New Mutants #44: Legion

I'd put off writing about New Mutants #44 for a while, because I didn't find Legion very interesting to write about. I was wrong, and X-Men: Legacy #1 has put me firmly in my place. Still, not much to say about him here.

Legion's telekinetic personality, Jack Wayne, is let loose by Haller when a poorly secured piece of Kirby Tech nearly kills Moira. Rahne is there to witness this. In Westchester, Mirage feels this happen, and then furiously tries to phone Muir Island. I love her narration during this.

Scotland -- phone -- hurts -- I'm burning -- I'm not -- flames -- don't exist -- what's the number -- remember the stupid dialling codes -- this can't be happening -- so much fear -- her emotions, sensations, shared over the psychic rapport that links our minds when she's in her wolf form -- oh Rahne Rahne -- I won't let death claim you, I won't. Answer the phone, girl, c'mon.

This would be a nice stream of consciousness piece if it weren't for the clunky stock exposition embedded within it. Oh, Claremont, how I love you.¹ The New Mutants teleport over, track Legion to Ullapool, and engage in a fairly unengaging battle with him. We're missing either of the redeeming things I can find in Legion: the mindscapes or the relationship with his father (Xavier being in space recently). What works a bit better is Rahne's inter-fight encounter with her father figure, Reverend Craig, but that is all too brief.

This comic has the strangest use of Magma's powers yet, as she uses them to prevent an oil tank catching fire.

1. no hetero.

New Mutants Special Edition #1/X-Men Annual #9: For Asgard!

I'd known that the New Mutants share some vague sort of link with Asgardian stuff for a while - Dani goes and asks for that boon in Utopia if nothing else. And then of course Exiled happened. But it was always a bit obscure. Those stories were rather taking the relationship as read, but it wasn't the type of character background you can absorb through osmosis. Dani has Valkyrie powers and a horse, yes, but the effect that has on her character is not something that can be easily expressed in a one-sentence potted summary. It's an complex event that happened to her, and it's I suppose the same problem that legacy characters have. Mind, it's a sorry state of affairs when having complex chararacter motivations and background is a problem.

So, New Mutants Special Edition #1 and X-Men Annual #9 - which together consist of over 100 pages of comics - gave me my answer, and I feel better for having read them, in much the same way as I have a fuller understanding of Magik from reading Magik: Storm and Illyana.

There's too much plot to summarise sensibly, especially as the nine New Mutants are spread throughout the Nine Worlds (although seemingly not one per world - I think they missed a trick there). Consequences that matter are: Dani is a Valkyrie, with a pegasus, but doesn't understand the full implications of that yet. Karma loses weight. Rahne makes a friend, in Hrimhari, a more mythological wolf shapeshifter. And Rachel Summers new identity of "Phoenix" becomes known to the group, although she still hasn't told Scott who she is yet. He thinks it's a bit tasteless, which is a fair point. And Loki's plan, to make Storm a new thunder goddess and take control of Asgard, fails, as it must.

New Mutants #23-#25: Cloak and Dagger

I'm off to Thought Bubble in Leeds today, assuming I feel up to it. If you see me say hello. I'm the one with the geeky t-shirts and the dyed hair.

New Mutants #23 follows up from Selene in Uncanny #189 - she gets ratified as Black Queen. Also, Emmanuel de Costa is confirmed.

In Westchester, Bobby is moping in a saloon that he shouldn't even be in (possibly he's mad about Amara and Rachel going on a date), and reacts very badly at Peter trying to talk to him. Peter ends up in a coma. Elsewhere, Rahne has gone missing. Dani and Sam track her to a hotel room in the city, with no memory of how she got there.

What we have here is a crossover with Cloak and Dagger (who are "between series" right now, as they put it in the trade), and more specifically the aftermath of Marvel Team-Up #6, which I have failed to get hold of a copy of. Bobby and Rahne are acting weird from the after-effects of that. Various attempts fail, including an informal first try by Illyana to fix it, but after some planning, she is able to successfully exorcise the wrongness. The fairly unsubtle drugs-are-bad-mkay message is leavened with the notion that black magic can save you from them, which is fantastic trollery.

There's a short re-appearance of Karma's younger siblings, seen here for the first time in New Mutants, and still under the care of Father Bowen.

Meanwhile, in the Bermuda triangle, Lee takes Magneto to his old island base, our Proto-Utopia. They start to explore it. Lee doesn't think he's been seen since #150 (which marks against God Love Man Kills being in continuity, because he made a pretty noticeable appearance on live television at that point). Lee calls him on his ungratefulness, and after some consideration, he very nearly apologises. Meanwhile, Lee reckons the people who built the strange sunken city full of fish-people statutes and non-Euclidian geometric horrors might not be even human. On that, all I can say is that I'm certainly going to continue to enjoy Bill Sienkiewicz.

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.

New Mutants #8-#11: Moon and Earth

We've bypassed Manaus, and instead join our New Mutants in the Amazon rainforest in New Mutants #8. SpaceSquid covered this only two days ago, and quotes me calling it "profoundly offensive racist garbage", which I totes stand by.¹ By the way, the story does actually use the word "rainforest", which made me look up that on Google Ngram viewer, and yes, it seems that was just before it doubled in popularity in the late 1980s, so well done, Claremont, have a cookie.

Anyway, Rahne is not dealing well with the heat (and, if her skin is as much like mine as it seems, I hope she's wearing sunscreen). Soon enough, they encounter a girl named "Amara", seemingly from a local tribe, but with strange arrows. One is from the Hivoto, from the Peru portrayed in the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and another of Jivaro origin, who Nina identifies as being local but in reality are from Peru/Ecuador. Amara's knife, however, is of steel!

So, there's an incident with the boats, and the New Mutants end up captured by Romans, who are living in a city ("Nova Roma") in an isolated valley (once more, we find something you can't really do these days - if this existed you'd be able to see it on Google Maps), and our captive Amara is revealed to be one of these Romans. She'd been in blackface and a wig, and really is white and blonde - which sigh, if they had to do this, couldn't they just have drawn her as a southern Italian and spared us that disguise crap? And she speaks English after all (to Rahne's great embarrassment), and gives her full name as "Amara Juliana Olivia Aquilla", exile and daughter of the first senator, one Lucius Antonius Aquilla. The city is part-Roman (to those the republican aspects are ascribed), but also accepted some Incas centuries again, who brought with them some tendencies towards despotism (because Romans certainly never do that sort of thing). Sigh.

Now, this is profoundly offensive garbage, and it is simply not a defence to say that it was of its time, and they weren't to know better. A letter printed in #19 outlines, with perfect clarity, the problem with this story.

Dear Marvel,



THE NEW MUTANTS is a pretty good book, but the plotline starting in #8 is atrocious. As a black person myself, I'm sick and tired of these storylines that place lost Roman legions or other whites in the jungle whenver it starts to appear that the so-called "savage" tribes have any intelligence. You've turned the clock back decades with that old bull about how the Amazon tribeswoman turn out to be whites wearing some kind of dye because their knives show sophisticated workmanship. I hope in the future you at Marvel will avoid such cliche-ridden worn-out racist stories when the action takes place in a non-Western country or culture (the New Mutants story takes place in an area where Western civilization hasn't arrived yet.)



Quentin Sinclair

(no address)

Do they acknowledge it's a problem and apologise? Nope. They defend the storyline elements, and say they hadn't consciously meant to be racist, as if that makes it any better. They do at least concede that the hybrid nature of the culture was only marginally apparent in the finished story, and note they'll do better in the future. But the hybrid nature, with democratic Romans and despotic Incas is half the problem!

Because it's a Roman story made out of pure condensed trope, and the protagonists have become captives, the boys are taken to Gladiator Academy, while the girls are pampered and drugged prior to be sold off as slaves.

Just as the boys face defeat, Rahne breaks loose from her drugging, shapeshifts, and saves them. This is the cause of some comment - they reckon her lupine abilities come to her from the line of Romulus. Heh. So, having gone through the being-gladiators-and-slaved-tropes, one of their number gets hailed as a living god. They've been saved courtesy of Senator Gallio, who is Lucius's rival and covets the Emperorship. He's married to Selene, who turns out to be an ancient moon sorceress slash living vampire. She wants to recruit Dani and kill Amara.

Amara, having been tossed into a lava pool, is reborn in molten form, and then battles Selene. Lucky, really. I wonder whether she might be a more long-term version of Darwin. If she'd have been drowned, would she have become Hydro?

They all rally round, put a stop to Selene and Gallio's plans, rescue Bobby's mother, and generally huzzah!

I was originally slightly puzzled by Emmanuel's plan: he wants to exploit the mineral wealth of Amazonas, and so therefore is sabotaging his wife's archaeological expedition. Amazonas is, well, a big place, larger than say, Mongolia. Towards the end it's strongly implied that he knew about Nova Roma already, and that it specifically would be a good place for mining, so that clears that up partially.

Having a random Roman colony in Brazil is very weird, even by the standards of X-Men, but this is not given the appropriate level of remarkableness in-comic. How did these people get here? Doesn't this change everything we know about history? Why do they speak English? For that matter, why do they speak classical Latin, anyway, rather than some previously unknown Quechua-Italic contact language? These are questions that are not even asked, let alone answered, in the story. (The letters page for #19 provides a feeble excuse that they'd learned English from previous expeditions, without explaining why, or why not Portuguese.)

1. This of course means I've caught up! At least as far as New Mutants goes. For Uncanny it'll take until the end of the month. I'm cheating by not doing Alpha Flight and Dazzler, but I will be covering everything else I can get my hands on, including the Magik: Storm and Illyana miniseries (coming Saturday), Kitty Pryde & Wolverine (13th November), X-Men & Alpha Flight (19th November), and then eventually doing X-Factor (2nd December) in full when it launches. I cannot find the Nightcrawler limited series, sadly. I fail to care about Longshot but will possibly consider it if recommended. X-Men vs. Fanstatic Four is in Essential, but I need to get hold of X-Men vs. Avengers, which is possibly rare, or at least hard to Google for now, THANK YOU MARVEL. Oh, and I have a copy of Fallen Angels already. Anything else I am missing from my list?

From this you can perhaps tell that I have got a LITTLE BIT AHEAD in my reading and writing, such that I've already started in 2013 posts and have only got five left to complete in 2012. This is good.