Uncanny X-Men #293 pg 29 (Raney pencils, Rubinstein inks, Lobdell story) Colossus laments over loss of his brother

DEATH IN THE DEPTHS - The Last Morlock Story

I do really love story pages and this one just captures a few beautiful moments that really bring life to these “characters”. This is a really sad storyline where the battle has its losses and the X-Men (era of the Gold Team) do not come out unscathed, in fact they actually lose the fight and have to make drastic decisions to get out alive. This page features the conversation from Piotr to his younger sister Illyana, where he has to retract a surprise he had for her (he found his older brother Mikhail, and was going to bring him home). He has to retract this surprise because in the battle, his brother was killed (defeated, as he was trying to kill all the remaining Morlocks, which he was fairly successful in doing). Within the next 10 issues, Piotr will loose his little sister to the Legacy Virus (UCX #303). He goes from one big loss to a major loss in these storylines.

Raney’s art with Rubinstein’s inks on this page are quiet, small moments, collaged together for a scene of Jean Grey reading the room (telepathically getting all she needs to understand what’s happened) and comforting the now broken stoic Goliath of a man, Piotr “Peter” Rasputin, aka Colossus. You can see that most of this page survived, but there was a head replacement for Jean Grey on the bottom panel, slight change for the better. Somewhere out there is her head floating around (likely lost in all the back and forth this page may have had from collector to collector, in the 30 plus years of its existence, 1992).

Another fun thing to note, that my Ukrainian partner brought up, is that the spelling of “Dos Vadanya” is more phonetically done, but would be written as “Da Svidaniya” (or a variation on this spelling). But it wouldn’t really ever be “Dos” and he feels like Colossus is wearing a crop top, some levity in this sad melancholy page, ha!