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.
, he chose to up the stakes of the damage that could be inflicted on Peter as Spider-Man and made the general tone of Spider-Man a lot heavier and darker. Throughout his run in 1990, McFarlane introduced Spider-Man to more horror-inspired iterations of his foes. Many of these decisions about how to handle the Spider-Man character (and his relationship with Mary Jane Watson) in this run feel indicative of McFarlane’s later development of the standalone comics series Spawn.
