New Mutants #31-33
NEW MUTANTS vol 4 #31-33
“The Sublime Saga”
Writer: Charlie Jane Anders
Main story artist: Alberto Alburquerque
Main story colourist: Carlos Lopez
“Young Shela & Morgan” artists: Ro Stein & Ted Brandt
“Young Shela & Morgan” colourist: Tamra Bonvillain
Letterer & production: Travis Lanham
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Sarah Brunstad
Now, I quite like Escapade as a concept. But I can see why this arc might annoy people. New Mutants has been drifting for a little while, wandering from arc to arc without all that very much to tie it all together, beyond drawing on the cast of the 1980s series. And to cap off the series, we have a three issue arc by a completely different creative team, which has not a great deal to do with anything that came before, and that foregrounds a completely new character.
It’s not exactly the last three issues of the series, since there’s a follow-up mini, New Mutants: Lethal Legion, starting in March. But it’s fair to say that this is not a New Mutants story in any terribly meaningful way. Mirage and Karma show up at the start of part 1 to lament the state of creative writing on Krakoa. Wolfsbane’s in the whole thing, but she doesn’t really do a great deal (and certainly nothing that has anything to do with her ongoing storyline about her missing son). Martha Johanssen is in it a lot, and she’s at least a regular supporting character. But… no, it’s not a New Mutants story, let’s be honest.
Still, let’s ignore that and judge it as what it is, which is an Escapade story. There’s a lot I like about the idea of Escapade. We haven’t had many mutants who react to Krakoa with outright scepticism and prefer to stay in the outside world. I get that the whole Krakoan concept is that everyone’s on the same page at last, and so you kind of have to play down the idea of dissent, but even allowing for that, we could really use some more characters who aren’t convinced. Escapade is here on Krakoa because she’s had a vision of a future where she kills her best friend through lack of control of her powers, and she grudgingly accepts the need for training. That’s a perfectly good starting point.
Well, except maybe for the bit where the best friend is a mutant too. Because the whole stakes of “he falls to his death too” run headlong into the fact that he can be resurrected. I’m not sure Charlie Jane Anders ever quite squares that away. There’s an attempt to suggest that Escapade is sceptical that Morgan will be stuck in the queue, but really it winds up being acknowledged and then brushed under the carpet, because… well, it kind of breaks the plot. It’s addressed more directly when Martha outright asks Escapade to kill her rather than leave her as a prisoner of Sublime, and there’s at least a suggestion that Escapade simply doesn’t believe resurrection is real. That could work, but I think if you want her to deny a basic premise of the Krakoan era which her friends have seen with their own eyes, you probably need to work a bit harder to justify that.
Escapade’s hazily defined powers are the sort of rules-lawyer fodder that can often rub me up the wrong way – she can swap properties with other people nearby, for short periods. Which could be their location or their powers but could also be their social status. Precisely how this works is all terribly hazy, but at this stage, that’s fine, because Escapade doesn’t understand it herself. The rules seem more or less consistent so far as it goes, and the manipulative Emma and Destiny appear to have figured out that this only works if Escapade is some sort of powerful reality warper who it would be terribly useful to have on side. All told, it works – it feels like the right sort of vagueness, where you get the sense that someone has worked out the rules, even if they’re not all being shared with us. And besides, it serves the plot, which is that Escapade doesn’t understand either.
Our villains for this arc are the U-Men, led once again by Sublime. Basically, he wants to recapture Martha and return her to being a brain in a jar, just as she’s finally got the body she’s wanted all this time. We’re returning here to Sublime as he was written in the first U-Men arc, before he was revealed as some sort of immortal collective mind with a series of host bodies. That’s not exactly contradicted – Martha points out that he’s a bacteria, in fact – but it’s understandably downplayed because this story wants to use him as Martha’s arch-enemy. Martha gets to face him down and emerge victorious, Escapade gets to step up to the challenge instead of running from it. All perfectly fine.
It’s quite dense, and that doesn’t always leave the art with a lot of room to breathe – most of the visual flair in the art comes from the “Young Shela & Morgan” strips that are scattered throughout it, though they don’t really feel of a piece with the rest of the page. Alberto Albuquerque does some solid acting, but the layouts are fairly bland. Still, there’s a lot of nice little details in the writing to round out the main characters, and a sense that these people have lives and hobbies and all that. Fundamentally they ring true, or at least the main ones do, and that goes a long way. There are moments when it trips up and spells something out a little too directly – “We keep getting stronger, and you stay the same” – but those are the exceptions.
It’s not a New Mutants story and it could stand to give the artist more space. But as an Escapade arc, it’s pretty decent.
OMG, I forgot that dreadful Peter David story that gave Rahne a demonic child. Is someone trying to resuscitate it?
In Ayala’s New Mutants issue. it was revealed that Rahne’s son was alive but not on Krakoa but there was something… odd about his backup. Then Ayala left New Mutants and it hasn’t been mentioned since. (I have a feeling that the next arc after Limbo would have been Illyana and Maddie trying to help Rahne save him if Ayala hadn’t left.)
“Mirage and Karma show up at the start of part 1 to lament the state of creative writing on Krakoa.”
I feel like these characters could be put to better use. I hope the original New Mutants get another shot at being a team in the near future.
Man, in retrospect a lot about that X-Factor run didn’t age quite well huh? I used to love it when I was younger but I’m not sure I’d have much patience for it these days.
I still think that the original New Mutants deserve roles of leadership after everything they’ve done and experienced over the years. And I like the idea of them being teachers and mentors to the younger mutants, an idea which kind of carried over from the Academy X days.
Admittedly, Sam has a family to worry about, and Roberto is busy with his schemes and plans, but Dani, Xuan, Rahne, Illyana, Amara would all be great as senior role models, instructors, and so forth. Maybe throw in some of the Generation X team who are at loose ends (Husk, Skin, Jono?) or even some of the most experienced from the Academy X days to round out a solid core of faculty…
Because lord knows Xavier and Emma are too busy to be teachers.
But I guess Krakoa doesn’t give a hoot about actual education. They probably just telepathically download whatever you need to know about basic subjects like math, science, English, so there’s more time to learn Sentinel Fighting.
Man, in retrospect a lot about that X-Factor run didn’t age quite well huh? I used to love it when I was younger but I’m not sure I’d have much patience for it these days.
The first 18-24 issues are still very good, despite being derailed by several crossovers. But it loses focus and the payoffs for long term story arcs are kind of a mess.
I still think that the original New Mutants deserve roles of leadership after everything they’ve done and experienced over the years. And I like the idea of them being teachers and mentors to the younger mutants, an idea which kind of carried over from the Academy X days.
I agree, which is why I generally don’t like seeing them back together except for an occasional reunion tour. Sam and Roberto belong on the Avengers. Dani should be leading a team of X-Men. Karma should be headmaster of a school. Rahne should be in therapy and trying to live a normal life.
But I’d have left Cyclops retired and living in Alaska with Maddie. I would have left Warren and Candy in New Mexico. Dazzler would be singing in Vegas if I had been hired instead of Bob Harras, and Peter would be painting in SoHo.
Between Tier and Siryn’s newborn, and even that weird French robot girl the Isolationist made to spy on X-Factor, it’s a miracle Layla survived long enough to become Madrox’s problematic kinda-child bride.
As for this arc – as I’ve commented under the annotations, I like the ideas, but the execution was messy. And it could have used another issue or even two.
@Nu-D: I’d extend the jumping-off point considerably further, at least to the end of Second Coming and the Hela/Las Vegas arc. It really did all go downhill from there.
Can I throw a stone in the pond and say that the New Mutants as a team just dont have the pull factor or coherence as a team to sustain a book?
The membership went through some fairly big shake ups. They were always the younger cast. Maybe we just acknowledge this and let the stronger cast finally, finally! Sit alongside the X-Men.
The only problem is how Moonstar has been sidelined so often and prevented from many meaningful relationships, and they’ve saddled Cannonball with a child *in space*. Agh!
I wasn’t reading Secret Invasion, so that was a distraction. The ice villain was not very compelling. I have no interest in Darwin, Longshot or Shatterstar, so those characters’ stories bored me. I really wanted to like the time travel story, but it never gelled. And the king of hell story was a disaster.
I feel like we need to start a petition for Dani finally getting a girlfriend because honestly, her queerness has been off the charts since she was introduced and yet she’s almost never actually had any sort of decent relationship. Flirtations, sure. Attractions, once in a while. That ill-advised thing with Nate Grey in San Francisco. I don’t know why there’s always been such reluctance to give her a partner.
“her queerness has been off the charts since she was introduced”
How so?
How so?
That psychic bond with Rahne codes as queer in retrospect. I don’t know whether Claremont intended it or not—I wouldn’t be surprised either way—but in retrospect it reads a lot like a queer girls crush before she recognizes she’s queer.
I never saw it that way at all. Still don’t.
I never saw it that way at all. Still don’t.
That’s nice. One of the good things about art is how we can all find different aspects of our own experiences in it.
Even if we do have to squint extra hard.
“Even if we do have to squint extra hard.”
Imagine reaching this hard to deny something to blatantly obvious.
Not really. Their relationship could be interpreted as akin to a big sister/little sister. Maybe some people are just reaching so hard to see something that isn’t there as well.