X-Men: 10 Characters That Must Appear In The New Mutants Movie

Telling the story of the costumed adventures of the teenage students of Charles Xavier’s School For Gifted Youngsters, the New Mutants ongoing comics series was introduced in 1983, following the characters’ first appearance the year before.

The comic lasted until 1991, when the core group of characters (having grown to very early adulthood in the previous 100 issues) evolved into X-Force, a more pro-active paramilitary-style version of the same team, and the title was relaunched.

Since the movie rights for the X-family of comics characters belong with Fox, the rights to make a New Mutants film also lie with them: and from all accounts, a film is in the pre-production stages, as is an X-Force flick (which sounds like it’s intended to be a basic action flick, entirely separate from the New Mutants film).

If Marvel’s mutant question has always been a metaphor for difference, alienation and evolution - both personal and societal - then the original teenage X-Men, and later the New Mutants, got to explore that metaphor through the lens of adolescence, a time of flux when you’re growing, changing and still deciding what kind of person you’ll end up becoming.

More to the point, the New Mutants are a group of kids all around the same age that are closer than friends. They’re something that the Fox has failed to realise in the X-Men movies to date: a family. That makes the selection of the characters who’ll comprise the main cast of vital importance. Here’s how.

When you’re a teenager, age brings seniority: and Xi'an Coy Manh, codenamed ‘Karma’, is several years older than the rest of the New Mutants, already working full time as the legal guardian of and sole provider for her younger siblings when she’s given a job working for Charles Xavier as his PA. That’s how she finds herself in charge of the rest of the New Mutants - through her maturity and responsibility, and experience in looking after people younger than her.

Xi’an (pronounced ‘shah-n’) has her own kind of troubled past, as many mutants do before coming to Xavier’s school - but hers involves an evil twin brother, a father high up in the South Vietnamese army and pirates murdering her mother, so she’s ahead of the game there, too.

Her power involves possession of a subject or subjects: not just hypnotism or simple mind control, but total domination, to the extent that she can not only make them do stuff, but edit their memories and their perception of reality, perhaps even engage in radical personality alteration.

It’s an ability that can be set at a variety of levels, depending on the needs of the plot, and carries with it its own ethical considerations, driving character and creating its own form of conflict. Besides that, Karma is the original leader of the team, one of the lynchpins of the early New Mutants line-up, and required casting in any TV or film adaptation.