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New Mutants Epic Collection
New Mutants Epic Collection, Vol. 3: Asgardian Wars
Chris Claremont's original iconic run on the New Mutants continues!
From Madripoor to Asgard! The New Mutants' search for Karma takes them to the lawless island, but will they be corrupted the same way she has? Then, when the Enchantress attacks, the New Mutants find themselves scattered across the Golden Realm of Asgard. Alone and out of their element, they must reunite in time to save Storm from Loki's clutches - and Dani Moonstar will be forever changed! Then, it's back to school with an unexpected new headmaster: Magneto! But with the New Mutants traumatized at the Beyonder's hands, can the recently reformed villain make enough of a connection to help his new charges? Plus: The threat of Legion, the menace of Mojo, Dani faces the specter of death, and the New Mutants get even! Collecting NEW MUTANTS (1983) #32-44 and ANNUAL #2, NEW MUTANTS SPECIAL EDITION #1, and X-MEN ANNUAL (1970) #9.
From Madripoor to Asgard! The New Mutants' search for Karma takes them to the lawless island, but will they be corrupted the same way she has? Then, when the Enchantress attacks, the New Mutants find themselves scattered across the Golden Realm of Asgard. Alone and out of their element, they must reunite in time to save Storm from Loki's clutches - and Dani Moonstar will be forever changed! Then, it's back to school with an unexpected new headmaster: Magneto! But with the New Mutants traumatized at the Beyonder's hands, can the recently reformed villain make enough of a connection to help his new charges? Plus: The threat of Legion, the menace of Mojo, Dani faces the specter of death, and the New Mutants get even! Collecting NEW MUTANTS (1983) #32-44 and ANNUAL #2, NEW MUTANTS SPECIAL EDITION #1, and X-MEN ANNUAL (1970) #9.
512 pages, Paperback
First published June 27, 2023
15 people are currently reading
56 people want to read
About the author
Chris Claremont
3,275 books888 followersChris Claremont is a writer of American comic books, best known for his 16-year (1975-1991) stint on Uncanny X-Men, during which the series became one of the comic book industry's most successful properties.
Claremont has written many stories for other publishers including the Star Trek Debt of Honor graphic novel, his creator-owned Sovereign Seven for DC Comics and Aliens vs Predator for Dark Horse Comics. He also wrote a few issues of the series WildC.A.T.s (volume 1, issues #10-13) at Image Comics, which introduced his creator-owned character, Huntsman.
Outside of comics, Claremont co-wrote the Chronicles of the Shadow War trilogy, Shadow Moon (1995), Shadow Dawn (1996), and Shadow Star (1999), with George Lucas. This trilogy continues the story of Elora Danan from the movie Willow. In the 1980s, he also wrote a science fiction trilogy about female starship pilot Nicole Shea, consisting of First Flight (1987), Grounded! (1991), and Sundowner (1994). Claremont was also a contributor to the Wild Cards anthology series.
Claremont has written many stories for other publishers including the Star Trek Debt of Honor graphic novel, his creator-owned Sovereign Seven for DC Comics and Aliens vs Predator for Dark Horse Comics. He also wrote a few issues of the series WildC.A.T.s (volume 1, issues #10-13) at Image Comics, which introduced his creator-owned character, Huntsman.
Outside of comics, Claremont co-wrote the Chronicles of the Shadow War trilogy, Shadow Moon (1995), Shadow Dawn (1996), and Shadow Star (1999), with George Lucas. This trilogy continues the story of Elora Danan from the movie Willow. In the 1980s, he also wrote a science fiction trilogy about female starship pilot Nicole Shea, consisting of First Flight (1987), Grounded! (1991), and Sundowner (1994). Claremont was also a contributor to the Wild Cards anthology series.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 6, 2025
4.1 stars
A joyous reread of the New Mutants tales that made me a fan in the first place. To think, the first time I read these stories, I was younger than the New Mutants… Now I’m almost old enough to be their grandfather… Life; where does it go?
Worthy of a mention: this volume contains New Mutants annual #2, which has the distinction of being both the first time Cypher and Warlock merged to become Douglock and the first time Betsy Braddock appeared in a US comic (having solely appeared in Marvel UK books up to that point) and is called Psylocke for the very first time. Comicbook history in the making, folks!
A joyous reread of the New Mutants tales that made me a fan in the first place. To think, the first time I read these stories, I was younger than the New Mutants… Now I’m almost old enough to be their grandfather… Life; where does it go?
Worthy of a mention: this volume contains New Mutants annual #2, which has the distinction of being both the first time Cypher and Warlock merged to become Douglock and the first time Betsy Braddock appeared in a US comic (having solely appeared in Marvel UK books up to that point) and is called Psylocke for the very first time. Comicbook history in the making, folks!
May 7, 2025
this was my favorite volume of the series so far. it suffered from the overall series issue of there being too much crossover tie ins, but the actual new mutants stories in here were great. the standouts to me were the trip they take to asgard and the mojo crossover at the end. really solid volume overall.
June 19, 2025
I read the individual issues when they were published 40 years ago, and they hold up pretty well. (But I must say that Claremont’s… shall we say… “fascination” with mind control is quite apparent.)
October 7, 2023
Peak Claremont, but kind of a mixed bag with the art.
December 31, 2023
Bill Sienkiewicz stopped pencilling New Mutants after 14 issues, but the book retained his influence for most of its next year - most obviously because he was still inking several issues, but also because the Sienkiewicz run had unlocked writer Chris Claremont's imagination. It gave him a direction on the "X-Babies" for the first time, a way of writing New Mutants which actually worked: do it as a horror comic.
Claremont being Claremont, an awful lot of his horror ideas involved mind control, but loss of will, agency and self is a genuinely scary idea, and with Sienkiewicz on art he developed ways of illustrating corruption, possession and fragmentation as cartooning concepts on the page - an energy that continues into this collection even if the visual inventiveness isn't as high. New Mutants in this phase is a dark comic, haunted by spiritual and literal demons as well as by the lead characters' dread of what they might become in future, after one of Claremont's dystopian time trips. (Even the biggest exception, the magnificent Asgard-set Special Edition 1, which I reviewed when it appeared in Marvel Masterworks: The Uncanny X-Men Vol. 12, still has a lot of transformations and threatened loss of self, and a chunk of horrific material for Illyana). There's body horror with the return of eye-swapping, spineless media parasite Mojo, and the ambitious done-in-one where Dani Moonstar confronts bigotry back home and has a gunfight with Death.
But after Demon Bear, the single best New Mutants horror story is #37's "If I Should Die" and its follow-ups. This issue also wins the - significantly easier to achieve - title of Best Ever Secret Wars II crossover. The plot of the issue is extremely simple, a tick on a bad Jim Shooter story map: the Beyonder kills the New Mutants. The way it's done, though, is savage - Mary Wilshire and Sienkiewicz on inks combining to create brutal, angular fight and death scenes with the Beyonder an affectless void in a suit at the centre of it - it gives the book its cover, with a dead-eyed yuppie in a blue suit casually throttling Rahne, the kindest-hearted of the Mutants, one of the most disturbing and effective cover images Marvel ever produced. If the Sienkiewicz run was the X-Books going 80s and new wave, this is the 80s turning rotten, their American Psycho flipside.
8 months into the grind of Secret Wars II, readers were all too familiar with plot threads happening in crossover books and then simply being resolved in the parent comic, which gives Claremont's next story a wonderful opportunity to flip those expectations. Oh look, another crossover that didn't matter, with business as usual in the Danger Room - except at the end, it isn't, in yet another of the extraordinary sequences the comic was dropping on a near-monthly basis. It sets up a story about arrogance, trauma, and healing which is one of the New Mutants' very best, with a triumphant, redemptive fight for Magneto at the end (well, as triumphant as a fight which concludes with the Avengers deciding he's recruiting a child army can be, but that's 80s X-Men for you: no win uncompromised).
Magneto is the other main plot thread in this volume - this book is where the ongoing story about Professor X handing the school to him winds up. This story is one of the earliest to suffer when Claremont starts shifting focus and leaves New Mutants, but the stories here are as good as it gets, particularly the excellent #35, the first and definitive "Headmaster Magneto" story.
This whole volume is studded with excellence, but by the final stories here things are beginning to flag a little - a fine Cannonball spotlight which makes the Lila Cheney romance a bit less gimmicky; a go-round with the Hellions (again!); a second Legion story - all readable but a bit insubstantial, as Claremont tries to work out where the X-Books are going in the wake of the dreadful decision to launch X-Factor. He finds an answer, but it's not one in which the horror-story version of New Mutants fits well, and this is basically the end of his glory years on the title.
Claremont being Claremont, an awful lot of his horror ideas involved mind control, but loss of will, agency and self is a genuinely scary idea, and with Sienkiewicz on art he developed ways of illustrating corruption, possession and fragmentation as cartooning concepts on the page - an energy that continues into this collection even if the visual inventiveness isn't as high. New Mutants in this phase is a dark comic, haunted by spiritual and literal demons as well as by the lead characters' dread of what they might become in future, after one of Claremont's dystopian time trips. (Even the biggest exception, the magnificent Asgard-set Special Edition 1, which I reviewed when it appeared in Marvel Masterworks: The Uncanny X-Men Vol. 12, still has a lot of transformations and threatened loss of self, and a chunk of horrific material for Illyana). There's body horror with the return of eye-swapping, spineless media parasite Mojo, and the ambitious done-in-one where Dani Moonstar confronts bigotry back home and has a gunfight with Death.
But after Demon Bear, the single best New Mutants horror story is #37's "If I Should Die" and its follow-ups. This issue also wins the - significantly easier to achieve - title of Best Ever Secret Wars II crossover. The plot of the issue is extremely simple, a tick on a bad Jim Shooter story map: the Beyonder kills the New Mutants. The way it's done, though, is savage - Mary Wilshire and Sienkiewicz on inks combining to create brutal, angular fight and death scenes with the Beyonder an affectless void in a suit at the centre of it - it gives the book its cover, with a dead-eyed yuppie in a blue suit casually throttling Rahne, the kindest-hearted of the Mutants, one of the most disturbing and effective cover images Marvel ever produced. If the Sienkiewicz run was the X-Books going 80s and new wave, this is the 80s turning rotten, their American Psycho flipside.
8 months into the grind of Secret Wars II, readers were all too familiar with plot threads happening in crossover books and then simply being resolved in the parent comic, which gives Claremont's next story a wonderful opportunity to flip those expectations. Oh look, another crossover that didn't matter, with business as usual in the Danger Room - except at the end, it isn't, in yet another of the extraordinary sequences the comic was dropping on a near-monthly basis. It sets up a story about arrogance, trauma, and healing which is one of the New Mutants' very best, with a triumphant, redemptive fight for Magneto at the end (well, as triumphant as a fight which concludes with the Avengers deciding he's recruiting a child army can be, but that's 80s X-Men for you: no win uncompromised).
Magneto is the other main plot thread in this volume - this book is where the ongoing story about Professor X handing the school to him winds up. This story is one of the earliest to suffer when Claremont starts shifting focus and leaves New Mutants, but the stories here are as good as it gets, particularly the excellent #35, the first and definitive "Headmaster Magneto" story.
This whole volume is studded with excellence, but by the final stories here things are beginning to flag a little - a fine Cannonball spotlight which makes the Lila Cheney romance a bit less gimmicky; a go-round with the Hellions (again!); a second Legion story - all readable but a bit insubstantial, as Claremont tries to work out where the X-Books are going in the wake of the dreadful decision to launch X-Factor. He finds an answer, but it's not one in which the horror-story version of New Mutants fits well, and this is basically the end of his glory years on the title.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews