X-Men: When Barry came to play

Back in the 1980s, the Uncanny X-Men was unquestionably the biggest comic book in the world, with its mix of broad pathos, balls-out action and general mutant melodrama paying huge dividends. And the you would occasionally get a weird issue by Barry Windsor-Smith, which would be utterly unlike anything around it, while still a vital part of the overall X-saga.

As much as anybody, Windsor-Smith had a greater claim to do the X-Men, he'd been there doing pencils in the original series at the tail end of Marvel's dominant decade. But he was always a welcome presence, with that incredibly detailed line closing in on his wide-open faces with all the emotions in the world.

Two of the issues appeared as part of the wonderfully pretentious Lifedeath storyline, bringing together Storm and Forge together before breaking them utterly, while the third was just a random issue with Wolverine getting royally fucked up in a snowstorm and running into the youngest member of Power Pack.

These issues were pauses in the grand tapestry of the X-men, but also vital parts for the main characters. Storm, still recovering from the loss of her powers and shakily taking on a new identity, finds some solace in a man who is far better mending machines than broken hearts. Even Wolverine, the old sod, is a different person at the end of 205 than he is at the start - his tired and sad disgust at the lengths a once-honourable enemy is something beyond the usual brutality of the character.

For all his famed wordiness, Claremont always knew when to let a good artist just let loose, wide and open in a way they usually couldn't in a mainstream superhero comic. Windsor-Smith''s art for these issues is phenomenal, the wide open spaces of Lifedeath reflecting Ororo's slow willingness to face the future, while the Wolverine issues gets tight and claustrophobic as a blizzard hits town, snow from the storm and glistening new body-horror technology crowding the page.

There was a fourth issue a year or so later, but that just had fairly routine pencils from the artist, for an issue that was just another part of the ongoing soap operatics, during a particularly turbulent time for the mutant team.  

Despite the rewards of these few issues, a third Lifedeath featuring Ororo returning to Africa was rejected by Marvel, so Windsor-Smith made some superficial changes and published it as its own thing. No use wasting a good Lifedeath, after all.

Windsor-Smith can still bring the intensity - his long percolating Monsters book in recent years was a truly beguiling experience, but it's still remarkable that the sales juggernaut of the X-Men could support this sudden diversions into truly wonderful pieces of art, small chapters of brilliance that still shine on the newsprint page.