X-Men: Fall of the Mutants, Vol. 1

X-Men: Fall of the Mutants

by Chris Claremont, Peter David, Louise Simonson

Two teams of mutants. Two tales of tragedy. The vicious Marauders have already slaughtered the tunnel-dwelling Morlocks, and now they plan to kill Cyclops' estranged wife, Madelyne Pryor! And if that means taking on the X-Men, that's just fine with them! Meanwhile, Storm goes on a vision quest to find Forge...but she discovers the evil Adversary pulling their strings, and the X-Men will need to literally sacrifice their lives to stop him! Meanwhile, the New Mutants take in the hybrid creature known as Bird-Brain...but when he flees back to the island where he was created, the team follows and clashes with the Ani-Mator. COLLECTING: Uncanny X-Men (1963) 220-227, Incredible Hulk (1968) 340, New Mutants (1983) 55-61

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, X Men, Marvel, Comic Book, Fiction, Superheroes

440 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2008

About the author

Chris Claremont is a writer of American comic books, best known for his 16-year (1975-1991) stint on Uncanny X-Men, during which the series became one of the comic book industry's most successful properties.

Claremont has written many stories for other publishers including the Star Trek Debt of Honor graphic novel, his creator-owned Sovereign Seven for DC Comics and Aliens vs Predator for Dark Horse Comics. He also wrote a few issues of the series WildC.A.T.s (volume 1, issues #10-13) at Image Comics, which introduced his creator-owned character, Huntsman.

Outside of comics, Claremont co-wrote the Chronicles of the Shadow War trilogy, Shadow Moon (1995), Shadow Dawn (1996), and Shadow Star (1999), with George Lucas. This trilogy continues the story of Elora Danan from the movie Willow. In the 1980s, he also wrote a science fiction trilogy about female starship pilot Nicole Shea, consisting of First Flight (1987), Grounded! (1991), and Sundowner (1994). Claremont was also a contributor to the Wild Cards anthology series.

Reviews

[Frédéric · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hadn't read these issues since their original release, probably a quarter of century ago. Trip down memory lane...

The whole package is more or less introductory stuff for the upcoming Inferno run.

The X-Men issues are classic Claremont: solid-though terribly wordy- action and melodrama intermingled, like he was so good at. I'll be honest, I skim-read it some, I just can read pages of descriptive or introspective captions so much, but it's well done and has aged quite well all things considered. And it ends with a Bang! that opened interesting doors for future issues.
Art is good and dynamic even if a bit feeble on settings and with some overuse of close-up shots. Marc Silvestri and Dan Green were a good match as penciler/inker like Gene Colan/Tom Palmer were in their time.

The New Mutants arc is harder to suffer. Clearly destined to younger readers it mostly revolves around a pseudo Jar Jar Binks bird-like character any sane person would like to pluck to death. From his introduction to the tragic final turn of events Louise Simonson overstretches her plot way beyond reason. What actually saves this run a bit are the aforementioned tragic event and Bret Blevins on the board. His cute/half cartoony style is just perfect for the title even though Terry Austin's heavy inking tend to ground him down.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection first offers up a swath of Uncanny X-men which serves as an interesting first Act. Followed up by a very weak second Act wherein the New Mutants title finds the youngsters involved with an irritating Jar-Jar Binks type character, Bird Brain with an Island of Dr. Moreau rip-off in the second half of the collection.

Don't be put off by the three star rating - Vol. 2 more than makes up for this collection's weaknesses.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marvel 80's Tour, next stop - The Fall of the Mutants

In The Fall of the Mutants Volume 1, we have Uncanny X-Men #220-227, Incredible Hulk #340, and New Mutants #55-61.

This collection holds a huge transition for both teams, X-Men and New Mutants, into a very different direction.

The X-Men part:

Wolverine, Storm, Rogue, Dazzler, Longshot, Psylocke, Havok, and later, Colossus and Madelyne Prior. They fight enemies like the Marauders (from Mutant Massacre fame), Freedom Force (formerly the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants), timeshifted dinosaurs and barbarians, and the supernatural entity The Adversary/Trickster. There are big changes and deaths. This is the gateway to lots of the future X-Men stories and spin-offs.

So much good story packed into these few issues. This established a version of the team that I enjoyed reading. This plot also ended up in such a way as to free up so much story space. Claremont takes full advantage of it over the year or two after this collection.

The New Mutants portion:

Louise Simonson starts her run as the writer here, following Chris Claremont's 54 issues. It felt like it took her a few issues to get her "sea-legs" as she re-hashed the team's rivalry with the Hellions and Cannonball's romance with Lila Cheney (intergalactic rock star). She took a while to get the character personalities right (and 5 issues to write in Wolfsbane's Scottish accent). She also had to clean up after some dangling plot points that Claremont left in his wake.

Once that was cleared up, the new direction of the New Mutants is awesome. It takes a very dark turn. There is death, destruction, and high emotion. I feel that this collection made the first hints of the team as it will become in the later X-Force series.

Big story. Pseudo-crossover. Lots of action and strong plot. This is a must for fans of the X-Men.

[Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

X-men issues were fantastic but new mutants had a slow start but had a good ending.

[Adam Stone · Rating 3 out of 5]

We have officially entered the era where I think Chris Claremont overstayed his welcome as X-Men writer. While I enjoy his continued fleshing out of the X-Men characters, I think his villains get stale and silver-agey, and his transition from science fiction comic to magic comic annoys me. I just don't care about magic tropes in a superhero comic, it reminds me of reading the very science-forward A Wrinkle in Time, getting to the end and seeing science fall to the Christian Power Of Love, and losing all interest in continuing to read that series.

The X-Men portion of this story just didn't gibe with me. Claremont had done an effective job of taking a number of characters off the board, and it felt odd how he threw Colossus back into the mix just in time for his weird Outback Reboot stage. The use of The Adversary as a villain made me less engaged with Storm's storyline, and adding in Roma from Captain Britain didn't help.

This is supposed to be an epic story where characters are forever altered because of the enormous stakes but it was so boring that I had to struggle to not just skip several pages at a time to get to the end.

It's certainly nowhere near the worst X-Men story ever written but it becomes clearer that this book is becoming less Marvel's Awesome Mutant Superhero Team and more What Is Chris Claremont Thinking About This Month.

It has taken me much longer to slog through this because I also know that it's not going to get better for a while, X-Men: Inferno, one of my least favorite Comic Events of all time is on the horizon.

The New Mutants portion of the story is a really focused tale that hits a lot of YA tropes of the time: don't do drugs, don't disobey your adult supervisors, don't rescue an artificially created humanoid bird creature and feed him junkfood, and other things you see on Saved By The Bell. In many ways, it's better than the X-Men story, even if I did find the Birdbrain character, and the The Island of Dr. Moreaustyle villain extremely annoying.

While there are Important Plot Points for both the X-Men and New Mutants in this collection, I don't think it's a necessary read if you're just reading X-books for fun.

[C · Rating 3 out of 5]

Revisiting an old classic as a bit of a bookend to my great x-read of 2017/2018... (cheating and reviewing both volume 1 and 2 together.)

Man, I love me some Claremont from back in the day. While you can see some of the problems which will come to plague his later writing, he is in so much better form than he is later. It's pure melodrama, but darned good melodrama 99% of the time.

Overall, this whole tale was good but it certainly had its ups (the X-Men issues) and downs (most of the non-x marvel tie-ins and that awful Power Pack issue in the second volume) and even a few what-the-hecks (what was up with the insanely dark, screwed up Daredevil tie-in? Fall of the Mutants becomes fall of humanity/sanity. I think there are more deaths in that one issue than the rest of the series and they're more impactful than even Doug's death in New Mutants...)

I think the only issue that I have with this is that is really doesn't feel like one big story (or even a particularly well-linked series of stories). Even when it is really working well, these events seem really disconnected from one another. While there are problems to be sure with later Marvel crossovers, this could have benefitted from a little of that enforced cohesion.

Still, there are some pivotal x-moments here. And some sweet, sweet nostalgia. I personally feel like a lot of this holds up. Your mileage may vary.

[Remxo · Rating 3 out of 5]

This volume contains the Uncanny X-Men and New Mutants issues that lead in to the Fall of the Mutants crossover event. The X-Factor issues that are part of this event are collected in volume two. This is the first time I'm reading this material.

The Uncanny X-Men stories are okay, albeit a bit slow and wordy at times. It's standard Claremont. Storm is on a personal quest to find to find Forge and get her powers back, and the X-Men team up with another team to prevent a time-stream distorting event in Dallas from destroying the world. Fear of and discrimination against Mutants is a sub-theme throughout the book.

Best part of this book for me were the shenanigans of the New Mutants (written by Louise Simonson) and their newfound friend Birdboy, a mysterious creature they take home with them. Their attempt to figure out who the Birdboy is and how to communicate with him while disobeying Magneto's rules are fun. However, the fight scenes that follow are cliché-ridden and boring, even though the outcome is tragic.

I understand that this is a fan favourite X-event, but I personally enjoyed the Mutant Massacre crossover event a lot more. The art by Marc Silvestri and Bret Blevins is not particularly noteworthy.

[Bonnie G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting stage of the X-men. We have mostly new members like a revamped Dazzler, lucky alien Longshot from Mojo world, a powerless mohawked Storm with Forge, a vet who can do sorcery and make anything, Wolverine as a leader, and Havok is cool AF and we have a sad tragic abandoned wife of Scott Summers aka Cyclops who also has had her son removed from this world - pretty sad story line really and makes Scott unforgivable. Also we got Rogue being a new good girl and her mom Mystique is part of a government group with a bunch of baddies as hired good guys?

New Mutants are also evolving with Magneto as their pretty bad at it headmaster and Illyana is going to the dark side of limbo more and more- and looking pretty bad ass at it too.

This is a place where the book Excalibur starts to happen as the X-men are dead- then they aren’t - then they are again in theory?! Wtf. But it’s fascinating reading about eugenics and war and chaos and people sometimes not choosing to do the right thing. An interesting place or chaos in the mutant universe.

[Judah Radd · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were some good parts and some boring parts. Mostly boring parts.

I’d rather this crossover story was it’s own miniseries, so these individual stories could intersect more and focus on the main plot.

As it stands, the X Men part was pretty underwhelming. The Marauders are scary and evil... so why do fights with them seem like filler? The Storm portions were decent enough... but they dragged for too many issues. Cut to the damn chase!!

The New Mutants story was actually quite a bit better. I liked Bird Brain, even if it took way too many pages and words to tell his story. The last two issues were money, but the rest was filler. Filler on top of filler. It was a slog.

This volume could have told the same story in 1/3 the amount of pages, and it would have been way better. I shouldn’t be bored reading a goddam comic book.

3 stars.

[Trevor · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection includes both an Uncanny X-Men storyline and a New Mutants storyline.

The X-Men one is on the more weird and esoteric side of Claremont's writing, with the X-Men battling a god known as the Adversary. I feel like it exists more as a way to setup future plots than really for any merit of its own.

The New Mutants story is written by Louise Simonson and mostly illustrated by Bret Blevins. They're a delightful team that do a better job of treating the characters as kids than Claremont ever did. The New Mutants find a bird person named Bird-Brain whom they try to teach to live with humans. Eventually they go to the island he originates from, basically the Island of Doctor Moreau, to rescue his friends and things quickly become really dark. It's a bit of a mood whiplash, but overall a good arc.

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 2 out of 5]

Collects Uncanny X-Men #220-227 (August, 1987 - March, 1988), Incredible Hulk #340 (February, 1998) and New Mutants #55-61 (September, 1987 - March, 1998). The X-men stuff here is good, though I wish they had held off the resurrection for another issue. The New Mutants stuff mostly just drags this collection down due to being very cliche New Mutants material, with the exception of the last couple of issues which deal with the death of Douglas Ramsey.

Though the Fall of the Mutants story lines were sort of marketed as a crossover, they really weren't. Each of the three mutant teams (X-Men, New Mutants and X-Factor) fall in their own separate ways.

[Sophia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actual rating 3.5 stars.
While I enjoyed most of this event, I do wish it was slightly more connected.

The three series; Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor and New Mutants all had separate stories that just played out within the same time frame.
Though, the New Mutant issues did show some of what was going on in Uncanny X-Men.

Surprisingly, the X-Factor story was the one I enjoyed the most.

I like how each team was left in a different position than where they started.

It’ll also be interesting to see how these new positions are affected by the Mutant Registration Act.

Is this whole thing worth the read? I’d say only if you want to.
I think you could skip the New Mutant and tie-ins ishs.

I was really invested at the beginning but it kind of lost me by the end.

[Chaitanya · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked lot of Chris Claremont's works. Huge fan of Dark Phoenix actually. But, this work was a mixed bag for me, its good in some places & boring in some (more boring actually). Some of the crossovers were tiring and was a tonal mess for me.

Liked parts w/ Storm & fall of mutants but, New Mutants was boring as hell. 2.5/5!

[David Allison · Rating 3 out of 5]

The fights are curiously flat, but the moments where people look chic in the middle of various psychic maelstroms are great comics. They'd make great movies too - maybe next time, eh?

[Cameron H · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the X-Men bit, but The New Mutants stuff was straight up amazing.

[Gary Fortuin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m mostly happy just to have gone to the library and picked this up. The beginning of the Fall of The Mutants plot. Collects both The New Mutants and The Uncanny X-Men.

[Garth · Rating 3 out of 5]

2025 - Days of Future Past: 365 Days of The X-Men
Day 276-291 (10/03-10/18)

2.5⭐️ At this point, no theme for next year. These trips down memory lane have shown I had no taste when I was younger. Badly told stories and the most horrible art/character design. Next year’s 365 will be just whatever comics I’m behind or want to read.

[Maurice Jr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This storyline marked yet another huge change in the X-Men's history. After losing her powers back in issue #185 to Forge's neutralizer gun, Storm finally made a move to get them back. She left the X-Men in Wolverine's charge and went to find Forge, to demand that he find a way to restore her to what she was.

While she was gone, Wolverine put the new team through their paces (Havok, Longshot, Rogue, Dazzler and Psylocke) and, training accomplished, he then led them against the Marauders to rescue Madelyne Pryor. They went straight from there to Dallas looking for Storm and found themselves fighting Freedom Force (formerly the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants), complete with their new members, Crimson Commando, Stonewall and Super Sabre.

When the Great Trickster revealed his master plan to generate a new Big Bang, the two teams joined forces to stop him, aided by Roma, guardian of the omniverse. When he failed in his plan to manipulate Storm into killing Forge, he banished them to another dimension.

Roma managed to recruit a recovered Colossus to join the battle before the Trickster captured her. He called his sister Illyana, who teleported him to Dallas to join the others. His presence turned the tide of battle against Freedom Force before they called their truce.

Forge and Storm found a way to escape the paradise world they were exiled to. Forge used the technology in his artificial leg to create a device to give Storm back her powers, and his sorcery to create a gateway back to their world. Storm activated it with her lightning and brought them back to join the battle.

Freedom Force got out of Forge's home building just ahead of the Trickster's ultimate play. He transformed the place into a killing ground from Forge's memories, but the X-Men survived, and found a way to take the attack to him in his own citadel. They freed a captive Storm and Forge, who joined the fight and ultimately found the way to hurl the Trickster out of their reality for an age- apparently at the cost of their lives.

Roma arranged for them to survive what should have been a fatal final encounter with the Trickster. To the world, it looked like they were disintegrated. Roma pulled them free and sent them on their way, invisible to all technology and free to take the battle to their many enemies who now think they're gone.

I enjoyed this look back at the X-Men as I knew them when I collected comics still.

[Shaun · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is really two stories in one. The first half follows the exploits of the X-Men and Storm as they fight the Marauders and the Adversary. This was a really great Storm story as she discovered how to cope without her mutant powers. With or without her powers she is a force to be reckoned with. While Storm was on her mission to "stop" Forge, the other X-Men were fighting off the Marauders and Freedom Force in San Francisco and Dallas respectively. The story ends with their ultimate sacrifice to help Forge stop the Adversary, they are resurrected by Roma's powers. The second story follows the New Mutants under the tutelage of Magneto. The story is a little comical with the introduction of Bird-Brain. I didn't care so much for the story, but I did like the inner conflicts between the teens, Magneto and the anti-mutant agency the Reach. It is fun reading older stories of comic book characters, I get caught up reading about the characters in their current 21st Century incarnations and forget the rich history they have from the past century.

[Brent · Rating 3 out of 5]

Liked the development of the core members here; thought the newer members were a little adjunct. Especially stellar were Rogue and Storm. I was pleasantly surprised by Forge as I hadn't read much of his involvement with the team.

[Aaron Swensen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Boring and suffers from Claremont's wordiness. I couldn't make it through more than a few issues. Jumped over to the Simonson issues and they were just boring.

[Dimity Hubbub · Rating 3 out of 5]

X-Men parts were 3 star,pretty good,if a bit OTT and wordy.New Mutant parts were 1 star-boring,and I hated all the characters and the story.

[Dante · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like this story. It's way better than when I was a kid. The only downfall is that they packed a novel into every page; very wordy. But The Fall of the Mutants is worth reading.

[Kerri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredible Hulk #340 3 stars
New Mutants #55 3 stars
New Mutants #56-59 4 stars
New Mutants #60-61 5 stars

That Bird Brain was a riot!

[Gregory · Rating 3 out of 5]

Claremont’s writing doesn’t hold up decades later but it’s still a classic story with art by a young Marc Silvestri. Hokey but entertaining.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gems include X-Men v. Marauders & Freedom Force 2parters in SF, the eponymous 3part X-Men crossover, & the Bird-Brain Saga

[Dave · Rating 2 out of 5]

The X-Men parts were 3 stars, the New Mutants part were 1 star!

[Ryan Fohl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Surprised I liked the new mutant story more.

[Sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 & 1/2 stars really.