396 – Giant-Size Special #11

That’s interesting, because what I found frustrating about this (not that my reaction is as strong as IconUK’s) is that I feel that there is definitely a story to tell here, these are the characters with which to tell it, and this might be the best single period for that story — with one big problem.

The New Mutants was in many ways at its core a coming-of-age story (with the various problems that entails in IP-preserving superhero comics). That makes these among the best characters for a story about younger selves meeting older selves. That story obviously has to be set when they’ve actually come of age in a noticeable way, and that could have been earlier or later than this.

But this era has a lot going for it. No “grown-up” mentor-figures like Cable and Domino around for X-Force any more. It’s also good since one of them has joined the X-Men, since that represented “growing up” in the original context*; it’s good that not everyone did that, so that there’s an element of the future not being what one was led to expect. Confronting Illyana’s death from AIDS allegory — there’s a lot of potential there for talking about what it’s like to grow up.

Which raises the problem that IconUK noted: Doug and Warlock’s deaths are handled so ridiculously awkwardly. That’s the thing: this story needs one New Mutant to have died, but it actively gets in the way that there are three. That would have been a difficult problem for Raab to solve no matter what, but at any rate, he doesn’t manage to solve it.

I suppose one way to do that would be to present it as that everything is great for the living New Mutants, but at the cost of there being horrific deaths for the others. You could do something with Inferno in that context, because the rescue of the child Illyana wasn’t, of course, de-aging (as this story mysteriously regards it as having been) — it was a last-minute happy(ish) ending for the character by erasing her trauma, which killing her off with the Legacy Virus then in turn erased. Illyana is the person who twice never had the chance to grow up.

(Incidentally, I find myself in pretty strong disagreement with our hosts that Inferno is such a masterpiece that you shouldn’t allude it to it for fear of inviting comparisons. Inferno is good, but it doesn’t deserve *that* level of reverence. I think the basic idea in this miniseries is stronger than the basic ideas in Inferno, in fact, and had the potential to be a better story — NM: ToD could have used more ambition, not less.)

This point, that the New Mutants actually are a set where it’s either “doing fabulously, thank you” or “dead,” raises another point that Raab handles poorly, for me — the debate on changing the past.

OK, I’ll say up front that this is a pet peeve of mine with SF genre media in general: there have been *so* many stories that turn on a dilemma, in which someone changes the past and it turns out worse, that “But that would change the timeline!” has cemented itself as a sort of self-evident moral truth, when it’s really not, it’s an artifact of particular stories that imagine the “rules” (moral and otherwise) of time travel in particular arbitrary ways. “Timeline“ is just a way of saying “The way things are,” extended into “were” — the logic of saying that “We have to preserve the way things are/were” is that we live in the best world that ever could have been, and paging Voltaire.

But leaving that aside and accepting that there are (not at all well-explained) horrible consequences here on both sides, this decision, which should be the emotional core of this story, is just awfully handled. It should be a terrible, hard decision for everyone to make, but the pro-child-dying-of-AIDS group, especially Sam and Dani, come across as quite absurdly cold and unemotional, with a whole “I’m afraid we just can’t take the risk” attitude that feels rather as if they were discussing whether to take out a home loan, not, you know, choosing not to do something that might save their friend’s life.

And then there’s the twist. So — this is a story about a man infected with AIDS who infects his sister in an attempt to find a cure for himself. That’s potentially a very effective story. (Better than Inferno, anyway. :)) But it’s self-evidently a morally serious story, one that calls for being handled with a certain level of care. Personally, I want something more than describing the person who does that in clichéd language as “a villain to the core” — our hosts discussed a lot of subtleties to the characterization of Mikhail Rasputin here, and I wish I could see any of those subtleties in what’s actually on the page here.

* This is why I really don’t mind the reset on Sam Guthrie, X-Man!’s maturity and confidence. Yes, it’s incompatible with his history over the previous years. Tell it to Johnny Storm, who has outgrown his immaturity and been reset approximately 137,873 times — superhero comics do this sort of thing all the time. Is this a good story to tell, a former New Mutant becoming an X-Man and now being the most junior and really feeling it? I think it is — it’s paying off one of the most basic threads of the original. And Sam’s a great character for that story. I can stand treating a few years of X-Force as “sort of happened, sort of didn’t” in order to get a good X-story that, critically, hasn’t been told before in that way.