Uncanny X-Men 228 - Inferno Prologue

And so the X-Men enter an all new era starting with... a flashback fill-in issue.

Uncanny X-Men #228

Scripter: Chris Claremont
Guest Penciler: Rick Leonardi
Guest Inker: Terry Austin
Colorist: Bill Wray
Letterer: Tom Orzechowski
Editor: Ann Nocenti
Guest Plotter, Editor-in-Chief: Tom DeFalco

This is the first issue in a very long time that is not solely written by Chris Claremont (collaboration with artists aside). Instead we get a plot by Tom DeFalco revisiting a character from Dazzler's own series albeit one introduced years after he stopped writing it. It's a classic fill-in structure with the main story told in flashback (and even containing flashbacks within the flashback) whilst the first and last pages anchor it to a character in current continuity, in this case O.Z. Chase a bounty hunter friend of Dazzler's as he reads a letter from her detailing an adventure she and Wolverine had with him.

This is the first problem with the issue - why on earth is Dazzler telling Chase about events he was involved with? And also Dazzler has not been with the X-Men that long which limits the period in which this adventure could take place to at most a few weeks before she could have sent the letter. It's likely this issue was intended to be used much later on but the big change in the X-Men's status quo is such that the narrative device won't work for a good while yet and so it's been pressed into service at this point. The result is that of all the former team members and supporting cast characters to be seen reacting to the news of the X-Men's death in the Fall of the Mutants we get an obscure bounty hunter and his cigar eating hound from the tail end of Dazzler's solo title.

The story also resorts to what was already becoming a tired cliche - a character Wolverine has interacted with in the past but never mentioned it before or since. In fact this time we get two. Wolverine's past has evolved from a well of story ideas to an incredibly convoluted list of characters and situations as "mystery" gets treated as a casual dumping ground. It stands out even more when he's not the regular character first drawn into the events but instead is following Dazzler as she rushes to Florida to help her friend who has been arrested on suspicion of being a werewolf killer. The real killer turns out to be Vladimir Zaitsev, a mutant ex Soviet agent Wolverine has tangled with before and is now on the run having first defected to the US and then fled to Columbia but has been deposed as a drug lord. As a result the Soviets are trying to eliminate him whilst the US government is trying to catch him. The latter is represented in the form of Henry Peter Gyrich, another character whose past and present are regularly adapted to suit the needs of the story at hand. Here we discover that he was Wolverine's CIA contact when the latter worked for the Canadian Special Intelligence Service. The story climaxes in a showdown in the Florida swamp where Zaitsev proves rather demanding in insisting on his life for his three hunters' and Cerberus decides to take the deal on offer. Back in the present Chase finishes reading the letter and hears the news of his friends' deaths then confronts a bigot in the bar about them.

It's easy to beat up on fill-in issues. They are invariably structured to be dropped in whenever they're needed and so can't do anything significant with the characters. The ongoing narrative structure also often requires them to be told in a flashback format to make them easier to adapt when called into service. And events in them invariably get forgotten completely. Chase hasn't been seen since this issue and I don't think any other issues have done anything with Gyrich and Wolverine's history. But that's by the by. The real problem with this issue is its placing. Coming immediately between a dramatic storyline and the launch of a bold new status quo for the series it can't disguise itself as an intruder getting in the way of ongoing developments. Because Inferno Prologue collects all the issues of all three series since the Fall of the Mutants it's understandable why it's wound up here but this has a strong potential to be the single most ignorable issue in this entire run. And it would have to be the very first Uncanny X-Men issue we come to.