New Mutants 67 - Inferno Prologue

Cannonball goes to a concert but finds his promise to not use his powers was rash.

New Mutants #67

Writer: Louise Simonson
Artist: Bret Blevins
Letterer: Ken Bruzenak
Colorist: Glynis Oliver
Editor: Bob Harras
Editor-in-Chief: Tom DeFalco

Sam secures permission to go to a Lila Cheney concert but promises to not use his powers. However the concert also attracts the interest of an alien slave owner called Spyder who regards Lila as his "property" through forcing her previous owner into bankruptcy. He sends his monstrous "accountants" to retrieve her at the concert with the rest of the New Mutants rushing to try to save Lila. Meanwhile Gosamyr, a slave of Spyder's, escapes and makes her way to Earth where she pleads to the New Mutants for help to save her family. She soon has Sunspot enthralled with her. Elsewhere Limbo continues to get worse and Illyana comments on how this reflects her own descent.

This is a relatively slow paced issue to kick off the last storyline before Inferno. And it introduces one of the worst conceived characters in the whole run of the series. Gosamyr is an alien with empathic powers and combined with the way she is drawn as a sexy young alien the result is an intergalactic seductress which is a highly dodgy approach that would almost certainly not be followed today. Spyder is a little better, an intergalactic businessman whose holdings include living beings and whose business methods including forcing bankruptcies to acquire assets. It's easy to see him as a parody of real life businessmen whose methods could leave chaos in their wake (something Marvel itself would experience in the next decade).

Otherwise we have a continuation in the seemingly endless pattern of the New Mutants being placed under restrictions by Magneto and getting round them one way or another. This situation cannot endure indefinitely any more than the deterioration of Limbo. Overall this issue is relatively relaxed to build the characters for the story arc but as one of the key ones is so ill conceived it dargs the whole thing down.