Let me make a full disclosure here--I'm certainly not a huge X-fan.

I'm not going to rip them. It's just a matter where, for the most part, they just don't align with my tastes. Different strokes and all.

For me, it was primarily Claremont fatigue. After about a million issues of X-Men, I just became bored with what I saw as a sheer repetitiousness of theme and tone that just didn't appeal to me.

And I felt the stories were getting so snarled in their own obsessive continuity, and retcons, that the book was becoming damn near indecipherable. And I'm the guy who says that complaints that current comic continuities are too complex are greatly exaggerated.

Hey, at least this is a special anniversary issue, right?

We should have a jumbo size issue, a celbration of all things X, a great place for new readers to jump on...

Not so much...

As I wrote in my look at the X-Men in 1978: "Can't we just fight a super-villain once in awhile?? Unless, of course, that super-villain is the evil clone of the son you had with a demonically transformed clone of your dead wife. Oh, too late." Well, this gets us more than halfway there...

Ah, Inferno. The multi-part X-Men/X-Factor crossover. Where they all went to Hell, and Hell came to Earth. How can we set the scene?

Let's try: Scott Summers' love Jean Grey had become the Phoenix, and killed herself when she became a threat to the universe; then Scott met someone who just happened to look 100% exactly like Jean, Madelyne Pryor; Scott marries Maddy, they have a kid, he retires from the X-Men; but then it turns out the Jean wasn't really the Phoenix, and now she's alive, so Scott abandons his wife and child to go hang with her and the rest of the original X-Men, forming X-Factor; Maddy hooks up with the X-Men, she and the X-Men die and are resurrected, and Maddy hangs around to play the part their Jarvis for awhile; then Maddy makes a deal with a demon so she can gain revenge on Scott, and became the Goblin Queen (?!); it's then revealed that Maddy was actually a clone of Jean, and when the Phoenix was killed it activated her, and she was implanted with false memories so Scott would fall in love with her and they'd get married and have an offspring that Mr. Sinister thought would be able to defeat Apocalypse; Maddy went both evil and mad and eventually killed herself in hopes of of taking Jean with her.

Pant, pant, pant...

And if you don't know every single bit of that, well, you're out of luck in this issue, bub.

Our creators:

Our anniversary celebration!!


You might need a scorecard to decipher this splash:

As I said, perhaps I'm not the best one to give a thorough critique of this era of X-Men. Let me instead highlight why I'd dropped the book several years earlier: The Late 80's Claremont Checklist:

**Lots and lots of brooding

**Just as Star Trek has technobabble and House has medical technobabble, a Claremont X-Men story always wallows in psychic technobabble:



**You can usually find 2 characters who have had their mind/memories/personality squished together:


**Tons of Phoenix Saga flashbacks:


**Lots and lots of Psylocke. Seriously, Psylocke was getting more page time than Wolverine in this era...



**Dialogue. Tons of dialogue. Soul-crushing, panel covering, unending streams of blathering. No one could fill word balloons like Claremont, and no one needed so many.





I always wondered how those post-Byrne artists felt about Claremont's ever-increasing logorrhea. Did they resent that word balloons covered upo so much of their pictures?**You will find characters who brood about the possibility of turning evil...

...actually turn evil (or are possessed) and revel in it...


...or have to admit a little of the dark side in so they can man up and become more powerful.

In Claremont's world, everybody is always fighting to restrain their dark side. It's tiring to read, and too dismal a view of the world for me.

And so we end our great saga:

Wait a minute--the 25th anniversary of the X-Men, and the 150th issue of the "new" X-Men, and the bloody story is going to be concluded in X-Factor #39?!? What a rip.

At least next issue sounds fun:

Ah, another item on the Claremont Checklist. When the X-Men get too broody, introduce Kitty Pride to lighten things up. When Kitty gets too broody, introduce Jubilee...

Again, I'm not ripping the X-Men (too much) here. A lot of people like this stuff. It's just not my cop of tea.

ELSEWHERE IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE:

Speaking of demons...

Inferno was made into a company wide crossover for February, March and April. Even though the X-Teams didn't appear in anyone else's mag, virtually every Marvel hero had to deal with the intrusion of evil hellspawn into their nice, quiet lives. A decent enough way to do a crossover, I suppose...you don't have to read the "parent" mag or some limited series, because there really was no actual continuity involved. Any type of demonic activity was good enough.

Daredevil was no exception. He had to battle a demonic dentist. No, I'm not making that up. Still, it's better than the umpteenth battle against the Hand...