The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent
vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums
here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules
document is now in effect.
"He did WHAT?" Most flagrant cases of plot induced stupidity and ridiculous feats
Posts
No, seriously. Just because it's Morrison doesn't make it automatically great writing. It was pretty pathetic. New X-Men had good parts, Magneto was not one of them. He acted so drastically from his previous personality that it might as well have been Loeb writing the Ultimates.
The same could be said of every other comic book hero.
Besides, he did mindwipe him once.
And as the last few comics have shown us (probably more material to this thread too in some cases), Xavier isn't exactly a saint himself. :P
He's killed commies in a sub, created a global EMP that killed the bulk of his victims right then (airplanes, hospitals, etc), and was Stalin-like in his taking over of Genosha (and almost went to war with the world after the Legacy Virus was cured).
And Magneto is so bad the mindwipe Xavier did created Onslaught.
The only thing that changed about Magneto was that the KICK finally gave him the power to fuck the world over on the scale he wanted to.
The ovens might have been over the top, but the Magneto I know would have appreciated the irony. Same with him using Xorn to pervert Xavier's dream, making the students not only complacent, but actually willing participants in Magento's genocide.
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
If a hero struggling to accomplish something, and failing, can be noble, then why can't the same thing be said for a villain?
Personally, I never agreed with the idea of Magneto as a genocidal maniac. For that matter, I never really agreed with the version of Dr. Doom that Mark Waid put forward in his pitch for Fantastic Four, characterizing him as someone who would eat a baby if it would somehow prove him smarter than Reed Richards, and kept secret death camps within his country to deal with dissenters. To me, these versions of the characters are infinitely less interesting than past versions.
When I think of Magneto, I think of the guy who taught at Xavier's school for a time, or the man who acted as the radical Malcolm X to Xavier's Martin Luther King Jr. He's extremely passionate about protecting his people, and while he'll take the more violent path there nine times out of ten, part of him honestly wishes that Xavier's way would work, but knows that it won't. And given that mutants are still being hunted and killed by people within their own government, who can blame him?
When I think of Doom, I don't think of someone who would eat a baby to prove anything to Richards, because such things are simply beneath him. Killing his own people for voicing their dissent? Why? The nattering of such obviously small-minded gnats is as nothing next to the brilliance of Doom.
Tumblr Twitter
as far as Magneto goes, I don't see how you could possibly think that. Every characterization of Magneto (with the exception of Joseph) has always been very vocal about how completely foolish and irresponsible he thinks Charles Xavier is. It seems to me like you might be projecting what you want to see onto Magneto.
And do the losses cause him to rethink his methods? No. Unlike heroes, villains don't learn from their mistakes, and lives continue to be lost as a result.
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
I did. Loved it. But I thought Waid wrote a much better Fantastic Four than he did Dr. Doom.
I'll grant you that my views on Magneto have been influenced by the version of the character I grew up with. Like most children of the 90's, I watched the old X-Men cartoon, and read that era's X-Men comics, which put forth a considerably more sympathetic Magneto. Having been pretty out of the loop on X-Men ever since, save for Morrison's run and Astonishing X-Men, it's entirely possible that I still have an outdated version of the character in my mind.
Tumblr Twitter
Don't get me wrong though, I like your version MUCH MUCH better. Without subtext and some humanity he just becomes another cartoon villain, twirling his mustache while he ties Xavier to the railroad tracks. When you do that, you get Ultimate Magneto, who is just pathetic in his single-mindedness.
The reality is, Magneto could be the most inconsistent character in comics. Or one of them. There really are two Magneto's.
There's the one who wants to help mutants and coexist with humanity, and there's the one that wants to help mutants by dominating humanity.
Which one will show up may as well be decided by flipping a freaking coin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JLA/Avengers
Magneto is a method actor.
if you're talking about the issue with the mutant baby in downtown nyc, we already discussed that the "internal monologue" was actually a letter he had written to xavier. it was all a bunch of bullshit, designed to fool xavier and the reader.
and if you're calling revealing xorn as magneto a "retcon", that's incorrect. it was a plot twist.
if you're talking about all the after-morrison retconning (which you might be, i'm not sure) then yeah marvel screwed up on that stuff.
I'm not talking about redemption. Magneto IS a bad guy.
But he's not a maniac. He doesn't kill people because it's fun or because he enjoys it. Only people who portray him as such have been Stan Lee (who portrayed pretty much all his villains like that) and Morrison. And maybe some one-off writers in some stories.
Yeah, with the other one being far more used and generally accepted as who he is, not a mustache twirling asshole who sends people in the ovens. Come on. That's really fucking tacky, the same Magneto that was in concentration camps kills people the same way that jews were killed? And I could pick a hundred quotes from that story that even Stan Lee's Magneto wouldn't utter.
Fuck, say Prince Namor. He's certainly no hero. He's killed thousands. If he suddenly started throwing surface people off a cliff because they are surface people and laugh like a maniac, it would be good writing?
I mean, sure, he did that maybe in few comics once back in the 40's, but that doesn't excuse throwing decades of character development into the drain.
This. Planet X clearly characterized him as being fucking nuts by this point. You could tell because he beat the crap out of Sophie all crazy like IIRC.
Funny though, no one mentions his flagrant child abuse when discussing his Planet X flaws...
Wikipedia says it's still around though.
I'd disagree that Morrison's X-Men wasn't intended for longtime fans. A lot of what Morrison did was picking up existing X-Men stuff off and running with those ideas in new directions.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
The guy who created Baron Zemo, Kang, Thunderbolt Ross, Dr. Doom, the Mole Man, the Kingpin, Doctor Octopus, the modern version of Namor, the Black Widow, the Ringmaster and his Circus of Crime, Paste-Pot Pete, Mr. Big, Power Man, the Enchantress, J. Jonah Jameson, the Lizard, Baron Mordo, the Red Skull, HYDRA, Dr. Doom and The Prowler "portrayed pretty much all his villains like that"? I think you could stand to read more actual Stan Lee comics.
And yeah, Stan Lee's Magneto was a psycho supervillain - that was his characterization, that was his thing. He was hysterical, paranoid, and manipulative, callously manipulating his own kids into being murderous super-villains. And that portrayal was Magneto, across all the books he appeared in (including stuff like Avengers and Super-Villain Team-Up) for nearly twenty years. What Claremont did was an interesting take on the character, and has possibly become definitive through repetition, but it does not enjoy some special unassailable status. Morrison was exploring the fissure between what the character had become (in his own mind and ours) and what he has actually done over forty years of Marvel comics, but he was still careful to give everyone an "out," in the form of Sublime, so I don't really see the issue here.
Can you show me where they showed it to be a letter to Xavier? Because I don't remember it like that at all.
I can't believe I dug up the right issue on the first try. From New X-Men #127:
"In Chinatown there is an old man who knows the roads of Urumqi below the Lake of Heaven in the Xianjiang Ugyur Autonomous Region. From him I receive the tools I need to set down my thoughts and freeze them in the form of these symbols."
and later
"You wished to see my thoughts but were blinded by the sun beneath my mask, Professor Xavier...so I have tried to capture my thoughts in the form of symbols here on this book of paper leaves. But these lines and curves are not much like thoughts or feelings, at all."
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
You may be right, I was going off of that Wizard interview prior to its release when they showed Quitely's design, and IIRC, Morrison explicitly said they were marketing new, college-age readers and were willing to do it at the expense of old, middle-age ones -because that was a shrinking niche market.
He was to be a clone that they could control. There was some chick who the retconned to be a part of the original Brotherhood who Magneto kicked out, and she wanted revenge on Magneto. The best way to do that apparently was to clone Joseph who would be a young Magneto and do her will.
As a sidenote, the Magneto War story was supposed to be a lot different than what it turned out to be (which was just a fight with Magneto and Joseph where Magneto winds up getting Genosha). The Magnetic poles were supposed to be changed so that it created a Day After Tomorrow effect (without the shitty global warming message), where it would effect all books in the Marvel Universe, like NYC being a new Siberia.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
Dude, you do realize that Kick was fucking up his mental state, right? I'm prety sure it was implied that Sublime, through Kick, influenced Magneto.
Possibly! Why do you think that?
Actually, scratch that. The last storyline wasn't that bad. The bad parts were Quentin or whatever and Magneto, although the Magneto part was bad for all sorts of reasons. I dunno, the whole "sentient drug" thing just turned something off for me.
TylerJ on League of Legends (it's free and fun!)
Man, I loved the Quentin Quire story. It's probably my favorite in the run. He and his crew remind me so much of people I actually knew in high school and college and it felt to me like a very wise, very sad story about the ethics of revolt and control and about why certain young people feel disenfranchised without feeling preachy or like "gosh darn those crazy kids."
As for Sublime...well, technically ( :P ) it was a sentient virus, and the drug was just one of its many forms. I don't know. I guess you buy it or you don't, but this sort of thing isn't even unheard of in the Marvel universe (off the top of my head, the Avengers fought That Which Endures - another billion-year-old sentient superpowered virus - and Tony Stark was infected by an intelligent organism in Armor Wars II) and I liked it because of how neatly it explained so many things in the X-universe, and was a perfect thematic fit. The first organism on Earth that has a four-billion-year-old psychotic hate for everything that's evolved afterwards is a perfect enemy for the heroes of evolution. And because Sublime is everywhere, and is potentially infecting anyone, it fits with the 90s X-Men tradition of having masterminds behind masterminds behind masterminds. A friend of mine once said the perfect X-Men cover would be a picture of Stryfe watching the X-Men fighting Juggernaut on a screen and laughing evilly, and then Mr. Sinister watching Stryfe watching the screen, and then Apocalypse watching Mr. Sinister watching Stryfe watching the X-Men, and Sublime really is the logical endpoint of all of that.