New Mutants: Fall Of The Mutants
…or how I became disillusioned with comics for a long, long time.
Way back in 1988, Marvel had an event called “Fall of the Mutants.” Basically it was three different storylines loosely linked under one title. The New Mutants part is what I’m concerned with, as it had impact far more than you’d think.
By this time, the Mutants had a new member called Cypher, aka Doug Ramsay. Doug’s power was languages; he could intuitively understand any written, spoken, or computer language that existed. However, this made him almost useless in a fight, and he was aware of that. Still, he had to learn to use his power like anyone else, so he was with Xavier’s team, and he befriended the mechanical creature known as Warlock. Things were good, until now.
The New Mutants discover a flying bird-human hybrid they call Bird-Brain. It turns out that he was created by someone who had close ties to Cameron Hodge, aka chief mutant-hater of the moment. The Mutants went to free his friends, and a really bad Island of Doctor Moreau pastiche happened. The Mutants get captured, and chained up, only to be freed when Hodge’s men go too far and the animals themselves have to choose between loyalties.
What happened next made me not want to pick up a comic for maybe five years.
People seem to dislike Cypher, but I can’t help if it’s because they are fake geeks. The thing about Cypher was, back then he was the insert character for the reader. He was a geeky kid with no cool talents or powers that was apart from society, and who got to be with a whole team of super-powered heroes. You identified with his vulnerability because in real life, it mirrored your own as a geek. Later on they tried to “fix” him, by defining what a language was to an absurdly wide degree. Body language is a language, so now he’s a martial artist! Etc.
However, once on Bird-Brain’s island, his lack of powers caught up with him, and he died protecting someone. Shot in the back.
Yeah, these days heroes die all the time. But they wound up killing the one character you often identified with and who was our viewpoint into a mutant world, and they killed him pointlessly. Bird-Brain has never existed in a Marvel book since, and while Cypher has been resurrected several times, the shock that Marvel would kill someone you grew up with and cared about hit hard. In a way it was like they killed the reader too. Our everyman had died.
The storyline was ugly, too. The art was ugly, as done by Bret Blevins. He’s not a bad artist, but he has sort of a pin-up/kewpie doll style to his art that either works, or it doesn’t. Then it didn’t, clashing wildly with the serious, somber tone of the story. It didn’t help that Bird-Brain wasn’t even likable, and looked ridiculous. It’s odd-the Demon Bear storyline didn’t kill Dani, but it was intensely dramatic even knowing that. The FoM arc killed Cypher, and it felt like a waste.
But even that wasn’t the end. Soon, the New Mutants would turn into X-Force, the book which truly initiated the Dark Age of Comics, and brought us the Unholy Trinity of Cable, Deadpool, and Rob Liefeld. The team disbanded, with only Cannonball and Sunspot staying, and we were subjected to bad air, massive shoulder pads, unnecessary facial lines, stupid character designs, Sam Guthrie somehow being immortal, and the destruction of a series about teens using their powers by a lot of stabby/shooty characters with bad design and no appeal.
I think they killed the Hellions shortly after, as if that wasn’t good enough.
Oh, and yes Deadpool sucks. He sucked back then, he sucks now. Anyways.
I lost my desire to read comics about that time. I think I read others, but I could no longer trust Marvel. The idea that comics would completely kill off characters and books was alien at the time, and part of the fun in reading them was in knowing that the heroes would win even if the stakes were high against them. By doing this, some measure of trust was lost. More trust was lost when you realized that they’d completely upend a series to the point of killing members off and making an entirely new book out of an old one. Before that, there had been change, yes; but usually the people would go to another team (X-factor and Excalibur, Fallen Angels, etc) and still survive. A line had been crossed, and I think from the 90’s on Marvel had lost some of the magic that they had.
In time I went back to reading them, though now it was more keeping current on critically acclaimed stories. I think comics have gotten worse since then. There were too many crossover arcs and ludicrously dark/violent stories happening every year like clockwork, and less fun or wonder to the stories. Like they lost everything except the ability to push the envelope.
So, that’s my story. Any stories or media that turned you off a genre due to attacking something you loved?
