New Mutants Annual #4: The Evolutionary War

The Evolutionary War was a 1988 crossover that ran over eleven annuals. The name refers to the High Evolutionary, who despite the name had little to do with the X-Men: he was originally a Thor villain. His backstory would eventually become a little more sinister, but in 1988 he has little other than a thematic link with the mutants, never even appearing as a villain to them. So, it's about time.

Our entry in to this from New Mutants is Magma, who has been captured by the High Evolutionary's Purifiers (not to be confused with Stryker's Purifiers, obv). They want to stop her being a mutant, on grounds of public safety, and frankly they have a point, as it turns out she had gone spare after the events of New Mutants #64, having had a severe case of reverse culture shock.

Amara's dad complains to Emma Frost; who then summons the Inner Circle of the Hellfire Club. Including Magneto, who specifically forbids the kids to leave the mansion while he's gone. They arrive at Wyoming before he does. They've got Bulk and Glowworm, too, which indicates that they really are targetting particularly dangerous mutants. The rescue mostly works, but Dani gets caught in the power-removing machine, leading them to think she's lost her powers (like they'd do that!) But that's not what happened: it's triggered what Grant Morrison will later call her secondary mutation (the third to be artificially triggered in an X-man, I think, after Lorna's magnetic powers in X-Men #50 and Hank's change of appearance in Amazing Adventures #11). Her mirages are now "real", and start eating everyone. Fortunately, she can only have one outstanding mirage at a time, so is able to cancel the angry multi-toothed red monsters by calling up a spear instead.

At which point the Hellfire Club turn up. The Mutants put the goons into Limbo, and sneak back to Westchester, leaving Amara back in Nova Roma. Magneto arrives there eventually, explains what happened (yeah, had to save Amara, she just got teleported away mysteriously to Nova Roma when we were about to reach her, how weird), and presumably Illyana looks guilty as hell. But he says no more? He knows he has nothing to teach them, and can't control them... What is the point.

New Mutants #41: Of Gods and Mutants

New Mutants #41 is going to be the topic of my weirdest tangent yet, so bear with me while I set the scene for newcomers who haven't been following the blog (and may know little of this part in X-history). Magneto has been running Xavier's school for a while, but in the last story arc, sent away most of the kids off to Emma Frost's school. Danielle Moonstar, known as Mirage, a young Cheyenne mutant with illusionist powers, stayed on for a while, and then has gone home to visit her recently resurrected parents. On her pegasus which she acquired in her capacity as a Valkyrie. Comics, man.

Her return is a payoff that has been delayed rather too long, I would say, so I'm looking forward to it. But not without nervousness, as it's a portrayal of a culture that comics have, um, not always done with great sensitivity or accuracy.

So. Dani's back with her parents, near Denver. Apparently when they had died (or rather, been turned into a Demon Bear... at any rate: they got better), she hadn't immediately gone to her grandfather, but had instead stayed with family friends the Roberts. After a week with them, she used her mutant power, to the distress of her friend and now foster-brother Pat. She ran away to her grandpa, and then you know the rest of the story from Marvel Graphic Novel #4. She has a decent enough time chatting with the folks, but since it's an X-Men comic, drama ensues. Specifically: she bumps into Pat at the local mall. In her absence Pat has turned into a massive racist, and gives her all sorts of abuse. But she's less shocked about that and is more surprised that using her Valkyrie powers, she can see he's going to die soon.

When Dani arrives back home, she hears him make an emergency call over the CB. She can't call 9-1-1 (the Moonstars' doesn't have a landline?), and sets out to rescue him. She fights a personification of death for his life, and wins. She appears to reconcile with him: it was only his discomfit at her powers - which may have outed some embarrassing secret of his - which was making him a racist, so that's alright then (!) She's a little easy to forgive him, but he has just nearly died, so I can buy that. Anyway, fighting off death turns out to have been merely metaphorical, and he dies in hospital.

So. This issue directly raises an obvious question for Dani: if Asgard is real (which it is and she's got the flying horse and Shinigami eyes to prove it), does this mean that her gods are real, too? It's probably for the best this question, while posed, isn't answered definitively. One of the many things I'm not an expert on is Cheyenne mythology, but I'm going to take a stab at this anyway. The names and phrases used when she's invoking them appear to be real, although I'm shocked at how little information there is on say, Wikipedia about this topic.

I think it's fair enough for people in the Western cultural heritage to play with making the Æsir and Olympians be aliens pretending to be (or taken as) gods. As an extension of this it's also reasonable to suppose that other pantheons are similarly inspired. In fact, it would be just wrong otherwise - they can't say "well, European polytheistic religions are of course based on actual happenings and persons, but everyone else, no, you're just making shit up." But then instantiating them, and trying to make other culture's religions fit a nice neat model of classical European paganism is difficult, and can lead to hilariously wrong results (as we'll see, very soon now, when Celtic mythology starts being brought into X-Men), even if not being outright offensive.

And then there is the question as to how many pantheons there are anyway. Marvel, for example, merges the Roman and Greek pantheons - something that was done by the Romans themselves. The link between Zeus Pater and Jupiter is not difficult to see. But comparative study of religion can go back further: there was a Proto-Indo-European religion, which we can take a good guess at, which features as its head figure a "Dyēus ph₂ter" †, which is reflected in the Vedic religion as Dyaus Pita. They also then have the Germanic gods - although specifically the better-preserved Norse versions rather than the Woden and Þunor as Odin and Thor would be known in English. Having had separate Norse and Greek gods they can hardly deny Hinduism - the one major surviving descendant of Indo-European paganism - its place as an equivalent pantheon, and so there are Marvel Hindu gods. But this is different, as here you are dealing with a major world religion with millions of followers, and you need to be careful not to have Thor beat up Shiva. For obvious reasons there's no Marvel Jesus or Muhammad, either; and while there are demonic figures, the identification of one of those as Satan is left studiously ambiguous. (Kieron Gillen did an excellent riff on this in Journey Into Mystery last year, with the Devil's Advocacy, a group of figures who are all very carefully not claiming to be the Devil.)

I mean, if you were doing this as a proper piece of science fiction, you wouldn't have the aliens inspire gods that we know from pop culture, you'd have them inspire figures in Proto-Indo-European paganism, and then have everything descend from that in accordance with currently accepted scholarship. There was a real world tree: and Yggdrasil and Ashvattha are but reflections of it. But in detaching the premise from the myths, you would loose the cool stories.

Given that approach was rejected (or rather, never considered), does that mean that every distinct polytheistic tradition will get its own set of aliens-masquerading-as-gods in the Marvel universe? Potentially, yes. How different do they have to be from each other to get a different set? Unsurprisingly, the answer to this is mostly related to how well-documented they are in accessible texts in English.

So, what does have to do with New Mutants #41? Well, as I say, the names check out. Presumably Claremont has done his research by reading Grinnell's ethnology, or something based on it. But here we come to the problem: it's not a case of whether it's right or not, but how authentic is it? There's some dispute as to whether "Heammawihio" is a traditional term - apparently "Maheo" was used prior to missionary contact. And it's not like Marvel is saying the gods are caused by belief (although it sometimes toys with this idea). So, like I say, it's probably a good thing that he doesn't wander on page, under whatever name, as this will be a white guy's take on what a real life Native American god would be like, and, quite apart from whether it would be cultural appropriation or otherwise objectionable, Claremont simply has nothing of interest to say on the subject.

Lucky escape, then.

† that "h₂" is the second laryngeal, by the way, a consonant that has left no evidence in its daughter languages apart from subtle traces in vowels. This is not a topic which I never expected to be covering in an X-Men blog, but there you go, life is full of surprises.

New Mutants #38-#40: And They Woke Up And It Was All Real

New Mutants #38-#40 deals with the aftermath of Secret Wars II. The New Mutants were resurrected, but as soulless automatons, talking but not caring. Only Dani seems a bit more active, crying, and explaining what happened to Brightwind for us. Thor appears to her in a vision with a message of hope. As a frog. (Never mind Loki being a girl or a kid, Thor was a frog! Blame Walt Simonson.)

Magneto, now going by the name "Michael Xavier", Charles' cousin, isn't able to do much about this, and, after much consideration, takes Emma Frost up on her offer of taking the students off his hands. He closes down the school, with only Dani and Warlock refusing to leave. The X-Men are still in San Francisco, otherwise they'd surely put a stop to this.

I think we're supposed to reckon Emma is causing all this, especially once Empath is found lurking around the school grounds, using his powers to forcibly rpslash Sharon and Tom. At the Massachusetts Academy, we find out it is instead real damage from the Beyonder, as Empath simply can't work on them, and Emma fixes the kids at least part of the way.

Meanwhile, Magneto is wondering whether he did the right thing, Dani goes to visits her parents, and then Sharon and Tom turn up, almost dead, reporting what Empath did to them. Magneto decides that he'd been emotionally manipulated too, and sets off to rescue the kids.

Emma sees this coming, and via her local police force summons the Avengers, here consisting of Captain America, Wasp, Black Knight (Dane Whitman), Hercules, Namor and Captain Marvel (Monica Rambeau), and tells them the mutant terrorist Magneto is planning on abducting some of her students. In doing so, she sort of gives herself away to the Avengers, as they realise that the only reason Magneto might be interested in them is if they are mutants. Anyway, Avengers and Magneto fight, but the New Mutants - who have been partly fixed by Emma, show loyalty to Magneto and defend him. The Avengers are at least temporarily persuaded of his reform, and allow him to leave with the students. As does Frost - she knows she can't hold them against their will, and gets some brownie points for next round by not trying.

The story has a detached mood matching its subject material, and it's not immediately obvious what is happening or is motivating any of the characters. I'm not entirely convinced by the ending: but I guess Emma can't be as much as a hardass as we'd been led to believe.

New Mutants #37: No New Mutants

New Mutants #37 has our New Mutants home alone, while the X-Men and Magneto are off in San Francisco dealing with the Beyonder. They are watching a John Wayne film. Amara provides popcorn, by holding a bucket of corns and turning into her Magma form, which is an innovative and novel approach to the problem. Illyana and Sam are making comments that Rahne calls as being inappropriate, given that Dani is in the room.

Dani is trying to make a long-distance phone call (at least someone in this comic knows how trunk dial!) to her parents. She tells them about the horse she recently acquired, but not about its wings or about the fact that she can see culturally-appropriate figures of death over everyone's head. She bolts, only to catch her reflection in a window, of her in full Valkyrie getup. Sam comes looking for her and is able to talk her down. Quite what this all means for her is a little confusing. She seems to matter-of-factly accept that it's possible, while still being upset by it.

Bobby is in Manhattan, and comes across a construction accident. Aha! Excellent! He transforms into Sunspot, and is barely able to keep aloft some of the wreckages before it crashes down and is stopped by She-Hulk, who saves the day and then does a press call. The bloke he saved thanks him - those few seconds were important. When Magneto was training him at greater strengths in #36 - he was right. But Bobby, being Bobby, can't admit that, and decides to abandon the New Mutants and go to his family in Rio.

Back at the mansion, the Beyonder has turned up, with predictable certainty (it's like he's got a rota). Illyana offers herself up as a sacrifice (seriously, get another personality trait, Rasputins), but the others won't let that good grief he just killed her. Suddenly. there's a big superhero fight. Well, if that's what you can call some kids futilely trying to lay a finger on the Beyonder, anyway. He kills them, one by one, vowing to make it as if they had never existed. And that's it. No New Mutants. They never existed. How are they going to get out of that one, eh?

New Mutants #35: Radically Different Than The Old Boss

The New Mutants return from Asgard to the school only to find their new headmaster, Magneto, in charge in New Mutants #35. Well, I suppose he must have caught the flight back with them, only to have told them on arrival.

They are suspicious. Well, you would be, wouldn't you? Bobby points out that this isn't really any better than, say, Emma Frost taking over their tuition. And Magneto is really starting to wonder about what he's let himself in for.

Fortunately for him (but less so for Dani), he soon gets the opportunity to prove his worth to his charges. When Dani arrives back having nearly been assaulted (we don't really have to read between the lines to deduce that's it's an attempted rape), Magneto goes looking for the perpetrators, and here demonstrates the difference between him and Xavier.

Professor X would have mindwiped them, or something. Magneto just puts the fear of Magneto into them, and they decide that confessing to the police would be a really good idea.

This is some good character development: Magneto is protective of the children, which is entirely in line with his revelation in #150, but useless at management or leadership skills (he's been a solo villain since the break-up of the original Brotherhood in the 1960s, and he was a fairly imperious and ineffective leader of that). Here, he learns that he needs to be loyal for the kids for them to be loyal to him - an important step forward, which combined with his missing of Lee make him appear to be an actual rounded person. Please don't screw this up, Magnus. But I question the point of having a story with an attempted rape and then somehow making it all about a man. Can we not find something less gratuitous?

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 #18-#20: The Very Long Night of Danielle Moonstar

New Mutants #18 introduces Rachel [Summers] into the 616. She pops up with an explanation in Westchester, walks up to the door of the mansion, During this sequence she has thought bubbles, and flashbacks. She's quite confused by Illyana answering the door: she's far too old! Which is true, but how does she know she's simply not arrived at the time of the attack on the mansion? She then runs off, to next appear in Uncanny X-Men #184. I don't know why this bit is even in New Mutants, rather than Uncanny, and it certain puts another nail in the idea-coffin that continuity is harder to follow these days. Another demonstration of this is the random Starjammers appearance in #183, which sets up something or other.

So, that done, we can go to our actual New Mutants content. Dani is having nightmares about the bear that killed her parents, decides she has to deal with this on her own, uses the Danger Room to train to fight bears, gets mauled by a bear and sent to hospital with bear wounds. While she's in hospital, The New Mutants first stop the bear from attacking her again, and then are transferred to the bear's realm (it's a demon bear, did I mention that?), defeat the bear, and return home.

Well, their home plane, anyway. This is all well and good, except for the small detail that the cop Tom Corsi and the nurse Sharon Friedlander have changed races. In better news, Dani's parents are alive again! For once, Claremont removes someone from the orphan list. For a Dani-centric story, it's mostly about her absence. I know this is all about friendship being magic and suchforth, but she could have had an actual role in the last couple of issues.

Bill Sienkiewicz took over the art (bar colouring) from this issue. He's far more fluid and expressionistic than the previous, rather literalist artists on the series. In particular, his painted covers are great. I wasn't expecting to see anything quite like them as early as 1984.

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.

New Mutants #5-#6: Team America: World Thieves

I'm afraid I still can't write "Team America" without thinking of this, so this'll have to be a short one.

The kids are visiting a carnival, where the motorcyclist stunt act Team America are performing. These were introduced a year ago in Captain America #269, and had then gone on to star in their own ongoing Team America series. These were the distant days when you could promote a line of toys by getting them in a comic book, and that's what's gone on here - someone has tried to relaunch an Evil Knievel line with different names after the assault charges. It is therefore hilarious that on page 20 Sunspot punches Wolf for giving him some lip.

So. Silver Samurai and Viper are at the carnival too - tracking an unspecified group. The New Mutants, perhaps? Nope - they're after Team America. There's a fight, Dani becomes the "Dark Rider" and protects Team America and wakes up amnesiac and captured. The others regroup: Xavier theorises that the Dark Rider is a gestalt formed by the members of Team America, who are mutants (see, relevant!). They are blackmailed into conducting a thieving expedition, and go ahead, with Xavier monitoring them.

That leaves the New Mutants free and unsupervised, and they pay Xi'an's uncle (now the Kingpin of San Francisco, if not in name) a visit looking for intel. This would be Nguyen Ngoc Coy. Another digression about nomenclature: the Vietnamese names here are broken, even worse than the Russian names. Nguyễn is a family name, not a personal name. As is Tran (her brother's name). Leong exists in Vietnamese as Lương, but is another family name. Looks like someone didn't get the memo about East Asian names often being FamilyName PersonalName, then.

I seem to recall I was writing about a comic. Oh, yes. So, Nyugen spills the beans, and the New Mutants liberate Dani. Meanwhile, Team America thieve that macguffin. Both teams are successful, although Xavier is pissed off that the New Mutants went on a field trip without his permission. But this is at a hideous cost. Karma has promised herself for a year's service to her uncle. That thing, that she was so determined to avoid in Marvel Team-Up #100, she's willingly signed up for in order to save Dani. Hardcore.

And then suddenly there's an explosion! Oh noes!

New Mutants #3-#4 / Uncanny X-Men #167

New Mutants has been leading in to #167 (cover date March 1983), but there's a problem, in that #3, which finishes the sequence, was released two months later, in May 1983, and #167 started with the New Mutants all watching television, all unaware of the Brood in Xavier's head.

Any story actually dealing with the Brood (rather than having it as a background element of Weird Stuff) in New Mutants will therefore not only see our team fail to deal with the problem adequately, but end with them not even recognising one.

And so we get #3, where Dani becomes aware the a monster, nobody believes her, it manifests in all their presence and then... it is revealed to all be a dream (caused by Dani's fear powers, under an outside influence). They even get as far as hypothesising that Xavier is linked. And then they go and see some TV, the five of them.

So, that moment in #2 where Stevie realises the only person who could have run the advanced training problem in the Danger Room, is Xavier, is just plain wasted.

Couple of other bits in #3: Moira and Sean talking about having children again, with Moira moping about not having had a son by Xavier. And Illyana, who Sean catches doing some kind of ritual to do with Belasco. Whatever it is, that can't be good.

#167 itself starts quite hilariously. The X-Men, having concluded there is a Brood egg in the Professor in #166, go straight for the mansion (bypassing the Proto-Utopia island, I suppose, although maybe they went there first and that's why they're in such a hurry), and then attack the group of children in the common room. This is not your usual superhero misunderstanding - the X-Men know full well that the kids are new students of Xavier's. It's just that subduing them is going to take less time than explaining matters.

The New Mutants prove less of a pushover than Cyclops was expecting, but ultimately are defeated. Just in time for them to find Xavier in the final stages of Brood incubation and watch him turning into a Brood Queen. The Brood beats the boys (Cyclops, Wolverine, Colossus and Nightcrawler) to a standstill, but then the artillery arrives in the form of Warbird and Storm, and the Brood Queen is taken down.

Just as they are about to kill it, they discover that Xavier's personality still exists within, and spare its life. By an amazing coincidence, the Starjammers have the technology to clone Xavier's body, and then "transplant" the mind. This works very well, and even gives him shiny new legs. Until he tries to stand on them, they buckle underneath him, and he discovers his mind needs time to adjust.

And what are we to make of this notion that Xavier has drawn together the New Mutants specifically to lay eggs in, mentioned in #4? Well, if you examine what happened more closely, it doesn't make much sense. Xavier was depressed after the apparent loss of the X-Men and Lilandra, and the idea to train Karma was practically forced on him by Moira, who also provided Rahne. Psyche he got a letter about, and then he only picked up Cannonball and Sunspot because they got entangled in Pierce's schemes. So, at what point did the Brood's influence manifest? If we can blame anything on it, perhaps it's the reason Xavier has decided not to form another team of X-Men to go on missions, but instead to keep the tasty tasty children safe and close.

#167 is also the issue in which the issue of Scott and Alex's grandparents are raised. Turns out, they have some, which is complete news to Scott, as if he's never thought about the issue before. He's not a John Doe, he knew the name of his parents - it's never occurred to him to check? Why, for that matter, wasn't he placed with them instead of being put in an orphanage?

And finally, Lilandra was stranded too, with the X-Men. Gladiator turns up, wanting an audience with her. He declares Deathbird unfit to rule, and suggests a space rebellion! And sets us up for a bizarre page in which Lilandra goes and gives Reed a piece of her mind for refraining from killing Galactus, apparently intended as a bit of cheeky revenge at John Byrne, after Byrne retconned the Doom in #145-#147 as a Doombot.

Finally, coming to New Mutants #4, it's one of those unusual X-Men stories where the only superhero element is the good mutants themselves. The "villain" of the piece, who has been making harassing phone calls to Stevie, is, shockingly, the new character introduced on page 2. Edgy stuff.

New Mutants #1-#2: Read My Lips: No New X-Men

The New Mutants graphic novel apparently proved a success and so we get an ongoing series! This is the real start of the X-franchise, notwithstanding the Wolverine and Dazzler solo titles.

But first, a comic.

The first three issues of New Mutants lead up to the events of Uncanny X-Men #167, which is a bit odd because they were released several months after it, so we already know that Xavier is infected by the Brood and has brought the children there to infect too. How plausible that is we'll cover in a post's time, but for now I'll note this robs the end panel of #1 (where we see someone setting off the Danger Room, apparently trying to kill Dani - not enough to make a positive ID, but his sleeve matches the type that Xavier was wearing earlier in the issue) of its mystery.

This arc is the first serious look at the ethics of power use - and by that I don't mean the obligation to use them to help others, but whether some means are just tainted entirely, no matter the ends. Two of our new mutants have mind-based powers: Dani, who can make people see their fears; and Karma, who can mind-control people. Karma is upset when Dani (by accident, it seems), shows the group her trauma: her escape from Vietnam, her mother's death, and her attempt to protect her younger siblings (who are curiously absent - I wonder where they are living?). Dani is of course mortified, and spends much of the story running away, and then trying to prove herself.

Meanwhile, the other four (with Stevie - Moira and Illyana are in London, finding out that Xavier has an autistic, powered, son, by the Israeli ambassador, one Gabrielle Heller - which can go on the Chart now) go to the local mall. This is a ground-level view of the X-Men's small-town neighbours that we've never really seen before, and has something of the Broxton about it. They're being followed, by agents of Hank Gyrich (introduced a few years ago as a bureaucratic obstructionist character in Avengers), who is conspiring with Sebastian Shaw, mutant member of the Hellfire Club's Inner Circle. So, the attempt to wipe the information in #158 was a failure.

Shaw is using Gyrich. He doesn't want to see the New Mutants arrested or dead. He's willing to see them use giant mutant-killing robots - which he used before in the Ororo/Emma bodyswap story - to try and convince young mutants that it's a dangerous world and to sign up with him. For all that Magneto was evil, he's never staged a false flag operation, so far as we know. And although the guys (with Michael Rossi's help) take down the Sentinels and turn the day. Our issue of ethics comes up again, as Karma forces one of the goons to make a confession. It's all true, says, Rossi, but what's really going to happen here? The moment Karma breaks the control, he wakes up not knowing why he's been handcuffed. His masters will be able to spin this as an "evil mutants" thing quite easily and whisk him away from the local police department. The effect of this all has to be counted as a victory for Shaw, as he manages to sow mistrust on all sides.

The new holographic Danger Room is introduced in this issue. How it came to be holographic is not made clear, but certainly the mansion was rebuilt with the help of Shi'ar tech, so making it be of that origin is a natural fit. Oddly, the mansion has been rebuilt with the X-Men's rooms as they were (complete with mess!) and Storm's roof garden, where the plants are starting to get thirsty after several weeks of separation from their tender). That's some construction robots for you.

We get some ages of the team in #2. Rahne and Dani are 14. Bobby is 13. Xi'an is 19 (and is therefore older or a contemporary of Peter!). And Sam, as we already know from the graphic novel, is 16. And, they all get codenames: Dani is "Psyche", Rahne is "Wolfsbane", Sam is "Cannonball" (a word that had been used to describe him in the graphic novel), and Bobby is "Sunspot". Xi'an is already known as Karma. Where these names came from - whether they were self-endowed, or like previous codenames bestowed by Xavier - is left unstated.