New Mutants Forever #1 Review

If you haven't heard, New Mutants Forever is a five-issue limited series by Chris Claremont that picks up right where he stopped writing New Mutants back in 1987, and ignores everything that's happened since (theoretically).  He's done the same thing with the X-Men (picking up from where he stopped writing them in 1991) in the ongoing series X-Men Forever, which I stopped reading pretty quickly because it sucked.

I went into this with basically no expectations, especially considering how disappointing I found the two or three issues of X-Men Forever that I read before giving up on it, but man, I enjoyed the hell out of this book.  It's certainly not without its problems.  The blatant anachronism is pretty WTF.  This is supposed to be picking up from a story that left off in 1987, so it's just a little weird when they just hop on the internet like it's a thing that exists and that they've been using for years.  And the random new costumes, which they're somehow wearing in that picture the Hellfire Club is looking at on the splash page even though they haven't worn them yet?  And then the explanation for why they have them is that Illyana randomly decided they needed new costumes so she just magicked them up while she was teleporting them?  And then Rahne is somehow wearing one even though she didn't go through the teleport?  Yeah.  Just a little effort could have probably put them into those costumes in a way that made even a tiny bit of sense.  I bet Bobby shows up in a new costume that matches the rest of theirs in the next issue even though he has no way of knowing they've changed costumes.  Also, there's the unnecessary expository dialogue (does Magneto really need to randomly announce to the Hellfire Club that he spent time in a concentration camp as a kid?).  But then that last has always been a feature of Claremont's writing anyway, so it has to get a bit of a pass.

Really, these are all fairly minor complaints (and I know from reading X-Men Forever that it could have been a lot worse), because the upside is finally getting to hear these characters that I love so much actually sound like themselves again for the first time since, well, 1987.  It shouldn't be that difficult a chore for a writer to capture a character's voice.  Plenty of writers manage to do it with plenty of characters all the time, especially in comic books, where a different writer might be writing the character next month.  But I daresay that not a single writer has managed to write the New Mutants with their proper voices since Claremont last wrote them himself.

I'm glad that Marvel gave the New Mutants a new ongoing series, and I'll read it for as long as it lasts, but Zeb Wells has not gotten a single one of their voices right yet.  He does a decent job with Sam and Dani, but he's way off with most of the others.  Especially Illyana and Doug, both of whom he's plagued with completely unnecessary Spock Speak for no apparent reason.  And I know he's trying to do something specific with the characters.  They've both been through big events that have changed who they are in fundamental ways that they're still dealing with.  But until I get some sort of reasonable explanation for why coming back from the dead should make you stop being able to use contractions, I'm going to continue to see it as lazy writing.  Especially when you already have someone on the team (Amara) who's actually supposed to talk that way (and, if I recall correctly, he doesn't have her talking that way).  It's getting to the point with Illyana where if he doesn't figure out how she's supposed to talk soon, I'd rather he just not even use her in the book.  I'll never say that about Doug though, no matter how poorly he's written.  I'll always take a Doug who sounds like Data for no reason over no Doug.

Though at least Wells doesn't write Doug as badly as Matt Fraction did in that last issue of Uncanny X-Men.  I was all excited to see Doug show up in Uncanny X-Men, but Fraction just had him saying the dumbest shit on every single page.  The worst was when he somehow wasn't able to tell when Nemesis was being sarcastic.  I mean, really.  He's got one power.  He can always understand what everyone is saying.  That's it.  It's pretty tough to fuck that up, but damn if Fraction didn't manage to find a way.

Anyway, point is, it's easy to see that no other writer has been able to get these characters right when you read this book and hear them all talk the way they're supposed to for the first time in twenty-three years.  And when you see how naturally it comes to Claremont to write them, you start to wish this was the ongoing.  But I'll gladly take the five issues they're giving us here.