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And a sort of drive-by victim of the whole AvX, Marvel NOW! thingies is the New Mutants, which reaches it's conclusion with #50

Most of the New Mutants had zero profile in AvX (I assume they have GREAT agents) aside from Sunspot and, I think, Magma making very brief cameo's. The title itself was busy with a completely different sort of story at the time: A corrupt/evil/alien possessed "Dark Cypher" (Though sadly never referred to as such) from the future who had become a dictator (a vaguely benevolent dictator, but a dictator) and a seriously frelled up timeline created by trying to defeat him. (They do, it ends happily with an averted timeline and no evil Doug)

So they are perhaps best seen as neutral ground... and Dani has the idea to do something which her team does better than any other current team of X-Men... she and the team throw a party and invite their friends and allies... which is a fairly impressive crowd!

Blink, most of the faculty from the Jean Grey School, Face (One of the Thirteen Limbo Mutants left over from the original Inferno story), The Warriors Three (and Helpuppy makes a walk on appearance), Doctor Strange (Who they know from the Dark Cypher arc), Gus Grimm (the ACTUAL human therapist Dani suggested Utopia retain), Mrs Livitz who lives downstairs (Who mentions what would probably have been a future subplot about wanting to set Dani up with her nephew, who is visiting from Latveria (but who we never meet)), the Disir drop in, as does Mephisto looking for one final chance with Amara (Who declines and suggests if he doesn't leave the Disir would probably not be happy). And then this rather nice little moment happens.

Sadly Rahne is still notable by her absence, but I think we were all resigned to her never being allowed out of X-Factor.

And there we have it in a nutshell, for all their posturing and arguing neither of the X-Men teams have achieved what the New Mutants treat as day to day living, they have mutants, non-mutants, aliens and alternate dimensional counterparts and that's just on the team itself. They have allies who are Asgardians, humans, sorcerors, all playing their parts and basically just being... people. It's nice to see that being acknowledged.

Warlock's problem there is yet another loose end, from warlocks reintroduction to the MU in the Nova series (In the middle of one of the space cosmic event thingies... Tyro, another Technarch who Warlock showed how to live free, but who, following other cosmic event thingies is having issues with his siredam (The Technarch "parent" that all Technarchs have and which tries to kill them as soon as they are "born")

And then we see why crashing this party is perhaps the WORST idea anyone could ever have... and I make no apology for making this double page splash my other two pages...

It ends happily, with another convenient use of Doug's awareness of transmode virus code. And the team basically reunite to share the fact they are still buds who will stay together to keep doing what they have been doing! "Here's to business... never unfinished!"

And so ends the New Mutants... we know Sam and Bobby are heading to the Avengers, but the fate of the other members of the team is unknown, this at least still leaves them an active team which will presumably keep operating, just without a book.

And my assessment of this run of the title? Well, that's a really tough one to answer. Of course this is the run that brought back Doug Ramsey from the long dead off the back of the Necrosha event, and that was pretty cool. It made Dani Moonstar a badass despite her having no more mutant powers.

And yet there were always.. oddities.

Dani being a love-magnet for just about every humanoid male on the team; Sam, Doug AND Nate (Not that she's NOT worthy of it, it just seemed random).
Bobby and Amara getting together.
A subplot about Amara trying to get a job which went nowehere and fizzled out, when mutants in the workplace was a rich source of plot IMHO.
They lost Sam for no readily apparent reason (and as co-team leader he was a fairly pivotal character), so he could go to be in Wolverine and the X-Men, where I don't think they've done a single thing worth a damn with him.
The complete lack of Doug dealing with being back from the dead (again, it would have been fascinating to see this done, in something akin to an Astro City style approach) and the sometimes rather random expansion of his powers (Cookery is a language? No, it's really not)
The New Mutants STILL face the same problems as the Teen Titans did. They're old enough to be X-Men, as the third class of students Xavier recruited they are VERY experienced, more so than many of the X-Men men, and yet, they are never allowed to replace the X-Men, or only one at a time it would seem, and usually Sam.

Even so, and knowing that it's been rather divisively received amongst fans, I'll miss this title, it was the only X-Men related title I've bought in years (for fairly obvious reasons) and it dealt with things that no other title actually tried to deal with, like actually having a life as well as being a mutant and an affiliate of the X-Men.

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From:

donnblake

"And there we have it in a nutshell, for all their posturing and arguing neither of the X-Men teams have achieved what the New Mutants treat as day to day living, they have mutants, non-mutants, aliens and alternate dimensional counterparts and that's just on the team itself. They have allies who are Asgardians, humans, sorcerors, all playing their parts and basically just being... people. It's nice to see that being acknowledged."

See, that's the thing that's always bugged me about Scott calling Captain America out for ignoring mutants- the X-men preached human-mutant integration, but they never lived it, certainly not to the degree the Avengers did.

From:

shadowpsykie

*bites lip...*

everytime they tried they were blown up, or hung on crosses....

the Avengers have had HOW MANY mutants on a team? when they are part of the Avengers, most people are fine... Quicksilver and Beast, or Wanda walk on the streets alone and try to stop a fight? they are just Muties, again.... at least that is how it always seemed to me...

From:

donnblake

Well, let's see- the second major roster of Avengers was literally half mutants. They've also had Beast, Justice, Firestar, and Wolverine just off the top of my head. They've also had Asgardians, aliens of various kinds (I don't think they've ever intentionally had a Skrull, but they have had both Shi'ar and Kree members) and androids. (Oddly, that last is the only one I recall actually causing a public outcry, where suicide bombers tried to prevent... I think Wanda's giving birth to her children with Vision:? It's been a while since I read that story.) Quicksilver and Wanda mostly stuck together, as I recall, but I definitely remember Beast wandering around on his own and having the occasional solo adventure.

And yeah, I guess it's not so much a criticism of the actual teams as of the writers- consistently, anti-mutant feeling is a lot greater in X-men books than anywhere else, even when mutant characters are depicted in those other books.

From:

coldfury

I get what you're saying, but how much of that can we lay on the Avengers, and how much can we point to the more meta conditions like editorial fiefdoms?

It's like blaming Spider-Man for not showing up every time the X-Men or the Avengers had a fight in New York. We hand wave it away saying he was busy, but how often is it an all out fight for the survival of the city? And he was 'busy'? If you shine too much light on it, it either falls apart or it makes it look like Spider-Man was ignoring his 'great responsibility.

Same too goes for the Avengers and not dealing with the mutant issue all the time. Sure, the Avengers if they actually existed would most likely be very strong proponents of mutant rights, but for story/meta/editorial reasons they can't. Do we then accuse the Avengers of being racists?

I'm not saying you're wrong, I really don't know the answer here. I do think they dealt with it more when Vision & Scarlet Witch were mainstays on the team, which means for the past 8 years or so it hasn't been brought up as much, which makes the team look worse given all the suffering the X-men have been through lately.

Edited Date: 2012-11-03 09:13 am (UTC)

From:

salinea

Except they did, unless you don't count the New Mutants as X-Men.

Bringing the crack since December 2003

New Mutants #50 - Unfinished business, finished?

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