How can they be "New" mutants if the story is thirty-seven years old?

So, Dave called me today and axed me about why I had sent him the New Mutants stuff and particularly why I thought it had something to do with God and good/evil.
My response:

As to your question about my experience with reading "The New Mutants" and my take on it: Yes, I did first read it when it came out in, as you say, 1984. It was a new mutant experience, after the several years of the Chris Claremont/ John Byrne X-Men experience, so it was, as designed, something that turned my head. Much as, say, a Sentinel might turn its robotic head and take notice.

My reading of it as having a good vs. evil aspect, however, was from watching the movie and rereading the TPB last year (last summer?). Before I sent it to you, I reread it and realized that it didn't have as much to say about that as I had thought, but still enough to engender the question.


Continuing: (BTW, Dave wants you to post this):

I think that the good vs. evil question stems, ultimately, from the characters of Sam and Rahne (I'm relying on memory here, since my only copy is the one I sent you) and their internal conflicts, as Claremont wrote them.

Of course, it's all just comic book FONFLIF! so it's all contrived, but I do think that Claremont was aiming at that, on the admittedly watered-down 12-year-old audience level.

I think that it's obvious that you explored the subject in far greater detail in "Cerebus, in a far more nuanced way, particularly when you got into the direct confrontations between Cerebus and Cirin/Serna. As well as the, as far as it went, internal conflict in Cerebus when he was the Pope


Page 3: I don't know if you have watched, or been able to watch, the movie yet, but I think that it got into the dichotomy a *little* bit more (as I remember it), within the parameters of "we only have two hours and we have this many characters/actors that we have to give relatively equal time to, so we can only scratch the surface of what we're trying to say and, remember, it's a comic book movie, fer cryin' out loud!"

In summation, I did think back then upon first reading it, when I was far more naive, that it had religious or, more to the point, internal conflict about good and bad elements to it. I still thought that, to a lesser degree, after reading it last year.


Page 4: I think that Claremont, being a skilled writer, was and is good at exhibiting internal and external conflict within and between characters, and that he did that in "The New Mutants." I know nothing about his personal life, so I don't know if he is a good, observant or lapsed Catholic, or Lutheran, or Methodist, or Zoroastrian. I just know that he was pretty good at tapping into the internal teenage angst of some of his New Mutants.

As to the demon element of Colossus' kid sister, well, I think that he kind of went off the rails with that character, but that he started off with (IIRC) some internal conflict for her before he just made her into a more one-dimensional character.

Claremont has confounded me with his comic-book characters (look! alliteration!) over the years and perhaps none so much as with Ilyana.

I hope that answers your questions. Fell free to try to get me to dig deeper.
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Okay, that's it, Matt. Do with it what you will.

Best to you and yours,
Jeff