The 4 Power kids - Alex, Julie, Jack and Katie - meet a kind alien who grants them superpowers. So they do what any kid would do, use the powers to protect their dad from evil aliens out to steal the information about a matter-anti-matter convertor from his brain.
Power Pack ran 62 issues, from 1984 into 1991. I assume the idea was a book aimed towards younger readers, with kids their age as the leads to identify with, rather than Marvel's usual late teen/early-20s protagonists. Plus a bit of a fantasy approach. The Kymellians (the kind aliens) look like horses. The kids end up with a talking spaceship named Friday.
Maybe that was the idea. I would have been in that age range, younger than even Katie when the book started, and it was never a book I was interested in. I knew Power Pack from guest appearances in other books. The issue of Uncanny X-Men where one of the Morlocks erases the memory of the kids from their parents because Annalee wants to abduct them to be her kids. Thor's Secret Wars II tie-in, where the Pack help Thor and Beta Ray Bill fight off a Beyonder-amped Kurse.
The one issue I do own was purchased along with those couple issues of X-Factor when I was collecting the Mutant Massacre storyline. The Power kids are friends with Franklin Richards, who had some kind of dream power, and was somehow subconsciously aware of what was happening to the Morlocks at the hands of the Marauders. The kids are friends with Leech, too, so into the sewers they go.
I think, when Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men discussed the Mutant Massacre, they talked about the, maybe it's a tonal disconnect, of positing this story as this brutal extermination of an entire community of mutants by a crew of psychopaths. The Marauders are pushing the X-Men to the limits, driving Colossus to kill, crippling Angel. Then you've got a bunch of kids fighting Sabretooth, who can knock Rogue out cold and tear up Wolverine, and making it out unscathed.
Even wilder, the kids had apparently just switched powers - something I don't think I knew they could do until years after the series concluded. Even when Alex Power had all the powersets during his stint on the New Warriors, I assumed there'd been some kind of accident, not a deliberate move on his part - meaning during Mutant Massacre they aren't even entirely sure how to use the powers they've got. So you have Julie, now with the density power Jack typically has, trying to hit Arclight by condensing her mass into a tiny self, getting backhanded into a wall hard enough to get stuck, Alex can't bring himself to hit anyone with Katie's Energizer powers, Jack can't figure out how to manipulate gravity to glide like Alex, but they all make it out unscathed.
It makes sense the kids would rush to help their friends, and they do save Leech and Caliban by keeping the Marauders occupied until X-Factor shows up. But they seem out of place in the story. Risks of a shared universe, not every story that makes sense for a character from a characterization perspective works from a tone perspective.
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