Posted in: Comics | Tagged: marvel, new mutants, recaps, x-men, X-ual Healing - The Weekly X-Men Recap Column

Who Will Fight for Clone Equality in New Mutants #14? [XH]

Published Mon, 21 Dec 2020 16:00:34 -0600

Welcome to a X-mas week edition of X-ual Healing, the weekly X-Men recap column where we read the seventy-two X-Men comics Marvel publishes every month and tell you what happened. There were four X-books released last week: New Mutants #14, X-Force #15, Wolverine: Black, White, & Blood #2, and Deadpool #9.

Sworn to sell comics for Marvel executives who feared and hated the fact that Fox owned their movie rights, The Uncanny X-Men suffered great indignities. Still, thanks to a corporate merger, a line-wide relaunch, and Jonathan Hickman's giant ego, the X-Men can finally get back to doing what they do best: being objectively the best franchise in all of comics for lovers of soap opera drama.

[MULTINAV]

NEW MUTANTS #14
OCT200568
(W) Vita Ayala (A/CA) Rod Reis
LOST IN THE SHUFFLE!
On the edge of Krakoan society, the NEW MUTANTS are loose in the Wild Hunt! Going big, blowing things up, and combining powers to see who gets crowned king of the mountain. But something lurks in the trees — something old… and HUNGRY… and its favorite prey is young mutants…
Rated T+
In Shops: Dec 16, 2020
SRP: $3.99

New Mutants #14 Recap

The issue opens with a flashback giving us a look at the childhood of Amahl Farouk, growing up in Egypt in the sixteenth century, developing mutant powers, seeing his father die, and meeting the entity known as the Shadow King with whom he would soon become synonymous. After that, the opening credits roll and then we see a letter signed by Danielle Moonstar, Rahne Sinclair, James Proudstar, Xi'an Coy Manh, and Magik to the Quiet Council warning of rising depression in young mutants and offering to address it. Marvel really had to stretch to find five handwriting fonts on their macbook to come up with these signatures. Oof.

Anyway, Professor X tells them to go for it.

At the OG New Mutants' house, Karma has been having nightmares, going back to when she looked into the mind of an Arakkii monster in Otherworld. Mirage helps her try to work through them. Karma keeps replaying that scene, feeling heat from the mind of the Arakkii, and then it transforms into a boy. He's familiar but Xi'an can't remember who he is.

The rest of the group arrives and they head to the jungle to train some young mutants. The kids are divided into teams and we see two of them fight: Ferals (Fauna, Nole, Nature Girl, and Scout), and the Elementals (Rain Boy, Sprite, Petra, and Dust). The Elementals win. The Old New Mutants square off into two teams (Magik, Mirage, and Wolfsbane vs. Warpath, Karma, and Warlock) and have their own scrimmage to demonstrate mutant synergy, combining the powers of two mutants for a greater effect, which is a concept refined in the Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 game, which is an example of corporate synergy. Magik's team wins.

After the demonstration, Scout raises a question: what happens if, in testing their mutant powers and synergies, someone "like her" (I.E. a clone) dies. She points out how Genesis (Apocalypse's child clone, not Apocalypse's wife, which is kinda creepy now that we think about it) and Madelyne Pryor haven't been resurrected. The New Mutants are properly shamed by this, as they should be. Icarus (there in the student group but not part of the match) points out that maybe it's because the Goblin Queen was evil, but Scout correctly responds that there are all kinds of awful villains on Krakoa including in its government. Magik blows her off and sends the kids home. Sellout!

Afterward, Rain Boy, Anole, Cosmar, and No-Girl head to a secret lair in a mountain where they meet with the Shadow King, who is apparently a teacher/father figure for them. Uh oh.

I'm so glad to see someone bring up the hypocrisy going on with the policy against clone resurrection. I think this issue was a great fresh start for the new writer, Vita Ayala. Nothing against Ed Brisson, whose work I've enjoyed elsewhere, but his stories in this book didn't work for me, especially the "lets go hunt down journalists and beat them up" thing. This issue seemed to realign the book as more of a school setting, which is good because that's an aspect that's been sorely missing from the X-Books since the reboot. Rod Reis, who's drawn a bunch of issues of New Mutants already, was great here as always.

Next up, we'll look at X-Force #14.