Step through A Flung Open Door in New Mutants #16, from Vita Ayala, Rod Reis, and Travis Lanham.
Stephanie Burt: The Wild Hunt is open to us once again! Ready to journey down this path less traveled?
Liz Large: This issue runs the gamut from truth or dare to the Shadow King, and somehow manages to incorporate a field trip and some gorgeous art on the way. I was born ready.
Reborn To Run
SB: I’ll never get tired of Rod Reis’s painterly– or maybe just digitally painted– art. His kids look like kids and his teens look like teens and the colors just pop. And his Krakoan gates look like Krakoan magical-sciencey gates.
LL: Reis is really doing some magic in this issue. His style is so good at giving a real sense of what’s happening, as opposed to a more “realistic” look– seeing a change in linework or coloring to reflect the emotions and atmosphere of a scene makes for such a great experience.
SB: Who’s running for the gates as we open the issue? Hey, it’s some kids, maybe some of the same the Shadow King has been trying to co-opt. Or maybe different kids! They’re clearly students but they don’t look like kids we know, and they’re not the kids named on the cast page. As in the Morrison run, I really like the idea that there are more mutant kids than the several handfuls of major characters whose names we know. One of them’s blue, with big Loki-style horns. One of them could be you! [Ed. note: If you are comics creator Liana Kangas, one of them is!]
LL: I totally agree with you! Back when the books were confined to a secretive school taught by one man (and the New Mutants had to walk uphill both ways to go cause trouble instead of using gates!), it made sense to keep the number of mutant kids that we saw low. But now, they’ve expanded to an entire island that is open to every mutant child in the world, even those who were dead. There’s so much opportunity here for new characters, and while I’m sure that the longterm favorites will get the lion’s share of the attention, there’s so much room for a deep supporting cast. For now, we’re seeing the kids interact in new and interesting ways– both in the era-spanning friendship groups they’re forming as well as the new “synergy” ways of using their powers. And even that’s expanded in this issue!
SB: One of them could be another one, if the Shadow King perfects whatever magic or tech he’s using to switch their bodies. His trial run shows how eager kids can be for any experience that takes us well and thoroughly outside ourselves. Especially if the bodies we’ve been given do not fit us very well. Trans allegory, anyone?
No-Girl appears to inhabit Anole’s body, Anole’s in Gabby, as for the rest… I’m not sure it matters who inhabits whom. What matters is that Gabby, and only Gabby, has the good sense to know the experiment should not get repeated. No coincidence: she, and maybe she alone, likes her body the way it already is.
LL: The Shadow King is offering the kids what they want– but there’s clearly a cost he’s not explaining. Once the kids settle down from their initial joy, some of them start feeling weird and exhibiting physical injuries. It’s not clear to me if this is an accidental side effect of an untested method, or if Shadow King is somehow benefitting from taking their health from them. My instinct is to assume the worst, as always. In the sense of fairness, he does mention that utilizing the group’s powers more effectively could possibly make the process less terrible next time, so maybe there’s more at work here then I realize. On the original hand, he also seems to think it’s fine if the kids die in these future attempts.
SB: Gabby points out that she could die permanently (since she’s a clone), and that Krakoan ethics of resurrection– whatever they are– should not make kids’ lives or bodies expendable. The Shadow King, in a move familiar to anyone who has ever spent any time in a left-of-center political discussion, tells her she doesn’t know what she’s talking about because she comes from a position of privilege: “Your body is already regenerated. A blessing that some of the others do not have.”
LL: Shadow King is so effective here as a villainous creep, without even using his powers, just good old fashioned manipulation. By setting Gabby’s experience up against that of the other kids, he makes it less likely that they’ll listen to her reasonable criticism. At the same time, he’s isolating her from her friends because she won’t go along with what he wants– so if and when she does want to make up with them, she’s going to have to be more willing to do what the group wants.
SB: Exactly! Also ew. For now, Gabby nopes out, as the Shadow King’s shadow looms larger over the kids who choose to stay. It’s a very large, almost inhumanly (though not Inhumanly) large shadow, in keeping with the general expressionistic feel in this part of the book, especially in Farouk’s dream-cave. That said: in terms of ethics and representation, the worst thing about 1980s Claremont comics– worse than the Orientalism, worse than the Psylocke body-swap– has to be the way that big, round bodies are pretty much always coded as evil, or scheming, or stupid, or selfish, or as mountains of self-hate. It’s consistent across plotlines and from artist to artist: Mojo, Farouk, disfigured Karma, Fred Dukes (whom, I know, began as a Silver Age figure), even Cain Marko… way past time to retire that trope.
LL: In the first issue of Ayala’s run on New Mutants, we saw Dani ask James to do a journaling exercise. We get the payoff here, and I have to say I love it. His too-literal responses to the first two questions, coupled with his reluctance to go back and make edits since he used a pen is great. I also like the distinction he makes between being a pessimist or an optimist–both of which he views as too limiting– and being a realist. He wants to help the people who come after him thrive, because his generation didn’t have the opportunity to. As a mission statement for New Mutants, it works well. It could also work as the mission statement for an environmental group.
SB: “Native Americans know how to live in harmony with the Earth, and white folks don’t” is another tired trope, but at least it’s not an overt insult, and Warpath’s text box appears to embrace that trope, telling us snarkily how he sees himself. I like it. I’d love to see a whole issue of conversation where Dani and James discuss Native stereotypes and Native survivance: a Native creator would need to write it.
LL: We get another data page providing a window into what’s happening in Otherworld– apparently, multiple unsupervised mutant kids have been taking field trips. I appreciate how Ayala is utilizing everything at their disposal to tell this story, between the data pages, narration, and the typical dialogue. It feels like a lot’s going on.
SB: I love the way the text boxes work in this run. They can explain, where readers need explanation, and they can delineate character when readers already know who’s here and why.
You Think You Can Take Me
SB: How little do young mutants know about their culture and history after a few months of de facto (“all are students, all are teachers”) vacation? Here’s how little they know: they think they can take Illyana. That’s a big no. Doubly so since Illyana sees them as school bullies, and if there’s one thing that keeps Illyana up at night, it’s her best privateer girlfriend, but if there are two things, the other one is how best to protect kids. In this case she’s protecting the kids from themselves, from their own tendency to become bullies, as well as protecting their unseen victims.
LL: I love that she points out that bullying the kids who are smaller than you? Is actually a sign of weakness. She’s offering the bullies plenty of opportunities to say sorry and get to work, and yet they somehow think fighting her will go well for them. The AUDACITY of these terrible teens. Even if they don’t know her full history, at the very least they have to be aware that she’s a Captain/former X-Man, right? I’m just imagining a bunch of real-world teenagers thinking they could fight, like….The Rock. It’s believable that they’re this overconfident, but oh gosh, what a bad idea.
SB: Teen bullies get a taste, as Magik says, of their own poisonous medicine, and a lecture about how Illyana can literally make them go to Hell (well, Limbo, but the distinction’s pretty technical). She won’t, however, send them there: instead she’ll task them with rebuilding the awesome treehouse homes they wrecked. I love it. I also love the way Rod Reis can draw Illyana as the fierce sword lesbian she must be, rather than turning her into Big Sword Barbie. Yes, I have been reading a lot of early 2010s comics recently. I prefer the comics of 2021.
LL: Illyana has menace here in a way that she does not always get to have. There’s a great close up of her face, mid-snarl, with red coloring to reflect her anger, and it really sells the scene. Reis isn’t worried about making her pretty (my personal taste notwithstanding!), and it makes his visual storytelling so much more effective. I get that a lot of artists have their particular preferences and style, but the ability to let a character’s face and body language reflect what’s happening on the page is what really makes or breaks a story for me.
SB: Not only are we reading an X-Book for sure: we’re reading an X-Book that believes in its own extended, interwoven, soapy plotlines, in the best Claremont/Simonson tradition, so much so that we barely get any fights. Everything’s a step towards something else, and the most fraught moments are conversations. Again, I love the way that editorial here must believe in what Vita Ayala has been doing, letting them develop their plans. A book with another editor, created in another time (after the 1980s but before Now) might have to take a commercial break for a supervillain fight, and I’m so glad this one can tell its stories.
LL: Speaking of stories, in the midst of everything, we check in on Rahne and her attempts to figure out when her son will be resurrected. After finding out last issue that he wasn’t even on the list, Rahne reached out to X-Factor with the hope of resolving it. Unfortunately, they’ve discovered that Tier is still being backed up by Cerebro and registering as alive. In theory, this could be good news, but unfortunately, the backups aren’t the way they should be. The location isn’t identifiable, but it seems like they’re being generated from another world. This means that Tier has been somewhere, probably alone, and Rahne has no idea what’s happening to him. It’s a nightmare scenario for her, and Rahne does not take it well.
SB: I’m not so glad when heroic women get reduced to distraught moms. That’s what the news about Tier does to Rahne. But if she stayed happy forever, we wouldn’t be reading an X-Book, right? Right? She looks great even when she looks sad– the color contrast between her hair and skin, her hair and her uniform, really pops, and, again, this Rahne feels like the Rahne we know from the great pre-Genosha New Mutants stories, even if her son comes from a much more recent plotline.
LL: Poor Rahne. This is the second issue in a row where we’ve seen her dealing with this pain alone, and she just looks so small. She’s all alone in the team’s empty home, and she’s crying all alone in the dark. Despite the fact that she’s mourning her own child, Rahne seems a little childlike in the art here– it just makes you want to comfort her. Part of it could be the vintage-style uniform she’s wearing, as the classic 80’s black and yellow outfits really make you feel like the characters are still in school.
SB: Especially Rahne! The art emphasizes the difference in age and experience between Rahne, on the one hand, and Dani, Xi’an, Illyana, even Doug on the other: that’s true to the spirit of 1980s New Mutants, and it’s true to the resurrected Rahne, who really seems to want a reset. I’m already looking back with longing to the first panels we got that showed Rahne on Krakoa. How delighted she looked. How young there, too.
One iceberg-sized difference between modern comics and their 1980s forebears: every 1980s Marvel comic could be someone’s first, and side characters get text-boxes of explanations whenever they’re reintroduced. Today if you don’t know who Tier is, or was, you have to come to sites like this one, because Ayala and Reis won’t tell you.
We will: he’s the precocious wolfy child of Rahne Sinclair and the Asgardian wolf-guy Hrimhari, Rahne’s true love from the Asgardian Wars. We haven’t seen Tier or Hrimhari for a while because the plotline comes from Peter David’s X-Factor and we haven’t seen PAD on X-Books for a while, and also because Strong Guy killed Tier with a magic trident while they were fighting Mephisto. (If you’ve noticed that Rahne and Guido don’t get along these days: now you know why.) Except that Tier’s not dead. So where is he? And why? [Ed. note: War of the Realms: Uncanny X-Men from 2019 had Tier and Hrimhari show up to incentivize Rhane to join them in death. It was weird.]
LL: One thing I really like about adding the resurrection system to the mix is that one fairly common story idea– someone we thought was dead was actually alive and in hiding/in a coma/had amnesia/etc.– isn’t possible for the X-Men anymore. If a mutant is alive, we know about it, and that opens up some very interesting possibilities.
Go West
SB: Meanwhile, far away, Dani and Xi’an will be tracking a horned mutant named Josh through Otherworld, where a dumb game of Truth or Dare has led him, and where the ever-irresponsible King Jamie has set him loose. Liz, did you think of those signs in bookstores that say “Unattended children will be given an espresso and a puppy?” Jamie’s awful and absolutely in-character speech to Dani and Xi’an contains the issue’s only silly mistake: “I’ve been a boar.” No, King Jamie, you’ve been a boor. A wild tusked pig would be an improvement. (And a feast, if you eat meat.)
LL: Somewhere on Earth, Meggan got a chill and reminded herself that Jamie is never babysitting his niece. Jamie is truly awful and has a long history of doing terrible things, but he is always fun to have around for appearances like this. Speaking of appearances, Dani and Xi’an’s outfits have changed between entering the gate and arriving at the throne room. They’ve gone from their typical uniforms to sort of Ren-Faire cosplay versions, and I love it. On Krakoa we wear “mutant clothes” and in Otherworld we wear “not historically accurate but matching the vibe clothes”.
SB: With a bucket of Alice in Wonderland props and power bars, Xi’an and Dani head out to the black-and-white West of Jamie’s and/or Dani’s imagination: color fades as the castle recedes, and the tumbleweeds tumble. Reis shows what he can do without his color palette, and he’s amazing as always. I am over the moon about the way this book looks.
LL: These pages are such a switch from everything previously, and it’s very cool. We get a text box explaining that there’s synergy happening between Dani’s abilities and the ambient magic that’s everywhere in Otherworld, and it’s a great reminder that this isn’t a normal mission–they’re in a different world, where everything operates according to different rules.
SB: As we head into the wide-open spaces of the imaginary American West– and towards a very European castle– we get hints about Xi’an’s direction. She lets herself show her anxiety around Dani (because, for once, Xi’an doesn’t have to lead). And she’s quite aware that her powers– classic villain powers, really: She Possesses People, as the tag said for her first appearance!– can lead her in sketchy directions. Here in Otherworld her mind is calmer. She doesn’t have to run from herself.
LL: Dani has always taken on a lot of responsibilities when it comes to the team. Outside of the standard “superhero team leadership” category, she’s done a lot to help her friends emotionally. Getting Xi’an to open up to her is yet another example of this, and she even defuses Xi’ans rapid change of topic with humor. Dani knows that emotional honesty is hard, and she’s trying her best to get everyone to be their best selves. Whether it’s talking, or journaling, or just being there, we’re really seeing her do a lot. Being there for Xi’an, and James, and Rahne and their extremely different needs, plus the responsibilities that come from taking on the younger mutants….it’s got to be overwhelming, and something’s going to have to give.
SB: Dani can’t stay with Rahne in Rahne’s emotional crisis and also go with Xi’an to track down Josh and Friend. So Dani leaves Rahne a note: “I know this has been hard but I’ll be with you every step of the way.” (But she’s not there right now.) My heart’s cracked and smushed. They’re such a good couple, though. “Love you, little wolf.” Could this be the second-best love note in all X-Comics? (The best, for comic purposes, remains “It not you, it Gambit.”)
LL: Move over “I am half agony, half hope.” “It not you, it Gambit.” is the best love letter of all time. [Ed. note: From X-Men ’92 volume 1 for the uninitiated.]
Jokes aside, this letter was wonderful. Having it superimposed over Rahne’s grief and also a possible sighting of the missing mutant kid worked really well for me. I love that Dani took the time to leave a note to Rahne, explaining the situation, and reassuring her that she’s not alone in this (except for physically at this moment).
SB: Maybe Dani wishes she had stayed: the wide-open spaces of her black and white West lead to… Fae HQ, where Beardy Would-be Merlin Dude dispenses a parody of justice to Xi’an and Dani, who have wandered into his kingdom. [Ed. note: He doesn’t get named in this one, but it’s Merlin, like actual Merlin]
Ayala set up a contrast here between responsible and irresponsible authority: between Illyana, who knows what to do when kids make bad decisions, and the adults of Otherworld, the egregious Jamie, who puts our favorite mutants in stocks and won’t listen. Jerk. How will our teaching staff get out of this one and back to the school before fifth period?
LL: I guarantee that Krakoa doesn’t have a substitute teacher system set up, so they’re going to be in a tight spot if Dani’s gone too long. I think Otherworld, much like the bullying teens we saw earlier this issue, is going to regret angering the New Mutants.
X-Traneous Thoughts
- The Shadow King is usually supposed to be Xavier’s nemesis, but he makes far more sense as Xi’an’s. Will Xi’an uncover and defeat him? She in particular could use a win.
- Rod Reis deserves some kind of special medal for the way he depicts bits of light in deep shadow (e.g. off the Shadow King’s glasses). All the tools are there. (I thought of Dave McKean, if you want an analogy.)
- Otherworld’s daily gossip rag is called the Crooked Caller. LIke the right-wing Daily Caller in our universe, but crooked. OK.
- Is the guy with Loki-style horns on the last page the same as Josh? He looks older. And more sinister. Maybe Otherworld makes you grow up fast. Also what kind of dinosaur is he riding?
- Dani and Xi’an present Jamie with a bagel plant as a way to smooth over the conversation about the missing kid, and I love this food-based diplomacy.
- Krakoan reads: DANGER AHEAD
Liz Large is a copywriter with a lot of opinions on mutants.
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.
