An artist other than Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko gets a plotting credit (congratulations Werner Roth!), but sadly the story is a little…Twisted up.  In what has become a major Marvel trope, bad guys (Blob and Unus) rob a bank disguised as X-Men.  The mastermind behind the plot: Lucifer.  He’s picking a fight with the young mutants, apparently in order to force them to listen to his long-winded and bizarre origin story involving an alien computer, and to rub it in that he crippled Charles Xavier.

There’s also Dominus (above), who is a short-lived partner to Lucifer.

Frankly, the convulsions the narrative has to go through feel an awful lot like future X-Men stories under Chris Claremont, when the X-verse got so complicated and confusing that only the most seasoned readers could follow any of the story.  And frankly, even guys who study Marvel, like me, would get lost.

Creators: Roy Thomas, Werner Roth, & Stan Lee
Grade: F