Broken Frontier

Last week, I drove from Missouri to North Carolina and back again.  The trip takes at least fourteen hours, unless you’re willing to risk life, collateral damage, and driving records.  And despite the interesting (if not always beautiful) countryside, after about eight hours behind the wheel, I was starting to feel a bit loopy.  The droning of the engine, the steady flash of the dividing lines on the pavement, the thump-thump of the tires on the asphalt—I might as well have been listening to the beat of a metronome as a hypnotist lulled me into a dream-like state.  As I cruised along the interstate, my mind started playing tricks on me. 

I started hallucinating. 

I’d obviously been thinking a little too much about the next installment of this column, because out of nowhere sprang a nasty comic book monster that’s haunted me for years.

The Demon Bear.

If you loved the New Mutants as much as I did, you know exactly who I’m talking about.  The Demon Bear was a spirit who had killed Danielle Moonstar’s parents and tormented the girl in her dreams.  He was big and scary and powerful.  Have you seen the movie “The Edge”?  If so, imagine the bear that chased Anthony Hopkins around... only the bear is about ten times bigger and possesses magical powers.  Like I said, scary, and all of a sudden he loomed before me just as surely as the mountains had towered in the horizon earlier in the day. 

I blinked, and the beast was gone.

But he’s been with me, lurking in my subconscious, ever since I first discovered him hibernating in a quarter box. 

Without a doubt, New Mutants #18 is my favorite single issue of that title, and it is almost certainly in my list of top ten personal favorite comics.  Even Marvel’s house ads leading up to the “Demon Bear Saga” were cool—a grim portrait of the young heroes, all of them looking so badass even the tag-team of Galactus and Thanos might think twice about giving them the business.  Scrawled across the top of the page was a grim threat:

“Don’t Call ‘Em X-Babies Anymore!”

But even though the ad made me wonder just what Chris Claremont and this other guy with the unpronounceable name had in store for Cannonball, Wolfsbane, and Sunspot, I missed the issue.  Back in those days, the vast majority of my comic buying was limited to what could be found at 7-11, the grocery store, or yard sales, and the selection wasn’t always great.  It wasn’t until a few months later that I discovered the joys of comic book shows.  One rolled through my hometown, and my dad dropped me off at the local Holiday Inn with a pocket full of cash I’d been saving up over several weeks.  When I walked out of the hotel a couple of hours later, I didn’t have a penny to my name, but I was wealthy in terms of comics.  Somewhere in the unwieldy stack of books I lugged out of the show lurked the Demon Bear. 

When I stumbled across several issues of New Mutants in a box of quarter comics, I greedily scooped them up.  One of the comics featured Dani Moonstar on the cover.  She was dressed as a warrior and stared out from a blizzard.  Terrible fangs loomed behind her, and the words “Demon Bear!” stood out in blood red against the brooding background.  As I pulled the comic from the box, the dealer nodded and said, “Good choice.”  That’s all the validation I needed as a young collector.

I didn’t even wait to get back home to read the issue.  Sitting in the backseat of my dad’s car, I opened the comic and instantly knew I was in for something different.  Something special.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that fans of the New Mutants fall into two camps.  One thinks the comic reached the pinnacle of whoop-ass when Cable helped the New Mutants become X-Force.  The other camp believes the comic was never better than when Claremont teamed up with an unusual artist for a wild, dark ride that started in issue 18 and lasted a little over a year.

Bill Sienkiewicz started his legendary run of New Mutants with this issue, and I think he was the perfect choice for the Demon Bear story arc.  The story is very much Danielle Moonstar’s nightmare.  Looking at his amazing artwork (so strange and surreal compared to the clean, traditional comic art with which I was familiar) I actually felt like I was plummeting into a nightmare myself.  Dani, facing the creature that killed her parents, must have felt the same way.

Claremont packed a lot into 22 pages—a vision of a horrifying future, the introduction of Warlock, and (of course) Dani’s battle with the Demon Bear.  The tale moves along at a breakneck pace, and the undercurrent of dread from page to page put me on edge as I waited for the world to fall apart beneath my feet.

The story begins with a bang—literally—as Rachel Summers, a fugitive from a future where the X-Men are dead and mutants are hunted, approaches Xavier’s mansion.  She thinks back (or is she thinking forward?) to the day the vaunted home of the X-Men fell.  Professor X stares out the window at the forces surrounding his school.  Under a barrage of artillery, the walls crumble around him, and he clutches desperately at the drapes, pulling himself out of his wheelchair and onto his feet.

“I must use my telepathic powers to try to reach their commander!  We mean no harm!  We surrender!  In mercy’s name, Cease Fir—*”

A turn of the page revealed the military’s response.  Professor X is thrown back in his chair and blasted across the room, his stomach and back blown open by what might be a shotgun blast... or a cannon shell.  Standing over Xavier’s body, Rachel clutches his hand even as smoke rises from his wound. 

I had already read Claremont’s “Days of Future Past” storyline in Uncanny X-Men, and I knew the future X-universe would be a bleak place.  But witnessing Xavier’s death drove the concept like a railroad spike into my skull.  And this wasn’t even the focus of the story!  There was no telling what else might happen! 

Cut to a very common day of exercise for the New Mutants, with Sunspot, Cannonball, and Magma trashing robots in the Danger Room while Ilyanna and Dani watch from the control room.  We have exploding robots, teenage gossip, and unrequited love aplenty.  But as the scene ends, Dani’s thoughts are heavy and fearful.

“I wish the professor was here.  I never thought I’d admit it, but I need him.  All week, I’ve been seeing my bear in my dreams.  Each time, the image is more distinct.  It’s nearby—and its hungry.”

Dani tries to exorcise her fears by tussling with a few bears in the Danger Room, but in the end she knows she must face the monster... alone.

“I am Cheyenne!  My father—my ancestors—were the proudest warriors of the plains.  I will be true to my name and heritage no matter what.  Tonight, I’ll prove myself worthy.”

That pride gets her into a lot of trouble, of course.  She keeps her dreams about the bear a secret.  If she had only turned to her teammates, the nightmare might have ended differently. 

“Bear!”  Armed with bow and arrows, Dani strides outside into a sudden snowstorm.  “Come butcher of innocents—Danielle Moonstar summons you!  Show yourself!”

And there it is—the Demon Bear, as big as the mountains along a West Virginia Highway.

The following battle is a sharp contrast to the flashy Danger Room brawl from earlier in the issue.  There is no banter or exploding robots.  The fight is gritty, brutal, desperate, and a little uncomfortable to watch.  When the Demon Bear falls to a hail of arrows, I breathed a sigh of relief.

It didn’t last.

“I don’t believe it—I won!” Dani exclaims as she stands before the massive creature’s body.  “I’ve slain the demon-beast that murdered my parents!  At last their spirits are at rest.  And my nightmare is...”

The Demon Bear’s blood red eyes snapped open.

“...over.”

Alerted by Rahne that something is wrong, the New Mutants charge out into the cold.  In the final panel, the team gathers in silence around the mauled body of Dani Moonstar, who lies not before the Demon Bear, but before a massive tree.  Her blood is spattered across the pure white snow.

The story of the Demon Bear lasted another two issues, and the mutants went through a number of changes over the course of their struggle to save Dani.  Wolfsbane became more animalistic and Magik discovered her magical armor.  The character’s were growing up and becoming more than just “x-babies”.  The series was changing, too, and the next several issues became a genuine, delightful surprise.

I couldn’t predict what the road ahead held for the New Mutants, but I was certainly enjoying the ride.

Cullen Bunn's fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies.  His comic series The Damned will be published by Oni Press in late 2006.   You can find out more about his work here.