STORY: "Prehistory" (22 pages)  While Rogue runs away to Manhattan, the other X-Men defeat Sauron.

What you need to know:
There's really not much to say about the fight with Sauron. The X-Men win.

A flashback confirms that Sauron came to New York by stowing away in Ka-Zar's shipment of his possessions to New York, which happened at the beginning of his failed mid-nineties series. Prior to this storyline, Sauron was meant to be dead; the flashback doesn't offer any explanation of his survival other than to tell us that "Sauron's ability to cheat eternity is nothing short of legendary", which is somewhat uninformative.

Before leaving the campus, Rogue finds Joseph lying unconscious in the Mansion and not breathing. She gives him the kiss of life, and Marrow walks in halfway through for a Hilarious Misunderstanding. Oddly, Joseph wakes up almost immediately afterwards, despite a fairly lengthy period of skin-to-skin contact that should have kept him out for ages - that's probably an error on Seagle's part.

Afterwards, Rogue heads to Manhattan to find the Agee Institute. That's the place that was advertised on TV in earlier issues, which claims to have the ability to remove mutant powers.

There's another subplot scene with Bishop and Deathbird. Deathbird has told Bishop that he was paralysed in the explosion of their spaceship and that she wasn't able to save the other X-Men, both of which he's rightly sceptical about. At the end of the scene, their new spacecraft is shot down by unidentified aliens, in a lead-in to issue #357's story.

Up in Ptarmigan Creek, Jean Grey turns up wearing a Phoenix costume. It's the green version from when the character was sane. More of this subplot in later issues.

Comments:
This is another issue which falls rather short of being satisfactory. The point of this whole storyline, as near as I can make out, is to give Rogue the impetus to head off to New York and appear in the Agee Institute storyline, which is all very well.  Unfortunately, having brought Sauron into the plot in order to play off his energy-absorbing powers, Seagle has nothing else to say about him and ends up delivering a straightforward fight issue desperately pretending to be something else.

Throughout the entire issue, the narrator rambles on in a rather incoherent way about the word "why", with occasional digressions into the nature of gravity as a force of nature.  None of this has anything whatsoever to do with the story it's meant to be narrating, nor does it work as some kind of counterpoint.  The upshot is that is comes across as rather pretentious, unfortunately.

FEATURE CHARACTERS
Wolverine, Rogue (both also in flashback between pages of issue #353), Iceman (next in issue #356), Joseph (next in X-Men vol 2 #73, where he leaves the X-Men), Cannonball and Storm

GUEST STAR
Jubilee (next in Generation X #41)

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
Marrow (next in X-Men vol 2 #73)
Maggott, Eeny and Meany (the latter two both last in issue #352)
Bishop (next in issue #357)
Cyclops and Phoenix III (both last in Cable '98)

VILLAINS
Sauron (also in flashback between X-Men Unlimited #6 and issue #351; also in flashback between issues #351 and #353)
Deathbird (next in issue #357)
The Chnitt (first appearance; next in issue #357)

GUEST APPEARANCES
Ka-Zar and Shanna the She-Devil (both in flashback between Ka-Zar vol 4 #4-5)
Zabu (in flashback between Ka-Zar vol 4 #2 and #5)

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