#38: “Aftermath” (April 1986)

Theme and Focus Character: Dead on the inside



The Story: It’s brief. The New Mutants were resurrected by the Beyonder, but they are PTSD-sapped shells of their former selves, going through the motions of life. They all keep having the same dream of dying every night, and Magneto has it right along with them. He feels helpless and frustrated at his inability to spark vigor within them. When Emma Frost offers to take the students off his hands and work with them telepathically, he rejects her at first but then finally accepts when Doug’s parents come to complain about the change in their son. Only Dani refuses.





We know what the kids do not: Emma was having Empath manipulate everyone’s emotions to make the situation worse. Tom Corsi and Sharon Friedlander discover him in the woods, and he consumes them with sexual desire for each other to keep them busy.



My Two Cents: The five page opening nightmare sequence is suitably disturbing, with the kids battling first the Sentinels and then the Hellions before changing bizarrely into their PJs (Rahne is wearing pajamas, a robe, and slippers under her X-suit, while Doug and Warlock have switched heads, and Dani wears her buckskin boots to bed), and climbing into their graves. Note that they call each other by their codenames, not their birth names, which they never do around the mansion.



Two details in particular from this dream. First, the kids know somehow about Empath’s ambitions to control or replace Emma Frost. I don’t know how that would be, based on their previous brief encounters. Second, When Dani summons a distracting image of Tarot’s true love, it’s one of the New Mutants. This fits with a scene back in New Mutants #17 in which Tarot was fiddling with her deck of tarot cards and, while thinking of the New Mutants, drew the card “The Lovers.” We don’t get to see who it is, and Claremont never followed up this plot thread, but my money is on Roberto.



Stevie Hunter makes a return appearance after long absence. Rahne wearing a knee-length skirt during dance is a realistic detail.



By far the weirdest scene is a one page sequence in which, while Dani is grooming Brightwind in the barn, she encounters a frog who is a transmogrified version of Thor, God of Thunder. The weird part is not that Thor is a frog. The weird part is that the Thor-frog would be way up in Salem Center, hanging out in Xavier’s barn to cheer up Dani. He’s supposed to be down in Central Park playing out “Watership Down” with sewer animals. How long would it take a frog to hop that far? Also, Secret Wars II showed Thor no longer in frog form before this issue occurred, so it’s just an oops.



Claremont is having fun putting Magneto in scenes where he has to learn not to be a megalomaniac, like this conversation with his supposed peer, the principal of the local public high school. She wants to impress the supposed headmaster of the super-rich, super-exclusive prep school outside of town, while he just wants to survive the conversation without getting his cover blown.



Meanwhile in X-Men (#204): Nightcrawler rescues an Eastern European princess from Arcade. The other X-Men are helping to clean up San Francisco after the Beyonder’s departure, so this would explain why they’re not helping Magneto deal with the New Mutants back in New York. However…

Meanwhile in Alpha Flight (#33): Heather Hudson comes to the X-Mansion to get combat training from her old friend Wolverine, and the two of them are attacked by Lady Deathstrike. The X-Men are home in Westchester, not in San Francisco as depicted in X-Men and New Mutants.

Meanwhile in X-Factor (#3): Hank loses his blue fur as an unwilling participant in an experiment to heal a disabled mutant.

Yeah, it seemed like the beginning of a story, but instead it was the end of one. Nightcrawler will be heading to England for Excalibur in the near future. Between these Beyonder-addled deaths and the Mutant Massacre, Claremont was into some grimdark stuff. Not enough wacky leprachauns! I wonder what was going on in his personal life.

Is it known at which point Sienkiewicz broke his hand? I didn't think he seemed at his best in the issues he inked but didn't pencil.

#40: “Avengers Assemble!” (June 1986)

Theme and Focus Character: Magneto vs the Avengers

The Story: The police forward Emma Frost’s report that Magneto plans to attack students at the Massachusetts Academy. The Avengers spring into action and intercept Lockheed and Magneto en route to Massachussets. The battle occupies most of this issue, with the Avengers puzzled by how restrained and talkative Magneto is now, even compared to their interactions with him during the Secret Wars.

Learning of Magneto’s presence in the woods nearby, Illyana teleports (perfectly I might add) to assist him, first alone and then with the rest of the New Mutants, teleporting him back to the Massachussets Academy. Illyana saves the day again!




Despite Emma Frost’s psychic surgery on the New Mutants, the New Mutants are still emotionally imbalanced. Remember how Magneto was coming here to get retribution on Empath and Emma Frost for screwing with his head? Apparently seeing the kids in their current state made him rethink this plan off-panel, because when we next see him, he’s collaborating with Emma to help the kids recover further. Emma is said to provide the telepathic expertise, and Magneto’s supposed contribution is the human touch, which does not sound at all like him, but whatever. Emma is also surprisingly gracious about letting the New Mutants depart with Magneto.



My Two Cents: One important step in rehabilitating Magneto into a hero was dialing back his power so that he can lose to foes he’s beaten before. Claremont accomplished this in three ways. First, by declaring him injured from falling all the way from Asteroid M to the ocean, where he was dredged out by Lee Forrester. Second, by Empath messing with his head more recently. Third, by acquiring a sense of compassion that prevents him from going all-out against his assailants. We see in this issue for instance that his concern for Warlock’s well-being takes precedence for his own danger from the Avengers.



John Byrne and Chris Claremont, characteristically, were of different minds about the process by which Magneto became a hero:



Emma comes off surprisingly well in this issue as well, a far cry from Sebastian Shaw's murderous flunkie in the Dark Phoenix story and the gaslighting wicked stepmother of the Firestar mini-series.



Do I believe that Magneto’s power can break Hercules’ bear hug? No, I do not. But Hercules costume has plenty of metal bling, so throwing him a mile away shouldn’t have been a problem. Not smart, Magneto! And eventually he does just that, albeit with “iron-laced ore” from the rocks in the ground.




Fun fact: The Massachusetts academy has 1,000 students. That’s a big boarding school! I hope it’s not too big, because after Illyana steals Captain America’s shield and returns to her friends in the Academy cafeteria, the whole team must have run all the way to the Hellfire Club’s underground base and changed into their Hellion suits before coming back to assist Magneto in the battle.



The artistic musical chairs continue, but Jackson Guice does a great job, so I won’t complain. He sticks around for a while, too.

Meanwhile in X-Men (#206): The X-Men are still in California (not back in New York as seen in Alpha Flight #33, which preceded the previous issue of X-Men) where they have an inconclusive battle with the Freedom Force.

Meanwhile in X-Factor (#5): When X-Factor tries to help a heroin-addicted mutant, the Alliance of Evil intervenes and takes him to their master, Apocalypse. (His first appearance as Apocalypse, though he was retconned to be a guy in a fez in the 1985 Living Monolith graphic novel also.)

What the reasons behind these costumes -- I just wanted to know!

Thanks for the explanations and I did not know that! ... Makes perfectly sense to me ^^^.

#42: “New Song for Old” (August 1986)

Theme and Focus Character: Sam can’t go home again.

The Story: On the bus back to Cumberland, Kentucky, Sam has a nightmare about his family rejecting him over his relationship with his rock star girlfriend Lila Cheney. After visiting his father’s grave and catching up with his mother about how his siblings are doing, Sam decides he’s going to drop out of school and come home to lead his family, but his younger brother Josh doesn’t appreciate his meddling, and his mother predicts his wanderlust will leave him unhappy at home.



Sam’s meet-up with Lila in Charlotte goes sour when she boasts about acquiring a priceless crystal statuette to give his mother. He accuses her of theft, she gets defensive but won’t deny it, the crystal breaks up, and so do they. (We’ll later learn that Lila is a master carver who mined the crystal from the ground herself and then made the statue herself, which seems pretty Mary Sue.)



Lila goes flying in a small aircraft with Alison Blaire (still her back-up singer as seen in issue #29) and guitarist Conal Duran. When the plane crashes in a storm, Sam flies with his brother Josh on a rescue mission. Josh sings a lovely song that provides enough noise for Alison to use her light power to laser a hole in the plane wreckage. (In case you’re wondering, the actual fatality rate for “plane crashes in the woods” is about 100%.) Sam apologizes to Lila for assuming she had stolen the crystal.



Lila shows up for supper in full punk regalia as a test. Sam pretends not to be appalled, and she changes into more traditional attire so as not to humiliate Sam in front of his mother. This unequal relationship does not seem to have a future.



My Two Cents: This must have been an inventory story commissioned after the Farouk arc (since Dazzler is with Lila). The previous issue claimed that it would be followed by a story called “Getting Even,” which is actually the title of #44, not #43.

This issue has no super-villain (which is great) and two themes. One is Sam’s sense of familial obligation butting up against his own personal development. I would have liked to see this play out over several issues rather than being one-and-done. Sam and Dani have both gone home and found that they’re just in the way; their families have adapted to their absence, and their presence is more a burden (though tolerable, because family) than a welcome help. But Sam’s story gives us the familial interactions that Dani’s story denied us.



The other theme is Sam’s mismatched relationship with the urbane and urban criminal Lila Cheney. He’s not wrong to wonder where she got a work of art she says is priceless, though his inquiry was more an accusation.



Josh Guthrie has a musical gift but little opportunity to be caught in the act of being awesome with it. You’d think that saving a famous musician like Lila Cheney would open doors for him. But no. You’d also think that when he’s revealed to be a mutant like his brother Sam, his mutation would have something to do with music. But no. Instead, he turns into a human bird, with hollow bones and wings, as well as a healing factor like Logan. I guess birds do sing, though.

How far can Sam fly? Back in issue #23, he struggled to carry Dani from Westchester to Manhattan, though he somehow carried both Dani and Rahne home from Manhattan. Here, he takes the bus from New York to Kentucky, presumably because that’s too far for him to fly. But then he flies from Kentucky to Charlotte, South Carolina under his own steam.

When Lila is lounging in bed on her tour bus, she wears one of her own concert T-shirts. Musicians don’t typically wear their own merchandise like that.



Kyle Baker does a nice job finishing Jackson Guice’s breakdowns. We’re a long way from Sienkiewicz’ exaggerated style but still nowhere near Marvel’s Bronze Age house style. But can we talk for a minute about the bus bench depicted in the first panel below? A bus like that has four seats divided by a center aisle, not benches the whole width of the bus. How do people get in and out?



Meanwhile in X-Men (#208): Rachel, severely wounded by Logan, is hunted by both the X-Men and the Hellfire Club. The two groups end up fighting each other, and she slips away. Then Nimrod arrives and announces his plan to exterminate both groups.

Meanwhile in X-Factor (#7): News media finally begin to realize that X-Factor and X-Terminators are the same group in two different costumes. Duhhh! Dumbest plot ever. Three Morlocks have to be dissuaded from attacking their supposed mutant enemies X-Factor. Jean realizes Scott is married to someone named “Maddie.”