Thoughts

FINALLY! After what must have endless petitions, a massive letter writing campaign and protests at conventions, Marvel bow to the inevitable and bring back… AXE!

Snark aside, this is another neat little issue detailing what happened to the members of the team that weren’t facing Legion. Namely Sunport and Magma get kidnapped by an underground murderous Gladiator tournament. Which all involves lots of fighting until Magento turns up as Mageus Ex Machina and stops it all. Just in time to head off with the kids for Secret Wars II

It’s a lightweight story, andthere really isn’t much by way of a tightly constructed plot. But its slightly meandering structure (there’s even a sidestep to Lily Cheney’s Dyson Sphere at one point) serves to give all the characters enough spotlight to be interesting.

The nature of the story is clearly not really written to let the artist be his usual crazy, inventive self but he handles the conventional story pretty well, and adds a real visual dynamism to set pieces. Cannonball’s failed attempt to rescue his friends is a real set piece of action in comics. Also its striking how we have another detour (so many detours – told you this issue meandered) to limbo and its a very restrained limbo given where Sienkiewicz could have gone with it.

Fun Panel

One of many great Cannonball action panels in this comic!

Any Googling

Half through the issue Dazzler returns – looking suitable revamped for the eighties. This serves to tie in the book with a recent mini-series.

Now – I had never read this series, and indeed its reputation from what I can tell is not good. It’s not reprinted in the X-men (or New Mutants or even X-factor) collections that I’m basing this blog on. So I oringally didn’t have it on my planned list.

However when I got to this stage, I decided to try and have a read anyway. Maybe it’ll be so bad I could make fun of it? Or at least have a decent stab at assessing what went wrong and why I’ve never read good things about it.

And you know what – I enjoyed it a lot. It’s not a classic but it certainly doesn’t deserve its reputation. It’s a fun little story that fills its four issues with a coherent adventure tale, which they don’t always do (Nightcrawler limited series, I’m looking at YOU here!)

It’s sort of a tale about Hollywood, and about the eighties showbiz decadence. So there’s the usual in-panel cameos and in-jokes about the place. The sheer ruthlessness of the place is satirised in the gladiatorial arena that ends up providing the villains for this New Mutants issue and it bumbles along making obvious comments about how folk in the place are filthy liars.

BUT it has a virtue of being unpredictable in its overall plot. Doom is involved, mad producers are involved. As ever with Dazzler the show business its depicting seems weirdly dated, but I do think there’s a subtle difference in Alison Blair’s depiction over the course of the four issues. In the first, she still has the air of a character in a fifties girl comic. But by the end she’s a lot closer to how she appears in New Mutants 29.

And it gets bonus points from me just be being an engaging romance between the two that ends with them not deciding to get together. A decision that doesn’t invalidate the book, but is a nice rejection of cliche while following on from where both characters are in the book. I know its a simple thing, but it gets a lot of plus points from me just by avoiding the obvious Hollywood-friendly ending.

It was a Product of its Time

This might just be me writing in 2024, but references to Magnum in New Mutants will never not be funny.

Mutant Mailbag Mayhem