STORY: "Mission: Murder" (20 pages)  The Sentinels keep capturing mutants.  Larry flies into a rage and orders the Sentinels to kill him, but when Chalmers rips off his medallion, Larry is exposed as a mutant himself, and the Sentinels turn against him.

What you need to know:
This issue's roster of new captive mutants: Iceman, the Angel, the Living Pharaoh, Mesmero and the Banshee.

Alex Summers turns up in costume for the first time.  For some reason, Larry saw fit to give him a costume to control his powers, and the codename Havok.  The costume's actually quite useful (at least once Alex gets rid of the devices that let Larry switch his powers off), so it sticks around until the early nineties.

Alex and Lorna Dane meet for the first time, kicking off a relationship which lasted through to the 1990s.

We get a flashback to Bolivar giving Larry his special medallion, and promising dad that he'll never take it off, ever.  Apparently he's never taken it off since he was a child.  (Lucky for him its the sixties, and big gold medallions are still marginally fashionable.)  Eventually Chalmers rips it off, and the Sentinels promptly turn on Larry.  Which is unfortunate, because the last order he gave was to kill all the mutants.

Chalmers is off in a little world of his own, seriously insisting that Bolivar Trask "wouldn't have condemned anyone without hearing both sides."  This is the guy who built the mutant-hunting Sentinel robots, remember.

The Sentinels smash the Magneto robot which Mesmero was working for.  This is the first time we (and Mesmero, for that matter) learn that it's actually a robot.  No explanation was ever offered for this, and eventually The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe ended up attributing it to an abortive scheme of Starr Saxon.  (See issue #49 for more on this.)  In fact, the suggestion in this issue is that Magneto himself built the robot, to do the legwork for him - but that comes from Larry, and how would he know?

Strangely, page 2 of this story features the X-Men's first venture into breaking the fourth wall, as a TV host actually accepts a handover with the words, "Thank you, Mr Narrator!"

The price rises!  Yes, an issue of X-Men now costs an extra three cents.  Okay, that probably doesn't sound like much.  But it was only 12 cents to start with, so that's a 25% price rise.  Mind you, the price had been 12 cents ever since the book launched in 1963, so it was probably about time.

The story is reprinted in X-Men Visionaries: Neal Adams and X-Men Classics #1, and an edited version appears in Giant-Size X-Men #2.

A more innocent time:
You don't get much more 1969 than Larry Trask's "polo neck and huge medallion" ensemble. 

All the monitor screens in Larry's hi-tech Sentinel base are black and white.

The Beast refers to the phrase "The medium is the message."  At the time, that was a relatively topical reference to Marshall McLuhan, who wrote several books around this theme in the late 1960s.  (The phrase was actually coined in 1964, so it's not that topical, but it's still pretty sixties.)

Comments:
I've always loved the original Havok costume - a black silhouette with white circles that always look perfect no matter what angle you're coming from.  It's just plain odd, and much more interesting to look at than the vast majority of superhero costumes.

Anyhow, we're now getting into the part of the story where Roy Thomas starts dragging in every mutant who's ever appeared in the X-Men, even if it's just for a cameo.  We're back in the days when there were literally just a handful of mutants, of course, and the Sentinels are busily rounding up all of them.  It's still quite effective in seeming to draw everything together.

The big exception is Magneto, who very conspicuously sits out of the story altogether by being exposed as a robot.  (Changeling doesn't turn up either, perhaps because he was already being kept in reserve as an explanation for Professor X's survival.)  When the story is so clearly trying to include everyone, Magneto's omission is striking, and must have been a deliberate decision.  Perhaps Thomas just didn't want the X-Men's arch-enemy to overshadow the story, especially when he was scheduled to be in the next storyline.

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

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
Havok (Alex Summers) and Lorna Dane
The Banshee (last behind the scenes in issue #43)

VILLAINS
Larry Trask (also in flashback which is his chronologically earliest appearance, preceding issue #-1)
Robert Chalmers
The Living Monolith
Mesmero (last in issue #52)
Bolivar Trask (in flashback which is his chronologically earliest appearance, preceding the flashback in the previous issue)

OTHER CHARACTERS
Chet Huntley and David Brinkley (first appearance for both; both next in issue #65)

Written: 5 May 2005

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