Didja Know... New Mutants Are in the News
Didja Know digs into the fun facts, strange stories, and divine details that helped build the hallowed halls of the House of Ideas!
Extry, extry, read all about it!
Hey, True Believers, y’know that old cliché “Everything Old Is New Again”? Well, tomorrow, the New Mutants turn that on its ear by saying “Everything New Is Still New!” as they put their simoleons where their smiles are in NEW MUTANTS #12…which jusssst happens to be about, you got it, the news!
So, howzabout we hitch up the horses and ride into the New Frontier with the New Mutants and dig up some gold about their harrowing history? We promise some of it might even be new to ya!
Didja Know… the New Mutants were the first X-Men spinoff ever?
It’s hard to imagine a time when we didn’t revel in the rush of a raucous rally of mutant mania, but a long time ago the X-Men existed on their own and in just one bashful book, UNCANNY X-MEN…that is, until the New Mutants burst onto the scene!
By 1982 the merry mutants were so popular with the Merry Marching Society that merry Marvel decided another terrific title was warranted, and so crafty creator Chris Claremont put his thinking cap on his noggin and dreamed up something new—the New Mutants. And, get this, they were supposed to burst like little bombshells in their own mag first, but as Fate would foist it upon them, the kids kicked it in by filling the pages of a little book called MARVEL GRAPHIC NOVEL #4 in late 1982.
It was one heckuva debut, let us assure you! Chris and artist Bob McLeod pulled out all stops to tell a tale of Professor X and Moira MacTaggert scouring the globe for young mutants to be the next generation of X-Men—the old guard believed deceased at that moment—and managed to mash together a team while under fire from Donald Pierce and the Hellfire Club. And lo! The New Mutants were born and just a month or so later took over their own title in early 1983!
Didja Know… the New Mutants were a truly global group?
The mutant gene knows no boundaries, Effendi! It pops up wherever there are humans, and over the years the ranks of X have been fantastically filled with a bevy of bounty from so many nations…and the New Mutants stand proud in those exalted ranks!
Charles Xavier and Dr. MacTaggert found candidates for their next generation project in places that still take our collective breath away: Cannonball and Mirage from the good ol’ U.S. of A! Psyche from Vietnam! Sunspot from Brazil! Wolfsbane from Scotland! And to make things even cooler, the New Mutants also boasted of one of the first female X-leaders when Karma took the top spot on the team—until she supposedly died and was replaced by Cannonball and Mirage…oops!
Not too long after, the group opened its arms to even newer New Mutants culled from even more countries: Cypher from America! Magik from Russia! Magma from, well, Nova Roma? And the icing on the cupcake, Clyde, was that they even accepted an alien from outer space in the wild and wooly form of Warlock! Woohoo! Also, wow!
Didja Know… the New Mutants lasted for a whopping one-hundred issues?
Doesn’t that sound just perfect, pals? One-hundred issues…it’s got such a nice ring to it, don’t it? And was the run overflowing with pathos and bathos, love and hate, not to mention peace and understanding? Hey, heroes; all that and more!
NEW MUTANTS wrapped up in early 1991, but not before new creative teams came and went, Magneto mastered the mutants, Massacres and Falls transpired along with deaths, de-aging, and destruction…but also friendships, beautiful bonds, teamwork, and all the frothy feelings that fill a comic book with fervent fans waiting feverishly for each installment.
The book segued into X-FORCE #1 and with it transferred its later cast members Cable, Domino, Feral, Boom-Boom, Shatterstar, and Warpath into a new world, though they’d always be remembered along with Sam, Dani, Bobby, Rahne, Illyana, and the rest as the nutty, nuanced neophytes of the New Mutants!
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