This week the news broke that Maisie Williams has been cast as Rahne Sinclair in Josh Boone’s New Mutants movie.
With an early (perhaps the first) New Mutant cosplayer, NY Creation Con, Thanksgiving 1985
It had been rumored for a long time, and I had been hoping and praying.
I love Maisie infinitely because of her amazing journey as Arya Stark and her completely rad dignity and coolness growing up in the public eye.
There is no one I’d rather see play one of the two characters most important in the world to me.
I feel like the story that matters more than any other to me is in safe hands with Josh Boone. (*I was wrong about this; see note.)
After 33 years, the New Mutants will be on the big screen! Who on earth could have imagined this? Certainly not me, seventeen in 1984, when I read my first New Mutants comic.
Why did I read it?
My girlfriend asked me to bring her a comic book at boarding school.
New Mutants 18 cover by Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz
She was going to Simon’s Rock, an elite private school that was part of Bard College. I missed her terribly, so I took a bus from Port Authority to Great Barrington, Massachusetts to visit her.
P. had gotten into this comic book series, “The New Mutants”, and she desperately needed me to bring her the next issue.
I lived in Chelsea with my mom; I vaguely knew there was a comic book store up on 23rd st., so I walked up there. In the acrid smell of mouldering paper I asked the big unkempt man where “the new New Mutants” was to be found, and bought it.
It was issue #18, written by Chris Claremont and drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz. SinKEVitch.
As every student of comics knows, New Mutants #18 was one of the issues that broke open the history of comics.
It was part of the 1980s revolution in comic art and storytelling that would culminate in 1986’s Dark Knight and Swamp Thing and Moonshadow and Watchmen.
I had seen 1980s comics before, when my boyfriend Paul lived with me and my mom in the West Village when I was fifteen. He brought a duffel bag with Frank Miller Daredevils and the Byrne/Claremont X-Men run. But I didn’t read them, then; just looked at the covers. They were sealed up in slippery poly-bags.
Me and P., NYC 1984
So when I went to Simon’s Rock I packed the New Mutants comic in my suitcase along with my long skirts and my bottles. At Port Authority I was drinking Midori from the bottle, calling P. from a payphone, so excited.
On the bus I took out the comic book. I hadn’t brought anything else to read. I was planning to be a children’s book illustrator or a fashion illustrator back then, career-wise.
I had dropped out of Stuyvesant and was taking adult ed fashion drawing classes at Parsons, waiting to be old enough to be admitted to the BFA program in Illustration. I wasn’t especially excited about becoming a commercial artist; it was just a practical career choice given my drawing ability. Commercial artists had job security.
Most of my energy and ambition in my teens went to finding beautiful boys and seducing them.
P. was my dear friend and sometimes lover, the only girl I’ve ever truly been in love with.
She was brilliant, absurdly smart – we met at Stuyvesant when I was a junior and she was a freshman- and in terrible pain.
I loved her profoundly, intimately, with a depth entirely unlike my relationship with my boyfriends and whoever I was cheating on them with. She was shy, furious, poetic, inhibited, intensely loving. We only had sex when I pulled a boy for a threesome or she was extra drunk.
But we were always physically close, always touching. She was queer as fuck, but she didn’t have parents who were like, “being gay is totally normal”, the way I did. She lived in Staten Island with her family, so she spent days at a time in the city, at the safe haven of the apartment I shared with my mom. And then she got a scholarship to this fancy prep school program, and I went to visit her.
On the bus I opened the comic book, and I met Danielle and Rahne and Sam and Illyana and Kitty and a red-haired girl named Rachel.
Later, when my friendship with Chris Claremont was known in the comics community, people thought he’d named her after me. But I didn’t meet Chris til 1986.
You probably can’t imagine, in the 21st Century with a million YA novels about disenfranchised traumatized gifted outsider teens out there, in a post-Buffy pop culture world, what it felt like to read The New Mutants in 1984. It was like coming home to a sanctuary I had only seen in dreams.
I was an obsessive science fiction reader, but I connected with the ideas, not the characters. Larry Niven never wrote about anyone who was my age and full of pain. In the New Mutants and X-Men, Chris wrote about how wounded teens could be at a loss for how to navigate the world and find a bearing with their friends.
The story in #18 was disjointed, haunting, full of bad dreams and traumatized teens on the run.
Rachel’s confusion about the timeline felt like my mornings after a blackout. Dani’s night terrors matched my own. The ending was terrifying, dark as hell.
When P. picked me up at the bus stop the first thing she asked was if I had her comic. “What IS this??! What the hell IS this??” I babbled at her. She told me she and her new friend M. had just started reading it recently, but were obsessed. Ah, M.- I would have been so jealous of how P. loved her, if she hadn’t been so fucking cool and easy to love herself. We talked about the New Mutants a lot that weekend, the three of us.
When I got back to the city I went and bought all the New Mutants comics there were- all 18 of them- and that led me right into the X-Men comics.
Of which there were 184 issues, plus Annuals and a couple of cross-overs. Getting my hands on those was a project. The X-Men led me to the rest of Marvel, and then within a year I found the TItans and they led me to DC.
In the Fall of 1984 I drew cartoon versions of the New Mutants and the Hellions featuring P. and M. guesting as “Scallions”. (I have no idea why the idea of them being onions was funny, but for some reason it was, at the time.) Then I started…drawing the New Mutants.
By Christmas I was making up pages with them. And I had decided that Rahne and Dani were definitely going to fall in love, even if the writer didn’t know it yet.
My mom, always completely supportive of my obsessions and ambitions, had gone to comic stores all over Manhattan with a list of X-Men back issues I needed.
There were stacks of comics under the tree along with all the science fiction paperbacks. I gleefully tore open the wrapping on each one, incredulous- “You found #146?? Ma!!!”
I never cared at all about their condition; I just wanted to read them and look at the art.
My older friends came home from college for the holidays and I showed them all my new comic drawings. All I could talk about was comics. All my letters had been about comics.
Someone said, “Hey, you should do this for a living”. “Somebody has to draw them, right?” someone else chimed in.
I actually have a photo of me from that night. I had enough life experience at seventeen to recognize a moment when the forces of the universe gather around you and give you a push.
I was reading a copy of Playboy my friend John gave me because it had Wendy O. Williams of the Plasmatics in it! That’s John and Donna above, looking at my sketchbook of comic art.
When I turned 18 in January and matriculated at Parsons my entire career and educational plan was laser-focused on becoming a comic book penciller.
Which was not a popular idea in art school, then. I was pretty much treated like a crazy person for wanting such a low-brow career. Mainstream awareness of comics was a year or two in the future, when Dark Knight broke.
The amazing woman who ran the Parsons Illustration Program, I think her name was Debra Diamond, was friends with Art Spiegelman and Gary Panter, and she was cool with the alternative comics in RAW.
But superhero comics were considered unbearably lame. Genre comics were just not something real artists talked about.
It was a job you did as punishment, when you couldn’t find something else in the world of illustration! When you couldn’t find something more remunerative and more dignified and less laborious.
Although my teachers thought i was crazy for wanting to do comics, they loved how hard I worked and how I could draw like hell.
I signed up for every figure drawing class available, with the toughest teachers, and took night classes from comics professionals around town. I found the comic artists I loved and followed their work obsessively; my longboxes were labelled and sorted by penciller, not book. José Luis García-López. Steve Rude. Gil Kane. Alan Davis. Paul Smith. John Romita and JRJR. It was a litany of men, but I was confident i could be as good.
I bought every book my teachers recommended and spent hundreds of hours studying Burne Hogarth and George Bridgman (Andrew Loomis was out of print in those days, and pages from his books photocopied from library books were passed around between comic artists like contraband).
I started out terrible and I got better fast. I studied perspective like a maniac. Even though I wanted to tell stories about superheroes in love, I expected to have to draw a lot of buildings. The Marvel Universe was based in New York, after all.
In 1985 and 1986 I was chipping, doing heroin only on the weekends, and during the week I just went to school and drew.
I threw myself into the work like a demon. I wanted to draw comics more than I had ever wanted anything in my life. I think wanting it so badly is a huge part of why I didn’t die in those years. So was the saving grace of the New Mutants, the X-Men and the Teen Titans.
Loving something the way I loved those comics, changes you, I’m convinced. It’s a source of strength.
Having my mom back my dream 100% mattered enormously – soon I had my huge drawing table and lightbox set up in the living room!
I was so lucky to be at Parsons, where traditional drawing skills were still valued and where technical perspective and anatomy were still taught.
Every month I was reading more comics – I came to love as many DC characters as Marvel, and even a few independents like Nexus. But the New Mutants were closest to my heart. In a Special Edition of the New Mutants Chris gave Danielle a (flying) horse, and I was like, great!! I can draw horses!
Then he had her attacked by drunk bros and nearly raped.
I was enraged, and I drunkenly sent Marvel a telegram to express my feelings.
I meticulously explained to the telegraph operator over the phone how to address it to the specific letter column group for the New Mutants, “Report Card”.
There were precious few women artists working in mainstream comics in 1985. Maybe even less than now.
Glynis Oliver (formerly Wein) was the colorist on the New Mutants and X-Men, and Cindy Martin had drawn Star Wars, as had Jan Duursema, who’d also done a variety of superheroes at DC. June Brigman had created Power Pack with Weezie. Mary Wilshire had done Red Sonja. Marie Severin was on Special Projects at Marvel, drawing Fraggle Rock and Muppet Babies for Star instead of superheroes. Trina Robbins was working for Marvel’s Star imprint too, drawing Misty, a grown-up Millie the Model. Wendy Pini and Colleen Doran were doing popular and much-loved independent work, but I wasn’t interested in creating my own characters or the tiny reach of the independents.
I wanted to be in the big leagues, to work for one of what have always been called “The Big Two”.
In ’85 there were some women on the production and editorial side, Weezie and Ann Nocenti and Bobbie Chase and Jo Duffy and Carol Kalish at Marvel, Jenette Kahn and Karen Berger at DC. Cat Yronwode was editor in chief at Eclipse.
Heidi MacDonald had put Chris on blast in the Comics Journal, and would soon take on Alan Moore. She’s still fighting the good fight. But in 1985, wherever I went in New York, whatever comic store or con I went to, I was the only woman.
In 1986 things started to change for women in comics. Mary Wilshire did several issues of the New Mutants, after Bill left, then got the Firestar mini-series. Colleen Doran was on the Legion, as mainstream superhero as it gets, and would eventually draw a historic issue that delved into trans identity.
Lynn Varley colored Dark Knight. Ann and Weezie were writing superhero stories. Mindy Newell wrote a Lois Lane mini-series. Cat and Trina’s book, Women and the Comics, got mainstream press. Trina became the first woman to draw Wonder Woman.
And comics as an industry was exploding.
New comic stores were opening all over the country, some of them even clean. The mainstream press was starting to write about the writers and creators who were changing the industry.
Storylines were getting darker, wilder, more mature. No one had done a mainstream comic with queer people in it, but John Byrne had wiggled around Shooter’s prohibition on gay characters with Northstar, and I believed the time was coming when you could show young lesbian mutants in love.
Which I just kept drawing! There was no tumblr, no deviantart, no Ao3; as far as I know I was the only person drawing New Mutants slash art in the 80s.
In February 1986, at a Creation Con at the Roosevelt Hotel, I met Chris Claremont.
I was working at a booth for my friends Chris and Gary who had a comic store in the Meatpacking District. I was walking back to the ballroom in one of my Betsey Johnson bondage dresses.
I recognized the man sitting on the hallway floor writing in a stenographer’s notebook; I had seen his picture in the Comics Journal. It was during a period when his writing was being dragged hard in the comics press (all two of it), both for its excesses and its problematicness.
“Whatcha writing?” I asked him brusquely. “X-Men plot.” “Is it any good?”
He gazed up at me, unruffled. I sat down with him on the carpet. and told him I wanted his job. I was nineteen and like Jim Kirk I feared nothing. I razzed him about the bdsm references in the X-Men. I was pretty problematic myself in those days.
Chris was thirty-four, and we became not quite lovers but passionate friends. He believed in my work. He treated me as a person he believed could work in comics.
“I don’t think of you as a fan, I think of you as a nascent pro”, he said.
His huge apartment in Riverdale was such a refuge, such a heaven for me. He gave me stacks of X-Men and New Mutants scripts, Marvel paper to draw on, walked me around the Marvel offices, which were a short walk from my house. In the summer of 1986, hanging around Marvel in my flowered Fifties dresses, high on heroin, wearing Keds and with huge skateboarding bruises on my knees, I was a unicorn.
What a time, summer 1986. I had a new boyfriend, a serious artist, who loved comics as much as I did, and he was so supportive and excited for me.
He wasn’t jealous of Chris, or P.. He took the picture of P. and I below, and came in the car when my mom drove me up to Chris’s. Every week Rob and I went to the comic store and got all our new books and sat down to read them together. Swamp Thing was our most special shared passion and my mom would tease us about reading a comic with such a silly name.
Everything was in place, but that’s not how life always works.
With P., summer 1986
I didn’t get to draw the New Mutants for Chris.
That summer I went to San Diego Comic-Con for the first time, at Chris’s suggestion, and although Chris looked after me as much as he could, everything fell apart.
At the Marvel 25th Anniversary Ball I sat with Chris and Stan Lee and John Romita, and a young artist from Eclipse got drinks from the open bar for me after I was carded. I had never seen an open bar before; I had three Long Island Ice Teas lined up in front of me at that table.
Later, blind drunk, high on pills and coke someone had given me in the bathroom at Dave Sim’s party, I was violently, anally raped in my hotel room by an inker.
That Friday in New York my amazing boyfriend died of an overdose, though I didn’t find out til Sunday night.
I came back to New York out of my mind with grief and fresh PTSD and whatever shot I had at keeping it together long enough to actually work in comics was gone. It wasn’t ever much of a shot, then; I had an appointment with an addict’s bottom and the timeline just got sped up a lot. Chris held me while I cried hysterically during a Christmas party that winter.
“Take a taxi”, he’d say, and I’d take a cab all the way up to his apartment in Riverdale and we’d sit on the floor talking X-Men while the cats paced around us. Things I said showed up in the book, thrilling me. He kept giving me scripts. But I lost touch with him and everyone else once I became a daily heroin user, a year or so later. P. was in trouble too, struggling with life.
By the time I got clean and sober, in January of 1989, Chris wasn’t writing the New Mutants anymore.
He left the book in 1987, and what it became was…nothing that meant anything to me. But I still wanted to work in comics, despite everything, even if it wasn’t on the New Mutants, even though the scene was changing fast.
It was a harrowing, exhausting process to break into the comic industry from St. Paul, where I’d gone to treatment, and stayed on the advice of the halfway house. I was constantly travelling to the cons and being constantly sexually harassed.
That hadn’t changed at all, from ’86 to ’90. It was horrible, and some of the editors were fucking pigs.
The first Marvel editor who gave me a sample script mailed it with a letter on Marvel letterhead. The script opened with a splash page of a dead girl, and the letter commented explicitly on my physical appearance. Another (married!) editor asked me, in front of the San Diego Marriott, if he could masturbate in front of me.
There were so many more women around, though, and women were getting work as the full-time pencillers on monthly books. More comics were being published and sold than anyone had ever thought possible. I met people who helped me, people who backed me.
Rest in peace, Kim Yale!! You were amazing!
There were men around who were clearly, obviously committed to helping women get work. Virtual hugs, Rob Simpson! I met a woman writer, Sarah Byam, and we became friends. I met a woman inker named Pam Eklund! I met Jill Thompson, who had Dave the Thune painted on her leather jacket! I never, ever considered giving up.
It took three more years, before an editor gave me a chance. In 1993 a woman editor, Margaret Clark, hired me to draw Star Trek The Next Generation #72.
And then a TNG Annual, and then the prize of prizes for a comic artist: the regular penciller gig on a regular monthly book, Star Trek The Original Series.
I did an issue that was inked by Pam Eklund, at my suggestion; it may still be the only mainstream comic ever pencilled, inked and edited by women.
In 1995 Chris had been doing some work for DC and we sat together at the DC table at the Chicago Comic-Con, signing comics, our faces blown up huge on a wall of monitors. It was good to see him.
And I was a pro, just as he promised me, just as I promised P.
Not very many people get to have their life’s ambition come true when they’re only 26.
Even now, less than twenty women have ever been full-time monthly pencillers for an ongoing book at one of the Big Two. I’m proud to be one of them.
The industry collapse that happened in 1995 didn’t change the basic character of the business. There are a few more big companies where you can kind of earn a living now, yet things haven’t really gotten better for women working in comics.
Sadly, what safety there is for women is mostly the ability to name and share the names of bad actors in the system and protect themselves pro-actively.
But things have gotten a little better for queer and trans visibility in the stories themselves.
Shan, Karma of the New Mutants, is canonically a lesbian and even crushed on Kitty!* Northstar married his boyfriend in the X-Men! When DC refused to let Batwoman marry her longtime girlfriend, the creative team walked. Wonder Woman and John Constantine are canonically bisexual, at least right now. Iceman is gay! The new Aqualad is gay! And that’s just the beginning.
The comics I imagined, where teenage mutant girls can love happily even if the rest of their world is insane, seem within reach. If creators can just keep fighting the toxic forces around them and their own demons to tell those stories. I couldn’t; I had to leave comics. Today, drawing real people is the best way for me to tell stories. Teaching drawing is the best way to honor my teachers and the work I put in to become a comic artist.
But today, at least I can tell my story, and the story of how much I loved superhero comics. How they saved me.
How much I loved the New Mutants, in the 80s.
More Rahne and Dani slash art!
new Rahne and Dani art
and more 80s New Mutants art, a portrait I drew of Chris, and my joy at Vita Ayala’s New Mutants run.
* Here‘s a beautiful piece about queer-girl subtext in the X-Men and New Mutants by Sigrid Ellis. In it I learned that in 2002 Chris wrote a series called Mechanix, where Kitty actually comes out as bisexual!
*Update Feb 17 2022, and it shouldn’t have taken me this long.
I was wrong to celebrate Rahne and Dani’s queer love story while not raising the issue of Bobby being whitewashed. Representation isn’t tit for tat; one group shouldn’t get to advance at the expense of another, and I was disturbed by ‘Berto being played by a light-skinned actor; I should have said so at the time.
When the movie was finally released, it became clear that the director didn’t understand the harm Bobby’s whitewashing has done *or* the harm his talking about it as a “casting choice” did.
New Mutants fans spoke up about the hurt and harm they experienced seeing a canonically Afro-Brazilian character portrayed by a light-skinned actor.
I hope to see the New Mutants on the screen again, but only if Roberto is represented by an actor who can honor his whole identity and history.
These two gay teen mutants were my OTP, my original ‘ship.
And not just mine. Queer subtext for Rahne and Dani is epic. And incredibly, people who weren’t born when the comics came out are as invested in their relationship as I was in the ’80s.
I got my first 6″ (dollhouse) scale action figure in 1999.
I didn’t finish the dollhouse for a good fifteen years, but I started collecting super hero action figures like a fucking fiend right away.
It was utterly thrilling to me to see the new X-Men action figures released with the first film in 2000.
It was incredible that there was an X-Men movie, incredible that there were mass-market toys.
Those movie figures of the X-Men in 2000 were only the beginning of what became a river of X-Men figures. Of course Wolverine has the most figures, even today! There are so many different Logans!
In 2014 an “original style” Jean Grey was released as part of an old-school X-Men Marvel Legends box set.
By 2018, so many X-Men action figures had been released I needed to build a new dollhouse.
So I built a School for Gifted Youngsters, seen above. It was a huge effort that took about a year, but it’s 99% percent done. The kids, of course, are relaxing in the living room.
I should probably say more about how I made them, and I will. But it was so emotionally wrenching to make them, and such a relief and mercy to be done and place them safely in the X-Mansion, that I’m done for now.