I didn't really ever see him after the mid 80s, so I can't comment on that. I just know that after reading him on almost the whole run of ROM, his faces started to grate me, especially the stereotypically trapezoidal way he had of drawing upset mouths:

• The kids were at a county fair in New York last issue. Now they’re in… San Francisco? Did they steal Moria’s hovercar? This story has a lot of problems, but the biggest one is thematic, because it begins a series of issues that take our students out of the school environment. Surely the “school” aspect of the series hasn’t been exhausted already?

• Xi’an believes that Xavier is “in Mexico aiding Team America” with the mission demanded of them by Viper, but actually Xavier has parked the Blackbird halfway between the Mexican border and San Francisco, so that he keep both teams barely within telepathic range. I thought his range was longer than that. Haven’t we seen him talk cross-country before? Especially with Cerebro.

• Hey, Xi’an’s powers worked for a change! On her uncle’s bodyguards, who look more like call girls.



• Xi’an has a new power: Not just to possess people, but to make them go to sleep. (Xavier shows that power later this issue also.) Does that mean she can make herself go to sleep? I would love that power. It’s the little things that count.

• Silver Samurai advises Viper to kill Dani because he can see Dani’s “untamed spirit” as she paces her cell. Later, he tries to kill Rahne, though he only grazes her side. This goes against his chivalrous “don’t harm kids” behavior last issue.



• Harada and Viper discus events from Wolverine’s mini-series and eventually go to Japan, where they tangle with the X-Men prior to Wolverine’s wedding. At first, Claremont did a good job of weaving these separate books into one coherent story.

• Team America end up at the A.I.M. fortress “Black Mesa.” Does Black Mesa have a portal to an alien dimension, as it does in the Half-Life video games? I suppose it’s a generic enough name for the game to come up with independently, but it could also have been lingering in the subconscious of the game designers from when they read these comics as kids. 



• After Lobo and Reddy travel all the way from New York to New Mexico, then ride their bikes for hours over rugged terrain into Mexico, just as they get to the Black Mesa base, Xavier decides they need a nap, so he puts them to sleep, and they don’t contribute to the Black Mesa infiltration at all. Next time just leave them home! So it’s up to Wrench (the mechanic) and Honcho to sneak inside to steal the crystal. Hey, they rode just as far! Don’t they get a nap? I suspect the absurd “nap” part was Claremont papering over some problem that arose in writing or drawing this issue. He really didn’t have enough to do for all of Team America to justify their arduous cross-country journey through Mexico as a group.



• A.I.M. was working on “Project: Matrix,” which was unfamiliar to me. This appears to be a new Claremont creation, not existing Marvel continuity. We never hear of Project:Matrix or Black Mesa again after this issue.

• Both the Black Mesa base and Viper’s Big Sur base employs female as well as male goons. Claremont was big on this sort of gender equality, as previously seen with the male and female flunkies of the Hellfire Club.

• At the moment the Black Mesa base explodes for unexplained reasons, someone in it (Apparently Xavier's old foe Farouk) psychically attacks Xavier, who is way up in Colorado. He also speaks to Xi’an (even further away up in Big Sur, California) and somehow rescues her from the ocean when Viper decides to detonate that base as well. Seems like a plot hole, but we’ve already discussed reasons for Claremont to excise Karma from the plot.



• Xi’an possesses two Viper goons and has then “attack their comrades” off-panel. They were carrying guns, so should we assume that Xi’an had them shoot their comrades? But at the beginning of the issue, she was all “The New Mutants do not kill” where her uncle was concerned. But I guess he’s family.



• Lobo embraces his mutanthood and summons the Dark Rider to possess him. I’m still not clear how this whole biker team are all mutants who happen to have the same power. Once again, changing his regular clothes into a black outfit and mask appears to be part of Dark Rider’s power.

• By sunrise, Team America has ridden their bikes from Mexico halfway to San Francisco, where Xavier parked the Blackbird in the mountainous wilderness along the Colorado River. I think “infinite gasoline” and "teleportation" must be among their mutant powers as well. Xavier and Lilandra are unconscious when they arrive, having been knocked out hours ago by Farouk while Team America was still at Black Mesa.

• There’s a colorist’s error: Honcho is shown carrying Cowboy up to the Blackbird after the two of them battled A.I.M. troops. Cowboy is blond, but here he’s shown as a redhead. Reddy is actually the redhead on Team America, because of course people surnamed Reddy (which is a surname for Asian Indians, by the way) are all redheads, right?



• Xi’an jokes with Dani about how fetching she looks wearing Viper’s slinky suit. Dani is quite embarrassed, which is surprising from our Nature Girl. Next issue she boasts loudly about her willingness to wear skimpy Mardi Gras clothes, and then follows through on it with something far more revealing than the Viper catsuit she wears here. So this panel is just a writing blunder. Dani should have told Xi’an, “Heck yeah! I’m rocking this green slinky thang!”



• I’ll give Claremont credit for packing plenty of both characterization and plot into this issue, while covering separate break-ins at bad guy bases by two different teams.

I need to get the entire run of this series and check it out. This thread has me itching to read the entire run. It seemed like it has depth in storytelling.

• So, time for a “lost world” romance right out of Doyle and Burroughs! I complained about Buscema previously, but this page of Wolvesbane stalking through the jungle is just gorgeous, and also well colored to give depth of field to the different foliage.




• The first five pages are a typical “Meet the team; let’s see all their powers in action” routine that we’ve seen many times in the Danger Room, cluing new readers in on who everybody is.

• Of all the people to get surprised by Rahne’s “Hide and Seek,” the one character who shares psychic rapport with her (Dani) would have been at the bottom of my list.



• I like seeing a character get sunstroke in a hot environment; we ought to see more of that. But Dani acts as if the X-uniform is part of the problem. I thought those suits somehow helped protect against both temperature extremes. But it does make sense that Rahne alone wears her suit near-constantly, given the nature of her mutation.

• Dani’s blizzard is only in Rahne’s mind, so it won’t actually help if she really is overheated. In fact, by encouraging her to move around more, it could make things worse.



• I wonder what “telemetry readings” they can send Xavier from the jungle that will give him any sort of basis to evaluate their performance. I continue to wonder whether they have any academic subjects in their school.

• Nature Girl Dani is back for four pages in a bikini. It’s fan-servicey, especially for a teen character, but at least she’s not drawn as a DD.



• Dani and Sam are accosted by four “savage women” armed with spears and long daggers. Even if we accept that Dani and Sam are well trained enough in combat to win 2-1 without using their powers, why does Sam take one of these three apparent savages captive? What does he intend to do with her? And why do the other three abandon her? Especially when she turns out to be a Nova Roma noble who wouldn’t have been sent on shore patrol in the first place. It’s a series of surprising reveals, but they make no sense in retrospect.

• Is the boat captain an American? He calls the tribeswomen “Indians.”



• Archeologist mom comes in handy for pointing out the incongruities in the “Indian’s” weaponry. It also gives Claremont a chance to mention the fictional Hovito tribe that we all came to know in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Mom also mentions the Jivaro tribe, a real tribe, which she claims is Amazonian, but actually they are further northwest, in Ecuador and Peru.



• The Amazon River expedition arrives at the fictional “Maderia” mountains, which Dani claims are more impressive than the Rocky Mountains. The name is close to the actual Portugese word “Madeira” which gives its name to a mountainous island off the coast of Europe.

• Castro’s death plot involves letting the ship with the kids go down a “tributary” of the Amazon with a waterfall. But the ship has been traveling upstream away from the ocean into the jungle, and tributaries feed into rivers, not out of them. So if the boat drifts, it will simply glide downstream, back toward safety. Come on, Claremont! They would have to have come up a waterfall at some point to be in danger now of going down a waterfall.



• We discover that Amara is actually a blonde Roman. I doubt that is a thing.

• Dani tells us again that the city is half Inca. Still haven’t seen any Incas.

• Castro, pretending to be Gallio’s enemy rather than his employee, spits in his face. That seems a bit too far.

• As you mentioned, for the second time in this series, Dani awakens to find herself a captive dressed in suggestive clothing, for a sequence that takes up a full seven pages. This time she’s one of three bikini-and-chainmail-loincloth clad sacrificial victims headed for the volcano to rejuvenate Selene, the succubus/sorceress. What, the volcano rejects virgins dressed in togas? Nah, it's just more teen cheesecake. At this point, we’re in a straight-up Conan homage. Dani being Dani, she’s not embarrassed by the (lack of) clothing but recognizes its significance. 

• Bobby’s knowledge of Latin was protested in a subsequent letters column on grounds that the language in Nova Roma would have evolved over the previous 2,000 years to become unintelligible from ancient Latin. Quite right, probably combined with the Inca tongue as well. But it is an opportunity to remind us that Bobby is high bred, with a fancy education. Sam certainly wasn’t learning Latin in Kentucky’s public schools, even before he dropped out to become the family breadwinner.

• Now it’s time for the kids to teleport from deep in the Andes of the Amazon, back to Rio de Janiero. Three problems: First, how did they make this journey? Their boat was smashed.

• Second, are the Nova Romans really going to risk letting these outsiders go blab about their long-hidden land? Seems dubious.

• Third: There are no mountains deep in the Amazon in the first place. The Andes run along the Western border of South America, through Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. Brazil is further east. So Claremont’s attempt to place this story along the Amazon but also nestled in an Andean valley would be like having the kids sail up the Mississippi Rriver for an adventure set at NORAD, in Colorado. (in fairness, there was an airport scene at one point.) See the yellow section on the map below:



• This issue has a nice contrast between two fathers. Emmanuel da Costa was partially restraining his own evil ambitions to maintain his relationship with his son Roberto. So when Roberto leaves, Emmanuel runs immediately into partnership with Sebastian Shaw. Senator Aquilla, on the other hand, would prefer to keep his relationship with his daughter but must send her away in order to protect his community from her uncontrolled lava powers.

• Now, we’ve previously seen that Senator Aquila is not a sentimental guy; he will sacrifice individuals, even innocents, for the Cause. And he’s already had his daughter running around in the jungle dressed in blackface for who-knows-how-long, so this latest banishment may come even easier to him. I don’t recall that we get to see Amara grappling with abandonment issues much down the line, though.

• It seems that Claremont “killed off” Karma to make room for Magma on the team. It’s a missed opportunity that he made her a blonde Anglo, from a society where we’re told that half the people are Inca. Her dad is even a commoner elevated to nobility (just like Roberto’s dad! Parallelism!), so surely he would have some Inca blood. Then the team could have had two mixed-race Brazilians, from different cultures yet similar family backgrounds, to provide some interesting opportunities for conflict and romance. But Amara’s extraordinary background rapidly fades into the background, and she becomes just another one of the many white blondes on the team.

• I don’t think we ever did learn how all the Nova Romans speak English, did we?

• Where does Dani take Amara in Rio? To the beach of course? So cue the Nature Girl again. Claremont never misses an opportunity for that. This issue's central plot conceit is that Amara, who's been living out in the open in the steamy Amazon jungle, can't handle the heat of the beach weather, even though her mutant power is to become a lava monster. I call shenanigans.



• The center of this issue is a cautionary tale about sexual harassment, as Amara’s “Me Too” moment turns volcanic.



• Rahne finally gets a snippet of personal development. She’s lovesick over Sam, who is paying more attention to princess Amara, and worried about the differences between Catholicism and Presbyterianism. She’s also miffed at being appreciated only as a tracker, and sure enough, in runs Sam, asking for her to be a tracker. Bad timing!





• So! Lots of plot holes in this run of New Mutants, but overall, I like it. One issue of family drama in Rio followed by four issues of Roman adventure in the jungle and then one issue of wrap-up back in Rio. It’s a perfect “There and Back Again” structure: the journey into faerie and back again, complete with a tunnel to a lost world, witches, characters discovering unknown depth of power and courage, etc. Joseph Campbell should be proud.