STORY: "I, Lucifer" (20 pages)  Lucifer uses X-Men impostors to attract the team's attention.  He mentally attacks Professor X, but the X-Men save the Professor and set out to stop Lucifer.

What you need to know:
Professor X tells Marvel Girl how he lost the use of his legs.  Basically, the story involves Xavier travelling to Tibet and investigating "a mysterious walled city in the shadow of the Himalayas."  The city turns out to be under Lucifer's control.  It's a beach head for Lucifer's race to invade Earth.  Xavier leads an insurrection, and Lucifer's superiors tell him to abandon the city rather than risk attracting attention.  So he does, but he crushes Xavier's legs with a stone block first.  For some reason, X-Treme X-Men #46 relocates this story to Afghanistan.

Lucifer's superior, the Supreme One, gives the go-ahead to unveil Dominus (their super-computer) and conquer the world.  Apparently it's a good strategic location rather than an end in itself.

The Blob and Unus rob a bank, posing as members of the X-Men.  This is the disadvantage of team uniforms - anyone wearing one can claim to be on the team.  It's all a scheme by Lucifer, who's trying to lure the X-Men into attacking.  He's manipulating them telepathically.

A flashback establishes that the two met up when their respective carnivals crossed paths.  Unus wasn't actually in a carnival the last time we saw him, in issue #8 - he was a professional wrestler.  But I suppose it's not unreasonable that he'd find himself working the carnival circuit - there can't have been too much mileage in the "stand there while the other guy bounces off your force field" match. 

Anyway, the Blob fought Unus in an open challenge to the crowd, and if you care about such things, it was a draw.  After all, they both have largely defensive powers.

Thanks to Lucifer's interference, the Beast's special anti-Unus ray from issue #8 doesn't work any more.

Cyclops leaves the team out of the blue (ie, to set up a subplot for the new writer).  He plans to find a doctor who can cure him, so that he'll be able to pursue Jean.  Okay, the connection's a little tenuous, but Scott seems pretty clear about it.  Of course, by sheer blind luck, Cyclops stumbles upon the Blob and Unus, and ends up reporting back to the X-Men about it.

Xavier builds a new Cerebro, to replace the one Magneto demolished in issue #18.  This one looks a bit more high-tech.

A more innocent time:
Scott, on leaving: "Until that day, the world shall hear no more from the one it knows only as... Cyclops."

Xavier sets out to build an alarming-sounding device which he calls "a mechanical memory inducer."  Ah, the happy days when the word "mechanical" sounded exotically scientific...

Professional wrestlers in circuses taking open challenges from the crowd?  Actually, this sort of thing wasn't entirely unknown - on occasion, wrestlers who actually knew how to fight did take challenges from the crowd in order to legitimise the rest of the show.  (It helps when the referee's on your side.)

Scott isn't sure who the two guys in X-Men costumes are.  Okay, I understand him not recognising Unus under a mask.  But the Blob...?!?

Comments:
My god, there's a lot of plot in this issue.  When people talk about how much more story you used to get in the old days, this is the kind of thing they mean.  Even by Silver Age standards, this could happily have filled two or three issues.

It's Roy Thomas' first issue as writer, beginning a run which would go through to issue #44.  He later returned for a second run, from issues #55-66, in collaboration with Neal Adams.  That's the better known Thomas run - but at time of writing, it's out of print, so don't hold your breath for me to get around to it.

This was Thomas' first regular assignment on a superhero title.  (He was already writing Nick Fury & His Howling Commandos, but that's another genre.)  He was always a huge superhero fan, and the arrival of writers like Thomas has often been identified as a turning point where Marvel brought in a second generation of writers who came at superheroes from a fan background.

Thomas had a definite fondness for playing with pre-established characters, as we'll see over the next few issues - though he did make a few significant additions to the mythos himself, the most important of which was Sean Cassidy.  He also tried to steer the book in a more soap opera direction, which becomes a little more apparent in future issues (though Scott's angst in this issue is a pretty good indication of where we're going).

It certainly takes nerves to come onto the book and immediately clear up one of the major outstanding pieces of back story - how did Xavier lose the use of his legs?  It would be going too far to say that the explanation is a classic (the flashback relies heavily on "the villain presses button X but the hero cleverly thwarts him by doing Y, repeat to fade"), but in fairness, Thomas was already saddled with Lucifer as the villain responsible - and he was never a particularly interesting character.  The best thing to be said for him was that he was a blank slate, and Thomas fills that out somewhat by making the vanguard of an invading alien race.  It's an improvement, but it doesn't really deal with the big problem - this key part of Xavier's origin story boils down to him stumbling upon a random villain and getting hurt.  There's a reason why it isn't mentioned all that often.

Still, there's an awful lot going on in this issue and plenty to like in there.  The influence of Stan Lee is very obvious, but it does hold together as a story, with plenty going on.  If you like your comics densely packed with plot, you'll like this.  Good start for the Thomas run.

FEATURE CHARACTERS
Professor X (also in flashback following the flashback in X-Men/ClanDestine #1 and preceding the flashback in X-Treme X-Men #44)
Cyclops, the Angel, the Beast, Iceman and Marvel Girl I

VILLAINS
Lucifer (last in issue #9; also in flashback which is his chronologically earliest appearance, preceding issue #9)
The Supreme One (first appearance; Lucifer's commander, and presumably the Quist leader; also in flashback preceding this story)
The Blob (last in issue #7; next behind the scenes in issue #26)
Unus the Untouchable (last in issue #8; next behind the scenes in issue #26)

OTHER CHARACTERS
The Blob's carnival workers (last in issue #7; next in Amazing Adventures vol 2 #13)

Written: 1 September 2004

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