Questions Of Who Gets To Die In New Mutants #18

The kids from the first 1980s teen X-team are now adults, and they’re in charge of mutant teens today. Previous X-schools trained child soldiers: can the New Mutants find a better way? And will Xi’an Coy Manh ever, ever, ever be free of her family’s psychic ghosts? New Mutants #18, written by Vita Ayala, art by Rod Reis, letters by VC’s Travis Lanham.

Liz Large: I wasn’t able to be here last month, but I’m excited to jump back in! Based on the gorgeous cover, I expected a nice, relaxing story about Xi’an befriending some rabbits. In reality, it was so much more. 

Stephanie Burt: Two plots hit turning points here– Xi’an vs her brother’s spirit trapped in her body, and various teen New Mutants vs. (or rather, allied with) the Shadow King.  

A/B Testing

SB: I’m absolutely sold by the left turn both of these plots take, and I can’t think of a better way to pay homage, and also to dissent from, the worldview of the 1980s OG New Mutants.

LL: Agreed. Ever since Ayala took the reins, the tone of the book has changed. It’s in conversation with the original run. It’s not a copy or imitation, but there’s a sense of real connection with the past here. We’re seeing a lot of threads get woven in, and so far everything seems to hold together. 

SB: In fact, this comic’s so good that its goodness feels almost too neat: the A plot and the B plot both hit big decisions at the same time, and in analogous ways. It’s the kind of thing a writer would do if they knew they couldn’t stay with the series– though maybe that’s just me catastrophizing. And maybe they’re just getting ready to pause between long arcs in order to highlight the Hellfire Gala, which is coming up soon.

LL: I’m hoping that a lot of the odd pacing— across the X-line, in my opinion— is the fault of the COVID delays snowballing into the scheduled events, snowballing into the necessary skip months because of printer schedules, snowballing into more events. My understanding is that the gala would have been during this past winter, and I suspect that this will flow better when I am rereading it all in a few years. [Ed. note: For the record the erratic pacing of releases has more to do with printer capacity for physical comics than anything else.]

SB: In our A-plot from last time, Xi’an has discovered that she’s still haunted by the ghost of her supposedly dead nogoodnik brother Tran. He took the form of a Lewis Carroll-style white rabbit last issue, as Xi’an and Dani pursued him through magical planes, but back on Earth he’s just taking up space in her head, and Krakoa’s strongest telepaths cannot dislodge him. 

LL: Can I just say that I loved this data page? Whenever there’s a problem that seems to be another character’s specialty, it usually requires some suspension of disbelief when they aren’t brought in to assist. I like seeing that the best telepathic minds were trying to help with this, and were all unsuccessful. Dani even has trouble making him appear for a conversation with Xi’an. 

SB: In the hands of a lesser, more conventional artist, these scenes of telepathic conflict and stalemate could have ended up really static. Rod Reis, as usual, makes the talking heads, and the psychic emanations, beautiful.

LL: Reid is so skilled at portraying mutant powers in interesting ways—mental powers can so often just be someone putting their fingers to their temple. It’s nice to see something new and exciting. He’s such a great fit in this book, especially considering the range of abilities this cast has. 

SB: This plotline is also very meta. In universe, Xi’an’s been trying and failing to disentangle her psyche from his. In our universe, Marvel writers keep trying and failing to tell Xi’an-centered stories that aren’t about Xi’an’s Vietnamese birth family. 

LL: Xi’an is a character who has so many cool aspects, but definitely gets left behind in favor of some of the other New Mutants. It would be great if this could help free her literally and figuratively, and let her move on to something new. 

SB: The Krakoan solution is– you guessed it– death and rebirth. If Xi’an dies in the arena, her new body will contain her soul and only her soul, and Tran, a mutant himself, can come back, via the Five, wearing his own hot, naked flesh. 

LL: I like that they’re treating this with the gravity it deserves. There’s definitely been a lot of jokes that people can die and come back for frivolous reasons, both in issues and online. Here, we see that it’s truly a last resort— the most powerful telepaths available have checked it all out, and there’s nothing they can do. The Crucible isn’t about coloring your hair, it’s about who you are as a person, like we saw with Aero and Callisto. 

SB: Callisto, as Marauders readers remember, chose to die in the arena at the hands of her not-quite-canonical one-time lover Storm; Xi’an chooses “death” by combat in an exciting no-powers-allowed fight with Dani, because you always hurt the one you love, or the one the fans ship you with, or something. 

LL: Their dynamic is extremely intense. Living up to the true Claremont style, there is so much subtext here. If I was reading these in 1992, I would be losing my mind. Choosing to have a no-powers fight just heightens the connection and drama here. 

SB: I love this part. Reis gives us combat that’s really collaboration, exertion that’s emotional as much as physical: Dani tells Xi’an “I won’t let you down,” when she also has to mean “I’ll really kill you.” And Xi’an speaks Vietnamese on panel, which doesn’t happen every day. It’s a strenuous, well-choreographed fight scene, although it’s only fun until someone– Xi’an– manages to die. Then it’s moving as hell. Very swordplay. Much dynamic. So death and rebirth.

LL: Midway through the fight, Dani calls Xi’an out for not giving it her all, and I like that expectation. There’s nothing about this that could be considered easy, and you can’t expect to give up and go with the flow. You have to fight the whole way. Xi’an has to rely on Dani to kill her, but also not to get killed herself. There’s a lot of trust and intimacy at play here. 

SB: It’s also a quite direct counterpoint to the B-plot, which has been going since Vita took over the title, and which joins up with the A-plot right here. A group of young non-passing mutants, Cosmar, Anole, Rain Boy and No-Girl, have been learning to animate one another’s bodies, and also to animate corpses (ew), thanks to very unauthorized after-school tutorials from Amal Farouk, the Shadow King, the fez-loving, problematically Orientalist OG New Mutants villain famous for taking over Xi’an’s body back when.

LL: This is why we can’t have nice things. There’s always someone or something horrible lurking in the next panel, waiting for us to stop focusing on a fight to the death between two gal pals. 

SB: These lessons seem cool, if creepy, but they’re also a second choice for some of these kids. Cosmar, at least– who looks like a cartoon nightmare, because her powers distorted her face– could probably get her human visage back if she went through the arena’s death and rebirth. But the adults who run Krakoa won’t let her: you can choose to die in the arena only if you’ve lost your mutant powers, or (as of this issue) if you need to get a parasitic consciousness out of your brain. If you want to un-deform your distorted face, or stop being a brain with no body attached, or otherwise fix a physical disability that’s not about losing your powers, you are out of Krakoan luck.(It’s like when insurers refuse to cover transition-related medical care, such as hormones and surgery, on the specious grounds that we should just learn to live with the beautiful bodies we have: last issue hit this analogy hard, and here it’s taken as read.)

LL: This system was never going to be fair—Quire has been brought back a dozen times because he’s on a field team, and yet Destiny languishes— but it could be improved in a thousand ways if anyone in power cared. These kids are getting screwed over, and while things aren’t going to go well for them, everything is understandable. 

Scout’s Honor

SB: Our junior team shows up to watch Xi’an fight Dani, because everybody shows up to see that fight– but they don’t want to watch the fight conclude. Instead, they zip off to the woods to conduct further experiments in the reanimation of otherwise unused bodies.

LL: Even for an island with incredibly lax supervision, this is a great time to do not-technically-illegal-but-still-sketchy things. Watching two long time superheroes duke it out, without powers? Everyone’s going to be there. It’s the perfect time to sneak off. 

SB: At which point they’re met by our fierce, black-haired, cute-as-a-button-with-claws reader surrogate, Scout, who would like her friends to cut out their Shadow King-sponsored extracurricular activities on the grounds that (a) anything that looks like necromancy is creepy and (b) anything the Shadow King wants you to do is probably a bad idea. 

LL: Gabby is such a good choice for this role. She’s been through so much in her life, and has a lot of life experiences that an adult soldier would, but socialization with her peers and communication? That’s where she trips up. She hasn’t had the best sources of guidance (the whole Wolverine family isn’t what you’d call well-adjusted). Add to that Laura being gone for a long time? Gabby has been on her own. 

SB: Reis’s one-panel, multi-scene flashback of Gabby, feeling isolated along with her best friend Jonathan the Actual Wolverine, is one of the sweetest pictures of anything or anyone I’ve ever seen, and the best use for this kind of everything-at-once panel I can recall since the tour-de-force spreads in All-New X-Men #25.

LL: Jonathan is an angel and I’m very grateful that Gabby has him in her time of need. I just wish he was able to talk again! She needs someone who can give her actual advice. 

SB: Scout has also talked with Jimmy about what to do; he thinks she should confront her friends and follow her own moral code. He’s not wrong but maybe her friends aren’t wrong either? Rahne, who knows a lot about pain and forgiveness and other people’s moral codes (the ones you shouldn’t follow once you have your own), makes peace between Scout and the Shadow King’s new disciples, then takes them all to speak with Farouk himself.

“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to take care of your friends, Gabrielle,” Rahne advises her. “You have a right to your fears.” But on Krakoa, we don’t avoid mutant supervillains: we talk to them. And the plot ends with a campfire meeting between Scout and the Shadow King, coming down very carefully on the side of Let teens make their own mistakes. Gabrielle cannot tell her friends what to do: she can only advise, and speak from what’s happened to her.

LL: I’ll be honest: I hate this. Not as a plotline, but as something happening to characters I like. It’s a slow motion car crash I can’t look away from. I don’t think the Shadow King has suddenly become a different person from the man who worked with Nazis and possessed Karma for years, and I cannot see this ending well for anyone. Is it Gabby’s place to tell her friends what to do? No. But it is Rahne’s place to look out for them, and she’s not doing a great job. 

Not to mention that Rahne herself doesn’t have a great track record with kids—when she was a teacher, she had an inappropriate relationship with one of the students (who was in Dani’s custody). I’m not equating her actions with the SK, but mutant kids have been failed by adults for a long time. 

No One Is Alone

SB: Back in the Crucible, Xi’an can’t tell her brother what to do. Her arena combat stops, for a page, as she considers whether to let Tran out, whether to let herself suffer for him, and Reis gets the chance to draw happy, painterly children in what could be a painted children’s book. Then we go back into combat, and Xi’an’s answer looks like the answer Rahne gives Scout: “It isn’t my place to decide who Tran is, who he will be. Only he can do that.” And he can do that only after the noble, chosen, temporary death that Xi’an suffers at the tip of Dani’s… dagger, or broken-off arrow, or very short spear. She yells a Vietnamese phrase that means “freedom,” and she spits blood and she’s gone. 

LL: This was beautiful. There’s a moment where we see Dani reflected in Xi’an’s sword, and it’s one of my favorite panels in recent memory. Xi’an chooses this, but not easily, and not as a quick fix. She worked for every bit of it. 

SB: You don’t get to decide what other people can do with their bodies, this issue says. No matter how much you distrust their friends. Scout’s moral code is very pre-Krakoa, very predictable, very sweet, very afterschool-special– as if her human friends had been doing hard drugs (not that she has human friends). In a pre-Krakoan X-book she’d be doing the right thing by trying to stop them: don’t we all know that Farouk is a villain? But Krakoan adolescence, like Krakoan adulthood, means second chances, and bodily autonomy, and letting your friends make their own dumb, haunted mistakes, rather than trying to save them from themselves. It’s lovely, it’s almost too neat, it leaves me wondering who on Earth Xi’an will become (dear Marvel: please let Vita show us!), and it’s not even my favorite part.

LL: As much as people may want to say “do X because Y,” everyone needs some learning experiences of their own. You can’t simply imprint past knowledge on a person and expect them to never make bad choices—but you can provide them with information so they make informed choices. And you can be there for them if their choices don’t work out the way they wanted, or if they discover that what they wanted isn’t actually what they want. 

SB: And now, my favorite part of the issue: a letter from Illyana to the Quiet Council about next steps in Krakoan education. Illyana– of course– misspells lots of English words, and then crosses them out (she’s a fighter, not a writer). She writes a distinctive script that resembles runes, maybe because she’s spent so much time writing glyphs and unearthly languages. But she’s got a brilliantly earthly take on the problem with mutant education thus far: if this letter didn’t occur at the end of a Vita Ayala comic I could easily see it popping up as the most insightful kind of fanfic. 

LL: This was my favorite part of the issue as well. Now that you mention it, I wonder if part of the reason I like these data pages is that there’s so much small background detail in them that doesn’t really fit in the typical issue, but would absolutely be explored in fanfic. But I digress. Seeing the letter Illyana has written as she’s written it shows that it required effort on her part, but she put in the time because she knows how important this all is. 

SB: See, Illyana’s generation of mutants has to educate the kids. The Quiet Council’s elders assigned them that job. And yet– Illyana tells the adults of the Quiet Council– they’ll need to retrain themselves to do the job right, because “we were raised by you.” Raised to defend one another, by force, against a world run by humans who hated and feared them. That’s been the status quo from the Silver Age all the way through the Morrison run, and Utopia, and Schism, and beyond. 

LL: In that world, controlling their powers and learning self defense was truly more important than anything else. If you’re not safe, how can you be expected to learn anything else? Even the adults they had available to teach them were often in the same situation. Most of the teachers were X-Men, many of them were themselves taught by X-Men. It’s just child soldiers all the way down. 

SB: But it’s not the status quo any more. “These people aren’t soldiers or an army, they’re supposed to be citizens in a new nation.” “These people (half of them kids) don’t need to learn how to kill, they need purpose… They need to feel like a community.” They need an education that’s not like the education Xavier and Magneto (and, later, Cable) gave lllyana and her friends. And that education is Illyana’s job.

LL: Seeing this realization from Illyana means a lot. She had an exceptionally bad childhood, even compared to some of the other mutants. It would be wonderful if this new status quo allows some of the adults to reevaluate what they’re doing with their lives as well. A lot of responsibilities amongst the X-Men seem to have been based on a “who’s around when a problem crops up” system, but this is their chance to change that. Mutants could choose to become teachers because they enjoy it, not because they happen to be on the field team and living at the school. 

SB: How will that education look? Or, put another way: what does a teen superhero book do when it’s not primarily about training, or external threats, or villains, or combat? That question goes back to the romances, bromances and quiet moments in Chris Claremont’s own New Mutants run. It’s never been answered definitively (because the threats keep coming). And there’s no writer I trust more to pursue it.

X-Traneous Thoughts

• Krakoan: PARTY HAIR
• Arena MC Silver Samurai is still problematic, but he seems to love his new job.
• Sound effects include SWEEP! DODGE! & CRASH!
• How cute is curled up Jonathan, napping on Gabby’s desk?
• Seeing all of the Siryn bodies in the body farm is a nice bit of continuity with X-Factor. 

Liz Large

Liz Large is a copywriter with a lot of opinions on mutants.

Stephanie Burt

Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. Her podcast about superhero role playing games is Team-Up Moves, with Fiona Hopkins; her latest book of poems is We Are Mermaids.  Her nose still hurts from that thing with the gate.