Warning: The following contains spoilers for New Mutants #9, by Jonathan Hickman, Flaviano, Mike del Mundo and Marcos Martin, on sale now.Â
The New Mutants gathered a lot of old foes over the years and as the group went through radical alterations, their rogues gallery evolved as well. In the '90s, the New Mutants frequently fought an opposing mutant group known as the Mutant Liberation Front (MLF), which fully embodied the spirit of X-Men comics of the decade. The MLF have largely gone forgotten since, but New Mutants #9 just brought them back to face a new threat.
While the recent New Mutants comics split up the team, with half their members going to space while the others went to Iowa, the conclusion of both missions brought the team back together for a whole new mission: saving a newly-emerged mutant in the hostile Eastern European nation of Carnelia. The mission goes sideways when it gets far weirder than the New Mutants could have expected.
That's saying something. The New Mutants were always known for weird adventures, fighting the demonic Spirit Bear in their early days and then venturing across space, time and reality. It was in the '90s, when X-Men comics across the board grew grittier (while simultaneously cranking the over-the-top drama to 11) that the New Mutants first faced the MLF. On the surface, the MLF may have seemed right at home with most political and grounded X-Men stories, but they were far from it.
Claiming to be a civil rights movement fighting for the freedom of mutantkind by any means necessary, the MLF were basically a more political Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. The political edge very quickly went out the window, however, when their founder Stryfe revealed he didn't care nearly as much about civil rights as he did wreaking vengeance on his clone, the time-travelling Cable who took over the New Mutants' leadership at the time.
Time travel and clones are hardly off-the-wall, but they were especially routine for the MLF. Their members consisted of the superstrong and four-armed Forearm, the time-altering Tempo and the energy-releasing Dragoness, Samurai and Strobe (all of whom projected different kinds of energy, but shooting laser beams out of your hands was never as cool as it was in the '90s). All five of those characters are extremely obscure, appearing in a scant handful of comics sprinkled throughout the '90s and since, but they're all about to help the New Mutants out in a big way.
The mutant the team went to investigate in New Mutants #9 turned out to be manipulating a small pocket of reality around them, trapping the New Mutants who tried to resist the power. Seeking help, Cypher went to a corner of Krakoa where the New Mutants apparently aren't the most welcome -- a pool joint that serves as the MLF's hangout. While previous members like Forearm were known to inhabit the island, this is the first that the group appears to have maintained their cohesion -- and their animosity toward their former rivals.
Doug blows past many of the MLF's members to a backroom to speak to their leader, Wildside. Still as gross and weird as ever, the animalistic Wildside clips his toenails by a half-eaten sandwich as he responds to Cypher's request for help. The mutant was known before for his psychotic homicidal urges, but with villains cooperating to an unprecedented degree since the birth of Krakoa, Wildside and the rest of the MLF could prove to be especially powerful allies.