Amanda Sefton? Don't you mean Amara Aquila?

Thanks, Steve. Fixed it. This isn't the first time i've swapped their names, either.

Related to my comment for Xmen/Micronauts, under that entry, and Moon Knight 35, this would seem to need to be moved forward as well, with the "orientation" of Magma to the school (though already the students have returned to the States, having missed Logan's failed wedding while in Nova Roma, but making it back to attend Scott and Madelyne's. We'll assume the kids returned, then went back for Amara later?) This allows for Valerie Cooper's proper introduction (UXM 177) before being seen with Gyrich and Shaw while introducing the next model Sentinel (NM 13), and we meet Doug Ramsey before Kitty rambling about him to Peter (same respective issues.)
I am going with (and this in regards to all things X, as that is what I am currenty revsisting/focused on.)

UXM Annual 7
Moon Knight 35
UXM 176
New Mutants 13
Alpha Flight 6
Xmen/Micronauts 1-4
UXM 177-179
Alpha Flight 7-8
New Defenders 129
Magik 1-4
New Mutants 14
UXM 180
New Mutants 15-17
Secret Wars 1-12
Alpha Flight 7-8

What do you think? I love your site/work, BTW!! Came across you in the last few weeks, searching for chronology databases while restarting my reading, and organization, of every X-related comic from Xmen 1 to today. Man, I wish you were beyond 1985!! LOL

Oops!! No edit. Please ignore that repeated Alpha Flight 7-8 at the bottom. :)

Hey Mark, thanks for these comments. I'm looking into it.

Generally speaking i'd be ok with Colossus' injury not being shown in other books, with the idea that it got more serious or aggravated after the events of Moon Knight and Micronauts, but i agree it reads better with your arrangement. So i'll do it if i can move stuff without complications. I don't want to move the MK issue or the X-Men annual since they are chock full of guest stars, but it's looking like i can shift the X-Men issues and NM #13 without triggering any dependencies.

A couple of questions: 1) Are you including the Alpha Flight issues here just because you consider them X-characters and that's what you're focused on, or is there some dependency with those issues i'm not remembering?

2) Magik #1-3 is referenced in UXM #177-179. But i guess your idea is that since those events already happened from Illyana's point of view, it's ok if she references them before the issues are published?

I don't see how Mark's timeline can work. In this issue, Magma meets Xavier and Xavier references the Beyonder's scanning wave in Uncanny 178-179. Xavier clearly already knows Magma at the start of X-Men/Micronauts. So the timeline has to be:
Uncanny 177-179
New Mutants 13
X-Men vs. Micronauts 1-4
So basically there's no alternative but to say that Uncanny 179 takes place before X-Men/Micronauts and Peter's injury got worse after X-Men/Micronauts. Or am I missing something?

There seems to be so far not that many meetings between New Mutants and X-men, except for Kitty here now.

It feels strange, since they literally are in the same building.

And then an issue or two later, we suddenly learn that Illyana and Kitty are roommates. I don't recall if it's specified that it's the mansions only two-bed room - it is specified in later issues - but even here it's, like, uh, what? Kitty shares a room with an X-Baby? If you don't know anything about their previous interactions, it's completely out-of-the-blue.

Even if you do know about their previous interactions, it only makes a small amount of sense on Illyana's part. Kitty told her stories when she was little, Kat from Limbo was one of her instructors. That's about it. Kitty is exactly at the age where she'd be most eager to prove herself a 'big girl' and not one of the 'kids.' "Professor X is a Jerk!" anyone?

The lack of meetings between X-Men and X-Babies early on was a bit strange, but if I recall, the New Mutants did a bit of travelling their first year, and the X-Men had reasonable excuses to not be around as well. The kids are in South America when the X-Men are home, the X-Men are in Tokyo when the kids are home, etc. It got better though. Maybe the creative team didn't realize the cross-title synergy they could build, maybe they wanted to keep each title separate for as long as they could.

It makes a certain amount of sense to keep the two groups separated to start with so that the New Mutants could establish themselves as more than a secondary X-men junior book, but it did go on for too long. The two titles begin to intertwine so much later that if you don't read both you miss bits.

Claremont definitely wrote X-Men and New Mutants as if people were reading both books. It is one reason I was kept confused by certain references in X-Men - it's because they referred to things established in New Mutants which I didn't read. That kept up until the books were separated after Fall of the Mutants.

Certainly Claremont hand waved a lot of things like personal interaction between the New Mutants and X-Men. He often failed to introduce things if they were mundane like that, as opposed to integral to the plot or "exciting" stuff like revealing someone had secretly been a magical alien bounty hunter the entire time. Usually though the reader could fill in the gaps quite easily.

Claremont had a lot of strengths as a writer, but I think he was undisciplined in the sense he could get easily distracted, and often didn't introduce short scenes (like a few panels) that would establish things more clearly for the rider. Some of these things could have been established in New Mutants at the expense of some of the worst plots (like the Team America detour) which would have been a good thing.

Some side comments. It's remarkable how female dominant this team is for the time. Cannonball and Sunspot are the only males. On the female side we have Karma, Mirage/Psyche, Wolfsbane, Magma, and Magik. Eventually we'll get Cypher and Warlock (and should he really count?), but the women are either tied with the men or in the majority throughout the title under Claremont.

Also, Claremont doesn't spend much time thinking about the age he's established for these characters. Sam and Dani are suppoed to be the eldest around 16-17. Both Sunspot and Wolfsbane are 13. No matter how charming Sunspot is, I find it hard to believe Dani would ever be disappointed that he wasn't using his charm on her. Claremont writes them all as about the same age instead of the ages he established them as. During these teen years, the differences in years are dramatic. I've seen boys be interested in younger girls, but that is often a function that girls tend to both develop faster and be more mature than boys. I don't recall such older girls being interested in boys that young. As mature adults, the gap doesn't mean anything, but at this age it should.

In fact now that I think about, this is really a group of 13 year olds with Sam and Dani the outliers at 16. (OK, Karma is even older, but she's written out quickly). It would have been good to see the two of them bond (not necessarily romantically) since they are much older and more mature.

With Dani, even though her thought balloon specifically wishes Bobby would use his charm on her, Bobby was the least important part of that wish. You're mostly right about Claremont and the age of the characters, and it may not be clear because Dani cites Bobby's charm, but Claremont did do a good job characterizing her as the tall lanky chick who would like to be noticed by boys. [Pretty much the same as Sam, who at least wound up with Lila Cheney.] It's not that she has any attraction to Bobby, it's that he has tons of charm, immediately uses it on Amara here, and Dani wishes he or someone else would do that for her. Even if it's only when Bobby's done something incredibly stupid and she's yelling at him about it and he's trying to get out of trouble, you know, 'just give me something!'

This sort of thing was more effective with Kitty being openly jealous of Illyana.

You're right about the age differences being much more important when we're younger, but I'm not sure that would hold true in a school as small as Xaviers, where everyone is in the same class regardless of their age. Rhane would have a crush on most of the boys in school at one time or another, Doug was making his way through most of the women, Sam and Dani (and Karma) were limited by their responsibilities, Amara by her status, Illyana by the evil she could unleash.

The New Mutants and the Hellions would make a great teen comedy/soap opera, with very few superheroics involved.