While you’re waiting for The New Mutants movie to hit —
and the wait certainly has been long — why not check out the Marvel Comics stories where these mutants got their start? These are the seven most essentially New Mutants comic books you should check out to better get to know Wolfsbane, Magik, and the rest of the team.
The tense and scary trailers for Josh Boone’s The New Mutants trade the usual pop-whizz superhero movie aesthetic for a spooky slice of asylum-centric horror. Surprising? Maybe, but a little less so if you’re familiar with the history of the New Mutants, which represented one of Marvel’s first attempts to leverage the X-Men’s popularity into other titles. Like their more famous forebears, the New Mutants have undergone a variety of iterations over the years, so let’s get you caught up on who they are and why they all seem to be trapped in some creepy haunted jail.
X-Men: New Mutants Classic, Vol. 1
Back in 1982, comic book writer Chris Claremont had transformed Marvel Comics’ X-Men from a little-discussed collection of mutant teen C-Listers into one of Marvel’s premiere titles. The X-Men became a bonafide sensation, and Marvel wanted more. So Claremont recruited artist Bob McLeod and they created the New Mutants. By the 80s, the X-Men had grown to adulthood and were far removed from their original conception as a group of high schoolers under the tutelage of Charles Xavier. Claremont’s idea was to recapture the idea of Xavier’s mansion as a school, and he did it with a whole new group of students: the new mutants.
The early issues are mostly introductory, introducing the super class to each other and to readers. The waves of teen angst gave Claremont a chance to stretch his soapy, melodramatic muscles — an opportunity he was already famous for never turning down. The New Mutants would spend as much time brooding over love, loneliness and loss as they did going toe-to-toe with super threats, but that was the original idea of New Mutants: they weren’t superheroes, vigilantes or explorers. They were kids, dealing with changes and powers they couldn’t understand and being forced by these changes to grow up faster than they wanted. It was another one of Marvel’s ace allegories for adolescence, although it only hinted at what was to come.
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The New Mutants: The Demon Bear Saga
While New Mutants never became the same sort of a-list team of household names that the X-Men were, they’ve had an influence over the comic book medium that far outweighs their notoriety. Most of that influence is largely owing to this series: the awesomely titled Demon Bear saga, which lasted only three issues but sent shockwaves reverberating throughout the industry.
Beginning with issue #18, McLeod was replaced as the New Mutants artist by Bill Sienkiewicz, who made New Mutants one of the most visually bold series of the 80s. While capable of rendering the team with lovely, photorealistic care, Sienkiewicz preferred to push the boundaries of what was considered acceptable for the superhero comic book medium. He was prone to impressionistic flights of fancy, crafting fantastically detailed pieces of abstract-indebted art that artfully conveyed the characters’ interior lives. It allowed the artist to be in conversation with the writer in ways never before seen in mainstream superhero comics,
The story — which follows the New Mutants facing off against an evil, Pennywise-like force that has merely chosen the form of a demonic bear in an effort to kill off one of the team members — is rumored to big a major influence on the movie. There was no sign of a demon bear in the trailer so it’s anyone’s guess how accurate those rumors are, but the Demon Bear Saga is the furthest the New Mutants ever strayed into horror comic territory, so its influence was certainly implicit in the trailer, if nothing else.
New Mutants Vol. 1: Back to School (X-Men)
In 2003, husband and wife duo Christina Weir and Nunzio DeFilippis relaunched New Mutants with Keron Grant handing the artwork. The story focused on Dani Moonstar, a former member of the team from Claremont’s original team, returning to Xavier’s school as a teacher to help raise yet another generation of new students.
While Claremont’s run found the new team turning to superheroics against Xavier’s better judgment and later iterations turned them into something of a paramilitary squad, Weir, DeFilipps and Grant returned to the essential notion of the idea of Xavier’s school as a real school. They greatly expanded the class size, handed teaching duties over to various X-Men, and created other buildings on the “campus” to act as dormitories. There were dances, sleepovers, roommates and homework — and the occasional Danger Room session.
The delight of this series is in Moonstar’s trips across the U.S. and beyond to recruit new students. The creative team has a blast exploring the possibilities of mutant powers, which ranges from useful (one mutant can absorb the intellectual knowledge of anyone in his immediate vicinity) to tragic (another’s very touch causes physical decay) to whimsical (a girl who can control wind, carrying distant voices and sounds to her own ears). The appealing cartoonishness of Grant’s art really sold these new mutants as an exercise in comic book creativity, and leveraged their abilities into all manner of angst-ridden adolescent adventures.
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X-Men: New Mutants Classic, Vol. 4
Sienkiewicz’s run on the New Mutants was not long, but the Demon Bear wasn’t the only iconic storyline he jammed into his brief tenure. He finished his time on the series nearly as strong as he started, introducing one of the X-Men’s most fascinating nemesis: Legion. The son of Charles Xavier, a mutant of near immeasurable power and a mind badly wrecked by trauma.
Sienkiewicz depicted Legion in oddly disproportional lines, the disorienting frame of his body mirroring his warped persona. And if his physical form was a little off putting, Sienkiewicz relished the chance to draw the Astral Plane — a psychic landscape in which the subconscious takes shape. By creating a landscape in which the abstract is reality, Sienkiewicz was able to make his unique art stylings a genuine part of the characters’ adventures instead of just an impressionistic flourish. The result gave grand, staggering stakes to the psychic conflict between Xavier and Legion.
Legion’s own adventures debuted in his titular FX series, created by Noah Hawley. It’s an excellent series and although there are no known plans to bring the movie characters into the show or vice versa, Legion certainly dabbles in some of the psychological horror tropes that New Mutants looks to be doubling down on.
New Mutants, Vol. 1: Return of Legion
When New Mutants returned in 2009, it was at the hands of writer Zeb Wells and illustrator Diogenes Neves, who brought Claremont’s original team back together to face off against a new, far more damaged Legion, who they found trapped in a crate in rural Colorado. This series takes place after the events of M Day, in which a large portion of earth’s mutants had been de-powered — including Dani Moonstar. This leads to excellent tension points between Dani, who still wants to help her team in the field; and Cannonball, who judges her to be a liability.
Neves’ art is a treat, depicting a dynamic showdown rendered in bold, sweeping action while forsaking small character beats. This version of the New Mutants is more of an out-and-out superhero comic than most other iterations of the team, featuring all the standard costumes, codenames and smackdowns you’d expect from a standard X-Men spinoff, but Wells and Neves still found ways to make the book stand out. The New Mutants are under no delusions that they’re a-listers — frequently calling in more seasoned pros like Cyclops and Rogue when things get too heated — and their field chemistry is still gelling. They are, despite everything, still new, and gives their adventures a thrilling edge of uncertainty.
New Mutants Epic Collection: Curse of the Valkyries
Louise Simonson was only supposed to briefly take over for Chris Claremont while he got a few other X-titles off the ground, but she ended up writing the series for three years and, along with artist Bret Blevins, wholeheartedly embraced the elements of fantasy and mysticism that Claremont and Sienkiewicz had been flirting with. Under Simonson’s writing, the New Mutants embarked on a quest to Asgard, Hell, dark dimensions without any real name, and back again — tangling with all manner of evil Norse gods. It’s more indebted to J.R.R. Tolkien than it was to Jack Kirby, but there’s something thrilling about seeing a group of mutant-powered teenagers pitted against stakes so high they’re nigh eternal.
Blevins clearly relished depicting Asgard’s otherworldly spires and dangers, and the magical fantasy elements continue to be cranked to eleven by including the likes of Doctor Strange and Hela. But this series all featured the X-Terminators, a young group mutants who were acting as wards to yet another team of mutants calling themselves X-Factor. Confusing? A little, but it also grounded the whole series in the baseline premise of super-powered mutants. Just because they were facing off against ancient, magical threats doesn’t mean that they weren’t, at their core, still a group of teenagers sworn to protect a world that hated and feared them.
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New Mutants (1983-1991) #21
Finally, a single but essential issue in New Mutants history, written by Claremont and drawn by Sienkiewicz. The issue starts simple: with a slumber party at Xavier’s school, hosted by the girls. But things slowly grow complicated as the New Mutants various insecurities and neurosis manipulate the party in ways subtle and dramatic — and then things take a turn for the very weird with the introduction of Warlock, one of the most out-and-out bananas creations ever to be depicted on the comic book page. While deeply unsettling in his asymmetrical techno-organic appearance, Warlock would reveal himself to be a gentle soul and comedic foil in future episodes, though it goes without saying his first appearance is not without drama. No Claremont plotline was ever without drama.
This double-sized issue let Sienkiewicz and Claremont excel at their respective strengths in singular, memorable ways. The issue starts slow, allowing Sienkiewicz to exercise his skill in photorealistic art until the introduction of Warlock lets him cut loose with some of the bizarre visuals that made him famous. And a slumber party is a natural habitat for the sort of moody dialog Claremont relished, casting his characters down bottomless holes of teen angst and hormonal writhing before pulling them back out to meet the needs of the plot. It’s everything New Mutants set out to be — cautiously indebted to the X-Men while carving out a name for itself as something unique.
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Tyler Huckabee is really something else. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he writes about comics, music, film and TV. You can read every thought that comes into his head on Twitter or IGN.
