It’s finally hot me what the current New Mutants series is missing - about 400 pounds!
In all seriousness, Karma has a thirty-year track record as being the perennially overlooked New Mutant. Way back in 1982 when Bob Mcleod was designing her look for the original series, Chris Claremont told him not to bother, as he’d be killing her off within the first few issues. Why that didn’t happen has never been officially explained, but all evidence suggests that he simply forgot. If that’s not a neglected character, I don’t know what is!
You’d think that she could have some romantic drama going on, but the openly gay Shan has never had a romance play out in the comics, and if you think she’s gonna start engaging in hot girl-on-girl action now, with Disney calling the shots, you’re huffing Steam Boat fumes.
But aside from the long-resolved issues with her family, the one time that Karma was brought to the forefront (presumably on a flatbed truck) was when she was possessed by the morbidly obese Shadow King, who continued his gluttonous lifestyle while inhabiting her, then left her high and dry. And fat.
For what may have seemed at first glance a superficial plot twist, Fat Karma made for a surprisingly sympathetic storyline. The former blank-slate Shan had suffered a fate that resonated deeply with readers.
And check out those gams - could Arthur Adams bring those drumsticks to horrifically realistic life on the page, or what?
Whether or not we admit it to ourselves or others, I suspect that every man and woman, no matter how heavy, thin, or super-hot physically fit, has struggled through a long dark night of the soul, fighting the urge to just stop trying, shut out the world and just curl up with a trough of Ben & Jerry’s for the rest of our lives.
Now the New Mutants are back in their own title, and Shan is once again - forgive me - vanilla. Let’s put some meat on those bones! It’ll make for great reading, the struggle to lose the weight will help to flesh her out (sorry) as a character (and convince Cyclops to buy a Wii Fit for Utopia), and when it’s all over we’ll all be relieved to see a thin, sexy Karma - without the extra folds, but with a weightier personality!
If you’re following the X-Book event Necrosha, then you know that Doug “Cypher” Ramsey of the New Mutants is back from the dead, and, like all undead former heroes in these kinds of crossovers, he’s on a mission to betray his former friends. Now that he’s dead, he’s finally found a cool use for his “good with languages” power: interpreting body language to translate what people say into what they really mean.
Click on the image to see Doug’s super-language power in action!
It doesn’t take mutant powers to see that the Prof’s body language is pretty creepy - “Oh my, my former students. Look how you’ve… grown.” But just how close are we to “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” territory?
Click the image below to see just exactly what’s on Chuck’s mind, and how the kids feel about reuniting with the man who shepherded them through their formative childhood years (all except for Doug, who died horribly shortly after meeting him).
Super mega-thanks to Marvel Smart Ass for contributing his mad art and production skillz, and additional writing.
It’s not that I’m not a New Mutants fan - I loved the original series. I’m crazy about the characters, and I’m glad to see the title back on the stands.
But the characters have been very active, and experienced a lot of change and growth in the THIRTY YEARS since this image introduced us to Xavier’s first younger generation of students.
Not that you’d know it from the newly reborn series - everyone’s right back where they were in 1982, it’s Brand New Day for the whole team. The only major differences between this series and the original appear to be Twitter references in place of Madonna jokes, and higher quality paper. Oh, and a significantly higher cover price.
It’s a shame that the New Mutants - a title that once stood as a shining example of boldness and originality in comics - is currently displaying stagnation and a fear of new ideas in its new incarnation.
The non-stop flood Zombie of books and variant covers that Marvel has been pumping out for like, five years now, apppears to be spiraling further out of control. How else could you possibly justify the need for providing New Mutants No. 6, with a cover featuring a close-up of Zombie Doug Ramsey…
Needing a Zombie Variant Cover?
I’m well and truly over the whole Zombie craze, and I think it’s fair to say that it’s finally reached its nadir with the whole Blackest Night/Necrosha thing.
If I may remove my dunce cap and put on my philosopher’s hat for a moment, there’s a wonderful book called The Monster Show that makes a very strong case for the theory that the most popular monsters of a given era are reflective of that era’s most prominent sociological problems and anxieties. The fact that we’ve been zombie-obsessed for years, at a time when the country is ignoring news about world-threatening calamities in favor of American Idol voting results, and eschewing original art in favor of pre-fab teenybop garbage and endless rehashing of music and literature created decades past, I can’t help but think that we identify with zombies so much because we have become a culture that borders on the mindless and survives by cannibalizing itself.
I’ve moved on to a new favorite recurring comic book monster: “meat men” of the sort seen recently in Buffy Season Eight, Manhunter, and Batman: Unseen.
After all, if popular monsters represent our real world phobias, the time is right for an avatar representative of the teror of meat.
1991 - Topps - New Line - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze - 3 Packs per Set - 8 Cards & 1 Sticker in Each Pack - RARE - Out of Production -Vintage - Limited Edition - Collectible
Reading New Mutants #4 today really weirded me out - not just because of all the plot and character inconsistencies, but because Dani Moonstar looked about two months older than she did in this Bob McLeod illustration from 1985. Back then America’s first Zombie president was beginning his second term, and the world was marveling at the amazing new invention called the Compact Disc, while saving their pennies for one of them fancy VHS doohickies, what let you watch a Hollywood pitcher from the comfort of your very own home!
That was 25 years ago - most people reading New Mutants #4 weren’t even Zygotes yet. The people who were alive and reading comics at the time have gone from nerdy virgins to super-cool bad ass studs, to unemployed losers in need of organ transplants. All Dani did was lose here mutant and valkyrie powers, and she acts like it’s the end of the world. It was a very depressing read from that perspective.
Less depressing, but equally confusing - those 25-year-old New Mutants comics featured bright, blaring cover insignia celebrating Marvel’s 25th anniversary. 25 years later, we’re celebrating Marvel’s 70th anniversary. If you’re a comics historian, it’s not too hard to figure out - back then, they were celebrating years since publishing under the “Marvel” banner, whereas now they’re celebrating everything that ever hit the presses since the first pulp sprung from the mind of Martin Goodman, founder of Timely, which would later rename itself Marvel, but not before inventing profitable characters like Captain America and the Sub-Mariner.
Still, who goes out of their way to look older? Not Dani Moonstar, that’s for sure. Or Stan Lee. All praise to a god of comics, but seriously, he has to be like 119 or something by now, right? He was in his 30s when Martin Goodman hired him for Timely… 70 years ago.