Posts Tagged ‘ New Mutants ’

Look, you know me. I’m a sucker for a good crossover and all that it entails including tie-ins. Tie-in issues that happen between the panels of the ‘main event’, or tie-ins that barely qualify to have the trade dress on the cover (AKA red sky tie-ins) – they’re all okay by me. Hell, the much-reviled Secret Wars II got me into Marvel Comics, and I’ve picked up the Inferno Omnibus and the Inferno Crossovers Omnibus in spite of having all the original issues because I love the story so much, and the fact that it reached out and touched so much of the Marvel Universe.

So picking up this was a no-brainer, wasn’t it? I hadn’t picked up the original Dark Wolverine tie-in issues and despite being irritated at Marvel’s shrinking trade sizes, I decided to pick this up – especially as I got it 50% off through Midtown Comics.

Collecting Dark Wolverine #82-84 (a whole three issues!), New Mutants #11 (also collected in the Siege: Thor trade, and New Mutants Vol 2) and the Siege: Storming Asgard – Heroes and Villains one-shot (which I’ll get to later), the book clocks in at a lightweight 128 pages.

Even so, 128 pages of good comics is 128 pages of good comics so for $10 I was willing to give it a shot.

Unfortunately, the main event here – the Dark Wolverine issues – can’t remotely be described as ‘good comics’. Daken – the son of Wolverine, for those not in the know – was introduced in Daniel Way’s Wolverine: Origins series before graduating to a starring role in the Dark Avengers and taking over one of his father’s other ongoing series. A bisexual, amoral, scheming, pheromone-emitting killer, Daken attracts the attention of virtually everyone he comes into contact with and always has a hidden agenda – even while he’s working alongside Norman Osborn’s Avengers.

In the three issues presented here, he heads to Asgard along with the rest of the team as Osborn – falling apart – has decided to take the battle to the Norse gods at Loki’s urging. Once there, Daken attracts the attentions of the Fates who consider him vitally important and go about showing him what consequences his decisions have.

You realize at the end of the first issue when Daken kills Norman Osborn what consequences these decisions will have for the reader: none. Everything that Daken does ends badly when he chooses to follow his instincts, so the Fates keep rewinding and giving him the opportunity to make different choices.

That’s right, it’s the comic-book equivalent of ‘and it was all a dream!‘.

Not only that, but this happens in every single issue. I counted three resets at the hands of the Fates, and each time Daken snarls a bit and begrudgingly chooses another path. The art is passable, the dialog readable, but the story here is so repetitive and pointless that it gives crossovers a bad name, because quite simply: nothing happens.

At the end of the three issues, we’re not far off where we started: Daken is in Asgard doing Osborn’s dirty work. I’ll say it again: nothing of note has really happened and – worse – it’s been boring while that nothing has not been happening. These are three dull, dull, dull issues.

Now I grant you, it’s possible – possible – that if I were a regular reader of Daken’s own book I might find the issues enjoyable, and see that he’s a changed man following the Fates’ intervention but – and this is crucial – I’m not a regular reader. And if these are any example of what I can expect when I pick it up, I never will be.

Unforgivably bad.

As far as the additional material goes, New Mutants #11 is good enough but available elsewhere, and the handbook-style issue makes the tragic error of not containing any handbook-style information. Call me old-fashioned, but when I read a handbook I like to read up on the past of a character or team, not get fictional characters’ opinions of them.

Avoid this trade. Avoid it like the plague.

Siege: X-Men is available on Amazon and elsewhere but I wouldn’t get it if I were you…

I may be following along in trades these days – but damn does this cover rock.

…bitching about, of all things, trade paperback collections. Well, hardcover collections as well, but it’s the same thing. There’s also blatant linkage to my Amazon store, but you don’t have to click on anything, do you?

As you may have noted, I’ve been dropping books left, right and center recently. Some I’m done with completely, some I’ll be picking up in trades.

I’ve now dropped pretty much all the X-books – but there are some that I’m going to pick up in trades; X-Force and New Mutants being two of them. I dropped both these titles (and X-Men Legacy) just before Necrosha hit them, figuring that there’d be a nice big juicy hardcover at some point – and there is!

Look, here it is -

It contains the X-Necrosha one-shot, X-Force #21-25, New Mutants #6-8 and X-Men Legacy #231-233. Maybe the Gathering one-shot, but it isn’t listed on the website. Whatever, that’s what I was looking for – great!

Only…wait, no. Not so great.

Because as I also want to pick up X-Force and New Mutants in trades from now on, I’m going to have to do some double purchases.

Take New Mutants. The first arc and its epilogue issue – #1-5 – are collected in one handy volume:

The big X-Necrosha hc picks up #6-8, so that works. The thing is, the second volume of New Mutants picks up #6-11 plus the New Mutants story from the X-Necrosha one-shot:

Which means #6-8 are printed in two collections. Not the end of the world, but irritating.

But wait, it gets better. I also liked the idea of picking up the Siege: Dark Wolverine/New Mutants collection…

…mainly for the Daken story – but that book also contains New Mutants #11. Of course, I could pick up the Siege trade and the X-Necrosha trade and forget about the New Mutants trade – but then that leaves me missing #9-10 of the series. Aaaargh.

Then there’s X-Force. I’m sticking my issues on ebay and plunking for the nice big collection of the first eleven issues:

Nice. But now I’m thinking about the next few issues. It’s only a few issues until Messiah War – so maybe I’ll just pick up that trade and assume that the next big hardcover collection of the book will skip on by that, the way that the individual collections of the book did. That makes sense, right?

But…the collected X-Force Necrosha trade includes #20, a book conspicuously absent from that big X-Necrosha collection, so what if the next hardcover X-Force will skip that? You can drive yourself crazy with this!

See, Marvel, I want to buy your trades. I want to buy the nice big hardcover collections of storylines you put out – but you just don’t make it easy, do you?

If you swing by the blog semi-regularly, you may recall me saying on Monday that I was dropping New Mutants in single issues as part of the purge in spite of the fact that I love these characters and have been waiting for this book for literally years.

And I did. This week, I didn’t pick up New Mutants #6 which throws the team into Necrosha, which I can pretty safely assume will be a pretty hardcover one day.

Then I went over to the ever-awesome Scans Daily this morning and oh my god, it looks like the issue fit right into the unusually brutal week in comics.

It looks like undead Doug Ramsey (hey, anyone know what happened to Douglock?) has been mixing it up with the team until Warlock (yay!) comes to see what’s what and help his old self/friend out…

…wait, what? A trojan? Look out, Warlock!

Are those tears in Doug’s eyes? Could there be mercy?

Apparently not.

HE JUST TORE WARLOCK’S HEAD OFF!!!!!

AAAHHHHH!!!

I know they’ve both been dead before, but still, this actually hurts a little.

Happier times…

Posted via web from Comic By Comic’s Wonderous Posterous!

I shit you not.

Via Rob Liefeld’s Twitter.

Presumed inspiration:

When I was a kid, New Mutants was my one of favoriet books. From the Larry Boyd issue (still one of my all-time favorites), through the Mutant Massacre, to the time-travelling adventure where Sunspot was revealed to have betrayed everybody and beyond to the Fall of the Mutants and the death of Cypher, the book just appealed to me in a way that the X-Men didn’t.

Part of it was probably that most of the characters were around my age, but it was also that they didn’t spend every issue in uniform fighting. They went out. They had a rivalry with Emma Frost’s students. They screwed up – but they learned, and they evolved.

That’s why when I saw this ad (missed it last week!), I got a little smile on my face. I mean, from where I’m standing, I’d say that certainly looks like Magma, Cannonball, Sunspot, Magik, Wolfsbane and Dani…

Is there a new New Mutants book in the works? Or would that just be Mutants now?

I confess to a fondness for J Scott Campbell’s work – and this variant for the upcoming X-Infernus #1 is all kinds of great.

And look! S’ym! Gotta love S’ym!

Offered without comment on CB Cebuslki’s blog…

Does this mean there’s a new Magik mini in the offing that will finally bring her back to the fold?

Or is it just another pointless tease of an appearance that ultimately doesn’t leave the character available for use going forward?

I have to hope for the former…

CB Cebulski has announced that in X-Men: Divided We Stand #2, there will be a tale about a personal favorite of mine…

Add in the Young X-Men book, Cannonball’s evolution in the first issue of Divided We Stand,Warlock’s return in the pages of Nova and Annihilation Conquest and Warpath’s recent return to the X-books and you have one very happy old New Mutants fan right now…

Just a brief stroll down memory lane.