The X-Men #94: The Doomsmith Scenario! Review
Medium: Comic
Release date: 8/1/1975
Review date: 11/4/2024
Score: 6/10
Isn’t it awkward when you go and make a bunch of new friends, and then introduce them to your old friends expecting everybody to just get along, but they don’t? Poor little Scott Summers just wanted all his old X-Men and new X-Men to come together to form one big X-Family but no, Iceman, Archangel, Havoc, and Marvel Girl (Jean Grey’s formal hero name) aren’t having any of that as they “no longer want to be child soldiers” and “have lives of their own to live,” so they bounce after Cyclops tells Jean he loves her (awkward). Oh, and Sunspot also leaves, but uh… we don’t… we don’t have to talk about him, its fine, nobody’s favorite member of the new X-Men was Sunspot anyways, just ignore the team getting rid of most of its non white ethnic minorities, its fine, this isn’t foreshadowing or anything.
So Scott decides to whip our new team into shape in the X-Men mansion Situation Room while the comic ominously cuts to the Valhalla Mountain NORAD defense base in the Rocky Mountains where we see a group of mutants, the Ani-men, take control over the base at the command of Count Nefaria, a villain from the old X-Men team’s past (specifically “The X-Men” issues #22 and 23). There the Count broadcast to the world that he is now in control of the Doomsmith missile program at the Valhalla base and demands the nations of the world pay him a ransom or watch the planet be nuked. Beast, formerly of the X-Men but now apparently an Avenger, calls up Professor X and is like “Hey, can you guys handle this? World destruction by nuke doesn’t really qualify as an Avengers level emergency these days,” so Xavier packs up Cyclops and the new team and ships them off to the Rockies to beat up their past foe. Scott tries to have Thunderbird stay behind at the mansion as he’s injured, but John blows him off and insists on coming anyways. The team only manages to just approach the base before Nefaria starts shooting missiles at them, eventually hitting the X-Men’s plane with a Sonic Disruptor Beam which causes the warplane to disappear entirely, plunging the X-Men into the open air below as the issue ends.
This issue was fine, more notable for the inter-team bickering and the old X-Men team walking out at the beginning more than anything else. The series is still writing Thunderbird about five times as unlikable as the other team members - like I get he’s supposed to be the hot tempered, hard-headed member of the team, but he just comes across as combatively stupid in a lot of his scenes, and it's hard to get much of feeling that the writers have any plans or ideas where to go with his character. Along those lines, and I know this was his first issue and I get that he had to continue on from where the other writers left off, but I’m really hoping that Chris Claremont starts injecting a bit of pep into this series’ step moving forward, because at the moment, this series seems pretty standard and a bit unremarkable as superhero comics go.