>were supposed to take over from the "old guard" and become the main X-Men
>not a single character ever caught on apart from Magik, and that was mostly after she became a 10s Animu Waifu
>the book itself never got any traction, and even Excalibur, basically "Wacky Bri'ish X-Adventures' Guv: The Book" got far more issues in its original run, and many more revivals
>even when people say "dude, you've gotta read the New Mutants" they just refer to the very early issues and the Sienkiewitchz art
Why did the New Mutants fail so much to do anything of note? I'm not going to pretend I'm a literal boomer, I grew up in the 90s/00s. And in my time you had the obligatory "Teen X-Men" OCs, which didn't particularly interest me, as I could still read about the actual X-Men. But due to diving deeper into the X-Line as a whole, I did try New Mutants, only to find it resoundingly "meh". Excalibur I did enjoy, but NM? It did nothing for me. No character bar Illyana (and that's mostly because I like Sorcerers and the such in general) grabbed me. The 90s/00s books like Gen X/Academy X/etc at least had the contemporary setting for me to enjoy/self-insert, even if I didn't, again, care for the characters the same. Yet they had better powers, aesthetics and demeanors. The NM always seemed to me like the absolute biggest chumps in the X-Verse. Even X-Factor, with Guido and Madrox, literal D-Listers, was more fun.
And the thing is, even in adaptations, like the Fox movies or X-Men Evo, they just picked someone like Rogue to make the "teen" character and act as the POV. Then you've got Kitty and Jubilee, the eternal X-Teens. As time goes on, the 90s/00s Classes get more exposure and are overtaking the rest as the "successors". The New Mutants are stuck as just literal nobodies that never had an impact on anything, and their book is a literal nothingburger. X-Factor, X-Force, Excalibur, they all ended up having an impact. NM is like the 80s Exiles I think; utterly inconsequential.
Bc they never got individual uniforms until too late. X-Force was their true potential. Man early liefeld was so inspired. Zoomers wouldn't understand.
You’re just a moronic homosexual tastelet.
And yet most of them continue to get used prominently in comics to this day.
So you are talking bullshit.
>were supposed to take over from the "old guard" and become the main X-Men
Yes, but the editors had other ideas
>they just refer to the very early issues and the Sienkiewitchz art
Billy the Sink didn't become the artist on it until issue 18, I wouldn't call something after the first year and a half "the very early" issues.
Cannonball had a whole storyline about graduating from X-Force to the X-Men
And he's been in and out of the main line up ever since.
Personally say that Hickman stealing him for the Avengers really killed his character since he got married and had a baby off screen, so now whenever Sam shows up you have to acknowledge that crap
Ironically joining the Avengers did the opposite for Sunspot who became more prominent than ever and developed a new role as a team financier and Mastermind.
He's probably the most successful and closest to mainstream right now aside from Magik. The X-Men 97 push should solidify him
Dani is probably a distant third
The problem with the New Mutants was that they were introduced only shortly before Marvel really stopped giving a frick about actually developing/progressing their stories and characters. By the time Claremont left, there was basically zero chance the New Mutants would ever actually progress to the main team or ever get older than teenagers, thanks to the whole 'illusion of change' bullshit
This is the entire problem with introducing teen characters like this in the first place and with the entire premise of "they're going to grow up and take over from the characters you actually like and want to read about".
Nobody in their right mind would ever let any writer actually retire the main cast of the X-Men or the Justice League, the Avengers, etc, and let the kids grow up and replace them. But writers can't help themselves from aging the kids up anyway, and they just end up in this purposeless limbo where they're too old to still be the teen kids, and the older generation is never going anywhere because they're what sells. The only real way around this is to push the teens into a radically different direction, where for example, the New Mutants don't want to grow up to be the next generation of X-Men anymore, and become X-Force instead.
is the only one here who wants to talk about how Rob Liefeld saved that book and saved those characters for a time.
You could start retiring some of them and rotate in a couple of the newer characters
Like what does Angel contribute at this point?
How many times are they going to harp on Iceman being gay and Omega?
Colossus looks great but he hasn't had a decent individual storyline in decades
Polaris and Havok are just pale imitations of their relatives and don't offer anything special on their own
In theory you could try, but in reality if they're been around for decades on the main team even characters who don't really do much anymore still have a lot of fans who want to see them.
Angel still has his Archangel alter ego, that's always good for story material whenever someone wants to focus on it. Colossus may as well just be a love interest character for whatever girl is with him by this point, and Iceman is basically a write off for anything except gay stories about being gay now. That's his entire character now.
Polaris' character arc went from "created to be Iceman's girlfriend" to "Havok's girlfriend" to "gets mind controlled or possessed by villains a lot" to "Magneto's daughter". Even getting voted onto the main X-Men team by fans didn't get Marvel to treat her better, but I'd rather be she still be around to look at than not around.
I don't think you're being fair on Havok though. The point of Havok is that he's the guy stuck in Cyclops' shadow, everyone expects him to be a natural leader and committed soldier for the cause, when he just wants to like a normie life and not have to deal with mutant stuff. There's enough character conflict and sibling rivalry material to work with for him, even before you get into him getting mind controlled by villains as much as Polaris does.
>Nobody in their right mind would ever let any writer actually retire the main cast of the X-Men or the Justice League, the Avengers, etc, and let the kids grow up and replace them.
Back in the 80s there was still a possibility they would. Even for some time in the 90s: Clone Saga was conceived as a serious attempt to give Peter an ending.
>Back in the 80s there was still a possibility they would.
You're missing the point that those people were not in their right minds, and it likely wouldn't have ever been allowed by editorial. A team book temporarily retiring characters in order to rotate the cast is about as good as you'd get.
>Even for some time in the 90s: Clone Saga was conceived as a serious attempt to give Peter an ending.
Again, these were not people in their right minds. And that story was an attempt to tell readers they'd been following Peter's clone for 20 years, the clone would get an ending, and the adventures of the real Peter would continue. They just never had a workable gameplan for have Ben start using Peter's identity again, and were eventually forced into aborting the whole plan.
Doug is based
Sam is based
Bobby is extra based
Rahne was good in X-Factor
The rest are all shit
Doug had such a joke of a power but actually ended up having a very interesting story arc
I honestly wish they'd left him dead rather than bringing him back with all that moronic power creep. Even the "body language = good at fighting" part was stupid.
This comic is stupid because in reality all of those ideas are equally implausible. Body language only sounds more relevant to his power because we call it "language" as part of a metaphor. But it's not actually connected to any linguistics whatsoever. So if you're already stretching a character to "speak metaphorical languages", i.e. tie his ability to skillsets in unexpected areas, might as well go all the way through. Or maybe not do any of that in the first place. What the frick was the point of this character, to begin with?
He was the original mutant with a non-combat power. The audience was supposed to identify with him and he was the writer's self-insert.
I had this comic as a kid and paid very close attention to that page
I think it is hilarious that Warlock gave Betsy high heals.
How come Claremont, with ALL his fetishes, never found a way to properly set up an actual relationship/romance between Doug and Psylocke?
It would've made Doug a hell of a lot more interesting
Maybe he was only a casual older woman/younger man enjoyer?
So Claremont will pay a dominatrix to dress up as Storm and shove her hand up his arse but he couldn't be bothered to commit to this simple age gap relationship???
What a gyp
>So Claremont will pay a dominatrix to dress up as Storm and shove her hand up his arse
To be fair, we're never going to know if that's true or just someone with a grudge trying to smear his reputation with a story that at least sounds plausible once you've read enough of his work.
>but he couldn't be bothered to commit to this simple age gap relationship???
This was after Shooter had already told him to stop Colossus/Kitty because of the age gap. He knew where the line was and actually committing to another pedo pairing wasn't going to fly.
Resurrected Doug is not Doug, that's not part of what I was thinking of when I said he had an interesting story arc
I actually think that seeing the pattern in the universe makes more sense than randomnly being able to talk alien language
You don't like Warlock? You have no soul.
they were supposed to take over as the next fox movie series but then disney bought them out (and the first movie wasnt good)
They became the bleeding edge 90s extreme team that as hugely popular. The real problem is that they vanished with the 90s when everyone had a back to the 60s classic drive in comics.
Literally only Sam "graduated" to X-Force. Pretending the New Mutants had anything to do with the X-Force that blew up in the 90s is disingenuous. The book was simply axed due to lack of interest and X-Force, X-Factor and X-Calibur were the core tertiary X-Titles.
Sunspot joined the team in the first year and was a longstanding member after that
Dani joined the book after her stint in the MLF and was part of the Roadtrip era
They were a proof of concept that the x-men were popular enough to substain a spin off book starring other characters, which lead to the franchise being what it is today.
It got canned and never properly revived as soon as other, more interesting characters got spin-offs though.
It lasted for a hundred issues, that's not bad at all.
Dani Moonstar is forever my favorite X-Person