New Mutants #26 – Review

By: Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning (writers), Leandro Fernandez (art), Andres Mossa (colors), Joe Caramagna (letters), Sebastian Girner (editor) & Nick Lowe (senior editor)

The Story: The New Mutants continue their first mission now that they’re on official mop-up duty for the X-Men: The search for Nate Grey.

What’s Good: As with X-Men Legacy this week, it is great that this X-comics has a unique cast of characters.  We have plenty of opportunities to see the exploits of the main mutants and some of those characters like Wolverine are so larger-than-life than they suck the air out of the room; it’s hard for a character like Magma to shine or develop much when Emma Frost is in the room.  I also really love that Abnett & Lanning have given these junior mutants a coherent mission: clean up the loose ends that the X-Men leave behind.  The mission the New Mutants are tasked with here is: Find Nate Grey.   And in finding Nate Grey, they’ll run across a leftover from Age of Apocalypse.  Funny how that story line keeps swirling around this summer, huh?

So, the basic set-up for the mission and series are solid.

The art is a positive from a storytelling standpoint.  There’s never much doubt about what is going on and the issue is nicely colored.

New Mutants #25 – Review

By: Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning (writers), Leandro Fernandez (art), Andres Mossa (colors), Joe Caramagna (letters), Sebastian Girner (assistant editor) & Nick Lowe (editor)

The Story: A new creative team takes over New Mutants and sets them on a new direction.

What’s Good: It’s just so nice to see the New Mutants with something to do.  The action here seems to pick up shortly after the New Mutants return from Limbo, thankfully without mentioning Age of X.  So, we find Cannonball kinda out of action due to injuries and loss of confidence and Karma still reeling from the loss of her leg in Second Coming last summer, not to mention Illyana isn’t going to be trusted by Cyclops for a good long time after the end of the Limbo mission.  In the face of all that, is there even a need for the New Mutants team?  Who’s left?

We open with a fun and well executed opening showing the New Mutants + Wolverine, Kitty and Colossus smashing up a car factory where a piece of Nimrod (from Second Coming) seems to have taken refuge and has been corrupting the machines.  Once they get back to Utopia, Dani Moonstar gets summoned to Cyclops office and while she expects to hear that the New Mutants are being scrapped, he instead puts her in charge of the team and gives the team a mission: To mop up after the X-Men’s big events by taking care of things like the “piece of Nimrod”.

And, you know what….  That’s not a bad mission for these guys.  It makes sense that there will be loose ends after any big X-story and the New Mutants are an appropriate team to take care of those problems.  One of my problems with the New Mutants is that the writers are always devising threats for them that are too damn big. If the threats were really that big, they would be taken care of by the X-Men, Avengers, FF, etc… Not by a bunch of B-list mutants.  So, with this mission, Abnett and Lanning can just riff on whatever X-story has just wrapped up and give us a new and cool angle.  Furthermore, they can probably pick and choose which X-stories to play with and just skip the bad ones.  For example, I’d be surprised if they fiddle with that whole Lobe story from Uncanny X-men.  Why do that when the much more enticing Curse of the Mutants or Apocalypse stories are laying there?