Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue at random, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published. 

Friends, cast back your minds to a time when the X-Men had disbanded and gone their separate ways. A time when villainous Skrulls threatened to infiltrate the Marvel Universe by masquerading as heroes, stealing their identities in an almost undetectable manner. Hey, wait a second…

Here’s the thing about any serial medium - eventually, certain stories are going to come back around. And sometimes they’re going to come back around together.

Following a visit to the skrull homeworld where they fought Skrull doppelgangers of the Marvel heroes, the X-Men were disbanded by Xavier after an apparent breakdown. For a couple of months, the X-Books contained solo adventures, and a 3-issue miniseries, Astonishing X-Men (Volume 2), featured an interim team lead by Cyclops attempting to save the Mannites (a race of man-made and powerful children) from Apocalypse’s new horseman, Death. At the climax of the series, Death killed Wolverine by stabbing him with his sword.

Which is where #375 picks up. The X-Men re-convene to autopsy Wolverine, and realise that he has been replaced by a Skrull - something Xavier suspected, hence his decision to disband the team. Preceding that revelation, though, is a fairly decent, if overly-long illusory fight scene involving the whole team where a bunch of characters die, and both Onslaught and Dark Phoenix return before it’s revealed as being a psychic illusion (well, duh) cooked up to try and flush out any infiltrators. The main problem is that when certain characters start lashing out insanely and dropping dead like flies, it becomes fairly clear to the reader that something’s up and it’s always a problem when the audience recognises something that the characters don’t, because you feel like you’re reading about a troupe of morons. The issue ends with the lingering question of where the real Wolverine is, a question fully answered in X-Men #95 when it’s revealed that Wolverine is the new Death.

At this time, Alan Davis was writing the X-Men. His run culminated with The Twelve - a storyline that had been hinted at for years by various writers (following their predecessor’s lead) who each had their own idea what it was, the only certain fact being that it involved Apocalypse. Davis used his run to finally tell the story, and the skrulls were prominent throughout. Claremont’s return immediately followed The Twelve, however, you only have to look at the first page of #375 to see why some people were speculating that even now Claremont already scripting Davis’ plots, rather than the credited Terry Kavanagh.

It’s unclear whether any elements of this story will get a mention during the course of Secret Invasion - it is basically built around an identical concept, and a team of mutant skrulls that span out of the X-Men’s involvement with them, Cadre K, did stick around for a while afterwards. Despite Davis’ remarkably tight plotting, it wasn’t a particularly great era for Marvel or the X-Men (though it did actually get worse when Claremont took over)  so chances are, they’ll want to leave the past where it is.

Download Uncanny X-Men #375 in .cbr format here for a limited time, and there’s always more Uncanny X-Men available to view online at Marvel Digital Comics.

Tags: Adam Kubert, Alan Davis, secret invasion, X-Men
Publisher: Dusting Off, Marvel