Beautiful Mutants 1990

X-Men #266 (August) Gambit. 

Chris Claremont, Mike Collins, Joe Rubinstein.

This issue provides an origin for the Hounds, as seen in various Days of Future Past sequels and distinguished by their studded leotards. I hadn't considered the possibility that they might require an origin story, but it's here if you want it along with the debut appearance of Gambit - which is why I wasn't going to bother buying a copy of this, the cheapest one costing about a million quid these days; but somehow my wife deduced that I was after this issue and picked one up for my birthday, and - Jesus Christ almighty - a copy signed by Claremont. She wouldn't tell me how much she paid for it, and I didn't tell her I didn't even remember it being an issue with much going for it. I love that woman.

Okay, so the art is a somehow awkward fit to the story, but it's otherwise readable aside from the introduction of Gambit, a character I've never found remotely interesting. Here he's introduced as one of those dashingly romantic burglars who swashbuckles as he disables your security camera with chewing gum and smashes a window at the back of the house while everyone is at work. He's a good burglar because he steals stuff that's already been stolen from the people who stole it in the first place, or summink. Also he's Cajun, which you can tell because he drops the occasional spot of Français into his conversation and addresses you as chère. For example, if he's going for a dump he might say Je suis just going a la lavatory because je am touching cloth, chère. His mutant power is the ability to throw playing cards at his enemies. To be fair, his power transforms them into energy bombs which explode on contact, so they don't actually need to be playing cards. He could throw PG Tips tea cards, Top Trumps, baseball cards from the forties, unsold Cats Laughing 7ʺ singles, but he throws playing cards because that's cool, and everything about the introduction of Gambit tells you how cool he is and how much we're going to love him, which is why I don't.

Beautiful Mutants 1989

Alpha Flight #75 (October) Tigers In the Rain. 

James D. Hudnall, John Calimee, Mike Manley.

I'm beginning to wonder whether Marvel's downfall in the early nineties came from paying too much attention to its fans. The worst aspect of anything will always be, without exception, its stupid fucking fans, and the letters page of this book has a few who describe Hudnall as the worst writer of all time while demanding the reinstatement of Byrne, and so on; but fuck 'em, quite frankly. In this double-sized issue Alpha Flight battles the Avengers, the X-Men, and other Marvel regulars in this variant New York which Puck - who pops up out of nowhere, again young and tall - informs them was originally the realm of the Dreamqueen; so the heroes they're battling aren't the real thing but products of imagination, which at least explains Rogue's giant triangular hair. With this in mind, Alpha Flight fights back with the help of Elvis and Father Christmas - Elvis, for fuck's sake! Elvis brains imaginary Thor with his guitar and Father Christmas is packing a machine gun; but sure, let's get a court order forcing Byrne to write the book again, you shitheads.

Beautiful Mutants 1988

New Mutants #67 (September) Promise. 

Louise Simonson, Bret Blevins.

We meet Gosamyr, as I knew we would, an alien resembling an inflatable sex doll of a human teenage girl. She seems to be some kind of hominid silk worm and is thus clad in revealing semi-transparent material, although in her favour, aside from this being deliberate and integral to the story, her depiction is less annoying than that of the Cobweb, a similarly attired lady detective created by Alan 'Superheroes' Moore and Melinda Gebbie who is able to distract and thus overpower her foes because you can see her tits and fanny! Gosamyr is slave to an alien called Spyder, who looks like a spider, and who has been ripped off by Lila Cheney. Spyder attempts to collect on the debt at one of Lila's exciting rock concerts. Despite all that is stacked against it, this issue is a lot better than I remember.

Beautiful Mutants 1987

X-Men #214 (February) With Malice Towards All.

Chris Claremont, Barry Windsor-Smith.

Dazzler flips out while playing keyboards for Lila Cheney at one of her sweaty rock concerts and starts doing the whole light show thing, thus dramatically upstaging the mockney Joan Jett. The X-Men are called in and find that Dazzler is possessed by Malice, as we saw in #210. Malice has no physical substance but hops from one body to another with her presence indicated by the possessed person sporting an art nouveau choker with a sinister looking face as the cameo. The usual fight ensues but with a twist as Malice inhabits different X-Men, and I feel I should probably make some wisecrack about Wolverine wearing the distinctive choker on page thirteen but I can't be arsed. Malice eventually flees, discreetly taking refuge in some random security guard and laying low, and Dazzler joins the X-Men because there's strength in numbers.

I've begun to notice the Claremont stream-of-consciousness creeping in over the last year or so, with dialogue or narrative reduced to a sort of freewheeling shorthand which I eventually began to find a little irritating back when I was buying these issues hot off the presses. It's something he's always done and it's often effective, but it gets repetitive when every scene showing plural adulation of a single individual always features at least one person thinking be still my heart; and then we have regular sentences broken up into seven or eight separate speech balloons strung down the side of the page like anal beads, presumably as a means of communicating pace; and those fucking annoying compound words - babyboy, boychick, boytoy and too many others. It aspires to rock 'n' roll but fails through its sheer incongruity. Back at school, my pal Grez had an ongoing beef with a younger kid we called Malcolm due to his resembling a chubby version of the Sex Pistols manager. Malcolm was younger and smaller, yet would effect a ludicrous hard man act when engaging with Grez, notably walking slowly towards my pal, effecting an evil grin while swinging his Adidas bag around himself at knee height as an improvised weapon. You'd better watch out, he warned us with affected glee, I'm a bagswinger! He seemed to be proposing bagswinger as a recognised gladiatorial type like the retiarius or murmillo. Anyway, I thought of Malcolm when Psylocke describes herself as a psycho-blaster on page nine.

This is still a generally great issue but, well, you know... 

Beautiful Mutants 1986

X-Factor annual #1 (October) Grand Design. 

Bob Layton, Brett Breeding.

Bob Layton bows out on a high note, relatively speaking. This version of X-Factor still feels conspicuously tooled for tidy monthly adventures ending with a joke on the last page as someone tosses X-Dog an X-snack which he swallows in one gulp before woofing eckshy-eckshy-racktaaaaa to make everyone laugh; so it's engaging and readable even if it reminds me that I still miss the New Defenders. X-Factor in their mutant hunting guise are sent to the Soviet Union by special request of the Kremlin, leading Bobby to quip, 'Maybe they found a female gymnast who doesn't have a full beard.' There they discover a mutant resistance organisation violently opposed to the institute which has drawn X-Factor across the iron curtain, which amounts to an experiment camp run by Doppelganger, himself a powerful mutant who was tentatively chalked in to become X-Factor's major villain - presumably before Louise came up with Apocalypse. I suppose Grand Design is a bit obvious in places, but the story is tight and well told with shocks sufficient to keep it interesting. It's also nice - if that's the word - to be reminded how the Soviet Union probably wasn't the greatest place to live, particularly given the growing number of purple-haired fuckwits born since its dissolution getting all misty-eyed over their heavily revised version of an historical reality that some of us actually remember.

Beautiful Mutants 1985

X-Men #191 (March) Raiders of the Lost Temple.

Chris Claremont, John Romita Jr., Dan Green.

Ye X-Men, Avengers, New Mutants, and Morlocks doth battle Kulan Gath with swords, maces, or just by throwing goblets at him or loosening ye wooden axles of his chariot, which is of goodly construction. There are many casualties and even fatalities. As they smite their most foul enemy, Selene snatches up ye necklace of power - ye one in which Kulan Gath didst spend many centuries of slumber - and revealeth that she was only pretending to be on ye noble side so she could get her mitts on ye goodies. Warlock hath turned Storm into a techno-organic being like unto himself, so dooming her to death, but before she dies she doth do the same unto Selene, so they're all brown bread by ye end. Luckily Doctor Strange is able to reverse time so that none of it ever happened and everyone is alive again. Were any other writer at the wheel, this would have been the world's biggest ever pile of wank, but Claremont makes the fucker work with effortless aplomb, creating genuine shock at the death of established characters even though we know they'll almost certainly be back next issue, and strewing our path with twists and turns which prove impossible to predict, despite having since become beloved time travel clichés. Also, the way issues of X-Men and New Mutants now mesh together is a thing of beauty.

Beautiful Mutants 1984

New Mutants #20 (October) Badlands. 

Chris Claremont, Bill Sienkiewicz.

The kids fight the Demon Bear on its own mystic territory, and their victory somehow brings about the revelation that Danielle's murdered parents were the Bear all along and, having been liberated, are now alive and well. Where New Mutants went from a fun bunch of teenagers jumping around and chugging soda to a soundtrack that almost certainly featured Hip to Be Square by Huey Lewis and the News, they're now something as starkly dramatic and gut wrenchingly powerful as a Swans album, and the transformation has somehow gone ahead without it feeling like a different book or seeming in any way laboured. I don't understand why the Sienkiewicz run on New Mutants doesn't get mentioned in the same sentences as Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns.