NEW MUTANTS: TRUTH OR DEATH #1-3 (1997-1998)

In the past, a mysterious stranger warns Illyana Rasputin about a dire future. Kitty encourages her to time travel foward and find out what’s going on.

Also, to check if she’s gonna marry Colossus.

Illyana teleports the team from the past into the future, where they meet Douglock and the five original New Mutants (Sunspot, Cannonball, Wolvesbane, Mirage, and Karma). Meeting them, Illyana learns that she’s dead in the future–killed by the Legacy Virus.

The stranger who warned her is revealed as Mikhail Rasputin.

Although the New Mutants of the present day know Mikhail as a villain, to Illyana he is her brother–and he offers to help her not be dead in the future so, why wouldn’t she work with him?

The current New Mutants fight Mikhail.

Their younger teammates defend him, so they also fight each other.

The beef gets squashed by Karma possessing everyone. Mikhail begins a medical procedure to render young Illyana immune to the Legacy Virus and…Of course, Mikhail not being a scientist, it backfires.

This ends up being an explanation of how Illyana got the virus in the first place (Mikhail infected her–he did not make her immune–in some odd plan that he thought would make himself immune), and Karma mindwipes all of them so nobody remembers any of this happening. That’s the second time she uses her mindpowers to solve the narrative problems presented by the story. Seems a bit lazy to me.

I’m not a fan of time travel, and I’m REALLY not a fan of “forget everything” stories, but putting those two (fairly important) aspects to one side, this isn’t bad.

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