New X-Men? #115

The Uncanny X-Men #115

“Visions of Death!”

Chris Claremont and John Byrne

Synopsis

The X-Men fight Sauron and delve deeper into some of the mysteries plaguing the Savage Land.

Rolling Commentary

Pages 2 and 3. I know I’m not a Byrne fan, generally, (especially anything he did after 1990) but I have to give the man props here (Inker Terry Austin as well). Sauron looks amazing here, really.

Page 9. How does Colossus going all metallic stop Sauron from absorbing his powers? No really, I want to know.

Page 10. Look kids, its Tarza- I mean, uh, Ka-Zar!

Page 13. Wow. I have no idea what’s going on here. Like, at all.

Page 16. I know that the alphabet translation from Slavic to romantic is sometimes a little rough, and my Russian even rougher, but I’m pretty sure that the pronunciation is “dos vidania”, not “do svidania”. (‘Dos’ has a longer “o” here, like “aw”. … This is pretty much the extent of my Russian knowledge.)

Page 17. Oh, come on, Ka-Zar! I totally want to see a Nightcrawler/Wolverine snowball fight.

Post Mortem

Hmm…. I’m gonna break this issue into two parts.

Part One: The fight with Sauron. Fun fight, hypnotized Wolverine, teamwork, it’s a good few pages. No complaints.

Part two: The remainder of the issue. Now maybe it’s because I simply don’t care much about Ka-Zar and Friends, but I couldn’t wait to get down with their little pow-wow. Now, I don’t know this for sure, but it seems that this story arc is trying to clean up some problems left by a cancelled series. Remember when Ka-Zar’s talking and the reference note tells us this happened in Ka-Zar #20? It is a fact of history that no Ka-Zar series has ever lasted particularly long. That’s not an attack on Ka-Zar fans, it’s a simple fact. If it makes you feel better, I’m big fan of Peter David’s Captain Marvel series, and it got cancelled within three years too. Twice, actually. So, it seems plausible that this Ka-Zar series they reference got cancelled mid-story arc, probably right at issue 20, honestly. Ka-Zar is left falling to his death or whatever, and this evil god thing is going to destroy the Savage Land or whatever, and Bam! Series cancelled.

Enter the now monthly X-Men, who have quite a history with the Savage Land. They show up here, we get told everything that happened earlier (odds are, lots of X-Men fans skipped that Ka-Zar series too), and now we’re all nicely set up for the real conclusion to the Ka-Zar series, minus all those dangling plot threads. Which is all well and good, except, again, I don’t really care. Go back to the Sauron fighting, or bring in the Savage Land Mutates or something. Alas. I’ll get over it.

Of course, if I’m completely off base and the Ka-Zar Series wasn’t cancelled early, well then… consider me simply bored by this stuff.