Visions of Death!

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THE UNCANNY X-MEN — Issue no. 115, August 1978

Book: The Uncanny X-Men

Issue No.: 115

Published: August 15, 1978

Title: “Visions of Death!”

Cover Price: 35¢

Format: Digital scan

The bad guy at the start of this book is Sauron the dinosaur man (he looks like a pterosaur). On top of being a dinosaur man, Sauron can drain the life force of humans and other animals, and he can bend the will of people just by looking into their eyes. And if all of that isn’t enough, Sauron is a Jekyll-and-Hyde type. His alter ego, Karl Lykos, is a good guy.

Sauron and the rest of the X-Men are hanging out in the Savage Land, Marvel’s lost-world-with-dinosaurs hidden in Antarctica. Fans of Marvel comics might know that you can’t spend much time in the Savage Land without running into Ka-Zar the jungle guy and his awesome saber-toothed tiger Zabu. That’s the case here, with Ka-Zar showing up about halfway through this book to defend Karl Lykos after he loses a fight with the X-Men and reverts to his non-Sauron form.

From there we learn about the real bad guy, the Petrified Man. As his name implies, the Petrified Man is made of stone. He also has a cult complete with a priestess. And he wants to kill everybody in the Savage Land who won’t join that cult. And he also might be responsible for bringing a blizzard to the normally tropical Savage Land, which is bad, ecologically speaking. But I’m not one-hundred percent sure yet who is to blame for the blizzard.

A panel from this issue showing Wolverine attacking Sauron. Wolverine says, “You stop, gutless! This bargain-basement Rodan just chopped an X-Man — an’ Wolverine’s gonna make him pay for — hey!!” Sauron says, “You should have listened to your leader while you had the chance, little man!”

This is another jam-packed X-Men story from Uncanny masterminds Chris Claremont (writer) and John Byrne (penciler). (In addition to the dense plot, Byrne delivers the usual opening splash page and then follows it immediately with a double-page splash.) I think I say this about most Claremont/Byrne X-Men stories, but this is terrific stuff. When it comes to Bronze Age superhero comic books, it just doesn’t get much better than Uncanny X-Men.

One piece of lettering trivia (you know I love lettering): this book only picked up its now-iconic “Uncanny” adjective with the previous issue. Before that, it was The All-New, All-Different X-Men. Anyways, before and after this issue, the “The Uncanny” lettering on the cover was done with a basic sans-serif typeface, the same one used for the “Marvel Comics Group” banner featured atop the cover of all of Marvel’s comic books of the era. But for this one issue, the “The Uncanny” text on the book’s cover was hand-lettered in a more stylized way.

Next time — A western book! Or maybe a rock and roll book!

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