Well, this is an odd book, and no mistake. \u00a0Be warned, by the way, that it’s one of those books where I can’t really talk about why it works without giving away big chunks of the plot. \u00a0If you were planning to read it anyway, I’d go and do that first.<\/p>\n
Matthew Rosenberg and Adam Gorham’s New Mutants: Dead Souls<\/em> is ostensibly a New Mutants miniseries. \u00a0Issue #1 establishes the premise: Karma, who inherited a mega-corporation during Marjorie Liu’s run on\u00a0Astonishing X-Men<\/em>, has recruited a bunch of superheroes to investigate paranormal phenomena. \u00a0The book kicks off as some sort of mystery-of-the-month horror title, with this random team visiting aftermath of an Alabama hurricane and dealing with an outbreak of zombies. \u00a0This turns out to be the result of somebody stealing from the body of a victim who had magical powers, and whose spirit is accordingly no longer at rest. \u00a0It’s quirkily and atmospherically done, but it’s basically a standard horror story.<\/p>\n Yet it’s also apparent from the off that there’s something not quite right here. \u00a0It’s clear that the real point of the team is only known to Magik and Karma, and everyone else is kind of aware that they’re not being filled in. \u00a0That’s clearly a plot point. \u00a0So is the fact that they didn’t actually go to Alabama to deal with the zombies or help the hurricane victims; Magik had something else in mind.<\/p>\n But on top of that, it’s a strange sort of New Mutants team. \u00a0The squad is led by Magik, and consists of Rictor, Boom-Boom, Strong Guy and Wolfsbane – so two core New Mutants characters, a couple of who were in there for a bit towards the end but are mainly associated with other things, and a member of X-Factor. \u00a0They’re just about entitled to lay claim to the name, but hardly likely to scratch many nostalgia itches. \u00a0Was this bunch really Karma’s first choice? \u00a0What’s Magik, the one who barely functions as a member of the human race, doing in charge? \u00a0And didn’t Guido kill Rahne’s kid in an\u00a0X-Factor<\/em> story, admittedly when he wasn’t in his right mind? \u00a0Are we just forgetting about that?<\/p>\n I’m so used to minis pretty much ignoring that sort of thing and asking to be taken entirely on their own terms that it comes as a pleasant surprise to find that these are not bugs, but features. \u00a0No, this version of the New Mutants doesn’t make any sense. \u00a0That’s the plot.<\/p>\n But Rosenberg sets it up slowly, since the first half of the series continues the story-of-the-month pretence. \u00a0Issue #2 sees the group visiting a research base at the Arctic, which is being menaced by a frost giant. \u00a0That issue establishes the villain as Xi’an’s brother Tran, who was absorbed into her back in\u00a0Marvel Team-Up\u00a0<\/em>#100, but has apparently escaped. \u00a0Meanwhile, the rest of the team are starting to show their disconcertment at some of Magik’s leadership choices. \u00a0Still, it’s a basically self-contained issue.<\/p>\n Issue #3 has the New Mutants trying to rescue a plane where Tran has taken over the pilot and driven all the passengers crazy. \u00a0This is where the series shows its hand on a number of points: Rahne has signed up for this because it’s supposed to be the New Mutants, but her patience at being hauled around on unexplained missions and asked to team with Guido has finally snapped. \u00a0Boom-Boom, still in\u00a0NextWave<\/em> mode, isn’t just flaky, she’s drunk. \u00a0And the mission is supposed to be to capture Tran so that Karma can figure out what to do with him – yet Tran insists that he’s the one trying to save the world from Xi’an.<\/p>\n This seems to end in a great heroic sacrifice as one team member is left aboard when the plane crashes, setting up a funeral in issue #4 where Illyana can lament her performance as leader before realising where things went wrong – except that this is all an illusion and we return to finish off the airplane story. \u00a0Normally that sort of thing really annoys me, but it’s beautifully set up here with the misdirection of doing two genuine one-shot stories and feigning a third. \u00a0That’s clever, and it works.<\/p>\n At any rate, if you’re paying close attention by this point – and it’s one of these things that emerges more clearly when you read it as a whole – you’ll have noted that people do keep asking why Karma has enlisted this particular crew. \u00a0And at least twice, our attention is specifically drawn to the fact that Dani Moonstar would have been a much more sensible choice than Magik for leading the mission that Karma’s has supposedly entrusted to her. \u00a0It’s a great slow build, until we finally establish that, yes,\u00a0of course<\/em> she tried Dani first. \u00a0And plainly, that didn’t work out so well.<\/p>\n Karma’s actual plan here is more to do with reuniting herself with her brother, the other half of her soul, and using the New Mutants to find magical phenomena that she can exploit for her company. \u00a0She’s kind of talked herself into thinking of this as a good thing, but we’re very much led to believe that this is how she’s rationalised ideas that were generated by Tran when he was effectively part of her. \u00a0Even without him, she is missing something in her soul, and she is very much not the good guy here. \u00a0This version of the New Mutants have been selected precisely because they’re trusting enough to sign up for pretty much anything that appeals to their brand loyalties, and shambolic enough not to ask the awkward questions – or at least not to ask them very effectively, since Rictor realises all the problems from the outset, but never manages to do anything very coherent about them. \u00a0Rahne and Guido are distracted by each other, Magik is too busy worrying about her adequacy for the role, and Tabby is… well, Tabby is drunk.<\/p>\n I’m not familiar with artist Adam Gorham, but his work here is appealing. \u00a0I like the awkwardness of his Magik, whose frankly dreadful haircut seeks exactly right for a character who surely wouldn’t regard it as any sort of priority. \u00a0There’s good detail across the board, a strong sense of location when the series goes to different places, and some inventive layouts in the Dr Strange issue. \u00a0And he can do Warlock, a character that many artists struggle to incorporate into their personal style.<\/p>\n This series could have been very annoying if it had played as “look at the bozos who thought they were the New Mutants”, but it’s got more sympathy for the team than that. \u00a0Rahne and Guido do reconcile. \u00a0Rictor is being genuinely heroic. \u00a0Magik is well aware of her deficiencies as team leader, and if she’s utterly unable to bridge the gap to actual leadership, or even letting the team into her confidence, she’s at least capable of figuring out that Karma must have an ulterior motive for putting her in that position. \u00a0The general sense is that these guys could<\/em> be the New Mutants, if only there was someone to play the leader.<\/p>\n The predictable story here would be for Magik (or someone else) to rise to the occasion and be that leader. \u00a0That doesn’t happen. \u00a0Instead, the series unexpectedly ends on a cliffhanger, with no indication of where the story is going to be picked up. \u00a0Presumably it’ll be in one of Rosenberg’s X-Men stories. \u00a0If you bought these six issues expecting to get a self-contained New Mutants story you could justifiably be annoyed by that. \u00a0But I’ll be happy to see more of this. It ducks and weaves and wrongfoots the audience, but does so very well. \u00a0And for us completists, it’s nice to be taken by surprise once in a while, when something seemingly marginal turns out to be part of a bigger picture after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, this is an odd book, and no mistake. \u00a0Be warned, by the way, that it’s one of those books where I can’t really talk about why it works without giving away big chunks of the plot. \u00a0If you were planning to read it anyway, I’d go and do that first. Matthew Rosenberg and Adam […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4291"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4293,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4291\/revisions\/4293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}