{"id":8401,"date":"2022-10-23T21:42:45","date_gmt":"2022-10-23T20:42:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8401"},"modified":"2022-10-23T21:42:45","modified_gmt":"2022-10-23T20:42:45","slug":"new-mutants-25-30","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8401","title":{"rendered":"New Mutants #25-30"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>NEW MUTANTS vol 4 #25-30<\/strong>
\nWriters: Vita Ayala (#25-28 and #30), Danny Lore (#29) & Alyssa Wong (#30, Deadpool story)<\/strong>
\nArtists: Rod Reis & Jan Duursema (#25-28), Guillermo Sanna (#29), Alex Lins, Justin Mason, Jason Loo, Emma Kubert, Roberto Poggi & Geoff Shaw (#30)<\/strong>
\nColourists: Rod Reis & Ruth Redmond (#25-28),\u00a0Dan Brown (#29), Bryan Valenza, Jason Loo, Antonio Fabela & Nolan Woodard (#30)<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Travis Lanham<\/strong>
\nEditor: Sarah Brunstad<\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s past time I started making inroads on the reviews, and what better place to start than the closing stretch of Vita Ayala’s\u00a0New Mutants<\/em>? To be honest, I was initially going to do the “Labors of Magik” arc separately, but the queue is building up, so let’s just bring the whole series up to date. We’ve got Ayala’s final arc, a fill-in issue, and a farewell anniversary anthology.<\/p>\n

Taking them together does bring out one point: viewed as an ongoing series, there’s not much sense of direction here. Which is odd, since the earlier parts of Ayala’s run seemed to know well enough where they were going. There’s a built-in challenge in finding a role for the New Mutants, since they were the original trainee team. Promoting them all to the X-Men kind of misses the point, but at the same time, the characters are 40 years old and they haven’t been written as rookies since 1990 or so. Ayala’s approach was to make them into the mentors for the next batch of kids, which isn’t novel – it was basically the approach taken by Nunzio DeFilippis and Christina Weir in their\u00a0New Mutants<\/em> series from the early 2000s, where the original team had become the teachers at Xavier’s School. But it makes sense as a way to give them a foot in both camps.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Having concluded the Shadow King\/Lost Club arc, though, the book sidelines most of its cast in favour of a Magik spotlight arc; Dani and Rahne are here too, but they’re hardly essential. And Ayala never gets back to the other material before their run ends, so instead of a detour, this winds up feeling more like a slightly curious coda. Still, the basic idea makes sense. Illyana is defined by her traumatic childhood in Limbo, and even though she gets her triumph by defeating Belasco to become ruler of Limbo, it’s an inherently tainted triumph because Limbo is a curse and a burden. So it makes sense that Illyana would, ultimately, prefer to get shot of the place altogether.<\/p>\n

Detaching Magik from Limbo seems dubious at first, but ultimately, why not? It’s been a long time since anyone really did much with Limbo, and Illyana herself is a character much in need of some healing. “Labors of Magik” sees her plan to offload the unwanted hellscape on Madelyne Pryor, and you can see the logic – Madelyne has a prior connection to Limbo, but her own arc is largely about rejecting her status as a pawn and trying to carve out her own identity. So, at least on the surface, Limbo seems like an opportunity for her.<\/p>\n

That plan gets comprehensively sidetracked, and instead, thanks to Limbo’s wonky rules of time, we get a quest through Illyana’s past, present and future so that she can come to terms with herself before moving on. The mechanics of this don’t altogether make sense but… well, that’s the point, surely. Limbo\u00a0doesn’t<\/em> entirely make sense. Rob Reis’ art remains a star attraction of the book, and he does a great job of bringing a bit more variation back to Limbo. Back in the\u00a0Magik<\/em> miniseries it had gardens, castles and the like; over time it’s drifted into a rather generic hellscape. Visual fireworks have been part of the\u00a0New Mutants<\/em> identity from the Bill Sienkiewicz days and he sits perfectly in that tradition. Alongside that, we have more traditional flashbacks to the young Illyana, done by Jan Duursema in something closer to the style of the\u00a0Magik<\/em> mini. I’m all for using artists with different art styles on a book when it actually plays into the scenes, and this is absolutely the way to do it.<\/p>\n

I’m not quite so sold on the details of the individual episodes, where the mini-stories feel a bit rushed. Then again, the alternative would be to stretch this out to something like six issues, which feels too many. It’s nice to bring Colossus back into the fold again, too, since he’s been conspicuous by his absence from most Illyana stories in recent years. The contrast between young Illyana idolising him and the current version barely talking to him comes across nicely. And it makes sense to build to a showdown with an alt-Illyana who\u00a0did<\/em> embrace Limbo, though she isn’t really present in most of the story.<\/p>\n

What feels a bit odd in all this is the Madelyne Pryor subplot. While she hangs around to offer commentary on Illyana, it’s not really her story; in a way, she feels bolted on. And hanging over all this is the fact that we already know Madelyne winds up as a villain in the upcoming “Dark Web” arc – they’ve already published a lead-in to that story. It rather hangs over the story, since it means Illyana really is handing over the reins to the bad guy. It’s hard to tell whether this is something that Ayala is studiously trying to ignore because it’s inconvenient to their story, or whether it’s deliberately laying the groundwork for future stories; I’m leaning towards the latter, because it actually works quite well that way. Illyana’s escape is tainted and gives her a direction in the medium term; Madelyne, ironically, gets her ascent to Limbo in, once again, a marginal development in somebody else’s story.<\/p>\n

Rounding out this block, we have two standalone issues. Issue #29 is a Daken and Warpath story by Danny Lore and Guillermo Sanna. It looks gorgeous, but the story doesn’t really work. The basic idea that Daken feels guilty about overlooking Gabby in a previous arc is fine, but it pushes it too hard by having him blame the New Mutants. The idea is that James can help Daken understand the perspective of the younger sibling, but the main problem is that Daken just doesn’t feel in character; this doesn’t read like the character seen in\u00a0Marauders\u00a0<\/em>or\u00a0X-Factor<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Issue #30 is \u00a040th anniversary issue in the form of an anthology, with vignettes focussing on different characters at various points in the past – two from the early\u00a0New Mutants, <\/em>plus a Karma story from the era of Moore\/Pollina\u00a0X-Force <\/em>(which was effectively\u00a0New Mutants<\/em> at that point). The Dani story is probably the best one; Bobby damaging her belt does feel like an early\u00a0New Mutants<\/em> plot, though it’s a weird choice to put Kitty in the friend role when her main interaction with the New Mutants in the early days consisted of loud disdain. The Karma story is perfectly okay but very straightforward. And there’s a Warlock\/Wolfsbane story that just doesn’t work for me at all, with a gimmicky approach of putting all Warlock’s dialogue in pictograms. Aside from the fact that that’s not how it worked back in the day (and doesn’t fit with Rahne being able to understand him perfectly), it just makes the story a chore to read. Emma Kubert’s Warlock is sweet, though.<\/p>\n

All told, it’s a slightly random assemblage. It doesn’t feel like a resolution to Ayala’s run, so much as a diversion that wound up being the end. But the main arc does look fantastic, and I appreciate what it’s doing to move Illyana on.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NEW MUTANTS vol 4 #25-30 Writers: Vita Ayala (#25-28 and #30), Danny Lore (#29) & Alyssa Wong (#30, Deadpool story) Artists: Rod Reis & Jan Duursema (#25-28), Guillermo Sanna (#29), Alex Lins, Justin Mason, Jason Loo, Emma Kubert, Roberto Poggi & Geoff Shaw (#30) Colourists: Rod Reis & Ruth Redmond (#25-28),\u00a0Dan Brown (#29), Bryan Valenza, […]<\/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,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8401","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\/8401","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=8401"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8403,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8401\/revisions\/8403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}