Bizarre Adventures 27 (3)

Bizarre Adventures 27

Jul 1981

Secret Lives of the X-Men: Nightcrawler

Show Me the Way to Go Home

by Mary Jo Duffy, Bob Layton, Dave Cockrum, Ricardo Villamonte

The X-Men (Cyclops, Storm, Wolverine, Colossus, Nightcrawler) investigate an alert sounded by Cerebro. They find the Vanisher stuck in the middle of vanishing. Only the right half of his body is visible. Nightcrawler reaches out and touches him.

Nightcrawler and the Vanisher, all of him, are zapped into another dimension where they are waited on hand and foot by beautiful women armed with swords. The Vanisher is content to stay there. Nightcrawler looks for and finds a way home. He goes back to get the Vanisher but the supervillain has no interest in leaving until they get attackers by a large monster.

Thoughts

This story felt inconsequential. The Vanisher had last appeared in Champions 17 (Jan 1978). It was in that issue that he got stuck while trying to vanish. Someone finally got around to explaining what happened to him, more than three years later. Maybe the story wasn’t inconsequential but it didn’t carry any heft.

The art by Dave Cockrum and Ricardo Villamonte is beautiful. I just wish that I could say the same about the plot or character interactions. 

I looked back in my records and see that I bought this comic book magazine at the Baltimore Comic Con in 2019. The copy I own is kind of beat up and cost me one dollar. 

I first became aware of this issue way back when, in the early 1980s. Reading it now, more than 40 years after it was published, I have to say that it did not do it for me.