By: Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning (writers), Leandro Fernandez (art), Andres Mossa (colors), Joe Caramagna (letters), Sebastian Girner (assistant editor) & Nick Lowe (editor)
The Story: A new creative team takes over New Mutants and sets them on a new direction.
What’s Good: It’s just so nice to see the New Mutants with something to do. The action here seems to pick up shortly after the New Mutants return from Limbo, thankfully without mentioning Age of X. So, we find Cannonball kinda out of action due to injuries and loss of confidence and Karma still reeling from the loss of her leg in Second Coming last summer, not to mention Illyana isn’t going to be trusted by Cyclops for a good long time after the end of the Limbo mission. In the face of all that, is there even a need for the New Mutants team? Who’s left?
We open with a fun and well executed opening showing the New Mutants + Wolverine, Kitty and Colossus smashing up a car factory where a piece of Nimrod (from Second Coming) seems to have taken refuge and has been corrupting the machines. Once they get back to Utopia, Dani Moonstar gets summoned to Cyclops office and while she expects to hear that the New Mutants are being scrapped, he instead puts her in charge of the team and gives the team a mission: To mop up after the X-Men’s big events by taking care of things like the “piece of Nimrod”.
And, you know what…. That’s not a bad mission for these guys. It makes sense that there will be loose ends after any big X-story and the New Mutants are an appropriate team to take care of those problems. One of my problems with the New Mutants is that the writers are always devising threats for them that are too damn big. If the threats were really that big, they would be taken care of by the X-Men, Avengers, FF, etc… Not by a bunch of B-list mutants. So, with this mission, Abnett and Lanning can just riff on whatever X-story has just wrapped up and give us a new and cool angle. Furthermore, they can probably pick and choose which X-stories to play with and just skip the bad ones. For example, I’d be surprised if they fiddle with that whole Lobe story from Uncanny X-men. Why do that when the much more enticing Curse of the Mutants or Apocalypse stories are laying there?
Fernandez gives us some pretty solid art. The story telling is mostly good (although he doesn’t establish the scene in a few places) and you can always tell what’s going on. It isn’t A+ art, but there isn’t a whole lot to complain about. I’d be happy with this art for the whole of the Abnett and Lanning run.
What’s Not So Good: A lot of the issue is focused on Cyclops dressing down Illyana and that part is pretty boring. It’s just several pages of talking heads batting back and forth where Cyclops is telling her how he can’t trust her and she is saying how the Limbo incident won’t happen again now that she’s solved the problem. The issue with this sequence is that there isn’t any real doubt over how it’ll play out: Cyclops has gone to all the trouble of sending all of her allies off to deal with Nimrod, so there is little doubt that he is going to “ground” her. If that’s the case, why make us read several pages of talking heads?
And, why does it have to be Wolverine again? I wholly approve of Colossus having a role with the New Mutants, but I really need a break from Wolverine.
Conclusion: A pretty promising start to a new direction for the New Mutants. Abnett and Lanning can do a lot of good stuff just showing alternate takes on the good X-stories. Hopefully they’ll get to tell them and not be pulled into constant crossovers the way this series has been for the last year or so.
Grade: B
-Dean Stell
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