Looking back with proper context, it’s wild to realize how powerfully strange and inventive The New Mutants was in 1984 and 1985. Even before co-creator Bob McLeod departed the book, making way for soon-to-be synonymous artist Sienkiewicz with August 1984’s New Mutants #18, writer Chris Claremont (then nine years into his tenure on Uncanny X-Men) was utilizing the book to develop major X-Men staples such as the Hellfire Club, Emma Frost, and the Hellions. Illyana Rasputin, an aged-up demon queen named Magik after 1983’s Magik: Storm and Illyana miniseries, was providing rich ground for Claremont to veer into the deeply supernatural, while the umbrella of The New Mutants presupposed the now-given but then-novel idea that there could even be a further generation of mutants after the largely radiation-born original Children of the Atom.
The coming of Sienkiewicz radically altered the X-Universe, let alone the artistic and abstraction boundaries of the medium. Certainly, 1984 was already a strange time for comics fans. Close to home, the X-Men’s Kitty Pryde was getting abducted to be married to Morlocks, Storm had been depowered and went through emotional revelation. Rachel Summers had arrived in the past from the dystopian future of Days of Future Past. In Alpha Flight, John Byrne was ramping up themes of delayed mortality and producing nearly blank issues of white paper.
Further afield, Frank Miller and Klaus Janson were working on Elektra after having rejuvinated Daredevil. Jim Shooter’s merchandising machine, Secret Wars, was in full swing. At DC, continuity was beginning its slow winddown and upset before Crisis on Infinite Earths – Hal Jordan was prepping for replacement in Green Lantern, the Flash was on trial for killing his own wife, and most notably Alan Moore had arrived to the pages of Saga of the Swamp Thing, radically altering the landscape of horror in superhero comics.
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All this, and still The New Mutants was a monthly spotlight on breaking boundaries in the medium. The issues collected in The Demon Bear Saga feel like a fever-pitch descent into abstraction, both narratively and visually. Big swing after big swing was connecting: the Demon Bear itself is immediately followed by the arrival of Warlock, whose entire deal is obfuscated by unclear origins and a singular lack of concrete shape. The Mutants go to space, to hell, to the impressionistic nightmare mindscape of Legion. They are possessed by the powers of Cloak and Dagger and are kidnapped into an underground gladiatorial gambling ring. There is almost no room to breathe for either the characters or the reader, right up to the reveal of ex-teammate Xuân Cao Mạnh, who has bloated and become an evil slavedriver. And, alongside this, Claremont is diligently chipping away at the foundation of Magneto’s redemption arc.
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To say that Sienkiewic’s artwork is revolutionary is to undermine its oddity; it must have read as nearly illegible to fans directly following the almost prototypical representations of McLeod, whose work felt rigidly true-to-life, foundationally house-style – almost Cockrum-esque. In Sienkiewicz’s Mutants, nothing looked the same – a character could be rendered differently on three different pages and still read as quintessentially Cannonball, absolutely Mirage, undeniably Magik. He tapped into the very idea of the characters and illustrated the abstraction of their concepts, and the reading public was meant to follow along as if these illustrious pages in any way resembled a comic book.
The Demon Bear Saga, and all the stories that follow it, feel unlike any other American comic book. This collection collects a singularly unique moment, a dizzying sprint of creativity and experimentation. In the context of its peers of the time, it was groundbreaking. In context of the medium moving forward, it remains iconic.
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