Uncanny X-Men #163-170

Uncanny X-Men #163-170

Originally released in 1982

Written by Chris Claremont

Art by Dave Cockrum (#163-164), Paul Smith (#165-170)

It's been over a month since I last came back to Claremont's X-Men run, so I figured this was overdue, especially since it last left off on a cliffhanger where Wolverine was considering the idea of killing the rest of the team to save them from being transformed into the Brood.

The Brood plot takes longer to resolve than I expected, though it doesn't feel dragged out.  While the Brood are trying to turn the captured mutants into one of them, they experiment on Carol Danvers as she's something new to them - a mix of Kree and human DNA.  Rogue may have stolen her powers, but her DNA remains altered, and by messing around with it, the Brood trigger a powerful side to her called Binary.

At first, I was concerned that this would go down a similar route as Dark Phoenix, where Carol can't control the power, though that doesn't prove to be the case.  She's in full control of herself, though she's torn.  She's always wanted to go into space, and now she has that opportunity, but it would mean leaving Earth, her homeworld, behind.

The others aren't so lucky.  Wolverine manages to free the X-Men, and Carol frees Empress Lilandra, but now most of them are at risk of becoming Broods, and only Wolverine is aware of it and struggling with whether to mercy-kill them before it happens.

Cyclops suspects it at first, but Storm senses that something is growing inside of her, and once she gets an idea of what it is, she flees the spaceship that the X-Men escaped in.  She ultimately burns out the Brood within her, calling upon all of her powers and otherworldly weather conditions to wipe the infection from her body, but she's near death, only surviving by being rescued by a space whale-like creature called an Acanti.

The Acanti are the polar opposites of the Brood, drifting through space without a care in the world, but when the Brood arrived to this galaxy, they saw that they had potential since they were living faster-than-light transportation, and they held the Acanti leader prisoner, keeping its soul bound and taking over any Acanti who came to rescue it.

Storm was found by a new Acanti leader, still a baby, but the former leader's soul needs to be transferred to it, leading to the X-Men, Lilandra, and Binary assaulting the world where the leader is held.  Throughout this, there's an ongoing debate on whether or not it's acceptable to even take the life of the Brood - unlike the Xenomorphs, they're sentient, though even if they weren't, most of the X-Men would have qualms.

The only ones without any issues with killing the Brood are Wolverine and Carol; Cyclops comes around to seeing it as necessary, though he's extremely reluctant to do so.  Meanwhile, Colossus returns Kitty's feelings, with both of them believing that they're going to die, though he does so with some unnecessarily creepy dialogue with her.

Deep within the caverns of the Brood world, there's a creature that even the Brood are terrified of.  While searching for the captured soul, Kitty stumbles across this vicious insatiable Brood-devouring monstrosity, who will come to be known as Lockheed.

The Acanti are saved, which also removes the Brood infection from those in the area who are still infected, though before being petrified, the Brood Queen mentions that a powerful Brood warrior is on Earth, and the X-Men realize that she's referring to Charles Xavier.  Upon returning to Earth, they make no attempt at being subtle, leading to a fight with the newly established New Mutants.

The X-Men are forced to watch as Xavier transforms into a Brood in front of their eyes, a grotesque procedure that is irreversible.  Xavier regains control of his body, begging for death, but the Starjammers (a group of space pirates led by Cyclops's father) have a different solution.

Using DNA samples, they clone a new body for Xavier, one which can walk again, in a decision that is very similar to what would later happen in Hickman's run. (though there's a psychosomatic aspect of his powers that prevent him from doing so on a consistent basis)  It's unclear what happened to his original body, though it was presumably destroyed.  Now that he's in his right mind, and a team of mutant teenagers has been formed, Xavier decides that it would be best if Kitty Pryde was transferred to the New Mutants rather than being on the X-Men.  This leads to what seems like Kitty's most infamous line that doesn't involve a racial slur:

Kitty tries to convince Xavier to let her stay on the X-Men, and the team is all for it.  However, Xavier isn't convinced until she manages to defend herself from a group of aliens that stowed away in the mansion's basement along with Lockheed, who had hitched a ride back to Earth.

Meanwhile, after everything that happened over the past few months, the team needs a vacation.  Scott learns from his father that Scott's grandparents are still alive, and the Summers men go to Alaska to see them.  It's here that Scott runs into a familiar face (belonging to a person who he's never met) that will haunt him for quite some time.

Angel is kidnapped from his Manhattan penthouse, forcing the X-Men into action.  As it turns out, his kidnappers are the Morlocks, forcing the X-Men into New York's sewers.  The Morlock's leader, Callisto, is madly in love with Angel and wants to make him her husband, whether he wants to be or not. (and starts to clip his wings while he's unconscious to keep him from flying around)

Another Morlock, Caliban, also acts out of love, kidnapping Kitty Pryde as he's under the impression that she'll fall in love with him and they'll live happily ever after.  Maybe it's because they're outcasts whose mutations keep them from passing as human, but all of the Morlocks seem to have a twisted definition of "love".

To save Angel (and Kitty, who has fallen ill at the hands of one of the Morlocks), Storm challenges Callisto to a duel without powers for the leadership of the Morlocks. Meanwhile, with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, Rogue has ran away from Mystique, who she views as a mother.

These issues made me realize just how strange my reading order has been for X-Men. I started with one of Chris Claremont's last issues, saw Scott leave Madelyn Pryor behind, reached the aftermath of that with Inferno, and now I've reached the point where Scott meets Madelyn for the first time.

It's hard to believe how close it is to the end of the year, and the end of this blog, but I'm hoping to get at least one more set of issues from Claremont's X-Men run in before that point. Even with how fragmented my read-through of this run is, I can see why it's considered one of the all-time greats and why it resulted in the X-Men being massively popular during the eighties and nineties.