I'm a big fan of these writers and the announcement of this title awakened a nostalgic fondness for the New Mutants that I didn't know I had, so I've been looking forward to this first issue. Like all of the Tsunami line so far, it lives up to its manga influences in terms of pacing, which means there's not a great deal of story in the first issue, but the structure of the series based on this first issue seems to be about introducing the new New Mutants and reintroducing one of the old New Mutants, and that's not a bad way to go about things. Like Runaways or Sentinel, New Mutants #1 hangs its hat on strong characterization and introduction, and while I was a bit let down by the art and remain a little worried that this manga pacing won't work unless the books survive a skeptical direct market and make it to trade, I have to admit I'm intrigued enough to come back.
This issue centers around a new character, a young mutant girl in Venezuela who is forced to move to America by a tragedy. There she finds an uncaring father who forces her to hide her mutant gifts and pretty much ignores her, leaving her largely in the care of Alfred... er, a personal assistant/butler who cares for her more than her actual father does. This is solid underpinning stuff, made even moreso by the fact that Sofia, the young girl, is so likable and earnest. DeFilippis and Weir flirt with making her too nice, so kind and easy-going and optimistic as to be unbelievable, but a particularly distinctive mutant teenage rebellion shakes up that notion and makes me want to root for her even more.
The conflict in the issue, though, isn't just about Sofia deciding there's only so much she can take of an existence where her father ignores her and her schoolmates torment her, it's about a little payback for the people who made her life miserable. That's where an older, wiser Dani Moonstar comes in, seemingly working in a role as recruiter for Xavier's school. This role, along with the teacher's role that has been promised in interviews, absolutely suits the grown-up New Mutants, better than the paramilitary fluff that was their role in X-Force or the standard super-heroing that would happen if they graduated to the X-Men, and Dani gets to use the inner fire that she developed facing down deadly adversaries to stand up to the rich and arrogant man in the way of Sofia's move to Xavier's in a pretty solid sequence.
So there's a lot to commend New Mutants #1 for, but that doesn't mean there aren't problems. The big one, for me, is the artwork. Josh Middleton's covers are beautiful, and I find myself wishing that he had been able to take on the interiors here instead of (as rumored) on the likely D.O.A. NYX. Instead we get Keron Grant and a passel of inkers, and while I enjoyed Grant's emulation of Van Sciver on New X-Men, his work here seems a little generic. The storytelling is solid, and there's some solid detail on the backgrounds - you can't accuse Grant of laziness, it's obvious he put a lot of work into the art - it's just that there's an inconsistency to the faces and a strange, flat unreality to the anatomies of the characters, as they all look sort of like beanpoles draped in clothes. It's visually dull, and when you've got a script and story style that isn't really action-packed either, you need stronger art than this to draw the eye.
Not all of the faults in this issue are in the art, however. I'm pretty happy with the story in this issue, but it could definitely be argued that there's not a lot here for your two and a half bucks. The premise of the series has been explained in interviews but is not evident in these pages, and the characters that will probably draw in the audience at first (i.e. the old New Mutants) are represented by about a half-dozen pages of Dani Moonstar in a pretty small role. Like all the Tsunami books, I'm left wondering if maybe they wouldn't have been better doing the straight to $10 trade Tokyopop style if they're going to emulate manga, rather than sticking to the 22-page comic, which doesn't really give the creators enough room to open the story up right away.
