The Mutant Liberation Front turns up while the New Mutants are already having trouble keeping their lives together. Rusty and Skids are in custody, their friends have been away,…

The Mutant Liberation Front turns up while the New Mutants are already having trouble keeping their lives together. Rusty and Skids are in custody, their friends have been away, and people who have actually helped save lives are being treated as the danger. Stryfe sees an opening in that situation. The group arrives in New Mutants #86, with the fuller introduction following in #87. Their public demand concerns Rusty and Skids, but their methods involve bombings and attacks on people who have no control over the pair’s imprisonment. That gap between the name and the behavior is there from the beginning. Calling an organization a liberation front does not answer the question of whose freedom its leader actually cares about. This thread covers the developing group through New Mutants #100. That includes the initial operatives, the three additional members encountered in Madripoor, and Rusty and Skids’ very different place within it. It is an era breakdown, not a claim that every person stands in the same room in every issue. The interesting thing about this team is how well some of the powers fit together. Concealment, altered time, heavy muscle, heat and teleportation make a nasty combination. The organization can be effective while the cause it advertises is being used to justify terrible decisions. Meanwhile, two familiar young heroes are caught inside a story the MLF has already started telling about them.