The “Mutant Massacre” was the first line-wide X-event. It tied through all the issues above.
It started with Mister Sinister ordering his Marauders to murder the mutants in the underground community known as the Morlocks, who live in the sewers of New York City.
Actually, it starts with Rogue getting some new duds.
In the pages of X-Factor, Jean Grey now knows Cyclops is married and she’s starting to get something going with Angel.
The X-Men and X-Factor teams both try to stop the Marauders massacre of Morlocks. (Tongue twister!)
But literally hundreds of Morlocks are slain. And Angel gets crucified.
His wings are so damaged that, eventually, he’ll have to have them amputated. Colossus gets so mad he kills a Marauder.
Power Pack and Thor show up to assist…
(And also gets reunited briefly with Puddlegulp, one of his friends from his Throg adventure.)
A cult classic. Still great today.
…which is pretty much all that prevents the wholesale slaughter of the entire X-Factor team.
Sabretooth, who is part of the Marauders, has a brief battle with Daredevil. It’s actually a pretty solid issue of DD, and you have to admire Ann Nocenti for writing a tie-in book as one of the early issues of her run on Daredevil.
And her tie-in wasn’t even identified on the “event map” at the top of this post!
After that, Sabretooth then tracks Wolverine back to the X-Mansion and during the fight we see Elizabeth Braddock is now living at the mansion and going under the moniker Psylocke.
It’s the first time we see her with that name.
We get a nice culminating Sabretooth vs. Wolverine battle.
Weaving through the event are more developments:
- Mystique’s new(ish) Freedom Force team battle X-Factor (in their X-Terminators guise), and in the course of that subplot, Skids and Rusty become lifelong friends
- The Hellfire Club offer Magneto a leadership slot, and he accepts (he’ll be a double-agent, though, working with Xavier’s teams as well)
- Rusty has a crush on Skids.
- Lots of debuts, including all the Marauder characters.
- Warlock’s father, Magus, goes to Limbo and infects all the Limbo demons.
- Angel’s crucifixion leads to infection and then amputation, setting him up to get his razor wings from Apocalypse.
- Speaking of the big A, he’s in the background recruiting Plague to be Pestilence of his Horsemen, after the Marauders nearly kill him.
- Kitty Pryde gets stuck in phased form.
- Psylocke officially joins the X-Men team.
There’s a lot more that goes on here, but that’s the gist of it. It will turn out to be quite significant, changing the lives of many of the folks involved.