New Mutants Forever: A Review

Writer: Chris Claremont; Pencils: Al Rio; Inks: Bob McLeod; Covers: Al Rio, Bill Sienkiewicz & Art Adams

Rating 2.5 out of 5 stars

When the New Mutants Forever miniseries was first announced, I was looking forward to it. I thought it would be taking place in the same continuity as Chris Claremont's very well written X-Men Forever ongoing book. I felt it would be a good way to see what was happening to some of the characters Claremont did not have room to feature in the main Forever series.

However, I soon learned that New Mutants Forever would be in a separate "universe," this one diverging from the end of Claremont's run on the original series, which would be, I believe, New Mutants #54. This seemed an odd choice, because Claremont left nowhere near the amount of unresolved plotlines on New Mutants when he left that book as there were when he departed Uncanny X-Men. Nevertheless, I was still anticipating it.

Unfortunately, New Mutants Forever is something of a letdown, a missed opportunity on Claremont's part. This is surprising, given the aforementioned high quality of writing Claremont was doing contemporaneously on X-Men Forever.

"The Fall of Nova Roma" sees that lost Roman colony in the South American jungles conquered by the diabolical Red Skull. The New Mutants join forces with one of their arch-enemies, Selene, Black Queen of the Hellfire Club and former ruler of Nova Roma, to liberate that city from the clutches of the Nazi supervillain.

Two of Claremont's pet tropes, mind control and physical transformation, are used to excess in New Mutants Forever. To wit, the Red Skull presses into his service his victims via brainwashing and/or mutating them into scarlet-hued doppelgangers. Particularly on the receiving end of the Skull's attentions is Doug Ramsey, a.k.a. Cypher, who is transmogrified into a bestial red monster.

Oddly, Claremont ends up not using half of the cast for most of the series. Mirage, Wolfsbane, Magneto, and the Inner Circle of the Hellfire Club are sidelined after the first issue. Both Cypher and Magma spend the majority of the story as either the Red Skull's prisoners or mind-controlled puppets. That just leaves Cannonball, Sunspot, Magik, Warlock, and Selene to carry the majority of the story.

The decision not to involve Magneto more deeply in the narrative is especially puzzling. After all, Magneto spent his childhood in a concentration camp. His entire family was murdered by the Nazis. So there would have been a lot of dramatic potential in Magneto, a survivor of the Holocaust, encountering the Red Skull who, in the Marvel universe, was Hitler's right hand man.

Another odd choice by Claremont is his depiction of Selene in this tale. The deposed monarch of Nova Roma should be, per the characterization established by Claremont himself, a sadistic, avaricious, manipulative immortal who maintains her eternal youth by vampirically draining the life force from her victims. Here, however, Selene is suddenly this warrior queen on a quest to liberate her enslaved homeland and rescue her granddaughter Magma from the Red Skull's clutches. Selene's devotion to Amara is especially puzzling. My memory is a bit hazy, but as I recall it when the two first appeared in the early issues of New Mutants Selene intended Magma as a sacrificial victim.

Claremont could have explored the notion that Selene, witnessing the threats to the safety of her family and the independence of homeland, undergoes an epiphany and awakens to the fact that she has a genuine desire to safeguard them. Perhaps then his scripting of her in this miniseries would have worked. It could have offered a previously unrevealed side of a character we thought we knew so well. Unfortunately, Claremont does not explore the reasons for Selene's sudden maternal, altruistic tendencies. So the casting of the Black Queen as a modern-day Boudica appears extremely incongruous.

Another area Claremont does not adequately explore is the Red Skull's motives for invading Nova Roma. Yes, the Skull is evil. Yes, he wants to establish the Fourth Reich. But why is he specifically in Nova Roma? What has brought him there, aside from a general desire to conquer & pillage?

And then there is the character of Tiberius. When we first meet him, he appears to be a prisoner of the Red Skull. Tiberius seems ready to aid Doug and Amara in breaking free from the Skull's mental domination. But in the end he is actually seeking to supplant the Skull as conqueror of Nova Roma. However, we never find out who exactly Tiberius is, where he came from. This seems like a major oversight on Claremont's part.

At least on the artwork end of things, New Mutants Forever is actually a decent series. Al Rio's work is very detailed, and his storytelling exceptional. All of Rio's characters are rendered as expressive, emotional beings. I think that due to his talent for drawing sexy women, and some of the past projects he was worked on, Rio is often pigeonholed as a "bad girl" artist. But his work on New Mutants Forever demonstrates that he really is a strong artist capable of rendering a diverse number of subjects and settings.

Rio seems to have a lot of fun with the techno-organic Warlock. In the past, others have observed that Warlock is a difficult character to render, and that few artists aside from his designer, Bill Sienkiewicz, have been able to capture his weird, alien qualities. Rio's style is light years away from Sienkiewicz. While I would say that Rio's depiction of Warlock perhaps does not have quite that much of the character's strangeness, it definitely possesses the fluidity of form necessary to depict the quirky shape-changer.

Whether it was Claremont or Rio's idea I do not know, but I was glad to see that in the final two issues Selene sheds her dominatrix outfit, and is clad in Roman battle armor. Certainly that is a much more pragmatic wardrobe choice if one wants to lead an army in liberating a conquered city.

Bob McLeod, the artist who co-created the New Mutants with Claremont, is the inker on New Mutants Forever. I am unfortunately not an art expert, so I have difficulty in discerning if any of McLeod style comes across in the finished artwork. McLeod has, in the past, lamented the tendency of younger artists to draw extremely finished, detailed pencil pages, leaving the inker with little more to do than trace the art. I can definitely understand McLeod's point of view, and his desire to bring his own stylistic flourishes to the final artwork. Also, I suspect it can become tedious to ink very tight pencil work.

I do not know if that was the case with New Mutants Forever. I have seen various examples of Al Rio's uninked pencils on his web site, though, and they had a very tight, finished quality to them. So I would not be surprised if the art McLeod was given to ink was in the same vein. If it was, that is unfortunate, as McLeod is a talented artist in his own right. I would have preferred it if he'd had the opportunity to brings something more of himself to this project.

(Taking another look through the books, there appears to be something of McLeod's style readily apparent on the first page splash of issue #1. As I said, though, I'm not an expert on spotting these things.)

Nevertheless, considering he is the co-creator of most of the characters in New Mutants Forever, I'm glad that McLeod was involved in at least some capacity. And I expect that whatever the level of McLeod's contributions, having Rio's artwork inked only increased the quality of the final look. Because more often than not, when a book is shot directly from uninked pencils, the coloring obscures and overwhelms too much of the detail.

The cover artwork for New Mutants Forever is very good. Al Rio draws two of the covers himself, namely issue #s 3 and 5. The first issue features a striking abstract cover by a former New Mutants artist, the aforementioned Bill Sienkiewicz. The remaining two were done by Art Adams, who previously penciled a well-remembered New Mutants special back in 1985, as well as numerous X-Men related projects over the years. I enjoyed seeing both Sienkiewicz and Adams do covers for this miniseries. I just would have preferred if Adams had drawn more story-specific images for his two covers.

In the end, New Mutants Forever seems like such a missed opportunity, with Claremont unfortunately fumbling the ball in a number of areas. But at least it can be regarded as a very well illustrated fumble.