Mutant Massacre (or, thank God comics have changed)

A few days ago I finished reading Mutant Massacre, one of the first big Marvel Comic crossover 'events' that came out in 1986.  With all the issues collected into one volume, the whole thing comes in at about 300 pages, so it's a pretty big story arc.  I actively read comics in the 1970s and only occasionally picked them up from the 1980s to 2000s before starting to read them again actively in the past seven or eight years.  There are some seminal comic book events from that big interval that I figured I should read because they had an impact on current storylines or characters.  Mutant Massacre was one of them.

The overall plot doesn't really matter that much, but certain plot elements stand out.  First and foremost, there is a lot of death in Mutant Massacre.  With this plot line, Marvel was turning the corner to a more adult-oriented (don't laugh) comic universe.  Dozens of minor characters are actually murdered in this storyline.  When I read comic books in the 1970s, there was a lot of punching and kicking, but there was little deliberate killing.  Even the death of Gwen Stacy was as much a failure on the part of Spider-Man as a result of the actions of the Green Goblin.  Somewhere along the intervening line (that I missed), Marvel made its villains nastier and its heroes a bit angrier.  Now villains like Bullseye or Sabretooth actually revel in murder and death - just part of comic books' evolution but interesting because I never saw the slow change.

I owned this way back when.  A quick search today shows it going for USD 250-350.

The thing that stands out the most in reading, Mutant Massacre, however is how comic books still had one foot in the world of serials while also trying to be somehow au courant.  The narration in Mutant Massacre still reeks of that deep manly voice speaking in an overwrought, reverent tone to tell you a story.  I picture Stan Lee reading something like Lord of the Rings to his grandkids as Gandalf casts some powerful spell.  At the same time, though, all the characters are decked out in outfits from a Cyndi Lauper video as if the artists were looking around trying to decide what all the cool kids of the day were wearing.  I can't help but thinking of Top That from Sabrina the Teenage Witch; it's some suburban guy's vision of what's popular these days.

Comic book artists also seemed to only have one or two faces to give to female characters.  All the women basically looked the same with only variations in hairstyle.  Betsy Braddock/Psylocke (who has since become a serious bad-ass) looks like some demure Elizabeth Montgomery from Bewitched.

Thankfully comics have changed in some ways.  They are still silly, but I wouldn't describe them as hokey.  Maybe in twenty years, I'll look back and think they are, but it seems that comics today are more firmly rooted in the present.  Sure it's a present where people wear weird costumes even when they are just hanging out, where people die and come back to life all the time, where New York is regularly levelled by some kind of extra-dimensional invasion and where every woman does battle in a sexy outfit revealing a ridiculously proportioned body, but at least everyone speaks like a regular person.  Thank God comics have changed.