Review: ‘New Mutants’ #19 Leans On Life-Long Friendships

The Hellfire Gala so far has been all about the big events of last week’s Planet-Size X-Men. But New Mutants #19 takes a different approach and it is all about how a group of friends handle an incredibly unique social event… 

This issue is a fantastic interlude to everything happening around Krakoa. It comes from Vita Ayala, Alex Lins, Matt Milla, and Travis Lanham.

The New Mutants cope with the events of Gala, from Sunspot losing the election to Magik and Karma dealing with a creep. This prompts Warlock to finally find the courage to have a talk he’s been putting off. However, back on the Island, things might be grim for some of the younger mutants the New Mutants have been mentoring…

Ayala takes a step back from the intrigue and mysteries and so on that have been happening at the Gala. Instead, they take the relationships between the characters, base the issue entirely on that, and craft the most engaging single issue of the entire Gala event to date. This is a fantastic character piece, and it’s built on the fact that all of them have been friends — and closer in several cases — for their entire lives. This continues to show why it’s perhaps my favorite book of the line at the moment.

I was unfamiliar with Lins prior to this issue, but he was an absolute star here. Outside of designing most, if not all, of the character’s looks (and knocking it out of the park), he roots his depictions of the characters in Ayala’s work with their relationships. His humor is paced perfectly, and he does a stellar job with both the talking heads and the splash pages. Milla’s colors then takes that work and brings it to dazzling life, making the entire gala sparkle around the team. It looks great.

We deserve more titles like this. Hopefully, Marvel can learn all the right lessons from this series, especially with other recent missteps and mistakes.

New Mutants #19 is available now from Marvel Comics.