STORY: "To Save A City" (20 pages)  Nefaria surrounds Washington with an impenetrable dome and holds it to ransom, framing the X-Men.  The X-Men play along to save the city, but they stop Nefaria getting away with the money and manage to disable his dome.

What you need to know:
Xavier unveils his newest invention - leg braces that allow him to walk again.  (And if you're saying to yourself, "Hold on, Xavier invented a device that allowed him to walk back in the Silver Age?!" - then, well, yeah.  We'll come to that later.)

The X-Men's reputation takes another hammering, as they get framed for Nefaria's ransom attempt.

Much of the issue is devoted to the X-Men fighting off the henchmen again, as they make a grab to take the money for themselves.

Marvel Girl receives a letter, which she says means she has to leave the X-Men forever.  Of course, it doesn't mean anything of the sort - it's a letter from her parents packing her off to college, as we see next issue.

This is the first issue drawn by Werner Roth under his real name.

A more innocent time:
Everyone wonders whether Nefaria's dome is a Communist plot.

None of this "don't deal with terrorists" stuff in the sixties.  It takes the USA only a few hours to cave in and pay the money.

Xavier allows Nefaria and the Unicorn to escape by boat, on the intriguing rationale that they'll be caught soon because he's tipped off the coastguard.  It's good to know Xavier has such faith in the US coastguard, but isn't this just a touch optimistic?

Xavier has now apparently been working on his leg braces for "months", which contradicts his angst about never walking again, only last issue.

Comments:
Xavier's leg braces, which debut in this story, are a particularly odd backwater of the X-Men mythos.  You may be wondering why Xavier abandoned this extremely useful and perfectly sensible device.  Well, he didn't.  They popped up sporadically from this point on, up until Xavier was supposedly killed.  And when he was brought back from the dead at the end of the Silver Age run, the braces were just never mentioned again.  It's all been airbrushed out of history, really.

I suppose there's two major problems with them.  One is that they undermine the distinctiveness of Xavier as a wheelchair-bound character.  Of course, that never stopped him from regaining the ability to walk for long periods at a time - but this is a kind of awkward halfway house where he's disabled-but-not-really.  The other is that they open up one of the awkward paradoxes of the Marvel Universe - if this sort of fantastic tech exists, why isn't it publicly available?  There's an obvious market, after all.

Anyhow, so much for the braces.  The story itself is more running around fighting minor supervillains.  Okay as these things go, but mostly forgettable.

FEATURE CHARACTERS
Professor X, Cyclops, the Angel, the Beast, Iceman and Marvel Girl I

VILLAINS
Count Nefaria (next in flashback in Iron Man vol 1 #8)
The Nefaria Family of the Maggia (the group schisms after this story; the mainstream Nefaria Family appear next in Daredevil vol 1 #22, while a splinter group loyal to Count Nefaria appear next in flashback in Iron Man vol 1 #8)
The Plantman and the Porcupine (both next in Sub-Mariner #2), the Eel I (next in Alpha Flight Special #1), the Scarecrow I (next in Captain America vol 1 #158) and the Unicorn I (next in Iron Man vol 1 #4)

OTHER CHARACTERS
Lieutenant General Fredricks (last in issue #17; next in Fantastic Four vol 1 #72)
Colonel Hendershoot (between issues #2 and #147)

Written: 22 September 2004

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