The X-Men #95: Warhunt! Review
Medium: Comic
Release date: 10/1/1975
Review date: 11/8/2024
Score: 5/10
I feel like if you’re gonna kill off a member of your superhero team, and brag about how you’re gonna kill off a member of your superhero team on the cover of that month’s issue, then that issue’s plot should at least be memorable outside of that death as well, right? No one wants for some random C-List villain in some throwaway story to get to be the one to finally knock off one of our masked protagonists - it should be the series’ main villain, or the big intergalactic cosmic threat that does the killing, not like, Doctor Polka Dot Wizard during a bank robbery or whatever.
Anyways, the big selling point for this release of “The X-Men” is that one of the X-Men are going to die in this issue, an announcement the comic seems to make with great relish and excitement and no sadness whatsoever. Following the X-Men's jet being “disappeared” at the end of the last issue, our team are rescued from mortal danger by the obvious solution of just being saved by the members of the team who can fly; wow. Nightcrawler then uses his handy dandy teleportation abilities to just appear in the overtaken base, where he exchanges some strong words with Croaker, a member of Count Nefaria's animal mutant goon squad the Ani-Men (including the slur “mutie!”). Croaker claims not to be a mutant and to actually just be a transformed man before getting his butt whooped by an indifferent Nightcrawler. Kurt lets the rest of the X-Men into the base, leading to some wacky hijinks and hilarity that ultimately results in the X-Men triumphant as the Count tries to escape in a fighter jet. Thunderbird chases after him and jumps on the jet, attacking the cockpit to get to the villain mid-flight. Professor X mentally reaches out to John and tells him to stop before it's too late and he kills himself, but John tells him to stuff it and that he's an Apache Warrior and that he's done taking orders. The jet then promptly explodes as the X-Men stand below watching and Professor X experiences the mother of all telepathic link feedback, accompanied by some really sweet art (good job Dave Cockrum). Cyclops then says "I suppose it had to happen sometime. Hell, sooner or later it happens to all of us in this business... it comes with the uniform,” and then they all walk away.
So let's get the positives out of the way real quick, this shouldn't take long. There was some really great art in this issue, and I thought the action scenes in particular stood out as well communicated through the panels - the team's throwdown with all of Nefaria's hypnotized minions was very readable and featured all the individual members of the team using their different powers in tandem, which was cool. And across the board I thought the X-Men made better use of the breath of the team's various suite of abilities this issue than some of the previous.
Alright, neat, with that out of the way, let's talk about the elephant in the room - the X-Men killing off Thunderbird just kind of out of the blue. Metatextuality, the writing team at Marvel had decided there was too much character overlap between Wolverine and Thunderbird (what with them both being surely tough guy characters who struggle to get along with others), so the writers decided to get some quick shock points in with the readers by killing off Thunderbird early on in the rebooted run. In theory this line of thinking is fine I guess; team dynamics can be hard enough to write without having two guys who basically do the same thing, but John was also offed pretty unceremoniously for a pretty stupid character decision. Thunderbird keeps attacking the jet even after the other characters warn him not to, not because of any compelling character or plot reasons, but because the writers just need him to die, which in turn unfortunately has the domino-like effect of making his character just come across as really, really stupid, cascading into the fact you've already made his character a basic Apache caricature, which in turn results in it really coming across like the authors just insulting the Apache by result of that decision; Thunderbird is such a barebones portrayal of a Native man that it's hard to divorce anything from his character other than “Apache.” That is, for better or worse (worse), all his character is, which makes his pointless death feel a whole lot more pointed, regardless of authorial intent. Cyclops’ “Eh you win some, you lose some, time to hit the showers” speech at the end also doesn't do too much to portray anybody as being all that torn up over the mutant's passing. Hopefully John's death and its effects on the team will be addressed a little more in-depth in the next issue, but ultimately I found myself pretty disappointed with the series’ handling of Thunderbird.