The New Mutants #36-37: Subway To Salvation! / If I Should Die

Writer: Chris Claremont
Artists: Mary Wiltshire & Bill Sienkiewicz

I'm reviewing these two issues together purely because I feel I should.

I mean, of course they go together. They are two consecutive issues of the same title. Aside from the colourist and one of the letterers, they are both by the same creative team. They both pit the New Mutants against the Beyonder.

And yet, aside from a little continuity, they are really two quite separate stories.

Subway To Salvation! finds the altruistic Beyonder using-up his regular two-page guest-appearance to free Illyana Rasputin of her darksoul, a benevolent act which he ties to his religious conviction of universal oneness. Ultimately though, Illyana gives up what she perceives as the logical good for the emotional good of saving her friend's life.

Illyana: "If I let her die, though, how can I call myself 'good'?"

The second story - If I Should Die - features the disillusioned Beyonder returning for pretty well the second half of the issue, yet contains by my reckoning only two lines that refer back to the preceding instalment. In this one he angrily sets out to kill everybody which, in a somewhat mould-breaking ending, he succeeds at. Utterly.

Closing narration: "And with a wave of his hand, he becomes true to his word. In Colorado, William and Margaret Proudstar forget they ever had a daughter. In Manhattan, Roberto DaCosta forgets his best friends. In Salem Center, virgin forest lines the shore of Breakstone Lake. Of Professor Xavier's School, of its youngest pupils... nothing remains... not even memories."

It's a mercy that the Beyonder's lost love Dazzler had stopped hanging around with the New Mutants by this stage. Had she still been present, then he might not have been quite so easygoing.