SENTINELS

The Sentinels came back at Christmas. In X-Men Vol. 1 #98 (1976), by Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum, Stephen Lang’s Project: Armageddon unveiled its new Mark III Sentinels by spending the holiday collecting X-Men: Jean Grey was snatched from a Rainbow Room dinner with Cyclops, Banshee and Wolverine were taken in the street fighting that followed, and Professor X was plucked off Peter Corbeau’s boat near the Bahamas by a Sentinel rising straight out of the sea.

Then the trail went cold in a way no X-Man could explain. For four days Cyclops swept the planet with Cerebro and found nothing at all — no deaths, no signals, no prisoners. The answer, when Corbeau worked it out, was altitude: Lang’s prison was an orbital platform, a derelict space station where technicians strapped the captives down and studied the machinery of their mutations at leisure, puzzling in particular over Wolverine, whose readings matched no mutant profile they knew.

The breakout nearly finished what Lang started. When Wolverine tore free and the captives fought their way out, Banshee’s sonic scream smashed a hole in the station’s outer wall — and the three escapees were sucked out into open vacuum, tumbling and dying in the dark. What saved them was their jailers: in X-Men Vol. 1 #99 (1976) the Sentinels themselves retrieved Jean, Banshee and Wolverine inside protective atom-spheres, because Lang’s specimens were worth more alive. The rescue chain that followed — Corbeau’s Starcore shuttle, a solar flare, a long fall home — runs straight into the birth of the Phoenix two issues later.