All month long we will feature brand-new Cool Avengers and X-Men Comic Book Moments in celebration of their fiftieth anniversaries this month. Here is an archive of all the past cool comic moments that I've featured so far over the years.

Today we look at the temporary end of the X-Men in Uncanny X-Men #251 by Chris Claremont, Marc Silvestri and Dan Green...

The concept of Uncanny #251 is that Wolverine returned to the X-Men's base in Australia after some solo missions and arrived to learn that the X-Men were all gone and the Reavers were waiting for him. They defeat him and crucify him on a giant X. Gateway uses some sort of weird power to give Wolverine fever dreams that show him what happened while Wolverine was gone (stuff like Rogue going through the mystical "emergency exit" known as the Siege Perilous and Storm seemingly being killed by Havok). The X-Men were down to just Psylocke, Dazzler, Havok and Colossus. The Reavers are preparing to do to them what they eventually do to Wolverine. Psylocke knows this, so she comes up with a plan of her own...

I love how Claremont takes something that Professor X used to do constantly back in the day (manipulate people's minds) and gives a nice spin on it where he completely addresses the somewhat immoral nature of Psylocke's actions here. Yes, she saves her teammates and in the end, that's the important thing, but she does so by corrupting herself a bit. Great, great scene by Claremont and excellent artwork from Silvestri and Green.