Madison Jeffries’ Famous Giant Crab Cake recipe

Uncanny X-Men #506
Apr 2009

The Manifest Destiny story arc continues in this issue of Uncanny, telling several concurrent tales related to the X-Men’s relocation to San Francisco from Westchester. One seemingly unrelated part of this is The Beast’s Science Team, tasked to solve the mutant birth crisis that began on M-Day. Mister Jeffries appears as a regular member of this team, having joined up in the previous issue.

The team moves quickly from Canada to Kunashir Island, a disputed territory currently claimed by Russia and Japan. There, they intend to recruit Dr. Yuriko Takiguchi, a Japanese scientist associated with raising Godzilla and creating Red Ronin. On the beach near his facility, Mister Jeffries detects nearby machinery – a sensory power not previously seen, but perfectly plausible given his power set.

The machinery he detects, buried in the sands of the island’s beach, are motion sensor/Geiger counters which are triggered by the team’s approach. Dr. Takiguchi’s defenses activate and giant crabs emerge from the sands to attack the team. Jeffries brilliantly morphs one of the motion sensors into an awesome lightning gun and blasts two of the giant crabs, but their superior numbers force a retreat into the facility. After introductions are made, Godzilla shows up and says, “BWWWWOOOOOOAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRR”.

Unlike his bizarre behavior in the previous issue, Jeffries shows no signs of psychosis whatsoever. While readers were left unsure as to his mental state in issue #505, readers in this issue are sure to notice his role on the team as a sane, respectable and stable member. Either he snapped out of it and regained his bearings quite rapidly, or he never had any instability in the first place.

Awesome lightning gun

The quick scene where Jeffries morphs the beach machinery into a weapon is really done well, down to the bits of unused floating scrap metal near the gun. It’s good to see Alpha Flight characters properly written and I’m glad Matt Fraction wrote this simple scene right, in an expository way to inform the reader of Jeffries’ powers and to establish Jeffries on the upper end of offensive power on an otherwise intentionally cerebral team.

The Bynars do not approve.

He does do one odd thing, though, one line of binary-speak. Ugh. While he’s examining the motion sensor/Geiger counter, right in the middle of a sentence, Jeffries says “00111 10010”, as if he’s communicating with the machine. Binary-speak is really not a good device for a writer to use as it’s just not realistic for him to say “zero zero one one one” and so on. Writers, if you want to show a character communicating with a machine, please give the machine a voice so they can talk in English to each other instead. He did a little bit of binary-speak in issue #505, too, but hopefully we won’t see anymore of this silliness again.

Note: Jeffries appears on the cover looking all bad-ass. Here is an inset enlarged to show detail. Also, here is a recipe for giant crab cakes:

Jeffries’ Famous Giant Crab Cakes

Ingredients and equipment:
13 dozen eggs
6 bottles Worcestershire
1 gallon of mayonnaise
1 quart lemon juice
2.5 gallons of Dijon mustard
5 gallons olive oil
1 pint dried parsley flakes
2 lbs Old Bay Seasoning
120 cups breadcrumbs
200 lbs lump crabmeat
1 awesome lightning gun

Directions
Kill a giant crab using the awesome lightning gun. Pick out all the meat. In a good size-mixing bowl, combine all the ingredients together except for the lump crabmeat. Fold in the crabmeat into this mixture but be careful not to overwork it or the nice large “lumps” will break into small pieces.

How to Cook
Sauté the crab cakes using the awesome lightning gun in a little bit of olive oil and butter mixture. Alternatively you can transmutate the awesome lightning gun into an oven and bake them in a 375° F oven for 12 to 15 minutes.

Serves: 320

Tags: Madison Jeffries