I think the next issue will clear some things up. Also, just a heads up but I think issues like #4-12 or so are the weakest of the 100 issue run. The Liefeld/Simonson issues near the end are probably objectively worse, but they had such profound anti-chemistry as a creative team that they go all the way around to being an oddly enjoyable mess.
The biggest bummer from New Mutants for me was that they killed off Cypher for a loooong time. His power, being able to understand and translate languages, is far from being flashy, but good writers were able to get a lot of interesting mileage out of it. I haven't read anything of the stuff after his resurrection, but apparently, he's a superb fighter now? Sigh.
I think this is mostly fixed. He's currently the only guy who can communicate with the sentient island everyone lives on, and his most recent (to me anyway) story was about how he's a terrible fighter. So, at the moment, he is maybe more central than he's been in decades and actually doing language stuff instead of Reading Body Language or whatever, which seems to have basically been swept under the rug (correctly, in my opinion).
(I guess technically his
most recent to me story was
an abrupt marriage to an Original Crossover Event Character in an event that I thought was mostly terrible, but maybe they'll do something interesting with it later. Also, back to the powers issue,
the marriage is also a language related story for him.)
Okay but they also love killing Professor Xavier. Like they first did that back when there only five X-Men. Also he doesn't stay in the chair long.
I will never miss a chance to talk about how soon he started to walk. He had built a walking machine by issue #23!
For some reason he used it to dress up as a cranky old man and yell at The Locust:
My favorite part of the original Xavier Walks Saga though was that the machine was imperfect, and so he also built Safety Tentacles to catch him if he fell down the stairs: