NEW MUTANTS/X-FORCE Appreciation 2024

[From The Shadows]

Adam Pollina X-FORCE Appreciation
One of the top eras of the teams artwork, befitting the quirky road trip era under John Francis Moore and Jeph Loeb.

This was my favorite era.

Early Greg Capullo X-FORCE Appreciation (before his own designs)

I could never really get behind this thing the New Mutants had against Xavier. How much Xavier can do when he lays dying is a little unrealistic. Do writers actually remember this?

Sam growing up from the awkward beanpole who couldn't control his powers to a true leader able to fight Gladiator was one of the best things the 90s gave us.

Despite what I said about the Xavier/Cannonball convo it just shows that Sam should have not been afraid of Xavier when he briefly joined the X-Men. Let alone a screw up. Cannonball was always my favorite of the 'New Mutants'.

[Thirteen]

Despite what I said about the Xavier/Cannonball convo it just shows that Sam should have not been afraid of Xavier when he briefly joined the X-Men. Let alone a screw up. Cannonball was always my favorite of the 'New Mutants'.

Sams "newbie" portrayal when he "graduated" from X-Force was a gross mischaracterization. Lobdell did slightly better in the main X-MEN book by making him take unsupervised initiative in the field. When it came back around for Sam to be on an X-Men team under Rogue, Cannonball was treated as more of a known commodity team member.

[Zero Hunter]

Sam was right though. Xavier gathered the team under the influence from the Brood Queen inside him. He then went full Brood got a new body and then left. He barely taught the team at all. Then under Magneto the team was literally killed and then brought back to life. Every one of them. Instead of helping them deal with that trauma Magneto just dumped them on the White Queen to fix them. Sam and the New Mutants never had that fatherly bond with Xavier like the X-Men because they barely got a chance to know him before he left. Honestly most of the adults that were supposed to be watching out for them when they were kids all let them down. They had to rely on each other and themselves more than any adult mentor. That is what made them so interesting back in the day. They were doing things there way regardless of what the "adults" thought. That is what made it so tragic when they destroyed all of Sam's character growth when they "graduated" him to the X-Men and turned him back into the rookie even though he had more experince than others on the team at the time.

I wish they would get back to that sort of attitude. The mix of all their teachers ideas and philosophies. Doing what they think needs to be done without worrying about what anyone else thinks. That was what made those characters great. Being all together. Just slapping individual members of that generation on random teams misses what made them great. They are like the Teen Titans of the Marvel U. They are family and friends first more than just teammates. These are the characters that need to break away again and do their own thing and be the ones the younger generations look up too.

Cannonball Sunspot
Moonstar Magma
Rictor Karma
Wolfsbane Boomer
Warlock Rusty Collins
Cypher Skids
Magik Warpath
Shatterstar Siryn

[Peace]

I Wish in the krakoa era rebirth Larry bodine ��

[wlfking]

Sam was right though. Xavier gathered the team under the influence from the Brood Queen inside him. He then went full Brood got a new body and then left. He barely taught the team at all. Then under Magneto the team was literally killed and then brought back to life. Every one of them. Instead of helping them deal with that trauma Magneto just dumped them on the White Queen to fix them. Sam and the New Mutants never had that fatherly bond with Xavier like the X-Men because they barely got a chance to know him before he left. Honestly most of the adults that were supposed to be watching out for them when they were kids all let them down.

Ugh. Feels like I'm hearing this sentiment a lot when it comes to youth hero characters and it's really starting to bug me to think the X-men have such a lousy track record when it comes to mentorship. I mean, I'm all for the adults still being flawed but I don't think they should be getting an F when it comes to this in every instance. I think Generation X ended with Emma telling the kids to get lost(can't remember for sure) and Sean becoming an alcoholic. I think they also kept changing how they were teaching the kids which made it feel like they were making it up as they went along. While you could argue that there isn't too much precedent for what they were doing, it still contributes to the image that the the adults in X-Men, even the ones that are passionate about teaching, all are kind of S#i! at it. In every incarnation of youth teams.

I think the Academy X kids were similarly neglected. Something I've heard people say but I don't remember for sure.

As for favorite order lists . . .

Rahne.
Dani.
Roberto.
Sam.
Xuan.
The rest are tied for sixth except . . .
Amara. I do still kind of like her though.

[wlfking]

I Wish in the krakoa era rebirth Larry bodine ��

Would have been nice. And if they couldn't resurrect him, there better have been a very good reason for it.

[Technopriest]

My favorites members were always Warpath, Caliban, and Rictor. I wish more would have been done with Caliban, he had potential to be an interesting, non-human passing character.

[AJpyro]

Chiming in to send love to the New Mutants and hope Roberto's true team show up in Xmen 97.

[Thirteen]

I Wish in the krakoa era rebirth Larry bodine ��

Would have been nice. And if they couldn't resurrect him, there better have been a very good reason for it.

Was there a Krakoa Resurrection tenet against suicide, perhaps?
Characters that wanted to enter the Ressurection queue to "fix' something about themselves had to die by combat in the Crucible ceremony. I didn't delve too far into Krakoan culture to know the ins and outs their mores on suicide, though euthanasia seemed fine.

[Sutekh]

The rest are tied for sixth except . . .
Amara. I do still kind of like her though.

Amara felt like she had a lot of story potential with the remains of Nova Roma, I feel, and a whole lotta nuthin' happened there.

At least some of the Nova Romans seemed to have been natives of the area who had been raised under Selene's spell ('coerced by her psychic powers' IIRC), utterly convinced that they were a splinter offshoot of Roman citizens, creating her faux Roman outpost. A bunch of folk, stripped of their language, their culture, their ties to the surrounding people, even their original skin color, to play dress-up for some batty immortal who got run out of Rome ages ago and wanted to recreate her glory days.

That's some pretty intense stuff, and Amara being one of them *could* have been amazing. Forced to embrace her mutant identity as she became aware that she's not and never was a 'Roman,' and that she literally can't go back to being whatever indigenous folk her bloodline was plucked from, since Selene didn't bother to keep track of the kidnapped native folk's tribal affiliations or cultural identities before she recast them as 'Nova Romans.' She be more 'mutant' than anything else, since everything she grew up knowing about herself would have been a lie.

The decision at her introduction to make her a blonde dressed as a native, and not a native glamered to appear as a blonde for Selene's fake Roman outpost, kind of stripped her of a potent story seed, IMO. And also made her kind of a dubious choice to go back and rejoin 'her people' in Nova Roma, since she was also suggested to be descended from Selene herself, the 'witch' that used her powers to enslave them, and not actually one of them. (Nova Roma itself was later retconned to be an actual Roman colony, and Selene to have just co-opted it, but that retcon seemed to subtract story possibilities, rather than add them, so was a strange choice, IMO.)

The waffling on her backstory, and the kind of scary nature of her powers (not a lot of non-lethal options for chucking 1300 - 2200 degree F molten rock at people...) did not do Amara any favors, combined with her kind of same-same generic blonde kid looks, on a team that already had Sam, Ilyanna and Doug in that role.

[wlfking]

Was there a Krakoa Resurrection tenet against suicide, perhaps?
Characters that wanted to enter the Ressurection queue to "fix' something about themselves had to die by combat in the Crucible ceremony. I didn't delve too far into Krakoan culture to know the ins and outs their mores on suicide, though euthanasia seemed fine.

I believe Magneto had some way requesting he not be resurrected but I'm fuzzy on the details. He and Storm destroyed their "back ups" or some such to show they were like the Arakko mutants.

Larry's death had such an impact on the issue he was in that I could kind of understand it being an editorial decision to not want it undone. Not that any of those editors are necessarily still around.

[wlfking]

Amara felt like she had a lot of story potential with the remains of Nova Roma, I feel, and a whole lotta nuthin' happened there.

At least some of the Nova Romans seemed to have been natives of the area who had been raised under Selene's spell ('coerced by her psychic powers' IIRC), utterly convinced that they were a splinter offshoot of Roman citizens, creating her faux Roman outpost. A bunch of folk, stripped of their language, their culture, their ties to the surrounding people, even their original skin color, to play dress-up for some batty immortal who got run out of Rome ages ago and wanted to recreate her glory days.

That's some pretty intense stuff, and Amara being one of them *could* have been amazing. Forced to embrace her mutant identity as she became aware that she's not and never was a 'Roman,' and that she literally can't go back to being whatever indigenous folk her bloodline was plucked from, since Selene didn't bother to keep track of the kidnapped native folk's tribal affiliations or cultural identities before she recast them as 'Nova Romans.' She be more 'mutant' than anything else, since everything she grew up knowing about herself would have been a lie.

The decision at her introduction to make her a blonde dressed as a native, and not a native glamered to appear as a blonde for Selene's fake Roman outpost, kind of stripped her of a potent story seed, IMO. And also made her kind of a dubious choice to go back and rejoin 'her people' in Nova Roma, since she was also suggested to be descended from Selene herself, the 'witch' that used her powers to enslave them, and not actually one of them. (Nova Roma itself was later retconned to be an actual Roman colony, and Selene to have just co-opted it, but that retcon seemed to subtract story possibilities, rather than add them, so was a strange choice, IMO.)

The waffling on her backstory, and the kind of scary nature of her powers (not a lot of non-lethal options for chucking 1300 - 2200 degree F molten rock at people...) did not do Amara any favors, combined with her kind of same-same generic blonde kid looks, on a team that already had Sam, Ilyanna and Doug in that role.

I run into the joke about every how New Mutant is liked "except Amara" quite often.
I'm sure something can be done with her but I haven't a clue what. She even had a story in the Krokoa era but I don't think it was followed up on.
At least she got to be the POV character in one of those x-men ps2 games.

[wlfking]

The original team itself was a breath of fresh air. In a genre that often started out with four or five person teams, with a single woman (Fantastic Four, Avengers, Defenders, Champions), here was a five person team with *more girls than boys!*

I found myself marveling at that a few times. Weren't many males left by the end of the last volume of New Mutants either since Sam and Roberto went to space and Doug and Warlock were usually doing Quiet Council stuff.

[Sutekh]

I found myself marveling at that a few times. Weren't many males left by the end of the last volume of New Mutants either since Sam and Roberto went to space and Doug and Warlock were usually doing Quiet Council stuff.

Rahne was a nice breath of fresh air as well. Super-ladies tend to get 'point and shoot' powers like mentalist or ranged blaster (like Jean or Storm), more than in-your-face scrapper (like Wolverine). And there was Rahne, all up-close-and-clawsy, before 'Wolverine, but a girl!' was even a notion. Plus, female characters who don't have fabulous manes of hair down to their mid-back? Lady heroes whose mid-riffs, arms and / or legs aren't exposed? What! Just mess with those stereotypes!

Rahne certainly wasn't unique, the Defenders had Valkrie as a lady tank, which was also cool, but Valkyrie on a team that *also* had the Hulk and Namor as he-tanks was kind of like, wow, the woman gets to be the third-best tank on a team with three tanks...

Rahne didn't have as much competition for the scrapper-y / 'infantry' role, since 'Berto was more of a tank-y character, so she had some 'niche protection.' (And when new scrapper-y sorts showed up, like Feral or Shatterstar, Rahne was usually off the team anyway...)

[mugiwara]

One of the missed opportunities with Young X-Men was that Amara and Jonas Graymalkin didn't get to spend much time together.
I'd would have liked to see Amara help him to get adjusted with this brand new world, since she had to go through that too.

It's also a shame that Nova Roma keeps being used only in "it was all a lie" or "oh no they're all dead" plots while it could help explore Amara's personnality, a foot in an ever changing world, the other foot in an old society that rejected change.
But no, the only idea some writer came with was that Amara should fall in love with the bad boy and maybe could "fix" him. Twice. Ugh.... Will that trope ever die?