Note that Wolverine says during the file with Callisto that stabbing him in the throat would kill him but Sabretooth tearing out his throat didn't kill him in Classic X-Men 10.
I could not stand Claremont's presenting Storm's embrace of her dark side as a positive thing. Storm's new attitude almost got Maddie killed in issue 175 and you'll see the problems it causes in issues 219 and 224.

I'm starting to remember how I saw a great strength emerging or re-emerging with these issues of Claremonte's. It was that he was he dusting off several characters that hadn't had too much use in X-Men nor had I read. With the next few issues he dusts off Dazzler and Havok and makes me suddenly care about them and like them a lot, along with Polaris ever so briefly before Malice gets to her.

Okay Dazzler had a series, which I know nothing about, but Havok seems to mostly be a guest appearance and that's it, oh and he's Cyclops brother...and that's it. Their personalities never really clashed nor did Havok ever have much of a character before. So I love it when a writer sort of re-invents/gives spotlight to someone and makes it work.

I find this era of X-Men to be much better than anything between this and Byrne's departure. Things are progressing well, and I think this X-Men team is one of the classic line-ups. I agree with David's comments.

Storm's defeat of Malice is a cheat. Despite getting a Mohawk and wearing leather, there has been very little "darkness" exhibited in her.

The Rouge/Rogue comment is something that only makes sense in a comic book. In person, no one would ever say the one for the other!

Looking at this at the same time that fnord is posting reviews of early Jim Lee work on X-Men, there seems to be a basic rule.

If you want your female X-characters to look hot, call Jim Lee.

If you want your female X-characters to look bizarre and freaky (and, like fnord says, to have the face of a dead fish), call Barry Windsor-Smith.

Malice is like Selene, another of these CXlaremotn concepts that seem to be sword-and-sorcery or demonic beings explained as "mutants' sot hey can fit into the X-Men universe. With Selene, it's halfway workable -- and she does use real magic to augment her mutant psychic vampire powers -- but Malice? Malice's mutant power seems to be that she can turn into an evil, mind-controlling necklace.

Is it ever made clear that Malice is a mutant? I mean I get that most of the Marauders are mutants, but some aren't (Vertigo). Is it possible that it's never been made clear what Malice is, and that she's simply a mystical entity under the control of Mr. Sinister?

"The supervillain Malice was created by Uncanny X-Men writer Chris Claremont. She is a member of Mister Sinister's Marauders. Being incorporeal, she has no physical body of her own and has to possess the body of others. Those she possesses manifest a cameo-like choker around their neck. It is unknown whether this is a physical artifact or an illusionary one."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malice_(comics)

Even as a kid, Malice never made sense to me- if she's a mutant, she should have parents, a physical body, etc. Did her physical body die?

Malice was just another unfinished storyline. But she actually does make sense. In this issue alone, she's tearing the X-Men apart as a team, accomplishing psychically what the Marauders did physically. Wolverine loses confidence in his own senses [inconsistently, but that's Claremont] and it makes perfect sense that Storm triumphs over the Dark Side, which she already possesses.

It won't be revealed for a few issues, but she's already planning to kill the X-Men, and fifty-some issues later, she will admit it wasn't her best idea. Look at where they are, considering where they were fifty-some issues ago. They hadn't even fought the Brood yet, officially. Considering where they're going and where they've been, I can accept that Ororo already owns her dark side.

So who does Malice go to next? Polaris. This goes back to Claremont's earliest stories. Erik the Red very explicitly brainwashed Havok, but Lorna just kinda joined him. Now he joins the X-Men (and sets up a 'my brother's wife' plot) and she turn evil (and sets up an unfulfilled ending to the Shadow King story.)

I don't have any answers, but I don't see Malice as pointless of a character as others might. In context, she makes no sense, but in the same context she works perfectly. Like Selene.

Someone should just pay Claremont to write "Bondage Comics" for the rest of his life as long as he explains this stuff finally.

@Omar, Mark, Michael and Chris: It’s pretty obvious that Chris Claremont drew his inspiration for this character from science fiction author Piers Anthony’s first published novel, Chthon, which was nominated for both the Nebula and Hugo Awards for Best Novel in 1968.

In this story the main protagonist commits the crime of falling in love with a strange and extremely beautiful woman in the forest named Malice and is therefore condemned to death in the subterranean prison of Chthon. The protagonist comes to discover that Malice is a legendary and dangerous siren called a minionette, which are females all identical to each other and semi-telepathic, their beauty and youth maintained eternally by negative emotions, whereas positive emotions cause them pain and sufficiently intense love kills them.

I’d therefore posit that Malice is Lorna’s twin sister and she became a being of pure psionic energy while a foetus in her mother’s womb, as a result of Viper’s possession by Chthon, his evil energy making it so that she was able to merge with the negative emotional instincts of others, overriding their personalities and taking control of their bodies. Her being Lorna’s twin would finally explain why Malice’s energy matrix was so compatible with Polaris’s powers and, if we go by Moira’s theory in Uncanny X-Men #254 about Zaladane, how the two became so easily grafted together, effectively inseparable. This would further explain why, when Malice attempted to leave Lorna, Mister Sinister informed her that he was aware of the connection and that was why he had suggested their union in the first place, telling her that she is “the unchanging pole star”.

We have never previously understood quite what Sinister meant by this phrase, but now it becomes so damned obvious. Polaris, the brightest star in the constellation Ursa Minor, is a BINARY STAR, a system which consists of two stars orbiting around their common centre of mass. So when Davan Shakari (Eric the Red) gave Lorna the codename Polaris he obviously knew she was a twin and that she would come to be psionically bonded to her. Sinister obviously also knew Lorna and Malice were twins, but as to how he discovered this and what destiny his bringing them together pointed to…

Started reading the last comment without noticing who wrote it and got to "I’d therefore posit that Malice is Lorna’s twin sister" and I thought, man, Nathan Adler's ideas are fun to read.

Erik the Red very explicitly brainwashed Havok, but Lorna just kinda joined him.

This isn't true. In the issue, Erik the Red brainwashes Lorna first and then she knocks out Havok and Erik brainwashes him.

No, it's not. Alex hears Lorna scream and runs back to the house where Lorna is already 'evil.' Then Erik says Alex will be useful. During the fight, Alex is the only one who even hesitates like he's fighting the brainwashing. Then in #107, Lilandra's exposition specifically states that Erik only learned of the X-Men through Lorna, "though he refused to say how he learned of her."

Yes, you can read the issue as though Lorna is brainwashed just like Alex, but they are treated very differently throughout, and Lorna never questioned the brainwashing. A different way to read it is that Lorna didn't need brainwashing. Never gets explained, but she was totally willing to turn evil.

And Nathan's explanation actually explains [I can't believe I'm writing this] how Lorna and the Scarlet Witch could legitimately be sisters. I don't get how Zaladane fits in [because I'm too lazy to look it up] but they come from the same 'father,' Magneto, and have the same 'birthplace,' Wundagore.

@ChrisW

Your theory doesn't make sense. Lorna is acting like a normal woman and having normal thoughts about settling down with her boyfriend until Erik shows up at the door and blasts her. After that when Havok gets back she's a totally different character, raving like a villain out of Batman '66.

Lorna also thinks Erik the Red is Cyclops at first when he's at the door so they've clearly never met and/or colluded before. In the time it took Havok to run back to the house does it make more sense that a man she never met before talked her into a life of super-villainy or that Erik used his alien tech to do a quick mind job on her?

As for only Havok fighting the brainwashing: it was because the issue was about brother vs. brother and that added some more drama to the Cyclops/Havok fight which was the issue's focus. If Iceman was still on the team then we probably would have gotten some similar dialogue between him and Lorna.

And finally, why wouldn't the X-men throw Lorna in jail if she wasn't brainwashed?

While it was surely as far from Claremont's intention as possible, Nathan Adler's description of the "sirens" from the novel Chthon also explains Grant Morrison's character Cassandra Nova.

Because it's one of Claremont's first never-finished subplots. How did Erik the Red find out about Lorna and only learn about the X-Men through her? He was a Shi'ar agent studying Earth, and the Shi'ar already had a lot of information about Earth. Wouldn't he have learned something about the X-Men just doing his job? Wouldn't he be obligated to explain how he learned of Lorna to his boss?

I'm not saying it makes sense. It doesn't. But something happened between Erik and Lorna that was not like the basic 'superhero brainwashing' between Erik and Alex. A different type of brainwashing which Claremont intended to explain in 300 issues, fine, I'll buy that. But there was *something* going on which wasn't the Claremont brainwashing we would all come to love. It just never got explained. Maybe it was the Shadow King, who knows?

As for why the X-Men didn't throw her in jail, they weren't present for the actual scene, and couldn't tell the difference between her and Alex after it was all cleared up. And anyway, she's family. They didn't make Alex pay for destroying an airplane.

When Lorna opened the door, she said, "Wha...you! It's impossible! It can't be!"

If he did indeed know Lorna, Erik may have had his helmet off when he came to the door, and she recognized him. If she had thought it was Cyclops, her reaction probably would have been something like, "Wha? Scott? Is that you underneath that get up? Why are you wearing that thing?"

Not sure who he would be, but it must have been someone she thought was dead, or missing.

It's interesting how each reader sees different things whenever they read a comic. Take Malice, for instance. Nathan Adler sees Lorna's twin sister, while I see someone who could be related to the Shadow King. Claremont had already put Rogue in place as his sleeper agent. Now it was time to terrorize them again with Malice. There could still be a connection to Polaris, but the Shadow King could have known about this and factored it into his plans, especially since Lorna becomes important to him later in the Muir Island Saga.

Malice must have had a body before she became a telepathic entity, but she moved past it much the way the Shadow King did. They transcended the need for physical forms, other than when it suit their needs to possess people, something they got a sadistic kick out of regularly.

Like I said, everyone sees something different in what they read. It's a part of what makes reading so fun.

Or someone sees a hack writer who people idolize for stories he never ever told anything close to on an actual page.

Man, why you gotta drag Steve Englehart into this? ;)

In case you were missing the horrible music of the 1980s but wanted new Dazzler product, here's what Lila Cheney's band sounded like when Dazzler was a back-up singer on the night the New Mutants showed up for a concert.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNcl3NMEXPo

And yes, there is another song with Dazzler herself. The song is actually better, and the special effects are so good they'll make you ignore the Longshot cameo. Guido is in this one, and he's awesome.

Thanks for that link Chrisw. That was an awesome set of videos. That is really put together well for a non-professional production.

That Lila Cheney video was fantastic.