Whilst the New Mutants were designed to be similar in a lot of ways to the original X-Men team, their inception was heralded by the renewed popularity of the main mutant team after years of flagging sales. It was the diverse All-New, All-Different X-Men - with Canadian Wolverine, Native American Thunderbird and Japanese Sunfire - that made the book a hit. So co-creators Chris Claremont and original artist Bob McLeod set out to make the New Mutants equally as diverse, if not more so. The main X-Men still skewed mostly straight, white and American, with Sam Guthrie aka Canonball being of the same stripe and somewhat a minority in his own team. Karma, or Xi'an Coy Manh, hailed from Vietnam, and you can bet her backstory involved a certain amount of trauma from Americas war with the South Asian country. Mirage, aka Danielle Moonstar, was Cheyenne. Sunspot was a Brazilian called Bobby De Costa. And Wolfsbane was the Scottish Rahne Sinclair, with a ridiculous accent to match.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
