This weekend’s light-hearted, escapist superhero post from Balladeer’s Blog looks at the first twenty stories of the “All New, All Different” X-Men beginning in 1975. I have a soft spot for superhero stories because reading them as a kid served as a gateway to two of my adult passions – mythology and opera.
GIANT-SIZE X-MEN Vol 1 #1 (May 1975)
Title: Deadly Genesis
Villain: Krakoa
NOTE: This was the very FIRST appearance of the new team of X-Men who replaced the original, blander team launched in 1963. That team’s original series had been canceled and reduced to reprints (reruns).
Synopsis: The story opened with a series of vignettes featuring Professor X traveling the world rounding up a new batch of mutants detected by his invention Cerebro. Three of them had prior history in the Marvel Universe:
*** WOLVERINE (real name unknown at the time), who had fought the Hulk and the Wendigo in Canada. Wolverine willingly joined the X-Men and angrily resigned from Canada’s Department H, which had been sending him on missions up to that point. This would have repercussions down the road.
*** BANSHEE (Sean Cassidy), a sometime foe and sometime ally of the original team of X-Men. This Irishman had also fought Captain America and the Falcon.
*** SUNFIRE (Shiro Yoshida), a Japanese mutant who had fought the original X-Men as well as Sub-Mariner, Iron Man and Captain America.
The rest of the mutants Xavier rounded up were new:
*** STORM (Ororo Munroe), from Africa, where her weather-controlling powers had made her revered as a goddess by an isolated tribe.
*** NIGHTCRAWLER (Kurt Wagner), a German circus performer whose monstrous appearance made him the target of a mutant-hating mob from which Professor X saved him.
*** COLOSSUS (Piotr Rasputin), a Russian teenager working on a Collective Farm in the Soviet Union.
*** THUNDERBIRD (John Proudstar), a Native American mutant from a reservation in the American Southwest.
Once they were all assembled at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, the professor introduced them to Cyclops (Scott Summers), the leader of the original X-Men, who briefed them. He had led the original team – Iceman, Angel, Marvel Girl, Polaris and Havok (Beast was joining the Avengers at this point) to investigate a new mutant detected by Cerebro on a Pacific Ocean island called Krakoa. The original team vanished and only Cyclops escaped in their aircraft, but with no memory of what happened there.
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THE PESHTIGO FIRE – This piece of neglected history may be one of the most Balladeer’s Blog-ish topics in Balladeer’s Blog’s sixteen-year history. On October 8th, 1871 Peshtigo, Wisconsin burned down in a monumental conflagration that killed OVER FIVE TIMES AS MANY PEOPLE AS THE GREAT CHICAGO FIRE KILLED! 
THREE – Aeneas and his fleet of survivors of fallen Troy arrive at Latium in what is now west central Italy. They are made welcome by King Latinus, who offers his daughter Lavinia to Aeneas as a bride per the oracles foreseeing the arrival of strangers possessed of greatness and whose leader he should marry to Lavinia. 
THE SPANISH MAIN (1945) – In the 1600s, Dutch Captain Laurent van Horn (Paul Henreid) is using his ship to transport refugees from the current war in Holland to safety in the Carolina Colonies. Storms and other misfortunes cause the ship to go wildly off course, ultimately wrecking near Cartagena. Spanish Colonial Governor Don Juan Alvarado (Walter Slezak) imprisons Laurent and his crew, sentencing them to hang. 
Captain van Horn and his crew take the Contessa to the port where the Barracuda and other pirate vessels hide out. A very inaccurate rendition of pirate Anne Bonny (Binnie Barnes) is jealous that Francesca has taken her man Laurent. She joins forces with pirate captains who resent van Horn’s leadership to deliver Francesca to Alvarado. 
Here’s a mid-week current events roundup from 
MACABRA – This hostess of Omaha’s Theatre of the Macabre (1982-1985) has accomplished the seemingly impossible – she has managed to keep her real name a secret all these decades! She was an Omaha businesswoman who beat out over 150 other applicants for the position of WOWT’s Movie Hostess for their new Friday night at 10:30pm Bad Movie show. 
On top of that, Macabra rejected the over-the-top humor that characterized Elvira and her cash-in imitators in favor of a wry, understated approach that put me in mind of a combination of Movie Host legends like Moona Lisa and Fritz the Nite Owl. For an airing of Attack of the Mushroom People (1963) this hostess munched on mushrooms completely deadpan rather than hit the viewers over the head with the joke. 
With Memorial Day Weekend fast approaching, Balladeer’s Blog does a seasonal look at a neglected aspect of American military history. Spare some thoughts today for the men who perished in this action. 
With the World War still raging, the other Allied Nations prevailed on President Woodrow Wilson to divert some American forces intended for the Western Front to Archangel and beyond, joining a combined army of Brits, Poles and White Russians. The fighting in North Russia dragged on past the end of the global conflict in November of 1918 into June of 1919. The fighting in Eastern Russia dragged on until January of 1920. In other words, if the Americans sent to Russia had instead gone to their original destination of France, their combat operations would have ended on November 11th, rather than continuing for more than a year of further bloodshed and loss of limbs from frostbite. All the more reason to remember the often-neglected troops who served there. 
LANCELOT LINK: SECRET CHIMP (1970-1971) – From Sandler-Burns-Marmer Productions came this fun children’s show that presented trained chimps in a spoof of secret agent stories. Dialogue was dubbed in over the usual twitchy mouth movements of chimpanzees to attempt the illusion that the “performers” were speaking. 
Lancelot Link was a secret agent for A.P.E. (Agency to Prevent Evil), the heroic spies who opposed the agents of C.H.U.M.P. (Criminal Headquarters for Underworld Master Plan). Lance’s cover was that he was a guitarist and singer for a bubblegum pop band called the Evolution Revolution. His fellow agent Mata Hairi was also in the band along with other chimps, and novelty songs credited to the group were released in the real world. 
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