7. The New Mutants #18-28 (1984-1985) “Demon Bear, Slumber Party, Cloak and Dagger, Legion” by Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz



My Two Cents: The New Mutants were something of a mixed blessing. Claremont did spin some interesting yarns. But they encouraged Marvel to think of the X-Men as a cash cow that could be multiplied into a dozen simultaneous books without losing quality or story coherence. Their saga began with Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter’s insistence that the core story of X-Men was “school for mutants.” Writers Chris Claremont and John Byrne bristled at the idea of turning their team that included adults like Storm and Wolverine back into students, but they did come up with a new single character, Kitty Pryde, to fill the student role. Not good enough; Shooter wanted more. Byrne moved on to other assignments, and Claremont dragged his feet but eventually produces a new teen of teen X-Men who could go through all the traditional super-teen rites of discovering their powers, learning to using them non-disastrously, and trying to fit a personal life in amidst the heroics. But the New Mutants comic drifted for its first year and a half, sometimes used as a “Brave and the Bold” style team-up book to try to drum up interest for mediocre Marvel characters like Team America. But at least Shooter was happy-ish that Xavier had someone to instruct. The art was serviceable but indistinguished and safe.



Everything changed when Bob MacLeod and Sal Buscema gave way on pencils to Bill Sienkiewicz, who was moving out of the Neal Adams style he used on Moon Knight into an experimental mode that seemed indebted to David Lynch and Pablo Picasso in equal doses, with watercolor, collage, and a very impressionistic anatomy that emphasized how things felt over how they “ought to look.” His chiaroscuro textures never would have fit for Action Comics, but they certainly caught the eye.



Marvel is to be commended for allowing this kind of experimentation, which sales must have justified; critical buzz certainly did. Claremont must have realized what he had on his hands, because the stories suddenly got crazy, with a series of stories that saw the X-babies facing off against dream-based monsters who inhabited impossible mental landscapes, including the nightmares of Danielle Moonstar, the drug-addled world of Cloak and Dagger, and the maddened mind of Legion.



This is the unusual comic book where the art tells you more about the personalities of the characters than the text does. Warlock’s confusion and wonderment come out in the body horror of his constantly shifting humanoid form, sprouting radar dishes, eyestalks, and tentacles first from one limb, then another. He was made for CGI, and vice versa, before CGI was much of a thing. Moonstar’s cool resolve, Magik’s sullen blonde gothitude, and Sunspot’s impetuosity are all over not just their faces but their postures and their very contours.