Given the protracted build-up for this issue it's fair to see expectations are higher than usual. And not only is this the series finally devoting a full issue to "Acts of Vengeance", but this is also a landmark for the creative team. It's the start of the run by Rob Liefeld.
New Mutants #86
Writer: Louise Simonson
Penciler: Rob Liefeld
Inker: Bob Wiacek
Letterer: Joe Rosen
Colourist: Glynis Oliver
Editor: Bob Harras
Editor-in-Chief: Tom DeFalco
Ah Rob Liefeld. It's astonishing to see that at the end of last issue he was actually billed strongly as about to start on the book. This is incredible for someone whose first published story had only appeared twenty months earlier and who had worked on a grand total of just a dozen issues before getting the gig. It's one thing to try a relatively new artist on a long-running book, it's another altogether to be heavily billing their arrival. Looking at this it seems clear that Liefeld peaked way too early and his style got stuck before it developed. Liefeld has his fans, as his sales over the years certainly demonstrate, but also his detractors, particularly given the way large charge of the comics industry started pursuing the style. I'm invariably biased as in the early 1990s I was largely reading titles that had avoided the trend and only first encountered Liefeld's work on a permanent(ish) basis with "Heroes Reborn", which wasn't the best circumstances.
Here the art shows a dynamism but also the odd awkward poses, extra-long legs and titillating shots that Liefeld would go on to be known for, though given the characters involved and Skids's established costume, the most overt are some of the angles of the Vulture's rear. It may be a theme of his story that he's showing there's life in the old man yet but there are some places better not gone. The multiple lines on faces actually works quite well for both the Vulture and Tinkerer, really emphasising that these are wrinkled old men. However the fight scenes are rather confused, with a limited sense of how the five characters are all positioned in relation to each other, and the explosive climax has captions describing what's happening over a two-panel spread that really fails to show the key moments of the sequence.
The plot is straightforward though we get a further dismissal of the wider crossover from Simonson with the Vulture receiving orders from an unseen stranger (but no doubt that particular mysterious stranger) to attack Speedball but decides this is beneath him, later bemoaning "Where's the villainy in that? Where's the prestige? Where's the vengeance?" and instead sets out to free Nitro, another old man being help sedated in a cannister to prevent him using his exploding powers. The Vulture aims to use those powers to show he's a force to be reckoned with. Meanwhile Rusty and Skids escape jail in the hope of capturing the Vulture and proving the value of mutants. However at the end Freedom Force show up, seemingly working for the government once more (another sign of the series's reluctance to integrate well with the wider crossover) to take them away. Later there's an attack on an energy research facility by a new terrorist group, the Mutant Liberation Front, and we also get our first glimpse of the mysterious Cable.
Given all the build-up to this issue and the high billing given to the series's new artist, expectations are flying higher than the Vulture. Unfortunately they're not met with a somewhat simplistic tale let down at key moments by the artwork. However it's good to see some villains rejecting the stock structure and heroes the overall scheme has assigned them as well as to show a villain at times written off as a feeble joke (and subject to more attempts at replacement than just about any without "goblin" in the name) striving to restore his reputation.
New Mutants #86 has been reprinted in:
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