INFERNO

INFERNO Spoilers for the original Inferno. I'm reading through the end of the Muir Island Saga, so nothing beyond that point here. Inferno brings together two parts of X-Men I've already wanted to spend a lot of time on: Illyana's story, and the mess surrounding Jean, Phoenix, and Madelyne Pryor. Putting them together makes this much more than a story about demons attacking New York. The invasion grows out of things that have been going wrong in these characters' lives for a long time. And with Illyana, I have a pretty personal reaction to where it ends. Magik might be my favorite X-Men character. She's definitely in my top three. I wasn't ready to lose the teenage version of her I'd been following. Before getting to that, though, there's a whole city coming apart. Limbo starts spilling into Manhattan, and everyday surroundings turn dangerous. The invasion gets into the city itself and into the people fighting to save it. The X-Men, X-Factor, New Mutants, and X-Terminators are dealing with different pieces of the same disaster. Having that many characters involved makes sense here because nobody has the complete picture when it starts. The New Mutants' side begins with Illyana trying to get her friends out of Limbo. S'ym has rebelled, and N'astirh offers her a way to fight back. She takes up the power she needs, but opening a way home gives him the opening he wanted. Her stepping disc becomes a route for the invasion, and she can't simply close it again. That's an especially cruel position for Illyana. She's trying to save her friends using the abilities that have let her survive, and the demons know how to use that against her. Her growing Darkchilde form makes the danger visible, but the problem isn't something that started when the horns showed up. It reaches back to the little girl trapped in Limbo. The X-Terminators are important to the other end of the scheme. Rusty, Skids, Rictor, Boom-Boom, Artie, Leech, and Taki are involved in the fight over the kidnapped children. N'astirh needs those children for his magical operation, and Taki's technological abilities become something he tries to exploit too. The kids help disrupt the arrangement keeping the invasion going. They have an actual job in this story; they aren't just waiting for the adult teams to arrive. Meanwhile, Madelyne's life is collapsing from a completely different direction. Scott left after Jean returned. Their baby was taken, and Madelyne was nearly killed. She found a place with the X-Men, but that didn't make the abandonment or the loss of her son disappear. S'ym and N'astirh exploit what she's already going through, and the search for Nathan leads her back to Mister Sinister. Then comes the revelation that she is a clone of Jean, created as part of Sinister's plans for a child with Scott. Something she thought belonged to her, her own life and history, becomes another thing someone else claims to have arranged. Madelyne is the Goblin Queen. Those aren't two separate women to keep track of. And the Phoenix connection matters because the fragment rejected by Jean had helped bring Madelyne to life. This is where the separate threads of Jean, the Phoenix duplicate, and Madelyne get tied together again. By the time Madelyne is threatening to sacrifice Nathan, the story has taken her from a mother searching for her stolen child to someone prepared to destroy him. Knowing what was done to her explains the route to that point. It doesn't make what she's trying to do to the baby harmless. Alex gets drawn in as her Goblin Prince, and the demonic corruption reaches the X-Men around her too. The teams have to get past their own divisions to stop this. Defeating N'astirh doesn't settle Madelyne's part of the crisis. Her confrontation with Jean becomes a psychic struggle, and Madelyne tries to take Jean with her in death. Jean survives by accepting the Phoenix fragment and the memories and personality material connected with both Phoenix and Madelyne. That doesn't instantly leave Jean with a tidy, settled mind. The aftermath continues beyond Inferno. She's carrying experiences she didn't originally live, and the story still has to deal with what that means for her. On the New Mutants' side, Illyana's resolution comes before that final confrontation with Madelyne. Rahne sees the child behind all the terrifying things her friend has become. Illyana turns her power toward sending the demons back and ending her part of the invasion. Afterward, in New Mutants #73, Piotr finds a little Illyana inside the armor. There's something genuinely hopeful in that image. A child has been rescued from the horror that shaped her. I can understand that and still be upset that teenage Magik is gone. I'd been following her friendships, her temper, her choices, and the way she used the Soulsword. I wanted more time with that character. Seeing the ending as a rescue doesn't erase that feeling. The crossover also has to finish with Sinister. In Uncanny #243 and X-Factor #39, the teams follow the conflict back to Xavier's school and confront the person who treated these lives as material for his experiments. The mansion is destroyed, and Scott finally breaks through Sinister's hold on him enough to blast him apart. At this point in the reading, that is their apparent victory over him. The city can return to normal faster than the people can. Nathan is saved, but Madelyne is dead. Jean has an enormous amount to process. The New Mutants have young Illyana back, but the teammate they knew is missing. That's where my reaction to Inferno stays complicated. It resolves a lot of what had been building, including the Phoenix and Madelyne questions, while taking away a version of Illyana I really wanted to keep reading. I understand what her ending is doing. I still miss Magik.