Mutant Massacre

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"Mutant Massacre"
Cover of X-Men Mutant Massacre  (2001), trade paperback collected edition, art by Terry Dodson
Publisher	Marvel Comics
Publication date	October – December 1986
Genre	Superhero Crossover
Title(s) New Mutants #46 Power Pack #27 Thor #373-374 The Uncanny X-Men #210-213 X-Factor #9-11 Daredevil #238
Main character(s)	ISBN 0-7851-0224-8

"Mutant Massacre" was a 1986

The crossover was a surprise success, yielding sales boosts to the mutant-based books and prompting Marvel Comics' long-running policy of holding such mutant crossovers annually.^[1]

Plot

The mysterious

Uncanny X-Men

• Uncanny X-Men #210 (Prologue)
• Uncanny X-Men #211
• New Mutants #46
• Uncanny X-Men #212
• Uncanny X-Men #213

X-Factor

• X-Factor #9 (Prologue)
• X-Factor #10
• Thor #373
• Power Pack #27
• Thor #374
• X-Factor #11

Daredevil
Daredevil #238 is set after the events of the Mutant Massacre. The issue features Daredevil fighting Sabretooth after his escape from the X-Mansion.

Consequences

• Angel is pinned to the wall by
  Apocalypse and becomes Archangel.^[12]
• During the Massacre, Apocalypse also saves Plague from Harpoon and recruits her for his Horsemen.^[4]
• Reed Richards and Doctor Doom.^[13]
• Wounded by Riptide's throwing stars,
  Colossus is briefly quadriplegic as a result of Magneto using his powers to heal the damage.^[8]
• Nightcrawler, already badly injured after a battle with Nimrod, is left comatose after being ambushed by Riptide.^[3]
• The Morlock Masque assumes control over the diminished Morlocks who return to the tunnels after the "Inferno" event. He uses his flesh altering powers to forcibly disfigure all Morlocks under his rule, an act that causes many Morlocks to go insane.^[14]
• Wolverine discovers that Jean Grey is alive after smelling her scent in the tunnels,^[3] but keeps the knowledge a secret from the rest of the X-Men.
• After proving her bravery in fighting Sabretooth, Psylocke is officially welcomed as a member of the X-Men.^[10]
• It is later revealed that Sinister had the Morlocks killed because they were experimentations of the
  Dark Beast, a version of McCoy who was Sinister's 'student' in the alternate timeline of the Age of Apocalypse
  and trapped in the prime reality twenty years in the past. As Sinister recognized his work in the Morlocks, he had them destroyed to keep his secrets out.
• It was also later revealed that Gambit was employed by Mister Sinister to assemble the Marauders. Gambit is temporarily expelled from the X-Men for his part in the massacre.^[15]

Death list

Here is the list of Morlocks that were killed during the Mutant Massacre and the issue they were killed in:

Hundreds of other Morlocks were killed, but were not identified in the comics. Annalee and Piper were the only established characters among the casualties; the others were all generic characters whose sole purpose was to be victims of the massacre. This aspect of the story was satirized in What The--?! #4.

Background and creation

Writer Chris Claremont originally conceived the systematic killing of the Morlocks as a storyline that would run in the pages of Uncanny X-Men, but X-Factor writer Louise Simonson felt that such a big storyline would run overlong in a single title, and suggested that it be done as a crossover between all three mutant titles.^[1][16]

Claremont and Simonson, the chief writers of the crossover, exchanged copies of their typewritten plots and scripts, and extensively discussed the intersecting storylines over the telephone.

Walt Simonson, who wrote the Thor instalments of "Mutant Massacre" and pencilled the X-Factor instalments, said:

Partly, what we were trying to do in the crossover was not create a string of beads where you had to go from one bead to the next bead to the next bead in order to follow the entire storyline. What we were trying to do, rather, was to take several separate skeins and intertwine them in such a way that in the end they formed a coherent whole, but then unwound and went in their own directions. And you can follow any one skein through the Massacre: you can read X-Men, you can read X-Factor, or you can read Thor, New Mutants, Power Pack, or Daredevil without really having to go over and read all the other books. But, of course, then you don't get the whole picture.^[16]

Collected editions

In other media

In

References

External links

• Mutant Massacre at the Comic Book DB (archived from the original)
• Mutant Massacre— guide by Mike Phillips.