Dazzler #42

Dazzler #42 (1986)
by Archie Goodwin & Paul Chadwick

All good things must come to an end.
And also the crappy Dazzler series.

Talk about a passive-aggressive tagline.

The story is narrated by the Dazzler stalker that was touched by Silence’s telepathic calling last issue.

As you saw on the cover, it also features the return of Beast, who has heard Dazzler is in trouble and is looking for her.

Since Dazzler isn’t home, Beast ends up teaming up with O.Z.Chase to fight off the bikers that used to answer to Dust before his death.

So what happened to Dazzler? While it looks like she’s been stranded in the Beyonder’s former universe…

…but she’s actually been captured by Silence, who is using her vaguely-defined mind powers to completely isolate Dazzler from the rest of the world. Including severing her connection to sound.

She also has Dazzler’s mother as a hostage, threatening to kill her if Dazzler doesn’t use her powers to enhance the abilities of Silence’s followers.

Dazzler tries to stand up for her mother…

…but Silence is blocking her powers, plus her follower Portia is relatively powerful.

All this talk about the connection between light, drugs and superhuman powers makes me think this might have worked better as a Cloak&Dagger plot.
In fact, considering the talk about “cleansing light”, this looks EXACTLY like a Dagger plot.

In order to save her mother, Dazzler agrees to use her light to power-up Silence’s followers.

And that’s where our stalker enters the story, because he’s also here to witness Dazzler’s powers.

The stalker is an interesting character. He’s not exactly a bad guy, he seems to have some serious problems understanding how people work.

Apparently Silence is feeing SO much sound into Dazzler that it’s going to kill her. Which is hard to accept considering she once fully absorbed the voice of freaking Black Bolt!!!

Back to Beast and O.Z.Chase, please note we don’t get a clear answer whether is cigar-eating and beer-drinking wolf has superpowers.
WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH THAT FREAKING WOLF!?

I already miss Dust and Silence. As evil as they were, they were also a great couple!

The stalker is lurking around the plot. He basically hasn’t done anything yet.

Although FOR ONCE, Dazzler doesn’t seem to need much help: despite Silence’s tampering, she’s able to focus her powers ONLY on her mother, to counteract the drug she’s been given.

Meanwhile, Beast and Chase are ready to ambush Silence’s headquarters, but they’ll need a distraction.

Which means driving a truck full-speed into the building WHILE firing a shotgun!!!

And so we reach the final boss of the series: Silence versus Dazzler.
I think the idea is that Silence is preventing her from turning the sound into light; without a way to release all that energy, it will destroy Dazzler’s body from the inside.

This is a GREAT sequence. I’ll even go as far as saying this looks like a Steranko layout.

The final blow is when Dazzler, instead of transmuting the sound she absorbed into light, just releases it against Silence ALL AT ONCE!!!

The effect on Silence is quite horrifying. Remember she’s been using her mind powers for decades in order to prevent her own powers from destroying her powers, but Dazzler’s attack has destroyed her ability to keep herself together.

But that’s not over, because Dust is SOMEHOW still alive and possessing one of the followers!!!

Dust is a delightfully evil little bastard, threatening to simply possess Dazzler’s mother.

Or Beast, for that matter!

The finale is… really confusing. Dazzler uses her light to overwhelm Dust’s powers, but then the stalker shows up to just shoot Dust? What?

Yeah, uhm, did we really need this guy? He seems to just make the whole story unnecessarily complicated.

Well there IS a point to his actions. Because apparently the stalker had the power to alter how other people perceive things…

…including making the authorities think he actually killed Dazzler.
So now the world believes Alison Blaire is dead, something that I don’t think was ever mentioned when she joined the X-Men.

And in the very last panel, Beast makes a not-so-subtle invitation to join X-Factor.

I guess the rest of the team vetoed the idea of Dazzler joining.

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Dazzler significance: 0/10
Had she joined X-Factor or kept her relationship with Beast it would’ve been something, but this story seems to have been completely ignored.

Silver Age-ness: 0/10
Not really.

Does it stand the test of time? 8/10
Nowhere as strong as the previous Goodwin stories; you can see it’s a bit rushed, even though they had to know quite in advance this would be the last issue. Had the story ended with Silence’s defeat, or even with Dazzler facing the last-minute resurrection of Dust… that would’ve been fine. But rushing the idea that Alison Blaire is considered dead feels off, and the stalker’s subplot really doesn’t work with the rest of the story.
I guess even this great mini-run could not escape the curse of Dazzler’s series.

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Dazzler was, in fact, supposed to be one of the founding members of X-Factor!!!
The decision to resurrect Jean Grey meant nothing came of that.

Dazzler would show up next in New Mutants #42, dying her hair and joining Lila Cheney’s band.
So much for her being considered dead and wanting to abandon her career!!!

That might as well have been Dazzler’s last appearance, if Christ Claremont didn’t have her show up in Uncanny X-Men #210. Notice she still has black hair after New Mutants (Claremont wrote both stories), and again we’re bringing up the bulls#it idea that ALL mutants are physically superhuman.

She gets to fight a hallucination of her “bad side” courtesy of Malice, and interesting she looks more than a little like her original design.

Dazzler will be possessed by Malice for a while, until eventually joining the team with Uncanny X-Men #214.

Dazzler would last on the team for just two years, leaving with Uncanny X-Men #248 in 1989.

She would then have sporadic appearances until 2006, when Claremont made her join a new version of Excalibur.
Amusingly, that series gave Dazzler the power to resurrect herself every time she dies (???) and then completely forgot about it!!!

I’m frankly more disappointed that O.Z.Chase has exactly ONE appearance besides the stories I’ve reviewed, in Uncanny X-Men #228. Not because I miss Chase… he wasn’t a particularly compelling character…

…but it drives me nuts that WE NEVER FIND OUT WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH THE WOLF.

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So what’s next for the Dazzler’s retrospective? A couple loose ends.

Next we’ll have a look at X-Men Unlimited #1 (possibly the only story to recap the entire series), a quick check with the fate of Dazzler’s half-sister, and the personally special Classic X-Men #37.

But before that, of course, we have the DAZZLER AWARDS.