Wolfsbane and Morgan get lost in the Morlock tunnels! Gabby Kinney gets into yet more fistfights! And our beloved Shela Sexton, trans mutant and body-swap master, gets…. drunk? It all goes down in New Mutants: Lethal Legion #2, written by Charlie Jane Anders, pencils by Enid Balám, inks by Elisabetta D’Amico, colors by Matt Milla, letters by VC’s Travis Lanham.
Here’s to Never Growing Up
Charlie Jane Anders’s sixth story for Marvel, her fifth whole comic book, and her second installment in this arc swerves hard from the serious, heartfelt trans teen narratives that shaped all her previous work. Those narratives shaped the coming-into-Marvel of Anders’s great creations: BFFs and anticapitalist heist planners Shela Sexton (Escapade) and Morgan Red (no codename, but he does come with a pet turtle, who can fly). Now Shela’s relocated to Krakoa to hang with all the other teen mutants, and she’s bored, and she’s planned a stunt fit for Robin Hood’s team. Shela and the intrepid and literally fearless Gabby Kinney (Scout) have set out to disguise themselves as ridiculous supervillains and try out for Count Nefaria’s new bad-guy team, while Shela’s likely near future girlfriend Martha Johansen (Cerebella) breaks into the Count’s vaults and steals 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 100% of his treasure.
I’m trying to keep my writeup as lighthearted as possible, because that’s how Anders– backed up by Balám’s fast, fluent pencils– plays it: Shela’s decided to become a banter-heavy superhero, like Spidey, or maybe like Bobby Drake, reflecting a confidence she does not yet feel by turning everything into a dialogue balloon and every dialogue balloon into a joke. And it makes sense: she’s following Gabby’s lead, as is Cerebella: “This Count guy didn’t count on us!” “He should have kept his dukes up!” Shela’s bright idea to get off the island and doing something fun that reflects teen autonomy has turned her, for the first time, into a leader: she reflects in well-placed text boxes: “I can’t stand the thought of Martha getting hurt… I can’t believe I have to be the responsible one.”
The psychology works– and it’s 100% compatible with the banter, and the ridiculous quickly-over fights against newly-minted C-listers, that show Scout and Escapade, a.k.a. Fisticuss and Blasterdame, making their way up the would-be villain leaderboard. Don’t miss our mutants’ introductory speech, which feels like the first reel of a competition-based reality show: “BlasterDame grew up on a shrimp boat in the Gulf of Mexico, but her family was kidnapped by Lemurians and she was sent to the fighting pits with nothing but a shrimping knife…” To which Gabby/ Fisticuss replies, from behind her Iron Fist mask, “Literally nobody cares.”
I’m With You
Meanwhile, under the mean or at least the median streets of New York City, Wolfsbane and Morgan Red are prospecting for unspecified technology when they encounter a sad community of fundamentalist anti-mutant preppers who have made their homes there. Ironically, they inhabit the abandoned Morlock tunnels, where the Morlock community of non-passing, often grotesque mutants lived in the X-Men comics of the 1980s before the Mutant Massacre and the first Marauders nearly wiped them out.
It’s the second of two big, fun continuity nods, the first being the 1970s legacy of Count Nefaria himself, and it (that is, the memory of the dead mutants from the first big X-Crossover) remains the most serious thing in this speedy, talky, fun book. “The mutants will be followed by the beast, the beast who devours,” declares the preppers’ bearded leader. Much as I wish the next panel showed Hank McCoy with a pipe and a case of the munchies, we get, instead, a giant dragon chasing everyone away. “I told you, Zsa Zsa. Mutants are the harbingers of destruction,” says beard dude. “RARRRGH!” says the dragon. Rahne figures out that they’re in the Morlock tunnels, knows where to run, takes a moment of silence for the murdered mutants, and discovers yet one more community of human runaways and refugees, about to get eaten by that green dragon… unless….
Rahne roars back! “It’s okay. You’re okay. I know you’re scared, but you’re safe with us,” Wolfsbane says to the dragon she’s just calmed down, by standing up to the reptile and then stroking its snout, and I wonder if she’s been reading a Squirrel Girl comic, or taking lessons from Dani. Probably both. She looks great: Balám and collaborators have finally figured out how to draw Rahne consistently, expressively, and with the dignity our girl deserves. She and Morgan are safe, though now do they have a pet dragon? What does it eat? How much does it eat?
Losing Grip
Meanwhile back at Count Nefaria’s mansion, Escapade– whoops, Blasterdame– has found unexpected, and frankly unwanted, success in her one-on-one fights with would-be villains. Having cleared her way through the competition, she’s got an invitation for drinks with Count Nefaria. Again, Balám, D’Amico and Milla are absolutely killing it on these lighthearted, sometimes talky panels: the tone of the art just fits the tone of the story, and the story is that Shela Sexton has no experience with alcohol and doesn’t know how little grappa will get her drunk. “It’s not just a drink, it’s a story,” she exclaims upon learning how grappa gets made, and then she imbibes rather a lot of said story. Whoops.
The fight scenes get more ridiculous from there, and I can’t help the feeling that after Saying Something Serious About Stigmatized Experience for the entirety of her first New Mutants arc, Charlie Jane Anders is letting herself Just Have Fun. She’s also letting us see that– unlike certain other writers famous for prose before they turned to comics– she understands the form, or else that she takes direction from artists who do. Two pages show the grappa drinking scene on left and right with Cerebella’s action in one elevator shaft-shaped panel down the center: it’s masterful, it comes off, it gets the timing just right, even as our New Mutants get it all wrong.
I can’t emphasize it enough: this issue’s just fun. At least, it’s fun if you like banter, and relatively wordy comics, and heroes who want to make quips and get heard at least as much as they want to defeat any bad guys. Esca– uh, Blasterdame has been reading her Squirrel Girl too: “You have a choice!” she says, kicking a guy in the head. “You can be better!” It’s Claremontian, but also Ryan Northish. It’s also like Mystery Men (the Janine Garofalo/ Ben Stiller film, not the comic), while multiple characters want to be like Spider-Man, including the Count, who tells the half-drunk Shela, “I too have felt the scorn of cruel men.” I mean, who hasn’t?
Teenage Clicks
[Editor, instead of running our usual set of three notes here, can you just copy the panel where Dani and Karma say the New Mutants have a slogan and propose to put it on a throw pillow? I can’t really do better than that. –Stephanie]
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.
