Oh, clever. Not just riffing another pop culture reference for the sake of it but because it was misinterpreted as alluding to a pop star's death. This comic book came out shortly after Piotr Rasputin had 'died' in the regular X-Men series. Over 30 years previous to this, the Beatles released 'Abbey Road' with an iconic cover featuring the four musicians walking across a zebra crossing on the aforementioned road (like you didn't know that already). Fairly soon after the album came out, bizarre rumours emerged about it signifying the fact that bassist Paul McCartney was actually dead. These rumours were based on the fact that Paul was out of step with the rest of the group, was barefoot and there was a registration plate on a car in the background with the number '28 IF' that fans supposed referred to the fact that that would be McCartney's age IF he was still alive. Phew. Anyway, you'll notice that two of the above details have been transposed onto this cover regarding Colossus (barefoot and out of step - don't know why they didn't have a car in the background - in fact, I'm not sure what the deal with the background here is). Another nice detail is that Kurt is wearing a white suit just like John Lennon did on the cover and considering that Kurt trained to be a priest at one point there's another nice nod to the mythology in his leading the procession. I believe Jim Mahfood came up with the image and it is pretty good but perhaps the concept is a lot more shrewd and fun than the actual completed cover.

I have ranked this cover no 196 as part of a long term project I am producing on my own blog 'marvel-ous' on blogspot.com re: my favourite marvel comic book covers. Please visit http://dmstarz.blogspot.com and check out the other covers that have made my top 250.