Issue(s): Uncanny X-Men #5
Cover Date: May 64
Title: "Trapped: One X-Man!"
Credits:
Stan Lee - Writer
Jack Kirby - Penciler
Paul Reinman - Inker

Review/plot:
Professor X was injured and rendered powerless last issue, so the X-Men carefully put him in bed...

...and then get dressed to meet Jean's parents...

...who are stopping by at the private school for a brief visit. They originally were not going to send Jean to this school but they were contacted by the government and told it would be a good idea. "I would like to know what the school's connection with the government is! Perhaps they're teaching a special secret science course! Oh well, I suppose we'll find out some day!". During the visit Cyclops gets trapped in the Danger Room (named this issue) and is forced to play through the Beast's training scenario.

Meanwhile the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, living on Asteroid M...

...are searching for the X-Men.

Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch continue to be portrayed somewhat sympathetically, and it's always interesting to read them interacting with Magneto in light of subsequent retcons that they are related.

They draw the X-Men out by setting up the Toad as a track-and-field athlete who turns out to be a mutant that is being persecuted.

The mutant hatred is something we haven't seen much of so far.

The Toad's goal is for the X-Men to rescue him and take them back to their secret base. However, the X-Men figure out that the mutant is the Toad...

...and a fight breaks out.

The Brotherhood manage to capture the Angel (useless) but they leave the Toad behind.

Magneto tries to get the Angel to reveal the location of their secret base, threatening to kill him. Scarlet Witch, who last issue saw Magneto try to detonate a nuclear bomb in a crowded South American city, is surprised that Magneto would descend to murder.

Meanwhile, in an unexplained sequence (i originally thought it was going to be revealed to be Professor X's doing, but apparently not), the Toad goes into a trance and summons a pick-up capsule so that he can return to Asteroid M. The X-Men take the trip back with him, and after a long fight with the Brotherhood...

...aided by Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch's refusal to let Magneto blast them out an airlock, the X-Men rescue Angel. The Brotherhood escape, but Asteroid M is destroyed.

Iceman is able to build an ice tunnel between two sections of the asteroid that protect the X-Men from the dangers of outer space.

They get home and it turns out that Professor X's power loss was a ruse. This whole scenario was a test; the X-Men's final exam. Their training period is now over.

Quality Rating: C

Historical Significance Rating: 4 - formative X-Men story. First Asteroid M.

Chronological Placement Considerations: N/A

References: N/A

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: X-Men: The Early Years #5

its interesting. I wonder if stan had the idea of reforming Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch from the beginning?

it's that time again where i point out the crazy things in this issue.

-Prof. X is asleep, pretending to be powerless. Ice Man says "It sure seems strange to see him sleeping that way, just like any normal homo sapiens!". uh...how does Ice Man usually sleep?

-where was Mrs. Grey raised that she thinks it's ok to just snatch someone's glasses right off of their face? it would serve her right if Cyclops zapped her in her trembling eye bulbs.

-Toad's mask and the wig that is apparently attached to that mask. that's all i have to say about that.

hrm...Magneto, the evil villain who "will stop at nothing to achieve mastery of earth", uses flashing lights to keep Angel from being able to sleep and high-pitched noise to drive him nuts. someone should tell Magneto those methods don't actually qualify as torture. some bad guy he turned out to be.

the X-Men working with the government and having the government intervene to help with student recruitment is a far cry from the Sentinel program and AvX and everything other anti-mutant storyline that i've come to expect as the norm.

Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch were really on the forefront of the eventual theme of having tons of villains be not so bad. At least they were sympathetic from the beginning.

More evidence of Prof. X being a dick - seriously, your final exam is going against the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants?

The Toad's bizarre trance seems like one of those time Kirby plotted things one way and Stan either misunderstood or decided to go a different route. Kirby seems to have drawn the Toad falling under Xavier's power, but Stan's script seems to imply that the Toad is so sycophantically dependent on Magneto that he goes almost catatonic over being left behind. Perhaps the idea, for Stan, is that tis isn't much of a "graduation" exercise if the X-Men teens don't do it all themselves.

Is this the first appearance of Asteroid M? (well an Asteroid M, Magneto makes quite a few of them but I guess that's what you get when you keep making bases out of random floating debris of rocks)

Correct that this is the first appearance of (an) Asteroid M. I've added a note in the Historical rating section. Thanks.

My take-away from Toad's trance is that in these early issues, multiple mutants are shown with mental powers, including Magneto, so perhaps Toad was mentally summoning the capsule to take him back to Astroid M.