PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:

(Issues 1-6) see The "Back To School" trade paperback

(Issue 7) When a former anti-mutant demonstrator enrolls at Xavier's, his transition is...explosive. Will the rest of the students and staff survive this imminent new danger within their own ranks?

(Issues 8-9)The pressures of school and family begin to take their toll on the students - and teachers - at Xavier’s. Sofia loses her temper, and gains a dangerous new mentor, while one student finds the pressure too much to bear…

(Issue 10)The New Mutants cope with the death of one of their own and the surprise return of one of the original New Mutants!

(Issue 11)The mansion and its new young residents get a shake-up when a member of the original New Mutants team comes home. But Rahne Sinclair – a.k.a. WOLFSBANE – is not the sweet little girl she used to be. Also, can the Xavier Institute help a mutant girl who has been living homeless on the streets of Salem Center?

(Issue 12)The mysterious homeless girl seen around Salem Center turns out to be a powerful mutant – but convincing her to come to the Xavier Institute could be a dangerous task!

(Issue 13)'The More Things Change' -- a special single-issue reunion story starring the original New Mutants: Moonstar, Cannonball, Magma, Karma, Sunspot and Wolfsbane!

(official New Mutants website)


AUTHORS' COMMENTS:

We discuss launching the series and the first 6 issues here, so in this spot, we'll talk about the issues that were never collected in a trade paperback, Issues 7-13.

[Nunzio] Well, if you read the issues listed above, and you read the publisher's solicitation text, you'll get a sense of how screwed up everything got here. Very few of the story descriptions above are accurate - in some cases because storylines mentioned there never happened, in others because they happened in different issues than described.

How did this happen? Well, that's a long story.

"The Ties That Bind" story arc got off to a rocky start. We had, as described elsewhere, been told to put action into the book by the end of the previous arc. So we planned Issues 7-12 of New Mutants to involve a new villain we'd started planting the seeds for. We wanted to bring Rahne back, wake up Amara, and introduce Surge and the villain - Garrison, in one big sweeping arc that'd take the kids to California, tempt them with their heart's desires, and put their heroism to the test. It would also be the story that gave Rahne her powers back and showed us the problems Josh had fitting in after his roots as an anti-mutant bigot.

So we sent in the breakdown/pitch for that arc, and it seemed ready to go. Then came the San Diego comic convention. We went to meet with Joe Quesada about getting more work. Instead of talking about more work, we wound up with a lecture from him about not giving him what he wanted on the first try with the book. He mentioned our pitch and seemed angry we'd done a supervillain story on the book when that was clearly not what they wanted. We mentioned how we plotted that as a direct result of notes from Bill Jemas about adding villains and action, and Joe backpedalled immediately. Jemas was leaving soon, so we should stick with the school and school drama and ignore what Bill wanted. Joe also suggested forming a rival group of kids to be the bad guys of the series.

So we developed "The Ties That Bind" as a way to slowly bring Josh from outcast to central character, to introduce the kids who eventually came to be known as the Hellions, to bring Surge to the school, to bring Rahne back, to wake up Amara, and to cement the ties between our main kids as a group of friends, almost a family. The centerpiece for this was the transformation of Josh, from intolerant to more understanding, from outcast to friend of our kids and son to Dani. And key to that change in Josh was going to be the suicide of a student at Xavier's.

Everyone at Marvel liked the story, and loved the suicide story.

We pitched a story with a student outing himself as a homosexual in order to convince his parents not to lobby for Shan's firing as a teacher (for being a lesbian). His parents reject him, and his friends (Josh included) shun him. And he kills himself. Josh goes to apologize for shunning him, finds him dead, is heartbroken. This is where Josh breaks from the Hellions clique, as Julian refuses to see his own role in this tragedy, and comes to blows with Josh over it. David and the other main characters back up Josh, and the rifts between them start to be bridged.

A key player in the story was Northstar, the first openly gay superhero at Marvel and still Marvel's highest profile homosexual. As a fellow teacher at the school, he would be the one to comment on Shan's struggle with the parents' reaction to her. He would also be the one to bring his own haughty point of view to the notion of a kid killing himself over being rejected when at a school for outcasts.

So we write the first issue of Ties That Bind. As we start writing it - we get the first bump (a minor one, as these things go). They want Amara out of the book. They also want Rahne out - but we made her return a centerpiece of our Josh plans for later. So we argue we want to keep them, they argue they want the focus on the new kids, and we compromise on only adding one character.

Now when we got the character of Amara, she'd been called Allison for a long while, the result of one of those comic retcons that seem wise when conceived but that always leave the continuity a far bigger mess than they found it. We had decided she would reclaim her name and we would re-establish her Nova Roman heritage when she woke up. So we had everyone refer to her as Allison, and wrote our script with her waking up and saying 'my name is Amara.'

So when we wrote her leaving, we checked with Chris Claremont - her creator, and the one who'd be taking on the character when we were done. He wanted us to keep the transition back from Allison to Amara, so we kept the line the same way.

And so we write her out with that as her last line. All goes well, it's drawn, colored, lettered and printed. When it's finally published - we see that they changed all the Allisons to Amara, and took out her line. No explanation. Go figure. But that's a minor bump in this roller coaster ride.

Then we move on to the suicide story. These are issues 2 & 3 of "Ties That Bind," (8 & 9 of the series). We write those, artists get to work, and we move on to the next story - bringing back Rahne. As we write Issues 10, 11 and 12, we learn that our artist has fallen behind. So Issue 9 will be drawn by a fill in artist, Khary Randolph, who is given very little time to get up to speed and is handed the emotionally powerful scenes involving the finding of the dead student (Victor)'s body. Khary hits it out of the park, nailing those scenes. But he rushes some of the other scenes, and feels his best work is in the suicide scenes.

We finish up Issue 12, and are starting to hear rumblings from Marvel. Issues 8 & 9 are drawn, Issue 8 is colored and lettered and going to the printer. But there's finally a new guy at Marvel to replace Bill Jemas. And his mandate is to be less controversial. So a gay student killing himself is not a story he wants to see in his young-reader friendly book. Now, we can't blame them for that - if they want the book young-reader friendly, a suicide story isn't right for it. It's simply bad timing - their definition of the book is changing after a story is already all but done.

So ideas are sent to us for ways to soft-pedal this story. Can we eliminate the lesbian kiss that sets off the parents? (The answer there is no, because without it, the story has no starting point) Can we not show the kiss, maybe have it happen off panel? (we tell them that's a cop-out, so they opt to show it in silhouette only) Can Northstar never mention he's gay? (This one threw us off,
because he's been out of the closet for a decade). Eventually we seem to defuse the situation (by silhouetting the kiss - the other stuff didn't happen, thankfully), and go about our business.

So we head home for Thanksgiving, and get the news - the issue has been stopped at the printer's. It was printed, but they don't know if they're going to distribute it. Marvel is deciding what to do.

We put in a call to our editor. Then one to Quesada. Then one to the publisher. No-one can tell us what happens next.

This mystery lasts from Thanksgiving to Christmas. We have a family trip with my family to Italy. Before leaving, we try to get answers. Nothing.

So we go to Italy after Christmas. And we're there through the New Year. And on New Year's Eve, we have a conference call with our editor. They're pulping the issue, and skipping Issue 9 entirely. They'll publish Issue 10 as Issue 8 and so on. We point out that in Issue 10 Josh has switched cliques and kids are reacting to a suicide. Maybe we can try something else.

So we convince them to let us write a new story, set during the Parents Week backdrop we'd had for the suicide story. We'd write it based on the artwork we had from Issue 8 & 9, and piece together a script to cover Josh's transition and David and Josh making peace. Then we'd excise the suicide references from previous scripts, and put in new pages there.

So that's what we do. We spend New Years Eve in Venice not enjoying the city or the night, but instead taking apart two of our scripts and making one Frankenstein-like construct of dead script-parts. The result is what was ultimately published as Issue 8.

Then the script for Issue 10 (with changes) became Issue 9. Issue 11 became Issue 10. And we wrote a new script for a new Issue 11, and thus was born the issue you can read there now - the story comparing and contrasting Rahne and Laurie. It's a story we're very proud of, but it is a bit of a cheat as we leave Issue 10 with a major cliffhanger, and Issue 11 ends with that cliffhanger not being resolved.

Then Issue 12 went as originally written (it, like what became Issues 9 & 10, needed some changes to reflect the removal of the suicide), and we were back on track.

Now, when this whole thing went down, we'd called everyone we could at Marvel asking them not to change the story. I'd even gone so far as to call such a decision one 'that could be perceived as homophobic.' So when all this was done, we were certain everyone at Marvel would have been mad at me for that comment, and that we might even be fired.

Fortunately, they told us we weren't being fired. Instead, we'd get the book relaunched with a new #1 and a more impressive title, New X-Men.

So, to bridge the gap between our story and the stories that occured in X-Men in the interim (the most significant being the destruction of the school) we wrote Issue 13. It was a fun little issue, a reunion of the old New Mutants team, and a chance to cement the changes in Josh's status with the new kids.

And that's how this arc came to be.

Whew.