New Mutants is set down for an overhaul as part of Reload, when it will be relaunched as New X-Men: Academy X (and if that's not a clunky name, I don't know what is).

This is an odd title.  In theory it ought to work, but somehow it never quite seems to get off the ground.  You can imagine it running around a field, flapping its little wings.  The solution seems to be to give them costumes and codenames, which I'm a little sceptical about, to put it mildly.  Reading between the lines, I suspect we're heading for a revival of the New Mutants/Hellions rivalry.

Then again, this title probably could do with a little more of the fantastic to it.  They seem to have been trying to keep it grounded, but ultimately there needs to be some kind of wish fulfilment aspect to the school of mutant superheroes, and that hasn't quite been there.  I'm in two minds about this - if they turn them into a junior superhero team it won't work, but making it closer to the original New Mutants title may be wiser than it first seems.

With this issue, we already seem to be starting a swing in that direction (and of course, this arc was drastically rewritten to the requirements of the new management).  Avalanche turns up to give the book its first actual supervillain, only to be promptly beaten up by a returning Rahne Sinclair.  It's a fun little action sequence.

Rahne has been overhauled to the point of unrecognisability, as she's now apparently a rock chick.  And, thank god, she's finally rid of that godawful accent.  I would love to permanently ban phonetically spelt accents, none of which ever work unless you can guess what accent the writer had in the first place.

I'm less certain about the rest of Rahne's revamp.  There's a clear acknowledgement that this is a drastic change for the character, so presumably we're going to get more detail later on about why she's changed to quite such a degree.  (By the way, note for the writers: she was Protestant, not Catholic.  Trust me, it's pretty fundamental when you get out to the western isles - in both senses of the word.)  At first glance, the changes seem so severe that it's effectively a new character, and I always have doubts about revamps that go quite so far.  Still, I'll give it a couple of issues to see where DeFilippis and Weir are heading with this.

Surprisingly, we still seem to be adding characters to the already overloaded cast.  Perhaps there's some dead wood being thinned in upcoming months.

This is a book in transition, but unlike some of the other books in the line, it had problems which needed to be solved.  I'm not entirely convinced as yet that this is the solution - but at least its issues are being addressed.

Rating: B

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