New Mutants #1-3
Originally released in 1983
Written by Chris Claremont
Art by Bob McLeod
The New Mutants are a bit of a departure from the X-Men stories. Whereas the team at the start of Chris Claremont's run, and even the original five by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, were well-trained and able to leap into action at a moment's notice, the New Mutants are kids - many of them are traumatized, all of them have no combat experience, and some of them are sheltered and naive - they're "new" in about every sense of the word.
Not helping matters is that the X-Men have been kidnapped and everyone on Earth seems to believe that they're dead. Xavier has no intention of reforming the X-Men, at any rate, and he tries to keep them out of trouble, but trouble manages to find them regardless. Danielle "Dani" Moonstar seems to be the main character, at least for these first few issues; I'm not sure if that will change. We don't get much of a background on the other characters, though one member of the team, Xi'an (or Shan) "Karma" Coy Manh (whose name was later changed to Xuan Cao Manh, as her original name doesn't exist in the Vietnamese language), has her backstory shown to the rest of the New Mutants in great detail thanks to Dani losing control of her power to show a person's greatest fear or darkest memory. (I was shocked to see how much they could get away with when it came to sexual assault)
Aside from a rogue government program sending out Sentinels, the team also has to contend with the Brood. The Brood are basically the Xenomorphs from the movie Alien, but with enough consciousness to speak, and thankfully their method of spawning more of their kind is not as graphic as the Xenomorphs. It's still a disturbing image, though, as people who are infected with Brood eggs slowly turn into members of the Brood.
Other members of the team include Rahne "Wolfsbane" Sinclair, a shy Scottish teen girl who can turn into a wolf or a werewolf, Roberto "Sunspot" Da Costa, a shameless flirt who seems to be able to coat himself in solar energy, and Sam "Cannonball" Guthrie, who (as he says variations of several times in these issues alone) is invulnerable while he's blastin'. We don't learn as much about them as we learn about Dani, but they're entertaining characters and it's fun to see them bounce off of each other.
There are some indication of what's to come - a psychic boy who's autistic is mentioned, though not seen, and it's revealed that he's the son of Charles Xavier, though I'm not sure how much truth there is to it. The X-Men return to Earth at the end of the third issue, with an editor's note indicating that it takes place about 20 issues ahead of where I am in X-Men - I'm not sure if the two teams will interact now that they're on the same planet or if they'll stay in their own spheres.
Colossus's younger sister, Illyana Rasputin, also makes a brief appearance - she eventually becomes a demonic sorcerer known as Magik, and going by her thoughts in this issue, she's already started down that path by this point. I'm pretty sure she becomes a member of the team further down the line, so I'm looking forward to seeing how she fits in their dynamic.
This was my first experience with X-Men spin-offs, and while it took a bit for the team to grow on me, I enjoyed it. They offer a very different perspective from the main line-up of X-Men, who have all gotten used to superheroics being part of their lives, so I can see why they got their own series rather than being shuffled into the main X-Men team as students of Xavier's school.
No comments:
Post a Comment