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.

Uncanny X-Men 257 - Acts of Vengeance

This issue continues events in Hong Kong. Wolverine arrives in Hong Kong and it's here that we start to see the boundaries between his own series and this one break down, with an impact on the wider chronology.

Uncanny X-Men #257

Writer: Chris Claremont
Penciler: Jim Lee
Inker: Josef Rubinstein
Letterers: All Available
Colourist: Glynis Oliver
Editor: Bob Harras
Editor-in-Chief: Tom DeFalco

The Wolverine solo title had launched during the period when the X-Men were presumed dead and in fact operating out of a ghost town in the Australian outback. Rather boldly the series did not simply copy the set-up but instead established Wolverine as having another home in Madripoor, a fictional city state in east Asia with a strong touch of Singapore about it. The early issues also saw Wolverine avoiding his conventional costume, instead using a mostly black jump suit, and disguising himself with an eye-patch, a feature much mocked by readers but subsequently explained away as "When somebody with claws and a temper wants to believe he's fooling people, well... no one wants to be the one to say, 'Hey, Wolvie what's with the stupid eyepatch?'" These arrangements lasted while Claremont was writing the solo title but then were clawed away a bit under Peter David before Archie Goodwin moved the series onwards, as seen in the relevant crossover chapters in Wolverine #19 and #20. But one side effect of the arrangements is that Wolverine's own chronology in the period requires a good chunk of his solo adventures to be slotted into gaps in the X-Men run. Multi-part stories can drag things out and a consequence is that his own title's contribution to the saga must take place before a lot of events that led to the scattering of the X-Men that these issues only begin to undo.

Bringing Wolverine to the Far East to go around with an eye-patch, meet up with contacts from Landau, Luckman, & Lake, wear the black suit and fight ninjas suggests that Claremont was still working off ideas from the other series rather than merely marking time to work through an awkwardly timed wider crossover. But the result allows for some exploration of culture clashes, particularly with the young mutant Jubilee who is of Chinese descent but was born and grew up in the states. Such is her level of Americanisation (even sporting a colour scheme clearly based on the Robin costume) that a street gang call her a "Yankee banana" - yellow skinned but white inside. Then she gets kidnapped and is subsequently seen under mind control. Meanwhile Psylocke has now been sent into the field as "Lady Mandarin", an enforcer for the Mandarin's takeover of the Hong Kong underworld, steadily establishing her reputation as she enhances her training. Finally she attacks Wolverine, who has been suffering from both a weakened healing factor and illusions of past comrades, leading to a brief battle in which he discovers her identity and new power, a psychic knife.

This is a fairly straightforward middle part of a storyline, but it continues to suffer from an excessive use of continuity from other series at precisely the moment a load of non-regular readers are expected. The visuals are also a little off, with the splash page of Psylocke introducing herself seemingly giving her only one arm, whilst the colour of her armour varies slightly between its two appearances and is notably rather different on the cover. And other than a reference to the absent Mandarin "gallivanting across the globe, picking gratuitous fights with American super heroes" there's still no real connection to the wider event beyond happening to use one of the villains. Again this is a good X-Men issue but less so a good crossover chapter.

Uncanny X-Men #257 has been reprinted in:

• Uncanny X-Men Acts of Vengeance (Boxtree, 1995)
• X-Men: Mutations (1996)
• X-Men Visionaries: Jim Lee (2002)
• Essential X-Men volume 9 (2009)
• Acts of Vengeance Crossover Omnibus (2011)
• X-Men by Chris Claremont and Jim Lee Omnibus Volume 1 (2011)