Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue at random, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

Uncanny #318 shows the team enjoying some downtime just between the almost-modest Phalanx Covenant crossover and the Legion Quest/Age of Apocalypse mega-crossover. Mmm, smells like the 90s. Hand me my checkered lumberjack shirt.

Most of the issue deals with the establishment of a new Xavier’s School, run by Banshee and recently-reformed villainess, Emma Frost. Jubilee says her goodbyes to the X-Men (pausing briefly to stick it to Archangel) and then leaves the mansion, joining the cast of Generation X. A parallel plot sees Beast giving grey-hued mutant Skin a lift to the airport as he attempts to draw a line under his experiences with the X-Men and Phalanx, but is ultimately convinced to join Generation X as well. Shoe-horned around those are a couple of scenes dealing with Scott and Jean’s return from their “honeymoon” several thousand years in the future, and some further advancement of a White Queen/Iceman subplot that Lobdell plugged neatly away at for a few years.

This is the kind of issue that used to turn up a lot, largely because there were as many crossovers going on that needed to be placed into some kind of context. The issue acts as both epilogue to and summary to the first Cyclops/Phoenix miniseries as well as a 2-month crossover that touched a total of 7 different series. Then it spins merrily off into the first issue of Generation X. Ye gods. While the decompressed arcs of today often make me nostalgic for the single issue episodic stories of the past, looking back does make you realise that it wasn’t quite as simple as all that.

At this point, Scott Lobdell was writing Uncanny. The shadow of Claremont’s legendary 15-year run still cast itself over the franchise, and Lobdell was probably the only person who managed to ape his soap-opera style with any success. Fill-in art comes from the, er, polymorphic Roger Cruz, doing his best Jim Lee impression. To his credit, Lobdell does manage to inject some humanity into what could’ve been nothing more than a mish-mash of editorial cleanup - Jubilee is the real star, though the Beast/Skin conversations are great and even Cyclops gets some comedy material. It’s a nice read for that stuff alone, but I shudder to think how someone who doesn’t have a degree in 90s X-Men would handle the actual plot.

Oddly, these kind of stories are the ones that really stick in my mind – the ones that dispense with action and really focus on the characters at the heart of the X-Men. Lobdell did that kind of thing best of all, and even now it reminds me just why I used to love the series so much.

Download Uncanny X-Men #318 in .cbr format here for a limited time, and there’s more Uncanny X-Men available to view online at Marvel Digital Comics.