"Even in Death..."
Last month, the X-Men was a solo story where Kitty Pryde had to fight a demon by herself. This month, it would be a similar story, only this issue focuses on Cyclops, who is on a temporary leave of absence from the X-Men. This issue was written by Chris Claremont, but had Brent Anderson as penciler and Josef Rubinstein as inker. It has a cover date of April of 1981.
Also, content warning:
Cyclops has left the X-Men temporarily over some psychological stress, which was a pretty common occurrence in the X-Men. He is working on a fishing boat in Florida, and the Captain of the ship, a young woman, needs some help because her father is in trouble. They soon learn what the reader has already learned in the first pages: her father, facing death by cancer, has committed suicide. But since this is a comic book, there is a twist: it was at the urging of the demon D'Spayre, a demon who, as his name suggests, causes despair. The demon lures Cyclops into his dimension, where he then torments him with a series of flashbacks to various points of his life history and X-Men history, including a replay of the Dark Phoenix saga, which was still a fulcrum point in the X-Men history at the time. Also, the Man-Thing shows up, because they are in Florida, and despite his marginal place in the Marvel pantheon, the Man-Thing does show up occasionally. Finally, Cyclops discovers that the power of hope is the only thing that can defeat D'Spayre, and the comic comes to a conclusion.
A few things of note here: first, (and this is going to be a theme), despite the popular conception that Claremont's run was based around the ideological issue of mutants as victims of persecution, this story doesn't mention that, and instead focused on the horror side of the Marvel Universe, and telling a personal story. One of the challenges in comic books is telling realistic, personal stories with a straight face in a world where aliens invade regularly. And this story (like last month's story) manages to do that, focusing on a personal tragedy and working it in with the supernatural in a natural way. The one thing that might be jarring for a modern reader is the depiction of suicide, especially given how strict the Comics Code Authority was at the time. Suicide, and self-harm in general, has become a much more taboo topic since the 1980s.
So the Chris Claremont run of the X-Men continues to be of high quality, and also to defy some of the retroactive stereotypes placed on it. It will be interesting to see if that continues.