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One of Marvel’s mutant teams has been around for years and proven their place as heroes for years, yet are still treated like children by the X-Men.
This year marks almost forty years since the launch of one of the first X-Men spin-offs, The New Mutants, which focused on a young team of mutants training to become the next generation of heroes. Four decades later, it is safe to say that the original team has exceeded their goal, as each of the founding members has moved on to join the ranks of Marvel’s superhero community, with a few even receiving the distinction of becoming Avengers.
In the current run of New Mutants, it feels like all of the growth that the team has achieved over the years has been entirely forgotten. In the first two issues of the current run, both the Starjammers and the Shi’ar belittle the group on multiple occasions, calling them children, despite the fact that team member Magik is both the sorcerer supreme of Limbo and a formidable war captain of the mutant nation, Krakoa.
Oddly enough, similar teams of next-generation X-Men are treated with far more respect. Generation X debuted in 1994, over ten years after the first appearance of the New Mutants, but many of their members are treated with far more respect, with Monet and Jubilee being accepted as members of other mutant teams in the modern age of the Marvel Universe.
Even more questionable is the fact that the members of Generation X are far younger than the New Mutants should be, yet none of them are referred to as children. Monet was even famously sent on a suicide mission alongside veteran members of the X-Men such as Wolverine, Nightcrawler, and Archangel in House of X #4 (by Jonathan Hickman and Pepe Larraz).
Fortunately, things appear to be changing for the better since writer Vita Ayala took over the writing of the series in issue #14, with the change in the roles of the now veteran team of mutants becoming almost immediately apparent. The team has now taken on mentoring and training roles for the younger mutants of Krakoa who deserve the title of “New Mutants” far more than their predecessors. The team is now facing problems of a more mature nature, and are finally being treated by the X-Men as more than children who need to be pat on the head and sent to bed while the adults handle the real issues of the world.
At this point, there now exists the question of whether this team of seasoned vets should even still be called “The New Mutants.” It now appears that they hold the title more out of a sense of nostalgia and legacy than actually being inexperienced at much of anything. Holding the title of “new” to maintain an “old” legacy seems ludicrous, especially considering the fact that these mutants should be considered seasoned vets who have paid their dues and are now passing on their experience to the next generation, much as it was passed down to them almost forty years ago.
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