YMMV / Inferno (1988)

• Bad Export for You: The 2015 trade paperback contains numerous excerpts of the events' subplots and leadups in other comics and includes all of the issues of X-Terminators and relevant issues of New Mutants, but cuts off its X-Factor reprints two issues before the actual confrontation between the X-Men and Madeleyne, meaning the story isn't actually complete!
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Decades later, many folks only remember Inferno for Pryor's outfit, barely remembering or acknowledging anything else about Inferno, including that Illyana and the New Mutants even had anything to do with it.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Madelyne Pryor got retconned as being a clone of Jean Grey (one of the most popular X-Men) to turn Pryor worthless and to kill her off. Years later Marvel brought in Laura Kinney (X-23), a female clone of Wolverine (the most popular of all the X-Men), and she has been thriving as a supporting X-Men character and even made a character in a movie.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Many years after resorting to this massive and hyped crossover — which came about because Jean Grey had been brought back, and to clear the path for Cyclops and Grey's relationship and eventual marriage — Marvel then decides that in order to attract new generations of kids to their comics, their lead characters (but with the notable exception of Reed Richards and Sue Storm), including Cyclops, must all be unmarried and single (Spider-Man being the most notorious example of this policy). Also, Jean Grey's increasing redundancy of storylines and character arcs lead Marvel to have her sentenced to the Dropped a Bridge on Him, not returning again for more than a decade.
  • After the Disney Corporation acquired Marvel in 2009, fanart was being created of Disney characters represented as Marvel characters and vice-versa. One was of Maleficent as the Goblin Queen since it seemed a perfect match. But then came the 2014 film Maleficent with a revisionist characterization. The Secret Wars (2015) revisit to Inferno concludes with the Goblin Queen resembling Maleficent. And calls for Madelyne to be granted an official canon re-evaluation keeps persisting decades later.
  • A 2005 film, whose lead actress would later be starring in the MCU films, is about clones being manufactured to be killed to provide organs for the people from whom they were cloned, with all the clones being the heroes and innocent victims, and most of the "normal" human characters being various levels of monsters, bastards, or indifferent. Briefly included in the film is a pregnant woman who is murdered after giving birth, and the baby then handed to a joyful woman from whom the birth mother was cloned.
  • Marvel created Inferno just to get rid of Pryor because Status Quo Is God makes it sacred that Jean Grey and Cyclops exclusively belong together. Decades later, Marvel decides to imply that both Jean and Cyclops are casting aside monogamy and are embracing Polyamory.
• Moral Event Horizon: An attempt to kill a dozen innocent babies including your own infant son just has to count as this.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • When Madelyne tries to kill her own baby.
  • The event was filled with minor moments of mass murder/maimings as the city warps into living objects of death, gouging out peoples' eyes and trapping them for eternity in postage stamps. But worse is the murderous elevators: one elevator murders a tourist family, complete with the son screaming for his daddy to save the family as they are killed behind the doors of the elevator. Even worse, was a page cut from all printings of the Inferno in collected format from New Mutants #71: right after a scene where the villainous Hellfire Club members are forced to go out to save people from the attack of the demonic objects, we see people banging on an elevator door trying to flee the building. In the page that is cut, a still at this time completely 100% evil Emma Frost is in telepathic linkage with the people as they flood into the now opening elevator, as she screams at them to not go into the elevator. Cut to the screaming sounds of the dying and the elevator reaching the first floor as Emma, in telepathic contact with the civilians as they are being murdered, screams in utter and complete horror as the elevator opens up and a tidal wave of blood pours out of it, with the skulls and corpses of the dead piled up inside the elevator. Also, the key plot point is that thirteen infants were supposed to be sacrificed. Thankfully this was averted; then, later subverted, as the U.S. government raised those infants into child soldiers.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Buffy the Vampire Slayer's season-5 finale episode, "The Gift", is suspiciously similar in plot to Marvel's Inferno, but subverts and inverts Marvel's storyline by (temporarily, of course) killing Buffy instead of Dawn Summers, who in several details is nearly an Expy of Madelyne Pryor. The episode's title is also the same as an X-Men and Alpha Flight story in which Pryor is a main character.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • The demon chessmaster N'Astirh is introduced, and killed, in this story arc. Given that he's just another magic-user, fans who think Belasco, the sorcerer who turned Illyana into Magik in the first place, should have returned for this instead consider his introduction to be this.
  • Numerous mutant children besides the babies abducted by the demons are depicted in the orphanage secretly run by Mister Sinister, are rescued by the X-Men from another gang of mutant kidnappers after the event, and then were never seen again unlike the babies.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: Havok's Evil Costume Switch apparently involved nothing but taking a knife to his regular costume.◊

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