New Mutants #64: Dead Means Dead

What do you call the New Mutants in issue #64?

Douglas.

After two fill-in issues, it's finally time for his funeral. The mood at the end of #61, where the team donned their graduation costumes and seemed almost about to strike out and leave the school has gone, and instead they are worried about Magneto's opinion all of a sudden.

They view the body and meet Doug's family, who have had to be lied to (they think it's a hunting accident). There's going to be a police investigation too, most likely, so they need to get their story straight.

The main plot is Warlock's reaction to his friend's death. It's suitably done, with Warlock showing the complete lack of comprehension that you'd expect. This reaches almost Monkey Paw levels of horror, when Warlock takes Doug's dead body around on a tour of his family and friends, to try and persuade him to absorb lifeglow. The Mutants just about manage to get the body back before anyone notices it's missing. The entire thing is bookended with Magik studying the tapes of Colossus's death and preparing for the next issue of Uncanny.

This is the story we needed immediately after #61. It's a shame about the gap, but that's publishing.

Fall of the New Mutants (#59-#61)

Fall of the Mutants runs in New Mutants #59-#61. Really, there are two stories here: the story with Bird-Brain and the Ani-Mator in #59-#60, and then #61.

The first part is a relatively standard New Mutants story at this point: they skip school to go on a mission. Specifically they are going to investigate Bird-Boy's origin story. We find he was created as an experiment by the maddest scientist of recent years: the Ani-Mator. The Ani-Mator has been hired by Cameron Hodge and the Right to investigate a mutant cure but instead has done a double cross, and is splicing together human and animal parts to create a new race of Ani-Mates (not to be confused with the Ani-Men). He'd quite like to study the New Mutants, as well.

The battle soon becomes a three-way when Hodge and The Right turn up, angry at having been deceived by the Ani-Mator. There is general confusion, but the New Mutants eventually win. But there's a price. Douglas.

Douglas's death is curious. I knew he was going to end up dead at some point, but I thought the transmode virus was going to be involved. It seemed like such a natural thing to do. Instead, Warlock's absence (he and Bobby arrived late, from being in Fallen Angels) was the problem. Yay cliche avoidance?

The reactions to this, and to telly coverage of the other Fall of the Mutants stories, are the focus of #61. There is plenty of self-blaming, as you might expect. And having let one set of friends die, surely they should go to Dallas and help Illyana's brother (she tries but can't get there due to a gridlock in the omniverse). They decide to defy Magneto, one last time. And not without reason: the scenario of these kids being in a school has really fallen apart since their jaunt to the future and to space. They can't be confined so easily.

New Mutants #53-#54: Pleased To Meet You

New Mutants #53-#54 is a two-part story set in one night. The gang have been grounded for weeks, Sunspot and Warlock have run away, and Magneto thinks he has just the idea to cheer them up: a party at the Hellfire Club, which the Hellions have also been invited.

This is not one of Magneto's better plans. And some of his have been real doozies.

It actually turns out surprisingly OK. Everyone gets little character moments. Wolfsbane and Catseye bond; Cannonball and Jetstream develop their rivalry; Magma discovers that Selene might be her ancestor (a distant very-great-grandmother - so I think we're supposed to believe that Selene actually is the Roman moon goddess at this point); Karma goes snooping for intel about her brother and sister; and Moonstar and Thunderbird face off about their respective teams. They end up in a challenge to find out who had sold a dodgy copy of a statue of Selene to a Hellfire club member; the Hellions win, by pointing the New Mutants at the early levels while the Hellions go straight to the boss fight. Sneaky.

Cypher and Roulette end up in bed together (after Cypher got lucky), where they are caught by the other New Mutants. This might possibly warrant adding them to the chart, except that the dialogue seems more pre-coital, so it will remain unadjusted.

And, while they were having all that fun, they've been basically driving off Karma, who has now left the team (again), on a quest to find Leong and Nga. According to the letters page in New Mutants #65, this was to have been a plot in Fallen Angels 2, which never did happen for various reasons...

New Mutants Annual #1: Homesteading the Dyson Sphere

Today's second post is New Mutants Annual #1. The New Mutants are going to a Lila Cheney gig, in New York. Lila Cheney's look is seemingly based on Joan Jett.

Amara hasn't seen anything quite like the venue, the closest thing being the "Coliseum" at home in Nova Roma (a term that specifically refers to the one in Rome, by the way. How authentic is Nova Roma, anyway?) Bobby is able to use his rich-kid privileges to get backstage passes, so they can skip the queue and watch the sound check. Sounds thrilling. Unfortunately, they just can't have a normal day.

So, a Vrakanin bounty hunter is trying to assassinate Cheney. Firstly, by sabotaging a stack of speakers (Sam saves Lila and gets a kiss, which makes Bobby rather jeallous) Then, during the gig itself, they attack in person. The New Mutants do what they can. This gets out of hand, and the band (and Sam) suddenly vanish, through a stargate, apparently created by Lila's guitar playing.

Lila and the band (and Sam) arrive at Lila's home away from home: an abandoned Dyson sphere, that she's taken up residence in.

In order to get the full ludicrousness of that concept, you need to understand what a Dyson sphere is. In the form portrayed here, it is a solid sphere of matter around a star, in the "habitable" zone, which therefore captures all that sun's energy. If you built a Dyson sphere in our solar system, with the radius of Earth's orbit, it would have 550 million times the surface area of Earth. There could be quintillions (short scale) or trillions (long scale) of people. Lila thinks it's otherwise empty, though, which is a trifle arrogant of her.

Warlock reopens the gate, and they end up 'porting. To space, frustratingly, but he's able to save them by transforming himself into a spaceship himself. They catch up to the sphere, and someone find our people on its vast surface.

There's some nonsense about Cheney being an intergalactic thief who is going to steal the Earth for no clear reason (she's taken lessons from the Daleks, then). Who is going to want to buy the planet anyway? Because of some damage during fighting, the Earth-moving device is going to end up destroying the Earth instead. Until Cypher saves the day, with his reading-alien-languages-and-therefore-the-instructions power. Anyway, for some reason all this doesn't mark her as a supervillain. Well, the "some reason" being simply that she's romantically interested in Sam. They kiss, and she even makes him dress up, and the way that the scene cuts away after that I think we can add this to the Shag Chart.

They all get home courtesy of Cheney, who it turns out has some innate teleporting ability - over interstellar distances only. This is sufficiently useful that it has to be hobbled by the restriction that she can only reach places she considers "home" - in this case London, making possibly its first appearance in an X-Men comic (her being British was implied earlier, when she called Sam "luv"). Not clear how she got to the Dyson Sphere in the first place though.

I'm generally all very keen on the genre-mashups that we see in the pages of these books, but this strikes me as a mash too far. Sam now has a girlfriend. Fair enough. She's a rock star. Who looks like Joan Jett. And she's space thief. And resides on a Dyson sphere. At some point it crosses that line from interesting fiction to absurd levels of wish fulfillment. If this carries on, our New Mutants will cease to be ordinary characters with the twist of their powers, and start being as well, comic booky, as the X-Men proper.

New Mutants #21: Party at Xavier's

So, I'd called that Starjammers appearance a couple of issues back wrong. Something is coming, and it lands in New Mutants #21.

That something is Warlock, who arrives at the X-Mansion (a coincidence? or not? there has been a lot of alien activity around there, maybe he picked something up) in the middle of the a party at Xavier's. Rahne, Dani and Amara have invited a couple of their local friends over, with Xavier's permission (perhaps he's trying to forestall the rising tide of prejudice, win the neighbours over before they start with the pitchforks). In a running gag, people keep assuming Amara is from Rome, New York, and expect her to act like it.

Our new character, Warlock, is a techno-organic creature, from a distant world. He feeds on lifeforce, rendering organic creatures inert masses, but can also subsist on electricity. He's unable to communicate with the humans: the breakthrough is supplied by Doug Ramsey, Kitty's friend, who has the mutant ability of hyper-communication. To involve him means outing themselves - and the school.

When Xavier gets back, they have present a new candidate for admission to the school: Warlock, who is a mutant of sorts and can now speak a kind of English. I don't know if they're actually going to admit the thing about Doug - they offer to tell the whole story to Xavier but he brushes them aside.

New Mutants #13: Never Mind You, I Hope We Survive The Experience

New Mutants skips ahead again for #13. Amara, now in Westchester, signs up with the New Mutants and joins the school. She hadn't met Xavier before, having agreed to enroll at his school sight unseen, and starts to get second thoughts when she realises quite how mindready he is. He's made an exact copy of her room in Nova Roma while assuring her that of course "Your mind is your own. I will not pry". What would this man consider prying, exactly? Her welcome barbecue goes hilariously wrong, with beer flying everywhere, her dress ruined, and a great big crack opening in the ground. They leave her alone for a while.

The non-New Mutants parts of this (which follow up events in Uncanny and will have consequences there - we'll see in the next year or so it how the two titles sort of becomes a bimonthly title under two names) are fairly talky but intriguing. Kitty has a new friend, a local boy called Douglas Ramsey. We've heard of him before - he's the software expert to Kitty's hardware geek. Kitty is recklessly using his contacts to hack into Hellfire Club computer systems, bringing down random remote systems, and getting leads about possible collusion with the government.

That would be Project: Wideawake, then, to which Val Cooper (just introduced in #176) is being brought on to. They're testing a new type of Sentinel, but it goes wrong and has to be destroyed. Five million dollars worth of equipment gone. (Seriously, only five million dollars? That's less than an F-16!)

All this hacking (WarGames was released last year, 2600 would be launched in 1984, so Claremont is riding a zeitgeist here) is making Kitty run late for her meeting with the Professor. Both him and the New Mutants call her on her ridiculous petty feud with them (something we've not really seen any evidence for, after she rejoined the main team). She takes the point, and agrees to patch up things and help Amara. The little Kitten is growing up.

The next day, it's Amara's first session in the Danger Room. She's got a new codename: "Magma", and a uniform. She's unhappy about the Professor casually mentioning that he is going to be telepathically monitoring her, and runs off, but this time without causing any minivolcanoes or earthquakes, which is progress of a kind.

The conflict between her and Xavier is somewhat vacuously resolved by her eavesdropping a conversation between Lilandra and Xavier. She decides to stay - she doesn't want to have any more incidents like almost destroying Rio. So we've taken an entire issue to put her more or less in the same position that she was at the end of #12.