Cover date: January 1964
Written by: Stan Lee
Illustrated by: Jack Kirby
Inked by: Paul Reinman
Lettered by: Art Simek
"You have never seen a super-villain like the Blob!! We promise you that! Of all the great Marvel epics, this may be the greatest!"
Maybe not the “greatest” but it’s actually pretty good, considering all that isn’t great about it. We begin with yet another training session with the X-Men in the Danger Room. Actually, it’s referred to as the gymnasium, but same difference, I guess. The boys are fighting off punching bags being launched at them by… a punching bag launcher, I suppose. There’s the usual dust-up between the Beast, Angel, and the instigating Iceman. Marvel Girl, on the other hand gets to demonstrate her ability to move a wood block through some hoops telekinetically. Even Jean has to ask Professor X if this is the most useful way to spend her training time. But in a bit of foreshadowing, Xavier explains that he’s more interested in testing her dexterity in the use of her powers then he is in exploring the brute force of them. Between all of this, there are some decent character moments. Cyclops begins his decades-long angst over how dangerous his uncontrollable optic blasts are, while Jean shows him a bit of affection by telling him that he shouldn’t wish that he wasn’t Cyclops.
Suddenly, Xavier somehow mentally senses that there is a mutant nearby and tells the X-Men to clear their minds of all thoughts so that they don’t interfere with his psychic dragnet. The team change into their street clothes and prepare to hit the town in search of this new mutant. Each of the boys vies for the opportunity to escort Jean on the mission. There are a couple of interesting character moments here. Scott begins a long period of pining away for Jean and regretting that he isn’t as outgoing as the rest of the guys on the team, and for fear that his uncontrollable powers make him too dangerous or unworthy of her. The other is that a thought balloon reveals that Xavier is also pining for Jean. In perhaps creepiest moment to ever appear in an X-Men comic (and we’re only 3 issues in!), Professor X reacts to Jean’s suggestion for him to not worry about her or the rest of the team when they go to seek out this new mutant. “’Don’t worry’! As though I could help worrying about the one I love! But I can never tell her! I have no right! Not while I’m the leader of the X-Men and confined to this wheel-chair!”. Right. Obviously not the most PC treatment of a handicapped character’s inner monologue. But he’s in love with Jean?! That’s just fucking creepy! It’s hard not to see this in light of revelations years later that Jean was his student as a very young girl. But even putting that aside, she’s his adolescent student! Fortunately, I believe this entire melodramatic plot point is dropped until 1996, wherein it’s lumped in with the repressed, dark side of Xavier that emerges as part of Onslaught. I’m all for continuity, but some things from the Silver Age are just better off left untouched. But that’s 1996 X-Men comics for you. Every word in the book up to that point was for grabs to exploit and contort with a compulsion to explain every single detail that ever appeared on a page. But even for a 1964 superhero comic, it’s still kind of gross. We haven’t determined at this point how much older than his students Xavier is meant to be, but it still feels off and it jumps off the page at the reader as being completely inappropriate and out of character. At any rate, Angel literally sweeps Jean off her feet and beats the rest of the guys to the punch and whisks her away in his yellow sports car, while his three classmates grouse about it. Cyclops takes it a little bit over the top when he says “One day, he’ll realize this is no game we’re playing, but a grim, life-and-death struggle!” Oh, Cylcops. Ever the tight-ass.
So later, in the city, each of the X-Men who didn’t escort Jean Grey on the mission are seeking out the new mutant that Xavier detected. Iceman stumbles across some guy who can seemingly make paper on the ground burst into flame. But wait. No. He’s just using a piece of magnifying glass to catch sun rays. Nope. Not the mutant. Elsewhere, the Beast sees a man who seems to be levitating several stories up, near a skyscraper. He climbs up the wall, being sure to wait until the sun sets to go unnoticed, to find out the guy is just putting up some advertising on the side of the building and standing on the glass that is meant to hold it. Nope. Again, not the mutant. Meanwhile, Cyclops comes across a carnival -- right in the middle of town. He thinks a trick shooter might be his man, but nope, not the mutant. But then! The carnival barker starts hyping up the star attraction, a fellow called “The Blob.” The Blob, a very fat slob, begins his show in which a bunch of guys are supposed to try to move him and can’t. Then somebody shoots him, he absorbs the bullets into his rolls of fat, and then expels them. Obviously the mutant -- finally!
So after the show, Cyclops meets the Blob in his dressing tent, claims to represent the X-Men and offers him a chance to go visit them because they are interested in him. The Blob couldn’t give two shits about the X-Men, disparages them, and tells Cyke to shove it. Then Warren and Jean show up. Warren uses Jean as the bait to get the Blob to go along with them. The Blob agrees, gets fresh with Jean, Cyclops gets upset and sucker-punches him in the back of the head with his optic blasts. Credit goes to the Blob for not getting all bent out of shape about that, and he does finally agree to go meet the X-Men.
When he gets there, the Blob subjected to tests. When he’s offered membership in the X-Men, he refuses, everyone gets all bent out of shape, and Professor X commands the X-Men to grab hold of him and take him into the lab so that he can wipe the Blob’s mind of the location of their headquarters. Obviously the Blob isn’t too keen on this idea, fights them off, and breaks out of the school.
He returns to his carnival pretty pissed off, and who can blame him? They’ve now put the idea in his head that the location of the X-Men’s headquarters might be valuable information. So what does he do? He gathers up the rest of his fellow performers and carnies, takes control of the operation, and heads off with them to beat up on the X-Men and gain whatever information and technology they have access to.
The X-Men hang around waiting for him to show back up after Angel flies a reconnaissance mission to find out what the Blob is up to. The Blob and his carnie army make their presence at the school known when a giraffe pokes its head through Iceman’s bedroom window and devours his ice cream sundae. The Silver Age is cute that way.
The battle that ensues is actually a lot of fun. The Beast goes up against a team of acrobats and a gorilla and the Angel is taken down by some fellows who are shot out of a cannon. Priceless. All it takes to subdue Iceman are a few guys in cold weather gear, Cyclops is easily taken out of the fight when some of the carnies cover his head with a gunny sack. And Jean is a woman, of course, so it’s fairly easy for them to overpower her telekinesis with brute force. Jean gets to redeem herself though and show off some of that telekinetic dexterity that she was practicing at the beginning of the issue by untying her blindfold with her powers and cutting the ropes she’s tied up with by levitating some of the knife-thrower’s props with a mental assist from Professor X. The rest of the team are freed and get the Blob and his cronies on the ropes.
And to wrap it up, Xavier once again comes in at the end with an intensifier ray he’s been working on that magnifies his telepathic powers so that he can mind wipe the Blob and all of the carnies and they go back to the life they came from. At two issues in a row, this is getting to be a problem. Once again, one has to wonder why Xavier bothered to recruit the X-Men if he’s that powerful and ends up resolving 2 out of 3 of their fights so far on his own.
There’s some slightly heroic narration at the end over a panel of the X-Men as students saying that they’ll be ready for next time. How nice. Except the X-Men come off as complete dickheads in this story. And the Blob really put up with a lot of asshole bullshit from them before he had had enough and decided to strike back. I can only imagine that the moral of this story is that if you invite someone over, ask him to be your friend and he says no, that it’s okay to try to beat the shit out of him, wipe his mind of the memory of you, and then turn him down the path of a life-long career of villainy. Job well done. The issue, overall, was quite fun, what with the Blob‘s frank and colorful language and a fight against some carnie folk and circus animals, despite how terribly the X-Men themselves are portrayed.
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