STORY: "The Triumph of Magneto" (20 pages)  Professor X and Magneto both try to recruit the Stranger.  But he turns out to be an alien, and abducts Magneto and the Toad.

What you need to know:
It's the first appearance of the Stranger, one of those enigmatic cosmic characters who helpfully does what the plot calls of him.  According to him, he's here representing "his people" who are interested in mutation.  This doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense in the light of later origin stories. 

The first stab at an origin was in Fantastic Four #116, which claimed that he was a cosmic being formed by merging all of the inhabitants of the planet Gigantus together.  The current version is in Quasar #16, which suggests that he's a kind of cosmic vivisectionist with connections to the Living Tribunal (don't ask).  That version at least makes more sense for the story as a whole, but it still doesn't match what he actually says. 

X-Men Forever elaborates a little further and tells us that the Stranger's aim is to accelerate the evolution of mankind, thereby bringing about the end of the universe (again, it's all rather complicated).  He hopes to be the sole survivor of this universe and occupy Galactus' place in the next universe.  No doubt it all makes perfect sense to him.

Anyhow, Magneto makes a rather obnoxious attempt to recruit the Stranger into the Brotherhood.  The Stranger is less than impressed and the result is the destruction of the Brotherhood's first incarnation.  He abducts Magneto and Toad to his own prison planet.  Don't worry, they'll be back soon enough.

The Stranger apparently can't be bothered with Mastermind and simply turns him to stone (sorry, "a solid block of matter").  It wears off in the end, but he doesn't turn up again until the Factor Three storyline, some way down the line.

That leaves Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch.  They decide they've done enough to repay their debt to Magneto, and call it a day.  Cyclops offers them membership in the X-Men, but instead they announce their intention to return home to "central Europe."  (Or more accurately, Pietro says that's what they're going to do, and Wanda nods meekly.)

If you're wondering, the title's ironic.  Magneto wanted to beat the X-Men and get to the Stranger first.  And he did.

Cerebro starts beeping at the end, to signal the imminent arrival of the Juggernaut.  (Of course, the Juggernaut's not a mutant, but whatever...)

A more innocent time:
Professor X has a new and needlessly elaborate way of finding new mutants.  Who needs Cerebro when you have "a radar-image beam" which "converts radar blips into pictures of the object"?  Quite how that helps you track down mutants, I'm not sure, but it finds the Stranger well enough...

The police are acting very oddly.  Ordered to "investigate anybody suspicious", they decide to stop Scott for the heinous crime of wearing sunglasses on a cloudy day.  Later, the Beast successfully distracts them by... er, jumping and down a bit.  ("He almost has a hypnotic effect!")

Marvel Girl compares Cyclops to Richard Chamberlain.

Bystander: "It's one of the X-Men!!  Some grave fantastic menace must be waiting inside!"

The Juggernaut is so scary that even Cerebro is frightened of him.  Says Xavier, "I've never seen a mere electronic device register such an extreme condition of panic!"  Cerebro signifies its panic as best it can, by beeping more than usual.

Comments:
Well, this is an odd one.  The Stranger doesn't really fit in the X-Men's world - something that must have dawned on Lee and Kirby pretty quickly, because he turns up in issue #18 and then never bothers the X-Men again for decades before showing up again in X-Men Forever.  To be fair, at least the "cosmic vivisectionist" origin story kind of fits with what's going on here, and it gives him some kind of rationale for taking an interest in the mutants.  Mind you, I tend to think they'd have been better off just leaving him as an enigma.

The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants are dissolved, which must have come as a huge surprise at the time.  Until now, it had seemed as though almost the entire series was built around Magneto and his Brotherhood as their stock villains.  While they were never entirely forgotten about, this signals a clear change of direction for the book - one where not every villain is connected to Magneto!

FEATURE CHARACTERS
Professor X, the Angel, Cyclops, Marvel Girl I, the Beast and Iceman (the latter two appear between pages in Marvels #2)

GUEST STAR
The Stranger (first appearance; last in flashback in Quasar #16; next in X-Men Forever #3)

VILLAINS
The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants I: Magneto (last behind the scenes in issue #8), the Toad (last in issue #7; both next in X-Men Forever #3), Mastermind I (last in issue #8; turned to stone; next, after returning to normal, behind the scenes in issue #26), Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch (both between Strange Tales vol 1 #128 and Marvel Heroes & Legends '97; the Brotherhood is dissolved in this story following the abduction of Magneto and the Toad and the incapacitaiton of Mastermind)
The Juggernaut (behind the scenes; last in X-Men Forever #3)

Last revised: 16 August 2004

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