STORY: "In the Shadow of Sauron" (20 pages)  The X-Men take Alex for treatment by Karl Lykos.  But Lykos is secretly an energy vampire, and when he tries to absorb Alex's mutant energy, he's transformed into Sauron.

What you need to know:
Lorna decides to stay with the X-Men instead of going home.  She'll stick around, for the most part, through to Giant-Size X-Men #1.  She's also smitten with Alex and trying her best to subtly distance herself from Bobby, who's still meant to be her boyfriend.

After last issue's cameo, Karl Lykos makes his first full appearance, and we get a lengthy origin flashback.  The gist is that Karl and his dad were acting as guides for the wealthy Anderssen family in a hike through Tierra Del Fuego.  Tanya Anderssen, the daughter, got lost, and Karl found her in a cave of pteranodons.  (Presumably this is meant to be a tunnel to the Savage Land.)  He heroically fights Tanya off but gets bitten by the pteranodon.  Yes, that's right, Sauron's origin is that he was bitten by a magic pteranodon...

Later, Karl develops energy leeching powers, and needs to absorb life energy from time to time.  After dad dies, he moves in with the grateful Anderssens, and falls in love with Tanya.  But her dad won't let her marry him, so he goes off to make his fortune by becoming a doctor.  He sets up a slightly dodgy-looking clinic in New York where he hypnotises his patients and leeches energy from them.  Somewhere along the way he also helps out Professor X with research into mutants, but that's really just a plot device to justify the X-Men going to visit him.

When he gets his hands on Alex, Karl is delighted, because mutants apparently have much more energy.  Unfortunately, Alex has so much more energy that it ends up turning him into Sauron - a humanoid pteranodon who absorbs life energy and can hypnotise people with his eyes.

Sauron explicitly names himself after the villain from Lord of the Rings, because he's so evil.

The Angel switches to the costume he wore as the Avenging Angel in his origin story.  There's a token attempt to justify this as Warren being angry about the treatment of mutants (hence, Avenging), but really it's just an excuse to get rid of an ugly costume.

Chalmers puts the medallion back on Larry, which will apparently wipe his memory of the whole thing and suppress his powers again.  The X-Men seem remarkably unperturbed about him getting away with it, although in fairness, they're probably more worried about Havok at this point.

Continuing his baffling approach to jurisprudence, Chalmers also lets all the mutant captives go free.  Even the wanted criminals.

The logo is tweaked.  The new one is by Sam Rosen - it's the same design as Jim Steranko's, but with slightly different proportions.  This is the version that was actually used for years to come.  For some reason, the "Strangest Teens of All" strapline makes a comeback as well, and hangs around for the remainder of the run.

Reprints of this story appear in X-Men Visionaries: Neal Adams and X-Men Classics #2.

A more innocent time:
The opening page has some incredibly melodramatic narration.  ("What is the sound of... EVIL?"  It goes on in that line for another paragraph.)

Lykos is compared to the title character of Ben Casey, a hospital drama which ran from 1961 to 1966.  By the standards of the time (it was a contemporary of Dr Kildare), it was apparently fairly realistic.  Casey was an early example of the irascible hero doctor fighting to get things done in the face of the bureaucratic medical establishment.  Russ Chappell points out that this is also an in-joke - there was a spin-off Ben Casey newspaper strip in the 1960s, which Neal Adams worked on.

In one of those logic-be-damned moments that really belong more to the early sixties than 1969, Scott actually forgets which door leads to the Danger Room, allowing him to blunder into a gratuitous action sequence.

Comments:
I've never been a big fan of Sauron, who's appeared in some fairly dreary stories over the years.  But when you read the original story from issues #60-61, the appeal of the character becomes much more understandable.  He's the classic tragic figure who's trying to fight off his evil urges with inconsistent success.  It's not a perfect story, for reasons I'll discuss in issue #61, but the core concept is surprisingly strong.  It just wasn't built for sequels, which is why there are so few decent Sauron stories other than this one.

And once again, the art is fabulous.  Adams' panel layouts are getting ever more imaginative, and the Sauron character design is a visual that he can do great things with.

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

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
Havok and Lorna Dane
The Banshee (next behind the scenes in flashback in Avengers #103)

VILLAINS
Sauron (Dr Karl Lykos; also in flashback which is his chronologically earliest appearance, preceding issue #59)
Larry Trask and Robert Chalmers (both next in Avengers #103)
The Toad, the Blob, Mastermind I, the Vanisher, Mesmero, Unus the Untouchable and the Living Pharaoh (all next in flashback in Avengers #103, where the latter two are behind the scenes)

GUEST APPEARANCES
Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch (both next in flashback in Avengers #103)

OTHER CHARACTERS
Mr Tindall (no further appearances)
Tanya Anderssen (first appearance; in flashback only
Dr Anderssen (full name unrevealed; her father; in flashback only;
Mr Lykos (Sauron's father; first appearance; in flashback; dies)
 

Updated: 5 June 2005

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