I've never cared for Mojo as a villain, never bought into him as a major threat to the X-Men. Mojo and everything that goes with him -- including the X-Babies concept, which turns up again here -- strike me as one-note jokes that don't merit repeated exposure. But here we are, exposed to them once again. To be fair, one can't fault the writer to employing characters I don't care for when there's an established fan base out there who do love them. But I fault him for writing that follows no sense of logic, that breaks its own rules and that's inaccessible. Complicating matters is that the artist chosen for this fill-in story boasts a style that's a poor match for the tone of the story and characters.
Mojo, with Spiral acting as his bodyguard, has followed Juggernaut and Nocturne through a dimensional portal into the X-Men's Danger Room, and he decides to have some fun with his favorite victims/media stars/super-heroes. Mojo uses his reality-warping powers to de-age the X-Men, transforming them into another collection of X-Babies. They flee the Danger Room, looking for help, so Mojo dispatches his legal team -- an alternative version of the reality-hopping Exiles -- to retrieve the super-brats while sealing the X-Mansion so no other X-Men can get in and provide aid.
I loved Raney's art on Outsiders and Thor, and his efforts here really aren't as strong. The characters are rendered inconsistently, but he's juggling a much larger cast, mind you. Raney tells the story fairly clearly, but ultimately, the problem isn't his performance but a mismatch of styles. The overall tone of the story is fairly light and goofy, and Raney's style just don't mesh well with it. He seems to have trouble with the X-Babies; they don't always looks as young as they should, for example.
Of course, inconsistency isn't a problem limited to the art. Claremont's story is all over the place. The storytelling decisions he makes are completely arbitrary and often don't make sense. Psylocke's exclusion from the de-aging process is never explained and contributes nothing to the story. Furthermore, we're told X-Babies, save for Juggernaut, have lost their powers, yet we see Nightcrawler and Nocturne use some of their mutant abilities at one point. Furthermore, we see the alternate-version of Sasquatch -- a being imbued with super-strength and endurance -- taken out when a vase is dropped on her head. The X-babies' script patterns are constantly shifting between a cute, child-like tone and the more flowery, adult diatribes Claremont usually pens for these characters.
Perhaps the most clumsy aspect of the script comes when Claremont tries to bring a bit of drama to the goofiness. This was not the time to resolve Juggernaut's inner conflict, and it wraps far too neatly anyway. Claremont doesn't offer the most accessible script either. The Exiles' appearance comes from out of nowhere, and unless one is familiar with that title and its cast, the relevance of the characters will be completely lost. 2/10
