STORY: "Firestorm" (22 pages)  Magneto captures the Blue team, Professor X and Moira MacTaggert and takes them to Asteroid M.  He makes Moira brainwash the Blue team into following him.

What you need to know:
Understandably annoyed that Magneto is blowing up nuclear missiles in their airspace, the Soviets (yes, they were still around back then) decide to invoke the internationally-agreed Magneto Protocols.  This involves taking a huge great ray gun and blowing up Asteroid M.  Must have taken months of tough negotiation to agree that one.  Fortunately for plot purposes, it will take a little time to get into position.  Nick Fury helpfully tips off the Gold team about the time limit, to ramp up the tension.

Magneto learns from Cortez that somebody has been tinkering with his DNA.  He correctly works out that Moira MacTaggert must have done it while he was a prisoner on Muir Isle.  That refers to a rather odd storyline from the mid-1970s.  In Defenders #16, Magneto was turned into an infant by his own creation, Alpha the Ultimate Mutant.  He was turned over to Moira for safekeeping.  In Uncanny X-Men #104, Shi'ar agent Erik the Red restored him to adulthood.  This plot has conventionally been used as an excuse to justify Magneto's apparent youth, bearing in mind that he's supposed to have been born in the 1930s.

Moira explains that she was trying to fix a defect in Magneto's powers - his body can't handle the amounts of energy he tries to channel, and it ends up driving him mad.  This, again, provides a handy explanation for most of Magneto's inconsistent depictions, and in particular his Silver Age ravings.

Somehow or other Moira's genetic tinkering ends up being a form of brainwashing.  As we find out next issue, it wears off pretty quickly, so it doesn't make much difference.  However, it does helpfully provide a plot rationale for an X-Men versus X-Men fight next issue!

Fabian Cortez is apparently better at hand-to-hand combat than Psylocke, which would make him very good indeed.  Since he never shows that sort of skill again, it's presumably something that was quietly dropped.

Off in a subplot, Matsuo Tsurayaba and some Hand assassins take advantage of the confusion in the Soviet Union to pop over to the Sakhalin Islands and recover a cocoon.  It contains Omega Red, and we'll come back to him in the next storyline.

Whatever it may say in the credits, pages 4 and 5 certainly don't look to me like they were lettered by Tom Orzechowski.

Comments:
It's a big fight with the Acolytes, a chunk of exposition about Moira's attempt at mind-control, and a whole load of set-up for the final act.  A perfectly solid middle chapter, given that the point of the exercise is really just to come up with an excuse for the two new X-Men teams to fight one another in issue #3.

Moira spends most of the issue angsting about her ill-advised (and highly unethical) experiments on Magneto.  It has to be said that this seems a fairly hefty burden to saddle the character with, considering that it's really just a plot device to justify next issue's inter-team fight.  To be fair, there's some follow-up in the next issue, but it doesn't really go anywhere in particular.

It's a great-looking issue, of course, and that's really the selling point for these issues.  The plot barrels along, not entirely making sense, but getting by on visual energy and momentum.  And it's not such a bad story - there are a couple of interesting ideas in here, amidst the chaos.  All good fun.

FEATURE CHARACTERS
Professor X (also in flashback following Defenders #16 and preceding the flashback in Giant-Size X-Men #1)
Archangel, the Banshee, the Beast, Colossus, Cyclops, Forge, Gambit, Jean Grey, Iceman, Psylocke, Rogue, Storm and Wolverine

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
Chief Magistrate Anderson
Moira MacTaggert (also in flashback following the back-up strip in X-Men: Deadly Genesis #4 and preceding her appearance behind the scenes in X-Men vol 1 #94)

VILLAINS
Magneto (also in flashback following Defenders #16 and preceding the flashback in X-Men Unlimited vol 1 #2)
The Acolytes: Fabian Cortez, Annemarie, Chrome and Harry Delgado and one unnamed member
Matsuo Tsurayaba (last in Uncanny X-Men #268; next in issue #4)
Omega Red (behind the scenes; last in flashback in issue #6; next in issue #4)
The Hand (last in ...; next in issue #4)
General Akhronayev (first name unrevealed; first appearance; a corrupt general; dies)

GUEST APPEARANCES
Nick Fury
Valerie Cooper (last in X-Factor #73)

OTHER CHARACTERS
Alexyev Kamenev (the Soviet UN ambassador; first appearance)

Updated: 27 February 2006
 

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