STORY: "The Road to Casablanca" (19 pages)  The X-Men try to find Wolverine, who has devolved into a feral state [after Wolverine #100].  They find him in the underground temple of Ozymandias, an Egyptian king who has been turned to stone and forced to serve Apocalypse.

What you need to know:
It's a crossover.  It fits in between Wolverine #100-101 and forms part of a, let's face it, downright silly storyline where Wolverine turns into a kind of humanoid dog.  Without a visible nose.  Just... don't think about it, okay?  The woman in red wandering around on the fringes of the story is Elektra, who plays a significant role in the ensuing storyline in Wolverine.

As part of the X-Men's attempts to find Wolverine, Professor X meets with Wolverine's sometime ally Zoe Culloden of Landau, Luckman and Lake.  This is an interesting meeting both because it establishes Culloden as willing to kill Xavier to protect LLL's secrets, and because we discover that Xavier knows an awful lot about LLL's secret interdimensional operations (which aren't news in themselves, but Xavier's knowledge of them is).

This is the first appearance of Ozymandias, whose origin is revealed some time later in Rise of Apocalypse #1-4.  Those issues establish that Ozymandias's claim to be a king is hyperbole.  He wasn't - the time-traveller Pharaoh Rama-Tut got there first. Ozymandias demonstrates his power to channel precognitive visions through the rather impractical medium of sculpture, which is a pretty important element of his later appearances.  He also demonstrates the power to bring his sculptures to life and control them mentally, which isn't.

The one stone statue that the X-Men don't recognise is Nate Grey, star of X-Man.  None of the X-Men present have met him.  The others appear to be the Blob, the Acolytes, Magneto, the Dark Riders, and some copycat X-Men.

Comments:
Ho hum.  It's a crossover, and it's a crossover into a downright stupid storyline to boot.  The bits with Landau Luckman and Lake work quite well, though, and Lobdell does get a bit of mileage out of the Ozymandias concept.  Having said that, Ozymandias obviously underwent a bit of a rethink after this story arc finished. His rather banal power to bring statues to life was quietly shoved under the carpet, and his motivations were steadily shifted from slavish devotion to Apocalypse (motivated by abject terror) to a rather more sympathetic position.  Reading it again in 1999, his depiction here is a bit jarring.

One thing that really doesn't work in this issue is the artwork on Ozymandias's wall carvings.  The inker appears to have tried to ink them in very thin lines, and it just hasn't come across at all in the printed version.  The effect that Madureira was aiming for is totally ruined.

FEATURE CHARACTERS
Cyclops, Phoenix III (both last in Further Adventures of Cyclops & Phoenix #4) and Professor X (all next in Wolverine vol 2 #101, then in X-Men vol 2 #51)
Cannonball II (between Wolverine vol 2 #100-101)
Iceman (next in Wolverine vol 2 #101)
Wolverine (last in Wolverine vol 2 #100; next in Wolverine vol 2 #101-102)
Storm (last in X-Men vol 2 #50)

GUEST STAR
Zoe Culloden (between Wolverine vol 2 #100 and Deadpool vol 2 #1)

VILLAIN
Ozymandias (first appearance; last in flashback in Gambit vol 3 #3; next in Wolverine vol 2 #101)

GUEST APPEARANCE
Elektra (between Wolverine vol 2 #100-101)

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