Hello my loves! I’m back already with the remainder of 1969. There’s only four issues left to cover, so this will be a much quicker discussion than yesterday. I’m flying through stuff right now in the excitement (and ADHD hyper focus) of starting the blog back up. But I can’t promise I’ll be able to maintain this pace long-term. So fair warning, we may slow down a bit eventually. But there won’t be any more five year hiatuses, so don’t worry too much! Just understand that I do have a career to navigate, an incredibly spirited 6.5 year old to parent, and an amazing husband and friends to spend time with. So let’s set some expectations now. LOL.

Speaking of amazing husbands and friends, we’re going camping this weekend with some awesome comic-shop friends and some awesome non-comic-shop friends, and I’m super excited! We do this trip every year, and it’s where Kevin proposed two years ago, so it holds a special place in my heart. It’s also the perfect excuse to run over to Carol & John’s later today to pick up some trades. I mean, what if I don’t have a cell signal this weekend and can’t get on Marvel Unlimited?! I need to be able to do some reading while we’re there. But seriously, I’ve been using Marvel Unlimited exclusively since I’ve been back. I lost most of my Avengers and early X-Men trades in the divorce. C seemed to think all of the comics were just automatically his I guess, and I wasn’t in a healthy enough place to fight him on it. I was able to hold on to my Uncanny X-Men Omnibus, my Adamantium Collection that I highlighted on the blog a few years ago when I got it, and my copy of God Loves, Man Kills, but that was about it. Those three were the most important to me, and two of them are now signed by Chris Claremont, so I’ll survive and rebuild my collection as I go! It’ll be fun to share my purchases and finds with you all as we go anyway, so look out for shopping posts in the future!

For now, let’s jump into our comics for today. We’re starting with Issues 60-61. You’ll remember we left off after the craziness with the Sentinels with the X-Men reaching out to a Dr. Lykos, who is apparently an old colleague of Charles’. We pick up exactly where we left off at the beginning of issue 60. The X-Men are rushing Alex to this doctor because he’s apparently gravely injured from the fight with the Sentinels. and they don’t want to chance a public hospital since there’s been so much anti-mutant sentiment lately. So, they drop Alex off and leave, and have some fun in the danger room. It’s a great little sequence of the guys training, while Jean and Lorna use their powers from the sidelines to fuck with the guys by activating different parts of the room. It’s great to see the danger room again. It’s been a really long time since we’ve seen it, and it’s such a wonderful part of the X-Men. And it’s great to see the girls have some fun, mess with the guys, and show off their powers. It’s also nice to see Jean have another girl to interact with and not just be there for the guys to infantilize. Meanwhile, we learn Dr. Lykos’ backstory. He used to live in the Antarctic with his dad, and they were guides for rich people who wanted to explore. One day, a rich guy and his kid had hired them for exploration and the little girl, Tanya goes missing. Young Karl finds her in a cave being attacked by Pteranodons and fights them off but gets injured. (Do you guys know where this is going yet? No? Okay, let’s keep going!) Rich guy is a doctor and helps him, but he now has the ability to drain living things of their energy! (Still unsure? Let’s keep reading…) His dad eventually dies and rich guys takes him in to repay the debt he owes Karl for saving Tanya. Karl and Tanya grow up and fall in love, but rich guy doesn’t want his daughter to marry Karl because he’s poor. So Karl leaves to find his fortune as a doctor and win the hand of his love. But, in the process, he finds he needs to drain life from people to gain strength and stay alive. Also, something is driving him to do it more and more. He’s battling with himself over the ethics and of this and it’s clear there is a good Karl and an evil voice fighting for control in his mind. We learn he worked with Charles before to try to get access to mutants because he thinks draining them will give him powers and allow him to amass a fortune to buy his bride. (He says it’s to win her hand, but we all know what it really is. He has to buy her from her father. That’s the not so subtle implication here. Tanya has absolutely no agency in this story!) So, now Lykos has his hands on an unconscious Alex, and he begins draining him of his energy. And as he does, he transforms! Into a fucking dinosaur! A Pteranodon to be exact! That’s right my loves, this is the very first appearance of SAURON!!!!!!!

Quick aside: I fucking love Sauron. He’s a talking Pteranodon that has a hypnotic stare and can only turn into/maintain his dinosaur form by draining life force from mutants. It’s just the kind of absolute ridiculousness that I love from my X-Men villains. Also, Lykos specifically tells us that he chose his name directly from The Lord of the Rings mythos, (see panel above) so that’s a fun fact I didn’t know about him! Seems fitting since he says that he’s giving in the the evil in his head, and given that his powers derive from his eyes. I like it!

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Anyway, Sauron takes off to go be evil, and the X-Men catch wind of it on a news report and take off to stop him. They fight. He loses his form, but not before hypnotizing Angel to help him and take him home. Sauron having gotten away, and the kids unsure why Angel helped him, they rush off to pick up Alex from Dr. Lykos. But Tanya has also shown up at his office, having run away to be with him. Alex is awake with no idea about what Lykos did to him, and feeling better then ever. And just then, Tanya’s rich dad shows up to demand she come home and never see Karl again. There is SO much happening in this office all at once! OMG. Tanya insists she’s staying with Karl, but Karl refuses her, saying he has to earn the money first to show her dad. Again, she has no fucking agency. It’s annoying. But since both of these men are villains, I can look over a bit and chalk it up to them being assholes. So lets move on. The kids head back to the mansion to find a dazed Angel bring looked after by Lorna. They decide they need Lykos’ help with Warren, but Warren freaks out at hearing the name, so Beast knocks him out! Because, you know, that’s the responsible way to deal with your mentally unwell team mate Hank! The X-Men leave to go get Lykos while Alex and Lorna stay to watch Warren and look through Chucks notes about the doctor. But Lykos shows up while the X-Men are away, and drains all three of them, turning back into Sauron. He leaves to find Tanya and her dad, and they all converge, with the X-Men. Karl wins out over Sauron when he sees how freaked out Tanya is, and he takes off. Tanya follows, and then the X-Men. He’s headed to his old home in the Antarctic. Tanya gets there before the X-Men, and Karl THROWS HIMSELF OFF A CLIFF so that Sauron can’t force him to kill Tanya for her energy. Seriously. The X-Men show up just in time to be too late, but they do stop Tanya from jumping over the edge after Karl. So, I guess that’s good? Cyke even makes a comment about how the man won out over the monster and that’s all they could hope for.

This was a fun little arc, and a fitting intro to Sauron, who is a great X-Men villain. (Spoiler alert I guess? You didn’t think he was REALLY, TRULY dead, did you? If you did, you haven’t been paying attention.) I have to say, as much as I’ve really not liked a lot of this 60’s stuff, the one silver lining to all of the it is getting to see the beginnings for all of these great, classic characters. And this next arc is no exception, so lets get to it, shall we?

Issues 62 & 63 start off with Angel, alone, fighting Pteranodons. Huh?!? He loses and begins to plummet from a deadly height. And as he falls, we get the story of what’s happened to bring us to this point. See, he woke up at the mansion to find the X-Men gone, and followed their trail. He showed up at Lykos’ a bit too late, but found his journal and guessed they were headed to the Antarctic. He got there too late as well, but was told by Tanya that the X-Men went down the cliff to recover Karl’s body for her. So, Angel heads that way as well and is attacked by the flying monsters we saw. All caught up, we watch Angel land on the ground in a tropical location, seemingly dead. He’s found by a frog-man and a mysterious stranger and they take him back to their base to try to revive him. Meanwhile, the rest of the X-Men are somewhere near-by fighting a T-Rex!!! Have you guessed where we are yet, my loves?!? No? Here’s another hint: As they’re fighting, an old friend and his feline companion show up to tell them to leave. It’s none other than Ka’Zar and Zabu!!!!!! That’s right, we’re in the SAVAGE LAND!!!!

Like before, Ka’Zar is having none of the X-Men’s shit and basically yells at them to leave because he has his own problems to deal with here. But, because these boys all have egos that are too big for their own good, Iceman fucking attacks Ka-Zar just for pointing at them, and they fight until Zabu pins Beast to the ground and the X-Men realize they’re outmatched. They follow Ka-Zar and watch him fight some locals who seem to have mutant powers. They join the fight to help him. Meanwhile, we see “The Creator”, the stranger from earlier, using a machine to revive Angel. He’s also put Angel into a snazzy new blue and white costume. Angel awakes and the Creator tells him how he’s been rescuing mutants in the Savage Land from being discriminated against by non-mutants, and says that Ka-Zar and the X-Men are trying to stop him. Angel agrees to talk to them to try to help the Creator and takes off to find his friends. He finds them quickly, but Ka-Zar attacks him before he can say anything since apparently the people who have lived and fought with Warren for the last five years can’t fucking recognize him just because he changed his fucking clothes?!?!? Poor Warren. These people either don’t give a shit about him, or they’re really really stupid. LOL. Anyway, he tries to tell them all to stand down, but just then the Creator’s mutants attack them all and a huge fight ensues. The X-Men prevail and fight their way into the base. We learn that the Creator is actually…. wait for it…. MAGNETO!!!! No joke. Our favorite bad guys is back!!! Horary!!!!!!!

Turns out he lied to Angel (I know, I’m shocked too.) He’s been making mutants by capturing the locals and doing experiments on them. His newest mutant is Lorelei, a gorgeous blonde with a siren song that seems to hypnotize and stop all the guys in their tracks. Marvel Girl is unaffected, and tries to fight Mags. She’s not doing great until she uses her telekinesis to lift Cyke’s visor and destroys Mags machine. The bad mutants revert to their normal, human selves, and Mags throws himself under the falling wreckage of his machine, seemingly dying. (This man is so emo and I am so here for it!) But, we’re smarter than that, right my loves? We know better than to fall for that again. However, the X-Men aren’t apparently, because they just assume Mags is dead. Really guys?!?! This is like, the fourth time he’s “died” and you’re just going to take it at face value and not look for a body or anything? GRRR. That said, we finally got a story where Marvel Girl gets to save everyone! I’m not thrilled that she acted like a weak little girl through most of the fight, but she still won out in the end and outsmarted Mags to save the day. So, YAY!!!!

And yay for finally being out of the fucking ’60’s. Overall, these last four issues had way less problems then the previous ones, and we got to spend time with a lot of my favorite X-Men baddies, so it was a nice end to an annoying decade! We’ll pick back up with 1970 soon. We’ll be hitting a break in the X-Men as the title ends soon, but we’ll be jumping back into Avengers, so there’s still plenty of mutant madness to go around! I’m excited to keep going. If you’re excited too, come back for more, and in the mean time, check out the brand new Facebook page for the blog: Searching for Genosha! It’s a great way to stay up-to-date on posts if you’re not following the blog on WordPress. There will also be more content there, as I share photos and quick updates about my life and about the shopping and writing/creative processes behind all of this. I hope you’ll join us over there, and until next time, my loves, keep searching!!!