New Mutants 63 - Inferno Prologue

Yet another flashback fill-in issue as we discover how Illyana obtained a space suit and a gun several years ago...

New Mutants #63

Plot: Chris Claremont
Script: Louise Simonson
Artists: Bo Hampton & Josef Rubinstein
Letterer: Tom Orzechowski
Colorist: Nel Yomtov
Editor: Ann Nocenti
Editor-in-Chief: Tom DeFalco

It's curious just how many of these early issues are so blatantly fill-ins, often pressed into awkward service by coming at a difficult point in the ongoing narrative and having to be twisted into service. This one stands out even more than most because it has a framing narrative that doesn't fit the current continuity and takes a bizarre step to fix that. It also sets out to answer a question that didn't need answering many years later.

Back in New Mutants #21 Illyana (Magik) was briefly infected with the Transmode virus when Warlock first arrived on Earth. She grabbed Lockheed the dragon and teleported away into Limbo and later returned cured wearing a strange spacesuit and carrying a gun. Where these came from was not explained at the time and so could just have been left as one of the little mysteries that life is full of. But now we get an explanation - or do we? This issue starts off with Illyana and Kitty Pryde fooling around in their bedroom before accidentally phasing through the floor into Colossus's room. That gives away that the story had been prepared some time back and its use has to get around the fact that Kitty is no longer at the mansion and Colossus is now believed dead. And so Illyana's thought captions on the first page establish this as a dream sequence even before Illyana starts to recount what happened to her. Then the last panel reaffirms the whole thing as a dream rather than genuinely being the untold tale of what happened to her between pages of that issue.

As a result the whole thing feels even more inconsequential than a usual fill-in issue. It tells how Illyana first faced off a demon in Limbo and cured herself of the techno virus then found herself in what appeared to be an alternate reality some time earlier before she arrived at the mansion. Curiously Colossus, her own brother, barely reacts to her claims. It turns out this isn't the past or an alternate reality but instead a spaceship where the Brood have cloned the X-Men and are using them to breed Brood eggs. Illyana finds the dead original crew of the ship and takes both a gun and a spacesuit for protection then faces down the Brood Queen with the help of the rebellious clones before leaving on the ship to protect its cargo.

This flashback sequence is a bit odd and in part feels like an excuse to allow an artist to draw the X-Men in their earlier costumes but otherwise there's little to it that suggests it couldn't have happened in continuity and just never been mentioned again. But the framing narrative is the confused mess with a second frame added at the end that just pushes the whole thing back into the realms of fiction-within-fiction. So ultimately it contributes little. And as the second fill-in issue in a row when the New Mutants are suffering the double fallout of both the death of one of their own and the death of the whole X-Men (including Illyana's brother), this feels a very odd time to be flashing back to explain obscure points from three and a half years earlier. Only the final panel hints at things to come as Illyana reflects on current events but overall this issue should have been left in inventory and only deployed into service at a less intense time and with a more current framing narrative.