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.

There was a time, before the earth cooled and the seas formed, when Chris Claremont was considered to be one of the industry’s top writers. A time when he was writing one of the industry’s best-selling and most highly regarded books – Uncanny X-Men. These days, he’s considered something of a living fossil, shuffled off to the side on X-Men satellite titles after failing to recapture the brilliance he was remembered for on two seperate occasions. But still, we’re not here to debate what went wrong.

When this issue came out, I wasn’t reading comics. I would dare say I was barely even aware of the X-Men. I first read it a few years later in the UK’s magazine-sized X-Men re-print comic. By this time, I was aware of the X-Men cartoon, and had moved on to the comics, and I was utterly loving the expanded universe. Sure, it didn’t always make sense, but I was old enough to understand that things in the cartoon didn’t necessarily match up exactly with the comic.

To this day, I think Rogue is one of the best characters to come out of X-Men – remind me to bore you with the details one day – but she’s certainly been my favourite for a long time. While I’m enjoying the current focus on Rogue in the recent X-titles, it’s a sad truth that no-one ever really wrote her as well as Claremont did.

In this issue, Rogue falls out of the Seige Perilous. She finds herself in the X-Men’s Australian base, long after the rest of the team has abandoned it – and what’s worse, it’s inhabited by the Reavers – cyborg mercenaries with anti-mutant tendancies. Naked and without her stolen powers, Rogue finds herself attacked by a zombie-looking Ms. Marvel 0 somehow, the two are sharing their life-force. To escape, she steals Gateway’s power and teleports herself to the savage land. Ms Marvel eventually follows, and a fight ensues – at the end of the issue, Magneto unexpectedly rescues Rogue just as Ms. Marvel tries to kill her.

It’s an excellent Rogue character piece, and touches on many areas of X-Men lore. In this issue alone, there are Reavers, the Savage Land, Deathstrike, as well as subplots involving The Shadow King and Lila Cheney. Somehow, Claremont made it all work. X-Men, as played by Claremont, was a sci-fi soap opera and was structured as such. In this issue, some mysteries are introduced, some are resolved, and throughout the focus remains on Rogue’s character. Compared to modern comics, there’s a lot going on in this one issue.

The art is by Jim Lee, and looks great as a result. Lee’s style has altered substantially over the years, but back then, there’s no denying he was perfect for the title, managing to do Claremont’s character moments as well as the big action scenes.

As an individual issue, it’s not strictly perfect – there’s a lot going on that might be hard to grasp for a new reader, but as with any soap, follow it a little and you’ll soon pick it up…