New Mutants #59 (Fall of the Mutants)

New Mutants #59 (January 1988)
Rating:  ★★★★★
Fang and Claw
Writer:  Louise Simonson
Artist:  Bret Blevins
Inker:  Terry Austin

As with the other Fall of the Mutants entries, this issue is the climax of a building story involving some mutant "Bird Boy".  It's funny how for every fantastic story Louise Simonson belts out, there seems to be an equally ridiculous concept that almost ruins a series.  Thankfully, Bird Boy doesn't hang around long and appeared to only be a plot device to lead the mutants to this island to shake them up.

The mutants find out that the "trials" are very serious and very deadly

The one thing you might notice is the lack of Sunspot and Warlock on the cover.  They were off in the Fallen Angels series (along with Boom Boom from X-Factor).  Never read the miniseries, nor do I have any strong feeling to finally pick it up after all these years.  Don't worry, though.  The two show up in this issue and trip some automatic alarms that Magneto has set.  Of course the New Mutants aren't around to greet them.  They ran away from home (AGAIN).  This was a recurring theme in Simonson's books and it drove me nuts.  It culminates in this story but I'll get into it a bit more in the third book.

If the trials were a video game, these guys would be the final bosses.

Another theme appears to be "What makes a man".  Bird Brain appears at first a mindless animal until Cypher is able to communicate with him.  Turns out that he operates on more than just instincts.  But the eveil ani-mator (what is with these crappy villains) views him as a mindless beast.  The basic premise is that the Ani-Mator works for the Right (Cameron Hodge's group) performing experiments on animals, creating mutants.  Bird Brain and the other "animals" on the island must go through deadly trials.  Birdbrain escaped to try to find food and led the New Mutants back to the island.  The mutants decide to help Birdbrain's friends, but although they treat Birdbrain well, they have the same reaction to the rest of the animals.  They view them as dimwitted brutes and figure they should be easy.  They are wrong.  The animates easily beat the Mutants, leaving them at the mercy of the Ani-Mator.

The New Mutants are at the mercy of a madman.

Honestly, this entire arc is just bad.  Birdbrain is a character that we can't even empathize with since he's a mutated bird, not a mutant.  The Ani-Mator is so completely off his rocker that he's not even threatening, he's just laughable.  Bret Blevin's characters are all misshapen.  The best thing about this issue is that when read as a whole with the other two issues, it fits in.  The reader really does get the sense that this is trouble the likes of which the New Mutants have never been in before.

This is also one of the easiest Fall of the Mutants issues to get and I think this was probably one of my earliest.  None of the New Mutants issues have ever been terribly difficult to find (except maybe the Liefeld years).  So I've had this one quite some time and don't really remember trying to find it.  I think I picked up all three at the same time.  If I remember correctly, I found it at a small comic shop near a pizza place I would go with my parents every few weeks.  Ah, memories...