"Gold Rush"
Professor X is in a coma, mentally tormented by strange demons. The X-Men gather around his bedside, together with his girlfriend, Lilandra the Empress of the Shi'ar. To escape his torment, Professor X must fight a war in his mind, which involves a long flashback sequence, all triggered when Lilandra cries a single tear of sorrow on his cheek.
As I might have said in previous issues: if you have become accustomed to wacky melodramatic comic book plots, this is actually going to get serious.
Professor Charles Xavier is a psychiatrist who has come to Israel at its founding to give psychological care to holocaust survivors. The future
Magneto is also present in the same place. One of them is
Gabrielle Haller, a catatonic woman who would go on to play a much larger role in the ever increasing X-Men mythology. But here, we are dealing with reality, and a harsh one. As Professor X probes Haller's mind, he finds that she is catatonic from watching her family murdered, as well as being repeatedly sexually assaulted in a concentration camp. Approved by the
Comics Code Authority. And deep in her memories, Professor X also finds her turned into a
gold statue.
And while we are dealing with this serious, almost realistic story of post traumatic stress disorder and the 20th century's worst tragedy...we find out that Gabrielle Haller had that golden statue in her mind because Hydra, the terrorist organization that was founded by fled nazis, had actually implanted a map to a stash of nazi gold deep in her mind! And then they attack with flying saucer looking tilt rotor aircraft, kidnap Haller, and Professor X and Magneto have to go on a secret rescue mission where they dress up like Hydra soldiers, and confront the Monocled, jumpsuit wearing leader of Hydra and then Magneto telekinetically levitates the gold out of there and this memory causes Professor X to snap back to life in the present. And then they all go out for a lavish victory dinner on a Shi'ar spacecraft and just as everyone is happy, Deathbird, Lilandra's treacherous sister, attacks and it turns out it was all a trap so that the Brood could parasitize the X-Men and we reenter the main story arc and
So my review for this is going to be obvious, and in line with previous comments: bringing up things like the holocaust, sexual abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder were groundbreaking moves in 1982. And maybe necessary moves, to address such topics. But on the other hand, all of that was done in a framing story about a dynastic struggle between avian aliens. And even the parts of the story itself certainly waver between trying to show the realities of genocide, and also tilt-winged futuristic airplanes. Whether this is acceptable is a matter of taste, or maybe lack of it. But also to be fair: in other media, trying to deal with the era has also vacillated between horror and chivalry. For every Schindler's List, there was a The Great Escape. This story includes both, inside of two dozen pages.