{"id":8760,"date":"2023-02-12T17:26:04","date_gmt":"2023-02-12T17:26:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8760"},"modified":"2023-02-12T17:26:04","modified_gmt":"2023-02-12T17:26:04","slug":"new-mutants-31-33","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=8760","title":{"rendered":"New Mutants #31-33"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>NEW MUTANTS vol 4 #31-33<\/strong>
\n“The Sublime Saga”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Charlie Jane Anders<\/strong>
\nMain story artist: Alberto Alburquerque<\/strong>
\nMain story colourist: Carlos Lopez<\/strong>
\n“Young Shela & Morgan” artists: Ro Stein & Ted Brandt<\/strong>
\n“Young Shela & Morgan” colourist: Tamra Bonvillain<\/strong>
\nLetterer & production: Travis Lanham<\/strong>
\nDesign: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen<\/strong>
\nEditor: Sarah Brunstad<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now, I quite like Escapade as a concept. But I can see why this arc might annoy people. New Mutants<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

It’s not\u00a0exactly<\/em> the last three issues of the series, since there’s a follow-up mini,\u00a0New Mutants: Lethal Legion<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Escapade’s hazily defined powers are the sort of rules-lawyer fodder that can often rub me up the wrong way – she can swap\u00a0properties<\/em>\u00a0with 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0too <\/em>directly – “We keep getting stronger, and you stay the same” – but those are the exceptions.<\/p>\n

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

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 […]<\/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-8760","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\/8760","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=8760"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8760\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8762,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8760\/revisions\/8762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}