X-Men (1963) #8

 

Cover by Jack Kirby

Cover Date: November 1964

On-Sale Date: September 1964

Synopsis: Unus the Untouchable is told that he has to defeat one of the X-Men before he's allowed to join the Brotherhood. Beast shoots him with a ray that makes his force fields go out of control, and makes him promise to give up a life of crime before returning him to normal.

CHRONOLOGICAL NOTES

Page 2, panels 5 and 6

Iceman adopts an icy form for the first time here, and will pretty much appear like this going forward, abandoning the snowman look altogether. The idea that he's transparent in this form will be quickly dropped, however.

Page 6, panel 3

After being chased by a mob of angry mutant-haters, Beast quits the team. He'll be back later this issue, so it's not all that significant, but I'm placing this here because this is about the point where the original X-Men are dragged to the future for the Brian Bendis run, starting in All-New X-Men (2013) #1. I'm a little hazy on the details, but I think they get returned to the exact point they left.

Page 6, panels 5 to 7

Professor X makes a cameo here, searching for Lucifer in the Balkans.  He only left last issue, and he'll be back next issue, so technically his leave of absence didn't result in him leaving the comic at all.

Page 7, panels 4 to 6

Beast makes his debut as a wrestler one week after leaving the X-Men, and has to make a meteoric rise up the ranks if I'm going to keep this story down to a reasonable time-frame.  This is televised wresting in the New York area, with a pretty sizable crowd, so the inescapable conclusion is that Beast is wrestling for the WWE (or the WWWF as it was known back in 1964).

Unus is described by the ring announcer as the "untouchable champion of all time", so here's another inescapable conclusion: Unus had a run with the WWF Heavyweight Championship.  In 1964 the champion was Bruno Sammartino, who had won it in May of 1963 from Buddy Rogers, and would hold it all the way until 1971.  From a 1964 perspective, the simplest thing would be to say that Unus won the title from Rogers in 1963, then dropped it to Sammartino in 1964, some time after this story (or possibly had it stripped for getting involved with a bank robbery).  This will all have to be disregarded as topical due to the sliding timeline, but it's helpful to determine how long Unus held the title for.

The WWWF held their New York events at Madison Square Garden. Generally, they held one of these events a month. In 1964, the dates were as follows: January 20th; February 17th; March 16th; May 11th; June 6th; July 11th; August 1st; August 22nd; September 21st; October 19th; November 16th; and December 14th. This part of the story should take place on one of those dates.

Unus notes later that he's spent years in the ring. This is all we get on his background, but I guess at least one of those years was spent as the WWWF Champion.

Page 12, panel 3

This story is the first meeting between Unus and the original X-Men. I should also note that he meets with Mastermind, but not the rest of the Brotherhood or Magneto.

Note in the background that Jean is back to her original cowl after a period of experimentation. She'll stick with this design for a while.

Page 20, panels 3 to 8

Unus is blackmailed here into leaving the super-villain life behind, under the threat that Beast will use his ray-gun to make Unus' powers go haywire.  A little bit before X-Men (1963) #20, Unus is made immune to that ray by Lucifer, but he shouldn't be making any prominent appearances as a criminal between this story and #20.

COUNTING THE DAYS

This is a tricky one, because I have to wedge a weeks-long wrestling career in here for the Beast. Here goes...

• Day 1: Page 1 to 7.3. The X-Men train, Cyclops gives them a day off, Beast and Iceman are chased by a mob, Beast quits the team.
• One week later, Beast begins his wrestling career.
• One day, weeks later: Page 7.4 to 20. Beast wrestles Unus, Unus tries to defeat the X-Men, Beast zaps him with his ray-gun, Unus decides to go back to wrestling. This story should happen on the same date as a WWWF show at Madison Square Garden. X-Men (1963) #7 happened around graduation time (late May, early June), so June 6th or July 11th seem like good options.