Comicon Advent Calendar Day 20: Canonball And Gladiator Clash Over A Twinkling Landscape Of Holiday Cheer

Welcome to the table,

I have spoken at length in these hallowed halls about my love for Joe Madureira‘s work. His video game, Darksiders, is my favorite video game series. His Sword & Sorcery comic Battle Chasers is one of my favorite works of all time.

So, when asked for a book to add to the Comicon.com Advent festivities, I was reminded of a holiday-themed issue of The Uncanny X-Men that featured his work. Not so much for the holiday trappings, but because it opened a door to a weird bit of X-Men lore for me that I would have never explored had I not picked it up.

So let’s get into The Uncanny X-Men #341. I’m warning you now, this is going to be chaotic rambling because I’m pulling it from the far-flung thoughts of youth.

I’m not the typical journalist you would expect to cover an X-title, but here we are. ‘Tis the season for mircials and such. I was actually a pretty avid X-Men reader and enjoyed the cartoon and Wolverine comic a lot as a kid. I’m sure I snagged this issue off the new comic shelf because it featured Joe MAD!’s work, but what I found within the pages stuck with me, even to this day.

The book follows two story threads. One of those threads follows Magneto, with his Final Fantasy haircut and at the time name Joseph, you are going to have to ask one of the Marvel comic guys for why exactly what was a thing, and Rogue, as they are having a holiday moment, while Gambit is irritated because clearly there is still romantic tension there.

The other follows Sam Guthrie, known by the codename Cannonball, and his random afternoon in New York City. I’m going to focus on Sam for a few reasons, and these are unhinged, so strap in, friends.

The Guthries are many!

First and foremost, do you know how many freaking Guthries there are? There are at least ten kids in this family! Tom Zebulon Guthrie and Lucinda Guthrie have ten freaking kids! Sam, known as Cannonball, Paige, who was Husk in Generation X, one of my favorite comics of all time, and honestly, the book I consider “my X-Men” comic. Then there is Jay, known as Icarus, Melody known as Aero, Jed, who at one point got killed but anti-mutant jerks and is back, but has no powers now,  Joelle, the traitor who at least came around, Liz who has not powers that I know of at this point, Lewis, who has a weird gauntlet thing and is kinda a jerk, Cissie who is Lewis twin and really not a developed charicter, and then THEN these people adopted another kid named Ray who’s dad was killed in a carb bombing.

So, already, we are dealing with someone who has a family tree the size of Yggdrasil, and this guy is just out here on the streets of New York wandering about giving money to panhandlers and walking by Frank Castle in his windy winter best.

Our boy Sam goes to F.A.O. Swartz and is amused by the crowds and filled with the holiday spirit. This shifts quickly as Kallark, the freaking Gladiator in all his purple mohawked glory, shows up in the middle of the city almost killing a ton of people… because X-Men!

Now we take a break from the “Why is a purple space man crashing into the holiday to and fro of the city” to spend time with Mag…reee… Joseph and Rogue are going to go on a carriage ride. This plot line is kinda lame because Magneto makes the cart float, and it scares the hell out of a guy working in an office building on a high-up floor, causing him to call his wife and go home because he feels like he has been working too much and is hallucinating. Magento also makes some kinda weird big ring thing, and it never really explains why. I honestly did not care because the cover of this comic is Gladiator fighting Cannonball! As a kid, I had no time for whatever the heck was going on in that love triangle, and honestly, as an adult, I find myself also not caring because this is not what I am here for!

Gladiator is supposed to be almost unbeatable! 

Okay, another side story from me. At the time of reading this book originally, my understanding of Gladiator was that he was almost indestructible. His trading card made him sound more powerful than a god. His appearance on the cartoon was iconic. This dude rips apart planets and black holes, can go toe to toe with Odin, take full force blasts from the Dark Phoenix, and he is crashing into the streets of New York during the winter holiday and is going to fight the “boom” kid from Kentucky coal mine country. There is no way Sam survives this fight, right?… RIGHT?!

So Sam, doing his best all on his lonesome, starts mixing it up with Gladiator, and it’s kinda baffling that Gladiator is not just obliterating this kid.

Sam even gets a few hits in, but it’s around this time I’m not oblivious to the fact there are so many freaking “See issue XYZ” notes in this issue that it feels like maybe they should have drawn the story out more or something because if I need to read ten books to get all the stuff happening, things have gotten a little to muddy in the mix.

Back to the fight! Gladiator gets worked up, it looks like he is going to obliterate Sam, and then, like some kinda holiday miracle, the boy comes up with something very clever…

Sam uses his ability to poof from one place to another super quickly, and it shakes Gladiator’s confidence. Unknown to me at the time, but something I quickly learned in the days following this issue coming out, is that Gladiator needs to have confidence or his power slides down the powerscale, making him susceptible to attacks.

Sam knocks the heck out of Gladiator, and the Gladiator tells him, and the other X-Men who choose the moment after the fight to show up, that there are issues out in the universe that he needs their help with. He then sends all of them… except SAM! WHO JUST KICKED HIS ASS!! Into space for some space adventure I never finished.

So there ya’ go, another holiday themed comic with little to nothing to do with the holidays but it looks super cool and it opened a ton of doors for me as a kid because I asked all sorts of questions and to this day remember how neat it was to see a kid from Kentucky best a cosmic power house over a twinkling landscape of holiday cheer.

Until next time, I had a Trivial Pursuit kind of game based on the Marvel Universe, fifteen years or so back, the answers to half the questions were well thought out and required deep lore, the answers to the other half of the questions were Dr Doom, Alpha Flight, or Guthrie. It resulted in the turn of phrase “Must be a Guthrie” being spoken any time someone asked who an unknown comic character was.

Happy Holidays!