Your most shocking Marvel comics moment

DAZ0273

GrimSkald said:

DAZ0273 said:

GrimSkald said:

Dragon_Nexus said:

GrimSkald said:

This moment.  I was collecting comics at the time, back in the 80s, and Marvel had built up this "Mutant Massacre" as a potentially pivotal event for the X-Men.  Point of fact, two of my favorite characters, Nightcrawler and Kitty, had been struck down hard (though not fatally,) and Colossus moved to intervene:

I mean, Colossus was always a pretty gentle soul up to this point, him being pushed to the point to actually snap someone's neck was ... very disturbing.

One might almost say...completely out of character.

Hmmm.  There's a fine line between "character development" and "changing the character entirely."  I kind of see this as the former - he had been pushed to the psychological brink by the carnage he had seen all around him (the X-Men became involved because the Marauders were quite literally slaughtering the Morlocks. they had seen a lot of dead bodies by this point,) and then two of his best friends were cut down, one of whom was a girl he had romantic feelings for (which was a mistake on Claremont's part, I think, but that's another story.) I could see his code against killing evaporating in a white hot rage.  I'm pretty sure that's what we're looking at there and that's what makes it a great moment.  Regardless, though, I see what you mean and I see how someone could see that as yet another character becoming edgier against their nature.

On the other hand, he was essentially taken out of the comic right after, so we never really got a chance to explore his feelings.  Handled well, that could be have been some top shelf storytelling.  As it was, he reappeared RL years later, noticeably more jaded and ruthless - it wasn't long after his reappearance and the whole "Grail" thing that my own interest really started to flag.  I stopped collecting X-Men not long after that.

I'd like to think that Claremont had some sort of longer planned arc for Colossus based around the Mutant Massacre but it never happened. Unfortunately, I think he got sucked up in the "grim n gritty" era when MM came out and just having the X-Men be more hardcore was simply pandering to the way things were going. He had already made Storm into somebody willing to stab an opponent through the heart and turned Kitty into a ninja so I really feel by this point his self control over who the characters are had given way to a desire to just make everybody the Punisher. You only have to look as far as when Havok shows up just after the MM and we have Pyslocke declaring that the X-Men should kill him before the Mauraders do!

Yeah, his writing definitely took a turn after that, there was a lot more sloppiness in his characters, IMHO.  I tend to think of the X-Men's heyday as around 150 to 210ish of "Uncanny X-Men," but that could just be my own bias talking.  I'm pretty sure the first issue I bought was "Wounded Wolf," a fairly good stand-alone Wolverine story, somewhere around 205 I think?  But I went backward and really liked the stuff before I started more than the stuff after.

Yeah, 205 - an injured Wolverine is hunted by Deathstrike and the Hellfire guys who survived Wolverine's attacks in Dark Phoenix. He gets "saved" by Katie Power. Some very nice Barry Windsor-Smith art.

I guess probably most would consider the Claremont/Byrne era as the peak but I think there are some pretty solid stories in the timeframe you mention above, although possibly things started going a little bit off kilter when Rachel Summers got introduced as a regular cast member. The Kulan Gath two part story (I think 190-191) can probably go down as a bit of a shocker too even if it was essentially a What If in the end. When Vision and Colossus make each other explode I was a bit whoah! And poor Spidey...

Dormammu

I thought Claremont's entire run of X-Men was brilliant. He, like every other writer since the original Secret Wars, had to deal with mandated crossover events on an annual basis. These were pushed onto the X-books more than any other due to their best-selling status. Claremont did a good job making sure those events were meaningful and had lasting effects, working them into the overall narrative he was trying to accomplish. Some weren't so great, but many were very memorable (like the Mutant Massacre).

There are so many great (sometimes 'shocking') moments in his run. The trial of Magneto, a powerless Storm defeating Cyclops for leadership of the X-Men, when Kitty is attacked by racist protesters... and fights back, Rogue's ordeal in Genosha, the Seige Perilous and its aftermath. I could go on and on.

Claremont also defied the traditions of bad guys. His bad guys didn't rob banks, they didn't always wear spandex, or maniacally create engines of destruction for seemingly no reason. They were racially charged (Hellfire Club, Nimrod, Sentinels), they were murderers and mercenaries (Mauraders, Reavers), and they were morally flexible (Magneto). Sometimes they were just cool (Brood, Shi'ar).

From the moment he introduced the 'All-new All-Different' X-Men until he first left Marvel, Claremont changed the face of comics and inspired a whole new way of storytelling.

DAZ0273

Actually Giant Sized X-Men #1 wasn't written by Claremont at all, it was written by Len Wein with plotting input from Dave Cockram. Wein co-created Nightcrawler, Storm, Colossus and Thunderbird and had of course already co-created Wolverine in the pages of the Hulk. Wein also plotted Uncanny X-Men 94-95 with Claremont scripting.

Wein became Marvel EiC and then departed for DC which left X-Men open for Claremont to take over. It would have been very interesting to see what the X-Men would have turned out like if Wein had never given it up.

grenadier

DAZ0273 said:

grenadier said:

• Guardian's death in Alpha Flight #12.  Total shocker, especially before we knew such things were coming because of the Internet.  Shocks in general are harder to come by now, since the Internet generally spoils them ahead of time.

Ha! It is pretty funny that you picked this one!

Actually, the above WAS spoiled! Peter David who at the time was working in the sales department at Marvel was promoting Alpha Flight at some event (I think to retailers) and handed out pages from an issue after #12 - #12 had not yet been published (I guess #13 was the book David handed out pages from?) which showed a dream sequence where Heather is suffering a nightmare and it is pretty obvious who it was who got killed in #12. John Byrne famously went berserk, hurling a chair across a room and this is the basis of the grudge between him and David that was still going strong in the 2000's (and quite possibly still now!).

Thanks for that.  I'm a fan of PAD, and knew he and Byrne had feuded for years, but hadn't heard that particular story about the start of it.  At the time, I was not attending conventions, and as I said, Internet was a little hard to come by in 1984.   People were using Compuserve and QuantumLink and the like.  

Someone else mentioned the Death of Jean DeWolff story.  That was actually PAD's second published story, after an earlier single issue of Spectacular Spider-Man.  

By the way, Google found me an old column of Peter's about the incident, filling in some extra detail, like the fact that he questioned the inclusion of the pages, and was told it was OK by Denny O'Neill, and that the assembled retailers thought it was a dream sequence until Byrne opened his mouth and spoiled the story himself.

http://www.peterdavid.net/archives/004716.html

DAZ0273

Yeah, if it comes down to a telling of a story between the 2, I'm inclined to go with PAD.

Ex_XMan_Man

When Marvel continued to allow Chuck Austen to write the X-Men comics....(insert shudder gif)