Thoughts

We’re back with the New Mutants, and from the opening panel it’s clear that everything has changed. The conventional art of recent issues is gone. So to has the low level storytelling that seemed designed to force the artists to reign in their stylish flourishes.

Bill Sienkiewicz’s art is still exciting to enjoy today, but its incredible to think how audiences at the time would have taken to it. The X-titles were already a Big Deal in the world of comics. And suddenly Marvel have decided to turn one of them over to images like this:

I do think, though, that thr art sometimes becomes to scratchy for my taste. The inking seems so incredibly heavy that it makes everything seem so much darker than it needs to be. There are beautiful moments of colour that help offset that, but its a mix that still hasn’t been perfected yet. I’m not sure it ever is, although it’ll be interesting reading this to find out.

Alongside the fact that the art can sometimes get difficult to follow, Claremont also isn’t at his surefootedness when it comes to plotting. It’s really hard to grasp some of the key story developments in this issue – and a couple of times it felt like I was the one who had missed something. This is definitely true in relation to the Demon Bear. We’ve had references to a bear that killed Dani’s parents, hints at a bad feeling that something is coming and in the final panel of the last issue an amusingly cuddly rendition of the thing – but the actual fundamental nature of the antagonist, and why it is coming for Dani, hasn’t really been explained.

Of course, good horror can thrive on mystery but all too often it feels like the characters know far more about why this threat is so important and why it is dangerous than we do, which engenders a feeling that we’ve just missed something. And when you get that feeling from a story and the art becomes hard to follow the issue is exacerbated.

Still, this does feel like the shot in the arm the title needed. It was never going to succeed on Team America guest appearances alone!

Fun Panel

Sienkiewicz’s art is rightly famous for its stylistic invention – but he’s also capable of really quite beautiful, simple moments. I love Illyana in this panel – wonderfully expressive and striking.

Any Googling

I mentioned above the problem with Claremont’s storytelling here and I can think of no better example of this than the arrival in present day Marvel of Rachel Summers.

Even with the benefit of having read so many of these titles before, I found myself perplexed by all this. I genuinely felt that I might have missed a chapter somewhere – skipped an important issue as to why she was here. Indeed, I even when to Google to assuage myself that I had not skipped or misread an issue.

It’s such a bizarrely handled introduction for the character who is going to become an important player in X-men stories over the next few years. Still, I do think she’s quite an interesting character, so its fun to see her turn up.