TRAPPED IN HELL WITH THE NEW MUTANTS: PART THREE: SOME MEDIOCRE COMICS
A Hilarious Cycle of Capsule Reviews
This will not be clear when this writing runs online, but at this point my progress languished. My reading slowed to a halt about five issues ahead of the two covered in this installment, and I totally lost motivation to write for over a week. There were a few reasons. On a pragmatic level, I had several other articles assigned to write for this lovely place that I needed to get a move on with and some big life changes were happening, so my priorities were shifted to different horizons. I think it is also reasonable to say, I am not alone in experiencing a drain on motivation in most spheres as social isolation and pandemic and all the associated awfulness of both lockdown and "reopening" has kept on grinding its gears. It’s been long enough for me to remember video games exist at this point, what can I say.
But all things considered I’ve been pretty productive with writing, I get a paragraph or two in almost daily, so why did New Mutants, my fun side project, the thing I didn’t have to put as much effort into, fall by the wayside? Well, truth be told, some of these comics just aren’t very interesting. Not a hot mess, just, unexciting. Filler. And when Claremont is bored, boy howdy does he still have a lot of sentences to chuck onto the page. It’s not that I have nothing to say about these comics, it’s just hard to remember why I would want to say anything about them. It isn’t like pulling teeth, more like picking a sock up off the ground and moving it to the hamper three days before laundry. But now it’s about time that I soldier on!
THE NEW MUTANTS Vol. 1 No. 44, October, 1986.
“Runaway!”
Stan Lee, Presenter [??? !! - Helen]
Chris Claremont, Writer
Jackson Guice, Penciler
Kyle Baker, Inker
Tom Orzechowski, Letterer
Elaine Lee, Colorist
Ann Nocenti, Editor
Jim Shooter, Editor in Chief
Chris Claremont & Bob McLeod, Creators
The New Mutants, Stars
Published by MARVEL COMICS GROUP
This is the issue where it dawns on me that maybe, just maybe, these comics are not all that good, and maybe I’m in for a rough ride. The issue itself isn’t actually especially bad - it’s a good self-contained story, well-paced, a lot of good "character moments" and "plot development," you know, all that stuff youtube critics think a good story is, the stuff that the 00’s Marvel brain trust would always promise a nostalgia-tinted return to before dropping yet another six-part overture to a crossover to be collected in a 20+ dollar GN sometime down the road. No, this is not a bad comic at all, it might even be a “good jumping-on point.” But it is definitely one of those comics where a big villain from a previous story shows up harasses the heroes a bit and is defeated very quickly, one in which the momentum and gravity of seeing that character again is meant to stand in for giving anyone a reason to really give a shit and the history and obvious urgency of the threat is more than enough of a short-hand for anything happening.
That said, the first page is excellent. Kyle Baker is back on inks, not really wowing as much throughout as in #42 - the comic looks fine, the inks are more than functional and make Guice’s compositions look a lot better than they might otherwise, just not stealing the show with expressionistic bravado like they did back there. But he pulls out all the stops on page one with the inks for an attractive scientist lady posing - arms on hips, facing front, head off to the side, a bit between character model guide and respectable older lady fashion magazine cover. Her clothes seem a bit tight but her lab coat is baggy in a way that she pulls off absolutely stunningly and her hair has nice volume and texture. Anyway directly above her a towering appendage of mechanical equipment is just about to crash down on her head. In the background, a wiry guy with crazy hair looks on and, behind him, the best dressed woman in the entire series rushes in panicked. Seriously, I want that sweater. Look at those matching socks. Her skirt looks good as hell. Her hair. Ugh. I really like the way Baker matches his thicker, action-y brush strokes on the figures with the precise, thinly mechanical, almost invisible lines on the background and the machinery. You can almost see the distraction from something instantly life-threatening. And the way that the small woman in the far back is drawn in with such thick, energetic strokes, really adds some weight to counterbalance the perspective and make the center figure look caught between these two women. Everything about the way this illustration is put together down to the direction that everyone is looking makes it instantly clear that the guy in the middle is the one who need to make a snap decision - NOW - if this lady is going to be okay. In another inker’s hands, maybe even another colorist’s hands, the pencils by Guice could have looked hackneyed and stiff - the front lady’s pose really makes no sense - but everyone is selling it so hard that the drama of the composition wins out. It’s a good page!
Sadly, I’m not here to write about pages, I’m here to write about comics, and this one? I dunno, kinda just not all that great? It’s the return of the New Mutants’ big arch-nemesis Legion, or at least, I’m assuming he’s a big deal because there’s absolutely no sense of what makes him such a serious threat within the comic because all the drama seems to hinge on the reader remembering this guy and exactly what a tough customer he is. (And, you know, I don’t…?) Legion’s an evil multiple personality of an innocent kid named David, let out when David uses his OP mutant abilities, causing him to hulk out...psychologically speaking. I guess there was a lot of discourse about this kind of genre character being problematic when M. Night Shayamalan’s Split was released in 2016, which I and many other brilliant adult children on “film twitter” take issue with because that movie is maybe...the most compassionate genre film about mental illness and trauma...ever? But that has nothing to do with Chris Claremont.
What I am SURE is problematic about Legion is his outfit. It’s hideous! Baggy pants, purple tunic thingie. Ugh! The look is actually great when Legion is not evil because he’s smaller and the fit’s loose and baggy, kinda charming, off-beat, but he gets roided up and tall when he turns into Legion and the fit is still just a little bit too loose to be tight (and therefore hot) and instead looks like baggy clothes that are too small on someone. It just looks awful! He looks like a clown! Why on Earth would I be afraid of this goofus! Please take a break from your rampage and get that wardrobe sorted out!
Single issue stories with a plot focused on an old antagonist returning in a different environment can be really fun, but this just isn’t, because Legion is hyped up as the most powerful from the get go so there’s no sense of scale and he’s so tough that for a resolution to occur by the end of the issue the big fight has to take place in big depopulated spaces and ends with a deus ex machina. It just feels deflated, with everyone immediately concerned and then the conflict totally done with 20 pages later. Whatever new insight into Legion gleaned from this issue is lost on the new reader, and imagine someone who loves the character would be disappointed by how little actually happens before he is contained once more. The b-plot of the issue is about the most generic you could think of for an X-Men comic, just another town where the people don’t trust mutants. I don’t know about you, but for me “mutant prejudice” was always kind of a hard sell, and here it’s just so bog standard that every beat feels meaningless.
The art, as I’ve said, is lovely but functional, occasionally pretty, occasionally ugly, but never so much so of either extreme as to feel spectacular, although on a second glance Elaine Lee’s colors are doing a lot of good work -- a sequence on page 18-19 has a very pleasing balance of yellow and purple tones. There are a lot of character moments that feel meaningful enough (probably more so if you are a little more invested in these characters than I was when I read this), but nothing feels like a significant moment in an ongoing soap opera, just enough that it’s recognizably these characters doing their things, effective but not involving. Everything is in place for a comic that could be really memorable or satisfying if there was just one thing, I don’t know, extra. It’s frustratingly thin, it’s frustratingly pat. It’s annoying, but it’s too competent to fill the niche of being irritating.
--
I hit another gap here, of two issues this time. Much calamity has ensued, but then again, when hasn’t it?
--
THE NEW MUTANTS Vol. 1 No. 47, January, 1987.
STAN LEE PRESENTS “My Heart for the Highlands”
Chris Claremont, Writer
Jackson Guice, Penciler
Kyle Baker, Inker
Lois Buhalis, Letterer
Glynis Oliver, Colorist
Ann Nocenti, Editor
Jim Shooter, Editor in Chief
Chris Claremont & Bob McLeod, Creators
The New Mutants, Stars
Published by MARVEL COMICS GROUP
First of all, very exciting Windsor-Smith cover on this one – not the best of these covers of his and even from a composition standpoint I’m not sure it’s especially great work on his part (what is going on with Cannonball’s body here, exactly?) but the relative lack of action dynamism in the New Mutants’ bodies as depicted with his elegant line and hatching paired with the sheer BULK of this big monster guy really sells the intensity and danger of the combat, their smallness before this behemoth, with only a very little bit of information, a nice variation on a standard cover image hook. The background gradient from red to purple is really wonderful as well and makes the lower lefthand corner of the illustration where the rocks forming the ground are inexplicably rising while three of our heroes are running and stumbling much more exciting than it would be otherwise. So much tension is added to the whole composition from a combination of little flourishes and details in a corner that the eye isn’t even drawn to immediately. We should never lose sight of what a gift to the medium Windsor-Smith is, truly one of the all-time greats.
Anyway, the comic itself? Eeeeeeeeeeh. We start off in an interesting place, with our heroes trapped in the limbo realm that Ilyana can access, really one of the more interesting ideas in the series and it was pretty exciting to see what this place looks like. But what it looks like is, uh, in this issue at least, pretty much one of those anonymous grassy plains where Goku goes to have a fight in DBZ? Gotta say, it’s a little underwhelming. And for the most part the demons populating limbo are all kinda cartoonish Gargoyles the animated series-looking fellas – having read a bit of the Inferno crossover recently I know now that there’s a lot of demented mileage to be gotten out of these goofball gremlins but honestly it wasn’t doing much for me here. What really stood out for me in this sequence were Glynis Oliver’s colors – increasingly conspicuous how much heavy lifting she and other colorists are doing on this title. Again the palette is very gentle and light, but the sky is rendered in reds, purples and the occasional pink that very casually sell that this place is more or less hell. It’s distinctive and disquieting without being especially aggressive, really defines limbo as a location.
What’s annoying about this issue is that the latter half of it is a really uninteresting time travel story where the New Mutants end up in medieval Scotland. It’s kind of enjoyable to read the kids having a PG-rated fight with some knights and hang out with a nonplussed Robert the Bruce, but this really doesn’t go much further than like a Saturday morning cartoon where the Transformers meet Alexander the Great or something like that, barely a skin deep history lesson, a few dumb jokes where the X-Men are now low-key part of Western history, really generic and squeaky clean setting. Padding! Nothing lived in but also nothing especially fetishistic, which would have been a little fun and clearly something in Claremont’s wheelhouse – like all his other kinks I know this historical Europe fixation runs weird and deep for our man, but it just is not here. Maybe I’d have been more entertained if I was Scottish? And this could get me some stinkeyes because I’m literally finishing a Masters in medieval studies right now, but Renfaire stuff really never grabs my attention, the whole aesthetic is a turnoff for me mostly. Just hard to care.
Kyle Baker once again makes Jackson Guice’s pencils look like a million bucks, but again that lovely gestural naturalism doesn’t really have much to act aside from looking good because the drama of the compositions and scenario don’t really offer enough to go ham on. Really polished work though, relaxing and satisfying to look at, and with this being the last Baker inked issue in my stack I know that I am going to miss him.
What really disappoints is the big demon version of Warlock from the cover, who bellows forth on a splash page. Warlock’s whole deal is just a Bill Sienkiewicz wet dream of a design, all spindly tendrils and scribbles, ink splashes wires and bugged out eyes. As a solo artist this is very much Baker’s wheelhouse – his line is jittery and caffeinated, his figures cartoony in the truest sense of the term. A big monster version of Warlock would seem like a good place for Baker to really go ham for like an inker version of one of those cool sakuga cuts anime fans love to compile of their favorite key animator then set to pop punk on YouTube or whatever. Instead, it’s just, kinda flat? Way too much of a mech and not enough of a techno-demon, which is really a letdown compared to the BWS cover which Baker could EASILY have outdone knowing how his chops from roughly the same time were being deployed in The Shadow and some of Damage Control. Too close to the pencils probably – which are fine! It’s not a bad drawing! The inks are just too good everywhere else! Not to mention Baker does actually let himself go a bit in a few drawings of regular Warlock which makes the big monster stuff even more disappointing! This comic is forgettable, which isn’t that big a deal really, but thirty-odd years later, it might be all that matters.
...
I began writing this feature at the beginning of quarantine, with a stack of 28 New Mutants comics. I intended to write about all of them. Now, with the economy reopening despite no clear end to the COVID-19 pandemic in sight and the New Mutants movie (which very occasionally I am reminded exists) finally trundling out into theaters despite health risks, I managed to write about six of these over the course of nearly 9000 words. What have I learned from this? Firstly, I've learned that calling 500+ words about 24 page comic books "capsule reviews" is possibly an understatement. I really need to think more deeply about what I am getting myself into when I come up with "fun projects." Secondly, Chris Claremont is an exhausting writer. These comics have a great deal going on in them, but the headier ideas are hampered by ornate wordiness, fuzzy politics, and numbing repetition that becomes painfully apparent reading these comics in a stack rather than their intended form as a monthly serial. The Louise Simonson run (which hopefully Tucker will allow me to write about at a later date after this headache, it's so awesome) has much that is questionable, but her writing is much more playful and I'm simply much more compelled as a reader to follow her melodramas than Claremont's, although (because?) Simonson often pushes her stories into gleefully vapid total camp.
But more the shortcomings of these comics are clearly not Claremont's alone -- the 80s Marvel turn towards the "universe" as an interconnected network of cross-promotion muddles the focus of these comics substantially. In the issues that follow the one this feature ends with, the New Mutants become practically a Greek chorus in their own title to storylines in other X-titles, the Days of Future Past storyline, and a spin-off miniseries called Fallen Angels. I don't have those comics, I don't really know how good they are or what happens in them, but would surely be a drag to read these issues of New Mutants regardless, stories about characters reacting to things that happened in another title in ways that you would expect them to. Claremont's final months on the title he co-created are neither a swan song nor funeral dirge, but elevator muzak accompanying a boot out the door.
But all that said, 80s Marvel comics are treasures just as much as they are trash, and judging by the the previous piles of verbiage you, dear reader, had to wade through to reach this terminus, it should be clear that I got a lot out of these comics that I claim to be a bit underwhelmed by overall. A major point in favor of Claremont's pretentiousness is that there's never not a lot going on, whether it's a self-contradictory allegory or semi-erudite sexual repression. These are the paradoxes that I like about superhero comics of the eighties especially, the drive to humanize something ridiculous and childish, to politicize and intellectualize what is so blatantly a fetish. And the real joy of course is the art. The good, the great, the merely competent -- there's something about the work of inkers and "finishing" artists in this era of American comics especially that really appeals to me, when there's something even just a little bit more stylistically vivid than anticipated. And sometimes, you get something dizzyingly exceptional like the Wilshire + Sienkiewicz Secret Wars tie-in issues, where the gulf between the dark, strange, artistically driven content and the drab intended context of cross-promotional filler feels transgressive and exciting. Are these the best comics to go to for this incredible energy? Not really. But hey, any port in a storm. Cheers to the fifty cent bin.
Did I ever figure out who The New Mutants are and what they do? Kinda. Sorta. Not really. I've already forgotten most of their names. Ilyana is the coolest one and I'm sure everyone agrees with this. If nothing else, I am more certain than ever that they are all gay.
