Kenneth Laster

Oh Inferno, you big beast of a crossover. 

Inferno is the culmination of a plethora of story seeds in the X-Men line of comics over the course of just…so many issues. The event runs through New Mutants, X-Terminators, Uncanny X-Men, and X-Factor. Not to mention, titles like Daredevil, Fantastic Four, Cloak and Dagger, and various Spider-Manses all get in on the tie-in game! And this Omnibus collects it all. It’s honestly a bit overwhelming, or at least it was for me when I first approached reading it in my 80s X-Read through sometime last year. However returning for this coverage, it’s much more simple to parse when you realize there are really two stories under one event. The first story is about Illyana Rasputin being tricked into opening the gate to limbo and reckoning with her role as the Darkchilde, and the second is the tragedy of Madelyne Pryor and her turn as the Goblin Queen. 

This is a big event for two big stories. It can’t be overstated just how many things were leading directly towards this event and how many elements can be tied right back to it.  But honestly, enough prologue. Like I said there’s a lot here.

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X-Factor exists in a really strange memory limbo. Most people think of the team as the Peter David run with Multiple Man or the government-run era with Havok and Polaris. But if you’re really tuned in you remember the original hook of the team being the Original Five X-Men reunited, and if you’re really really tuned in you remember the additional hook of them masquerading as Mutant Hunters to take and train the mutants they “captured” as the “X-Terminators”. This Original Five era may not be necessarily the most well-remembered era in the concept of the X-Factor team, but it can’t be denied that it gave some incredibly influential building blocks into the X-Universe – including Apocalypse, Archangel, and of course…Nanny and Orphanmaker. 

While Bob Layton was the author of the beginnings of this series, it really started bringing these ideas to life when the great Louise Simonson, primarily joined by her husband Walt Simonson, took the reins. X-Factor Epic Collection: Angel Of Death collects this Simonson era in its full swing. This collection really pushes the scope for what X-Factor as a concept can be by stripping it down and rebuilding what works, what doesn’t, and making it look like it was meant to be there from the beginning. From Archangel to “Inferno”, this collection really captures some of the heights of the Simonsons’ X-Factor run while keeping up the serialized soap opera so at home in this era of X-Books. 

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