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Android Blues posted:Super agree with this. I like Morrison's New X-Men but writing Magneto as a mad old fascist bastard who is not only a genocidal dictator, but a really incompetent genocidal dictator with a drug habit, comes off like a moderately bitter move. Like, he's literally marching humans into Nazi-style ovens, and whining at his minions about everything, and then occasionally doing hits of Kick, and it comes off more like a character assassination than anything. I think Morrison admitted that it was a mistake. Apparently he was going through some poo poo at the time, and it turned up in his work in most inelegant ways. He also wrote The Filth during that time period if I remember correctly.
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Feb 5, 2018 15:31
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That's really interesting. It feels like one of the most jarring things in an otherwise pretty great run, so I'd be interested to hear Morrison's take on it now.
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Feb 5, 2018 16:27
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I actually missed out on Morrison's reversal, it was apparently in a Playboy interview promoting Supergods.quote:Morrison: “Magneto’s an old terrorist bastard. I got into trouble—the X-Men fans hated me because I made him into a stupid old drug-addicted idiot. He had started out as this sneering, grim terrorist character, so I thought, Well, that’s who he really is. [Writer] Chris Claremont had done a lot of good work over the years to redeem the character: He made him a survivor of the death camps and this noble antihero. And I went in and shat on all of it. It was right after 9/11, and I said there’s nothing loving noble about this at all. At the time of Morrison's X-Men run I hadn't really read much of Claremont's X-Men, though as a youth I had been suckered into a few years of post-Claremont X-Crossovers where they tried to juxtapose "Noble Anti-Hero Survivor Magneto" with annual plots to kill millions of people, so it all sort of washed over me. In the decade and a half since Planet X, Marvel has been consistent enough in wallpapering over the worst of Magneto's "annual plots to kill millions" and focusing on the "Noble Anti-Hero Survivor" part that I imagine Morrison's interpretation seems even clunkier in hindsight. Part of that was Morrison's whole manifesto for the X-Men being that maybe we can stop rehashing the same storylines about tiny clans of feared and hated mutants fighting Sentinels and mysterious badasses with mysterious pasts and super dark alternate futures and Magneto rolling dice to decide if he's noble or bloodthirsty and some combination of creators, readers, and stockholders have voted resoundingly that nah, those things are all what the X-Men are.
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Feb 5, 2018 16:51
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I do agree with the horrible propensity of a lot of post-Claremont X-Men stories to be increasingly distorted rehashes, and I really like that New X-Men tries to advance the timeline a little bit and ask new questions. Claremont's run was so good because it asked new questions, because it introduced the dark alternate futures and brooding anti-heroes with mysterious pasts and heightened mutants being under existential threat to something more psychologically believable. A lot of later runs have just repeated those ideas rather than recognising that part of why they worked so well was because they were exciting ways to take the characters in new directions, advance the X-Men's timeline, and grow the world. That's a good point about it existing in the context of years of terrible Magneto stories from the 90s, as well. If you go straight from Claremont to Morrison, it reads like a smack in the face, but it is fair to say he was responding to more than just Claremont. Although, of course, Morrison's run does conclude with a dark alternate future story which I think may be one of its weakest parts. "A sentient evil bacteria was controlling Beast and also orchestrated most of the bad stuff in the entire run" isn't a great lynchpin for the final arc to turn around, or at least it didn't work well for me.
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Feb 5, 2018 17:02
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I don't know why people are so confused by Morrison's Magneto. Before and after Claremont's run Magneto was depicted as a fascist and a terrorist. That whole trial in the Claremont run that exonerated Magneto used some really flimsy logic to clean his slate in the first place. Like Doctor Doom, he can play at being sympathetic and noble, but he's an evil bastard at heart.
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Feb 5, 2018 17:09
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Android Blues posted:That's a good point about it existing in the context of years of terrible Magneto stories from the 90s, as well. If you go straight from Claremont to Morrison, it reads like a smack in the face, but it is fair to say he was responding to more than just Claremont. quote:Although, of course, Morrison's run does conclude with a dark alternate future story which I think may be one of its weakest parts. "A sentient evil bacteria was controlling Beast and also orchestrated most of the bad stuff in the entire run" isn't a great lynchpin for the final arc to turn around, or at least it didn't work well for me. The series ends with a super dark super grim future that happened because after Magneto killed Jean, everyone was so despondent that the X-Men fell apart and everyone became very dark and sad indeed. Future Jean Grey's last act before ascending out of the super dark grim Earth was to send a message back in time for Cyclops to "live", to not spend his life mourning the past and his relationship with Jean, but to live and move forward and grow, and so the last page of his run is Scott and Emma kissing and the X-Men continuing on, averting the dark alternate future and hypothetically setting the franchise moving forward. Kind of like how the whole point of Fantomex/Weapon Plus was that there was a literal factory pumping out mysterious badasses with mysterious pasts that don't matter because they're not real, etc. Morrison really thought that maybe the X-Men should stop doing that -- all of that -- now. The redemption/betrayal arc for Magneto was definitely part of 'that', along with decades-old love triangles, cross-time capers, drawn out mysterious backstories, etc. etc. Again, no one was even remotely willing to follow through on much of any of this, and this month alone they brought Jean back and proved that she and Scott are each other's One True Loves and had the X-Men From The Past team up with The X-Men Of Multiple Futures team up against The X-Men Of A Different Future Pretending to Be X-Men From Another Past and they're bringing back Mariko and original Wolverine and Colossus and Kitty Pryde are getting married and Weapon H is a hulked out badass with a mysterious past and so on and so forth. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 17:22 on Feb 5, 2018 |
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Feb 5, 2018 17:20
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It depends on what you think of as defining canon for the X-Men. For some, Claremont's Magneto is the definitive version, and his revamp of the character is when Magneto as we now know him really began to take shape. I think it's fair to say that the Lee and Kirby Magneto is striking, but he isn't deep. He's a generic archvillain to pit this superhero team against, a sort of Y-Man to their X-Men. With how vital his Holocaust survivor background is to modern portrayals - something Claremont introduced from whole cloth and lovingly developed issue by issue - I think it would be fair to say his version of Magneto is pretty foundational, arguably more so than Lee and Kirby's. If you strip away the things Claremont added, Magneto's tragedy, his humanity, his struggle with his jaded outlook on the value of human life, you're not left with much of a character. Post-Claremont, Magneto definitely gets a lot more evil, but he still is never so outright monstrous as he is in Morrison's New X-Men. There's never a moment where he is marching humans into furnaces directly cribbed from Auschwitz, doing a tonne of drugs, killing children who are on his side, and babbling about how he will need to leave a few humans alive so they can toil as slaves doing undesirable jobs. It's a huge reversal even from the x-treme 90s version of the character.
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Feb 5, 2018 17:30
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the first run of xmen I ever read was morrison's and magneto as a sympathetic character took some getting used to
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Feb 5, 2018 17:35
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Android Blues posted:Post-Claremont, Magneto definitely gets a lot more evil, but he still is never so outright monstrous as he is in Morrison's New X-Men. There's never a moment where he is marching humans into furnaces directly cribbed from Auschwitz, doing a tonne of drugs, killing children who are on his side, and babbling about how he will need to leave a few humans alive so they can toil as slaves doing undesirable jobs. It's a huge reversal even from the x-treme 90s version of the character. It gets talked about a lot less, but Mark Waid did almost the exact same thing in Fantastic Four at almost the exact same time (Unthinkable kicked off in April 2003, Nation X in September 2003) and was a story about how despite all the plays at nobility and honor Doctor Doom is a vindictive piece of poo poo with oceans of blood on his hands. Once Waid left that story was sort of papered over and he's back to Not That Bad, Really.
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Feb 5, 2018 17:51
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While it was coming out I thought the story was going to be about how Magneto had done more good as Xorn than he could do evil. But then he annihilated New York and that storyline only existed in my head, but I far preferred that. Because even just the transition from Xorn to Super batshit crazy Magneto was too much. They played Xorn too straight so that it felt like Magneto got lost in the role, but what really happened was lovely writing. But I liked Unthinkable because it showed Doom’s devotion to power, not necessarily Evil.
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Feb 5, 2018 19:08
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Edge & Christian posted:It gets talked about a lot less, but Mark Waid did almost the exact same thing in Fantastic Four at almost the exact same time (Unthinkable kicked off in April 2003, Nation X in September 2003) and was a story about how despite all the plays at nobility and honor Doctor Doom is a vindictive piece of poo poo with oceans of blood on his hands. Once Waid left that story was sort of papered over and he's back to Not That Bad, Really. I think the reason people get up in arms about the Magneto thing but not about Doom is based purely on Mags' (and all mutants') status as minority allegories. Like no matter what Magneto may do, he's got that Holocaust backstory there, and so he's always gonna come off as a little tragic. Meanwhile, Doom runs his own country. Even when/if a writer brings up Doom's past as a discriminated Roma (it definitely doesn't come up too much since I only just learned it speedreading his Wikipedia page), the fact remains that he made it out from his beginnings and received a first-world education before blowing it (literally) because of But really no matter what, it comes down to the fact that Doom has his own country, and people are just inclined to not sympathize with people in power. TwoPair fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Feb 5, 2018 |
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Feb 5, 2018 19:19
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Please come back!! https://twitter.com/Newsarama/status/960573757113995265
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Feb 5, 2018 19:29
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site posted:Please come back!! quote:In the upcoming Captain America #698, Steve Rogers will once again become a “man out of time” when he’s unfrozen in the distant future after being trapped in ice by his new enemies, the terrorist group Rampart. I guess I don't really get why Captain America has to be taking over places when he's supposed to be all about freedom and right to choose. quote:Nrama: Captain America #700 is coming up in April, and in it Cap becomes “king” of the future world. He doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to taking over a whole society – what leads to this moment? So instead of Nazi Germany this is going to be the occupation of Iraq? Maybe I'm just being too cynical.
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Feb 5, 2018 19:50
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captain america :: king seems legit
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Feb 5, 2018 20:51
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It's 100% opposite because Mark Waid is a good writer while Nick Spencer is not.
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Feb 5, 2018 20:55
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I mean, you would think the 100% opposite of cap is a Nazi is cap beats up Nazis but I guess only DC has figured that out
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Feb 5, 2018 21:00
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Maybe he becomes king and beats up future Nazis
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Feb 5, 2018 21:05
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I can work with that
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Feb 5, 2018 21:12
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As long as he's a reluctant king I can deal with it.
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Feb 5, 2018 21:15
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100% opposite, so Captain America is a fascist who reveals he was actually fighting for freedom the whole time! What a twist!
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Feb 5, 2018 21:18
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Given that one of the most hagiographic nick names George Washington has is "the man who would not be king" I'm not a fan of King Captain America as a concept, but Mark Waid as a writer gets way more benefit of the doubt than Nick Spencer ever deserved. Also this isn't a line wide event derailing other books I like so if it's bad it just means that I don't need to read Captain America.
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Feb 5, 2018 21:40
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Sorry this is actually the beginning of the year long buildup towards Overt Empire
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Feb 5, 2018 21:42
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I'm really getting to the point where I want somebody high-up at Marvel to do a five-year moratorium on time-travel plots, whether it's a flash-forward, a grim alternate future, or what-have-you.
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Feb 5, 2018 21:44
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Wanderer posted:I'm really getting to the point where I want somebody high-up at Marvel to do a five-year moratorium on time-travel plots, whether it's a flash-forward, a grim alternate future, or what-have-you. This is what Age of Ultron should have done.
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Feb 5, 2018 21:50
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Happy Noodle Boy posted:This is what Age of Ultron should have done. I love that they said "Time travel is broken and doesn't work anymore" immediately after Age of Ultron and a month later had time travel plots in multiple books. I did really like the time travel arc in Hickman's Avengers and have a fondness for a bunch of time displaced X-Men (not just the O5, Rachel and Majik are awesome as well, Bishop and Cable I could take or leave).
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Feb 5, 2018 21:58
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In a lot of ways the bad 90s Fabian Cortez/Magneto storylines were trying to do what Morrison did later more effectively. Man those were bad stories though.
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Feb 5, 2018 22:09
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Rick posted:In a lot of ways the bad 90s Fabian Cortez/Magneto storylines were trying to do what Morrison did later more effectively. Man those were bad stories though. I recently read the stuff where he's given Genosha and didn't hate it.
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Feb 5, 2018 22:24
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The early Fabian Cortez stuff is really clunky because it's literally just like Some Assholes show up at Asteroid M where Magneto is in miserable seclusion and are like, "hey, we love you Magneto, let's take vengeance on the humans together," and Magneto is like, eh, uh, I dunno, and then Cortez just does it anyway and the X-Men blame Magneto and Magneto is like How Dare You, I Will Be Evil Now. It's a really circuitous way to get him working in opposition to the X-Men again after a decade of being either a neutral party, or their ally.
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Feb 5, 2018 22:29
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The last Claremont story (X-Men (1991) 1-3, with Jim Lee) was the start of the Fabian Cortez/Acolytes stuff, and baked into that was that Magneto believed that when he was re-aged back in the 1970s by Moira MacTaggart that she (and Xavier) had manipulated him to be nicer/more peaceful/more heroic and so all of his reformation in the Claremont run was due to MIND CONTROL, though within the same story Moira claimed that anything she did back then would have 'worn off' by then, so he really did reform, though Magneto didn't seem to believe that in the comics, and "you tried to brainwash me" was at least part of his motivation for his first big post-Claremont storyline as a villain. This person goes into more details, though they do not believe that the 'brainwashing' took for reasons they explain. If nothing else, I can imagine this being something Claremont wrote into his last story as an 'out' for Marvel if they wanted to go back to using Magneto as a villain, and it's something they chose to do. Shawn posted:While it was coming out I thought the story was going to be about how Magneto had done more good as Xorn than he could do evil. But then he annihilated New York and that storyline only existed in my head, but I far preferred that. Because even just the transition from Xorn to Super batshit crazy Magneto was too much. They played Xorn too straight so that it felt like Magneto got lost in the role, but what really happened was lovely writing. There's also a number of spots in the Xorn storyline that read completely differently when you look at it as "Magneto play-acting as Xorn", whether it's the entire letter written by "Xorn" about the powerful mutant in hiding in New York, or the fact that he "mercy kills" Quentin Quire who was not actually dying but *had* figured out that he was really Magneto. By still being Magneto under the Xorn mask, he was actively harming -- literally murdering, in at least one case -- the next generation of mutants as "Magneto" while actively helping them as "Xorn". Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Feb 5, 2018 |
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Feb 5, 2018 23:09
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"Good Good Guy Mags" will always be the definitive Magneto for me mostly because before his transformation into a slightly more of a good guy, was a two dimensional and forgettable character. Claremont and Co. put a bunch of work into him to make him a bit more nuanced and interesting (especially in the New Mutants books), and then later writers went spergy about it when they got their mitts on him. The whole "character was like this when I grew up reading them, so they must be brought back to my personal status quo" that happens all the time in comics. And saying that the character was a villain most of their career so they have to stay that way is a silly argument.
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Feb 5, 2018 23:14
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Android Blues posted:The early Fabian Cortez stuff is really clunky because it's literally just like Some Assholes show up at Asteroid M where Magneto is in miserable seclusion and are like, "hey, we love you Magneto, let's take vengeance on the humans together," and Magneto is like, eh, uh, I dunno, and then Cortez just does it anyway and the X-Men blame Magneto and Magneto is like How Dare You, I Will Be Evil Now. It's a really circuitous way to get him working in opposition to the X-Men again after a decade of being either a neutral party, or their ally. That's always been my favourite reason for someone being evil  "You think I'm evil? Well gently caress you I'm going to kill a load of people!"
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Feb 5, 2018 23:15
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I have no idea what sort of role Cortez has played in the comics because I remember him mainly as the character with the hammiest voice actor on the X-Men cartoon. "MY PEOPLE will have VENGENACE... SAYETH... MEEEEE!"
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Feb 5, 2018 23:18
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Wheat Loaf posted:I have no idea what sort of role Cortez has played in the comics because I remember him mainly as the character with the hammiest voice actor on the X-Men cartoon. Did you somehow miss every episode involving Apocalypse in your ranking of X-men cartoon characters by hammiest? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVxCwNdWhg
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Feb 5, 2018 23:31
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site posted:I mean, you would think the 100% opposite of cap is a Nazi is cap beats up Nazis but I guess only DC has figured that out Personally, I took it as Captain America wakes up in a future where Rampart, the white supremacist group, has taken over the world and then works with the resistance to take them down.
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Feb 5, 2018 23:51
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Skwirl posted:Did you somehow miss every episode involving Apocalypse in your ranking of X-men cartoon characters by hammiest? *WHIR* *WHIRL* *CLICK* *WHIRL*
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Feb 5, 2018 23:53
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Skwirl posted:Did you somehow miss every episode involving Apocalypse in your ranking of X-men cartoon characters by hammiest? Conceded, but it's so suited to Apocalypse while Cortez always sounds like he's on the verge of tears when he's yelling, "DESTROY THE FLAT-SCAN HUMANS!"
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Feb 6, 2018 00:43
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Wheat Loaf posted:Conceded, but it's so suited to Apocalypse while Cortez always sounds like he's on the verge of tears when he's yelling, "DESTROY THE FLAT-SCAN HUMANS!" Storm and Gambit are also top tier, ranking of hammiest voice acting on X-Men is probably a fool's game anyways. Championship title goes to either Scott yelling "Jean" or Jean yelling "Scott" and then fainting.
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Feb 6, 2018 00:50
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Open Marriage Night posted:I don't know why people are so confused by Morrison's Magneto. Before and after Claremont's run Magneto was depicted as a fascist and a terrorist. That whole trial in the Claremont run that exonerated Magneto used some really flimsy logic to clean his slate in the first place. The missing piece is that at the time of Morrison's run the version of Magneto occupying the pop culture consciousness was Ian McKellan's live action version, which while still villainous leaned heavily on him being a charismatic and sympathetic holocaust survivor. Morrison initially justifying his Magneto with something along the lines of "people might like Ian McKellan but the *real* Magneto is a stupid evil rear end in a top hat" didn't really help the perception that what he did was character assassination.
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Feb 6, 2018 02:04
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Endless Mike posted:It's 100% opposite because Mark Waid is a good writer while Nick Spencer is not. ... No he's not, but there's still no doubt in my mind that he'll handle Cap a lot better than Spencer did.
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Feb 6, 2018 06:26
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Hey again. What're your thoughts on the massive events that happen every so often in marvel? I'm looking at reading all of the cosmic story stuff, then I'll probably branch out onto other big events. Any to recommend?
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Feb 6, 2018 07:10
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