The New Mutants return

NYCC:  A New Start For "New Mutants"Reunions can be tricky things. For every soft-spoken, tear-filled get together with old friends, there are a dozen cases where reconnecting lets old conflicts boil back to the surface. Considering that, fans may have a bumpy ride in store when the students of Marvel's classic "New Mutants" series reunite for a new, May-launching ongoing helmed by writer Zeb Wells and artist Diogenes Neves as announced this weekend at the 2009 New York Comic-Con.

Making their original appearance in a self-titled 1982's Marvel Graphic Novel, the New Mutants were created by writer Chris Claremont and artist Bob McLeod and served as the first major expansion to Professor Charles Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters since the All-New X-Men years before. Over their original 100 issue run (which also featured the artistic hand of creators from Bill Sienkiewicz to Rob Liefeld), the core team including Cannonball, Dani Moonstar and Magma amongst others confronted both growing up as mutants and facing down supervillains for the first time. The new series (which will replace the soon-to-wrap "Young X-Men"), promises to feature the majority of the original book's core cast after graduation in a much more dangerous world for mutantkind than they once faced.Comment:  As far as I know, Moonstar still has no mutant powers. I suspect she'll get her powers back in the new series.

Another blogger recently wrote about the confusing changes in Moonstar's powers. This is the key problem with Moonstar that I mentioned before.

I'm not sure how well the new NEW MUTANTS book will work, either. The problem is that Marvel has created too many X-teams: the X-Men, X-Factor, Excalibur, X-Force, Generation X, the New X-Men, the Young X-Men, et al. There are so many overlapping teams that few of them have a clear raison d'être. Since the eldest X-Men never grow old or leave, the newer mutants have nowhere to go except to irrelevant side teams.

For more on the subject, see Comic Books Featuring Indians.