George Perez drawing the X-Men on a Chris Claremont script! This makes up for the fact that the villain is Arkon. Almost.
Arkon needs Storm’s lightning powers to fuel the electrical contraptions that keep his planet alive.
Hasn’t he ever heard of solar power?
They all fight a bunch. Colossus clobbers Arkon with a tree.
But in the end, the X-Men just agree to charge up the machines for him and everyone leaves happy.
And it turns out that Cyclops, not Storm, was the key to the battery.
Yeah, Arkon. You really should have asked.
It’s an annual. It’s supposed to be self-contained and full of action. So for what it is, it’s pretty good. And again, George Perez. Nice.
Cyclops is the star of two of the greatest lines of prose ever written for a comic book- this issue’s “It’s said that the eyes are the windows to the soul- if so, what does that say of the soul of Scott Summers…..” and issue#94’s “Games: Some like ’em, some don’t- take Scott Summers, for instance- he gave up on games the day he became the leader of the Uncanny X-Men……” Nice. Claremont, ultra-feminist that he is, is, nevertheless, the Shakespeare of our time. This story is a nice diversion from the tribulations that the X-Men were dealing with at the time, ( the Hellfire Club, Mutant X, Dark Phoenix, etc. ) The best things I can say about “A Fire in the Sky” are a) The great George Perez gracing the pages of ‘The X-Men’, b) Storm losing her poncho in her attic room as she walks away from the reader’s point of view, thus gaining the nomination for “Miss Butt 1979” ) and c) The awesome Gil Kane cover, which I always felt would make a great glass-framed living room wall poster. I believe this is the ONLY time Gil Kane would ever draw the X-Men! What a shame! I would say this interesting issue rates a “B”!