With the announcement of Children of the Atom, Marvel makes clear that it is taking a classic idea and giving it a refreshing new twist. Rather than just being a new class of young students inducted into the Xavier Institute, the Children of the Atom will be played as sidekicks to the popular X-Men super team.
After teasing the news earlier this week, Marvel editor Chris Robinson provided more details about the new class of mutants to help whet fans' appetite. The idea that there would be a new class of mutants in itself will be nothing shocking to fans. Ever since 1982, when The New Mutants first debuted there have periodically been at least one new class of mutants to join the school and freshen up the cast of the X-Men.
Part of the intent, both initially with the New Mutants and in subsequent iterations, like Generation X, was to return the X-Men back to their roots of being the School for Gifted Youngsters. The older the main characters got and the more their stories centered around adventures in space or teaming up with other heroes, the less the stories were a coming-of-age tale involving powers as an analogy for maturation or social isolation.
Part of the problem with coming-of-age stories in ongoing titles is that, eventually, the characters have to arrive at the age they've been progressing towards. The original New Mutants -- Cannonball, Mirage, Karma, Wolfsbane and Sunspot -- could no longer be teenagers once the new class of Generation X, with members like Chamber, Monet and Jubilee, were introduced. In turn, Generation X had to be older once Surge, Hellion and Rockslide were introduced in the next decade. As the recipe was repeated throughout the years, it started to dilute the flavor.
But Children of the Atom seems to promise refreshing new ingredients to spice up that old recipe. As much fun as the new classes of mutants could always be, it could get a bit tedious following a lot of the same themes and stories play out with different characters. By introducing the new characters as sidekicks to the old guard there transforms an angle on the story that readers have never seen.
Vita Ayala, the writer for the series, even leans into the refreshing new angle during their breakdown of the concept. “MY take on it became," Vita said, "what would actual kids from our current time be like if they were X-Men sidekicks? What would Gen Z X-Men be like?” Such a take pushes the concept of the X-Men firmly into the 21st Century, where the X-Men themselves are recognized in the story as heroes and icons in parallel to the real world.
Part of the problem that plagued past classes of new mutants was their isolation from the mainstream. Outside of cameos and occasional team-ups, it was a frequent occurrence for the new students' adventures to take place well apart from the primary X-titles and for their casts to fade to the background after a decade or so. Many of the new mutants introduced in a familiar manner now primarily serve as set dressing to flesh out the background of splash pages, but it would be all the harder to forget about such characters if they couldn't be forgettable.
By tying the Children of the Atom so intrinsically into the main team, Marvel is exploring a way to make its new class of mutants feel more important than ever. With the popularity of X-Men books in the wake of Powers of X and House of X's smash success in 2019, there's no doubt that there is plenty of momentum heading into a new age of stories for the X-Men. There's no telling just what the next big X-crossover will be, but it's immediately apparent that Children of the Atom will be a part of it, and something no Marvel fan will want to miss.
Children of the Atom, by writer Vita Ayala and artist R.B. Silva, debuts in April from Marvel Comics.