The X-Axis – w/c 11 August 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #32. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ Diaz & Clayton Cowles. This is the start of a new arc, and I’ll warn you now that I’m going to spoil the ending, because that’s the real hook for the arc. Up to then, we have a framing sequence of Sean telling the story to Black Tom (nothing wrong with bringing those two together, and this is the natural book for Tom to be used in), and the story itself involving the return of… the Changeling. That’s the Silver Age Changeling, the one who was in a handful of issues from the Factor Three storyline and then got retconned into having replaced Professor X when they wanted to bring him back from the dead at the dawn of the 1970s.
The Changeling is… not a character anyone has really been crying out to see again, which is why he didn’t even get used in the Krakoan era. But presumably he was resurrected off panel – he was an X-Man for one issue (retroactive), after all – and now he’s gone back to mutant radicalism. Tim Seeley does a good job of setting up why Sean would care about this character, reminding us that he debuted as a pawn of Factor Three back in the sixties – and Audino actually makes that wonky costume look pretty fun, giving the guy some presence, even though we really have to stretch to believe that the Tesco Value Mystique is going to get anywhere in a straight fight with Banshee. I mean, Banshee has range attacks that he doesn’t even need to aim with, right?
But the actual point of all this is to bring in Morph at the end – presumably the Exiles version, but who knows. And that does kind of intrigue me, because the Changeling is a character with the rather odd legacy of being the notional template for a much more popular character who bears almost no resemblance to him whatsoever. There’s got to be a story in that, right…?
X-MEN #20. (Annotations here.) We’re back to the single issue format, it seems, and that’s fine by me – it works better for Jed MacKay than longer storylines. With a bit of downtime conversation in the B-plots, this issue is built around a third confrontation between Scott and Agent Lundqvist, which ends up with them coming to blows and going to jail. It’s the first time that Lundqvist has come out more or less ahead – or at least that Scott has failed to bring him down a peg. MacKay has taken an odd approach in building up this character, presenting him as fundamentally outclassed from the word go; I suspect the whole idea is that we’re meant to be underestimating and misreading him to some extent. Diaz does a rather good job of making him smugly satisfied with finally getting a partial win over Scott. The reveal here, if you take it at face value (and Scott doesn’t), is Lundqvist arguing that he isn’t anti-mutant, he’s just anti the really powerful ones who think they’re above the law.
That actually is a plausible reading of his behaviour to date – with hindsight, it’s unfortunate we didn’t get more of him and Scott interacting over “X-Manhunt”, where they actually seem to have had some sort of off-panel understanding – and honestly, it’s probably a more interesting direction for O*N*E. After all, we have Corina Ellis doing the anti-mutant lunatic angle over in Uncanny, so this gives Lundqvist something more his own. And “where do the X-Men get off acting as if they’re above the law” is a completely reasonable motivation for a law enforcement character to have, with a post-Krakoa subtext that you could also tap into. It’s an issue I like more, the more I think about it.
LAURA KINNEY: WOLVERINE #9. (Annotations here.) This is… completely okay, I guess? I don’t really understand why Gabby was kept out of circulation in both this book and NYX for so long, especially if she and Laura are supposed to be in touch. Packing her off to hunt monsters with Xarus in the aftermath of Blood Hunt is at least a reasonable explanation for why she’s not been around and builds off the last story we saw her in, but it runs up against the problem that Xarus is not a very interesting character. Nor is Strega, the new villain, especially memorable. I kind of like Laura’s blatant inability to handle Gabby adventuring with a different partner, and it looks perfectly nice, but it’s all a bit surplus to requirements.
MAGIK #8. (Annotations here.) So this is an odd issue. Magik, Mirage and Liminal are packed off to Las Vegas, supposedly to recover a mystical artefact for the Society of the Eternal Dawn in order that it can be used to free Cal from Liminal’s possession, but in reality in order to deal with the Society’s dissidents on their behalf. So far, so normal. But the issue also features an extended hallucinatory fight scene (and I’m still not entirely sure why these Scarlet Eye dissident guys are dealing in hallucinogenics). It’s wonderfully odd, particularly as Matt Horak’s art normally strikes such a grounded tone even when dealing in magical dimensions; this is where he gets to go nuts. And there’s a subtler level of weirdness as Liminal gaslights his way through the issue blandly denying what other characters have literally just seen him do, and calmly insinuating himself into steering the story even though he’s meant to be Magik and Mirage’s prisoner. In isolation it’s all a little confusing, but the book’s earned the benefit of the doubt on this sort of thing.
GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #2. By Jackson Lanzing, Collin Kelly, Adam Kubert, Laura Martin & Clayton Cowles. Well, the House of M issue wasn’t bad, but on the whole I think we have to chalk this mini up as a misfire. I get that we’re trying to do stories about Kamala coming to mutant culture as an outsider, and in theory giving her a tour of X-Men history works with that, but in practice I’m increasingly convinced that this whole direction for the character is misconceived. She’s being dragged away from the neighbourhood hero role that was so central to her, yet she’s also too established a character to fit comfortably into this newcomer role. So none of this really leads up in a satisfying way to her coming out to her parents as a mutant – the strings are too visible.
As for the story itself, it’s basically just a fight between some of the major X-Men and Legion (or the abandoned personalities of Legion, who get packed off to the White Hot Room at the end). Kamala seems to have rounded up these characters… um, somewhere? It’s all terribly arbitrary, and it certainly wasn’t worth having Phoenix show up on Earth for this. There are other books where that would be a much more meaningful deal. Kubert’s art mostly delivers – the page of the two sides of Legion being reunited is genuinely lovely – but the issue as a whole is a bit of a mess.
The back-up strip is by Jed MacKay, Cafu & David Curiel, and basically consists of Mystique and Destiny trailing “Age of Revelation”. There isn’t much more to be said about it than that.
SPIDER-MAN & WOLVERINE #4. By Marc Guggenheim, Gerardo Sandoval, Victor Nava, Brian Reber & Travis Lanham. Because you demanded it: a book whose only selling point is the Kaare Andrews art, with a fill-in artist.
I pretty much enjoyed all of Claremont’s New Mutants run. Magneto as headmaster was a little wonky, but an interesting idea. (Didn’t Secret Wars II kinda throw a wrench into some of that period, with the team dying and being resurrected with PTSD?)
It’s wild to me that the stuff Simonson and Blevins were doing was so bad that Liefield was viewed as a step up, but having been a reader at the time, it really was the case. (His stuff turned out to be a whole different kind of bad, but still…)
SanityOrMadness, Omar-I guess it would still be a “bootstrap paradox”. Which name’s origin is taken from a Robert Heinlein short story, “By His Own Bootstraps”, which wasn’t an example of “I’m My Own -Parent”, but popularized the idea of a causality paradox.
I thought Louise Simonson did great work… as an editor.
“Didn’t Secret Wars II kinda throw a wrench into some of that period, with the team dying and being resurrected with PTSD?”
Yeah but that gave us a good story with Magneto being manipulated into sending the kids to the White Queen’s academy so they could recover, and then he figures he was manipulated and goes to get the kids back, and the White Queen reports him to the Avengers, and then he fights the Avengers…good stuff.
@Moo: I did like her X-Factor work up through the end of “Inferno.” As you’d expect, she and Walt were extraordinarily effective collaborators. She wrote effectively to his art, and he drew to the strengths of her plots and scripts.
And nobody managed to script Power Pack anywhere nearly as well as she did.
M<y sense was always that her New Mutants was written a bit too much like Power Pack.
She characterized the New Mutants and the Hellions as more juvenile than Claremont ever did, and her plots revolved much more around weird worlds and curious critters.
That all works for Power Pack, but it made the New Mutants seem wacky and ramshackle, with little real connection to the themes and meta-plots of the X-books. Even her “Fall of the Mutants” stuff revolved around the over-the-top Bird-Boy/Bird-Brain and the slobbering, raving Ani-Mator.
Bret Blevins’s art didn’t help either, and I get the sense that Simonson pitched her scripting and plotting to his cartoonier pencilling style.
Blevins also had a habit of making the teen characters look both like little kids and like sexualized superhero designs, falling right into an unsettling valley between the two, and this seems to have bled over into the scripting of the Gosamyr plotline, one of those 80s relics that looks really creepy from today’s point of view.
Of all the Weezie stuff I can remember reading, I’d prob put the Superman Traingle books at the top.
I’ve always considered Claremont’s New Mutants to be a better run than his Uncanny X-men. A smaller cast, an ensemble of characters that he created (barring Xavier and Magneto, and Xavier always feels much less a part of the book when he’s headmaster), a smaller number of issues with less fluctuation in quality, it has a lot going for it that I think is underappreciated. His writing on New Mutants always seemed to have a little bit of a defter touch, the entire cast seemed to get at least some attention and a time to shine.
In contrast, I can think of maybe three issues with a focus on Colossus in nearly 200 issues of X-men? Five, if you include Classic X-men backup stories. (For the record: Classic X-men Anya and Nereel stories, Colossus and Kitty teaming up against Miss Locke attacking Murderworld in her Doctor Doom costume, the first part of Fall of the Mutants where Colossus returns, and the one where he rescues the New Mutants from Baba Yaga during the Australian era.)
Power Pack was great. That was a top-notch series, and it was an embarrassment that Marvel kept that book going after Simonson left. It was unreadable after her. I would recommend that book for an example of quality Louise Simonson writing.
I don’t hate her New Mutants run as much as most fans. Was it a huge tumble from Claremont? Definitely. Did she write the kids too young, in a way better suited to her Power Pack? Yes. Were the Gossamyr, Ani-Mator, Bird-Brain, and Asgard stories kind of terrible? Sure. I didn’t mind the rest of her run, and I did enjoy the whimsy of her NM a lot more than Liefield’s paramilitary squad.
@Omar – In all fairness to Louise Simonson, becoming a writer was not her idea, but Jim Shooter suddenly decided that all Marvel editors should have to write some comics as well. Simonson initially resisted this idea because she didn’t want to take work away from freelance writers. That’s a fair enough point, but I think she should have objected to it on the grounds of it being a profoundly stupid idea. To me that would be like a hospital mandating that all of their administrators perform open-heart surgery on the side.
But yes, Power Pack was decent, but she came up with the idea after all.
And I didn’t think her X-Factor was terrible, but I didn’t find it to be it particularly good either.
I thought her New Mutants was dreadful though, but again, in all fairness to Simonson, I believe I read somewhere that she was under editorial direction to take a more kid-like approach to the book. It was apparently felt that the characters seemed too old and the book too serious as Claremont’s run progressed. Ican’t be sure if my memory of that is correct however, but even if that’s true, that’s still no excuse for Bird-Brain. Although, I guess I should give Simonson credit for that as well. She was certainly ahead of her time on that one. She created the Jar Jar Binks of the X-Men universe years before Lucas created Jar Jar Binks.
I remember hearing that Marvel editorial wanted Simonson to write the New Mutants as younger and more innocent.
Well, the one good thing about Shooter’s edict for editors is that it gave the comic world Ann Nocenti, as that was also how she got her start. She quickly became one of my favourite comic writers.
Plus, it overall worked so much better than the early-mid-‘90s decision that artists were the only part of comic creation that mattered, editors could surely write as well as authors, and since editors were already on the payroll, Marvel could save a ton of profit by hiring the editors to do 90% of the line’s scripting.
I think the problem with New Mutants, as noted before.has to do with the fact that it’s difficult to do a “heroes in training” book long term. Yes. as discussed before, it’s hard to keep calling them NEW Mutants after 100 issues. But the larger problem, and this also was an issue with Generation X, is that the characters keep being treated as rookies while other heroes don’t seem to need such a long training period. Monica Rambeau went from a rookie to leader of the Avengers in just over four years. She-Hulk went from a rookie to a member of the Avengers to a member of the Fantastic Four in little over four years. But the New Mutants kept being treated like “heroes-in training” who needed the mentorship of Professor X, Magneto and Cable for 100 issues. Some of this can be ascribed to their youth but still…
Of course, this seems to be a problem sometimes with heroes that started out as teenagers in general. The New Warriors were treated as inexperienced in Civil War despite the fact that by then they’d been heroes about as long as Scott had been a hero at the time of the Dark Phoenix Saga.
A contrast to the 70s and 80s, with the writer/editor being so prominent at both companies.
While we’re on the subject of runs that lasted too long despite horrible sales and fan backlash, Stephanie Phillips has announced that Phoenix 15 will be her last issue of the series!
She claims it was her decision.
YAAAAY!!!
In other news, Nate Grey WILL be appearing in X-Men of Apocalypse but the series takes place in the “direct aftermath of the original crossover’s explosive finale”. So it’s llikely the story takes place in the past.
I’d say that taking so long to train works better for mutant characters than other characters due to the fact that Xavier has to brainwash these children to spread his propaganda and carry out his bidding, rather than just training them to be superheroes.
@Chris V- Shooter’s edict also gave the comics world Jim Owsley/ Christopher Priest.
“Monica Rambeau went from a rookie to leader of the Avengers in just over four years.”
Yeah, but Monica had the benefit of being written by her creator, Roger Stern, during that period, and Stern treated her like a favorite child.
“She-Hulk went from a rookie to a member of the Avengers to a member of the Fantastic Four in little over four years.”
That’s nepotism for you.
There’s also always the option of redefining the “New” element of the title in the way that the adjective works in phrases like “the New Woman” or “New [insert name of political party affiliation].”
The premise might have been able to shift to the way this group of characters gets a different sort of training or life experience and grows into some new role. I suppose that’s kind of what X-Force was supposed to be.
But the X-Men had already had their period of being underground mutant warriors, down to Inferno giving them all what we’d now call edgy revamps.
And Claremont had also steered the X-Men through being general superheroes; a mutant rescue squad; an evolutionary vanguard of humanity expanding the scope of Earthers into the extraterrestrial, spiritual and supernatural; and up-and-coming power players in the shadow politics of mutantdom.
That didn’t leave much for the New Mutants to become once they’d been super-powered high schoolers for a bit too long. Except, I guess, to lean into whatever post-1980s thing was becoming the new hot idea in comics.
A few years later and perhaps they’d have been the realization of the “mutants in plainclothes” idea Roy Thomas supposedly had for reviving the X-Men in the early 1970s, characters defined as “posthumans” rather than as “superhumans.” But the Counter X era didn’t quite do that for them or for their successors in Generation X.
No, but we did get interesting directions for both teams (X-Force and Generation X) during the John Francis Moore and Brian Wood eras, respectively. Moore, counterintuitively, spoke much more to the Gen X crowd with his X-Force than the Generation X comic. X-Force decided they had enough of the ideologies of all the sides (Cable, Xavier, Magneto) and decided to set out on their own to discover themselves and the world. They even visited the Burning Man Festival.
Wood’s revamp of Generation X was simply his Demo and shared elements with Moore’s depiction of X-Force, of what it was like for those who are both “more than human” and treated so differently than other humans trying to live somewhat normal lives among fellow humans.
Basically, what happens when youth/students who were raised completely differently start to grow up.
I really enjoyed both. I thought it was a shame that Generation X got axed after a few issues when it was good again for the first time since Lobdell/Bachalo.
I loved Simonson’s work on New Mutants. At the time her work seemed to be the best of the line, even as creatives like Liefeld, Lobdell and the editors seemed to conspire to make it impossible. It should have been the Louise Simonson and Fabien Nicieza team that everyone else revolved around instead of Lodbell/Nicieza. Alas.
I think it was Jay and Miles that explained that it was planned to portray the New Mutants as younger, because X-Factor was starting up and they wanted each X-title to have a clear agenda with no overlap. Hence the goofy plots, and Blevins’ cartoony style.
I’m pretty sure this was also the reason Secret Wars 2 killed the New Mutants and brought them back weaker – it was felt that the characters were getting too good with their powers and they were outgrowing their novice status.
But it’s a fact that I learned in my librarian days. Any title that includes words like New, Young, Today, etc. will become dated much faster than more neutral titles. It doesn’t stop the publishers though.
“Any title that includes words like New, Young, Today, etc. will become dated much faster than more neutral titles.”
Well, “The Young & the Restless” is still on TV after fifty years. Maybe DC ought to try out a book called “Young & Restless Justice”
Brave New World also seems to have done pretty well. I don’t think Brave Forced World would have done better.
BThe Bold & the Beautiful is still airing (since 1987). So maybe “The Brave, The Bold & The Beautiful” could be another winner for DC.
Oh, “The Today Show”. Still going after seventy-three years. Good thing they didn’t call it “The Yesterday Show”. Then it would’ve really sounded dated.
Well yes, there are exceptions. New Zealand and all that. But in general it’s a good rule of thumb for throwing away books nobody reads any more.
I disagree that New Zealand is an exception. That Zealand is way too old of a Zealand to still be referred to as New Zealand. They should just change it to Uncanny Zealand.
Now, New Zealand I do find dated. It’s less dated than Old Zealand, of course. I’ve heard Zealandia may be making a comeback though.
Would it have done better as Force Zeeland? I can’t answer.
Teen Zealand.
“Teen Zealand.”
I don’t think it’s a good idea for an island to be named “Teen” anything given the whole Jeffery Epstein thing.
“I think it was Jay and Miles that explained that it was planned to portray the New Mutants as younger, because X-Factor was starting up and they wanted each X-title to have a clear agenda with no overlap. Hence the goofy plots, and Blevins’ cartoony style.”
But that didn’t happen until a year or so after X-Factor debuted. That title came out in 1996 and CC left New Mutants in 1987. That’s when Simonson took over and the kids became less mature. Now I’m not saying there was editorial interference, just that there was at least a gap in stories between X-Factor’s launch and how the NM were being written as less mature.
“I’m pretty sure this was also the reason Secret Wars 2 killed the New Mutants and brought them back weaker – it was felt that the characters were getting too good with their powers and they were outgrowing their novice status.”
They weren’t brought back weaker, they were brought back as being less experienced with their powers, which only lasted a few issues anyway. The bigger plot poit was the trauma they experienced over being killed and brought back to life. Which was also resolved without dragging it out too long.
It was GN #17 when we wrote this song
It’s Exceptional now, but it won’t be for long
People ask why must they grow up to
Be X-Men
But all the Young X-Men that you loved
Are already looking old
You love them now as you loved them then
Though you put them on a pedestal
We gave them to Liefeld
You don’t feel bad about seeing them in books
You just feel bad that they’ve lost their hook
We don’t want to let them grow
We’ll keep calling them New Mutants
We’re just looking for a soft reboot
We don’t want to lose more sales
We’ll move on from these New Mutants
And just launch some brand-new book
You loved the words Chris wrote
But that was his heyday
We can’t survive on slumping sales
Every time a new book fails
You saw New Mutants launch one year
You followed them but then we launched Gen X
Were we wrong to switch to Young X-Men
We’ll switch, we’ll switch, we’ll switch: Gen Hope
We don’t want to let them grow
We’ll try relaunching New Mutants
We’re just looking for those old-time sales
We don’t want to stop replacing
Young X-Men, Gen Hope, New Mutants
We’ll just rebrand when the last one fails
@wwk5d- the loss of skill with their powers due to the Beyonder thing was another example of Claremont forgetting his plots. Dani points out that all of the New Mutants except Sunspot have lost skill with their powers in New Mutants Annual 2 but by the time Claremont left they seemed to be using their powers as well as they did before they fought the Beyonder.
“For the record, Xian hadn’t left the team yet, her last issue where she left was also Claremont’s last issue on the series.”
Sorry, I was unclear about that. I meant she’d left before Simonson started, Claremont beginning the disintegration of his own team.
You’ve almost sold me on the Beyonder story, but killing the whole team in order to motivate Magneto’s characterization seems a bit much. Claremont was in a very “kill the whole team” mood back then, though, so I don’t know.
Otherwise, I think what’s holding me back from enjoying the last two years of Claremont is a) too much focus on individual characters instead of the team and b) the absolute trainwreck the art team turned into.
The art thing happened in Uncanny, too, maybe at the same time? But the book had such a distinctive style under Sienkiewicz, and then it turned into a rotating team of whoever was available: Leialoha, Leonardi, Whilshire, Sienkiewicz back on inks (for like 3 issues).
Jackson Guice and Kyle Baker (usually) were the most consistent team before Blevins showed up, but their work was so thin and scratchy — maybe because of new printing techniques? — that it didn’t inspire me.
What’s sad is that Art Adams turned in some absolutely incredible covers around this time. But then I’d open the book and…blah.
Anyway, I should probably try to read those issues again without critiquing the art and see what I think. But at the time they were published, it all seemed such a slog, and a far cry from the book’s high point just a few years before under Claremont and Sienkiewicz.
All-New All-Different Zealand, is that anything?
“the loss of skill with their powers due to the Beyonder thing was another example of Claremont forgetting his plots. Dani points out that all of the New Mutants except Sunspot have lost skill with their powers in New Mutants Annual 2 but by the time Claremont left they seemed to be using their powers as well as they did before they fought the Beyonder.”
There was like a year and a half (at least) between the New Mutants being killed off and CC, so I just chalked it up to them training off/screen.
“I meant she’d left before Simonson started, Claremont beginning the disintegration of his own team.”
I don’t think that was CC’s intent. She was the only one he wrote out, just as he himself was out the door. Plus iirc his departure from NM was origianlly only supposed to be temporarily, not permanent. He just never got back to the title. Now I will give him grief for having her appear in Wolverine when he started the title and not resolving her storyline there…
“You’ve almost sold me on the Beyonder story, but killing the whole team in order to motivate Magneto’s characterization seems a bit much. Claremont was in a very “kill the whole team” mood back then, though, so I don’t know.”
Well technically it was the recovery to their being killed that motivated Magneto’s character 😉 As for CC’s mood then, I guess so though the only other time he did that was a bit later with the X-men during FOTM.
“Otherwise, I think what’s holding me back from enjoying the last two years of Claremont is a) too much focus on individual characters instead of the team and b) the absolute trainwreck the art team turned into.”
I’d say we got a good mix of issue focusing on a character or 2 mixed in with issues featuring the team as a whole. Which I appreciated and enjoyed.
The art was ok overall for me. Not great, but not that bad on the whole either.
At the end, Claremont had also loaded out Sunspot and Warlock to Jo Duffy for Fallen Angels, so that made it feel like the team was disintegrating.
The aforementioned Magneto versus the Avengers issue also showed that Magneto probably could have beaten the entire team by himself if he wasn’t holding back. In the Avengers own comic, they would have found a way to win, but it was in stark contrast to his depiction of working with the X-men where he always seemed no more powerful than other members of the team on the few occasions that he was in the field.
New Mutants could have worked, post-Fall of the Mutants, if the book had been more grounded. Following Cypher’s death and Magneto’s departure, the team could have had to find ways to survive on Earth. No Gossamyr or Asgard, no living with X-Factor, the characters have to make it on their own while dealing with mutant problems. The Hellfire club could have been more active in trying to manipulate them, they could get involved with the remaining Morlocks, they could encounter other teenage mutants… no need for the otherworldly nonsense.
Also, Claremont’s last year on the title was inconsistent- the time travel story wasn’t great- but he wrote some of his best character pieces in issues 45 and 51. Sure, Jackson Guice’s art can’t compare to Bill Sienkiewicz’s, but it was still good and Kyle Baker’s inking looked great. Issue 51 is Rick Leonardi at his best, and issue 52 features some early Kevin Nowlan goodness. I’ve never been a fan of Louise Simonson’s New Mutants writing, but the issue in which Warlock digs up Doug’s body is suitably disturbing. The Inferno issues might be her best work on the title, and I wish the rest of her run (and I haven’t read all of it, just enough to know I didn’t care for it) was that good.
@Mike Loughlin- I think the problem with keeping the New Mutants away from X-Factor is that it’s hard to justify why the New Mutants wouldn’t go to either Scott or Kurt and Kitty if they thought the X-Men were dead and Magneto was evil. In fact. post-Inferno, it was increasingly hard to justify why the X-Men and X-Factor were separate teams.
BTW, In Comics Interview 98, Claremont revealed that Harras originally didn’t want Jubilee on the Blue Team:
“His feeling was that by focussing a lot of attention and energy on a new kid character, it functioned to take a step or two away from the established characters. He wanted to restore the focus more tightly on them, so he decided to shunt Jubilee into the background for a while. ”
So I guess that’s one more piece of evidence that Harras doesn’t like teenage heroes.
Established characters? Jubilee got there before Gambit, lol.
Think he also said that he saw Jubilee as a reader POV character and that the X-Men didn’t need a reader POV character.
But I don’t believe that Harras simply didn’t like teen heroes. Generation X was launched under his reign, after all.
Myself, I think that the New Mutants were a victim of their own success.
There was always an element of market expectations behind the existence of more than a single X-Book. People don’t want to follow what they perceive to be peripheral books that won’t dictate or reflect the supposedly important events. IMO much of the reason why it is difficult to establish ongoing of Alpha Flight or Excalibur comes from the perception that they are supposed to be non-essential X-Books.
In their first few issues “New Mutants” had the dual mission of showing the events surrounding Xavier and Moira while the X-Men and Lilandra were inaccessible in outer space fighting the Brood and showcasing the adventures and adjustment to the changes in the lives of Rahne, Dani, Sam, Roberto and Xuan now that the cat of them being mutants was out of the bag. Then the X-Men returned form space and they had some more plot to work with from the presence of Kitty and later Doug and the readjustment of character dynamics and leadership questions. Later came Amara, Illyanna, Doug, Warlock, Magneto, and by that point it was already fairly clear that the book could not really justify its own existence in the long run except to the extent that the intercharacter dynamics proved appealling.
There was never a need for a separate book for the training of newly found mutants; if anything, the core book fulfilled that role from very early on and arguably should remain doing so in most circunstances. But there is sometimes a combination of opportunity for and interest in introducing new characters and their relationships to other new or established characters and their current status quo. In other words, sometimes there is more plot than the existing monthlies can handle confortably.
For a while there Claremont managed to deliver new plot that kept interest in the New Mutants of the 1980s alive and made their book viable for years. At the time his name was itself a very valuable help as well.
But by the time Magneto became the school’s headmaster it was clear that the book had no clear reason to exist anymore. The core cast was both established and confortable enough with each other. Wounding and effectively exiling Xavier and having Magneto take his place was an early shake-up event, perhaps the fourth such after the capture of the original X-Men team by Krakoa; the separation from Phoenix after fighting Magneto; and the extended period in space fighting the Brood. Claremont back then liked to take his toys and toss them up to the ceiling to see if he could go on with them in the places they fell back down. IMO it was also one of his first clear failures; he never managed to sell the idea that Magneto had some idea of how to run the school or deserved the chance to try. He was still Magneto and we had no reason to expect him to have changed any. Some people think highly of that period. I do not. Compounding the problems, he also had no clear idea of what to do with the new characters. He attempted to focus on Illyanna and IMO failed quite clearly there as well. Claremont’s Illyanna isn’t a complex or intriguing character, but instead just overcomplicated and underexplained.
The way I see it, “New Mutants” shoud have been cancelled at that time, perhaps with #28. It had no clear reason to be beyond that point. But instead Claremont kept writing it up until #54 and Louise Simonson took over with #55. Meanwhile “X-Factor” debuted around the time of “New Mutants” #38, further complicating the scene. It was all a slowly growing mess that led to a resolution-seeking bigger mess in the form of “Inferno”.
After that the whole idea of the New Mutants team was running on nostalgia fumes and essentially keeps doing so to this day. We have a half dozen or so of interesting characters as legacy from that book, some of which were even allowed to grow. But the idea that there must be a “New Mutants” book is inherently self-contradictory.
@ Michael: it makes logical sense that the New Mutants would seek out the other X-teams, but I don’t think it was necessary. Being teenage characters, they could be written as resenting the older mutants for not looking after them. The X-Men were supposed to be their mentors, but they skipped town every other week. The NMs don’t know X-Factor from a hole in the ground, so why should they trust them? They could even develop a sort of rivalry with the X-Factor kids. After they try and fail to make it on their own, a man called Cable recruits them for his missions. They don’t trust him entirely, but he helps them out/ saves them/ convinces them that he’s not like other mutant leaders. I think the road to X-Force could have been paved with the ‘80s cast.
@ Luis Dantas: Magneto tried and failed with the New Mutants, paving his way to rejecting Xavier’s path. The storytelling was rocky, however- X-Men vs. Avengers and Acts of Vengeance pushed him back to villainy inorganically (although his attack on Red Skull made sense no matter what his moral alignment) while his Savage Land arc worked better.
He wasn’t a total failure, however; he helped Illyana (disagree with your assessment of Claremont’s writing for the character) and swallowed his pride to work with Emma Frost to help his students. Ultimately, he was not suited to being a teacher, and it cost both him and the New Mutants.
@Mike Loughlin: It’s hard to tell where Claremont really wanted to take Magneto, given the editorial interference pushing the character back towards cartoon supervillainy. I always got the sense that Claremont’s take involved Magneto growing into the role of mentor, albeit a different sort of mentor than Xavier.
At the same time, I think Claremont wanted to show that the New Mutants’ and X-Men’s situation was, er, evolving beyond classic superheroics, with the increasingly dire politics around mutants requiring a “Gray King” approach.
In the bigger picture, my sense is that Claremont liked Magneto as a character aware of his own flaws and capable of reflective doubt, even as he’d written Xavier into a character oblivious to his own shortcomings and the limits of his own experiences. Xavier gets to grow as a character out in space, of course, which is why he can help out in the final battle with the Magus, but part of his growth is about knowing when and how to step back.
The New Mutants title was central to these moves. From the start, the team is exposed to Xavier’s faults, since he brought them together under the influence of the Brood. And it’s The New Mutants book that introduces Legion, a character who represents the worst of Xavier’s moral blind spots (as of the Claremont era) and the extremes of his failures to hold himself accountable.
And it’s clear Claremont had some of this in mind for a while. Uncanny X-Men v.1 #161, the story that shows the beginnings of Xavier’s relationship with Legion’s mother, Gabrielle Haller, also takes pains to show a much less decisive and capable Xavier, a man with profound moral weaknesses that he refuses to acknowledge.
That story positions Magneto/Magnus as the decisive and knowing figure in their clash with Baron Strucker, even as Magnus’s ruthlessness and anger have started leading him astray. And, of course, it’s a story that comes out just under a year after Uncanny v.1 #150 shows the beginnings of Magneto’s reform, establishing his more sympathetic motivations and backstory.
Uncanny v.1 #161 came out in 1982, and that same year also saw the publication of God Loves, Man Kills. Thought it was conceived of as a non-continuity story, it has a particularly sympathetic Magneto, one who’s motivated more clearly by a desire to defend mutants regardless of the kind of action needed to do so. And that story also has Xavier spend a lot of time as a captive, even as a weapon against other mutants, and ends with Xavier wondering if Magneto might be right after all.
Those themes and ideas seem to have found their way into Claremont’s X-books over the ext couple of years. By the time the Legion plotline in New Mutants v.1 ends, in June, 1985, Nimrod has already turned up in Uncanny v.1 and the setups for Xavier’s departure and Magneto’s reform in Uncanny v.1 #200 as well as Claremont’s abortive “Mutant Wars” plotline are all becoming evident.
And by the end of January of the next year, Magneto will be in and both Xavier and Cyclops — already being diminished in favor of Storm and Logan as far back as the Paul Smith-era Brood storyline — will be out.
@Omar Karindu: yeah, I was looking at Magneto’s arc based on what was published. Magneto returning to villainy too quickly doesn’t make sense, whereas his abandoning Xavier’s path in stages flowed better. I’m reasonably sure Claremont didn’t want Magneto to break bad again, but Harras, Stern, Byrne, and maybe Jim Lee thought otherwise…
Byrne and Stern both thought of Magneto as a straight-up villain, and they seem to have disagreed fundamentally with Claremont’s revision of the character.
With Lee and Harras, my sense is that Jim Lee wanted to do he X-Men stories he remembered loving as a reader, and Harras was on board for that.
And then Lee really only got to do one story with Magneto as a villain before he left the X-books. Magneto’s next big story in “Fatal Attraction” is distinctly villainous, but ends with him mindwiped by Xavier and written out for some time.
And then Scott Lobdell goes for a quasi-redemption plotline with “Joseph” that also winds up being undercut by editorially-driven creative changes that push him off the book. With Uncanny v.1 #350, Marvel editorial finally got the evil Magneto they wanted, but only through some ham-handed intervention that seriously damaged the books.
By the time Grant Morrison decided to go all-in on Magneto-as-evil to put the boot into tired old “Erik and Charles” and their tired old ideas, the fan backlash was such that it was retconned as “not Magneto” almost immediately…and Claremont got to write Magneto s appalled at the actions of his wicked impostor.
From there, barring House of M and some of its immediate aftermath, Magneto has become a core member of the X-Men themselves. But by then, the X-Men’s militancy and anti-heroic qualities were often at the forefront, so we’ve gotten something halfway between Claremont’s initial reform arc and the more arrogant, megalomaniacal Magneto characterization of yore.
@Omar- It’s not clear that Claremont intended Xavier to be in the wrong when he slept with Gaby. As we’ve discussed before, Claremont had a questionable idea of consent- there’s Peter and Kitty but also Lee asking Scott for sex when he’s lost his visor and dependent on her to guide him around. Claremont previously wrote Carol as having had a relationship with her psychiatrist and although he was depicted as being a jerk, Carol wasn’t depicted as a victim. Claremont made it clear that it was Gaby that made the first move and when Xavier insists in New Mutants that he took advantage of her, Gaby dismisses his concerns.
Regarding Harras and Magneto, the first attempts to turn Magneto back into a villain started in Simonson’s New Mutants. The first steps took place a couple of issues before Harras became editor, so it’s possible that Simonson favored Magneto as a villain as well. During Inferno, Magneto and Emma Frost try to cut a deal with N’astirh while he’s trying to kill mutant babies. (This is forgotten later on when Emma becomes a hero for obvious reasons.) In New Mutants 75. Magento claims that he NEVER really reformed and was basically trying to turn the New Mutants into the new Brotherhood. This was similar to attempts to try to claim that Madelyne Pryor did some bad things before S’ym in X-Factor 38. Both issues were written by Simonson and edited by Harras and both made no sense. The New Mutants revelations was hand-waved away with some dialogue in X-Men 253. The X-Factor ones were quietly forgotten about.
Even after New Mutants 75, Harras still seems to want to establish how evil Magneto was. Harras supposedly had Lobdell rewrite Uncanny X-Men 304 several times to make Magneot more evil. This caused problems for Colossus’s arc- he was supposed to join Magneto’s Acolytes but the rewritten version had Colossus join while Magneto was trying to kill thousands of people, incliuding the X-Men. So Colossus’ behavior had to be written off as brain damage.
We’ve been trying to get New Zealand renamed to Aotearoa, its Maori name (not least to save time scrolling through country lists when doing address lookup), but our right wing populist government seem really keen to double down on it.
@Luke – Try running “Uncanny Aotearoa” past them.
@Michael Loughlin: For the record, I like Jackson Guice’s art as much as the next comic reader, and I am a big fan of Kyle Baker. I just don’t think either of them were turning in their best work on New Mutants.
I also appreciate that Claremont was trying to tell a nuanced story about Magneto through a haze of editorial interference. It would have been interesting to see his vision completed without all the changes thrust on the X-line at the time.
I still think it’s wild that Shooter (or whoever at Marvel) couldn’t be bothered to find permanent replacements right away for Sienkiewicz and (later) JRJr. NM and UXM were two of their best selling books, so finances alone would indicate that you need some stability in your creative team. The artistic merry-go-round on those books seems like another symptom of whatever was going wrong behind the scenes.