The Uncanny X-Men #229

History

Written by Chris Claremont and drawn by penciler Marc Silvestri, with Dan Green on inks, Glynis Oliver on colors, and Tom Orzechowski lettering, the issue was edited by Ann Nocenti under editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco, and carried a cover date of May 1988. It picks up directly from the 'Fall of the Mutants' arc, in which the X-Men had publicly died stopping the Adversary and were secretly resurrected by Roma — a status quo that gave Claremont the freedom to operate the team covertly, without a fixed address, in what he himself later described as a run he wished could have lasted another decade. Silvestri has spoken about Claremont's explicit desire to give the book the feel of a Western, framing the Reavers as black-hat bandits descending on a frontier town — a genre shift that is legible on every page of the issue's opening Singapore heist sequence.

Trivia · 8 facts

• First appearance of the Reavers — a gang of approximately twenty cybernetic criminals operating out of a ghost town called Cooterman's Creek in the Australian Outback — created by Chris Claremont and Marc Silvestri.
• First individual appearances of Reavers Bonebreaker, Pretty Boy, and Skullbuster, the three named lieutenants who escape the X-Men's assault and return as recurring antagonists throughout the Outback Era.
• First appearance of Gateway, a mute Aboriginal Australian mutant who creates teleportation wormholes by spinning a bullroarer; he was coerced into Reaver service under threat to a sacred ancestral site and later became an informal ally of the X-Men.
• First appearance of Jessán Hoan, a Singapore banker kidnapped and partially psychically reprogrammed by Pretty Boy; she later resurfaces in Wolverine's solo title and Marvel Comics Presents as Tyger Tiger, crime lord of Madripoor.
• Roma bestows the Siege Perilous on the X-Men in this issue — a cosmic gem whose portal judges those who pass through it and rebirths them into new lives; it becomes the central plot device of the entire Outback arc and is used to disperse the team in issue #251.
• The X-Men claim the defeated Reavers' Australian base as their new covert headquarters, ending a continuous association with the Xavier Mansion in Westchester that stretched back to the team's 1963 origin.
• Roma also reveals to the X-Men that, since their resurrection, they are invisible to all electronic detection — cameras, sensors, and scanning devices — reinforcing their 'officially dead' status and shaping the storytelling of the entire era.
• The issue was collected in Marvel's Essential X-Men Vol. 8 (first published December 2007), which reprints Uncanny X-Men #229–243 and Uncanny X-Men Annual #12. The Reavers later appeared in the 2017 film Logan, with Donald Pierce (their eventual leader) portrayed by Boyd Holbrook, and in the X-Men: The Animated Series two-part episode 'Out of the Past.'

Cast · 22 characters

Full credits

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