What’s Inside:

The X-Men are broken and scattered after an attack from a
new group of mutants calling themselves “X-Men” and led by a mysterious doppelganger
claiming to be Professor X. Stranded in the swamps of southern United States, the
X-Men must find a way to regroup, recover, and prevent the evil X-Men from
launching a missile for some reason.

The united X-Men defeat the evil X-Men and their Professor X
at an Air Force base, but the missile has been launched. Rogue provides us with
the one thing we would all want her to do in the movies a few years later and
absorbs her teammates’ powers all at once! Equipped with Wolverine’s healing,
Colossus’ metal skin, and Nightcrawler’s teleportation, she is able to catch up
with the missile and stop it from doing that thing it was going to do!

With the bad guys defeated and the day saved, the team
abscond with a (re)stolen jet and head back to Westchester, while the audience
is given a peek at the erstwhile Professor X’s true identity: a sentient and
renegade Cerebro!

Writer: Joe Kelly

Artist: Brandon Peterson

Publisher: Marvel

Why I Kept This
Issue:

This, right here, is firmly my favorite X-Men cover ever. I love this team line up, I love those poses,
especially my beloved Nightcrawler being all wild and agile, with his foot
right at yo’ face (such a beautiful Carlos Pacheco cover) – I LOVE IT!

Sadly, this particular era in the comic’s history is pretty
forgettable, which I think Marvel was totally banking on years later. They
hoped that we readers would not remember this run so that Whedon’s run, which
introduced a sentient and renegade Danger Room which takes a robotic body and
attacks the X-Men, wouldn’t feel redundant. But it’s one of my personal
favorites just because it gave me everything that I want from an X-Men run; a small, focused team with
Nightcrawler and Shadowcat, my first and second favorite X-Men respectively.

Attached Memory:

I remember bringing this issue along during one of my annual
trips to Cross Country Camp in high school, along with the ’98 Godzilla soundtrack. Offended by the
movie, but damn I still love that P Diddy song. P.S., don’t judge.

During this excursion, we all took turns each day in the
kitchen, preparing the food and cleaning. I made this incrediballs No Bake
Chocolate Chip Cookie Cake. It was to die for. You take some Chips-Ahoy
cookies, dip ‘em in Starbucks Frappuccino and let ‘em get all moist (MOIST) and
soggy, spread a layer of cream cheese on the back, and then layer the cookies
on top of each other until they form a cake, then fridge that shiz for a while,
then BAM. It’s the best thing you’ll ever put in your face.

Anyway, I went through all this effort of making this
delicious desert and this huge team of teenage boy and girl athletes devoured…about
a quarter of it. Many on the team were health nuts or not willing to eat
something as heavy as No Bake Chocolate Chip Cookie Cake, anticipating all the
running we had to do. So, I had to throw so much deliciousness into the
dumpster, since I didn’t exactly think to bring Tupperware with me to camp.

Kitchen fail.

Condition of My Copy:
Pretty and glistening and signed by the artist!