STORY: "Romp" (22 pages)  Storm, Gambit and Yukio have a big fight in New York with the Phalanx, Part I.

What you need to know:
This is the first full-scale appearance of the Phalanx, who are now established as having a collective mind and techno-organic bodies similar to Warlock's. The precise relationship of the Phalanx to Warlock is a notoriously complex area of continuity and doesn't really concern us here. Oddly, the Phalanx are pretty relaxed about absorbing unwilling humans into their collective as well. A footnote in this story confirms that the events of issues #305-306 featured early manifestations of the Phalanx.

Yukio reveals that she is a member of the Mutant Underground. In the way of these things, we hadn't heard of the Mutant Underground for years, but now that the writers have come up with the idea, members are crawling out of the woodwork.

Yukio and Gambit were on opposite sides of a contract at some point in the past. (They disagree over whether this was in Milan or Singapore.) Yukio doesn't trust Gambit and doesn't like him.

For some reason, the credits wrongly list Kevin Somers as the editor.  This caused a flurry of interest at the time.

Comments:
Issues #312-313 are a two-part story introducing the Phalanx through the medium of a very big fight. They certainly come across pretty impressively here, but one of the problems is already apparent. Because the Phalanx adapt so quickly to their powers, the X-Men are reduced to pretty bizarre uses of their powers in order to win. In trying to pitch them as a seriously credible villain, the story overshoots the mark and leaves future creators struggling to find a way the X-Men can credibly defeat them. Also rather bizarre is a series of dialogue exchanges in which characters muse about whether the Phalanx have a right to life in the same way as anybody else. I'm not convinced that this is anywhere near as big a dilemma as the characters seem to think - yes, they're allowed to exist, but they're not allowed to kill people, and the latter takes priority. What's wrong with that?

This is the debut of the new regular penciller Joe Madureira, whose work is already cartooning at this stage and becomes even more stylised as his run goes on, as he works in more and more of his beloved manga influence. His first storyline is actually a pretty good performance, but he just doesn't bring the same imagination to the Phalanx that Romita did. Like so many artists before him, Madureira struggles manfully but without success to evoke the qualities of Bill Sienkiewicz's original techno-organic character designs, but can't really translate the sheer weirdness of the original into his style.

 

FEATURE CHARACTERS
Professor X and Gambit (both last in X-Men vol 2 #32)
The Beast, Bishop, Iceman and Storm

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
Jubilee
Yukio

VILLAINS
The Phalanx
Sabretooth (next in Uncanny X-Men Annual #18)
Emma Frost

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