Fallen Angels (comics)

Fallen Angels is a team of fictional comic book superhuman teenagers in the Marvel Comics universe. The team's only appearances were in the Fallen Angels eight-issue limited series, written by Jo Duffy, which ran from April 1987 to November 1987. The series was originally titled Misfits. Early ads and solicitations for the series showed this title shortly before it was released.

History

The Fallen Angels was a group of adolescent superhuman pickpockets based out of the Beat Street Club in Manhattan, New York. Unlike most super-teams, they had no specific mission or goal, primarily remaining together simply out of an enjoyment of each other's company.

The man known as the Vanisher first recruited a male cyborg named Gomi and his two cybernetically enhanced lobsters Bill and Don. Other recruits included a young female teleporter by the name of Ariel and a young Korean girl named Chance, who had the ability to randomly enhance or inhibit the abilities of other mutants, which she called her "double or nothing" power.

After causing trouble with X-Factor members Beast and Iceman, the young mutant Boom-Boom was recruited by Ariel.

When Roberto da Costa, Sunspot of the New Mutants, accidentally injured teammate Cannonball, he left the team in shame after being viciously berated by the other New Mutants (except for Wolfsbane and Cannonball himself after he recovered). Not wanting to lose his friend, the techno-organic alien known as Warlock left with him. Two X-Men allies, Multiple Man (actually one of his duplicates) and Siryn, were asked to follow Sunspot and they, too, soon encountered the group of adolescent thieves and joined the group.

Ariel, an extra-dimensional alien, was the driving force behind the group. Her race, a hedonistic group called the Coconut Grove, had ceased to evolve and reached a genetic dead end. Ariel's superiors sought to remedy that situation by studying mutation in other species. She had used Chance as an accomplice to this end, not realizing that Chance was a mutant herself. Ariel even teleported the group to a different dimension where they added the beings Moon-Boy and Devil Dinosaur to their ranks before finally journeying to Ariel's home dimension, the Coconut Grove.

In the Coconut Grove, the Fallen Angel, including Ariel, who was discovered to have evolved a persuasion ability unlike any other members of her race, were made captives and subjected to experimentation and proposed vivisection. Gomi, whose abilities as a cyborg were unaffected by mutant inhibitor fields, was able to escape his cell and free the others, and Ariel used her persuasion ability to convince the Coconut Grove to let them leave peacefully. Afterward, they all returned to Earth, including Ariel.

Sunspot and Warlock returned to the New Mutants, and eventually Siryn and Multiple Man returned to their base at the Muir Island research facility; Siryn eventually joined X-Force, while Multiple Man joined the second incarnation of X-Factor, and the two were later reunited in a later X-Factor incarnation. Boom-Boom subsequently joined the New Mutants, X-Force, Nextwave, and eventually the X-Men.^[1] Devil Dinosaur and Moonboy eventually found their way to the Savage Land. The Vanisher was next seen pursuing other criminal endeavors, and he later joined the X-Men's black ops X-Force squad.^[2] Gomi and Bill (Don was accidentally killed during the Fallen Angels miniseries) were listed among the many potential superhuman recruits for the Initiative,^[3] and Ariel joined the X-Men. She became trapped on another dimension during the events of Second Coming, while escaping an explosion by teleporting, but was then saved by a coalition of X-Men and the unwilling help of Korvus.

References