STORY: "Underbelly" (23 pages)
Callisto is beaten up by angry Morlocks, and the Healer takes her to the X-Men's Mansion. The X-Men go into the Morlock tunnels to find out what is going on with the Morlocks, and find the Morlocks killing each other. Back at the mansion, the Healer kills himself by using his powers to heal Callisto, restoring her scars in the process. Iceman, the only X-Man still at the mansion, tries to stop her leaving, but gets beaten up by her and Mikhail Rasputin.

What you need to know:
Callisto is restored to her original appearance - she'd been made "beautiful" by Masque shortly before issue #260, although the editorial office really endeared itself to longtime fans by admitting in a footnote that they couldn't remember quite when it had happened.

The Healer dies, which I'm sure is of enormous concern to those of you who like bit part characters with beards. And if anybody wants to explain quite why the Healer's healing powers restore Callisto's scar tissue, I'd love to know.

The Morlocks have all gone mad. They stay that way.

There's a notoriously baffling subplot in which a blond man recovers another blond man from a mental institution. What's actually happening is that the sane one is an agent of the Friends of Humanity, and the mad one is Steven Lang. Lang's been in there ever since his mind was downloaded into the Master Mold in Incredible Hulk Annual #7. This eventually turns out to be foreshadowing for the Phalanx storyline. Two years later. By which time everybody had forgotten about it.

Comments:
Issues #291-293 were, at the time, "The Last Morlock Story." As it turns out, the Morlocks are like weeds - no matter how many of the buggers you kill, no matter how ostentatiously you do it, some writer or other will always drag them back.

The main purpose of the storyline seems to be to write out the Morlocks and Mikhail Rasputin. Both of these are entirely understandable aims. Mikhail's ill-defined energy abilities were never particularly interesting, and the Morlocks had decayed in recent stories from being a fascinating subterranean community of outcasts to being just a bunch of psychotic deformed people. Getting rid of them was not a bad idea at all.

Unfortunately, Lobdell ends up giving us a story in which every single character who isn't actually in the X-Men is literally a raving lunatic. It is possible to do good stories about mad characters, but this isn't one of them. Mikhail and Callisto's motivations flip-flop about, and the Morlocks are little more than a Greek chorus of loonies. There seems to be some complicated idea about Mikhail being driven mad by grief over the Posse Comitatus members who died under his leadership, and therefore being driven by (a) a mad desire to instal himself as the leader of pretty much any group that'll have him; and (b) a deranged nihilist obsession with mass suicide. It just doesn't work.

Since the title didn't have a regular artist at this point, the storyline is drawn by Tom Raney (over breakdowns by Rurik Tyler). Raney eventually shows up again as the regular artist on Mutant X in 1998, by which time he's much, much better. The art in this storyline is alright, but nothing great.

 

FEATURE CHARACTERS
Professor X (last in Avengers vol 1 #351), Archangel, Colossus, Jean Grey, Iceman, Storm (the latter five last in Infinity War #6) and Bishop

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
The Healer (last behind the scenes in issue #278; dies)

VILLAINS
Callisto (last in issue #264), the Morlocks (last in X-Force vol 1 #10), Mikhail Rasputin, the Friends of Humanity (first appearance; next in issue #294) and Steven Lang (last behind the scenes in Incredible Hulk Annual #7; next behind the scenes in flashback in X-Factor vol 1 #106)

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