*X-Men: Mutant Massacre*

 

Written by Chris Claremont

 

Art by half the Marvel Bullpen, Class of '86 & '87

 

 

Not long ago I spoke with a former Marvel Editor in Chief who placed the death spiral of comics squarely on the shoulders of gigantic crossovers such as *X-Men: Mutant Massacre* and all that came after. Of course these stories are often fun to read-- * Mutant Massacre* is-- but oh, what a Pandora's Box it was, holding the comics reader hostage as he rushes to buy every issue involved in the story.

 

Once upon a time, there was no such thing as a gigantic, continuity-defying crossover in comics. Not in the Marvel Universe, not anywhere. There were limited series, of course, such as *Contest of Champions*, which came out in the dark ages, and *Secret Wars*, which was something of a phenomenon back in the year of Orwell. But we owe the gigantic crossover to the maxi-series sequel, *Secret Wars II*, which sprawled across the Marvel Universe leaving almost no title unsoiled in '85. *Secret Wars II* left the community underwhelmed enough that, apparently, Chris Claremont thought the concept should be tried again, this time as a way of promoting *X-Men* sales. The result was *Mutant Massacre*

 

And it's a lot of fun, or at least it is *now,* when readers can pick the whole story up in a trade paperback. Reading *X-Men: Mutant Massacre* gives us an opportunity to survey the rarified look and feel of the X-Books in the mid-to-late Reagan years, from 1986 to 1987.

 

*X-Men: Mutant Massacre* tells a story that has now become one of those continuity benchmarks like the crash of the Fantastic Four, a dividing line in the history of the New X-Men. We *still* talk about the death of the Morlocks.

 

Who were the Morlocks? A Claremont creation, the Morlocks were a straggling band of mutants who turned their backs on humanity to live in peace, harmony and a certain amount of muck in the tunnels below New York. Many of these were the ugly mutants who couldn't "pass" the way Jean Grey and Scott Summers, modelesque mutants, could. But many of them, like the merely plain-Jane, one-eyed Callisto, went underground because they preferred the community.

 

It was a lovely little myth, so lovely that Peter David borrowed it in *The Incredible Hulk*, giving the Abomination his own band of tunnel-dwellers. One presumes there are so many networks of tunnels below New York that these two bands never crossed paths. (As a hint about how ashamed we are of our pristine myths, Peter David eventually massacred his, too.)

 

And massacre them Claremont did. In order to promote sales of the X-Men books, Claremont reached into his soap-opera bag of tricks and came up with "mass murder of innocents" as the best thing to hang a year of stories on. And as cynical as that sounds, it played fairly well.

 

The Marauders are a bunch of  mutant hunters-- including Sabretooth-- who descend on the Morlock tunnels shouting "a good mutant is a dead mutant" and begin slaughtering mutants left and right, men, women and children. As in a disaster epic, alarm bells ring out and the entire upper Mutant community comes running. The heroes head into the tunnels to survey damage, avoid more killing (the killing seems to take weeks) and find out who's at fault.

 

And here's where the real fun happens for today's reader, as you get a gander at *who* is there to respond in 1986. The X-Men come, led by Storm, powerless and mohawked, who is also the leader of the Morlocks at this time. Remember this? She's got *no* powers, but managed to beat both Callisto and Cyclops in hand-to-hand combat, winning leadership of both teams.

 

We've got Wolverine, Kitty Pryde, Nightcrawler, and Colossus, who kills for the first time. Psylocke is still a member of the New Mutants (the precursor to X-Force), but it's here that she transitions to the X-Men.

 

In 1986 there is no Professor Xavier (he's missing or dead,) so believe it or not, the Mutants are all being led by Magneto, who's turned over a new leaf and now wears a purple, heroish outfit, and his lack of a helmet makes him look like his son, Quicksilver. In the New Mutants, so much has not happened-- Illyana is still a black magician, but she's still alive.

 

Oh, and of course this is the time when Cyclops, Beast, Marvel Girl, Iceman and Angel were wearing no less than *two> sets of utterly forgettable costumes and posing as government agents. I'd explain, but do we really want to go back there?

 

The story rambles. On and on the X-Men tear into the marauders they catch, and more mutants die as even Thor and Power Pack inexplicably wander in. The infuriating thing -- SPOILER-- about *X-Men: Mutant Massacre* is that it does not conclude. The whole *point* is to find out who drove the killings, but whoever it was, we don't find out here.

 

*Mutant Massacre*, in the end, is about the emergency, not the culprit. Reading it is more an exercise in comics history study, as we watch the death of whatever innocence the X-Men had and the birth of a new age of cynicism. It's a dividing line as clear as the Morlock Tunnel, which ends up so empty that characters in the MU still whisper about it like the Chicago Fire. (This isn't so surprising when one considers that in the Marvel Universe, the FF crashed some fifteen years ago, so surely the Morlock Massacre happened about six years ago.)

 

Those who are just getting interested in the X-Men because of the movie will find this an impossibly confusing and yet interesting tale, I suppose. The movie has a tightly closed plot, whereas here, we see the X-Men as part of a vast community that continues to change and grow. Comics fans should take note, this was the beginning of the end-- the end of simple continuity, indeed the end of Claremont. Soon would come Liefeld, and comics would never look the same, and Claremont's heavy writing would slip into disfavor.

 

*X-Men: Mutant Massacre* is a time capsule, however rambling it may be, and it should be read as such. Part of the fun is the confusion.