X-Men: Mutant Massacre

X-Men Mutant Massacre is one of the most infamous and talked about crossover story arcs ever.  I had always wanted to read this crossover given how many times I would find it referenced in modern story arcs, but finding all the books in this relatively old & popular crossover stories with some hard to find titles like Power Pack just seemed like more work than I was willing to go through.  Luckily, that’s exactly what trade paper backs are for.

Just to clarify, I had tons of preconceptions about this story.  What I — and probably most people who never read the story but followed the X-men comics — knew was that a group of assassins including Sabretooth called the Marauders were hired to cull the morlocks, and the popular X-man Gambit had led those assassins there.  Finally and probably the most significant change from the story was the transformation of Angel into Archangel.

I was envisioning all kinds of cool looking Weapon-X black-op type of soldiers creeping through the tunnels below New York and killing unsuspecting & ugly mutants with uncanny efficiency, what I got was something a whole lot different.

Ok, so time for a synopsis.  Contrary to future history, as confusing as that sounds, Gambit was never in the storyline.  There wasn’t even a dark figure stalking about the tunnels that we could pretend could have been Gambit, but that’s comics for you, re-writing history (retcon) whenever it makes for a shocking twist.  Ok, so no Gambit, but we still got these super-cool assassins called the Marauders.

Well, as it turns out the Marauders aren’t as cool as I was imagining them to be either.  I’m not going to go through all the Marauders, but a couple of key villains were Harpoon, an Inuit who throws electrically charged harpoons, Scalphunter who wears a ridiculous outfit with thousands of gun pieces all over his body so that he can make different guns on the fly I guess and Riptide, a killer who could spin really fast and then fling out an unlimited amount of shurikens at everyone within range.  Fantastic!

Ok, so the villains kinda left something to be desired, but what about the heroes.  Well between the X-Men and X-Factor (consisting of the original four X-men) you’ve got a lot of good superheroes in this mix, the problem was that neither team ever got near each other so both teams end up taking solid butt-kickings.  I have no problems with heroes getting whooped now and again though, so I was Ok with this.

I must admit reading a comic from the 1980’s does throw you a bit.  I mean Psylocke is not yet a hot ninja chick, Storm has a Mohawk and wears a leather vest and Rogue has a mullet with a skunk stripe right down the center.  But those were the times, so you’ve got to take those in good spirit and laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Another hero of note in the Mutant Massacre is Thor, who killed a guy which was pretty cool actually.  I had no real problem with the God of Thunder making an appearance in a mostly mutant storyline & kicking some ass, but the first eighteen pages of his appearance has him babysitting a group of children until a pair of frogs named Pudlegulp and Bugeye inform him of the Morlock massacre.  And no, I’m not kidding, though I wish I were.

The New Mutants make an appearance which really makes no difference to the storyline whatsoever.  You could scrub their entire appearance and be no worse for the wear.  Speaking of appearances that should have been scrubbed, we move to our last group of heroes, Power Pack!

Do I even need to make a list of the cons of having Power Pack make an appearance in what is supposed to be a landmark crossover.  I mean it’s Power Pack for Christ’s sakes. They have to sneak out so their mom and dad don’t see them because their powers are a secret.  If annoying not only the Marauders but also the readers was the point of putting them in the book, then I say job well done Power Pack!

Ok, so maybe my pre-conceived notions of how cool this book was going to be spoiled the read for me.  Kinda like when I saw clerks five years after everyone else in the world had.  It was still a fun read to fill in some of the X-Men history I had always wondered about.

So what did I make of this all?  It’s not a perfect book by far, but it was pretty entertaining.  The cons were really Power Pack’s appearance, the whole X-Factor versus The Executioners ridiculousness which I didn’t even bother going over here and the lack of truly impressive villains.  The pros on the other hand were some fairly violent changes not contained merely within the book, but also as to how far you could take that kind of violence within fairly conservative super-hero comics at the time – but that’s just my opinion.

So between the historical significance of the book, the birth of brutality in X-titles and some pretty good scraps between Wolverine and Sabretooth, I deem this a pretty good read for fans of the X-Men line regardless of my sarcasm throughout this review.  Just don’t expect too much like I did or you’re bound to be disappointed.