Comic Book Resources

That's hilarious, because I was just debating the other day putting Fantastic Four 1234 #2 into the "Eight Awesome August Books from the Past Eight Years"!

It took me a bit, but I did manage to track down all the singles of this, and I quite enjoyed it. I don't see any incest text or subtext, myself, but I do see a really cool Fantastic Four story that gives us the best of the characters.

Also, yes: I really don't see Doom and Magneto as noble characters *at all.* Maybe Claremont or something wants them to be, but no. The point of Doom is that he pretends to be noble when he is, in fact, a bag of douche. And Magneto's tragedy is that, having survived Hitler, he becomes his own Hitler. They're supposed to be evil. They're the bad guys.

Maybe I should read this one.

One of the rare few stuff, I haven't read of Morrison.

Bill, you've got part of it but if Doom doesn't even keep up his basic pretense of nobility it really comes across as wrong. Yeah at his heart Doom should be a evil douche but when well written he hides that by pretending to himself to be a great guy who's just a bit misunderstood. I haven't read this one but compare Doom's most recent appearances in Avengers and Fantastic Four. There's a reason why one of them got people annoyed and the other didn't despite the fact that Doom wasn't really being noble in either.

I finally tracked down the trade of this one and read it last month and... yeah, it's not a very good Fantastic Four story.

That said, it's a good story, just not a good FANTASTIC FOUR story. Morrison dicks around with the incest subtext and the "Reed might be Autistic OMG!" themes, and really, his Doom was pretty lame and one-dimensional. Doom's one of my favourite characters, mostly because he's a complete asswipe who works hard at trying to appear noble and tragic, but also because he actually is slightly noble and tragic. He's also competent as hell, and his master plan in this series felt really weak to me. Namor's motivations also made very little sense, and he flipflops faster than a Dolphin fin at a Korean barbecue.

The art was sure purty though.

Also, I totally forgot the original point I was trying to make when I got sidetracked with talking about Doom. Really, a great Fantastic Four is going to be, well, FANTASTIC, and it's not just the sci-fi trappings I'm talking about. It's mostly about tone, and as the OP points out, we're given a story that's just too dour to work with here. There's a reason that Stan and Jack, Byrne, and Waid and Wieringo's runs were so well-received, they were packed with energy and the stories were pretty fun.

That said, the ending was kind of cool, but more in a "this should probably be a What If? or Ultimate FF story" kind of way.

Magneto wants to protect the mutant race just like Xavier and the X-Men. Its only his methods have changed over time. He has gone through just about every method of trying to protect mutants short of attempted genocide (thanks to Planet X being retconned) from building a home land in space, to building a homeland on Earth, to following Xavier, to trying to disarm the world of nukes, to trying to take over the world.

Doom wouldn't join Richard's and try to work for the greater good of everyone because his driving goal is power and one upping Richards. Magneto tried following Xavier's dream and left it only when he found it not working to protect mutants.

One doesn't have to agree with anything Magneto does, but one should understand why he does them. It isn't out of a desire for power or glory and when written well as Claremont did it isn't about vengeance against ordinary humans either. It is about preventing the next Holocaust.

What pops into my head when I read this in the middle of the night is: People, notably Dr. Larry Niven, have written on the subject of whether a human woman would survive Superman's affections; what about the Sub-Mariner's? Would he crush the Invisible Girl with his vast strength, and if not, why not? Would Sue be able to reinforce herself using her force-field as sort of a 'Star Trek' structural-integrity field? I mean, if she did want to step out on Professor Impossible, I mean, Dr. Richards?

"One doesn’t have to agree with anything Magneto does, but one should understand why he does them. It isn’t out of a desire for power or glory and when written well as Claremont did it isn’t about vengeance against ordinary humans either. It is about preventing the next Holocaust."

That's a retcon, and if you like the retcon, then that works for you. If not, it doesn't.

Simple as that.

I really love the characterisation of Ben in the book. Morrison's take on him is more interesting than pretty much any other writer since...probably Simonson, I'd say. And the Reed being autistic thing is pretty cool too.

The incest? Well, it's sort of a guilty smirking pleasure part of the story, but it's a bit silly overall.

"Dr. Larry Niven?"

No...not a doctor. College education with a bit of grad school, but not a doctor.

@ Apodaca It is a retcon, I think we can all agree with that, but I'm not too bothered by retcons that took place almost thirty years ago. By this point, couldn't one argue that it's an essential feature of the character? It's not like all the different versions of Batman. Before Claremont, most of the themes that we all associate with the X-men didn't really exist (or were very, very implicit). I think your argument works better for Doom.

"People who are really too fond of Dr. Doom tend to not care for this. But those people are really too fond of Dr. Doom. Like, way too much. Much like people who later freaked out over Morrison writing Magneto as a drug addicted terrorist, I think they’re extracting too much nobility out of guys who are basically Super Hitler with softer edges. I mean, I like that Magneto can be a pretty complex, sympathetic guy, but when push comes to shove he wants to enslave humanity. I’ve always found the “Doom’s a failed hero” thing less interesting, but that could because I’ve always been more of an X-Men guy, and I think being in a concentration camp trumps being a regular opressed gypsy in a vague, undefined Eastern European country."

Way to show you don't know the any of the character development in the last 30 years. Magneto has not wanted to "enslave Humanity "since the Silver Age. And the Hitler comparison?

Way Off. Magneto has never been genocidal nor fascist. That is an oversimplification of writers and readers who neither under the character, nor the definition of either word.

http://www.magnetowasright.com/pages/analysis/genocide-or-acts-of-war-magnetos-brand-of-terrorism.php

"...Despite the casual use of the word “fascist” in popular culture today, fascism is not simply state mandated racism. If that were the case, the U.S. in the era of the "Jim Crow" laws and South Africa under Aparthied would be fascist states. Obviously they were not. Fascism is the placing the state’s needs above that of the people. It is the rigorous control of economics and society, including personal lives, so that all portions of society serve the state. "Deutschland über alles", Fatherland over everything. Usually people are persuaded to believe and participate in a fascist state through nationalistic ideals of a single cultural unity, which inherently relegates those perceived as “outsiders” to lives of discrimination, repression, and often, as we saw in Nazi Germany, extermination.

While we can not know the full extent of Magneto’s political policies in Santo Marco in the Silver Age (though the allusion to Hitler was made in that the human troops Magneto was using where wearing uniforms highly reminiscent of those of Nazi Soldiers), we can see his political ideals in action in Genosha and House of M. Magneto’s purpose is to protect the individual rights of mutants, and in both those societies his words to Cyclops in Uncanny X-Men #150 and God Loves, Man Kills bear out. What freedoms are missing are not readily apparent. People seem to be living their own lives. It is noteworthy and rather amusing in Magneto: Dark Seduction that the one of the only two specific accusations of "evil" Wanda has to level at Magneto’s rule was that he employed socialist domestic economic principals to ensure the well-being of the entire population as Genosha lived through the final phases of its Civil War. As stated in the defintion above fascism is directly opposed to communism and its cousin socialism's ideals. After Genosha recovered from the war in the 616 and in House of M, Magneto favored capitalism. Magneto's utopia seems to one in which Mutants can celebarate their individuality as well as their "genetic gifts".

As we have seen, after Genosha recovered it from its civil war it was an open society. There was a mutant majority yes, but both mutants and humans lived there. While it was unclear just what rights mutant had vs. what rights humans had, they did work side by side and had relatively equal standards of living. Magneto even had two baseline humans in his Advisory Cabinet: Alda Huxley and Philip Moreau. The world of House of M was the same. While humans were a declining population due the birth of more and more mutants every generation (human parents producing mutant children just as the parents of the first X-Men did), humans lived and worked side by side with the mutant majority. The discrimination was mostly social rather than political, the difference between someone being turned down for a promotion because they are a minority versus “Humans/Mutants only” hospitals and drinking fountains. Both are reprehensible, but the responsibility for the former does not lie at the feet of the government.

So while Magneto is a racist, he is not a fascist.

Even the callow and maniacal Magneto of the Silver Age did not engage in segregation, let alone genocide. When Magneto conquered the small country of Santo Marco in (Uncanny) X-Men #4, he was shown being a tyrant, throwing a man in jail for speaking out against him, but he was not lining people up to be shot. He even employed human troops. (“Charles, I’m the Master of Magnetism, I had…what’s the word? Flunkies for such tasks.” Every would-be-world-conqueror needs flunkies.)

Magneto has declared “war on humanity” and has engaged in that war with deadly effects. The most noteworthy example of which is the worldwide electromagnetic pulse in Fatal Attractions which resulted in the deaths of thousands when the power cut out in hospitals, planes crashed, and similar situations in which human life was reliant on technological aid. The most heinous of Magneto’s acts took place back in the Silver Age when he twice left atomic weapons behind him as booby traps for his enemies when his plans were foiled. Fortunately Marvel heroes saved the day, but if those bombs had gone off, they would have killed tens of thousands of people.

But are these acts of genocide?

I remind one of the definition of genocide above: “the systematic, planned annihilation of an ethnic, racial, or political group”. The Holocaust, the “ethnic cleansings” of Bosnia, and the massacres of Rwanda are defined as genocide. But how do these acts differ from the nuclear bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki which also resulted in the deaths of over a million Japanese? What is the difference between genocide and an act of war?

The intent, necessity, and the word “systematic”. In the case of the Nazis, the Bosnia-Serb army, and the Hutu extremist Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi all had a stated intent to rid their territories completely of groups they deemed “undesirable”. And they went about doing so in a systematic way, eliminating all members of these groups, even non-combatants such as children and the old and infirm, in a methodical fashion. The Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi went around shooting, clubbing, and hacking to death any Tusti they could find, man, woman, or child. They even forced non-combatant Hutus to kill their Tutsi neighbors. The Bosian-Serb army rounded up every Muslim they could get their hands on and shot them en masse, the bodies buried in mass graves which are still being uncovered. In the most extreme and horrific example, the Nazis researched, discussed, and formalized the most efficient means of rounding up, and murdering millions of Jews, Gypsies, Catholics, and anyone else that did not fit their narrow definition of “human” and put them in gas chambers to be killed by the hundreds in minutes, their bodies systematically disposed of through cremation.

War is not genocide. Declaring war on a group is not the same as calling for the eradication of a group. The United States has declared war on England, Mexico, and Japan, but we have not called for the utter annihilation of their people. The deaths of the Germans, Italians, and Japanese were regrettably necessary in the World War II, but none of the Allied governments had any interest in wiping the German, Japanese, and Italians from the face of the planet as a whole. While the United States planned to kill millions of Japanese in the first atomic bombings, their intent was not to wipe the Japanese from the face of the earth, nor were their attacks a methodical means of mass-murder. As much as people would like to deny it, there is little about war that is methodical. War is barely controlled choas. One can prepare for war methodically, but once you are in the fight anything can and does happen and the rest of the war is spent reacting. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagaski were extremely savage blows in a fight, and while the deaths of millions of people is deeply saddening and regrettable, they did bring a horrendously bloody and violent conflict to a swifter close. Though the morality of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is debated to this day, it cannot be denied there is a valid argument to be made for their necessity (not saying I agree with it, but it is there). The deaths of the Tutsi, the Bosnian Muslims, and the Jews did nothing to end the various conflicts in which they occurred. They were mere acts of violent racism, not necessary to the war effort of any nation or group.

So where then do Magneto’s acts fall? First of all, Magneto has never stated that eradicating humanity was what he wanted. He regretted frequently that the deaths of humans may be necessary to achieve his goals of mutant protection, but he does not want to erase them as a whole from the surface of the world. “It is a true human tragedy Ferris, when a man holds salvation in his grip, and it too blind to see it. Given the chance they would see our kind swept from the earth. I…do not want this Ferris, but they have forced my hand. There can never be peace.” (X-Men # 85, and yes I think the irony was intentional).

In the case of the EMP in X-Men #25, there was a declared state of war. Magneto had made no aggressive moves (except towards the X-Men, who struck first when Magneto came to recruit them) when the U.N. blockaded the mutant colony of Avalon with a system of satellites. Magneto used the EMP to knock out the satellites, the side effect of which was the deaths of thousands planetside. It is not a “proportionate response”, but then what country does engage in proportionate response in a war? The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki certainly were not. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. held the world hostage in their Mexican standoff for 50 years, the smallest friction between the two raising the specter of planetary annihilation. Had a Russian ballistic missile submarine launched nuclear warheads at the United States as they did at Magneto in Uncanny #150, the U.S. wouldn't have merely sunk the sub as Magneto did. They would have nuked Russia. The Fatal Attractions EMP was an act of war just as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were acts of war.

It is also noteworthy that these deaths were wholly indiscriminate, mutants probably died along with humans in that incident, as would have been the case had the nuclear bomb gone off in Santo Marco or New York. Nor were those two nuclear bombs a methodical means of wiping humanity from the globe. They were cowardly, they would have been heinous incidents of terrorism and mass murder, but they were not acts of genocide. And as noted above, when Magneto has had the opportunity with countries under his control, he did even not engage in segregation, let alone enact genocidal progroms. He did not haul the Genoshan humans out of their homes and have them shot. He kicked a few political and social leaders out of the country and most of the rest were free to leave or stay as they wished. (Admittedly, he did temporarily hold some humans on Genosha during the war to continue their work to maintain the infrastructure, however after Genosha got on its feet they were free to leave. This hardly qualifies as "genocidal behavior".) Indeed, even when he got to have his "dream world" in House of M, humans were still a part of it, still living and working side by side with mutants.

Magneto is not a nice man, but then global politics is not a nice place. While he has tried to moderate his responses on a couple occasions, such when he created the volcano in Varykino in Uncanny #150 he retarded its growth to allow for the evacuation of the city, more often his rage lashes out indiscriminately, and despite the claim he made Secret Wars I #1, he has killed innocents. But then so has every other country that has engaged in a war. Magneto is a racist, he is a revolutionary, he is a terrorist, he is a rogue state, he is a mass murder, but he is not a fascist and he is not genocidal. It may seem like a too fine a point to put on a character that already has so many negative aspects, but it is a fine point that people pay a great deal of attention to. It is the difference between calling the character a villain and calling him evil incarnate. We sympathize with revolutionaries, we deplore racism, we fear terrorists, but genocide is the one crime we cannot forgive, and it is the one crime Magneto is not guilty of."

I liked FF1234, but I had one problem with it: Reed does not have Asperger's syndrome. Being a big nerd with an intense interest in, and aptitude for, science is not the same as having Aspberger's. He is too socially integrated (even if he's not the most charismatic guy), and too empathetic towards others. He can be intensely passionate when it comes to friends, family, and situations. Other super-heroes look to him for leadership in crises.

Morrison didn't say he definitely had Asperger's, but speculating that he does seems another one of Morrison's half-thought ideas that doesn't hold up. Again, I liked the series a lot. Jae Lee was in top form, especially in that first issue, and I thought the plot and dialogue were great. I can see why Morrison would suggest Reed had Asperger's. The suggestion does not hold up to scrutiny, however.

What is also interesting is that even though Magneto is a terrorist, and even Magneto threatens to kill everyone on the planet in his global blackmail schemes, such as in Magneto War and Uncanny X-Men #150, he rarely does. In fact in Magneto War, he practically killed himself keeping the Earth's Magnetospehere together when Joseph's attack destroyed the machine Magneto was using to control it. When Magneto created the Volcano in Uncanny #150, he retarded it's two to allow an evacuation.

It is only in instances in which someone has drawn first blood that someone is going to die. In Uncanny #150 the Russian submarine he sank had fired nuclear weapons at him. In Fatal Attractions, Magneto had made no aggressive moves when the U.N. declared war on him. The mountain his pulled down on Carrion Cove was the coup de grace in a civil war against his legitimate rule in Genosha.

So basically, while Magneto is ready to create situations of conflict, and he is ready to take it to the wall, he usually waits for someone else to draw first blood before he get medieval on people buts.

Y'know what other character did that?

Lincoln. He left the troops at Ft. Sumter knowing the Confederacy was spoiling for a fight. All he did was just wait for them to start one.

So before one casually tosses around historical comparisons, one might want to actually think about what really goes down in history.

@Apodaca, what exactly was retconned? What did we know about Magneto's past in the original X-Men series? Nothing. He just showed up in X-Men #1 as an "evil mutant" who, like many comic book villains of the time, wanted to rule the world. The background that Claremont gave him makes him more understandable, and therefore more interesting, to me.

Y'know, X-Men fans've been arguing back and forth about Magneto on the internet since the creation of the internet. And for a long time I was one of them. But check this out:

Just a few months ago X-Men: Legacy featured a wonderful three-parter in which we saw Claremont's Magneto - the mature, sophisticated, reflective Mangeto, coming to Xavier's aid.

Then last month the fantastic 500th issue of Uncanny X-Men had Stan Lee's Magneto attacking the X-Men, taunting Cyclops, commanding giant death machines and plotting something decidedly disastrous.

The stories were both okayed by the current editorial regime, just a couple of months apart... and both stories completely worked. The dialogue and characterization in both versions rang true for me, and they were both well-told stories. This medium is big enough for different interpretations.

What if there's room for both Mangetos?

This is probably my favorite standalone FF story, primarily because it's the only one in my memory that really focuses on Sue as a sexual being. We've been inside the Reed/Sue marriage before, and we know she has a bit of a thing for Namor, but this is the first story where we see the whole gamut of feelings and emotions together and at war with each other — lust, loyalty, pride, and longing. She feels like a real married woman, with complicated feelings, and not just a cog in the FF storytelling machine.

The cosmic chess-board macguffin, the "10 Little Indians" device, manipulating Ben by restoring his humanity, and the Doom/Namor team-up have all been done to death. What stands out about this issue for me is the "girl talk" section with Alicia, where Sue just VENTS about Reed and the boys, how she'd love to be an undersea princess, how it's not all about Namor's body (but, really, it mostly is), how she thinks the dynamic of the relationship works, and more. And it's not just a conversation. It's a very sensual passage, with Lee's artwork palpably dark, cold and wet, with smooth surfaces and grotesque tactile objects all around (Alicia's sculpture, Reed's eerie communicator thingy), and the girls eating and talking about sensations (even how Namor SMELLS). It's pretty damn sexy, and scary in how far Sue seems removed from Reed. It feels very real to me. And even though she's devoted to Reed in the end (and I feel like I sensed the great pride she has that Reed in the end is the biggest badass in the Marvel Universe; which explains a lot about why she stays with him), she's still going to take some pleasure for herself and lay a sloppy one on Namor. That's strong stuff.

Eric Carpenter, I believe you libeled Dr. Larry Niven. To my knowledge he has a Ph. D. in physics. That makes him someone you would address as 'Doctor'. If I'm wrong I'll admit it, and I'll look him up right now, but if he has a Ph. D. then you libeled him.

Wow. Okay, it seems I was grossly misinformed. Ugh. For decades I've thought Larry Niven was a PHYSICIST who became an author. Ouch.

"What if there’s room for both Mangetos?"

There is not.

Being a Magneto fan in the last 8 years has like being a Wolverine fan and not knowing if Logan is going to be be kicking butt and picking daisies from one appearance to the next.

It doesn't matter if both portrayals appear in the pages, one of them is simply out of character. The Magneto of Excalibur Vol. 3, House of M, Son of M, New Avengers #20, and X-Men: Legacy is in keeping, is part of the logical progression, of 30 of the most recent years of the character's development.

The Magneto of Eve of Destruction, Planet X, and Uncanny #500 is not. (Hell, Morrison said his protrayal of Magneto was a hissy fit thrown at Ian McKellen's performance in the films. Not based on anything n the comic books. The films! Fortunately, it was retconned almost immediately it was so far out of character.)

The X-Men rogues gallery has a plethora of baddies, straight "evil" characters: Shadow King, Cassandra Nova, Apocalypse, Mr. Sinister, Selene, the Hellfire Club, the Purifiers, Nimrod/Bastion, Magus, etc.

Why would anyone want to shove Magneto back into the crowd? Why would anyone want to destroy such a unique creation in Marvel comics? Characters like Magneto are more normally found in dystopian SciFi novels and graphic novels like the Watchmen and V for Vendetta. Why would anyone throw away such a gift on simplistic characterization?

To be honest, I am sick of the clumsy wrestling match over the character's protrayal. Magneto did not shoot to popularity until AFTER Claremont made him into a sympathetic, three dimensional anti-hero/anti-villain. Magneto did not garner a 9th place on lists of the Greatest Comic Book Characters of All Time compiled by both Wizard and Empire magazines this year by being a, as one writer back in the day called him "A poor man's Dr. Doom". That should be the end of the discussion on how the character is written in marvel comics.

sorry..."Kicking butt OR picking daisies one appearance to the next."

Niven only completed one year of grad school before dropping out to write full-time, according to both Wikipedia and larryniven.org (a fansite that he sanctions).

I'm also pretty sure that being mistaken about a person's CV in a blog comment is probably a long way from libel.

So R.J. Sterling should probably chill out.

"or Cody Rhodes dressing down Hacksaw Duggan"

Awesome.

I mean look at the characterization of Magneto in X-Men: Legacy to his behavior in Uncanny #500, in which Magneto attacked the last group of remaining mutants with mutant killing robots (which after the Genoshan Massacre is like Magneto using Hitler to attack Jews) while spouting rabidly over-the-top factionalistic drivel?

How can that possibly be explained in a logical manner?

..and I think we know that editorial is one of the weakest links at Marvel right now. Last week Tom Brevoort said this:

"Does the Illuminati even still exist at this point," Brevoort questions. "Black Bolt is missing, Doctor Strange is gone, Professor X is powerless—it seems like they've got problems above and beyond just the Skrull Invasion."

Never mind that a fully powered Xavier is currently starring in a X-Title.

{{{“What if there’s room for both Mangetos?”
There is not.}}}

*Sigh*
Something so similar between comics fans and religious fundamentalists sometimes.

Listen, I completely agree with you that Magneto is written best as the multi-dimensional, morally sophisticated and unique character that Claremont worked so hard to turn him into.

It just so happens that he also cuts a fine figure as a big bad super-villain, and if he didn't, he wouldn't have been reverted so many times by writers and higher-ups alike. (After all, Emma Frost is a reformed villain too, and she's managed to say on the side of the angels for something like 13 years now).

{{{{To be honest, I am sick of the clumsy wrestling match over the character’s protrayal.}}}

See, you're continuing the wrestling match here. It doesn't have to be a fight. It doesn't have to be a dichotomy. Some people play the hero in one story, the villain in another. Most people, in fact.

I prefer to read about the sophisticated Magneto, the heroic Magneto, myself. But one of my favorite things about comics is that each character's open to so many different writers' and artists' interpretations, and there's room for them all. How many different writers have handled Magneto over the years? No two writers will ever have the exact same vision of him.

Not every one is going to connect with each reader. Personally, I wasn't satisfied with Bendis's handling of Erik and his family in House Of M at all. I didn't feel like he got any of the voices right. But you know what? It doesn't really matter. The fact that Bendis wrote a few Magneto stories that I didn't like, doesn't change the Magneto stories I've enjoyed over the years at all. Even if a new writer comes in and takes the character in a terrible new direction, nothing last forever in comic books; eventually they'll change the status quo and we'll get good Magneto stories again.

Personally, after Morrison, after Xorn, after the Collective and all that mess, I just want to relax, set aside my agenda for who I think the One True Magneto is, and let each writer give their own interpretation. Again, I think Carey and Fraction/Brubaker are both doing great jobs. There's no reason to quibble over whether apples or oranges are better when you've got you've room in your belly for both.

Some people really love mad old terrorist twats.

And excellent points, Stefan.

I'd add that I think comparing Magneto to Hitler is less apt than to Bin Laden.

I already admitted my mistake, 'Happy', and I believe that would have fit the definition of libel. This is technically a print medium. Verbal defamation is slander. Print defamation is libel. Also I used my real name to say what I believe, 'Happy', and not a pseudonym as you are. I repeat, I was misinformed about that author's credentials. YOU chill out.

I might add that citing Wikipedia as a reliable source of accurate data about any subject is hella risky. It's rife with assertions that are speculative at best and erroneous at worst, as anyone who has spent any time using it must know.

"I already admitted my mistake, ‘Happy’, and I believe that would have fit the definition of libel. This is technically a print medium. Verbal defamation is slander. Print defamation is libel."

Now all you have to do is make a case for why, if D. Eric Carpenter's statement had in fact been false, it would've amounted to defamation rather than a simple error. "Libel" is a pretty strong term to be throwing around.

"R.J. Sterling":

1) How do I know that "R.J. Sterling" is your real name? You don't provide a link, and there's no registration or background check to comment on this site, so your "real name" doesn't mean anything to me.

2) I cited both Wikipedia and larryniven.org. You cited nothing.

3) As MRW points out, there is a huge difference between making a mistake about a person's CV and libel.

4) We should all chill out.

Here's the 70 cent question:

Am I wrong to want something other than "Good Vs Evil" from my comics?

I realize it's not how he was created, but i'd much prefer Doom to have a point, albeit one that is horrific and says bad things about us as a race, than just be super petty, self-deluded Doom. I just find it more interesting to have some philosophical content to my bad guys, and a few more shades of grey.

I want Lex to be a tragic figure. I think that Veronica Cale is a brilliant character, because there's something to her being as well-achieved as a female can be and still completely overshadowed by Wonder Woman through no real fault of her own. That's an interesting starting point for a villain.

No one goes around trying to act "evil" unless they're seriously insane. A Doom that's so self-deluded not to realize how he comes off is two-dimensional at best to me and therefore less interesting.

Or maybe i just expect too much out of a genre that's supposed to be about good conquering evil and entertaining kids with 25 cents to blow in 1966.

I'd just like to thank KiplingKat for his extremely thoughtful posts. Very well written and well reasoned. I don't really have a horse in that fight, but I'd say he won on points.

("Horse in that fight" sound right to me, but it's a hell of a mixed metaphor, isn't it? Unless there's some underground horse-boxing league.)

"I’d add that I think comparing Magneto to Hitler is less apt than to Bin Laden."

Actually, Magneto doesn't compare to Hitler OR to Bin Laden. Magneto is not a "bombs on buses/planes into buildings" terrorist. Whenever he does something, he makes a very loud public announcement before doing it.

Magneto is more analogous to the leaders of rogue nations like Ahmadinejad than either a terrorist like bin Laden, or a genocidal fascist like Hitler.

"Something so similar between comics fans and religious fundamentalists sometimes."

You open with a personal attack...Nice.

It really adds validity to all your following statements to insult the person on the opposing side of the argument.

"It just so happens that he also cuts a fine figure as a big bad super-villain, and if he didn’t, he wouldn’t have been reverted so many times by writers and higher-ups alike. (After all, Emma Frost is a reformed villain too, and she’s managed to say on the side of the angels for something like 13 years now)."

Let me get one thing clear right away: I don't care of Magneto is being portrayed as a good guy or as a bad guy. I liked him as a good guy during the 1980's, a liked him as an anti-hero/anti-villain during the 1990's. I think the writer who actually nailed Magneto closest to center, the one who nailed the core of the character, was Fabien Nicieza who wrote Magneto in Fatal Attractions and Magneto: Dark Seductions. I loved his protrayal of Magneto.

And you know what? It made sense. They were Magneto as a three dimensional, morally ambiguous character who was acting as the X-Men's foil.

Not "RWAR! I'm Teh EEEEEE-vil Magneto. BWUHAhahahahaHA!"

And Magneto's reformation period lasted over ten years. It took five years for Claremont to take Magneto from Uncanny #150 to joining the X-Men and becoming Headmaster of the New Mutants. And it took five years for Claremont to guide the character back to villainy in a manner that was consistent with his character devlopment. Magneto did not go from being the Headmaster of the New Mutants to the leader of Avalon by turning on a dime. Claremont had to put the character through the wringer, by having the Mutant Massacre occur, by having the X-Men abandon him, by having the Mutant Registration Act in play, by having Doug Ramsey be killed. With all of those events in play, it made sense for a character like Magneto to go to his "comfort zone".

That is what character development is. Not "I want to write this character this way and be damned to what came before" but the building of new aspects of the character on the old.

Nicieza's, Davis', Pruetts, Lobdell, most of the writers in the 1990's, their "bad @$$ Magneto" was built on what Claremont did. They did not throw it away, they did not ignore what Claremont did. They developed, built on, what he did.

This is the thing about character change, it has to be written. You can't have a character going from introspective gentlemen to raving madman in a single issue with no explanation.

"See, you’re continuing the wrestling match here. It doesn’t have to be a fight. It doesn’t have to be a dichotomy. Some people play the hero in one story, the villain in another. Most people, in fact."

That's very true, and I have no problem with Magneto playing both the hero and villain...but it has to be consistent with his characterization.

And "dichotomy" is what the current writers are giving us: Two characterizations that do not make sense together. There is no way to logically progress from the Magneto of House of M, Son of M, New Avengers #20, X-Men: Legacy...to what Bruction wrote in #500. There is no logic in that portrayal.

"I prefer to read about the sophisticated Magneto, the heroic Magneto, myself. But one of my favorite things about comics is that each character’s open to so many different writers’ and artists’ interpretations, and there’s room for them all. How many different writers have handled Magneto over the years? No two writers will ever have the exact same vision of him."

No, they don't. Of course not, each writer is an individual. But up until the 2000's, what most of the writer were doing could all be seen as different shades of a single character. Now it just a free for all. Two characters that are completely different in personality who just happen to share the same name.

There isn't room for all the "interpretations" in a single universe when what the character is doing is not in a rational progression from what has come before.

If writers want to write a flat out, bastard Magneto, they can go and write for the Ultimate Universe. That why they made him that way there. But that characterization does not make sense in the 616 any more than a writer suddenly deciding to write Wolverine as a metrosexual pacificst in the 616.

So no, there is not room for every characterization in a single Universe. If they want to write for the Ultimate Universe, if they want to write a "What If..." story, if they want to write an alternate reality story, then yes. There is room.

But what they write in the 616 has to follow on the previous character development in the 616...or all of Marvel Comics becomes a free for all with people writing whatever the hell they want without regard to characterization and continuity.

Which is the end of any emotional investment fans can have in the stories.

"Not every one is going to connect with each reader. Personally, I wasn’t satisfied with Bendis’s handling of Erik and his family in House Of M at all. I didn’t feel like he got any of the voices right. But you know what? It doesn’t really matter. The fact that Bendis wrote a few Magneto stories that I didn’t like, doesn’t change the Magneto stories I’ve enjoyed over the years at all. Even if a new writer comes in and takes the character in a terrible new direction, nothing last forever in comic books; eventually they’ll change the status quo and we’ll get good Magneto stories again."

Actually of everyone writing Magneto in the 2000's, next to Claremont (who even hot a false note when he made Magneto inexplicably passive in Excalibur vol. 3), Bendis was the one that was closest to center of the character. (And he has only written two Magneto stories, House of M and New Avengers #20, both times he got it right). In the 2000's, Magnet has been put through the wringer like nothing before. He failed as the leader of his people when Genosha was massacred, he failed as a father when Wanda went insane and could not be helped. He was literally suicidal walking into House of M (he had asked Xavier to kill him), and after wards...after he was indirectly involved in a version of his worst nightmare coming true, after his own child who he had tried to help ripped away his very self identity...not, He's not going to be the same grandstanding global terrorist he was before.

But no one, except Bendis who just touched on it briefly in New Avengers #20, seems to want to deal with the emotional fall out of all these events, their effect on the character. Magneto has not been emotionally torn down this far since the night Anya died and Magda left him. And we have seen events much smaller than these, such as the near death of Kitty Pryde, have a profound effect on the character....

So how do you get from the Magneto that went through all that....to Uncanny #500?

Obviously, Magneto has been put in the middle of major character altering events, but all many writers want to do is regress the character.

How does that make sense?

"Personally, after Morrison, after Xorn, after the Collective and all that mess, I just want to relax, set aside my agenda for who I think the One True Magneto is, and let each writer give their own interpretation. Again, I think Carey and Fraction/Brubaker are both doing great jobs. There’s no reason to quibble over whether apples or oranges are better when you’ve got you’ve room in your belly for both."

Yeah, but what they are trying to do in the 616 is call apples "oranges" and that sort of insult to my intelligence as a reader just pisses me off.

And believe me, the faults in Uncanny #500 went FAR beyond Magneto's characterization.

Here's the list:

~First of all, IF Magneto and the High Evolutionary are trying to undo the effects of M-Day (and given what Magneto said it certainly sounded like it), why did they need to hide what they were doing? Beast contacted Wyndham in Endangered Species to get help correcting M-Day. Wouldn’t the X-men want to assist them? Or at least stay out of their way?

~Forty-five years and “Magneto tactics” still means “Everyone take a turn like a bad martial arts film”? Compare this fight to the X-Men Vs. Magneto fight in Uncanny #113. As someone in my LCBS said, "What was the point of the Danger Room if they are not going to use tactics?"

~The fight was paced horribly. Did we really need an entire page of panels showing Peter getting tossed through a building?

~Characters (Storm, Cannonball) literally showed up out of nowhere to beat on Magneto and disappear. Were not in the issue before, weren't in the issue afterward. Especially Sam taking out Magneto out like a Kentucky Duex Ex Machina, resulting in a very anticlimactic fight.

~Nightcrawler, longstanding member of the X-Men is present...and speaks all of five words.

~The dialog is horrendous. Just stilted and overblown and...ugh!

~Then there was the X-Men wondering how a guy who controls electromagnetism turns on a giant robot. (Hel-loooo!)

~And hasn’t Storm learned by now that throwing lightning at someone who controls ELECTROmagnetism is simply handing him a weapon?

~Then there is the incongruity between what Cannonball did and what Magneto said to the High Evolutionary about the suit making him feel “more powerful than he ever had been before”. And he’s taken out by Cannonball? Just by blasting into him? Are you kidding? Magneto’s shields have stopped blows from Thor and the She-Hulk, at once! He has stopped ceramic missiles that were fired at his back while fighting off the X-Men. We’re talking about a guy who was held the planetary EM field together while he was fighting a younger version of himself. That has raised piece of the ocean’s crust to create small islands. That has started playing around with space-time. He’s been a lot more powerful than he showed in this issue. So either the suit did not make him measure up to his previous power levels and Magneto was...being nice about or something, or what happened makes no sense.

~“You find a way to fake out losing your powers? We’ll find a way to stop you from ever doing it again.” Uhm…no Scott, Magneto is faking having his powers. If he is relying on a suit he really did lose them. (I won’t even touch the screamingly out of character and unnecessary “Suck it”.)

~Speaking of which, I guess we are all supposed to forget that "Still a mutant" thing from the end of Extremists? Right?

~Then there was Emma, who is now more powerful than Xavier has ever been, able to reach minds all across the globe without cerebro/a's help.

~Scott calling all mutants to gather in one place...where they can be wiped out....again. "Yes! Look at us setting up the old paradigm with a new backdrop!" (Heck, "Hellfire Cult"? "Sisterhood of Evil Mutants"? Trask...how is any of this stuff new? How is this "changing the status quo"?)

~Not to mention Bruction missing the irony of Cyclops playing "hero" to Magneto's "villain" now that Scott is wandering into Magneto's moral grey area with X-Force.

So no, I don't think Brubaker and Fraction are doing a good job. In fact Brubaker has not done anything worthy of positive note on Uncanny for two years. Not that that is entirely his fault, he is obviously a great writer for the street level, single character books. Uncanny was just a bad fit. But I'm sick of waiting, so I canceled my subscription and dropped the title until there is a major change in the writing team.

Thank you, Matt Bird ...and pardon my typos all.

And P.S. as mixed metaphors go, that was pretty stylin' actually.

"@Apodaca, what exactly was retconned?"

It was retro-active continuity. It seems like you're taking the term "ret-con" to mean something that contradicts previous continuity, but that's a limited application of the term. It just means any continuity that was applied after the fact, in terms of the characters' chronology.

By your defintion, any origin elements told after a character is introduced is a retcon.

Actually most people define '"retcon" as something that changes a previously established continuity. You can google the defintion.

And since Magneto had no origin prior to Claremont revealing his incarceration at Auschwitz (though he did make a couple statements hinting he was part of a persecuted people), it's not a retcon. Just as the revelation that Storm used to be a thief in Cairo was not a retcon since we had no story for her early life.

Kipling, you've obviously got a far greater emotional investment in this issue than I do so I'm gonna bow out for most of this argument, when it comes to Magneto. I just don't have the patience to do back and forth, point by point discussion. No offense. We also such have vastly different viewpoints on how Magneto's been handled over the years that I'm not sure we'd make headway anyway. First of all I don't think Claremont spent his last 5 years bringing Magneto back to villainy at all. It was Jim Lee's move to have Magneto revert to villainy for the Avalon story; that was part of the struggle that led Claremont to leave the book, because the editors weren't listening to him anymore. It was a pretty sudden switch; the last time we saw Erik he'd been with Rogue in the Savage Land. Anyway, X-Men 1-3 sold record numbers and so the editorial vision of Mangeto as the X-Men's greatest villain became re-established. Lobdell and Nicieza simply followed suit.

I agree with you that Brubaker hasn't done very much at all in the last two years. It has been quite weak. Brubaker's a wonderful writer normally, but somehow I don't think he gets the X-Men. After Milligan, after Mark Waid years ago, he wouldn't be the first talented writer to flop inexplicably when given the X-Men to work with.

Fraction does get the X-Men, and he showed that instantaneously and beyond the shadow of a doubt in his Nightcrawler story from Divided We Stand... and in my opinion, in the dramatic increase in quality (which you obviously don't agree with, but this is my perspective) from 499 to 500. And Johnston just announced last week that Brubaker will be leaving the book and it'll be solely in Fraction's hands.

By your defintion, any origin elements told after a character is introduced is a retcon.

Actually most people define ‘”retcon” as something that changes a previously established continuity. You can google the defintion."

The original use of the term, as brought forth by Roy Thomas in All-Star Squadron, refers to material that adds to previously continuity, not material that replaces it. The fact that the term has come to mean other things as well doesn't invalidate this meaning.

"But what they write in the 616 has to follow on the previous character development in the 616…or all of Marvel Comics becomes a free for all with people writing whatever the hell they want without regard to characterization and continuity.

Which is the end of any emotional investment fans can have in the stories. "

No, it ends the obsession that people that think continuity is more important than an interesting story. And there's plenty of folks like that, but many of us would not want to be put in that category.

Continuity is the backbone of an interesting story. It is the logical progression of events that makes any story make sense. In comic books, in novels, in film, and in television. You can't have a character breaking his leg and then ten minutes later he or she be fine.

Even writer who played around with how the story was told, like Kurt Vonnegut, still maintained continuity within the individual stories they were entwining.

So this fashionable disdain for continuity is simply a counter productive excuse for lazy writing.

"Continuity is the backbone of an interesting story. It is the logical progression of events that makes any story make sense. In comic books, in novels, in film, and in television. You can’t have a character breaking his leg and then ten minutes later he or she be fine.

Even writer who played around with how the story was told, like Kurt Vonnegut, still maintained continuity within the individual stories they were entwining.

So this fashionable disdain for continuity is simply a counter productive excuse for lazy writing."

Your argument would make a lot of sense if comics absolutely had to be all linked to each other. They don't. Some writers like linking, and that's great. But I'd rather have a good story unlinked than a bad one linked. Inside-the-story/book continuity/consistency? Obviously something you should almost always do. Inter-company continuity? To hell with that unless it inspires you to something greater.

Yeah, "libel" is a ridiculously strong word for getting someone's credentials wrong.
Also, while having a PhD entitles a person to be called "Doctor", most people with one will restrict this to specific professional situations, or not use it at all, due the fact that there is a perception (even amongst other academics with doctorates themselves) that insisting on its use when one is not a medical doctor is the action of a self-aggrandizing insecure douchebag.

"Kipling, you’ve obviously got a far greater emotional investment in this issue than I do so I’m gonna bow out for most of this argument, when it comes to Magneto. I just don’t have the patience to do back and forth, point by point discussion. No offense. We also such have vastly different viewpoints on how Magneto’s been handled over the years that I’m not sure we’d make headway anyway. First of all I don’t think Claremont spent his last 5 years bringing Magneto back to villainy at all. It was Jim Lee’s move to have Magneto revert to villainy for the Avalon story; that was part of the struggle that led Claremont to leave the book, because the editors weren’t listening to him anymore. It was a pretty sudden switch; the last time we saw Erik he’d been with Rogue in the Savage Land. Anyway, X-Men 1-3 sold record numbers and so the editorial vision of Mangeto as the X-Men’s greatest villain became re-established. Lobdell and Nicieza simply followed suit."

Quite wrong.

Quite, Quite wrong.

First there was the Mutant Massacre , after which a panicked Storm made the decision to ally with the HFC (New Mutants #51), and when she decided to fake the X-Men death, that left Magneto to interface with them. This made him lose the fragile trust he had built up with the New Mutants (staring in NM #54). Simonson then worked at and finally broke the relationship between Magneto and the New Mutants over his growing involvement with the HFC in New Mutants #75. After that, in Uncanny #253, Magneto announced to Banshee and Moira MacTaggart that he was going back to his ways of villainy (ie. getting marginally involved in Acts of Vengeance, as seen in West Coast Avengers and the famous Magneto vs. The Red Skull smack down in Captian America #367) as a show to draw attention away from the X-Men.

Magneto dropped out of sight for a while, reappearing to save Rogue's life and team up with her, Ka-Zar and Nick Fury against Zaladane in the Savage Land in Uncanny #274-275. At the end of that adventure, Magneto executes Zaladane in cold blood and announces that Xavier's way does not work, and because of the growing threats to Mutants, Magneto will have to resort to violence as he did before. "The world does not need a kinder, gentler Magneto". A few months later, in Adjectiveless #1-3, Cortez and the Acolytes show up on the door step of Asteroid M, giving Magneto the vehicle for his new role: Mutant Separatism. (Avalon did not come along later until Lobdell and Nicieza's Fatal Attractions).

From joining the HFC to Adjectiveless #1: Four years. Almost all under Claremont (with Simonsons work to get Magneto out of the New Mutants, which took over a year.) Jim Lee had nothing to do with it. He certainly didn't write the character in the very brief period he was writing the X-Men.

And it was a logical progression of events over four years, five if you count the Mutant Massacre itself, that led Magneto out of his Reformation Period back into "villainy".

It was not *snap* one issue.

"Fraction does get the X-Men, and he showed that instantaneously and beyond the shadow of a doubt in his Nightcrawler story from Divided We Stand… and in my opinion, in the dramatic increase in quality (which you obviously don’t agree with, but this is my perspective) from 499 to 500. And Johnston just announced last week that Brubaker will be leaving the book and it’ll be solely in Fraction’s hands."

I agree the his Nightcrawler story in DWS raised great hopes...that were utterly dashed by Uncanny #500. I have no issue with drama, so long as it is well written. The DWS story was extremely well written and thought provoking, just my kind of comic. Uncanny #500 was just...awful, just really, really awful.

But a lot of the things that wrecked Uncanny #500 were the same problems we have been seeing in the X-men in the last 2 years (Crappy pacing, anticlimactic stories, bad characterization, lousy fight choreography), so hopefully thing will improve with Brubaker departure. Once he is gone, I will start flipping through the issues in the store, and if they are good enough I will buy them, and if remains good enough I will renew my subscription.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the death of Dough Ramsey and Magneto's screaming argument with the New Mutnats in NM # 61, after which Magneto outlined his fears for the future.

But that wasn't Claremont, that was Simonson.

Joe Rice, I'm not sure I understand what you mean by inter-company continuity. But continuity of characters' personalities (for lack of a better term) means that those personalities can be developed over time, can become more complex, more realistic, and (to me) more interesting.

"Your argument would make a lot of sense if comics absolutely had to be all linked to each other. They don’t. Some writers like linking, and that’s great. But I’d rather have a good story unlinked than a bad one linked. Inside-the-story/book continuity/consistency? Obviously something you should almost always do. Inter-company continuity? To hell with that unless it inspires you to something greater."

So comic books are no longer a serial medium? They're now episodic like the old Star Trek?

Well, that's news to me.

But it still doesn't work as even Star Trek maintained continuity of characterization and the universe in which they existed.

It sounds like what you really want is a comic like "Marvel Presents", or "What If...", the "Twilight Zone" kind of stories in which it is completely different each episode.

That is the only way to do away with continuity in comic books.

And I understand that viewpoint, JMarieB. But it's not the only one. Another is that a lot of this "development" tends to lessen the character, to dilute what makes it work, etc. There's room for both, and there are times I agree with either. I only balk at saying that one MUST BE THE ANSWER and ANYTHING ELSE IS TERRIBLE.

I can read some continuity-drenched comics and enjoy it. But I can also appreciate a writer so says, "Ugggh . . .that was a dumb 10 or 20 years, fuck that."

"So comic books are no longer a serial medium? They’re now episodic like the old Star Trek?"

Not all comics rely on the sort of continuity you're talking about. Not even monthly superhero stories HAVE to have it to be good.

"But it still doesn’t work as even Star Trek maintained continuity of characterization and the universe in which they existed."

Even with the myriad of Star Treks and their diminishing returns, it was closer to a singular story than all the 60-some years of mainstream superhero comics.

"It sounds like what you really want is a comic like “Marvel Presents”, or “What If…”, the “Twilight Zone” kind of stories in which it is completely different each episode."

Then you're reading me wrong, or, rather, thinking in a dichotomous absolute that doesn't exist. My point is you don't have to respect "continuity" to make good comics. You can, but you don't have to. You personally might not enjoy anything that disregards something from 20 years ago, and more power to you, but it's not the only position to be held.

"That is the only way to do away with continuity in comic books."

Stop saying "comic books" when you mean "mainstream Superhero/genre fiction." And, no, it isn't the only way.

"But it’s not the only one. Another is that a lot of this “development” tends to lessen the character, to dilute what makes it work, etc."

Name one.

I'd like to see an example of how making a character more three dimensional and allowing him or her to grow in reaction to events has ruined the character.

You obviously disagree, but, believe it or not, plenty of people feel that way about Magneto.

Turning Hal Jordan into a drunk driving ass was another example.

Jean Loring as psychopath.

Darth Vader as annoying child.

Sometimes, one man's "more three-dimensional" is another's "hacky wish-washery."

If you add to a previous continuity, you're changing it. Logical necessity. But you can add character and even historical details to a story that have nothing to do with any "continuity" -- if Steve Rogers was interested in art as a boy, it affects nothing, connects to nothing, is therefore not part of a continuity until it is made one. And, there ain't no continuity that can be added to, that isn't of necessity previous continuity, either -- so if you just put in something where previously there was absolutely nothing, that's not automatically a retcon. Steve likes art, sure; but also, was Norman Osborn being revealed as the Green Goblin a retcon? I'd say not.

Finally, if you add something to continuity that makes it discontinuous, that's not a retcon either, that's a thing that needs a retcon.

Was Magneto's history as a camp survivor a retcon? I tend to think it was, since it instantly caused all of his past appearances to be reinterpreted in the light of what we know and feel about Holocaust survivors -- and that's the added continuity, not the historical detail. If he'd instead been revealed to have grown up in Detroit or something, it would not have been a retcon, any more than revealing he's left-handed would be a retcon...unless it was made one. But one thing's for sure, his subsequent character development is not a retcon, no matter where he was revealed to have come from!

Also, the Asperger's thing...I read 1234 as just a standard-issue FF plot invested with some defamiliarizing gloominess, and in the end it all comes right in the conventional FF manner. Fine, well-crafted story, and Reed doesn't have Asperger's, Sue just worries about it while Doom makes his reality-bending moves.

Wow, it's possible I care about all of this a little too much...

Not all comics rely on the sort of continuity you’re talking about. Not even monthly superhero stories HAVE to have it to be good.

Yeah, yeah they do because if the stories cease to make sense, I lose interest. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.

"Even with the myriad of Star Treks and their diminishing returns, it was closer to a singular story than all the 60-some years of mainstream superhero comics."

I...ye...what?

The only American SciFi TV show that approached the type of continuity seen in the major monthly titles of the major comic book houses is Babylon Five, which was unique in American TV of the time because it was specifically a serial story.

"Then you’re reading me wrong, or, rather, thinking in a dichotomous absolute that doesn’t exist. My point is you don’t have to respect “continuity” to make good comics. You can, but you don’t have to. You personally might not enjoy anything that disregards something from 20 years ago, and more power to you, but it’s not the only position to be held."

Uncanny X-Men is one story, one long story from Giant Size X-Men #1 to Uncanny #500. Same for the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, Batman, Bird of Prey...Fables, any major comic book title. Those are serial stories. Those require dealing with continuity.

If a writer does not want to deal with that kind of continuity, they should not be writing these huge titles. They should write younger titles, episodic titles, or their own books. That's just the way the game is played. If they want the attention and the big bucks of writing the X-Men or Batman or some other major title, they have to work for it.

Maybe they don't like the way things are going in the comic, maybe the writer before them left a huge mess behind, but that doesn't mean they can just ignore it, pretend it doesn't exist. They have to write their way out it. They have to write the change. That's what they are paid to do.

Sure Xorn pissed a lot of people off, but they could not just have Magneto show up again and be fine without explaining WTF happened with the character Planet X. They had to write their way out of it. Marvel obviously was unhappy with the massive boom in the mutant population Morrison left behind. But they couldn't just ignore the numbers, pretend they didn't exist, they had to write House of M to bring the numbers back down.

In doing so, they went waaaaay overboard, which resulted in another situation people were not happy with, but writers could not ignore that happened and just pretend there are tons of mutants again. They have to write their way out of it.

That is serial storytelling, each story building on elements that came before.That is mainstream superhero comic books.

To get away from continuity, you have to step away from the type of storytelling employed in mainstream superhero comics. You have to go into Neil Gaiman's Sandman (which even that had a continuity), you have to go into X-Men Unlimited, "What If...?", etc. You have to depart the mainstream superhero genre because it's a serial genre. Hell, even Alan Moore and Frank Miller use continuity within the stories they write. The Watchmen has continuity. V for Vendetta has continuity. Sin City has continuity.

Turning Hal Jordan into a drunk driving ass and Jean Loring into a psychopath sounds to me like writers disregarding continuity and writing the characters as they please. Or did these changes take place over a period of time? (The only DC comic I read is Legion of Super-Heroes .)

Clearly we won't get agreeing with each other and I feel as though I'm talking to a wall. You probably do, too. Enjoy your comics. I'll enjoy mine.

Also, respecting continuity doesn't have to mean the same thing as employing it. You can still write a great Magneto story...um, let's just change that to "a good Iron Man story"...you can still write a good Iron Man story without fucking up what someone else has done, can't you? Just tell a different story, leave the freakin' whatever-whatever that somebody else did out of it! Don't like the current Melter or Pepper Potts? Write a new character that you do like, jeez. No one needs to write a story in which all previous character development, history, or whatever is abrogated -- if it's even within someone's capabilities to write a good Iron Man story, it ought to be within their capabilities to write one that makes sense and is its own thing at the same time. I mean for pity's sake it's Iron Man. How hard can it be?

"You obviously disagree, but, believe it or not, plenty of people feel that way about Magneto."

And I tend to notice that people who do usually hate the character and wish to see him written as a craven madman to fulfill their negative expectations. Bryne, Morrison, many fans.

But given the character's popularity, making him a three dimensional anti-hero/anti-villain was obviously a very successful move on Marvel part.

And there is simply too much character development now to shove him back into the two dimensional stock villain role again.

Besides, you have Exodus for that.

Now, I hate Sally Floyd, despise her. Wish she could have gotten stepped on in WHH and wiped of Bruce's foot like dog poo.

But that does not mean I want to limit Sally Floyd to be a complete callous, self absorbed, alkie bitch forever. It would be very interesting read a story in which she is redeemed.

"Turning Hal Jordan into a drunk driving ass was another example.

Jean Loring as psychopath."

I can't speak to those.

"Darth Vader as annoying child."

That one I have to agree one (though it did show that Luke came by his whiny nature honestly).

"Sometimes, one man’s “more three-dimensional” is another’s “hacky wish-washery.”"

Yes, that does happen. Look what Chuck Austen did to Lorna Dane.

But that doesn't mean that that episode of Lorna's life should be ignored. Honestly I'm surprised no one is eager to write her out of her crazy. I mean, that would be a fun story to tell.

Just as Carey is working to get Rogue back to where she should be after Lobdell turned her into a co-dependent train wreck in the 1990's.

Although as far as the mutant population problem goes...you know, that could've been solved by just writing stories with fewer mutants in 'em, for my money. Do a couple dozen issues of Cyclops talking on the phone trying to give people directions. Poof! No more mutant overpopulation "problem". And then if anyone wants to bring it up again one day, they can.

I keep missing the topic at hand, don't I?

No, not at all.

The entire population boom and how they handled it was...just a bad scene. A bad idea that was badly dealt with.

"Was Magneto’s history as a camp survivor a retcon?"

No it wasn't. Until Uncanny #150, his past had not been revealed, though he had made a couple statements hinting that he had belonged to a persecuted group as far back as the Silver Age.

I do agree that it is entirely possible to write good stories that deal little in past continuity. Just write a story that is happening now that has nothing to do with the past. (Actually, that would be kind of refreshing at this point. I mean how many writers actually write utterly new situations and villains for their characters?) My initial complaint here is that as far as characterization goes, there has to be some kind of consistency in development. You can't have Magneto be a reserved, thoughtful gentleman in one appearance (X-Men Legacy) and then have him show up acting like a raving loon in the very next appearance (Uncanny X-men #500) without some kind of explanation.

And while Fraction did say that Magneto was "faking it" to distract the X-men, the characters behavior still does not make any sense from a storytelling stand point. If all he had to do was distract the X-men, why did he attack them with mutant killing robots (something he would find utterly abhorrent), why did he rant like a lunatic?

The only way it makes sense is when you realize that the writers were forcibly trying to create a Silver Age homage, which because it was so forced and so nonsensical, came of as being incredibly lame.

The explanation is that they are different comics written by different writers. What else do you need?

Darn it, I hate it when I end up in complete agreement with Joe Rice. Let me see if I can add a few comments that he could disagree with, just to restore balance.

I think that one of the (many, many) reasons why comic books sales have been on a long decline is that the two major companies have decided to favor "continuity fans" over "story fans". How many stories just in the last few years were primarily driven by a need to get to a certain point, to fix "problems" in continuity? A very incomplete list would include:

One More Day
Emerald Twilight
Anything ending in "Crisis"
(and on, and on, and on...)

That's great, for the continuity fans. Sometimes continuity repair stories can be good, too. But most of the time they're not, so the "story fans" either go read stories from somebody other than the Big Two, or quit reading comics altogether.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the idea of the shared universe, and appreciate the history behind the characters. But, given a choice between a comic that violates some aspect of that history while giving me a great story, and a mediocre story that is faithful to that history, well, it's not even a choice.

Mutants becoming more integrated into human society was a natural development, and one of my favorite parts of Morrison's run. It made sense that there would be mutant music and sitcoms and fashion showing up in the Marvel universe, especially with human teenagers rebelling by emulating mutants. Of course, this upset the MU status quo, so mutant integration was cut off.

It seems that *any* developing of characters appearing in movies, cartoons, and licensed products is turned back. Magneto will always revert to villainy, just like Johnny Storm will always be immature, Spider-Man goes back to being single, Batman goes from loner to leader and back, Hal Jordan and Barry Allen are coming back, the Hulk can't be totally heroic or totally monstrous for too long, Daredevil goes back to Milleresque misery... maintaining the brand is more important than character development. For the big "jumping on point" of Uncanny X-Men 500, a more nuanced or tamed Magneto isn't the Magneto Marvel thinks people expect to see.

Unfortunately, semi-good Magneto is a dead end. He either becomes a hero or goes back to being a villain. Maybe he'd be a good hero. I think Claremont & Lee (who was heavily involved in the plotting of Uncanny when he was drawing the book, possibly ignoring Claremont's plots entirely) did a good job bringing Magneto back to villainy, but I don't like how he became a raving maniac in "Fatal Attractions." I liked "Planet X," and I would have been happy if they didn't bring him back. Oh well.

Umm, Tyson, Joe Quesada may have disliked the Parker marriage, but I don't think he considered it a 'problem' in continuity. And as wretched as One More Day was (Peter and Mary Jane making a deal with Mephisto!?!), it was at least an explanation. Would you really have preferred it if they just suddenly started printing stories in which Peter is single and living with Aunt May again, and Harry Osborne is alive again (WTF!?!) with no explanation?

Uhm...O.K., first of all, people who insist on continuity see it as a vital part of story telling because they like stories to make sense (silly us). Not because they love continuity for itself.

And One More Day actually screwed up continuity by retconning 20 years of Spider Man history.

The Crisis on Infinite Earth's was a way of drastically altering the DC universe to shuck a lot of it's continuity, and I assume Final Crisis is also approaching a similar end of drastically altering DC continuity.

So those stories you cited are in fact hated by people who like to see continuity in their stories because they screwed with it so much.

Thus these stories prove my point: Disregarding continuity creates a crappy story that makes a lot of people unhappy.

JmaireB made the better argument there. Nicely done.

JMarieB said:
(snip)Would you really have preferred it if they just suddenly started printing stories in which Peter is single and living with Aunt May again, and Harry Osborne is alive again (WTF!?!) with no explanation?(/snip)

Yeah, I loved it - they called it Ultimate Spider-man. You should check it out.

As much as I like consistent characterization and continuations of character developments, I'm in agreement with Joe Rice & Tyson re continuity vs. story. I also think writers and editors of DC & Marvel could put in the effort to keep characterizations more consistent. (not plot minutia, like whether or not Hawkman is an alien or a reincarnated prince or both or neither. That's the kind of crap I could do without.)

Cute, Tyson . But Ultimate Spider-Man did have an explanation. It was a separate reality. Seriously, if One More Day had never been printed and Marvel just started up the Brand New Day status quo in 616 Spider-Man with no explanation, wouldn't you have found that kind of...jarring? Even if you liked the new staus quo?

And are there any DC fans who can answer my question about Hal Jordan and Jean Loring? Were the characterizations Joe Rice referred to developed over time in the comic books? Or were they (so to speak) just pulled out of a hat--as though the writer were ignoring character continuity for the sake of his story?

"Unfortunately, semi-good Magneto is a dead end. He either becomes a hero or goes back to being a villain. Maybe he’d be a good hero. I think Claremont & Lee (who was heavily involved in the plotting of Uncanny when he was drawing the book, possibly ignoring Claremont’s plots entirely) did a good job bringing Magneto back to villainy, but I don’t like how he became a raving maniac in “Fatal Attractions.” I liked “Planet X,” and I would have been happy if they didn’t bring him back. Oh well."

First of all, I don't know where you guys are getting this, but Lee had little to do with bringing Magneto back to villainy. That was Claremont and Simonson.

Secondly, how is a "semi good" Magneto a "dead end"? They got plenty of stories out of morally ambiguous Magneto for twenty years. Why was that suddenly going to come to an end?

When they set up Magneto on Genosha, they opened up a wealth of stories through Genosha's analogy to the real world Israel. I mean God Gawd, it was a treasure trove, as proven by Nicieza's Magneto: Dark Seduction.

For instance, Magneto forced the world to give him a mutant homeland. Israel drove out the Palestinians to get their homeland. Genosha faced continued aggression from all sides, just as Israel is sitting in the middle of countries that would like to see it wiped off the map. Both Magneto and the Israelis and Palestinians use that as an excuse for continuing violence. Both Jews in the real world and mutants in Marvel comics had been through genocides at the point they established their homelands...so was it really so wrong for them to want a corner of the world for their own where they could feel safe? Was gaining that scrap of their own worth the cost of establishing it? Are they going about maintaining that little scarp of somewhere in the right way?

And that's just one situation Magneto was placed in that was a wealth of stories that got cut short because someone had a hate-on for Ian McKellen's Magneto. Turn Magneto into a one dimensional "evil" lunatic, and he doesn't raise those kind of questions anymore. He ceases to be a mirror to ourselves.

In the situation Magneto is in now, there are multiple paths. He could become the savior of the mutant race (as he is trying to do with the High Evolutionary in Uncanny #500), he could become an underground political leader (finally fitting the Malcom X analogy that Singer kept touting for the films). He could be freeing mutants from the Initiative and sending them out of the coutnry via an underground railroad.

The SHRA and the Initiative have put heroes in the situation Magneto has been predicting for years, so he could find himself leading more than just mutants. And that puts him in an interesting position in relation to most of the Superheroes in the M.U., like the Secret Avengers, who are going to be agreeing with his goals, but distrusting and hating him because of past animosity.

Then there is the whole situation to work out with his kids.

Not to mention his own personal growth from the massive events he was place d in the middle of.

So...where is the Dead End? Because I don't see it yet.

So is a "semi good" Magneto a "dead end" or has there simply been some writers who lacked the maturity and vision to see the potential of the character? It isn't Magneto's choice to become a raving lunatic again, it's the writers. It's the writers who have seen a "semi-good" Magneto as a "dead end", who lack the imagination to see the wealth of stories that character is capable of.

The true "dead end" is Magneto as a static, craven madman who does not grow or change in reaction to events. That is the character that is going nowhere, because he has nowhere to go.

And again: Morally Ambiguous Magneto = "The 9th Greatest Comic Book Character of All Time" by both Wizard and Empire magazines.

Three dimensional Magneto = Popular Magneto.

"For the big “jumping on point” of Uncanny X-Men 500, a more nuanced or tamed Magneto isn’t the Magneto Marvel thinks people expect to see."

Well, I can tell you that in this instance, Marvel was quite wrong. There are a LOT of people who read that comic and said "WTF!?!"

Perhaps some writers feel that it's offensive to portray a terrorist and killer as a misunderstood hero.

Morrison used Magneto to explore how violent revolutionaries like Che Guevera are viewed by a younger generation. It was clever and interesting, and it fit in with previous characterizations. It may not be what everyone would have wanted him to do with the character, or what Claremont would've done, but that hardly makes it invalid.

It does when his behavior was so wildly, and unnecessarily, out of character. Morrison could have explored those same themes without making Magneto into a genocidal, drug addled, lunatic. Morrison ended up invalidating his own argument by putting up a strawman rather than really examining the dynamic of the romantic appeal vs. the reality of terrorists.

Hence the reason it was retconned so quickly.

Totally agree with Mike Loughlin, and Joe Rice above.

Personally, if I want continuity I read manga. The universes are largely (re: almost entirely) self-contained, so continuity is easy to maintain. Superhero comics, on the other hand, are all about personalities. That's what you get when you have a shared universe. And, in my opinion, they're at their best when they remember that.

And not to open this discussion again, but when respecting continuity or character how is Magneto not a homicidal maniac? Two of the first X-Men stories I read were a reprint of number 1 and 150, and both of those paint a pretty clear picture of Magneto.

I think that a lot of the difference between the two camps here comes from what they consider the "story" - KiplingKat seems to be reading all the X-books as one giant narrative. So inconsistencies between an issue of Uncanny X-Men from 20 years ago and an issue of New X-Men now are internal inconsistencies.

I tend to look at each arc, whether it's a single issue or a TPB, as a story in its own right. The overarching framework is just that - a framework, like Tolkien had for his books (and good luck making everything in The Silmarillion consistent with The Hobbit). An even better analogy might be the the framework for Greek myths - Apollo is the sun god when needed, other times it's Helios (and later they put the two together). Everything is adjusted to the needs of the story being told.

The above may not correctly describe KiplingKat's take, so I'd be happy to be corrected if I mis-characterized it.

JMarieB--

I'm not even sure who Jean Loring is, but Hal Jordan's case, at least, is very complicated. I think (emphasis on the think) turning Hal Jordan into a drunk driver was actually a part of a long redemptive arc for him. But that's going off of what I've read here and there on CBR. The last story pre-Final Crisis that I read with him in it was New Frontier.

"And not to open this discussion again, but when respecting continuity or character how is Magneto not a homicidal maniac? Two of the first X-Men stories I read were a reprint of number 1 and 150, and both of those paint a pretty clear picture of Magneto."

First of X-Men #1 (the very first X-Men comic, which I point out was 45 years ago), where did Magneto kill anyone? (And again with Adjectiveless #1, where did he kill anyone?)

And the only people he killed in Uncanny #150 was the crew of the Russian Submarine that had fired nuclear missiles at him. You know what the U.S. would have done if a Russian sub had fired missiles at the U.S. in that time period? They would have nuked Russia. It would have World War III.

So..where is this "Homicidal maniac" again?

"And that’s just one situation Magneto was placed in that was a wealth of stories that got cut short because someone had a hate-on for Ian McKellen’s Magneto."

Where the hell did you get that one from? Is there, on record, a rant by some writer bitching about the movie Magneto, or did you just pull that out of thin air?

Also, there were not "too many mutants" before Decimation. The situation held more opportunities for more interesting stories than the one following it (and more than the status quo at most points during the previous decades as well, as far as I'm concerned). Speaking of "a wealth of stories that got cut short," there's the biggest case in X-history since, well, some other big dumb status quo change that sucked...

"I think that a lot of the difference between the two camps here comes from what they consider the “story” - KiplingKat seems to be reading all the X-books as one giant narrative. So inconsistencies between an issue of Uncanny X-Men from 20 years ago and an issue of New X-Men now are internal inconsistencies.

I tend to look at each arc, whether it’s a single issue or a TPB, as a story in its own right. The overarching framework is just that - a framework, like Tolkien had for his books (and good luck making everything in The Silmarillion consistent with The Hobbit). An even better analogy might be the the framework for Greek myths - Apollo is the sun god when needed, other times it’s Helios (and later they put the two together). Everything is adjusted to the needs of the story being told.

The above may not correctly describe KiplingKat’s take, so I’d be happy to be corrected if I mis-characterized it."

You do have the essence of it. And I do like the "frame work of LOTR" analogy. I actually think a problem with the major X-Books is that there is not framework right now. They're just winging it.

But I will say that I am not sitting here quibbling over little things, like the fact that Xavier only erased the knowledge that Hank was a mutant from the people of his hometown, not the knowledge of Hanks existence as Carey said in X-Men: Legacy. *chuckle* That kind of little stuff is just a "whoops". I've been reading comics for 24 years, I've seen plenty of "whoops". It doesn't matter.

What I am arguing for is consistency in characterization and character development.

"Where the hell did you get that one from? Is there, on record, a rant by some writer bitching about the movie Magneto, or did you just pull that out of thin air?"

I love pulling this one out...

"What people often forget, of course, is that Magneto, unlike the lovely Sir Ian McKellen, is a mad old terrorist twat. No matter how he justifies his stupid, brutal behaviour, or how anyone else tries to justify it, in the end he's just an old bastard with daft, old ideas based on violence and coercion. I really wanted to make that clear at this time." ~ Grant Morrison.

I can't think of a another character (except perhaps Phoenix), who was killed twice in one writer's run.

"Also, there were not “too many mutants” before Decimation. The situation held more opportunities for more interesting stories than the one following it (and more than the status quo at most points during the previous decades as well, as far as I’m concerned). Speaking of “a wealth of stories that got cut short,” there’s the biggest case in X-history since, well, some other big dumb status quo change that sucked… "

I agree. Decimation was a rotten idea.

What is doubly amusing about Morrison's comment is that the Movie Magneto is actually more murderous than his 616 counterpart.

He took nuclear weapons and threatened people with them. In the case of the submarine, I think that would fall under the rubric of mass murder. Magneto couldn't be at war with the Soviet Union, as he's an individual. And self defense doesn't hold up, as his powers would allow him to deal with situation in a non-lethal manner.

In just about every other appearance he made as a villain, the X-Men stopping him people does not absolve him.

"He took nuclear weapons and threatened people with them."

Oh he's threatened to destroy the world several times. But he never actually does it.

In fact, in Magneto War when Joseph destroyed the Machine Magneto was using to control the earth's magnetosphere (and thereby threaten the world) , Magneto practically killed himself (he lost his powers as a result) trying to hold the EM sphere together while he was fighting off the Joseph and the X-Men. He could have just dropped it and let the chips fall where they may, but he didn't.

No, it does not absovle him of the crime, but his restraint shows that he is not a "homicidal maniac".

"In the case of the submarine, I think that would fall under the rubric of mass murder. Magneto couldn’t be at war with the Soviet Union, as he’s an individual."

Actually it falls under Acts of War. There was a declared state of conflict between Magneto and the world...and he was ruled to be a country by the world court.

"And self defense doesn’t hold up, as his powers would allow him to deal with situation in a non-lethal manner."

Yes, he could have, but how many nations to you know of that practice that kind of restraint in war?

"In just about every other appearance he made as a villain, the X-Men stopping him people does not absolve him."

I''m not saying it does. I'm saying people are characterizing his crimes and him. He is not a "homicidal maniac", he is not genocidal fascist. He is not Osama bin Laden, he is not Hitler. He isn't even really Che Guevera. His behavior is actually more analogous to the leader of a "rogue nation" like Iraq used to be, Iran, or North Korea.

Sorry...

"I’m saying people are MIScharacterizing his crimes and him."

I have never said Magneto was a nice guy, that he was a hero. He isn't. But he is *not* evil incarnate and a lot of his behaviors are ones that we find acceptable when practiced by our own governments. Which is one of the best analogies a moral ambiguous Magneto presents to the reader.

I'm sorry, it's just such a false choice: "rather have a great story that ignores continuity than a mediocre one that's faithful to it", or whatever it is everybody keeps saying. What about a great story that's faithful to continuity while at the same time largely ignoring it? And where are these "great" continuity-spiking stories anyway? Do they even really exist? You can't tell me Morrison's X-Men would have sucked without "evil Magneto", can you? I wouldn't ask him to change a thing about his X-run, myself...but at the same time, I can't believe it would have suddenly become mediocre if if he'd changed that detail, for whatever reason.

Honestly the event that makes Magneto a mass murder is not the sinking of the submarine or the EMP in Fatal Attractions, those are both acts of war.

When he killed the crowd that prevented him from saving his daughter, that is his act of mass murder.

Well said Plok, well said indeed.

Damn, missed the hop again!

*chuckle* Don't worry about it. It's a internet, we all used to keeping track of 8 thread of conversations at once.

And I would like to add that compared to leaders of rogue nations, Magneto is actually far less murderous. When he has run his own countries, he isn't even as murderous as Doom. Not even close.

Plok, that's another false dichotomy. It's not would have Morrison's X-Men have sucked if it had a different characterization of Magneto, it's would it have been as good. And my answer is no. The Magneto/Xorn through-line was one of the main plot points that developed through the run.

The other problem here, is this is all subjective. What I think is good may be very different than what you think is good. Another example of ignoring continuity? Well, Final Crisis does so and I am enjoying that quite a bit as well. I'm sure there are other examples, but I don't really know enough about continuity in most cases to know when it's been violated.

And no one is saying that stories can't be good while adhering to continuity. Just that continuity-laden stories can be tedious, and that sometimes characters can be used to drive stories.

With that said, I'll just agree to disagree after this. It's an interesting discussion, but the fundamental differences underlying each position never seem to go away.

"And no one is saying that stories can’t be good while adhering to continuity. Just that continuity-laden stories can be tedious, and that sometimes characters can be used to drive stories."

But if the characterization make no sense, if it suddenly radically changes for no reason, how can the audience be invested in the story they are driving?

And to be honest "character driven stories" are becoming something of a rarity at Marvel these days.

And to be honest, had Morrison not turned Magneto into a strawman/raving lunatic, the end of his run could have been much better because people would have looked at the Che Guevera analogy rather than at Magneto's ridiculous behavior.

KiplingCat, you used:
I love pulling this one out…

“What people often forget, of course, is that Magneto, unlike the lovely Sir Ian McKellen, is a mad old terrorist twat. No matter how he justifies his stupid, brutal behaviour, or how anyone else tries to justify it, in the end he’s just an old bastard with daft, old ideas based on violence and coercion. I really wanted to make that clear at this time.” ~ Grant Morrison.

-as an example of Morrison having a "hate on" for McKellan's Magneto. How is calling him "lovely" a "hate on" for his portrayal? I think I see what you're trying to say, but you need to majorly re-word it.

Well, its either a hate on for Ian KcMellen's protrayal because Morrison thinks it is McKellen that made Magneto sympathetic and three dimensional, or it is a hate on for the character itself.

Either way, how he treated Magneto in his issues was obviously motivated by a personal hatred of the character, which is not exactly the most skilled, not mature, way to approach one's subject.

Sorry..."NOR the most mature...."

My typing is really crap this evening. I apologize.

"And again: Morally Ambiguous Magneto = “The 9th Greatest Comic Book Character of All Time” by both Wizard and Empire magazines.

Three dimensional Magneto = Popular Magneto."

A) Popular =/= Good.
B) Wizard and Empire =/= Anything worth quoting.

And: "What people often forget, of course, is that Magneto, unlike the lovely Sir Ian McKellen, is a mad old terrorist twat. No matter how he justifies his stupid, brutal behaviour, or how anyone else tries to justify it, in the end he’s just an old bastard with daft, old ideas based on violence and coercion. I really wanted to make that clear at this time.” ~ Grant Morrison."

. . .he's calling Ian McKellen lovely. You do realize that Ian McKellen isn't really Magneto, and that Grant Morrison realizes that, as well right? He's saying just because an actor is charming and charismatic doesn't change the fact that Magneto tends to, you know, threaten to destroy the world. He fails, because he's a mad old twat, but he's definitely a terrorist.

Oh wait...I just remembered, Magneto did kill someone in Adjectiveless #1, he killed the cop who had shot Annalee in the back just because she moved towards Magneto.

Yeah, real homicidal mania there...

"Well, its either a hate on for Ian KcMellen’s protrayal because Morrison thinks it is McKellen that made Magneto sympathetic and three dimensional, or it is a hate on for the character itself.

Either way, how he treated Magneto in his issues was obviously motivated by a personal hatred of the character, which is not exactly the most skilled, not mature, way to approach one’s subject."

Uh, OR, you know, maybe he has a "hate on" for making a hero out of a terrorist to begin with. Hence the Che comparison.

"“And again: Morally Ambiguous Magneto = “The 9th Greatest Comic Book Character of All Time” by both Wizard and Empire magazines.

Three dimensional Magneto = Popular Magneto.”

A) Popular =/= Good.
B) Wizard and Empire =/= Anything worth quoting."

It is to Marvel's marketing department, which seems to be running things at the moment.

And that in-depth characterization is good. It makes Magneto a much deeper subject, with many more stories to written, than a two dimensional stock villain ever could be.

I mean for chrissake, if you took away Magneto's mutantcy and gave him another cause, no one would blink an eye if they saw him on the nightly news. That's how realistic he is. As I said above, a character like Magneto is more usually found in dystopian SciFi novels, political thrillers, or more artistic graphic novel offerings like the Watchmen of V for Vendetta.

What person in their right mind wants to throw that kind of depth and moral ambiguity, not to mention dramatic power and story treasure trove away.... to make Magneto just another "monster of the week"?

". . .he’s calling Ian McKellen lovely. You do realize that Ian McKellen isn’t really Magneto, and that Grant Morrison realizes that, as well right? He’s saying just because an actor is charming and charismatic doesn’t change the fact that Magneto tends to, you know, threaten to destroy the world. He fails, because he’s a mad old twat, but he’s definitely a terrorist."

Personal insults? I must really be backing you into a corner.

Just as Morrison's statement is a insult to the fans, since he seems to think their perception of the character is based off of Ian McKellen's portrayal rather than reading comic books, some of us for decades, and making up our own minds.

The actor is not what made people like Magneto. Chris Claremont is what made people like Magneto, Fabien Nicieza is what made people like Magneto, Scott Lobdell is what made people like Magneto, Alan Davis is what made people like Magneto, Scott Pruett is what made people like Magneto.

Yes Magneto is charming. He is a charismatic leader. Most political leaders are. A cult of personality does not form around people who are rabid raving lunatics.

No one has forgotten that Magneto is a terrorist, I have not seen anyone claiming that Magneto is a hero. But Morrison went out of his way to make Magneto immensely more distasteful than any of his former portrayals, going far outside of character to do so, rather than working the subject more subtly, in character, and letting people make up their own minds.

He could have portrayed Magneto as he had been before, and then had him order those young kids into battle in which they would "die for the cause"...because that is how real terrorists work. That is the real ugliness. That is what is both in character and in the reality Morrison claims he was going for.

"Uh, OR, you know, maybe he has a “hate on” for making a hero out of a terrorist to begin with. Hence the Che comparison."

Who made him a hero?

No one to my knowlege. Not even Claremont.

"I am no hero. Merely a man who has seen and done and endured what can never be forgotten or forgiven." ~ Uncanny X-Men #196

Just because one enjoys the character, that does not mean one idolizes the character, or even agrees with everything the character does.

"Just as Morrison’s statement is a insult to the fans, since he seems to think their perception of the character is based off of Ian McKellen’s portrayal rather than reading comic books, some of us for decades, and making up our own minds."

Let's do some fun math here. Using the comichron.com estimates for June 2008, and assuming that each X-book sold went to a different buyer, we have 376K people buying X-books. The reality is probably under 100K, because so many people buying one of the titles are buying other ones, but I'm willing to inflate the number of comics readers. Let's pretend that all these readers have been reading the X-books for decades, too.

Then, using the worldwide theatrical gross numbers from the-numbers.com, and assuming that every ticket cost $10 and that everybody who saw it ended up going five times, we have 5.9M moviegoers. Here, I think I'm probably understating the number of people, but that's okay, too.

This means that, for every 6 people who get their idea of Magneto from the comics, there are 94 people who get it from the movies.

So, I'm pretty sure Morrison's statement is not really an insult to anybody, just a statement of fact. Now, he's addressing comics fans, but I still suspect that he's right - the movie stamped a certain view of Magneto in the public's mind. Morrison doesn't like that view, so he tried to change it.

Holy crap, I just realized that I'm turning into KiplingKat, arguing the fine points of all this. And I don't really even care about Magneto (or anything current in Marvel or DC)!

"If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

As DanLarkin commented on this earlier, I seriously have to wonder if this dichotomy of characterization is not caused by 9-11. In the 1980's and 1990's people, both writers and fans, were not as reactionary against the character (except maybe John Bryne, and even he did not go as far as some writer have in recent years). The various characterizations were pretty much in sync with one another. In the 2000's, the opinions of the character have become extremely polarized, as have his characterizations. For some people Magneto is EVIL! And anyone who sees Magneto as a three dimensional character with understandable motives is accused of saying the character is a hero.

(Which has shades of the vilification people underwent for many years whenever they suggested that while the insurgents and terrorists were violent, murderous criminals, they perhaps had a right to be angry for the U.S. foreign policy of interference, supporting of tyrants, exploitation, and so forth, in the Middle East. )

I wonder if because Americans have now personally experienced terrorism on a large scale (and 9-11 hit us as a nation harder than Oklahoma or WTC bombings in 1993), some people don't want to see anyone labeled as a terrorist portrayed in a manner that is in any way sympathetic and understandable. Terrorism = Evil, therefore Magneto = Evil. Ergo, Magneto needs to be shoved back into his shallow, simplistic Silver Age roots, no matter what has happened in the intervening 30 odd years.

Never mind the fact that Americans have not only supported, but engaged in terrorism in the past....Now that we are the victims, anyone that does so must be evil incarnate.

Obviously this is not everyone, but perhaps for a number of people...

Just a theory.

A very interesting argument Happy, but how many of those people that got their image of Magneto from the movie started buying comic books? Some for sure, but not all 94.

(And those of us who had been reading the X-Men prior to the films' release separated the film version from the comic book version. Yes, that is a Magneto, but it is not the comic book Magneto.)

As I noted earlier, McKellen's version was actually colder and more murderous then his 616 counterpart. So Morrison's statement that it was McKellen that made Magneto charming and sympathetic doesn't make sense.

And given the fan reaction to his Magneto and it's immediate retcon, I'd say Morrison made a very bad call in trying to change a situation that didn't exist.

I'm not trying to insult you, Kipling. I do honestly think you're misreading things, including Morrison's quote and what I have said.

There are evil people. They are three-dimensional. I prefer Magneto, a terrorist, to be shown, even if his deluded mind thinks he's doing something good, is really no better than those folks on the nightly news he resembles.

Terrorists believe in their cause; some have good causes. But those that threaten the world, or innocents at all . . .that's not morally ambiguous. That's morally deluded. Which is the point Morrison made with the character, and the downfall this moral delusion caused is still being felt today in some interpretations of the character.

Interpretations that some folks like; you don't. I'm glad there's comics out for both groups to read.

For the last time, he wasn't saying that Magneto was sympathetic in the film, or at all. He was comparing a fictional mad old terrorist to a lovely human being that portrayed him in a film.

OK?

And given the fan reaction to his Magneto and it’s immediate retcon,

Yeah, no one was happy when they did that bizarre ret-con.

That shit made no sense, and there wasn't even a good story idea for it.

Stupid publishers, and their stupid undoing of good Morrison!

Trying to undo the awful damage Funky just tried with his quotage. I HOPE IT WORKED

I actually don't really care about Magneto. I've barely read the X-books, I liked the first two movies, but that's about it. I don't even like Grant Morrison, particularly (this has been documented in other threads), so it's not really about defending him here, either.

I'm more interested in the general discussion about continuity, not about some particular character or some particular run. So, at least for me, that last KiplingKat comment was really irrelevant.

Besides, you're trying to describe the motives of somebody who's debating with you on a blog, and pulling in an event that occurred 7 years ago. That's really reaching. It's also a wee bit offensive.

The fact of the matter is that I want good stories, and if the author chooses to ignore some bit of history to give me that story, so be it. To argue that "it could have been just as good" is silly - you don't know that. Maybe the author just couldn't have made that work. Maybe another author could. We'll never know.

I agree with that, Tyson. I'd rather have a good story either way, with or without continuity. Forcing writers to work with something that doesn't fit, make sense, or is just plain awful (not naming any specific thing for this, as it'll vary from writer to writer and reader to reader) is just counter-productive.

Remember, Funky, you need to add a / before the second blockquote.

I’m not trying to insult you, Kipling. I do honestly think you’re misreading things, including Morrison’s quote and what I have said.

I don't think I have misread his quote at all. All I have said it that he obviously had a personal hatred for the character, either from the what the character is, or from Ian McKellen "sympathetic' portrayal. You guys are the ones jumping through hoops to make what he said sound more mature and even handed.

"There are evil people. They are three-dimensional. I prefer Magneto, a terrorist, to be shown, even if his deluded mind thinks he’s doing something good, is really no better than those folks on the nightly news he resembles."

But his actions have shown that he IS different than the terrorists on the nightly news. Magneto does not blow up marketplaces, he does not planet EID's, he does not fly planes into buildings.

He is not a terrorist in the sense we call it, he is more like the leader of a rogue nation than a terrorist.

"Terrorists believe in their cause; some have good causes. But those that threaten the world, or innocents at all . . .that’s not morally ambiguous. That’s morally deluded. Which is the point Morrison made with the character, and the downfall this moral delusion caused is still being felt today in some interpretations of the character."

First of all, many writers have made that point repeatedly without turning Magneto into a one dimensional stock villain. Claremont made it many times, Nicieza made in Fatal Attractions. Every time Magneto was beaten there was Xavier with a speech about how morally corrupt Magneto's actions were.

Secondly, what did the Israelis do when they invaded Palestine and drove the populace into refugee camps? Were those people not innocent...just as the Jews of Europe were innocent when they were driven into concentration camps? Don't they deserve a coutnry of their own where they can be safe? What is right? Are they both right, or is neither side right?

Plus we have engaged in terrorism against innocents, Tory merchants and families during the American revolution were assaulted and murdered. Abolitionists were assaulted and murdered in the decade leading up to the American Civil War. And gawd knows we have supported it in other countries when it was politically in our best interest. Don't forget who trained Osama bin laden when we needed him against the Soviets. Or who sold Hussien his chemical weapons when we needed him against the Soviet backed Iran.

So...it's just not that simple to say that someone who engages in terrorism is evil and nothing more.

Okay, this whole thing where I find myself in complete agreement with Joe Rice HAS to stop! It's starting to freak me out!

Hey, one more point that may be helpful for the pro-continuity contingent: people are often very inconsistent in real life. That's not always bad writing.

Read about the Second Desmond Rebellion sometime - it's quite fascinating how Gerald, Earl of Desmond, seems to swerve around, not only from being somewhat neutral in the first rebellion to being the leader of the second one, but also how he at times seems incredibly self-serving and evil, and at other times he's quite noble and makes sacrifices for the Irish cause. If you read a story that focused on only one episode of his life, and then read another during a different episode, you might think "that's not a consistent characterization." So, maybe think of these different versions of Magneto as just being different views of him, different phases of his life.

Or not, it's up to you.

"Besides, you’re trying to describe the motives of somebody who’s debating with you on a blog, and pulling in an event that occurred 7 years ago. That’s really reaching. It’s also a wee bit offensive."

Perhaps it was, and apologize to anyone i offended. Dan's comment did get me thinking tho' .

"The fact of the matter is that I want good stories, and if the author chooses to ignore some bit of history to give me that story, so be it. To argue that “it could have been just as good” is silly - you don’t know that. Maybe the author just couldn’t have made that work. Maybe another author could. We’ll never know."

I don't care about a "bit of history". As I said before, this is not about the little stuff. This is about consistent characterization. And that's a big thing.

And given that Morrison's goal was the make people think about the Che analogy, and instead he created a furor over a characterization, when he could have just as easily told the same story but kept Magneto in character...Yeah, I feel fairly confident in saying it could have been a much better story arc.

"I agree with that, Tyson. I’d rather have a good story either way, with or without continuity. Forcing writers to work with something that doesn’t fit, make sense, or is just plain awful (not naming any specific thing for this, as it’ll vary from writer to writer and reader to reader) is just counter-productive."

But the problem is the writers who are ignoring the continuity are the ones that are creating stories "that don't fit, make sense, or is just plain awful".

Its ignoring continuity that is counter productive.

"Read about the Second Desmond Rebellion sometime - it’s quite fascinating how Gerald, Earl of Desmond, seems to swerve around, not only from being somewhat neutral in the first rebellion to being the leader of the second one, but also how he at times seems incredibly self-serving and evil, and at other times he’s quite noble and makes sacrifices for the Irish cause. If you read a story that focused on only one episode of his life, and then read another during a different episode, you might think “that’s not a consistent characterization.” So, maybe think of these different versions of Magneto as just being different views of him, different phases of his life."

That I would say is Magneto in the 1980's and 1990's. Different phases of his life, different situations, same guy.

Now we have two very different characterizations that have little in common beyond they share the same name and have white hair, and he jumps one to another with no explanation.

And one of them is in line with his past characterization of 30 odd years...and one of them is not.

Wow. This has gotten intense.

I definitely agree with the notion that 9/11 is part of the problem. A lot of writers seem to have said "now that actual evil has affected my life, I can never write a villain as a sympathetic character again." Not a good idea. They tried to turn the Joker into Osama Bin Laden for that movie. Remember when the Joker used to be fun?

Oh, now that's depressing. I haven't seen Dark Knight yet, but I had heard many good things about it.

Trying to undo the awful damage Funky just tried with his quotage. I HOPE IT WORKED

Cheers big ears!

And given that Morrison’s goal was the make people think about the Che analogy, and instead he created a furor over a characterization, when he could have just as easily told the same story but kept Magneto in character…Yeah, I feel fairly confident in saying it could have been a much better story arc.

But he did...

The story was about how when Magneto died, his ideology inspired people to start to accept mutants - not the way he envisioned, but they were on the way to becoming mainstream (the parallels were there to gay and black culture in their early days of crossing over into white culture).

Whilst recuperating, Magneto started taking Kick so that he could operate with his powers at full force, either to seek revenge, or even give the world the leader he thought it wanted (as he mistook the love of him he was receiving whilst dead as a want for him to come back and lead, as shown by his confusion when the crowd doesn't respond to him in Planet X).

The problem with Kick is that it allowed Sublime, the ancient gene/bacteria to which can't live in mutants (or was it the defense to the extinction gene in humanity? Been awhile since I read it, and I've got a cold today and can't think) to take control of him, as Kick was actually a highly concentrated dose of Sublime.

Sublime took control of him, and set about doing anything and everything it could to take down Mutants, especially the X-men, hence Planet X.

So if you don't like Magnetos actions at all in that story, that was because Sublime was in control.

If you do like them, Sublime only pushed him to do what he truly wanted him to do.

The story had a built in out, it didn't need retconning, and it only changed the character as much as you wanted it to.

When has Magneto ever been a drug addict before this storyline?

That just falls in with the "oh he was faking" excuse from Uncanny #500. It still doesn't work in terms of character (not only is he not a drug addict, Magneto would rather die than enact a genocide) and storytelling.

I''m just going to reiterate a point I made above and then I'm off. In the last 8 years Magneto has been put through the wringer like never before. The Genoshan Massacre (failure as a mutant leader), Wanda's madness (the first time Magneto actually tried to be "the good father" and he fails) and then culminating in House of M/M-Day in which his dearest dreams were granted, and then ripped away from him. In which he is indirectly responsible (both being the father of the ones responsible and in killing his own son he set Wanda off) for what is close to his worst nightmare: the elimination of the mutant species. And in losing both his life's work, and his own mutation, his own child ripped out a keystone of Magneto's adult identity.

He was literally suicidal walking into House of M...and then M-Day happened. This is not "his GF left him", this is major "hitting rock bottom" stuff.

No one has tackled dealing with the emotional fall out of these events. Bendis touched on it briefly in New Avengers #20, but since then writers have been studiously ignoring it. And now we have this Silver Age thing, which makes zero sense at all, not in the last 30 years of characterization but especially in the last 8. There is no way Magneto can be running around convinced of the rightness of his actions when his actions were indirectly responsible for what happened, on top of his previous failures. Not without some major emotional soul searching and change in direction, which is what most people do when they hit rock bottom.

Magneto has not been emotionally torn down this far since the night Anya died and Magda left him. Now that event was a major catalyst/turning point for the character. He cites that event as much, if not more, than the Holocaust.

And we have also seen Magneto be deeply affected by "lesser" events, such as the near death of Kitty Pryde, which started Magneto on the road to his Reformation period. Magneto is a character capable of growth, even when he returned to villainy, he still did not go back to what he was before. His goals changed from world conquest to mutant separatism, he treated the Acolytes far better than he had the Brotherhood. It's a "two steps forward, one step back" kind of growth.

So there Magneto is, a character capable of emotional growth, ripped down to his core having just been at the center of major universe and therefore one would think, character altering events...and where is the character going from here? What makes sense given what the character has just been through?

When has Magneto ever been a drug addict before this storyline?

Never.

He was at a low point in his life, his body was wrecked, his people dead, and along came a drug that could boost your powers.

He would have dabbled at first, to help his healing, and before he knew it addicted - but as it was helping him with his plans, he wouldn't have seen it as addiction.

That said, it's a rather silly question - when were most drug addicts before they started taking the drug they got addicted to?
I'd never been addicted to smoking in my life before I got addicted to smoking.

What makes sense given what the character has just been through?

Going bug-fuck crazy and being unpredictable from one day to the next?

Stress and grief will do that to you.

See, it's that easy to make an out for a story you don't like.

Dan, from way back there: no, they never do, do they? But give me this last crack at it, because in my view it isn't at all a false dichotomy, because we're not talking about plots, we're (apparently) talking about greatness. And plots aren't great, they just hold the water.

The only false dichotomy I'm seeing here is the "you can have it in continuity or you can have it great, but not both ways" idea that seems to underlie the suggestion that there's great work out there somewhere that continuity is acting as a brake on. But why blame "continuity"? For heaven's sake Tintin has continuity, continuity's not just this evil thing that tramps on stories, it is whether the stories are any good anyway that makes the continuity in them good or bad, worth saving or better gotten rid of. Anyone could write an existing superhero comic book and leave most of its continuity right out -- violated, preserved, if you just stop touching all that old stuff the question doesn't even arise. Even with Magneto! Magneto wants something, the X-Men don't want him to have it, they fight. That's the freakin' basics of the comic. That's the plot. So where does the continuity come in, and who carries it in?

Give you an example: Deadly Genesis. All about continuity. Reference to old Apocalypse/Mr. Sinister plot, check, You know, gak, but check. "Krakoa The Living Island" was a stupid idea, check. Something was a lie for the last thirty years, check. But seriously now, I like Bru, but there was a case where he might have done anything, but decided to turn the continuity machine up to eleven instead. So everything I know is wrong again, sigh. But this doesn't mean he wrote a great story and continuity be damned, this means he wrote a story that deliberately screwed with continuity because that was the story he wanted to tell. And that, it seems to me, is what we're really talking about, because no one gets upset at the stories that break new ground and leave continuity to one side while they're doing it, they only get upset at stories that keep on coming over to where continuity lives and repainting the walls 'cause they don't like the colour. So the anti-continuity feeling doesn't seem to be, as Tyson has suggested, about not caring if a writer ignores some arbitrary thirty-year-old filigree in the service of a good story...that doesn't bother me either. What bothers me is that when somebody busts continuity because they can't think of anything else to do, somebody else comes along and says they don't care because continuity shouldn't get in the way of a good story...and I agree, it shouldn't, but when writers go all John Byrne on continuity anyway just because they think the Scarlet Witch is a slut or whatever, it looks like changing things to suit themselves is the only story they're interested in telling, and then it gets in the damn way in exactly the way you all say it shouldn't. But it does. Ignoring continuity in the name of a good story, hell yes! Super-defensible! Blowing it to hell and back in search of one, not so much.

Now, maybe I differ from KiplingKat in that I have no problem with Morrison's Magneto -- I found it perfectly rationalizable, pretty much exactly as Funky said. But it did require some rationalization, as most of Morrison's work does, so I can understand where KK's coming from. And, did it have to be that way? I'm with Tyson: it's something we can't expect to know. But then we certainly can't expect to know the opposite either -- it's not a perfect example, but Claremont and Byrne had a story they wanted to tell in X-Men #137, that met with a big shitload of editorial interference, and actually we got a good story out of it anyway, and who knows, now, if their way was the right way, or Shooter's was? I think it was Shooter's, but this isn't High Art, so it probably doesn't matter too much, or at worst it might matter once every twenty years or something, so I don't know how restricted by continuity writers actually feel, but I bet it's not a lot...and especially not these days.

Oh, two more quick things about how nonsensical Morrison's Planet X was.

A. Why would Magneto, who had worked most of his adult life to gain a foothold for Mutants, give up his only legal possession for them by leaving Genosha when there was still "his people" on it...to go slumming in China?

B. How did Magneto manage to hide his presence from both Xavier and Wolverine while living right under their noses?

"I’d never been addicted to smoking in my life before I got addicted to smoking."

You weren't in your late 70's when you started smoking. That's how old Magneto was when that storyline went down.

And just because some people become drug addicts, that does not mean ALL people exposed to a drug become drug addicts. Magneto is a scientific genius, you do really think he just grabbed some Kick and huffed without figuring out what it was first?

"Going bug-fuck crazy and being unpredictable from one day to the next?

Stress and grief will do that to you.

See, it’s that easy to make an out for a story you don’t like."

And it easy to rationalize stories you do like.

"Anything goes! Wheeee! Emma can be Buddhist in the next issue! Logan can be a pacifist metrosexual!"

People do go crazy from stress and grief, but they go crazy in ways that make sense, that are in line with their personalities, their characters.

Uncanny #500 wasn't that.

Plok...I'd say "marry me" if it wouldn't make me look totally bizarre.

So...*stands up and claps*

Well Said!

Why would Magneto, who had worked most of his adult life to gain a foothold for Mutants, give up his only legal possession for them by leaving Genosha when there was still “his people” on it…to go slumming in China?

Because his nation was destroyed - Emma was the only survivor I ever saw from it in the book.
The Genosha plan had failed, and so it was time to try something new.
(which also can explain the change in tactics).

B. How did Magneto manage to hide his presence from both Xavier and Wolverine while living right under their noses?

How has anyone ever snuck up on the x-men? It happens.
I actually believe it was explained in the story - Xavier is easy... he was wearing his helmet.

You weren’t in your late 70’s when you started smoking. That’s how old Magneto was when that storyline went down.

And just because some people become drug addicts, that does not mean ALL people exposed to a drug become drug addicts. Magneto is a scientific genius, you do really think he just grabbed some Kick and huffed without figuring out what it was first?

BUT, the drug Magneto took boosts mutant powers, which he would have needed boosted as he was weakened and alone.
He would have needed the boost just to heal and defend himself.
As he was using the drug, which was actually SUBLIME (there's your big out for not liking the story, but accepting it) it took over and influenced his thoughts.

And yeah, it took everyone ages to realise Sublime was Kick.
What's Magnetos scientific specialty? Why would he have expected the drugs to be a sentient gene?

Another note - most people don't turn to vices in the good times (except rock stars), and Magneto was not in good times.
Overcome by grief and in need of a power boost, he started taking Kick.
What's wrong with that?

And it easy to rationalize stories you do like.

Actually, you don't have to rationalise them, you just enjoy them.

You're the one kicking up the fuss.

People do go crazy from stress and grief, but they go crazy in ways that make sense, that are in line with their personalities, their characters.

How do you go crazy in a way that makes sense?

I get what you are trying to say, but you're ignoring that people do go crazy and lose it.
Mental institutions and prisons are full of them.

It would never work, KK -- I liked Planet X.

The thing is, continuity's an open-ended process -- the next writer always inherits all the good and bad stuff from his predecessors anyway, and everything gets fixed-up eventually, provided only that the people running the joint are pros and not overgrown fanboys...

But it did require some rationalization, as most of Morrison’s work does, so I can understand where KK’s coming from.

What's rationalisation?

The story said he was under the influence of Sublime.

Well, all that stuff about Magneto having been through crazy shit, that you were just going through, that's the rationalization, connecting those dots...

Wow, a lot of posts yesterday!

Kipling, I'm amazed you brought up Vonnegut. He's one of my favorites. And he's one of the best arguments for a more fluid view of continuity.

The character Kilgore Trout appears in seven (or about half) of Vonnegut's novels, even though the novels are vastly different from another in setting, plot, theme and sometimes tone. Kilgore Trout is always seen as a science fiction novelist, and usually a science fiction novelist whose books tend to wind up in the porn section. This is sort of the central spine of Kilgore Trout's character, and there are a few traits that are common to the character's appearance in each of the books.

However (and I have a little help from Wikipedia here): among the different novels, Trout is given two different dates of birth, and at least three different dates of death, as well as several different means of death. And while Kilgore Trout seems to be much the same person between Breakfast Of Champions, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater and Timequake, for example, the Kilgore Trout in Jailbird was quite a different backstory from the Kilgore Trouts in ALL of the other novels. And in one book (I forget which one) Kilgore Trout is revealed to have twenty one eyes. (Which it's safe enough to presume he doesn't in the others, at least in Jailbird or Breakfast where he certainly interacts with others in the cast like a relatively normal human being).

With a strict view of continuity, there is no possible way to reconcile one version of Kilgore Trout from another. And all of these stories are written by the same author!

Now I happen to think Trout is an excellent example of a Stan Lee style "shared Universe" in modern literature, and he's even made appearances outside Vonnegut's novels, having been alluded to by Salman Rushdie's characters, and thanked in liner notes (as though a real person) by Ringo Starr. But Vonnegut obviously doesn't sweat the continuity. He has an overall vision for who Kilgore Trout is. But he's not bound by the details. If he wants to change something (even something big, as in Jailbird), then he does it. It doesn't weaken the character. It doesn't weaken the novels. It just means we've got more than one vision of Kilgore Trout. In each story the character plays a little differently.

When most Marvel writers have written about Thor, they show him as a superhero who speaks in archaic English. When Neil Gaiman wrote about Thor, he was a big clumsy oaf boasting of his sexual adventures. Do these stories weaken the continuity of the Norse myths?

How many different versions of Robin Hood did you see when you were growing up? Or Peter Pan?

A fluid view of continuity DOES mean that all the details don't add up at the end of the day; they don't for Kilgore Trout, or for Thor (historically speaking), or for Robin Hood... or for Magneto. Why sweat the details? Why not enjoy each story on its own terms?

When I hear fans crying for continuity (and I used to be one of them), what I feel like they're really crying out for is integrity. But in storytelling, the real question of integrity can only be answered within the story itself. It doesn't matter to so much whether one writer's vision of a character fits with another''s; only that it fits with the other characters, and with the overall vision that the writer has for the story.

Having said that about rigid continuity, I do agree with plok that going back into old stories and radically changing the continuity CAN be a tricky issue.

With Deadly Genesis is it was just a bit foolhardy of Bru to come onto a book that he really didn't get and start mucking with it so substantially right away. He didn't know the characters very well. He hadn't read the X-Men when he was a kid. And in his first arc he killed a fairly substantial character, seriously defamed another and wound up completely rewriting a pretty major part of the X-Men's history. Doesn't matter how good a writer you are; that's bad form.

On the other hand, where would Swamp Thing (or indeed, any Veritgo comic at all) be if Moore hadn't re-envisioned the entire premise of the series?

Plok said:

"But this doesn’t mean he wrote a great story and continuity be damned, this means he wrote a story that deliberately screwed with continuity because that was the story he wanted to tell. And that, it seems to me, is what we’re really talking about, because no one gets upset at the stories that break new ground and leave continuity to one side while they’re doing it, they only get upset at stories that keep on coming over to where continuity lives and repainting the walls ’cause they don’t like the colour."

Ok, this I can totally get behind. Mucking about with continuity, and changing the nature of past stories is odd, and doesn't really serve to advance the story. It's the difference between ignoring Morrison's stories and actively going back and changing the universe such that they didn't happen.

On things like Tintin, though, isn't that closer to the manga example? A self-contained universe, consistent characters, development over time, etc. Continuity seems to be much easier to maintain when you're not connected with 80 other titles a month.

See, the thing that really gets me up in arms is contiuity of characterization. As far as I can recall, ever since Reed and Sue Richards got married, Reed has been shown to be a faithful husband. Now if somebody wrote a story where one night Reed left his lab, went to a singles bar, picked up some strange woman, and had a night of wild sex, wouldn't you be inclined to say: "What the hell is going on here?" Even if it was a great story, if there was no explantion for his behavior, I know I'd be thinking, "That's not Reed. Not really."

Am I making my point clear?

Stefan, I know about Kilgore Trout, and I don't think that argument holds as the continuity remains solid within the stories themselves. Kilgore Trout does not suddenly change and get twenty eyes within the same story, for no reason. As I pointed out earlier, comic books are a serial medium like Babylon Five, not episodic like old Star Trek.

JMarieB -

So, you're saying that things like that never happen? Apparently faithful husband snaps, goes and has an affair?

Happens all the time. (Unfortunately.)

I don't think that sounds like a very good story, but the problem isn't that it's unrealistic - it's that we don't like the place they take the character.

Just like most of the complaints above aren't really about whether Magneto character is developed rationally from past sources, but rather about whether they like the direction the author took Magneto.

I have no problem with that complaint, by the way, I just think it's odd to defend it in terms of continuity. People act inconsistently all the time. Sometimes it's because they've really changed, sometimes it's because your prior knowledge of them was incomplete or inaccurate.

Kipling, we're not talking about the same story with the X-Men either. You seen to want it to be one continuous story from 1963 up to the present day, but it's not. The X-Men aren't just one story. They're a mythology, from which lots of different stories sprout.

True, Jailbird is one story and Breakfast of Champions is another.

And Mike Carey's Xavier/Magneto/Exodus was one story, and Uncanny 500 is another.

"Because his nation was destroyed - Emma was the only survivor I ever saw from it in the book.
The Genosha plan had failed, and so it was time to try something new.
(which also can explain the change in tactics)."

Actually, they were finding dozens of survivors at the same time they found Emma. You saw the medial tents.

And even if there were not survivors, Magneto had been through Hell and back to gain Genosha, why would the guy who has rebuilt Asteroid M three times give up an entire country?

To go slumming in China?

"How has anyone ever snuck up on the x-men? It happens.
I actually believe it was explained in the story - Xavier is easy… he was wearing his helmet."

For months? 24/7? Never taking it off?

He must have smelled like mofo then, so wouldn't Logan have picked up on who he was?

"BUT, the drug Magneto took boosts mutant powers, which he would have needed boosted as he was weakened and alone.

He would have needed the boost just to heal and defend himself."

How did the drug heal his severed spine BTW?

"And yeah, it took everyone ages to realise Sublime was Kick.
What’s Magnetos scientific specialty? Why would he have expected the drugs to be a sentient gene?"

And Magneto is a genius in genetic engineering (He created Savage Land Mutates, and Alpha the Ultimate Mutant), not to mention being extremely paranoid. I don't think he would have simply gabbed to drug and starts huffing away without knowing what it was.

"As he was using the drug, which was actually SUBLIME (there’s your big out for not liking the story, but accepting it) it took over and influenced his thoughts."

Had Morrison NOT made Magneto reenacting the Final Solution, then I might have bought it. But Magneto would rather die than become Hitler, and his iron will is rather legendary.

"Another note - most people don’t turn to vices in the good times (except rock stars), and Magneto was not in good times.
Overcome by grief and in need of a power boost, he started taking Kick.
What’s wrong with that?"

Because that is not in everyone character. Magneto went through the 4 years in Auschwitz, losing his entire family, then lost his daughter. and the woman he loved, whom he had proven himself to again, left him, calling him a monster.

If Magneto did not turn to drugs or alcohol after all that...he wasn't going to later.

"Actually, you don’t have to rationalise them, you just enjoy them."

You do if it doesn't make sense, and Planet X does not make sense to me.

"How do you go crazy in a way that makes sense?"

Take a college psycology class. There numerous textbooks on how people go crazy in keeping with personality types and specific events.

" get what you are trying to say, but you’re ignoring that people do go crazy and lose it.
Mental institutions and prisons are full of them."

No, I am certainly not ignoring people go crazy, I'm saying that "crazy" is not whatever the writer happens to want at the moment. Crazy is not a license to write whatever you want. Even "crazy" has to make sense in terms of character and events.

For instance, "Let's have Emma become a materialism-rejecting, pacifist Buddhist in the next issue, because she's crazy...and on drugs!"

It just doesn't work.

"Kipling, we’re not talking about the same story with the X-Men either. You seen to want it to be one continuous story from 1963 up to the present day, but it’s not. The X-Men aren’t just one story. They’re a mythology, from which lots of different stories sprout.

True, Jailbird is one story and Breakfast of Champions is another.

And Mike Carey’s Xavier/Magneto/Exodus was one story, and Uncanny 500 is another."

Unfortunately, that does work because the current stories are built on previous stories in the past. They do not start utterly anew, with new characters and new worlds, in each story arc.

And titles even build on the continuity of events in other titles. It's one big serial medium. That's the joy and the pain of mainstream superhero comic books.

(And I said one story from Giant Size X-Men #1 to now, there was a break there.)

Thing is, Claremont's reinturpretation/retcon of Magneto (which I liked) is a greater departure from the Stan Lee/ Roy Thomas Magneto than the Morrison version (which I also liked) is from Claremont's (especially if you take into account all the stuff that happened in the decade between Claremont's first run and "Planet X"). If the whole 45 year history of the X-Men is one continous storyline, the only conclusive thing once can say about Magneto is that he has behaved inconsistantly over the years.

"If Magneto did not turn to drugs or alcohol after all that…he wasn’t going to later."

I dunno, helplessly watching your entire country be slaughtered? Kind of a big deal.

See, here's the thing. You see Magneto as this noble, high-willpower, morally-ambiguous figure. That's an interesting interpretation for you, and there are and will be plenty of comics where he is shown as such.

But to some people, that sounds more like a boring, muddled, unrealistic Claremontian throwback that glorifies an incompetent terrorist and killer. It's a fictional character with lots of interpretations, so it's nothing personal to see it differently. I see an old fool who'd failed at his many attempts to kill or dominate, finally had something close to what he wanted, and saw it wiped off the face of the planet. Of course this vengeful terrorist was going to go even further this time.

Just like most of the complaints above aren’t really about whether Magneto character is developed rationally from past sources, but rather about whether they like the direction the author took Magneto.

I have no problem with that complaint, by the way, I just think it’s odd to defend it in terms of continuity. People act inconsistently all the time. Sometimes it’s because they’ve really changed, sometimes it’s because your prior knowledge of them was incomplete or inaccurate.

People act inconsistent in their personal consistent manners. Everyone has their own "major malfunction". In Reed Richard's case it is not not adultery and proving his manhood or seeking intimacy or validation from another woman, it's about being an emotionally unavailable workaholic. He isn't about seeking intimacy to replace his wife's, he's about avoiding intimacy entirely. He is less likely to walking and have a one night stand than he is to accidentally wipe out the universe after 52 hours of coffee and radical experiments.

People, have emotional breakdowns, but they do not suddenly become different people. They still are who they are. So their emotional breakdowns have to be written in the context of that character.

If Doom had an emotional breakdown, you would NOT expect to see him shopping on 5th Avenue for women's clothing. If Doom is going to go crazy, he ius going to go crazy in a manner consistent with Doom.

"And titles even build on the continuity of events in other titles. It’s one big serial medium. That’s the joy and the pain of mainstream superhero comic books."

And again, for you and some folks, that's the joy and pain. Plenty of us are perfectly happy reading just the stories we like and paying zero attention to the rest. There's room for both, which was my point from the beginning.

"Crazy" isn't always as consistent as you seem to think it is.

Okay. Enjoy your zeal, then.

But I will say one more thing: It isn't new. You suggested this divide about Magneto's character happened after 2001. (That post was AGES ago in blog time, but only yesterday, and I'm in a different timezone so I missed most of the follow-up discussion since then).

A decade ago I remember quite vividly people were arguing just as dogmatically about Magneto and how he was being portrayed. Except in 1998, the villains weren't Morrison and Brubaker.

They were Scott Lobdell, Fabian Nicieza, Jim Lee, Bob Harras, Mark Powers... everybody since Claremont. At the time the Magneto fanatics of the world -- or at least those that were vocal online -- did not see Fatal Attractions, or any of Mangeto's villainy after 1990, as natural extensions of the Erik's previous characterization. It was well-documented that Claremont and the X-office fell out over Magneto becoming a villain again, and that even while Jim Lee wasn't writing, he was plotting, and the editor, Harras, favored his superstar artist over his writer. You're right that Magneto was probably never meant to be a superhero or an X-Man in a long-lasting way, but Claremont definitely didn't want him to become a villain again and he's said that numerous times. Keep in mind, the Savage Land stories, 269 and from the 270's, were all during Lee's tenure too.

And the Magneto fans were furious. They're still furious, but now they have different targets for their anger. So it's got nothing to do with 9/11. Magneto himself is just a, ahem, polarizing figure.

“If Magneto did not turn to drugs or alcohol after all that…he wasn’t going to later.”

I dunno, helplessly watching your entire country be slaughtered? Kind of a big deal.

Considering he's helplessly watched it before?

And then only after he lost everyone he loved, discovered he had the powers by which he could have saved everyone.

"See, here’s the thing. You see Magneto as this noble, high-willpower, morally-ambiguous figure. That’s an interesting interpretation for you, and there are and will be plenty of comics where he is shown as such."

First of all, I would like for ANYONE here to point out where I used the word "noble", Once again i am accused of seeing Magneto as a "hero" when in fact I am doing nothing more than seeing him as three dimensional.

People should really think about that reaction.

"But to some people, that sounds more like a boring, muddled, unrealistic Claremontian throwback that glorifies an incompetent terrorist and killer."

Wow, people are really proving the point I made last night aren't they.

How is Magneto "unrealistic". In fact I kind of have pointed out over in over, in the analogies Magneto presents to real world stations, in the type of character he is, he is perhaps one of the MOST realistic characters in the M.U.

Here a fact that people have to deal with if terrorism is ever going to end. Terrorists are not ciphers, they are not cardboard cut outs on a shooting range, they're people, with motivations. And while their actions are wrong, a lot of their motivations have validity.

The Nat Turner rebellion was a series of horrid massacres, murders, but he was attacking a system that had enslaved, murdered, raped, his people for hundreds of years. Yeah, what he did was wrong, but didn't he have valid motivations? Didn't the IRA? (Hell, people in the U.S. used to donate money to them) Didn't the Mujahideen? Didn't the Sepoys? Didn't the American Revolutionaries?

So how is Magneto unrealistic again?

"It’s a fictional character with lots of interpretations, so it’s nothing personal to see it differently. I see an old fool who’d failed at his many attempts to kill or dominate, finally had something close to what he wanted, and saw it wiped off the face of the planet. Of course this vengeful terrorist was going to go even further this time."

So..basically you are admitting you hated the character and wanted to see him portrayed in a extremely negative light and wanted to see him suffer?

Here's another tip off, Magneto is not driven by vengence. He's driven by survivors guilt. Were he driven by vengeance, Germany would have been a smoking crater a long time ago.

"Thing is, Claremont’s reinturpretation/retcon of Magneto (which I liked) is a greater departure from the Stan Lee/ Roy Thomas Magneto than the Morrison version (which I also liked) is from Claremont’s (especially if you take into account all the stuff that happened in the decade between Claremont’s first run and “Planet X”). If the whole 45 year history of the X-Men is one continous storyline, the only conclusive thing once can say about Magneto is that he has behaved inconsistantly over the years."

Here's the thing, Claremont did not "retcon" or "reinterpret" Magneto. He developed him. Over years.

Magneto had no background prior to Uncanny #150, and after Uncanny #150 it took five years for Magneto to join the X-Men.

That's not "reinterpretation", that's character devlopment.

“Crazy” isn’t always as consistent as you seem to think it is."

Speaking from personal experience, yes it is.

I want people to look at something here. In the opposing arguments, both terrorists and crazy people cease to have any rational motivations that need to be understood...basically they cease to be considered as human beings.

Think about that one.

But I will say one more thing: It isn’t new. You suggested this divide about Magneto’s character happened after 2001. (That post was AGES ago in blog time, but only yesterday, and I’m in a different timezone so I missed most of the follow-up discussion since then).

A decade ago I remember quite vividly people were arguing just as dogmatically about Magneto and how he was being portrayed. Except in 1998, the villains weren’t Morrison and Brubaker.

They were Scott Lobdell, Fabian Nicieza, Jim Lee, Bob Harras, Mark Powers… everybody since Claremont. At the time the Magneto fanatics of the world — or at least those that were vocal online — did not see Fatal Attractions, or any of Mangeto’s villainy after 1990, as natural extensions of the Erik’s previous characterization. It was well-documented that Claremont and the X-office fell out over Magneto becoming a villain again, and that even while Jim Lee wasn’t writing, he was plotting, and the editor, Harras, favored his superstar artist over his writer. You’re right that Magneto was probably never meant to be a superhero or an X-Man in a long-lasting way, but Claremont definitely didn’t want him to become a villain again and he’s said that numerous times. Keep in mind, the Savage Land stories, 269 and from the 270’s, were all during Lee’s tenure too.

And the Magneto fans were furious. They’re still furious, but now they have different targets for their anger. So it’s got nothing to do with 9/11. Magneto himself is just a, ahem, polarizing figure.

Yeah, but not this polarizing. Magneto may have gone back to villainy, but through most of the 1990's his characterization was consistent with that development. Yes, there were different interpretations of the character, just look at the difference between Lobdell's Magneto and Nicieza's within Fatal Attractions itself, but they could all be seen as shades of the same character.

Now we have the Magneto of X-men: Legacy...and the Magneto of Uncanny #500 back to back. Show me where Magneto ever made a single leap that vast in the 1990's.

And It may have been editorials decision to make Magneto a villain again, but Clarmeont made it work and fortunate, he (and Simonson) had been laying the ground work for it years prior.

"Considering he’s helplessly watched it before?"

Yes. Especially considering that. One can only see that so many times, I would assume. The fact that a terrorist like that didn't snap earlier is silly.

"First of all, I would like for ANYONE here to point out where I used the word “noble”, Once again i am accused of seeing Magneto as a “hero” when in fact I am doing nothing more than seeing him as three dimensional."

Look, I'm not trying to say you like terrorists. That's not my intention. Perhaps noble was the wrong word, but it is a feeling I get from some die-hard Magneto/Claremont fans. Perhaps "strong" is the better word? This talk of his indomitable willpower and such . . .I get the feeling that you simply (and people that agree with you) see him as a much stronger character in these terms, even if you morally disapprove of his actions.

What I'm saying is that there's a point of view I share with some folks that Claremont didn't make him more three-dimensional. He added gravitas in a clumsy, heavy-handed way and switched a perfectly serviceable villain/foil to a middle-of-the road blob of blah.

"Wow, people are really proving the point I made last night aren’t they."

Er, no, they aren't.

"How is Magneto “unrealistic”. In fact I kind of have pointed out over in over, in the analogies Magneto presents to real world stations, in the type of character he is, he is perhaps one of the MOST realistic characters in the M.U."

Well, yes, when he's a mad old terrorist twat, certainly. But when he's this stark, noble teacher-of-children Claremontian thing, no. That part is ridiculous and so far off base it's weird--TO SOME OF US. To some folks, you prefer that. Cool. Again, I'm glad we both have comics we can enjoy.

"Here a fact that people have to deal with if terrorism is ever going to end. Terrorists are not ciphers, they are not cardboard cut outs on a shooting range, they’re people, with motivations. And while their actions are wrong, a lot of their motivations have validity."

Um, OK.

"The Nat Turner rebellion was a series of horrid massacres, murders, but he was attacking a system that had enslaved, murdered, raped, his people for hundreds of years. Yeah, what he did was wrong, but didn’t he have valid motivations? Didn’t the IRA? (Hell, people in the U.S. used to donate money to them) Didn’t the Mujahideen? Didn’t the Sepoys? Didn’t the American Revolutionaries?"

I've already said that some terrorists have valid causes. I can't even get into the weird grey line between terrorism and rebellion, but suffice to say Magneto =/= George Washington or even Nat Turner.

"So how is Magneto unrealistic again?"

Well, first off he is a mutant that can control magnetism. Also he's like 90 or something and . . .OK, that's not what you mean. Magneto is unrealistic to different people for different reasons. To you, it's unrealistic that he went crazy, got taken over by a viral being, and tried to kill everyone. To me, he's unrealistic because he went from trying to kill everyone to teaching kids and such.

Nice that we both have the option to ignore the stories that either don't make sense or are lame to us.

"So..basically you are admitting you hated the character and wanted to see him portrayed in a extremely negative light and wanted to see him suffer?"

Uh, this is where we get a huge disconnect. I don't hate the character, never have. He's fictional. Why the hell would I hate a series of drawings? Do I think it's appropriate to portray an old terrorist in negative light? Of course, especially if the story calls for that. I mean, really, "see him suffer"? What?

"Here’s another tip off, Magneto is not driven by vengence. He’s driven by survivors guilt. Were he driven by vengeance, Germany would have been a smoking crater a long time ago."

Let's not pretend there's not a whole lot of other reasons, mostly meta-textual publishing reasons, that never happened.

KiplingKat -

Dude, write a complete answer, then post it all at once. (Please note: complete doesn't mean the same thing as long-winded.)

The only reason we're at 150+ comments on this post is because you post four times every time anybody writes anything.

Take a deep breath, collect your thoughts, and write one comment. Try it - you'll sound more thoughtful and rational.

And, more importantly, my inbox will stop getting spammed with 4 notifications every time you have something to say.

"That’s not “reinterpretation”, that’s character devlopment."

Your "character development" seems a whole lot like "reinterpretation" to some folks. That's something you're going to have to live with. To us, it makes no sense and lessens the character.

"Speaking from personal experience, yes it is."

Personal experience is the opposite of always. Do people usually go "crazy" in predictable ways? Yes. Always? Absolutely not.

"I want people to look at something here. In the opposing arguments, both terrorists and crazy people cease to have any rational motivations that need to be understood…basically they cease to be considered as human beings.

Think about that one."

COMPLETELY OUT OF LINE. You are comparing people talking about a fictional character with dehumanization of real human beings. Absolute bullshit on that, I have to call it. Not a single person here has said what you claim here. At most, we've said SOME terrorists or "crazy" people don't have rational motivations. Nothing about needing to understand and nothing about their supposed lack of humanity.

Completely out of line.

"Yes. Especially considering that. One can only see that so many times, I would assume. The fact that a terrorist like that didn’t snap earlier is silly."

Why, because terrorists are somehow more susceptible to falling apart in the face of horrible events than other people? They are they somehow mentally and emotionally more deficient than the average person?

Is that what is so scary about this character? The fact that a person who is otherwise just like you can become a terrorist if put in the wrong situation?

"Look, I’m not trying to say you like terrorists. That’s not my intention. Perhaps noble was the wrong word, but it is a feeling I get from some die-hard Magneto/Claremont fans. Perhaps “strong” is the better word? This talk of his indomitable willpower and such . . .I get the feeling that you simply (and people that agree with you) see him as a much stronger character in these terms, even if you morally disapprove of his actions."

First of all, I have already said that my favorite protayal of Magneto is Nicieza's. He I think got the character closest to the "center" of all his various portrayals. Claremont was a little too "Warm, n' Fuzzy Uncle Magnus", Lobdell was a little too "Raving Madman". (Morrison simply went off the Reservation.) Nicieza nailed a nice middle ground.

Secondly, the character's indomitable will has been commented on several time before by various people, including telepaths.

Third, I see Magneto as a strong character because of his complexity, his moral ambiguity, his realism, the analogies he presents to real world people and events. The dramatic power of the character is undeniable.

"What I’m saying is that there’s a point of view I share with some folks that Claremont didn’t make him more three-dimensional. He added gravitas in a clumsy, heavy-handed way and switched a perfectly serviceable villain/foil to a middle-of-the road blob of blah."

And think about it, if Magneto was just a stock villain of the week, if he were not this morally ambiguous and complex, would we even be having this discussion? Isn't the fact that he is so polarizing a sign that he is not, as you say "middle-of-the road blob of blah"? Doesn't that say something about the power of the character as a three dimensional person?

"I’ve already said that some terrorists have valid causes. I can’t even get into the weird grey line between terrorism and rebellion, but suffice to say Magneto =/= George Washington or even Nat Turner."

Why not?

Other than the fact he is in fact far less of a "homicidal maniac" than Nat Turner was.

"Well, first off he is a mutant that can control magnetism. Also he’s like 90 or something and . . .OK, that’s not what you mean. Magneto is unrealistic to different people for different reasons. To you, it’s unrealistic that he went crazy, got taken over by a viral being, and tried to kill everyone. To me, he’s unrealistic because he went from trying to kill everyone to teaching kids and such."

Menachim Begin went from blowing up British Hotels to signing the Camp David Accords as PM of Isreal.

It happens.

"Nice that we both have the option to ignore the stories that either don’t make sense or are lame to us."

Given that mainstream superhero comics are a serial medium, I don't have that option. And I really wonder at people who say that they do...and if they really *never* complain about breaks in continuity.

"Uh, this is where we get a huge disconnect. I don’t hate the character, never have. He’s fictional. Why the hell would I hate a series of drawings? Do I think it’s appropriate to portray an old terrorist in negative light? Of course, especially if the story calls for that. I mean, really, “see him suffer”? What?"

You statement basically say that Because Magneto is a terrorist, he should. be portrayed as straight evil with no moral ambiguities or three dimensional complexity. You don't want him to be seen as sympathetic, or even understandable, at all. That is taking thing a little further than just a casual reader of the character. And Grant Morrison gave you that by taking the character far outside his normal characterization. He had to force the character to be something it wasn't...and he had to create excuses for his characterization in saying Magneto was a drug addict, which should say something about Morrison's characterization right there.

"Let’s not pretend there’s not a whole lot of other reasons, mostly meta-textual publishing reasons, that never happened."

Actually, no in Uncanny X-men #274, it was clearly stated.

“I wear red, the color of blood, in tribute to their lost lives. And the harder I try to cast it aside, to find the gentler path, the more irresistibly I am drawn back. I should have died myself with those that I loved. Instead I carted the bodies by the hundreds, by the thousands, from the death house to the crematorium, and the ashes to the burial ground. Asking myself now what I could not then—Why was I spared?” ~ Uncanny X-Men #274

During that entire story, Magneto is trying to figure out what his next step will be, how he should be...and the end of it he states that he is going back to the path of violence. He wasn't thinking, "I have to kill these people because they hurt me!" He was thinking, "Why am I still alive? What Purpose do I serve?"

When he first got out of the camps, he thought his purpose was to be a good husband and father. He called Anya his "Talisman" that "made everything he had gone through worthwhile" (Classic X-men #12)...and that purpose was ripped from him. He then went to Israel to volunteer in a mental hospital...And it wasn't until he met Charles, and they had the encounter with Hydra in Uncanny #161, that Magneto finally had an epiphany of what he perceived his life's purpose to be. And he has acted on that ever since.

Not, "They hurt me so I am going to hurt them back..." But, "My purpose, my reason for still being alive, is to save my new people, mutants, where I could not save my old people, the Jews."

“That’s not “reinterpretation”, that’s character devlopment.”

Your “character development” seems a whole lot like “reinterpretation” to some folks. That’s something you’re going to have to live with. To us, it makes no sense and lessens the character.

If Claremont had Magneto join the X-Men that very issue (Uncanny #150), then it would be reinterpratation, but he built Magneto journey from that point to where Charles basically guilt tripped him into the X-Men.

That's development.

"Personal experience is the opposite of always. Do people usually go “crazy” in predictable ways? Yes. Always? Absolutely not."

More and more rarely these days. There is always a "method to someone madness", it just has to be figured out. People do not become different people because they are crazy, even patients suffering from late stage Alzheimer, who brain is physically deteriorating, even they still are the people they are...which is what makes the experience so painful for those around them.

"COMPLETELY OUT OF LINE. You are comparing people talking about a fictional character with dehumanization of real human beings. Absolute bullshit on that, I have to call it. Not a single person here has said what you claim here. At most, we’ve said SOME terrorists or “crazy” people don’t have rational motivations. Nothing about needing to understand and nothing about their supposed lack of humanity."

I had a feeling that was going to offend some, and truly it was not my intention. I apologize for doing so.

But in this discussion about a fictional character, we have done more than just touch on real world terrorists and now the real world mentally ill. And the attitudes towards them in this conversation have been pretty negative, and that is a reflection of how the character is viewed, as how the character is viewed is a reflection of the person's feeling on the the real world analogs. Some people here do not want to understand terrorists. Just want to see them as straight evil. And the mentally ill, that was maybe a stretch on my part, but people do seem content just to see them as ciphers (the repeated claims that mentally ill people are just crazy and don't make sense) rather than people operating in a radically different frame of logic.

I have never said crazy people were rational, only that they did not cease to be the person they were and that their insanity usually makes sense in terms of who they are and the events they went through. It is not our logic, but there is a logic there.

So a writer cannot just sit there and say, "Oh they're crazy, so they're just going to do whatever..." he has to look at the character and the situation and figure out how that person would go crazy. And in Uncanny #500, Magneto being who he is, having gone through what he has gone through, attacking one of the last remaining groups of mutants with a mutant killing robots (especially when he had a plethora of other options available to him to achieve the same effect) was simply outside those boundaries.

"Why, because terrorists are somehow more susceptible to falling apart in the face of horrible events than other people? They are they somehow mentally and emotionally more deficient than the average person?"

Where the hell did you get that? I think watching your entire country and dream be destroyed would eff up all kinds of folks. And when, like Magneto, you're already prone to violent outbursts, boy, that's not a huge leap there, huh?

"Is that what is so scary about this character? The fact that a person who is otherwise just like you can become a terrorist if put in the wrong situation?"

This has nothing to do with anything. Stop trying to imply weird things about me personally.

"First of all, I have already said that my favorite protayal of Magneto is Nicieza’s. He I think got the character closest to the “center” of all his various portrayals. Claremont was a little too “Warm, n’ Fuzzy Uncle Magnus”, Lobdell was a little too “Raving Madman”. (Morrison simply went off the Reservation.) Nicieza nailed a nice middle ground."

If Nicieza is your favorite just about anything, I think we're looking for different things out of our comics. And that's cool and fine. I don't mind that you like what you like; I'm happy. Stop trying to take what I like away.

"Third, I see Magneto as a strong character because of his complexity, his moral ambiguity, his realism, the analogies he presents to real world people and events. The dramatic power of the character is undeniable."

I deny it. He's at once a simplification and a distortion of "real world people and events." But, again, I'm glad you're into him. That's awesome.

"And think about it, if Magneto was just a stock villain of the week, if he were not this morally ambiguous and complex, would we even be having this discussion? Isn’t the fact that he is so polarizing a sign that he is not, as you say “middle-of-the road blob of blah”? Doesn’t that say something about the power of the character as a three dimensional person?"

No, it doesn't. He's interesting as a foil to Xavier and his students, and was so before Claremont decided to soften him up.

“I’ve already said that some terrorists have valid causes. I can’t even get into the weird grey line between terrorism and rebellion, but suffice to say Magneto =/= George Washington or even Nat Turner.”

"Why not?

Other than the fact he is in fact far less of a “homicidal maniac” than Nat Turner was."

How many nuclear warheads did Turner threaten the world with? Oh, wait, none.

"Menachim Begin went from blowing up British Hotels to signing the Camp David Accords as PM of Isreal.

It happens."

He was the same person throughout that. He didn't go from a snarling villain to a headmaster at a school just because some writer wanted some bullshit gravitas.

"Given that mainstream superhero comics are a serial medium, I don’t have that option. And I really wonder at people who say that they do…and if they really *never* complain about breaks in continuity."

Here's the thing, you DO HAVE THAT OPTION. Watch this. Right now I'm saying to myself, "______ story was bad. I'm going to disregard it." None of it actually happened so I can pick and choose what I enjoy. My life is fine. I never have to complain about continuity. I just get to enjoy or not enjoy stories on their own merit. Lots of people are like that. Back when comics actually sold, they were like that even more. Just enjoy your stories. If you hated Planet X, disregard it. I'm glad that I get to disregard everything that Marvel did afterwards.

“Uh, this is where we get a huge disconnect. I don’t hate the character, never have. He’s fictional. Why the hell would I hate a series of drawings? Do I think it’s appropriate to portray an old terrorist in negative light? Of course, especially if the story calls for that. I mean, really, “see him suffer”? What?”

"You statement basically say that Because Magneto is a terrorist, he should. be portrayed as straight evil with no moral ambiguities or three dimensional complexity. You don’t want him to be seen as sympathetic, or even understandable, at all."

I have never said this. This is, apparently, what you think I said. It isn't. I'm saying I've enjoyed the stories like Lee's and Morrison's versions, where he is shown to be a deluded terrorist. I have yet to enjoy any stories where he supposedly is more morally ambiguous. Do you see the difference there?

"That is taking thing a little further than just a casual reader of the character. And Grant Morrison gave you that by taking the character far outside his normal characterization. He had to force the character to be something it wasn’t…and he had to create excuses for his characterization in saying Magneto was a drug addict, which should say something about Morrison’s characterization right there."

No. He didn't have to do anything. He took a mad old terrorist and showed how desperate he was and how his posthumous image could have inspired more folks in a deluded way than his old/current methods. The Sublime/Kick thing was also part of the overall narrative of youth versus the aging, the new versus the old. Magneto is an old fool, stuck in bullshit dichotomies, but Sublime is an even older creature, one that sets out only to destroy the new. It is the aged attempting to consume the new, and Magneto and his outdated dualism was merely the conduit for its destruction. See, stories can work on multiple levels when they're good enough. New X Men had overall narratives and smaller stories that built into that. In Planet X we see the dangers of dualistic thinking, how terrorists delude themselves, and how the old always fears the new. And Magneto was perfectly used in such themes.

“Let’s not pretend there’s not a whole lot of other reasons, mostly meta-textual publishing reasons, that never happened.”

"Actually, no in Uncanny X-men #274, it was clearly stated."

It was "clearly stated" by a fictional character because even if Claremont had wanted him to, Magneto could not, in a Marvel comic, eradicate Germany.

And I'm glad you enjoyed that story, that's cool. I wouldn't be able to stomach it myself for several reasons, but comics are big enough for both of us.

You are strawmanning in really weird ways. No one here says they don't want to understand why terrorists do things or that the mentally ill are sub-human or beyond our understanding.

NO ONE IS SAYING THAT. AT ALL.

I've said that terrorists are often morally deluded and think their actions are righteous. And perhaps some, the ones we call revolutionaries, their actions may have been righteous. But certainly this isn't true for all. I don't like portrayals of Magneto as even semi-righteous because he adopted horrible means to his noble end. That's foolish to me.

And the only thing I've said about the mentally ill is that the way their illness takes shape isn't always rational. It's silly to say otherwise.

Joe -

Your last two posts hit it on the head.

I'm sure there will be multiple follow-ups explaining why you're WRONG and twisting your words around, though. (Joe, why do you hate the mentally ill?)

At some point, you have to stop feeding the troll. Sure, sometimes it takes a while to realize that they are a troll (clever trolls are tricky), but once that becomes clear you must stop.

I'd enjoy a new post from you regarding your views on the twisted relationships between continuity, protecting the money-making potential of the properties, and good storytelling.

It's just a suggestion, but use your energy for something like that, instead of keeping the troll fed.

Just wanted to reiterate what Tyson said above about a post on continuity. I think there have been a couple that touched on it in the past, but would be interesting to read more. And it might move this discussion in another direction.

Amen.

Oh, now I'm a troll.

Nice.

I must really be hitting close to home.

"Where the hell did you get that? I think watching your entire country and dream be destroyed would eff up all kinds of folks. And when, like Magneto, you’re already prone to violent outbursts, boy, that’s not a huge leap there, huh?"

It did fuck up all kind of folks, there were millions of survivors of the Holocaust after all. But they did not become drug addled, genocidal lunatics...and neither did he. Even after his child died and his wife left him. That is just not his "major malfunction", not how he reacts to stressfull events.

"This has nothing to do with anything. Stop trying to imply weird things about me personally."

I am implying nothing, this is what you are saying. You are saying Magneto should be treated as a pure evil, stock villain, just because he is a terrorist. That because he has this label attached to him, he should not be portrayed as three dimensional, morally ambiguous character. Terrorists = Evil, ergo Magneto = Evil.

"If Nicieza is your favorite just about anything, I think we’re looking for different things out of our comics. And that’s cool and fine. I don’t mind that you like what you like; I’m happy. Stop trying to take what I like away."

And stop trying to take what I like away.

"No, it doesn’t. He’s interesting as a foil to Xavier and his students, and was so before Claremont decided to soften him up."

O.K. seriously, I gotta ask, have you actually read some of those comics. Seriously, have you sat down and actually read the Silver Age X-Men? Because in those comic Magneto was not "a foil", he was just a crazy bad guy, a monster of the week.

As one writer at the time called him, he was a "poor man's Dr. Doom".

"How many nuclear warheads did Turner threaten the world with? Oh, wait, none."

We've already been over that argument.

Magneto has threatened the world numerous times, but he's followed through. In fact, in Magneto War he damn near killed himself trying to keep the EM field together (ie. saving the world) while fighting off Joseph and the X-Men.

So how murderous is he, really?

"He was the same person throughout that. He didn’t go from a snarling villain to a headmaster at a school just because some writer wanted some bullshit gravitas."

A. You don't know how much Begin changed over the years from Young Terrorist to PM of Israel. And B. Magneto was the same person too. His character was developed over years to get him to the point he became the Headmaster of the New Mutants. It did not happen overnight.

"Here’s the thing, you DO HAVE THAT OPTION. Watch this. Right now I’m saying to myself, “______ story was bad. I’m going to disregard it.” None of it actually happened so I can pick and choose what I enjoy. My life is fine. I never have to complain about continuity. I just get to enjoy or not enjoy stories on their own merit. Lots of people are like that. Back when comics actually sold, they were like that even more. Just enjoy your stories. If you hated Planet X, disregard it. I’m glad that I get to disregard everything that Marvel did afterwards.

Yeah I can ignore it, until a writer comes along who likes what I hated and decides to build on it and then I will find myself ignoring more and more of the comic as it continues to build on things that don't make any sense to me and I don't enjoy.

"I have never said this. This is, apparently, what you think I said. It isn’t. I’m saying I’ve enjoyed the stories like Lee’s and Morrison’s versions, where he is shown to be a deluded terrorist. I have yet to enjoy any stories where he supposedly is more morally ambiguous. Do you see the difference there?"

Yes, you have. You just said it right there. It's what we have been arguing about the entire time.

"No. He didn’t have to do anything. He took a mad old terrorist and showed how desperate he was and how his posthumous image could have inspired more folks in a deluded way than his old/current methods. The Sublime/Kick thing was also part of the overall narrative of youth versus the aging, the new versus the old. Magneto is an old fool, stuck in bullshit dichotomies, but Sublime is an even older creature, one that sets out only to destroy the new. It is the aged attempting to consume the new, and Magneto and his outdated dualism was merely the conduit for its destruction. See, stories can work on multiple levels when they’re good enough. New X Men had overall narratives and smaller stories that built into that. In Planet X we see the dangers of dualistic thinking, how terrorists delude themselves, and how the old always fears the new. And Magneto was perfectly used in such themes."

Except Magneto was never a drug addled, genocidal person, and he hadn't been a lunatic or "mad" since the early 1970's. And before Morrison came on the scene, Magneto had ceased to be a terrorist. He was the leader of a nation. Morrison forced him back into the role of a terrorist to make his "point". What does that say?

And given that genocides have happened in our lifetime, that organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch still have to exist, I fail to see how Magneto is "outdated" as an analog to the real world. And the fact that O: ZT went down and the Pruifiers seem to roam free over the Marvel Landscape, I fail to see how he is "outdated" in comics.

"It was “clearly stated” by a fictional character because even if Claremont had wanted him to, Magneto could not, in a Marvel comic, eradicate Germany."

I think the thought process in the development went a little farther than "I can't have him destroy Germany, so I will spend decades developing the character into a three dimensional anti-hero."

Actually Claremont has told us what his thought processes were in the X-Men Companion Vol. 2.

Claremont: "..I have no interest in two dimensional villains, except maybe in a one shot story, perhaps. But Magneto is the major villain of the X-Men book; he is their opposite number. He should at least be as interesting and credible as they are. To my way of thinking, a hero is measured by his or her antagonists. And if the antagonist is a wimp, the hero becomes a wimp. For example, when the X-men fought Moses Magnum in #119, my thinking was: Here's Moses Magnum fighting the X-men to a standstill. The readers will think "Wow! This guy is pretty strong!" Nope. He fought them to a stand still and the readers all said, "What the hell happened to the X-Men? They can;t defeat this one creep? We read Power Man. This guy is a jerk. Get rid of 'im!" to coin a phrase. So Dave and I deliberately spent time making Magneto a credible foe."

Sanderson: "A villain has to have a strong personality as well as powers."

Claremont: "Yes. he has to be intelligent he has to be courageous. Frank Miller has spent #170 of Daredevil building up the Kingpin. It's a Kingpin story with a few scenes of Daredevil, because when Frank bring Kingpin back, he wants the reader to be aware that this guy is a force to be reckoned with. It involves taking care, taking trouble, and taking the time to think about who, what, where, when and why of your villains as intensely as one does about the heroes.

That why he developed magneto into a three dimensional character.

"And I’m glad you enjoyed that story, that’s cool. I wouldn’t be able to stomach it myself for several reasons, but comics are big enough for both of us."

But we are talking about the exposition of the fictional character himself. Just as I cannot ignore Magneto's recent appearance in Uncanny #500 or his ranting in Uncanny #304 (Lobdell's Fatal Attractions), you cannot ignore that major piece of character development just because you don't like it.

I hate what they have done with Wolverine in the last 15 years, the multiple origins, "James Howlett", all that jazz. But I can't ignore it, because it's cannon. It is what the current character is built on.

"I’ve said that terrorists are often morally deluded and think their actions are righteous. And perhaps some, the ones we call revolutionaries, their actions may have been righteous. But certainly this isn’t true for all. I don’t like portrayals of Magneto as even semi-righteous because he adopted horrible means to his noble end. That’s foolish to me."

But the U.S. has adopted horrible means to our ends. God Gawd, we are the only country in the world to use atomic weapons offensively...against civilian targets. There were no military bases in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they were factory towns. Were we "morally deluded?"

When it comes to use of violence in global politics, it just is not that simple.

How could you be hitting close to home??? You're talking about a comic book supervillain!!!!

::Gives up, goes home::

Krsipykat, you've flooded a blog about the FF with so much repetitive pedantic crap about Magneto, it's only interesting to read for it's spectacle and the lengths you will go to make sure people know what you think. Start a blog. It's cheap, it's easy, and you can link your comments to CSBG without drowning out anyone who wants to have a reasonable conversation.

"I hate what they have done with Wolverine in the last 15 years, the multiple origins, “James Howlett”, all that jazz. But I can’t ignore it, because it’s cannon. It is what the current character is built on. "

I'm ignoring it right now. It's easy if you try.

I love love love the cliffhanger at the end of #3 in this series, when Giant Doom knocks open a hole in the Baxter Building and declaims "I have destroyed your family, your woman is in an adulterous frenzy at the bottom of the ocean, blah blah blah. What have YOU been doing?"

And Reed replies: "Well Victor, I've been thinking."

Oooooooo. Gave me shivers then. Y'know, one thing Morrison does better than most everybody is that penultimate issue, just before the finale. People sometimes rag on him for the way he ends his story arcs, with some justification. But that 2nd-to-last issue, especially the last page cliffhanger leading up the the finale, is almost always electric. He creates that month of anticipation for the finale as well as anyone ever.

The stuff Mason King posted --
([Sue] feels like a real married woman, with complicated feelings, and not just a cog in the FF storytelling machine. ... What stands out about this issue for me is the “girl talk” section with Alicia, where Sue just VENTS about Reed and the boys, how she’d love to be an undersea princess... It feels very real to me.)
-- really rings true for me. That's the part that means the most in this series. In that same scene Alicia calls out the beauty/sensuousness of the weird communications device, and tells Sue that all Reed's creations are like that. It's all art; every device is infused with his love for Sue.

Other writers have "gotten" that Sue is the key to the FF, and relied heavily on the family themes, notably John Byrne; but that one issue (#2 in that series?) portrayed probably the richest, most compelling Susan Richards I've ever read.

"I’m ignoring it right now. It’s easy if you try."

As are all of the X-Writers. *chuckle*

But to bring the Magneto portion of the discussion to a close, as people seem to be demanding (as is usually the case when I have made many good points):

In this debate, we have discussed real world terrorism, historical terrorism, the use of violence in global politics, the mentally ill. Now if Magneto was a stock villain as he was back in the Silver Age, would he be engendering such discussions? No he wouldn't. People wouldn't think about what he was doing because there wouldn't be anything to think about.

Don't try to take away the one character in the X-verse that raises these kind of questions. That is a fully developed foil to not merely the X-Men as a superhero group, but to the X-Men's basic philosophies. If one wants a character to just tear up the landscape, the X-Men have a plethora of them to choose from. Don't remove this one unique character.

The arguments about Magneto's characterization date back at least to the 80s. After Claremont wrote Magneto as a Holocaust survivor, Byrne (naturally) went out of his way to disagree with that characterization, insisting that Magneto was just a cheap evil guy. Nowhere near as noble as Doom.

I don't know that I like "good" Magneto. But COMPLEX Magneto is awesome. The Holocaust backstory is so much more compelling than anything else, I was always amazed that other writers didn't embrace it. Was very pleased when the x-screenwriters did embrace it.

Someone at Marvel is embracing it (and stop me if you have heard this already). Magneto: Testament is a five issue miniseries covering his life from 1935 to 1945, coming out under the Marvel Knights imprint this fall. Greg Pak, who is writing it, has apparently done a schload of historical research.

From an article that just now came up on CBR --

Matt Fraction on Magneto in UXM 500: “Because of how heavy things had been in storylines like ‘Messiah Complex’ and ‘Divided We Stand’ we wanted to write a fun, self-contained, special-effects laden adventure story. And part of that meant writing Magneto like how he was in the early days of ‘Uncanny X-Men,” Fraction said. “But that was also a gag and stunt which he used to flummox and distract the X-Men while the High Evolutionary and Kingo Sunen were lobotomizing the Dreaming Celestial. Later, we see Magneto with the High Evolutionary he’s much more the character we know, a lion in winter."

wow... interesting how an article on the FF can turn into a thread about Magnetto...

I know how late I am going back to this, but I had to leave the computer yesterday & couldn't return until today. I'm not getting into the continuity debate, because I waste enough time each day as it is (I'll just say that absolutism is always wrong. Heh), but this still bugs me:

"Well, its either a hate on for Ian KcMellen’s protrayal because Morrison thinks it is McKellen that made Magneto sympathetic and three dimensional, or it is a hate on for the character itself."

Besides this being just plain silly reasoning, your use of the term "hate on" really seems to be a case of ascribing an over-reactive emotional way of responding to things to others that isn't necessarily there.

Maybe not everyone is as vehement and emotionally invested in all this as yourself, regardless of sides?

I'd be much more open to your position without the tendency to browbeat and lecture and the impression you give that any variance from being as rigidly orthodox regarding continuity as yourself is tantamount to some sort of moral failing.

KiplingKat said:

Oh, now I’m a troll.

Nice.

I must really be hitting close to home.

I just counted, and unless I screwed up, you have 73 comments on this post so far, many of them considerably longer than the original post. Hmm.

KiplingKat said:

But to bring the Magneto portion of the discussion to a close, as people seem to be demanding (as is usually the case when I have made many good points)

Let's summarize some of your "many good points":

If you don't love the correct version of Magneto and hate the incorrect version then:

1) You think the mentally ill are subhuman

2) You believe that no terrorist ever has behaved rationally at any point

3) The way you read super-hero comics has been affected by your reactions to 9/11

4) You can't possibly really enjoy any X-men books

5) You hate complex villains

6) You have a hate-on for Ian Mckellen

KiplingKat, calling you a troll means that I'm paying you a compliment - I'm assuming you're not jackass enough to believe any of that, or irrational enough to think that you "made" these "good points".

In regards to Matt Fraction's statement, I have to say that I really can't think of Magneto torturing Colossus as a gag and a stunt.

In regards to characterization continuity--and speaking only for myself--I can accept changes I dislike as long as there's an explanation for them. For example, the romance between Scott Summers and Emma Frost. I disliked it intensely, but I accepted it because Morrison developed it over time. The readers got to see that
Scott and Jean were having marital problems, and got to see Scott and Emma interacting, then Scott going to Emma for counselling, then the two of them starting a psychic affair. And though I don't expect this to happen, if some writer should choose to break up Scott and Emma, I want to see a build-up to it. I don't want a break-up just coming out of nowhere.

Just want go back a bit to point out how simple the solutions to some of these 'problems' are:

And even if there were not survivors, Magneto had been through Hell and back to gain Genosha, why would the guy who has rebuilt Asteroid M three times give up an entire country?

Well, if he didn't give up on it, it's just be in... everyone who'd wanted to be in his country died.
It'd have just been him.
He'd failed.

How did the drug heal his severed spine BTW?

The boosted powers allowed him to keep himself upright using the iron in his blood - much the same way he let Xavier walk.

Had Morrison NOT made Magneto reenacting the Final Solution, then I might have bought it. But Magneto would rather die than become Hitler, and his iron will is rather legendary.

Well, of course in any good story you would have the person running from Hitler become a hitler themselves - it makes good dramatic sense.

But in terms of the story, where is it given that fighting Sublime has anything to do with will power?
No one fights it off with will power, so it doesn't matter what Magneto would want once his under Sublimes control.

Of course, after watching 13 million people under his rule die, it's quite possible he took one last stab at getting revenge on humanity, in the hope he would die.
Morrison was actually giving him a last hurrah - if he'd stayed on the books, MAgneto would never have come back.

But to bring the Magneto portion of the discussion to a close, as people seem to be demanding (as is usually the case when I have made many good points

Actually people are just getting bored with yelling at the wall.

And don't call it a discussion or a debate - you rejected everything anybody said that disagreed with you.

Personally, I think "troll" is a bit harsh. I didn't see any ad hominems here.

Maybe I'm just crazy, but I don't have a problem with understanding Magneto's motives, and the experiences that shaped him into the man he is, and even feeling sorry for him...

But still acknowledging that yes, the things he are doing is wrong, and he is a villain for taking the path of villainy in trying o achieve his goals. As he has for the entirety of his adult life, except for a brief period where, at the request of his friend, he tried it the other way, and failed.

After all, people are defined by their actions, not their words. If one acts like a terrorist (and I think telling the UN to accede to your demands or you will spontaneously reverse the polarity of the Earth's magnetic field, as he did in 1999's "The Magneto War", qualifies as acting like a terrorist), then one is a terrorist.

Actually, as I mention it, I recall the prelude to that story, which summed up the flaw in the "misunderstood antihero" view of Magneto. In it, he picks a human construction worker at random, and tries to get him to admit that he hates mutants. The guy responds to each of his points rationally, though, saying that some mutants might be bad, but some are also good, and there's no point in painting them all with the same brush. Magneto refuses to relent, though, and eventually descends to shouting in the guy's face about how he and his evil mutants will conquer the world, real B-serial villain stuff about how your sons will be our slaves and your daughters will be our playthings, so don't you hate me, don't you want me dead? And the guy screams back "yes," and Magneto says to himself how this proves that deep down, the humans are all alike, and only war and conquest can save the mutant people. Which is, of course, a bullshit rationalization that completely ignores everything he did to force that "confession" out of the guy. He's blinded by his bigotry and his self-importance, ignoring the fact that he has, in the end, become just another global bully. And all of it's built on his Holocaust background; he's become that which he most hates.

Justifications and rationalizations aside, he kills people, he tries to engulf the world in a war far more destructive than the one he lived through, and he aspires to tyranthood. That's not an admirable person, no matter how you shake it out.

(Like they said, stop feeding it.)

That's interesting, Michael, I didn't know about that scene! I missed so many of these post-Claremont stories, it's kind of fun to find out what happened without having to trudge all the way back into the Nineties to see it.

Who wrote that issue? Just curious.

Quasar could beat up Magneto.

Who wrote that issue?

Grant Morrison

Quasar could beat up Magneto.

That would be so out of character for Magneto, it wouldn't even ever make any sense.

I don't think Morrison watched the whole movie- otherwise he might not have bothered writing the story at all. Wolverine points out those very points that Morrison does, albeit in slightly different terms:

"You're so full of shit."- regarding his sacrifice of Rogue proving that saving and protecting mutants is important to Magneto... immediately after securing self-preservation for numero uno. Its actually one of the best moments of the first film. Frankly, McKellen's Magneto is pretty cruel and vicious throughout all the films. He'd take Quasar easily.

And on the subject of continuity....

Where does that one-shot of Doom having dinner and chess with Reed occur between Doom's "Unthinkable" storyline, his "resurrection" and subsequent battles with the FF (mind you they do establish it shortly after "New Avengers" formation)? Despite my enjoyment of the encapsulated tale, I was annoyed that Reed would instantly go back to being the man waiting for Victor's innate nobility to show through. I found the whole point of "Unthinkable" and the follow-up tale of Reed's agressive disarmament of Latveria (also irritatingly ignored in current storytelling) was to write Doom as a malevolent bastard in no uncertain terms, and finally, finally provoke Reed to the point that he would actually hate Victor- no more attempts at reformation or reason- by attacking his children and hurting his family for no more reason than petty revenge, Reed realizes Doom is Doom- he will never be anything else. Another interesting sea change in character done away.

"Who wrote that issue? Just curious."

Alan Davis, if I remember correctly.