New Mutants Pin-Ups

[sandoz_iscariot]

Reposted from SD 1.0, a series of beautiful Bill Sienkiewicz character pin-ups from his New Mutants run.

Comments

Bill Sienkiewicz is awesome.

[proteus_lives]

I still have these somewhere. Sigh...memories, I loved the original run of the New Mutants so much.

[iskander]

If Bill Sienkiewicz drew this book again I would toally pick this up. That Sunspot pinup is right out of "International Male"

[nezchan]

Never cared for Sienkiewicz at all, unfortunately. I just thought his stuff looked like a muddy mess.

Although he did the definitive Warlock, so that makes up for all the rest.

[sandoz_iscariot]

I can see where the "muddy" complaint comes from; I think 80s era printing wasn't really ready for Sienkiewicz. It looks a lot clearer in modern reprints.

[silverzeo]

AHHH! 80's Pop Art! It Burns!

[cleome45]

Though I still like the art from this era, I count the whole Lila Cheney/Sam routine as my personal point-at-which-the-wheels-came-off.

[crabby_lioness]

I could totally see it happening. Lila isn't her stage personna, and Sam isn't as simple as he lets people think he is.

[cleome45]

It's not about his "simplicity," or lack of same. I just usually don't like my "joe average" heroes paired up with globe/galaxy-hopping rock stars.

[shrug]

[crabby_lioness]

Sam, average? Sam's origin is that he had to grow up fast to take care of his large family. He's unusally mature and responsible for a boy of his age. There's nothing average about Sam.

And I wasn't aware that galaxy-hopping rock stars were so common.

[cleome45]

But having to step up to the plate was likely very common where Sam was from. It's common in a lot of poor and working poor families.

And that's exactly my point: I don't mind seeing Tony Stark step out with a rock star. I don't even mind seeing a teenage kid idolize a beautiful woman whose a rock star. But having her suddenly treat this ordinary-looking kid whose still (in one way or another) going to work hard his whole life? [rolleyes]

Yeah, these are superhero comics and all kinds of goofy, crazy things happen that we just accept as normal. But each and every one of us has a personal, "Oh, C'MON!" moment and that happened to be a big one for me. "Not only do I idolize this beautiful, famous, successful woman, but she's crazy about ME, too!" Feh.

[crabby_lioness]

Think this through.

While a poor kid having to step up to the plate was common back in Kentucky (and it's more common in myth than in actuality), Sam hadn't been in Kentucky for a long time. He'd been living among upper-class and less mature Yankee teenagers. He's used to having to work hard and be responsible, and they're not. He's the fish out of water in that crowd.

Lila was kidnapped as a child and taken as a slave off-planet. She's been forced to work for herself from a young age. She escaped, made her way back to Earth, and started a rock music career, which is a lot more work than most people realize. She's used to having to work hard and be responsible in a way her contemporaries can't even imagine.

Honestly, who else could they relate to? There's no one else around them their age who's had that much work and repsonsibility thrust on their young shoulders.

[cleome45]

Wait! Sam had been away from home "a long time"? How long had he been away from home in comic book-time, as opposed to real time (as readers experience it)? Six months, maybe?

Like I said, everyone's got their own breaking point, and that was one of mine. It's perfectly all right if yours is completely different. Honest.

[crabby_lioness]

Long enough to feel out of place. For some people that's six months, for others it's six seconds.

There's a common misconception that being a rock singer is not a lot of work. It's actually quite grueling. That's the reason for all the perks in the first place, most of which are actually supplied on credit that has to be paid back later.

[cleome45]

Lila is a star and a celebrity, regardless of how much harder she supposedly works than other people. If Lila had been a street busker, I don't think my WTF?-alarm would have been tripped quite so strongly. But... whatever.

[crabby_lioness]

She's not a star and a celebrity regardless of how much harder she worked. She's a star and a celebrity because of haw much harder she worked. She's not Paris Hilton, for goodness sake. Nobody handed her fame and fortune on a silver platter.

[cleome45]

Uh, plenty of people work hard their whole lives, have tremendous talent and yet they don't become stars.

Can we put this to bed now? Especially since it's not the personality of Lila I'm objecting to. In an entirely different sort of story with different surroundings, I'd probably like her just fine.

[crabby_lioness]

So your problem isn't that Lila worked her ass off. Your problem is that Lila worked her ass off and, against all odds, succeeded.

[cleome45]

[headdesk]

No, my problem is that I didn't want to read about a blue-collar kid with superpowers dating a interplanetary rock star.

[crabby_lioness]

An rock star -- who was also a kid from a blue-collar background with superpowers. We're not talking about Paris Hilton, or Miley Cyrus, or any other "star" who was a managed and cossetted property. We're talking about Joan Jett, whom no one believed in, who had to print her own records and sell them out of the trunk of her car to get her start. That's someone who could only relate to a guy like Sam.

[cleome45]

I think you need to go back and just read my first comment on the pairing again. Because from here on in it's just going in circles.

[halloweenjack]

I don't think that Sam was supposed to be average-as-in-mediocre so much as he was supposed to be the character that most readers would be able to relate to, in other words, he didn't have the relatively exotic or tragic background of all of the other New Mutants, and had a power that was difficult to control and of limited utility (at least at first). And then he hooks up with interstellar thief/rock star Joan Jett wannabe. And it wasn't even the first time that Claremont tried, and failed, to create a character of that kind and ended up Mary-Sueing them; Kitty Pryde was supposed to be the Jane Average character in the X-Men, and then somehow she went from being an honors student to being able to talk science with Reed Richards.

[crabby_lioness]

A 17yo orphan trying to support a family of 9 in a coal mine isn't a tragic background? That sounds like the very definition of a tragic background to me.

[halloweenjack]

"Tragic" in the context of the original line-up of the New Mutants, where one of them was raped repeatedly by pirates while escaping from Vietnam and another had her parents eaten by a demon bear.

[crabby_lioness]

I was there, I remember. Sam was the American trajedy to go along with all the foreign/ethnic tragedies. Kitty and Doug were the American non-tragedies.

[okkult3000]

That happened within the first few issues. The first annual, at most. That's such a small amount of New Mutants that you may as well say you don't like the series.

[cleome45]

Uh, weren't there a whole year's worth of issues before that annual? Am I missing something?

[crabby_lioness]

Those were good days.

[selke]

Yay, Catseye! I love her from what I've seen. It's a shame my first experience with the Hellions was when they, y'know, died.

[salamangkiero]

The Demon Bear Saga is still the early high-point of the series, for me. It left me nightmares, knowing that somehow, the clost monsters can be real.

[ar_feiniel]

Had fantastic art too.

[suzene]

I remember these! The Catseye and Wolfsbane portraits are still my faves. Those two really needed more screentime together.

[icon_uk]

As I thought at the time, like the New Mutants and Hellions though I do, LILA CHENEY got a freaking pinup and Doug didn't? Bad form guys, bad form...

[sandoz_iscariot]

I can't recall if Doug was a full member of the team (rather than just Kitty's friend) at the time these came out.

Poor Karma didn't get one either.

[icon_uk]

Doug and Warlock essentially became part of the team in the same issue (though Doug didn't get a costume until a little later), which instantly gives him more entitlement than Lila.

And Karma was believed dead at this point in time, they wouldn't find she was alive for a while longer.

[jkcarrier]

You know, Claremont, the reason Sienkiewicz uses all that negative space is to make the design better, not so you can fill it up with acres of purple prose. Yeesh.

[kiplingkat]

These are character profiles, of course they are going to talk about the characters in detail in ways he can't in the comic.

[jkcarrier]

Except he did the same thing on the comics pages too. ;)

[kingrockwell]

Lovely!

[freddie_mac]

Sienkiewicz's art started right around the Demon Bear storyline (#18, IIRC), and I don't think I would have been as receptive if he'd started off with a "normal" story. However, given that DB was such a bizarre story, his art really set the tone. It strikes me that DB was a definite marker in NM vol. 1, where they had "normal" stories before that (NM graphic novel, 1-17), but post-DB things became much more warped. One of my favorite artists -- Sienkiewicz is responsible for making me think about those pictures in my comics in an entirely different way, and for making me realize just how much the *right* art could enhance a story.

[x5455]

Berto's looking a little how you doin? in that pinup...