributes to his years spent at the school).  That starts him off on his quest to catch up with the X-Men and help them out, which will take him most of the next year.

Vera is deeply suspicious about Bobby's behaviour.  She calls the only other Silver Age supporting character she's met, Warren's girlfriend Candy Southern, and asks what's going on at the school.  Candy already knows that Warren's one of the X-Men, but decides to go and visit the school anyway, thus drawing her into the book's regular cast.

The cover displayed to the right is a variant (part of the the "2 for 2" programme Marvel was running at the time, in an attempt to boost orders for second issues).  The number #68 appears on the main cover, on a mushroom on the right-hand side, level with Cyclops' neck.

An 8-page insert in the middle of the book carries part 2 of the notoriously dreadful anti-drugs story "Fast Lane", of which the less said the better.  It appeared in every Marvel book for this week.

Comments:
You can tell it's going to be a traditional superhero story when the book opens with Cyclops recapping the previous issue's plot in a flashback, and then demonstrating his powers in a gratuitous fight with a dinosaur.

The X-Men are already getting split up all over the place, something which is going to be a regular theme in this book.  The X-Men spend remarkably little time together in X-Men: The Hidden Years, and instead Byrne scatters them all in separate plot strands of their own, which he then has to juggle.  At this point, it's working quite nicely. 

There's also a neat little twist as the Savage Land tribesmen's religious convictions are revealed to be hopelessly wrong.  And Magneto's presence is just about enough to answer the question "What makes this an X-Men story?", something that a lot of X-Men Savage Land stories fail to answer.  Pretty good, on the whole.

FEATURE CHARACTERS
Professor X (behind the scenes), Cyclops, the Angel, the Beast and Marvel Girl I

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
Iceman (next in issue #4)
Vera Cantor (next in Amazing Adventures vol 2 #13) and Zelda (no further appearances for either; both last in flashback in Marvel Holiday Special 1994)
Candy Southern (last in the Angel story in Marvel Tales #30; next in issue #5)
Avia (first appearance)

VILLAINS
Magneto
The Nhu'Ghari (first appearance; last in flashback in issue #4)

OTHER CHARACTERS
Savage Land tribesmen
Zelda's mother (behind the scenes; first and only reference)

Written: 23 October 2005

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