Thoughts

Claremont wrong-foots me with this issue, in a way that I really quite enjoyed. Half way through, Claremont returns to his characters telling a “fairy tale” idea. The visuals presenting us with the narrative the character wants to tell. There’s always a risk that these become just a bit too twee, and also in this instance its coming from Rahne. A character I’m still struggling to engage with.

So, when Rahne’s fairy tale begins I initially didn’t feel great about it. Rahne’s two-dimensional puritanism v guilt really isn’t doing it for me, and chuck a child-ish fairy story on top of that and it seems even less like my cup of tea.

And then the issue pulls a twist. One that you can deliciously sense coming as the twee storytale seems to be slightly off, that there’s something rotten here that even the narrator is unaware off. Culminating in a final panel that nicely teases the next issue.

Aside from that, this issue presents the New Mutants very much in the bosum of the X-men. They train with Nightcrawler and Colossus, Warlock is being studied by Xavier. It’s nicely understated stuff, albeit not the sort of material you’d bring Sienkiewicz at his wildest onto the title for.

That said – he even presents these simple concepts with some nice visual invention.

Fun Panel

Well, here’s the first stirrings of the visual imagery of Inferno many years earlier.

Any Googling

As the world of the x-titles become more entwined and more complicated, the inevitable is going to happen with this readthrough. Namely what constitutes chronological is hard to pin down. I’d forgotten when compiling this that this issue introduces Selene to the Hellfire Club. Something that becomes a big deal inUncanny X-men 189. Which I’ve already read.

That’s a screw-up on my part, although its also something that shows up the limitations of googling to check reading order. Nowhere online agrees on this stuff. It’s hard to know when to split between storylines now that the titles seem to happily hop between X-men and New Mutants. Sometimes compromises have to be made.

So I’m going to stick with this order. Even though I can see its flaws.