Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Say it ain't so, Shoeless Joe

X-Men #123 (July 1979) crams a lotta stuff into its four-color 32 pages. Not only is it the second appearance (after Marvel Team-Up #65) of Arcade, the Marvel Universe's least cost-effect superassassin (seriously, just shoot the guys, don't put them in a multi-billion dollar robotic pinball machine, dude), but it also features...

A guest appearance by Spider-Man...
X-Men #123 panel
panels from [Uncanny] X-Men #123 (July 1979), scripted by Chris Claremont, co-plotted and breakdowns by John Byrne, pencils and inks by Glynis Wein, letters by Tom Orzechowski


Scott Summers not quite "getting the concept" of dating somebody new...
X-Men #123 panel


Wolverine at his most cultured...
X-Men #123 panel


Storm in the shower...
X-Men #123 panel


Heck, Storm in her bathrobe!
X-Men #123 panel


But flip between the story pages and you'll find two ads in this comic book that are, only in modern retrospect, creepy and a little unsettling in their juxtaposition: two ads featuring major sports figures of the seventies who ain't quite the heroes now that they were then:
X-Men #123 panel
X-Men #123 panel


Oh dear. Those were innocent times, weren't they? Well, the rest of the comic at least is still fun, and Spider-Man's still a hero. That is, when he ain't bustin' up New York City public phone booths:
X-Men #123 panel


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Okay...I have been checking out your blog for months and enjoying what I see and sharing it with my firends and just today, just now, I discovered your alt-text goodness. I get to go back and read it all again. Wow...I...wow.

SallyP said...

Oh heck, this WAS a good story. Arcade of course, is ridiculous, but I still possess a certain fondness for his giant pinball machine.

Anonymous said...

This was my first exposure to the X-Men. I have a little black and white digest of this somewhere. I love commie Colossus in it and the various Wolverines. Good times.

Sea-of-Green said...

See? Those lousy X-men were a corrupting influence on everyone!

And ... awww, heck, I loved Arcade. I really, really did. I thought he was hilarious.