New Mutants Forever

Chris Claremont, Al Rio & Bob McLeod
New Mutants Forever (2011)
Chris Claremont had already returned to the X-Men in 2009 with X-Men Forever, a title continuing the story from which he'd been unceremoniously unplugged back in 1991 when it was discovered that some readers disliked issues in which the X-Men girls go shopping and felt there weren't sufficient stabbings. Here he does the same with the New Mutants, although there are different circumstances to the end of his original run, notably that - so far as I understand it - he simply didn't have time to keep it going given everything else he was writing at the time, and handed the keys over to Louise Simonson who was at least on his side. I'm not sure this one really needed to happen by quite the same terms as X-Men Forever, but it's mostly fun with Claremont playing to his not inconsiderable strengths.

I can see the logic of utilising the trusty crayon of Bob McLeod given his status as co-creator, but I have to admit he's never been one of my favourites; and Al Rio's art looks very much as though he attended the Bob McLeod school. There's nothing wrong with McLeod's art and, to paraphrase what somebody or other once said of Tony Hadley, that's what is wrong with his art. It's very clean and clear, and it gets the job done, but it gets the job done with a limited range of variant facial expressions and not much you could describe as dynamic. Still, the magic of Claremont is that he can worm even the most preposterous shite into your subconscious and have you swear you've been watching Citizen Kane, sidestepping the problem of clichés - of which one should probably expect a number given that New Mutants is one of those caped titles - by splashing them about regardless with just enough spin and distraction to get away with it.

Here we have the New Mutants battling Red Skull and his Nazi pals in a version of Rome which has somehow survived the last twenty thousand years in isolation in the Amazon basin. Red Skull turns Cypher into a boggle-eyed version of himself who stands around in just his y-fronts agonising about this most ludicrous of transformations; and even the swastikas resemble something from the Beano; but not once does it inspire the question of why anyone bothered. It's no Demon Bear Saga, but New Mutants was a great book and this collection effortlessly reminds us why.