NEW MUTANTS was very much an anticipated comic book in 1982. It was going to be a long-in-development spin-off/expansion of X-MEN, which was at that moment and throughout the decade the most popular comic book in the land. NEW MUTANTS started as a way of pushing back at Marvel EIC Jim Shooter, who had been insisting that the central concept of X-MEN was “school for mutants”. By shifting that concept into a separate title, Chris Claremont and, at the time, John Byrne, hoped to get him off their backs. Byrne was gone from the series by the time NEW MUTANTS was launched, its first three issues combined into a single high-priced graphic novel. It was a fun series and I liked a bunch of the characters, but that wasn’t enough to keep me reading through this period, especially as I dropped X-MEN itself at the same time.
I first encountered the New Mutants in the aforementioned graphic novel. It was the fourth book released in this format, and the first one that put naked commercialism ahead of artistic intent. To wit: up to this point, the initial three MARVEL GRAPHIC NOVEL releases all seemed as though they were attempting to push the envelope in some fashion. This one, though, just felt like a big comic book, And it was–it was three comic books stitched together into one. Originally, this material had been commissioned as the first three issues of NEW MUTANTS, but at some point the decision was made that there was more profit to be had charging $4.95 than in releasing it as three 60 cent issues. This was a good book, a really nice introduction to five new characters–but it was hard to get the bad taste of that price out of my mouth. Even in 1982, I could tell that I’d been gouged by greed here.
The actual NEW MUTANTS series launched a month or two later, and continued to develop its five lead characters in fun ways. I liked that it was a bit more low-key than the main X-MEN series, less concerned with world-saving than with individual personal problems, at least for the moment. But that said, there was something missing as well. The book felt like X-MEN, but not entirely. As I say, it was softer, quieter, more introspective–and that introspection was carried out in massive amounts of Chris Claremont’s prose in enormous word balloons. Chris was the master at getting you to care about a character in this period, but sometimes it felt as though you really had to work at it. I think also that new X-Editor Louise Simonson was more simpatico to Chris than prior editors had been, and so let him have a freer hand a bit more.
This issue is a good example of the way Chris’s X-Books were tending to go at this point. it has a central plot–Dani Moonstar is being stalked by a Broodling that’s been living secretly in the X-Mansion, but her power to bring forth a person’s worst fear and make it tangible has her manifesting the Demon Bear that killed her parents and thinking that’s what’s after her. But all that said, a bunch of other stuff is touched upon as well, including bits of business that don’t seem to be about this series at all. There’s two pages dedicated to Banshee and Moira MacTaggart in which the existence of Legion is hinted at (he wouldn’t show up for real for another 20 issues or so) as well as an interlude with Illyana Rasputin, just back from her momentary stay in Limbo which seemed to have aged her up. But there was more to that experience, as is hinted here, and Chris takes the time to set up elements for his eventual MAGIK limited series.
The stalking Broodling is meant to give the story stakes and danger, and it does. But it also winds up feeling like a more toothless version of the then-recent story in which Kitty Pryde was chased through the Mansion by an Alien-esque N’gari Demon. Given that this is a group book, the odds here are five against one, which makes it feel like even the undertrained New Mutants still have the tactical advantage. And it turns out that this is all the precursor to a story that had already seen print in the main X-MEN book, where it turned out that Professor X was unknowingly harboring a Brood Queen within his body. But that situation had already been resolved in X-MEN, making this set-up feel unnecessary after the fact. Maybe if this issue had come first it would have worked, but trying to jigsaw the timeline pretty well eliminated the stakes.
I mean, literally the last page leads directly into that issue, an issue that had come out something like five months earlier. It all works, but it’s a bit of a mess scheduling-wise. and it made the series feel a bit more unnecessary and surplus than it needed to. This as much as anything else is what made me drop it in my purge. I was enjoying it, but I just wasn’t enjoying it enough. And so that was it for me and NEW MUTANTS, although I did wind up reading another couple of random issues that my brother Ken bought during his year-long flirtation with the X-Men. All of this was before Bill Sienkiewicz’s transformative arrival that shifted the entire series in wild new directions and made it seem a lot more challenging and interesting. But it didn’t matter to me, I was off of it.
The thing that brought me back was the same thing that made me start picking up X-MEN again: peer pressure! By college, I had developed a circle of friends mostly in the nascent anime fan community, and a few of them and I would talk comics regularly, as we were all fans. And I couldn’t follow anything that they were saying about events transpiring in either X-MEN or NEW MUTANTS. It was on a trip into Manhattan during a convention, a Lunacon or some such, that my buddy Frank Strom insisted that I needed to pick up a copy of this NEW MUTANTS SPECIAL EDITION, with artwork by Arthur Adams. he and Mike Kanterovich had already sold me on LONGSHOT, so this was just more of the same. And it’s a pretty great comic, one of the best Marvel releases of this period. From here, I began following the regular NEW MUTANTS series again, starting at around issue #34 and piecing together what I had missed in-between.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
Both NM and X-Men were unbearable at this point. While I stuck it out X-Men I never warmed up to NH and was out when the Beyonder knocked them back down to zero during Secret Wars II, which was another level of unbearable.
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Both NM and X-Men were unbearable at this point. While I stuck it out on X-Men I never warmed up to NM and was out when the Beyonder knocked them back down to zero during Secret Wars II, which was another level of unbearable.
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Was the GN originally supposed to be the first three issues, or the first two? Per GCD, the page count on the story was 47 pages. The page counts on the stories in the first two series issues was 23 each. It seems it would be a lot easier to get Claremont & McLeod to do an extra page or two then to edit the existing story from 60+ pages down to 47. This is particularly likely given that the story was published as a GN because of deadline problems.
My recollection is that it was deadline problems, not greed, that caused The New Mutants to be the fourth GN. X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills had been delayed because of the need to replace Neal Adams as artist. As the deadline approached, Walt Simonson’s Star Slammers was supposed to be the fourth book, but he didn’t finish it in time. The printer and binder for these books required an advance reservation. (The same company handled the Batman: The Dark Knight serialization a few years later, and I gather the delays in the second and third issues was because DC chose to use the reservations for them for additional printings of the first one.) Marvel needed to send the printer something, and the New Mutants material was the best option.
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Oh, lord, how I hate Sinkewicz art. I liked New Mutants but I couldn’t take having my eyes bleed (I know, YMMV for man y people).
I’m not much of a fan of the Brood either.
The Demon Bear was such an odd plotline as it peters out right after turning those two supporting cast members into magic Native Americans. I wonder what Claremont had in mind?
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My early thoughts of the New Mutants was I wasn’t impressed by their powers ( After the original X-Men or when they added Polaris & Havok to the team or the Giant-Size X-Men#1 team — they just seemed unimpressive to me ) and considering that if I remember correctly Professor X wasn’t going on missions with the X-Men so he should have had a much bigger role in the New Mutants series. I mean the guy is one of the most powerful telepaths on Earth 616 so it isn’t like he couldn’t be with the New Mutants and telepathically help out the X-Men. Plus I hated that Sunspot couldn’t store solar energy in his body like Mar-Vell or Superman so that he could use his Super-Strength longer ( If my memory of his power limitation is correct ) — otherwise he was the only interesting early member whose abilities I liked. I was also disappointed that Arthur Adams wasn’t able to do ( unless it was didn’t want to do ) a monthly series, cause I liked his art.
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Yeah, there was a lengthy shakedown cruise with some missteps, most of them being Karma. Magma was an even bigger mess than Karma but that’s when the book started sparking for me. I did love Bill S’s arrival and Cypher and Warlock as well.
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I enjoyed the early New Mutants issues for much the same reasons Tom cites — the lower stakes, the (relatively) lighter tone. X-Men by this point had become really dark and nihilistic, just pure doom and gloom, and this was a nice break from that. The NM kids had their dark & troubled moments, but there was still some sense of hope and optimism in them. Also, the art was more to my taste than what Romita Jr. was up to in the sister title.
And then Bill Sienkiewicz came on board, and completely blew my socks off. I’d enjoyed his work on Moon Knight, but his New Mutants was on a whole other level, a real revelation. It also seemed to light a fire under Claremont, and the tension and stakes started ratcheting up. Which made for great drama, but started to erase some of the “teenage shenanigans” feeling I enjoyed. Eventually, the dark themes that had soured me on X-Men — the body horror, physical & mental torture, general sense of despair, etc. — took over New Mutants as well. Once Sienkiewicz was out, I pretty much bailed too.
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I wasn’t a huge fan of the early issues of the New Mutants, partly because I didn’t find the characters’ personalities or power sets particularly interesting. That all changed when I happened to stumble upon the Bill Sienkiewicz issue with the Demon Bear on the cover. Like the poster above, I bailed on the title after Bill Sienkiewicz left but I did pop back in during the Arthur Adams NM as well and even liked Vita Ayala and Rod Reis’ take on the team’s Krakoan era.
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I remember reading New Mutants as it was first coming out, and I found it to be pretty bland overall. I didn’t particularly like the characters and didn’t really like kid heroes at the time either. So I was a bit surprised to discover later that some people really like the title, especially when Sienkiewicz jumped on. It’s one of those runs I need to sit down and read all the way through someday.
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I found Sienkiewicz’s work on this feature a revelation. His last issues on MOON KNIGHT certainly pointed the way to what was seen here, but nothing could have prepared anyone for the graphic sophistication on display. That opening splash panel in #18, with Dani cringing underneath a blanket with a fabric pattern that transforms into the bear of her nightmares, is a stunning image. The nuance of his draftsmanship in the panels that followed put every other Marvel and DC artist of the time to shame. And then came the painted work in DAREDEVIL: LOVE AND WAR, ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN, and STRAY TOASTERS. Sienkiewicz adapted Bob Peak’s approach of tailoring the style to the subject in an illustration to tailoring the style to the larger scene, and then juxtaposing the various scene styles to a larger sequence. And he did it again and again to marvelous effect. As a visual stylist, he ranked every artist of his time.
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Now a minor motion picture!
I remember reading that at one point, X-Men writers were being told to watch and imitate the daytime soap opera Days of our Lives. Ever since I’ve wondered whether Wolverine or Gambit was the Patch Johnson expy.
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This might explain my love of both Days of Our Lives and X-Men during the 1980s. 😄
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I could never figure out why Marvel launched the New Mutants with a graphic novel. It didn’t fit in my comic bins, was awkward, and necessary to learn how they came together. I just now learned that they can combined the first three issues to for the GN. Now it makes more sense. Plus, I could never understand why they made a switch to Bill S artwork when they did. Given another 3 issues that were in that initial run, the change would have fallen about 18 issues in…about a year and half…and that makes more sense too.
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