New Mutants 18-30
So you might be wondering what’s happening in the X-Men’s sister book, the New Mutants.
When we started the campaign, the New Mutants had just finished issue 17 of their canon run, in which the team rescued a kidnapped Kitty Pryde from the Massachusetts academy, and therefore got kidnapped themselves.
- Issues 18-20
Concurrent with our issue 188 (Charles Xavier goes to War) we had canon issues 18-20, the badlands story, in which we learn the truth about the demon bear that had been stalking Dani Moonstar – that it had been her parents, who had been cursed and conjoined into the form of the bear for reasons still unknown. The New Mutants are able to confront the bear and eventually free Dani’s parents through the use of Magik’s soulsword.
- Issue 21-22
There are several weeks where the New Mutants are more or less confined to the house because of the threat of Karma’s mind control, but after Shaman’s visit the Professor is able to get enough rest to go with them into NYC for some pre-Christmas shopping. There they again encounter Cloak & Dagger – who they met previously in Marvel Team-Up Annual #6. (In which they had a really stupid plot in which Sunspot and Wolfsbane had been kidnapped and injected with the drugs that gave Cloak &Dagger their powers, which temporarily transferred the C&D powers to Sunspot and Wolfsbane, who couldn’t handle them and C&D had to take them back.)
This time around the New Mutants are able to aid the super-powered teens in thwarting a runaway kidnapping/ human slavery ring which was cracked when one of the runaways escaped and made it back to the Port Authority church claiming to be one person but looking nothing like her. With the Professor able to confirm her identity the New Mutants and Cloak & Dagger are able to locate slavers, bust up the operation and defeat the handful of unstable super-humans made by a new strain of the drug with original empowered C&D. This story strongly suggests but does not outright state that Masque of the Morlocks is involved in the slavery ring, since his powers would let him change the faces of the victims.
[BR: Note that in the original series issue 21 was the introduction of Warlock and Doug Ramsey joining the New Mutants. In our timeline Warlock doesn’t exist and as we know Doug learns about his powers in X-Men Annual 8, joining the New Mutants shortly thereafter. In the original series issues 22-24 the New Mutants did work with Cloak and Dagger and Sunspot and Wolfsbane started re-absorbing those powers. This was a muddled mess of a plot arc in which we learn that while the C&D powers are extra-dimensional in origin with a distinct sentience that makes them feel like magic, they are accessed through the special drug injection _and_ the drug injection only works on mutants. Ugh. I hereby strike as much of this as I can from the record without invalidating MTU Annual #6, which falls before my allowed cutoff time.]
- New Mutants Annual #1
Picking up immediately after the end of Issue 22’s Cloak and Dagger story – before the Prof and the New Mutants have even made it out of the city – they are snagged by a Shi’ar transport beam and pulled into a starship. An ally of Deathbird claiming the mantle of Eric the Red has kidnapped Xavier in hopes of using him as a bargaining chip in the ongoing Shi’ar civil war. While Eric the Red is outfitted with devices to block Xavier’s telepathic powers he hadn’t counted on the scope and potency of the New Mutants various powers and they are able to escape in a shuttle, team up with a small contingent of the Imperial Guard (Electron, Oracle and Tempest) and return to rescue the Professor.
That done, the Professor and the New Mutants return to Earth, arriving via transmit beam seconds after the end of X-Men Annual 8. That had been one busy day.
• Issues 23-28: Rachel’s Story This is a six issue arc that details the life of Rachel Summers from age 4 to 24 in the alternate Days of Future Past timeline. Each issue takes place 4 years after the previous one and covers the actions of the Summers family (Rachel, Jean and Scott) in the attempts to train North American mutants and shelter them from the Sentinels. The series tone is dark – though there is some humor and romance – but that is to be expected in a series that chronicles the full descent into the dystopia from which Rachel escapes in X-Men 184. Most of the series in POV for Rachel, meaning that the reader’s information level spikes after issue 3 once her telepathic powers appear.
The framing sequence for this is Professor X having therapy sessions with Rachel Summers to deal with the issues that produced her ill-timed flashback in Annual #8. In this he is aided by Mirage, who uses her powers conjure up scenes from Rachel’s memory as a way of more directly working through her issues.
The last three pages of each issue are dedicated to what’s going on with the actual New Mutants during the ten weeks covered by these issues. (This story runs concurrent with X-Men 191 to 196.) This is all advancing of romantic and personal subplots: Roberto learns that his father has joined the Hellfire Club and has to be talked down from attacking them. Cypher joins the team. Fighting against her unnatural instincts, Magik recruits Cypher to help resolve the Cannonball/ Wolfsbane/ Magma love triangle. At the end of issue 28 Wolfsbane has gained more confidence in and she and Cannonball are starting a relationship.
- Issue 23:
The year is 1991, Rachel is 4. This starts with a recap of the Mutant Registration Act in 1983 after the assassination of Senator Robert Kelly by the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. The issue details the destruction of the X-Mansion in a Sentinel/US Army attack while the X-Men are on a mission. Most of the residents are killed. Rachel sees Cypher buried under a pile of rubble, and sees Xavier get shot. Later Sunspot, Magma, Karma and her siblings are confirmed dead. Miss Scarlet (a new character with wavelength manipulation powers and bright red skin) is saved by Cannonball. Rachel and Jubilee are saved by Ilyana Rasputin, who in this timeline was never kidnapped into Limbo and is therefore still a teenager (her code name is Alice due to her ‘looking glass’ portals).
The surviving New Mutants and Rachel reconvene with the X-Men at the Grey household (Rachel is well acquainted with her maternal grandparents). Cyclops and Phoenix (Jean Grey returned to life in this with Shiar-constructed genetic blocks against her space-time connectivity powers) take charge of the students while Storm leads the X-Men in more direct battles. Jean is outfitted with a pocket Cerebro that she can use to locate emerging mutants to try to save them from Sentinel attacks. The New Mutants begin a cross country odyssey from New York to Seattle to Las Vegas to Denver.
Team Cyclops, Phoenix, Cannonball, Miss Scarlet, Alice, Jubilee.
- Issue 24:
The year is 1995, Rachel is 8. The New Mutants have been reconstructed a school called The Aerie in the Rocky Mountains on land owned and left undisturbed by Warren Worthington’s business interests. The place feels something like a survivalist camp, but given the Sentinel’s increasing takeover of the US government these sorts of places are not uncommon. In addition to our other heroes we have added three new members – Longshot, a young man from Los Vegas with probability manipulation powers and enhanced agility, and Husk, Cannonball’s younger sister who is able to grow and subsequently shed several epidermal layers for various powers and Yar, a Rhode Island heiress with water manipulation powers who is Cannonball’s girlfriend (she is drawn to look like Grace Kelly – the name is a reference to the film _High Society_). We learn that the rest of Cannonball’s family is dead or imprisoned.
The New Mutants modus operandi at this point is as follows – Phoenix locates a mutant with Cerebro, Cyclops develops an extraction strategy and Alice transports the team members to perform the extraction. At a neutral location the mutant is scanned by Phoenix to confirm they aren’t double agents before bringing them to the Aerie. The new mutant is speed trained in the use of their power and then Alice evacuates them out of Sentinel controlled territory unless they want to stay and help others. This is why while the team has gone on dozens of missions they’re still relatively small. The other problem is that their missions are only successful about half the time – confused young mutants, angry mutant hating hordes, giant killer robots and soldiers mix to make this a very dangerous affair. The team stalwarts are either true believers, those seeking vengeance or bound by family ties to the effort. The rest are moved elsewhere to protect themselves.
This is shown directly in the mission this issue, where the team leaves and then returns without the hoped for mutant and without Yar. The Sentinels had deployed a new polymorphic robot design that Yar was able to reduce to an amorphous shape with her powers, but foolishly thought that would disrupt its weapons systems. It didn’t, and she was killed instantly in the counter attack. Cannonball is devastated.
Team Cyclops, Phoenix, Cannonball, Miss Scarlet, Alice, Jubilee, Husk, Longshot, Yar.
- Issue 25
The year is 1999, Rachel is 12. The New Mutants are still operating out of the Aerie, though the place looks distinctly more threadbare than before. Cannonball is gone – we eventually learn that he went on a suicide run to take out a Sentinel manufacturing plant in New Mexico via an attack run from a sub orbital location. The impact crater is three miles wide. In his place the team has Bellebête, the daughter of the Canadian mutant Aurora and Walter Langoswki. She is a teenage genius with the power to create a solid light hologram of a big hairy monster around herself (he name is from the French for beauty and the Beast) and she is acting as liaison between the Canadian resistance movement and the New Mutants.
As the issue starts we see the arrival of Kid Fantastic (20 year old Franklin Richards), Julie Power (Lightspeed from Power Pack), Bonita Juarez (Firebird), Luke Cage and Pietro Maximoff. This gathering of heroes is necessary because the Sentinels – who now occupy the Baxter Building – are pursuing two separate plans: a worldwide satellite mutant detection system and the destruction of the Blue Area of the moon (and with it the Inhumans). A massive effort of the assembled heroes, plus the Canadian resistance movement and the X-Men, prevents the latter plan from coming to fruition and hobbles the satellite network so it only covers North America.. This comes at a horrible cost: of our new guests only Franklin lives through the event, a swath of the Canadian Resistance Movement is eliminated and Jubilee dies.
During this issue Rachel’s mutant powers appear. Her out of control telepathy gives the reader a viewpoint on what has been happening with the Inhumans, with the surviving Avengers, in New York City, Los Angeles and other places. She takes part in the escape from the Aerie when the Sentinels counterattack and is once again saved by Alice when she creates a looking glass portal to the Morlock tunnels through which everyone can escape.
Team Cyclops, Phoenix, Miss Scarlet, Alice, Jubilee, Husk, Longshot, Bellebête, Kid Fantastic, Rachel Summers.
- Issue 26
The year is 2003, Rachel is 16. The New Mutants have spent the last four years operating out of the Morlock tunnels in New York, since their construction blocks the Sentinel’s mutant detection scans. This means that Phoenix can’t scan for mutants via Cerebro without exposing herself. Still, with the North American Mutant Tracking system on line hiding under the Sentinels feet is one of the few safe places. That same system means that the New Mutants job is even harder since they have even smaller windows of operation. Husk is missing an arm.
Rachel and the whole team are becoming harder. She is a full-fledged team member now, and she and Franklin are orbiting each other romantically. Longshot is, and has been, carrying on with both Miss Scarlet and Bellebête. We learn that Jean and Scott had another child at the Aerie – Nathan – who died some 6 years previous. We also learn that the Summers have turned down a chance to join the Starjammers as an escape route from this – this means that Rachel has met her paternal grandfather, Corsair.
In this issue Doug “Cypher” Ramsey reappears, claiming to have survived the destruction of the mansion and having been on the run for the last decade. Eventually Cypher is revealed as being a Lang Model X-Sentinel programmed to infiltrate and kill the New Mutants. Unbeknownst to the Sentinels their reconstruction of Cypher’s personality to the level able to defeat telepathic scans let that personality use its power of language mastery to overwrite the underlying sentinel code, freeing it/himself from the Sentinel’s anti-mutant directives. He stays with the team, using his language skills and techno-shape shifting powers for the mutant cause.
Team Cyclops, Phoenix, Miss Scarlet, Alice, Husk, Longshot, Bellebête, Kid Fantastic, Marvel Girl (Rachel Summers), Cypher.
- Issue 27
The year is 2007, Rachel is 20. The New Mutants original goal is dead: the mini Cerebro is broken beyond repair, Alice vanished when hit by a psionic scrambler mid looking glass and lacking a way to locate and reach mutants Cyclops has adopted a different tactic – hit and run disruption of the Sentinel operations. Three years ago Bellebête and Cypher devised a personal mutation masker that let the team members act above ground in short bursts and since then they have been full subversives. This is a losing proposition and everyone knows it, but there isn’t anything else to do. Then Phoenix disappears.
Cyclops learns that the technology of the long defunct Stryker Crusade has been renovated by the Sentinels and they just need a sufficiently powerful telepathy to operate it. Through their rapport Cyclops is able to feel the genetic blocks being removed by the Sentinels, opening the drugged and helpless Jean Grey to the cosmic power she once wielded. Cyclops leads a desperate, brilliant attack to save his wife and every mutant in existence. Husk dies getting the New Mutants into the Sentinel base. Miss Scarlett, Longshot and Bellebête hold off the Sentinels long enough for Cyclops and Marvel Girl to reach Phoenix, though only Longshot survives.
The X-Men arrive in time to help foil the plot, rescuing Longshot and giving Cyclops and Marvel Girl time to act. Ultimately Cyclops and Phoenix are consumed by primordial fire when her restored powers go awry. Rachel is bathed in that power as well, which strips away the inherited genetic blocks that had prevented her access to the weave of space-time. She, Kid Fantastic and Longshot end up joining the X-Men since the New Mutants are no more.
Team Cyclops, Phoenix, Miss Scarlet, Husk, Longshot, Bellebête, Kid Fantastic, Marvel Girl (Rachel Summers), Cypher.
- Issue 28
The year is 2011, Rachel is 24. As part of the X-Men, Rachel, Cypher, Longshot and Kid Fantastic are trained by the team’s deputy leader, Ariel. Out of the tunnels they are constantly on the move, relying on Magneto’s limited remaining powers to shield them from the Sentinels. The last four years have been an unending retreat. The end the X-Men don’t even get a bang: they are surprised by the firing of an orbital based mutation suppression beam and surrounded by Sentinels. Kate tries to pull something out of her bag of technological tricks and is nearly obliterated by a Sentinel plasma cannon. Cypher interposes himself, sacrificing his life for hers. Wolverine manages to escape but the rest are taken prisoner.
The next two years in the internment camp go by in a blur, as does the recap of Rachel’s attempt to alter time with Kate’s personality. Kate swears she succeeded but there are no changes to their timeline. At best they saved another universe.
Over the next six months Rachel and Kate were separated. Rachel was being tracked by the Sentinels and to escape she went to the burned out manor and time jumped backwards. Instead of landing at the X-Mansion she landed on the Baxter Building.
The year is 1984. Rachel is 26.
Team Longshot, Kid Fantastic, Marvel Girl (Rachel Summers), Cypher, Storm, Ariel, Colossus, Wolverine, Magneto.
- Issue 29-30
Stepping back to take a look again at our sister book, the New Mutants finished ‘Rachel’s Story in issue 28 (published alongside our issue 196, ‘Appearances’; turns out the ‘transmit Rachel’s past to Magneto’ thing was a good way to keep people reading X-Men but not New Mutants up to date of those plot developments). That means the contemporary New Mutants stop being back up players in their own book. New Mutants issues29 and 30 take place alongside our recently completed issue 197 – specifically right after the scene where Peter and Charles discuss educating the Morlock children. This is where we pick up with Peter and Charles broaching the idea with Callisto and the two teams of youngsters meeting.
Said meeting goes about as well as you’d expect, that is to say the usual ‘toss a group of strange cats into a room and see what happens’ but with super-powered teenagers. In any event the teams are split when they are attacked by an outside source. Magik manages to teleport half of each team away with a stepping disk, but her pressured attempt to move them out of danger instead sends them through time. Specifically she, along with Magma, Cannonball, Sunspot, Harvey, Komodo and Shuffle end up back in time interacting with White and Specs in the early days of the Morlocks, while Psyche, Wolfsbane, Cypher, Aztec, Miss Scarlet, Aviary and Ursus remain dealing with the threat in the present.
That threat is the return of the kali worshipping cult that White belonged to before joining the Morlocks. The teams’ adventures parallel one another as the current team work to fight the cult and the latter team assists in While undoing his past and fighting the cult, ultimately at the cost of his own life. Harvey begins leaving messages in the tunnels for Cypher to find in the future which ultimately lets them deal with the threat and understand what’s happening.
Right after this we get into the results of X-Men issue 198, which means everything goes to hell.
