New Mutants: War Children #1 - Marvel Comics

NEW MUTANTS: WAR CHILDREN No. 11, November 2019

Asked by “Marvel Comics” to reunite with Bill Sienkiewicz “to do a thirty-page New Mutants story”, Chris Claremont’s script for this Eightieth anniversary celebration probably pleased the majority of die-hard fans who fondly remember the school of youngsters’ early days when both comic book legends were in the middle of their original run on the title. Indeed, between the British-born American novelist’s nostalgia-inducing penmanship concerning Warlock’s substantial angst at fulfilling his destiny “to become the Magus” and Bill’s “brilliantly unique” visual representation of this publication’s beloved characters, this one-shot could easily be argued as simply being the series' next issue – “It just took us thirty years to get here.”

Disappointingly however, once the narrative moves beyond the extra-terrestrial Technarch fleeing Professor Xavier’s mansion for fear of harming his friends, and the rest of the fledgling super-team follow him to “the ridgeline at the west end of the estate”, this periodical debatably starts to lose much of its ‘old school’ charm on account of some unconvincing plot-twists and plenty of perturbing pencilling. For starters, just how does Hela, the Goddess of Death, become “infected by Warlock’s virus” when Danielle Moonstar is simply “summoned to thy destiny” as “one of my Valkyrie -- chooser of the slain” via her wrist-communicator, and why does the Mistress of the Darkness later tolerate the adolescent mutant’s defiant petulance considering the soul-stealer’s formidable Asgardian power; “But none of us will die today. You have a problem with that?”

Equally as dubious is Claremont’s basic premise that the partial destruction of the X-Men’s home, the temporary transformation of Cannonball, Lockheed, Moonstar and Magma into villainous techno-killing machines, as well as Illyana’s full-blown demonic possession, is all simply due to “Gear-face” having a sudden moment of insecurity. Just why Warlock ‘loses his head’ so dramatically at the story’s start isn’t ever satisfactorily explained, nor how the shape-shifting alien is able to put right all the chaotic damage his mental instability has caused just by morphing with his team-mates.

Unfortunately, such pernickety contrivances are soon forgotten though, courtesy of some significantly impenetrable artwork by Sienkiewicz. The Pennsylvania-born penciller was undoubtedly a revolution in the Bronze Age of comics during the Eighties. But his overly-busy panels and decidedly indecipherable action-packed sequences for Issue One of “New Mutants” War Children” makes it really hard at times to see just who is doing what to whom, especially towards the end of the magazine when the numerous heroes and heroines start falling like dominoes to the ‘dark side’ following their infection by Warlock’s techno-organic virus.

Writer: Chris Claremont, Artist: Bill Sienkiewicz, and Color Artist: Chris Sotomayor