New Mutants 72 - Inferno

Illyana's transformation is completed.

New Mutants #72

Writer: Louise Simonson
Penciler: Bret Blevins
Inker: Al Williamson
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Colorist: Glynis Oliver
Editor: Bob Harras
Editor-in-Chief: Tom DeFalco

The demons descend upon New York as N'astirh encourages Illyana to embrace her dark side completely. S'ym shows up and the two leading demons battle whilst Illyana flees. The rest of the New Mutants see the X-Terminators in the sky fighting to destroy the pentagram and take off to help them. They succeed but with several wounded. The surviving members of both teams join together. Illyana finds herself teleporting into surreal distorted versions of life in New York with the twisted demonic forms overwhelming her and taunting her to use the Soul Sword. Eventually she does so as the demonic magics increase due to N'astirh having absorbed the transmode techno organic virus and now having magic in all his circuits. He survives an explosion and confronts Illyana, telling her there is no path of redemption. She uses the Soul Sword again on him and her armour now fully forms, encasing her completely.

This issue demonstrates a major problem with the crossover structure of Inferno. Rather than having separate issues of different series tell distinct chapters that flow smoothly from one to the next it instead has a lot of overlapping issues with characters jumping from one set of pages to another and back. This is why there are so many different orders in circulation for the event though they tend to at least line up around key moments such as the opening of the portal bringing the demons into New York. Sometimes the overlap is especially great the whole narrative jumping between titles. This happens here.

With the exception of Illyana's part of the issue it is very hard to follow in isolation. It overlaps heavily with the final issue of X-Terminators to the point that the battle between N'astirh and S'ym is only fully understandable when the two issues are read in close proximity. The team-up between the two teams is mostly covered in the limited series but here we get more of the rescue of the babies and an extension to the scene of the two teams resting at the end. The two teams are effectively fused in this issue with a redivision based on wounds rather than existing affiliations and this looks like it could lead to a future expansion.

However Illyana's story is mercifully told in a single series. Here we see her descent continue as she becomes ever more a pawn of the demons. Some proclaim to worship her but others are more overt in simply using her. The scene at the end as she sees what she has become and N'astirh tells her that there was never a right path for her once she entered Limbo and everything ultimately led her to this moment is truly chilling. Her continued destruction has driven so much and left her vulnerable to abuse and manipulation, making for a very dark cliffhanger as her only source of help seems to be S'ym (who is drawn and coloured to look more menacing here than usual).

This issue is very much in two pieces. One side is a mess because it overlaps upon another part of the crossover so heavily that it doesn't work well in isolation and even read together it feels jumpy and slightly repetitive. The other side is self-contained and shows a terrifying final descent for Illyana as she truly becomes the Darkchilde with seemingly no escape. The stakes are rising but this issue could have been better structured to get there.