**WARNING: Minor spoilers for the New Mutants movie (but honestly, if you know this is coming you'll probably be willing to sit through a lot more of it)
So...The New Mutants finally came to streaming this past week, and after years (years) of anticipation, waiting and waiting to finally see Magick and Dani Moonstar and Wolfsbane brought to life, and then months of hoping against hope that the movie was better than the middling reviews suggested...it's really just okay. It's a very ambitious attempt at a different kind of superhero movie, but it's let down by shoddy editing, inconsistent writing, and bad, boring villain. (Sam, my wife, did some research after the movie was over and suggested Selene should have been the villain. I knew in that moment that I had married the perfect person.)
But this post isn't about the New Mutants movie. I'll do that another day, maybe once the movie is free to stream on Hulu and I can give it another watch and really suss out what's wrong with it. For today, I'm going to talk about the wonderful, beautiful, talented Lockheed, the best part of the movie and maybe the best part of X-Men as a whole.
Awww, look at Lockheed! He's such a good boy! Even the fact that he's introduced as the best friend of Magick, not Shadowcat, doesn't really ruin him. He can't be ruined. He's Lockheed. He's about as perfect as a character can get. He is perhaps the weirdest character in all of X-Men not named Doop, and yet nobody is more comfortable and happy being who they are than Lockheed. Lockheed is a perfect boi.
So, if you're unfamiliar with Lockheed, let me break down his comic book origin. He's a dragon who lives in space who shows up when the X-Men are fighting the Brood (basically Xenomorphs who can talk), he decides he's Kitty Pryde's best friend, then he follows her back to Earth and remains her best friend forever. His arrival is foretold by a fairy tale that Kitty tells Ilyana a few issues before his appearance. And, um...(checks notes)...yep, that's it.
No, seriously. That's it. He's a purple space dragon who just shows up out of nowhere and becomes a young girl's best friend. He's...that's it.
See, X-Men is weird. Incredibly weird. Stuff just happens because Chris Claremont or Louise Simonson or whoever was working on building the X-Universe on any given day in the 80s decided it would be fun to write. And when you think about it, that's completely in keeping with the spirit of the X-Men as a concept. Why do these characters have powers? Why can Cyclops shoot lasers out of his eyes? Because reasons. Okay, now let's have some fun.
It's this weirdness that really sets X-Men apart from the rest of the Marvel universe to the point where I really don't think of X-Men as even being part of the mainline Marvel universe. Oh, you thought Guardians of the Galaxy was weird because there's a talking raccoon and an ent? X-Men has a space dragon just because.
In a way, Lockheed's appearance in New Mutants is one of the few things that movie truly nails. Well, other than the fact that he's Kitty's best friend, not Magick's. He's just Magick's friend by proxy to Kitty. But in the movie, Lockheed kind of just shows up, and we, the audience, are supposed to just shrug, smile, and go, "Yeah, why not?" And that's how he shows up in the comics. One second, there's no space dragon fighting Xenomorphs. Next, there is. Just shrug, smile, and keep on moving.
See, Lockheed is a great litmus test for X-Men fans in general. If you grow up with your main exposure to the X-Men being the Fox movies, you might have it in your head that X-Men is a gritty superhero comic full of violence, angst, allegories, political messaging, and well, yes. Those things are a part of X-Men. But X-Men is also a grand, glorious pop culture mashup. It's a sci-fi series, a horror series, a comedy series, a fantasy series, a detective story, a western, a heist movie. It rivals Cowboy Bebop in how many ideas it is willing to smash together in order to create something cool and fun. And Lockheed is emblematic of that.
I can't say this enough. He's a purple dragon who just shows up and now he's been a constant presence for decades.
He's great. He just exists because Chris Claremont thought it would be fun to have a cute dragon pet on the X-Men. And Lockheed is perfectly happy to just stick around. He doesn't need to be explained away as "Oh, there was a genetic experiment that Kurt Connors was working on with Beast's grandfather and something went wrong and he became attached to Kitty Pryde because her pheromone scent time traveled to the moment of his birth and..." NO! No explanations needed for Lockheed. He's a good boy. Sometimes you just want a good boy in your comic, so you put a good boy in your comic. And X-Men is wonderful because you can just do that.
Here's a last thought about Lockheed and his broader implications. Did you, as a child of the 90s, constantly see X-Men as a "boys'" thing? Did you see X-Men action figures grouped together in the part of the toy aisle that was for boys? Did you see sheets and pillowcases with Wolverine's grimacing visage and assume that could only be sold for boys? Well, guess what? One of the best characters in the entire X-Universe is a purple dragon who is best friends with a teenage girl and he looks like he came out of LEGO's Elves line. Lockheed's enduring existence and popularity should be a permanent refutation of the entire Comicsgate mindset. Anyway, let me conclude this with a picture of Lockheed. Because he's the best boy. He just is. He's such a good boy that my D&D Ranger has a pseudodragon who looks exactly like Lockheed. If I ever get a tattoo, I have gone on record as saying it will be a tiny picture of Lockheed.
What a good boy!
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