Beautiful Mutants

Here we go. Assuming you've read the last month's worth of comic book reviews posted right here, you should by now have some idea of whether or not Beautiful Mutants is truly the obsessive potty-mouthed X-pilgrimage for you, based on whether or not you care to read more of this stuff. If it makes any difference, the reviews, of which there are admittedly many, serve as brightly coloured filling in a marginally more nutritious sandwich defined by hefty slices of analytical bread attempting to define what it all meant and where it went wrong.

Sounds fun, huh?

If you answered yes, then a print copy or copies can be ordered here for an as yet undetermined period of time. If I get the slightest sniff of legal activity (regardless of disclaimers stating that this book is unofficial and is not endorsed by the copyright holders of that which I'm writing about), then I'm pulling the link because life is too short for that sort of headache.

If you're reading this in the future and the link doesn't work, get in touch through either Twitter or facebook, or leave your email address here in the comments (I screen all comments prior to publishing them so your email address won't be seen by anyone but me) and I'll see what I can do if I'm still alive.

Beautiful Mutants 1991

New Mutants #99 (March) The Beginning of the End part two.

Fabien Nicieza, Rob Liefeld.

Sunspot leaves to take care of his recently assassinated dad's business interests, meaning he won't be getting in the way of any non-stop action to come, the whiny fucker; and we meet Feral, who is essentially Wolfsbane but better because she has bigger tits, triangular hair, and her main interests are revenge and growling with no personality to get in the way of either. Also we learn that Thunderbird, younger brother of the original, is similarly interested in war and revenge, so he's an obvious shoo-in for the revised team, now down to just Cannonball and Boom Boom from the original bunch, both of whom should know better, although luckily they both fit right in thanks to the magic of what I suppose we'll just have to call character development. The art is very much blossoming into that which I remember disliking first time around with the bumhole mouths, dead eyes, and anatomical Vorticism; plus we get a first glimpse of one of Rob's innovations, the excessively-muscular dude in a suit and tie drawn as though the clothing is printed upon a skin hugging superhero leotard like those comedy chefs' aprons you buy for a relative you don't know very well. I'd say Rob is unable to draw figures in loose clothing and instead adapts regular dress to the exaggerated superhero frame except that's obviously not true, so fuck knows why he thought it looked anything less than ridiculous. The final page introduces yet another new guy freshly minted from the Liefeld house of ideas. He looks like some sort of ninja, or maybe an assassin and he's called Shatterbolt, or possibly Deadblade, unless I've mistaken him for Deathshrike or Killtool or one of the others.

Wait…

Shitterstar, I think. I'm sure it's him. I may need to check the spelling. Anyway, it seems safe to assume a million fan wankers spunked their pants when they turned to that final page.

I didn't like this issue very much. I don't know if you can tell.

Beautiful Mutants 1990

X-Men #266 (August) Gambit. 

Chris Claremont, Mike Collins, Joe Rubinstein.

This issue provides an origin for the Hounds, as seen in various Days of Future Past sequels and distinguished by their studded leotards. I hadn't considered the possibility that they might require an origin story, but it's here if you want it along with the debut appearance of Gambit - which is why I wasn't going to bother buying a copy of this, the cheapest one costing about a million quid these days; but somehow my wife deduced that I was after this issue and picked one up for my birthday, and - Jesus Christ almighty - a copy signed by Claremont. She wouldn't tell me how much she paid for it, and I didn't tell her I didn't even remember it being an issue with much going for it. I love that woman.

Okay, so the art is a somehow awkward fit to the story, but it's otherwise readable aside from the introduction of Gambit, a character I've never found remotely interesting. Here he's introduced as one of those dashingly romantic burglars who swashbuckles as he disables your security camera with chewing gum and smashes a window at the back of the house while everyone is at work. He's a good burglar because he steals stuff that's already been stolen from the people who stole it in the first place, or summink. Also he's Cajun, which you can tell because he drops the occasional spot of Français into his conversation and addresses you as chère. For example, if he's going for a dump he might say Je suis just going a la lavatory because je am touching cloth, chère. His mutant power is the ability to throw playing cards at his enemies. To be fair, his power transforms them into energy bombs which explode on contact, so they don't actually need to be playing cards. He could throw PG Tips tea cards, Top Trumps, baseball cards from the forties, unsold Cats Laughing 7ʺ singles, but he throws playing cards because that's cool, and everything about the introduction of Gambit tells you how cool he is and how much we're going to love him, which is why I don't.

Beautiful Mutants 1989

Alpha Flight #75 (October) Tigers In the Rain. 

James D. Hudnall, John Calimee, Mike Manley.

I'm beginning to wonder whether Marvel's downfall in the early nineties came from paying too much attention to its fans. The worst aspect of anything will always be, without exception, its stupid fucking fans, and the letters page of this book has a few who describe Hudnall as the worst writer of all time while demanding the reinstatement of Byrne, and so on; but fuck 'em, quite frankly. In this double-sized issue Alpha Flight battles the Avengers, the X-Men, and other Marvel regulars in this variant New York which Puck - who pops up out of nowhere, again young and tall - informs them was originally the realm of the Dreamqueen; so the heroes they're battling aren't the real thing but products of imagination, which at least explains Rogue's giant triangular hair. With this in mind, Alpha Flight fights back with the help of Elvis and Father Christmas - Elvis, for fuck's sake! Elvis brains imaginary Thor with his guitar and Father Christmas is packing a machine gun; but sure, let's get a court order forcing Byrne to write the book again, you shitheads.

Beautiful Mutants 1988

New Mutants #67 (September) Promise. 

Louise Simonson, Bret Blevins.

We meet Gosamyr, as I knew we would, an alien resembling an inflatable sex doll of a human teenage girl. She seems to be some kind of hominid silk worm and is thus clad in revealing semi-transparent material, although in her favour, aside from this being deliberate and integral to the story, her depiction is less annoying than that of the Cobweb, a similarly attired lady detective created by Alan 'Superheroes' Moore and Melinda Gebbie who is able to distract and thus overpower her foes because you can see her tits and fanny! Gosamyr is slave to an alien called Spyder, who looks like a spider, and who has been ripped off by Lila Cheney. Spyder attempts to collect on the debt at one of Lila's exciting rock concerts. Despite all that is stacked against it, this issue is a lot better than I remember.

Beautiful Mutants 1987

X-Men #214 (February) With Malice Towards All.

Chris Claremont, Barry Windsor-Smith.

Dazzler flips out while playing keyboards for Lila Cheney at one of her sweaty rock concerts and starts doing the whole light show thing, thus dramatically upstaging the mockney Joan Jett. The X-Men are called in and find that Dazzler is possessed by Malice, as we saw in #210. Malice has no physical substance but hops from one body to another with her presence indicated by the possessed person sporting an art nouveau choker with a sinister looking face as the cameo. The usual fight ensues but with a twist as Malice inhabits different X-Men, and I feel I should probably make some wisecrack about Wolverine wearing the distinctive choker on page thirteen but I can't be arsed. Malice eventually flees, discreetly taking refuge in some random security guard and laying low, and Dazzler joins the X-Men because there's strength in numbers.

I've begun to notice the Claremont stream-of-consciousness creeping in over the last year or so, with dialogue or narrative reduced to a sort of freewheeling shorthand which I eventually began to find a little irritating back when I was buying these issues hot off the presses. It's something he's always done and it's often effective, but it gets repetitive when every scene showing plural adulation of a single individual always features at least one person thinking be still my heart; and then we have regular sentences broken up into seven or eight separate speech balloons strung down the side of the page like anal beads, presumably as a means of communicating pace; and those fucking annoying compound words - babyboy, boychick, boytoy and too many others. It aspires to rock 'n' roll but fails through its sheer incongruity. Back at school, my pal Grez had an ongoing beef with a younger kid we called Malcolm due to his resembling a chubby version of the Sex Pistols manager. Malcolm was younger and smaller, yet would effect a ludicrous hard man act when engaging with Grez, notably walking slowly towards my pal, effecting an evil grin while swinging his Adidas bag around himself at knee height as an improvised weapon. You'd better watch out, he warned us with affected glee, I'm a bagswinger! He seemed to be proposing bagswinger as a recognised gladiatorial type like the retiarius or murmillo. Anyway, I thought of Malcolm when Psylocke describes herself as a psycho-blaster on page nine.

This is still a generally great issue but, well, you know... 

Beautiful Mutants 1986

X-Factor annual #1 (October) Grand Design. 

Bob Layton, Brett Breeding.

Bob Layton bows out on a high note, relatively speaking. This version of X-Factor still feels conspicuously tooled for tidy monthly adventures ending with a joke on the last page as someone tosses X-Dog an X-snack which he swallows in one gulp before woofing eckshy-eckshy-racktaaaaa to make everyone laugh; so it's engaging and readable even if it reminds me that I still miss the New Defenders. X-Factor in their mutant hunting guise are sent to the Soviet Union by special request of the Kremlin, leading Bobby to quip, 'Maybe they found a female gymnast who doesn't have a full beard.' There they discover a mutant resistance organisation violently opposed to the institute which has drawn X-Factor across the iron curtain, which amounts to an experiment camp run by Doppelganger, himself a powerful mutant who was tentatively chalked in to become X-Factor's major villain - presumably before Louise came up with Apocalypse. I suppose Grand Design is a bit obvious in places, but the story is tight and well told with shocks sufficient to keep it interesting. It's also nice - if that's the word - to be reminded how the Soviet Union probably wasn't the greatest place to live, particularly given the growing number of purple-haired fuckwits born since its dissolution getting all misty-eyed over their heavily revised version of an historical reality that some of us actually remember.

Beautiful Mutants 1985

X-Men #191 (March) Raiders of the Lost Temple.

Chris Claremont, John Romita Jr., Dan Green.

Ye X-Men, Avengers, New Mutants, and Morlocks doth battle Kulan Gath with swords, maces, or just by throwing goblets at him or loosening ye wooden axles of his chariot, which is of goodly construction. There are many casualties and even fatalities. As they smite their most foul enemy, Selene snatches up ye necklace of power - ye one in which Kulan Gath didst spend many centuries of slumber - and revealeth that she was only pretending to be on ye noble side so she could get her mitts on ye goodies. Warlock hath turned Storm into a techno-organic being like unto himself, so dooming her to death, but before she dies she doth do the same unto Selene, so they're all brown bread by ye end. Luckily Doctor Strange is able to reverse time so that none of it ever happened and everyone is alive again. Were any other writer at the wheel, this would have been the world's biggest ever pile of wank, but Claremont makes the fucker work with effortless aplomb, creating genuine shock at the death of established characters even though we know they'll almost certainly be back next issue, and strewing our path with twists and turns which prove impossible to predict, despite having since become beloved time travel clichés. Also, the way issues of X-Men and New Mutants now mesh together is a thing of beauty.

Beautiful Mutants 1984

New Mutants #20 (October) Badlands. 

Chris Claremont, Bill Sienkiewicz.

The kids fight the Demon Bear on its own mystic territory, and their victory somehow brings about the revelation that Danielle's murdered parents were the Bear all along and, having been liberated, are now alive and well. Where New Mutants went from a fun bunch of teenagers jumping around and chugging soda to a soundtrack that almost certainly featured Hip to Be Square by Huey Lewis and the News, they're now something as starkly dramatic and gut wrenchingly powerful as a Swans album, and the transformation has somehow gone ahead without it feeling like a different book or seeming in any way laboured. I don't understand why the Sienkiewicz run on New Mutants doesn't get mentioned in the same sentences as Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns.

Beautiful Mutants 1983

Marvel Team-Up annual #6 (October) The Hunters and the Hunted. 

Bill Mantlo, Ron Frenz, Kevin Dzuban.

I've never been a fan of comics instructing kids not to do stuff because the message invariably seems to get in the way of whatever fun is to be had. Here we find Spider-Man teaming up with Cloak, Dagger, and the New Mutants in order to foil drug dealers who are making the kids take drugs so they can sell more drugs to them later on and Cloak & Dagger are involved because some drug dealers made them take drugs and those drugs gave them superpowers and thus have they sworn revenge on all drug dealers who sell drugs to kids because drugs are bad - although drugs as the cause of Cloak & Dagger's powers surely sends out a message more in line with the writings of Timothy Leary than the one which was obviously intended, when you think about it. The good guys win, you may not be surprised to learn, and we get what may be the worst art I've seen in any Marvel comic for a while. Wolfsbane's transitional human-wolf form looks like Biffo the Bear on page fourteen.

Beautiful Mutants 1982

Dazzler #11 (January) Lest Ye Be Judged.

Tom DeFalco, Danny Fingeroth, Frank Springer, Vince Colletta.

Dazzler, whom we should probably recall is more or less Kylie Minogue with a superpower, gets the best of Terrax the Tamer, escapes a black hole despite not having a spacesuit, catches up with Galactus - who has given up and gone home by this point - and persuades him to behave; and not once have I been compelled to hurl the half-read comic book across the room in disgust. Also in this issue we have the long overdue return of Beefer beginning on page seven where he is seen holding the drumsticks like chopsticks, possibly deliberately, and Harry S. Osgood is played by Joe Don Baker. Beefer can also be seen enjoying a candy bar on page fourteen and a bag of potato chips on page nineteen. Welcome back, big guy.

Beautiful Mutants 1980

Marvel Two-in-One #68 (October) Discos and Dungeons. 

Mark Grunewald, Ralph Macchio, Ron Wilson, Gene Day.

We're getting to see a lot of ol' flappy this month, don't you think? Here the Angel is getting over the death of Jean Grey by dancing his ass off at the same discotheque as the Thing, and the two of them inevitably end up fighting for their lives in Arcade's Murder World. This would be business as usual but for this Murder World having been put together by the Toad, with Arcade thankfully just a shadowy sponsor somewhere behind the scenes. The Toad is taking revenge on anyone who ever pissed him off, working his way up to Magneto. The Angel's name appears earlier on the list for obvious reasons and the Thing is simply caught up in the sweep. Being a millionaire, the Angel takes pity on the Toad, even sympathising with him, and so spontaneously finances a theme park called Toadworld in the hope of keeping his former enemy's mind off crime and that. It's possibly the most stupid ending to any superhero comic ever published, and that's why it's great.

Beautiful Mutants 1979

Captain America #229 (January) Traitors All About Me.

Roger McKenzie, Sal Buscema, Don Perlin.

Cap needs to investigate the disappearance of the Falcon in Los Angeles and, continuing the public transport motif we've seen in other titles, needs to take  a long-distance coach. Unfortunately he's a bit low on funds. The Beast offers to help out and we learn that, despite being a fully-grown man, Hank saves pennies in a piggy bank - albeit one which looks more like Sasquatch from Alpha Flight than Napoleon from Animal Farm. Unfortunately the Beast has only $4.75 saved, but thankfully Jarvis is able to step in with his pin money. Things get even stranger once Cap is on the coach and finds himself sat next to Billy, a small boy reading Daredevil #156, as described below*. Billy is very excited about Gene Colan having returned to the title, although he doesn't seem to rate Captain America as a comic, which is probably a good thing. Had Billy been sat on the coach next to Captain America while reading Captain America #229, the issue in which he sees himself sat on the coach next to Captain America while reading Captain America #229, the book might have turned into David Tennant era Doctor Who and would have been shite.

*: In the book as printed, obviously.

Beautiful Mutants 1978

X-Men #112 (August) Magneto Triumphant. 

Chris Claremont, John Byrne, Terry Austin.

Having cornered the X-Men in a sideshow caravan, Magneto flies them all off into space, meaning they can't knock him out because he's keeping them alive, although I'm sure Phoenix could have come up with something. None of this has anything to do with Mesmero or his circus of doom. Magneto points out that he's never even met the man and simply happened to be passing, also failing to shed further light on the robot version of himself we saw revealed as an imposter back in X-Men #58 - ten fucking years ago. Anyway, the lad flies our gang to the south pole, to his massive underground base—well, one of his massive underground bases - then makes them captive by means of technology which reduces them all to infancy in terms of motor coordination, being able to form words, and presumably wiping their own arses. This is to teach them a lesson. Alpha reduced the magnetically empowered nutcase to infancy back in Defenders #16 and, even though it was his own fucking fault, Magneto now invites the literally blameless X-Men to give account of how much they like them apples.

Beautiful Mutants 1977

Captain Marvel #50 (May) To Begin Anew.

Scott Edelman, Al Milgrom, Terry Austin.

This is where I realise that of any praise I've heaped upon the shoulders of Carmine Infantino, John Byrne and others, about half of it has probably been the due of Terry Austin. You learn something new every day. Anyway, I still find it difficult to move beyond the Gene Colan version of Captain Marvel and I'm not convinced there was much point turning him into David Bowie, so I'm a bit lost here. Apparently he's now Rick Jones - the Hulk's own Jimmy Olsen - with whom he trades places when Jimmy Rick says the magic word fiddles with his bangles, just like C.C. Beck's Captain Marvel and the guy Alan Moore later wrote as an adult character for grown-ups by having him do it with a nude lady. Getting to the point, this issue sees the Captain teamed up with the Avengers against the Super-Adaptoid, and if it's hardly breaking new ground, the telling is fucking terrific with the creative team here rendering an arguably hokey antagonist as genuinely weird and scary. We also get a brief glimpse of Rick Jones' career as a rock star - same month that saw the release of Never Mind the Bollocks and the first Damned album* but I get the feeling these wouldn't have been on Rick's radar, so fuck him. Otherwise, this one has me wondering whether I should have tracked down the first forty-nine issues.

*: Also the Heartbreakers' LAMF and Rocket to Russia by the Ramones.

Beautiful Mutants 1976

Avengers #150 (August) Avengers Assemble.

Steve Englehart, George Perez, John Tartaglione, Duffy Vohland.

This is it! screams the cover, a Spectacular 150th Anniversary Special - all this plus the usual Marvel mind-stunning action! most of which is a press conference interspersed with the Avengers discussing Thor's decision to leave, segueing into a flashback reprinting Avengers #16 by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Dick Ayers from May 1965. The action promised by the cover seems to be Captain America saving some guy from a leopard, following which it's mostly an earlier press conference interspersed with an Avengers board meeting discussing the recruitment of new members. At one point we see Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch posting a letter.

Beautiful Mutants 1975

X-Men #94 (August) The Doomsmith Scenario.

Len Wein, Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, Bob McLeod.

What the hell am I going to do with all these fuckin' X-Men, Professor X asks himself now that there are thirteen of them hanging around the school, knocking things over and failing to flush the bog after they've been for a shit; and I'd put money on Wolverine being the worst offender on the last score. Anyway, Sunfire announces that he has no interest in sticking around - even though the X-Men are at last back in their own regular book - which is fine because it turns out that he's a massive dick. Marvel Girl, the Angel, Iceman, Havok, and Polaris also declare that they all liked it better in the old days when everything was better than it is now, and duly have their bags already packed so they too hit the road leaving just Cyclops to lead the new bunch, which is tidy. Cyclops puts them through their paces in the danger room, and just in time because Count Nefaria is up to his old tricks. This time the Count has captured a mountain full of missiles with the help of his Ani-men. The Ani-men are people with animal characteristics, but are probably marginally more convincing than the Porcupine and the gang Nefaria had helping him last time. Last time, according to Count Nefaria, was those many months ago even though it was actually 1966, not because time works differently in the Marvel universe or because Count Nefaria is a bad guy and therefore dishonest, but because X-Men is a comic book and the issues to which the Count refers were published in 1966.

Beautiful Mutants 1974

Captain America #172 (April) Believe It or Not: The Banshee.

Steve Englehart, Sal Buscema, Mike Friedrich.

On the trail of the villainous Secret Empire, Captain America and the Falcon encounter the Banshee at a Merle Haggard concert, little realising that the Banshee is also on the trail of the Secret Empire, so he is, to be sure, to be sure. Naturally they have a scrap, so they do, which is broken up when Professor X arrives with both of the X-Men. The Banshee escapes, so he does, and Professor X explains that the Secret Empire is currently waging war on mutantkind, so it is, hence the Banshee being as much on edge as a man whose Guinness has been drunk by the pub dog while he was outside checking on his potatoes. Also in this issue we learn that even Irish people enjoy American country music, so they do.

Beautiful Mutants 1973

 Avengers #111 (May) With Two Beside Them.

Steve Englehart, Don Heck, Mike Esposito.

Magneto is now so powerful that he can control people through the iron in their blood. This must be a power he either forgets during subsequent encounters, or else will feel embarrassed about using. Here he causes the X-Men and Avengers to fight, which would never happen otherwise. His plan is to detonate an atom bomb in hope of the resulting radiation creating more mutants for his proposed army, even though mutants are surely born rather than created, otherwise every caped fuckwit who ever had a balls-up in the science lab would be a mutant. Those Avengers who still have their free will save the day and Magneto is defeated by the Vision who points out that the Master of Magnetism can't count, supporting my hypothesis that he's a massive thickie. The X-Men recover to the realisation of the Angel still being missing and that they're now down to just three, not including Chuck.

Beautiful Mutants 1972

Amazing Adventures #12 (May) Iron Man: DOA.

Steve Englehart, Tom Sutton, Mike Ploog.

Professor X tries to contact the Beast, who duly responds with a heartfelt piss off, baldy - leave me alone, or words to that effect. Possibly his attitude is explained by Marvel Girl's comment that the Beast is the only one who has been allowed to leave by the Professor. They've been in hiding ever since X-Men #66. Regretting having turned himself into Chewbacca, Hank makes a latex face mask and fake hands and devises special strappy bondage underwear to correct his now Gorilla-like posture so he can disguise himself as himself, if you see what I mean. It's probably not worth worrying over whether or not this will work given how certain superheroes can fool even close family members as to their identity with just a pair of specs. Following this latest transformation, Hank gets angry more easily and so gets into a scrap with Iron Man and actually kills him - or so he believes, although this is an illusion created by Mastermind who wishes to recruit this new Beast to his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.