Here’s a comic chosen at random from my collection.
X-Force (1991) #98 Jim Cheung & John Moore (storytellers), Mark Morales (inker), Chris Eliopoulos (letterer), Marie Javins (colorist), Jason Liebig (editor), and Jim Cheung (cover)
My sister-in-law called me one day asking if I wanted a bunch of comics that she found while at a local Goodwill, and this was one of them. It is from a time (2000) when I read very few superhero titles and certainly no Marvel comics. The story is about a Hellfire Club member, Selene, attempting to convince (coerce) Sunspot into joining the group. She creates several illusions to entice him, while at the same time is torturing the rest of the X-Force team, though they all manage to either see through the illusions or are rescued by his or her teammates. In the end, Selene gets her way by offering to resurrect Sunspot’s dead girlfriend. The rest of the team leaves, leaving Sunspot to ponder his fate.
So, what did I think of this? In short: there’s some bad dialog and a cliched plot. Early on, a character appears in the first of Sunspot’s illusions and introduces himself to Sunspot (and us) by telling Sunspot that which he should already know about the character given the confines of the illusion (the “As you know…” approach). Bleh. All of the illusions are easily broken, thus just filling up pages in the issue for the real interesting part, namely the temptation of Sunspot, who acquiesces because of another hackneyed trope. The art is ok, if repetitious: many of the same facial expressions are used on many characters, not to mention a lot of open mouths, which is a pet peeve of mine. It was interesting to see Sunspot’s powers portrayed in the way they were (like he’s dipped in India ink), though not my preference from when he was first introduced. And why does he wear that armor? In the end, however, it was nice to revisit some of the New Mutants characters again after all these years.
Longbox Review 