Where to start with this one?
When this comic came out, it skyrocketed in price. According to all the sources I can find, this is the first time Wolverine and Sabertooth face one another. Sabertooth was originally introduced as an unpowered assassin in Chris Claremont's Iron Fist, and subsequently found his way into X-Men history via this crossover. Claremont has gone on record saying that Sabertooth was always meant to be Wolverine's father, and the dialogue in today's issue really does reinforce that. Wolverine's expositional captions reveal that the two have a history together, a subtle retcon, but page 14 of the story gives us their first published meeting.
I think that even by this point, I was getting sick of Wolverine. I wonder if anyone's done any work on Logan's dialogue in 80s X-Men comics in comparison to the clipped style of Frank Miller's Dark Knight. I really think Wolverine, and the way he was depicted in the early to mid 80s, influenced the Grim'n'Gritty (TM) aesthetic that overtook comics in the wake of Dark Knight. Regardless, even this early into my X-Men reading I noticed the ridiculous over-exposure of the X-Men's resident Canadian. He's still overused and over-rated, IMHO, but there's a lot of people out there who love him to bits.
What else? Rick Leonardi's guest pencils on the issue are just beautiful. He reminds me of Halo Jones' Ian Gibson, though with a more American inflection. His ability to communicate movement in a static frame is just amazing. This comic includes, even outside of the Wolverine/Sabertooth scuffle, some beautifully-drawn action sequences. And the characters have extremely expressive faces, something not always in evidence, particularly in the more violent era of superheroes that this issue heralds.
Another interesting thing about this crossover in general is that after that first, violent foray in X-Men 210-211 and X-Factor 9-10, most of the story is aftermath. The Morlocks, for the most part, are dead by the time we get to the crossover issues and the rest of the main series story. The Marauders are vanishing back to wherever they came from, mopping up a few final stragglers. Like I said in an earlier post, it's the teams reacting to a level of violence that they have a hard time resisting at the beginning. Now, later into the story, it's about them returning to the scene of the crime to see if there's anything left that they can do.
"Coulda chopped you smooth as sin while you were dreamin', bub!"
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