MSI #4: "Darkchild"

(End of an error.)

Comments

Here we reach the end of this second X-Men mini-series.  I've not been entirely kind to this story overall - though I'll admit it gets better as it progresses - but will the final chapter turn me around on it?

Well, not really. Like this issue before it, MSI #4 can at least claim to be entirely competent.  It knows its theme and sticks to it, and throws in a couple of nice ideas.  Given this series started off with apparently no clue about what it wanted to do other than fill in a gap (which having read the whole thing I can now say with full confidence should have been left a mystery), tying the whole thing together is better than might have been feared.

Really, though, it's all depressingly obvious.  I had the series pegged halfway through the second issue: Illyana learns from Storm, then Cat, then Belasco, and puts it all together to save humanity at the end.  As it turns out, this is exactly what happens.  Combine this with the fact that we already know that Illyana spends seven years in Limbo and then escapes, and there's nothing surprising to distract from the rather obvious and basic template.

The biggest shock here is that, having killed Cat at the end of last issue, Illyana kicks this one off by stabbing Storm to death.  This is interesting for several reasons.  Firstly, it's an implicit refutation of a recurring argument in the series (that I've already railed against several times) that murder is invariably an evil act.  Here Illyana murders Storm in order to save her from the agonising extraction of her soul.  An act of compassion, essentially.  It's also interesting to note that Storm concluded at the end of issue 2 that she'd have to kill Illyana to save the girl's soul, which means that not only have their positions been reversed, but that Belasco has been the only one of Illyana's three teachers to not try and kill her.

He does however banish her, sending her to the wilderness without access to her stepping discs, and without the ability to die, ensuring maximum torment.  Before this, though, Illyana manages two last jaunts, one to Ororo's garden in Limbo, which is already dying without the weather witch to sustain it, and to her own home in the USSR.   Here she meets her parents, who not surprisingly cannot reconcile a teenage girl clad in sabretooth tiger fur with their six year old little girl, and throw her out.  This gets across the fact that the damage has already been done to our heroine more than any amount of "I hate Belasco, but I love him" dialogue, though Claremont certainly goes to great lengths in his attempt to disprove that hypothesis.

Once out in the wild Illyana returns to Ororo's garden, to take shade against the magical blizzard forever enveloping the land in the huge oak tree that is all that remains of Storm's creation.  For some time (presumably two years, though it's not actually clear), Illyana survives by leeching energy from the tree, trying and failing to create new life to regrow the garden, and seeing it explode in corruption whenever she tries.  Ultimately, even the mighty tree she shelters beneath runs out of energy, and collapses to the ground.

I said this was all kind of obvious. Our heroine has had everything stripped away: her past, her future, her friends, even her shelter (and I think Claremont could have stood to dial back the strength of the bond formed here twixt girl and tree; I like deciduous growths as much as the next person, but come on...). It's time for her to suddenly work out how to beat the villain.  Three and a half issues into the series, and we've arrived at the most important point.

And... it's just so horribly pedestrian.  Illyana concludes that Storm could create acorns because a commitment to life was her defining feature.  Illyana wants to do it as part of a larger plan of survival and revenge, which won't work.  She needs to aim directly at what she wants.  She doesn't need an acorn; she needs a sword.

Is that really what we've been working towards?  She can just fashion the McGuffin Blade and everything's peachy?  Illyana herself notes that if she'd worked that out sooner it would have saved a whole lot of bother, and as usual, this blog holds to the priciple that if your own characters are complaining they've wasted their time, you've messed up somewhere along the line.

It doesn't help that in addition to gaining her weapon, Illyana's realisation just suddenly turns her disks back on.  Yes, there were suggestions last issue that Belasco may have ended up with a pupil rather more popular with the Gods than he himself is, but that can't do the heavy lifting needed here.  Basically, after an issue of Storm counselling non-violence as regards Belasco, an issue of Cat demonstrating the folly of violence against Belasco, and an issue in which Illyana learns violence against Belasco is not only ineffective but counter-productive, the ultimate solution turns out to be: violence against Belasco?

That said, the strands do tie together, as I've said, so long as you see Illyana's triumph coming not from what she accepts from each teacher's approach, but in what she rejects.  She refuses the passive role Storm played, but also refuses Cat's approach of thoughtless, headstrong violence.  When she finally fights Belasco, the kindest reading of this book is that this balance is what allows her to win out.  The rather less kind reading would just have it that she wins because she's more powerful and the Chaos Gods would rather see her in charge than Belasco, but on this occasion let's try and stay positive.  The same problem rears its head when Illyana refuses to kill Belasco and take his place; is she denying the Gods because she's rejecting Belasco's philosophy that what one wants and what is best for you are the same thing?  Or because she got to see what trying to do Belasco in got Storm years before: i.e. less than nothing.

Like I say, I'm trying to stay positive.  A story that can be reasonably read two ways is no bad thing, even when the duality seems more plausibly due to lack of thought than intentional ambiguity.  Looked upon favourably, this series ends up doing it's job; filling in the gap with a story that works on its own terms.

It just doesn't do anything at all beyond that.  Illyana defeats the bad guy, refuses to kill him, and goes home.  All boxes ticked, all questions answered.  Events happened, and no more needs to be said.

I still say that's a damn shame.

Clues

This one's a little confusing; Illyana states that she has no idea how long she spends banished from Belasco's citadel, but later says she's been away from Earth for seven years, which means her exile had to have lasted two years. How she comes to that conclusion isn't explained.

It snows during Illyana's recitation of her story, which apparently isn't unheard of mid-May in upstate New York.

Date

Sunday 13^th May, 1984.

X-Date

X+6Y+73.

Contemporary Events



Standout Line

"I made the supreme effort... and Ororo's tree, the supreme sacrifice."

Holy lizardballs, Illyana.  Keep some perspective.  Captain Oates made the supreme sacrifice.  Ororo's tree just fell down after a while.

MSI #3: "Soulquest"

("It is unavoidable. It is your destiny.")

Comments

Now this is more like it.

As was fairly obvious at the end of last issue, issue #3 is indeed about Belasco getting his chance to influence Illyana.  Fortunately, though, Claremont takes a different approach here which improves the narrative considerably.  Instead of Illyana's increases in age taking place mid-panel, here the story picks up two years after MSI #2 ended. That's a much better way to mark the passage of time.  It's particularly effective here, because whilst the last two major jumps forward in Illyana's personal timeline can be essentially boiled down to "meditative coma" and "being punched a lot", this latest two-year slice of our heroine's life has quite clearly been utterly horrific.

The basic idea here has been alluded to before, but Claremont finally hammers it home: Illyana is caught at the LaGrange point of three competing impulses: ambition, love, and fear.  So far, so standard dramatic fare. What makes things more interesting here is how all three bleed into each other in Illyana's mind.  She hates Belasco, so she must learn more of the black magic he offers so as to defeat him.  She fears what Belasco wants from her, so she must defeat him.  She loves Cat, so she fears what the feral remains of her former friend will do to her, knowing Illyana will not kill her. Which in turn makes her want to learn more from Belasco in order to keep herself safe.

This, I freely admit, is an excellent set-up.  Illyana knows that she's being tempted by Belasco, and knows that part of her wants to accept, so she's completely unable to separate her desire for power from her desire to stop her monstrous host. When a spectral Ororo appears to speak to Illyana, the young girl blurts out her plan to defeat Belasco with his own magic, and Storm is horrified, seeing this as exactly the kind of endgame Belasco has in mind.  Worse, by Illyana's own admission, there's reason to believe the Dark Gods actually prefer her to Belasco, which means that even if she succeeds in destroying her mentor, she may simply be catapulting herself into an eternity of servitude at the hands of his own masters (this is known in geek circles as "Returning the Jedi", or at least it should be).

In short, this is a tremendously interesting confluence of desires, which stands out in marked contrast to the overblown, objectionably simplistic rhetoric of the last two issues.  It's also notable how well Claremont's shift in approach has aided the atmosphere the script invokes.  The idea that Illyana has spent two years in a castle filled with demons, learning blasphemous sorcery from Belasco half the time and being chased by the carnivorous ruin of her former friend, aware that Belasco wouldn't even care if she was killed due to his ability to raise the dead, is genuinely chilling.  Putting the time-jump into the gap allows us to imagine the horrors Illyana must have endured, which is vastly more effective than showing them, particularly given Claremont's habit of undercutting himself with leaden, ill-placed humour.  There's also a scene in which Cat finally remembers Illyana just enough to be heartbroken when the young sorceress blasts her in self-defence that's honestly quite sad.

All this takes us to the mid-point of the issue, when events take a sudden turn: Illyana learns that she can control "stepping discs" that can teleport her from place to place.  Given that this power manifests at the exact same point as she's lamenting her inability to find spells that can teleport from place to place, there are two ways to look at this.  Either Illyana's power was always going to be teleportation, and this is the greatest coincidence Claremont managed in a writing career filled to the brim with them (though I suppose it might not have manifested until she really wanted it), or there's something more going on here, and something to do with being a mutant reaching puberty in Limbo has caused the normal rules of mutant biology to be rewritten somewhat.  Personally, I'm entirely happy with the latter approach, but your mileage, as always, may vary.

Whichever way you want to go with it, though, Illyana summons a stepping disc, and jaunts herself out of the castle.  Again, though, Limbo has rules all its own, and instead of merely changing location, Illyana manages to throw herself back in time as well.  Briefly trapped in the past, she watches a younger Storm battling Belasco. With none of the accumulated weaknesses of advancing years to hold her back, Storm seemingly has no problem beating the lord of Limbo.  Defeated and desperate, Belasco begs for mercy, only for Storm to kill him.

Here, alas, is where the false equivalency bullshit slams into us once again. Storm's reward for slaying Belasco is to be turned into a demon herself, because by not observing Queensbury rules and/or the Geneva Convention when fighting a demonic horror with the stated goal of destroying humanity itself, she has demonstrated that she is "no better than the creature she fought."

Fuck.  Off.

At least when the X-Men argue that slaying supervillains is morally problematic and may end up just leading to greater suffering, you can comprehend the point.  The idea that you have to stop fighting an extra-dimensional embodiment of pure murderous evil whenever it asks you to is just unspeakably idiotic.  The idea that choosing not to do it is as bad as choosing to murder billions of innocent lives for your own amusement is several orders of magnitude worse.  I realise I keep banging on about this, but then this mini-series keeps bringing it up as well, and seems determined to present it in a more ridiculous fashion each time.

The one useful result of all this is that Illyana learns that Belasco is in fact immortal whilst in Limbo, so her earlier plan to spellcast him to death is worse than useless, since it'll irrevocably corrupt her soul in exchange for nothing.  Ironically, once she returns to the present, she discovers that this is exactly what Storm is trying to do; she's attacked the castle and seems determined to give killing Belasco another go.

Illyana attempts to join the fight, hoping her stepping discs can be of use, but Cat jumps her before she can get her bearings. The resulting fight costs the erstwhile Kitty Pryde her life, which manages to be more affecting than I'd anticipated (this might have something do with Illyana's reaction, recognising the horror intellectually, but utterly unable to feel it on any emotional level. Sometimes there's nothing more painful than realising how many things can't cause us pain anymore).

Whilst our heroine is battling with the frozen remnants of her soul, Belasco has bested Storm. It seems he still bears a grudge over Ororo shaking off the demonic influence that dominated her after she thought him dead, and it's time for payback. More specifically, it's time for Illyana to demonstrate how far she's fallen by assisting her master in murdering her friend, the situation rendered with a total absence of subtlety on the front cover.

It's a good job villainous over-reach is so rare a problem, huh? I mean, what could possibly come next?

In conclusion,then, this issue manages to improve on its predecessors, but only by waiting until the halfway point to start sucking, rather than going for it from page one.

Clues

This issue is, like the previous two, a bit tricky to sort out.  It's not clear why Storm, having resolved at the end of last issue to kill Cat and Illyana so as to save their souls, would wait two years to put her plan into action.  On the other hand, there's no way to tell how much preparation she needs, and more to the point, no reason to believe time in Belasco's castle flows at the same speed as in Storm's garden.

Date

Sunday 13^th May, 1984.

X-Date

X+6Y+73.

Contemporary Events

Eeeeeurgh, I'm starting to run out of stuff for this.  Um, it's Mother's Day all over the place? That'll have to do it.

Standout Line

"Ororo gives him the fate he deserves...  Only to get the fate she deserves for his murder..."

Tonight on "Morality with Claremont", we explain how murdering a demon who deserves to be murdered means you deserve to become a demon who deserves to be murdered! Or something.

MSI #2: "Cold Iron, Hot Blood"

(The Modern Limbo Triathlon.)

Comments

Ugh. 

Look. I tried.  I really did.  Abigail and Teebore were all like "It's not that bad!", and between them they gave me hope that perhaps this second issue would turn me around on this mini-series. 

It has not.

I will at least admit that this second issue is better than its predecessor.  Now that Cat has determined to bypass Ororo's ethical issues (which, as noted, were entirely foolish and in no small part objectionably solipsistic) by running away with Illyana, we at least get an issue in which our characters get to be proactive.  I don't think Storm's plan to teach Illyana restraint was a bad idea under the circumstances, but actually reading it kept making me think of that old Simpsons line where Bart tells his karate sensei "Look, I already know how not to hit a guy".

One of the core problems with this issue, though, is a follow-on from the last; the argument in that issue was whether Ororo was right to risk the human race in the hope she could reverse Illyana's partial corruption, or whether Cat was right in insisting the stakes were too high and Illyana would have to be killed.  This seemed so central to the piece that when in the final pages of MSI #1 Cat stole into Illyana's room to offer her a route home, I assumed she must be lying, tempting the child out of the sanctuary so Cat could kill her without interruption.

Here, though, we learn that Cat really does think she can get Illyana home, which negates pretty much the only interesting idea this series has managed so far.  In it's place is a short-form version of what we may as well call - with an exceptional lack of originality - the epic journey.  In this case, Illyana and Cat have to cross through a viciously twisted version of the Savage Land to get to the portal that will take the young Russian home.

So, fine.  Not something the X-Books have done particularly often, and if there's still a problem with the people we're following - Cat is just a relentlessly unpleasant version of a character I never had much interest in first time around, and Illyana remains an almost entirely blank slate - well, it's not like Lord of the Rings was full to bursting with fascinatingly complex characters, either.

So how does it work as some kind of messed-up travelogue of Limbo?  Well, not too bad at all, actually.  John Buscema makes a decent fist of the barren expanses of the pseudo-Savage Land, and there's a superbly creepy moment when Illyana's exploring by hand an almost lightless cave, and grabs hold of what proves to be the boots worn by the corpse of her dead brother:

(Except of course that she clearly couldn't have reached him; and also there's a stogie-chomping demon, that might belong in some scene, but certainly not this one.)

Whilst this horrifying tour is being conducted, it's becoming clear what the structure of this story is.  Last issue had Ororo go all Dumbledore (to quote Buffy) on Illyana, with a bunch of stuff about harmony and restraint and all the sorts of things that lead to villains having their arses entirely un-kicked.  This time round, it's the turn of Cat, who during their long trek to their mountainous destination (which, contra Illyana, really doesn't look much more than thirty miles away or so, though I wouldn't wanna run that either) teaches Illyana the ins and outs of swordplay.  So you've got the path of restraint and the attendant price of having to watch things get worse and not interfere.  You've got the path of violent resistance, and the attendant price of becoming hard and callous.  Presumably next time round, Belasco will get his chance, and give us the path of magical assault, at the cost of losing one's soul in the process of satisfying one's every whim.

That at least is reasonable framework, and with Illyana now adept in swordplay (via a brief "I was shit for ages, but now I'm good" sequence that's basically a montage filtered through Claremont's melodramatic approach), I assume the final conclusion will be that there's something to be said for all three approaches combined.  Naturally, this requires we be reminded of Storm's position, so she shows up in spirit-form to harangue Cat some more, and once again insist that were she to kill Cat to retrieve Illyana and save the fucking world, she'd be just as bad as Belasco.  Sigh.

This just keeps being the problem.  The end is a foregone conclusion, because we know Illyana survives and so does humanity.  The characters involved are either unpleasant, undeveloped, or painfully stupid.  And the whole thing revolves around such ludicrously extreme choices that there's never a chance to actually shade any of the players' philosophies.  It's just never kill, always kill, kill to prevent more killing.

I'm also not keen on the handling of Illyana's age.  The implication in "Chutes and Ladders" was that Illyana suffered years of degradations during her time in Limbo.  Here, she just seems to keep growing at an accelerated rate.  She gained a year in Ororo's gardens whilst apparently just doing a spot of meditating, and here we learn she's aged two more years in the trip to Belasco's mountain, despite it being in sight when she and Cat first set off.  It seems fairly clear that Claremont didn't want to address this, really (though of course the latter two issues may prove me wrong here); the fact that Illyana laments turning fourteen instead of eight in MSI #1 but here mentions being six when she fell into Limbo one year earlier suggests he put very little thought into this at all (to make things more ridiculous, New Mutants will put her age at fifteen in an issue or two).  Frankly, it feels like a cheat; a way of telling this story that severely weakens the original gut-punch of UXM #160. "I spent seven years in a hell dimension" is just so much more unpleasant to contemplate than "I spent four issues in a hell dimension, and aged like heck whilst I was doing it".

Anyway, let's finish up on the plot: eventually Cat and Illyana get to Belasco's citadel, carved into the mountain, and they go searching for the portal home.  Instead, they find Evil Nightcrawler, who does his best first to kill Cat, and then Illyana (doesn't Belasco brief his guards about who's on the guest-list?), but comes a cropper when Cat phases his leg into the floor and let's go.

Which, I confess, is utterly awesome in it's sick nastiness.  Like everyone else with a diseased mind and an interest in the X-Men, I've always wondered what an untimely unphasing could do to someone, and now I know - it shatters your bones utterly and leaves you unable to do anything but scream in agony until someone stabs you to death.  A powerful warning indeed, I think.

With Nightcrawler dead, it appears that the coast is clear, but of course it's all a trap.  The waiting arms of the X-Men are just an illusion hiding Belasco, the duelling skills of Cat no use when Belasco first paralyses her and then completes her transformation into a feline.  In another moment of supreme hideousness, she pads over to start eating Nightcrawler's body, but Illyana hardly notices.  She's almost entirely under Belasco's power now, opening her own arm to provide the blood needed to form the second bloodstone (collect all five to unleash the Elder Gods!).  Watching in horror in her crystal ball, Storm decides she's been going about this all wrong after all.  The only hope for saving the world relies on her taking action.  Illyana must die!

So, that's a kind of odd end to an odd issue.  I mentioned the framework here seemingly being that Illyana will receive three lessons and choose which of them to base her actions on (though as I say, I suspect a combination is by some distance the most likely outcome).  Here, though, Storm has abandoned her position, and Cat's has been shown to be fruitless.  Once Belasco's approach proves - as surely it must - to not be worth the price it requires, where is that going to leave us?

I have no idea.  Well, that's not entirely true.  I do know one thing, courtesy of the first page of the first issue in this miniseries.  Right now, Illyana has two bloodstones.  When she escapes back into reality, she's carrying three.

Which means that whatever else happens, Illyana hasn't finished paying for her ticket out just yet.

Clues

Yeesh, this is a mess.  It always amuses me to think that the seed for the idea that led to this blog came from John Seavey arguing the following:

In Uncanny X-Men #165, during the Brood saga, Kitty Pryde is described as 14 for the first time. Her birthday, we’re told, passed while she was in space. (So Lockheed? Officially the Coolest Birthday Present Ever.)

Then, in Excalibur #15, we see her celebrating her 15th birthday in the company of Saturnyne. (Who she thinks is Courtney Ross at the time. God, it’s hard explaining Chris Claremont comics.) These two comics were both written by the same author, so there’s no question of continuity mistakes or differences in authorial intent. The span of X-books from January 1983 to late July 1990 are fully intended to take place over roughly one 365-day span of time.

I still chuckle every time I read that. Claremont couldn't even keep continuity straight from the first issue of MSI to this one.  Last time around Illyana's narration says she's speaking on her fourteenth birthday, but that it would be her eighth had she not been lost in Limbo.  In this book, we learn she is speaking about her experiences one year after she returned, which would make her seven when Belasco took her.  So, obviously, it's explicitly stated that she's six when she and Cat leave to find the portal home. Grr.

Actually, this isn't at all hard to fix; we can just assume that Illyana's framing narrative isn't exactly a year after her return.  If we make it, say, a year and two days, then so long as we don't count the year Illyana aged physically in Ororo's garden, the timings all add up.

Interestingly, this means that Illyana's narration is taking place some time after the events of the surrounding X-Books; 13th May 1984 in our current time-line.  We shall have to see if that causes problems down the line.

Date

Sunday 13^th May, 1984.

X-Date

X+6Y+73.

Contemporary Events

Seventeen hostages (sixteen British, one Portuguese) are feed by the Union for the Total Independence of Angola, having been captured in an attack at Cafunfo in February, along with some forty-three hostages released the previous month.

Standout Line

"Does that feel good, my Cat?  Shall I stroke you more?" - Belasco

I really can't tell if this is meant to be as disturbing as it actually is, but it's genuinely unsettling in all the right ways.

Majik: Storm & Illyana #1: "Little Girl Lost"

("What good is the ability to see the future, if no-one listens?")

Comments

For those that don't already know, Magik: Storm & Illyana is a four part miniseries that deals with what happened to Illyana when she fell into Limbo back in UXM #160, describing her development from an innocent seven year old child into a twisted thirteen year old sorceress.

Unsurprisingly, it's pretty dark.  I say that not just because a Limbo-based story isn't something you'd expect to be draped in rainbows and kittens, but because Claremont's last foray into the world of the spin-off mini was Wolverine, which was very dark indeed.

It was also very good.  This is less so.

The obvious hurdle, at least for this first issue, is that Illyana cannot possibly hold down a narrative in the same way Wolverine can.  When Illyana was a seven-year old, she was the blankest of blank slates, something that didn't particularly bother me at the time (she was hardly in the comic at all, for one thing), and there's been almost no effort put into fleshing out her post-Limbo character over the last eighteen standard months since she returned to Earth a teenager.

This is not necessarily a crippling problem, but it does mean the story has to rely heavily on at least one of the following three things: Storm, an intriguing plot, and/or artistic spectacle.  The trouble is, none of those are working in this first instalment.  There's nothing bad about the artwork here Tom Palmer finishing John Buscema's layouts) but it's nowhere near as good as the stark, shadowy Wolverine, with its evocative palette.

The plot doesn't really do much for me either, and again there's an obvious issue: we already know how this turns out.  I've no problem with the idea of filling in the blanks, of course, but when we know the story starts at A and ends at B, there needs to be something more for us to hang our interest on than the simple transistion from one point to another.  In this issue, Illyana has her soul corrupted by the demon and would-be world-ender Belasco, only to be rescued by Storm and Kitty (now calling herself Cat), the only two X-Men still alive from the previous timeline in which Illyana escaped but each of the rest of the team was killed, corrupted, or abandoned. Belasco now wants Illyana back to complete the process, Storm wants to find a way to uncorrupt her, and Cat wants to kill her to ensure Belasco's plans don't come to fruition.

That's by no means a bad set-up, but as I say, we already know Kat doesn't get her way, because Illyana survives, and neither does Belasco, because to quote Oz "We know the world didn't end because: check it out." So a lot of weight is getting put on the moral quandary Storm is in: risk the world to save a little girl, or kill her to keep humanity safe.  Again, there's nothing wrong with that set-up on paper, but even if we didn't know everything works out fine - and as much as Claremont tries to convince us Illyana is a real threat by having her beat the crap out of Storm in the psychic realm - it's just impossible to imagine Marvel in 1983 green-lighting a project in which a seven-year old girl is murdered by two long-time superheroes, alternate versions or not.  So now we're a step back again; the story can't even rely on that dramatic tension narratively, because it doesn't plausibly exist.  It can only rely on it emotionally, in terms of how the characters respond to it.

But even this isn't really possible, because Storm is so far removed from how we know her, and Katherine Pryde even more so (it turns out her time in Limbo has partially changed her into a literal cat, a revelation Claremont holds back until page 18 and is quite the best thing about this book), which means two characters who are more or less strangers are arguing rather heavy-handedly over a choice both historically and narratively inevitable.  And by "heavy-handedly", I mean Storm tries to argue that if they kill Illyana, they're no better than Belasco, which is easily the most enragingly idiotic example of an enragingly idiotic argument we've seen yet.  Killing a seven year old girl in order to save six billion people is not no better than twisting a seven year old girl into a demonic sorceress in order to kill six billion people, and anyone willing to base the central character clash their story relies on on such an obviously terrible idea isn't capable of taking the one escape route left for this story.

There are some nice bits in here - a brief nod to the difficulty in teaching children respect and self-discipline when others are offering them immediate self-gratification, and an ending which suggests Cat may have found an alternative method to save Illyana, or may be lying in order to kill her - but really, it's a poor issue, and poor for such fundamental structural reasons that I don't have high hopes for the next three installments.

Clues

Since almost all of this issue takes place in flashback during a period we already know to have been mere hours according to "our" time, there's very little to say here.  All we need is to place where Illyana is whilst she's relating this story.  I don't see any reason not to put that in line with that month's issue of UXM. Excitingly, since Illyana tells us it's her fourteenth birthday, that gives us an opportunity to cycle out Colossus from the age tracker, and put her in there instead.

Date

Saturday 17^th September, 1983.

X-Date

X+5Y+197.

Contemporary Events

The Lebanese army begins an attempt to flush Syrian-backed militiamen and Palestinian guerrillas out of the mountain ranges overlooking Beirut.  US President Ronald Reagan argues that attempts by Congress to exert authority over the length of time US troops spend in that country would send a "dangerous signal" to the Middle East and the USSR; one more interesting data point in the repeated attempts by the executive branch to argue Congress has no authority in military matters.

Standout Line

"Laughter helps me maintain my perspective." - Storm