New Mutants #33
The team finds themselves at the mercy of Sublime in New Mutants #33, by writer Charlie Jane Anders, artists Alberto Alburquerque, Ro Stein, and Ted Brandt, colorists Carlos Lopez and Tamra Bonvillain, and letterer Travis Lanham. This issue ends The Sublime Saga and this book in a mostly underwhelming fashion.
The recap will be short because there’s a lot to critique here. Basically, both sides get out of their respective traps in rather convoluted manners, but Sublime gets his hands on Escapade. The New Mutants catch up to them. It looks like the prophecy that she’s going to switch places with Morgan is about to happen, but it doesn’t because the New Mutants save her. She decides to go to Krakoa and join the New Mutants and then sasses Emma Frost and Destiny.
So, to begin with, calling this three-issue story The Sublime Saga is a little much because it’s not really a saga. It’s a fair to middling three-issue story, with a last chapter that just sort of meanders in a complicated fashion to the ending. There are several times in this chapter when it feels like there are panels missing, which is always sort of frustrating. The nature of the comic page allows the creative team to play with time, but in this case, it feels like things just got skipped. Can the reader infer what happened? Sure, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating.
There are several other times when things don’t really make sense, either. Escapade’s powers are weird, and she and Cerebella change places again in the beginning, messing everything up. Then she switches places with a guard, and there are two panels where she’s shooting a gun in one and holding the stick she had before she switched places. At one point, Wolfsbane turns into a wolf, and there are four wolves. There are no movement lines, as if she’s jumping around the room quickly, just four wolves. Anders makes a bunch of mistakes that take an average story and makes it mediocre at best. New Mutants has been through some ups and downs since it started, with the beginning Hickman/Brisson issues being mostly okay, the Ayala issues being brilliant, and Anders being a disappointment. There’s apparently a new series coming soon, but if this is how good Anders is going to do, it’s really not worth it.
Alburquerque’s art is the best it’s been in the book so far. It’s a bit too cartoony at times, but the detail and line work are pretty good most of the time in this chapter. Stein and Brandt do a nice job with their comic strip pages, and Lopez and Bonvillain’s colors are basically the best thing about this issue. Lanham’s letters are always a treat, too. He gets the emotion across, and everything looks good and is easy to read.
New Mutants #33 sees the book go out with not a bang, but a whimper. It’s just a disappointing, badly written comic. The story was never better than okay in the previous issues, but Anders’s writing in this one falls off a cliff. The art is better than its been, and the lettering is nice, but if this is the quality of the upcoming series, there’s not much reason to stay with this book.
