Also note that the team was majority female, a feat still rarely reproduced outside of the X-Men comics. The lineup followed the X-Men tradition of featuring a racially and ethnically diverse cast.

The original team of five include Wolfsbane (Rahne Sinclair) - a Scottish werewolf-like mutant, Karma (Xi'an Coy Manh) - a Vietnamese teenager with psychic powers, the variously codenamed Danielle Moonstar - a Cheyenne Native American with more psychic powers, Brazilian firebrand Sunspot (Roberto da Costa), and Kentucky hayseed Cannonball (Samuel Guthrie), because there had to be one white American male. With a lot of scrutiny being levelled at Marvel Studios' Avengers films and their various diversity issues, New Mutants has a gratifying history of strong representation that Fox would be crazy to ignore. There have been several New Mutant series over the intervening years, as well as various spiritual and literal spinoffs including New X-Men, Young X-Men and, most famously, X-Force.

The settings were equally creative, taking them from Thor's home of Asgard to a lost Roman civilisation in the Amazon. The series became very popular, dealing with different subjects from its parent title including teen angst, myth and mysticism and establishing new villains like the immortal mutant witch (!) Selene, the alien Technarchy and Native American monster the Demon Bear.

The New Mutants by Chris Claremont