I had to give this one 4 stars - Bill Sienkiewicz's artwork here is just amazing and Claremont's writing is at its peak especially with Magik succumbing to her dark sorcery. The Demon Bear storyline is fantastic - the Cloak & Dagger one is not bad. Also introduced Lila Cheney, the interdimensional teleporting rock star. Her seduction of Cannonball is just pure Claremont depravity. ( )

Ohhh, that Sienkiewicz art. I think he may be my all-time favourite comics artist.

Anyway, this is from Claremont's "pre-senile" period, where characters do compulsively repeat things like "Good thing ah'm invulnerable when ah'm blastin'" and "I am Cheyenne!" on every page, but it hasn't yet metastasized to the point of pushing out plot and characterization and all the stuff that made us love Sam and Dani and crew (compare to, say, the "X-Treme X-Men" era). The New Mutants, with possibly some help from the New Warriors, taught me about being a teenager, and thus have played a role in my life similar to Archie comics in Heidi's. I'm glad these comics were part of that process: they're beautiful and imaginative and surprising and surprisingly adult, in the best way. There's a force in them that's moral but never moralistic--Dani vs. the Demon Bear, Cloak and Dagger coming back to relieve 'Berto and Rahne of their curse, and just always being there for your friends, you know?

And then there's that incredible wonderworld conjured by the art. I hadn't seen all of these before, but the ones I had are still indelibly burned into my memory from 1989. ( )