A Look Back at X-Men and the Micronauts

Of all the completely nonsense crossovers X-characters have had over the years and there have been plenty), X-Men and the Micronauts excited me the least.  I can enjoy a dumb comic book story as much as the next person, but the facts of this series make it sound positively wretched.  The X-Men (Marvel's hottest property at the time) having a limited series crossover (so, maybe it could be an "event" or important to future stories?) with a licensed property (okay, so it's unlikely that anything important or "event"-ful would happen with characters that Marvel may lose the rights to) based on a toy line (ugh, but Innerspace Online is a great resource if you want to learn more about the toys) that had been discontinued a few years earlier?  That sounds positively wretched.  I can't be alone in that reaction, because I can find no proof that Marvel ever reprinted this story in any form.  I wasn't aware of the toys as a kid, so this doesn't even hold the promise of nostalgia for me.  What are the chances that this is enjoyable?

Marvel house ad, circa 1984

Slightly different pencil-and-ink version of the house ad

Well, let's look a the story first.  Charles Xavier's repressed "dark side" manifests itself as a destructive entity (fittingly called The Entity) that decides to massacre everything he finds in the Microverse, with the ultimate plan of taking over Xavier's body and the "real" world.  Why did The Entity show up in the Microverse?  How did it get a corporeal form?  Why did it have the ability to create massive destruction, when Xavier's ability is telepathy?  The bad news here is that none of these questions is answered in this series.  The good news is that nobody bring them up, so at least the only people that ask these frustrating questions are the ones who wasted their time to think about the miniseries in the first place; I'm imagining that number is pretty small.  Thanks to some plot contrivances (characters switching bodies, Kitty Pryde's powers acting in a way they have never worked before or since, mind control, etc.), we see the X-Men and Micronauts fight and later team up.  And hey, they win!  The only casualties are the unnumbered masses in the Microverse, the Micronaut Bioship (AKA Biotron), and the innocence of a few of Xavier's younger students (more on that later).

So...story-wise, it's not great.  Surprisingly, it's not truly bad, aside from having a ridiculous premise and enemy. I think the characters come off reasonably well-represented (thanks to the regular writers of each title, Chris Claremont and Bill Mantlo, participating), and there were some fun and clever moments.  I really liked how they pulled off having the small-scale Micronauts fight against the X-Men (and later, the New Mutants).

And in case you were wondering whether or not Wolverine's claws can cut the armor of Micronauts villain Baron Karza, you finally have an answer: yes.  Also, it is pretty funny to see Wolverine go full-out against a character that is maybe six inches tall.

I am not a huge Jackson "Butch" Guice fan, but it was kind of cool for the then-current artist on Micronauts to get a chance showing them off on a (presumably) larger stage.  At least readers that are unfamiliar with the Micronauts (like me) can be reasonably assured that the characters are being drawn on-model.  I found some interesting inked pages online that show off Guice's skills.  He wasn't doing a ton, detail-wise, but he can tell a story, at least.

How essential is X-Men and the Micronauts? I can't say definitely for Micronauts fans, but I'm gonig to go out on a limb and say "not at all."  A lot happened to the Microverse in this series --- a seemingly huge portion of the population was massacred --- and the balance of power between Karza and the Micronauts seemed to be heavily swayed toward the good guys.  Also, the Micronaut Bioship died!  However, if you search for "Bioship" online, hoping for a character biography or anything like that, you come up short.  For whatever reason, he was also known as Biotron, and if you look up info on him, this miniseries is not mentioned.  This may be because Micronauts only lasted two issues more after this miniseries ended, but it's still damned odd.  Why even bother to kill him off?

As for X-Men fans, X-Men and the Micronauts holds an interesting place in history.  It is similarly unessential reading for X-fans, but it is one of the earlier instances of a writer highlighting Xavier's dark side.  It wasn't the first time --- Uncanny X-Men #106 is the most obvious precursor --- but it may have helped plant the seeds that eventually resulted in the infamous Onslaught storyline in the 1990s.  More interesting to me, though, are the implications that come from the fact that this series is never mentioned by anyone, ever, in any other X-Men comics.  Think about all the potentially disturbing things that happen in this series: body swapping for the teenage Kitty, the X-Men killed a bunch of people, and Xavier was revealed to be a sexual predator with a taste for underage girls.  Let's take another look at those gross sexual scenes with Xavier:

"Other aspects of your...personality --- intrigue me."  Okay, maybe that's more innuendo than anything else, but Karza/Kitty spells out that this is a lusty villain, so it's not like the grossness is taken out of context.  The scene with Psyche was far, far worse, though.

 

At least The Entity got distracted before going too far with Kitty.  Here, Dani basically has her mind raped.  There isn't much grey area here, either; the only real argument you can make would be the degree of how much Dani was violated.  Since Chris Claremont co-wrote this series while writing both Uncanny and New Mutants, I guess we're left to assume that Xavier basically mind-wiped this entire experience from the minds of his students, and that's why they never seemed traumatized by it?  I guess the other explanation would be that this is entirely out of continuity, but that's a less interesting reading.

What's the bottom line?  Well, X-Men and the Micronauts is a completely unnecessary miniseries that never needed to happen.  I'm assuming that Claremont and Mantlo wanted to work together, and had hoped this would improve the sales of Micronauts.  It didn't, and it looks like the only people who ever thought about this series after 1984 are retro reviewers on the interwebs.  If it wasn't for the truly awful decision to make Xavier's dark side into statutory rape (and I'm being generous with that description), this would be an inoffensive series that ends with the X-Men shrugging off all the death that they caused.  But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.  I guess.