The recent House of X and Powers of X comics have taken the X-Men to strange new places, but the New Mutants spinoff looks to be taking that team even farther: off the planet altogether. Marvel's new teaser image promises, "a trip to space...what could go wrong?" If the past year of X-Men comics has taught us anything... so, so much.
Jonathan Hickman, Pepe Larraz, and R.B. Silva's event series has effectively rebooted the the entire X-Men universe, including the core team. The new mutant nation has forgiven the X-Men's greatest enemies and offered citizenship; and now that the X-Men are basically immortal, even death won't be much worse than a speed bump in the mutants' future. And now that the event has wrapped up, Marvel's ready to launch a whole new line of X-Men comics and teams, including one for one of their most durable spinoffs: the New Mutants.
Hickman himself will be writing along with Ed Brisson, who recently oversaw epic X-Men events like Disassembled and Age of X-Manand. Joining forces with artist Rod Reis, the new series brings back classics like Sunspot, Wolfsbane, Mirage, Karma, Magik, and Cypher--along with "a few new friends, Chamber and Mondo"--to seek out their missing member. And the first teaser image shows where they're headed on that very mission, and how the cult favorite Starjammers will be joining the story:
The New Mutants have been running around the Marvel Universe ever since 1982's Marvel Graphic Novel #4. Like the original X-Men of the sixties, the team were teenage students in matching black-and-yellow 'school uniforms' learning how to use their powers from Professor Xavier. That series is best remembered for Bill Sienkiewicz’s breathtaking, abstract art and covers, and based on the preview image, Reis seems to be leaning into that legacy. The star of the teaser image, Sunspot, is especially relevant to series co-writer Hickman, who wrote the Brazilian hero in one of his very first Marvel books, Bobby and Sam in Mojoworld. Hickman would later add him to the Avengers, where Sunspot bought out the supervillainous A.I.M. organization (turning it into the new U.S. Avengers in recent years). As for those "new friends," the fire-breathing Chamber and the matter-absorbing Mondo were part of a later generation of new mutants in the nineties’ Generation X series.
As mentioned above, those aren’t the only classic X-Men characters appearing. The Starjammers are every kid’s dream: they’re not just pirates, they’re space pirates! Led by Cyclops’ father, Corsair (it’s a long story), they were recently the subject of a tribute in Jason Aaron’s Avengers, where the core team were changed by their travels in space to more closely resemble Corsair’s crew. As for the New Mutants themselves, at least this series seems more likely to make it into fans’ hands than the legendarily ill-fated New Mutants movie.