I can never get enough James Steranko.
In these issues, we meet Lorna for the first time. She’s not an X-Man yet, but she’s got the green hair to prove her mutant roots. But more importantly, on the credits side: Arnold Drake signs on as writer, and we get a few of these issues drawn by the great Jim Steranko, like that terrific panel, above. Such an unusually gifted artist. Wish he’d done more.
Then, if that wasn’t enough of a gift, we get Barry Smith drawing issue #53. Another terrific talent—look what he did with Cyclops up there, and the one eye. And this extended Blastaar fight…
Blastaar ends up dying as a result of the mechanism that freed him from his prison.
Mesmero is a disciple of Magneto, and he has the ability to activate latent mutants and he boosts his power to trigger an awakening across the world–awakening Polaris.
He says she’s the daughter of Magneto but…
Issue #53 has Jean Grey kill Blastaar, the Living Bomburst from the Negative Zone, and Drake shows us how she feels bad about the villain’s death.
This kind of morality play was sorely lacking at the time. After years of low-grade writing on the series, Arnold Drake is a shot in the arm. Sadly, he, like Gary Friedrich, only stayed on for a few issues, leaving with #54–in which he introduced The Living Pharoah.
Drake wrote only a handful of Marvel Comics (but he created the first iteration of the Guardians of the Galaxy), wrote quite a few more for DC—where he created Deadman and The Doom Patrol. It’s too bad he didn’t write very much, considering his career spanned from the late 1960s until 1985. He did some non-comic book work as well, particularly writing skits performed at VA medical centers to entertain ailing veterans.
So, a handful of good issues and soon Neal Adams signs on. The X-Men book finally gets good, but it’s too late. It will be cancelled for a looooong time.
I know, right?? After several years of serious floundering in the hands of sub-grade artists and writers who just couldn’t get a grasp of the concept, by 1969, the ‘X-Men’ series had, uh, mutated to the point where it was, under Roy Thomas and Nefarious Neal Adams, truly and literally the State of the Art!! Unfortunately, ( and debatably ) the benevolent mutations had arrived too late to save the series. Of course, Roy Thomas and others connected to the project at the time have always contended that, since poor Neal habitually failed to meet his deadlines, by the time of cancellation, the decision had already been made by higher management to can Adams anyway, ( the series’ final original issue, #66, had to be drawn by Sal Buscema- a great action-artist-but certainly no Neal Adams!! ) which would undoubtedly have resulted in the series once again falling into vastly inferior-and incapable-hands, resulting in the series’ eventual cancellation, regardless! As Roy Thomas has repeatedly pointed out since 1970, “Hey-if Neal and I couldn’t save the ‘X-Men’- who could??” He MIGHT have a point-were Stan Lee , Gerry Conway, and Archie Goodwin all unavailable?? But modesty was never one of Roy Thomas’ strong suits. I am sure that we will all be playing “what if”??? over the final year of the original ‘X-Men’ series for the rest of all of our natural lives- and that, and a buck-fifty will buy us all a doughnut! ‘Nuff Said!