Alan Davis, if I remember correctly.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

“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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.