STORY: "Homecoming" (39 pages)  The X-Men return to the Mansion only to find it stripped bare.  Cecilia Reyes performs emergency surgery on Cyclops while the other X-Men keep Juggernaut at bay.

What you need to know:
It's a giant-size issue, and the start of the Joe Kelly run.

Maggott, Marrow and Cecilia Reyes all become residents of the Mansion with this issue.  It's slightly debatable when they actually join the team, as we never get a scene which spells it out.  Here's the approach that I'm taking.  Cecilia Reyes joins in Uncanny X-Men #351, when she returns to the Mansion permanently after losing her job.  Marrow doesn't join until issue #75, which is the turning point where she stops fighting with the others and declares herself a member (which the team apparently just accept).

As for Maggott, he proudly tells Eeny and Meany that he wants to stay and be an X-Man, and then does exactly that.  However, in issue #73 one of his new year resolutions is "to become an X-Man", so he obviously hasn't joined by that point.  It seems that he also joins at the end of issue #75, after he's cleared of Pilgrimm's murders and the rest of the team start to trust him.

Bastion has completely stripped the Mansion - not just of technology, but of everything, including wallpaper and carpets.  Wolverine tells us that the Mansion has been stripped by nanotech, which at least explains how Bastion found the time.  It's less obvious why he bothered to strip the facility to that extent, except sheer vindictiveness.  Outgoing writer Scott Lobdell intended this to set up a storyline where the X-Men would have to function without any of their technology; in reality, it hangs around for a few issues and then gets quietly dropped as the X-Men simply re-furnish the place.

Cyclops is still saddled with a bomb that Operation: Zero Tolerance planted in him.  This gives the newbies a chance to look heroic - Cecilia does the emergency surgery to get it out, Marrow supplies bone implements, and Maggott's pets eat the bomb before it explodes.

Not surprisingly, the more established X-Men aren't at all happy to see Marrow there.  Storm is immediately hostile, and basically threatens Marrow in an attempt to get her to leave.  This proves completely counter-productive, as Marrow sticks around simply to annoy her.  This storyline continues for the next few issues as Joe Kelly tries to justify having a terrorist in the cast.

Marrow also flirts with Cannonball ("You do know how to grind, don't you?"), which sets up the idea that he's the only X-Man who really tries to be welcoming to her.  She takes up residence in the cellar and carves "This way to a dark ride" on the door.

The Juggernaut turns up with his attorney in tow, brandishing some sort of legal document to freeze Professor X's assets.  He's planning to try and get himself appointed as the administrator of Xavier's estate so that he can spend the money helping his longtime partner Black Tom Cassidy.  He doesn't say what for, but presumably it's medical bills again.  Anyway, the X-Men drive him off.  Or rather, he simply decides he's wasting his time and wanders off, although Maggott chooses to believe that he was scared of Eeny and Meany.

The freezing of Xavier's estate was widely interpreted at the time as a dropped subplot.  It certainly disappears in due course, and the X-Men manage to get the Mansion completely refurbished long before Xavier rejoins the group.  On one view, in fact, the story is meant to end this issue, since Eeny and Meany are clearly shown eating Juggernaut's legal documents (which wouldn't work in real life - you'd just get a replacement - but often seems to do the trick in stories).  On the other hand, in issue #73, the X-Men are so low on funds that they can't afford to hire a decorator, which suggests that they still don't have access to Xavier's money.

For some reason, Archangel and Psylocke are missing from this issue, even though they should have travelled back with the other X-Men who were in the Antarctic in Uncanny X-Men #350.  This is almost certainly an error, but Uncanny #352 tries to cover for it by saying that they were both dropped off in New York on the way back.

With Kelly writing, Maggott's dialogue suddenly starts to include South African slang.  He describes Juggernaut as a "vrot stoepkakker", which is tricky to translate - "vrot" just means rotten, but "stoepkakker" is rather more specific, and means the sort of old, fat dog that sits on a porch in the sun and snarls at you if you try to move it.  Honest.  He also claims Eeny and Meany would have left Juggernaut with "hap marks all down his guava" [bite marks on his arse].

Maggott has a one-page subplot scene establishing that he's secretly in tremendous pain when Eeny and Meany return to him after an excursion.

The cover is, of course, a pastiche of Giant-Size X-Men #1.

Comments:
This is the start of the short-lived Joe Kelly run.  Although it runs through to issue #85, the latter months are really just Kelly slogging his way through editorially-mandated storylines, and to all intents and purposes the run might as well finish with issue #79.

Kelly was brought onto X-Men at the same time as Steve Seagle took over Uncanny X-Men.  At the time this looked like an interesting and daring move, since neither writer was a remotely obvious choice.  Seagle was best known for Vertigo stories, while Kelly had built a cult following through his justly acclaimed run on Deadpool.  At first everything seemed to be going fine, but it wasn't long before everything got dragged down into the swamp of editorial meddling.

Kelly's run has ended up as a footnote in X-Men history, since most of his stories are concerned with the three new cast members, Maggott, Marrow and Cecilia Reyes.  None of them really caught on, despite his best efforts, and perhaps the most important lasting result of these stories was to convert Marrow into a character who could plausibly be a member of the team.  This called for a bit of fudging to play down her history as a mass-murdering terrorist and shamelessly redefine the character, but ultimately he did manage to pull it off, which is something of an achievement.

As for this particular issue, it's a transitional story which serves to get all of the characters back to the Mansion, put the new cast members into the foreground, and hammer home the fact that there's nothing, absolutely nothing, left in the Mansion.  Of course, that storyline never got the chance to go anywhere.  On its own terms, it's really rather good, only undermined in retrospect by the knowledge that most of these storylines were cut off before they fully developed.

FEATURE CHARACTERS
The Beast (next in Journey into Mystery #513), Joseph (next in Uncanny X-Men #352), Cannonball, Rogue, Storm and Wolverine (all last in Uncanny X-Men #350)
Cyclops and Phoenix III (both last in Uncanny X-Men #350; both next in Cable #50, then in Journey into Mystery #513, then in flashback in Uncanny X-Men #376)

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
Trish Tilby, Maggott, Eeny and Meany (all last in Uncanny X-Men #350)
Marrow and Cecilia Reyes

VILLAIN
The Juggernaut (between Peter Parker, Spider-Man vol 1 #84 and Uncanny X-Men #361)

OTHER CHARACTERS
Brad Perkins (Juggernaut's lawyer; first and only appearance)

Written: 9 March 2006

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