Broken Frontier

For those of you just joining the party, this is the second installment of Broken Frontier’s continuing retrospective on X-Men crossovers of years past in light of the ongoing Messiah CompleX story arc.

After starting strong in 1986 with the legendary Mutant Massacre, the annual X-overs began to falter the very next year, beginning the slow slide into bloated irrelevance that led to a decade-long moratorium on line-wide storylines from the late ‘90s until  now. The crossover in question is titled, appropriately enough, The Fall Of The Mutants.

Fall ’s biggest weakness is that it is not really a crossover at all. Despite being advertised with the same logo and title across all three X-books of the time ( Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor and New Mutants), Fall was actually three totally different plots lumped together under one banner, presumably for marketing purposes. Published in parallel to one another in late 1987 and early 1988, the three arcs stayed confined to their respective books. None of the characters appeared outside of their own titles, and there is only the briefest diegetic acknowledgement that the events are taking place simultaneously, via newscasts and the like.

This is, obviously, about as far away from being a crossover as one can get and still try to call it a crossover. Even though the teams never encountered each other in Mutant Massacre, they were still united against the same threat! The Fall Of The Mutants doesn’t even have that going for it, and consequently is one of the least remembered or discussed X-overs in the line’s history.

And that’s a shame, because at least one of the plots is hugely important to X-Men lore. X-Factor’s branch of the crossover had the team, at the time made up of all five original X-Men, squaring off against mutant eugenicist Apocalypse, bent on making "survival of the fittest" more than a Darwinian trope for both mutantkind and humanity. The power of the story comes in the transformation of the formerly free-spirited Angel into the dark herald of death known as Archangel, one of Apocalypse’s Four Horsemen. Alongside other mutants similarly transformed by Apocalypse, Archangel is thrust into battle against his teammates and friends.

X-Factor eventually manages to turn the tide once Archangel breaks free of Apocalypse’s control. Uncertain of who to trust, the winged mutant flees, beginning a struggle with inner darkness that only ended with his recent restoration to his former state. X-Factor’s section of Fall benefits from many of the strong choices that made Mutant Massacre so successful: it relies on previous continuity for plotting and characterization (the rise of Apocalypse and Angel’s crippling at the hands of the Marauders), and has lasting consequences in the creation of Archangel. Unfortunately, given the story’s self-contained nature, it does not enjoy the other storytelling devices of scope and intricate plotting that are available in most crossovers.

It would have been perfectly plausible for the entirety of Fall to be centered on the battle with Apocalypse, and it is difficult to understand why that was not the case. Fans would have thrilled to see the old and new generations of X-Men fighting alongside one another to overcome such a powerful foe. Actually having the teams working together would also have been a logical progression from the ships-in-the-night arc of Mutant Massacre.

Alas, this was not to be. Uncanny X-Men’s storyline followed the X-Men’s struggle with the mystic being known as the Adversary. Aided by the multiversal guardian Roma and erstwhile enemies Freedom Force, the X-Men are victorious, although not without dying, being resurrected and acquiring a new base of operations in the Australian outback – to say nothing of Storm and Forge’s romantic sojourn on a parallel world. And the dinosaurs!

The convoluted action of these three issues was not scribe Chris Claremont’s finest hour, and his successors did a poor job of acknowledging the elements he had set up. (All of the X-folk that passed through Roma’s Siege Perilous were rendered undetectable by any means save the naked eye. How many security alarms have they set off since then?)

Over in New Mutants, meanwhile, the students snuck off campus to fight a Doctor Moreau rip-off called the Ani-Mator, resulting in the death of mutant linguist Cypher and the breaking of the team’s ties with Magneto, who was their mentor at the time. Cypher would be resurrected during the Phalanx Covenant arc a few years later, and Magneto should have never been anywhere near those kids anyway – in other words, not much of consequence going on there.

Lack of consequence is the kiss of death for event storylines like The Fall Of The Mutants. Where Mutant Massacre largely succeeded in setting up repercussions that would haunt Xavier’s pupils for years afterwards, Fall fumbled around with villains-of-the-month, its only memorable facet coming out of a plot point established by – you guessed it – Mutant Massacre.

Future X-overs would avoid the error of running parallel plots rather than uniting the characters against a common threat, but would soon to begin to succumb to the other pitfalls inherent in the format.