Magneto vol 1: “Infamous”
Magneto has been an antihero, or at times even an outright hero, for the better part of thirty years now. Which makes it surprising that he’s not had an ongoing series before, particularly given Marvel’s evident keenness to find every exploitable angle on the franchise.
There are two likely major reasons for that. First, bear in mind Magneto’s role in the X-Men. When first introduced in the Silver Age he was just a generic would-be world-conqueror. The early Claremont stories largely stick to that portrayal, though they throw in an element of personal bitterness towards the X-Men. But it’s only later that Claremont really brings his big theme front and centre, and – almost as a consequence of that – has to retool Magneto.
The X-Men were always about peaceful coexistence, but in their Silver Age iteration, the main threat to that peaceful coexistence is the threat from the villainous schemes of “evil mutants”. Under Claremont, the main threat shifts to being humans and their anti-mutant prejudice. That poses problems for Magneto’s role as arch-enemy, since he obviously can’t embody that threat, being a mutant himself. Instead he has to represent an alternative response to the threat.
The point of departure between the X-Men and Magneto, of course, is that the X-Men believe that coexistence is both possible and desirable, while Magneto thinks it’s impossible and responds, depending on what year it is, either with pre-emptive attacks on humanity, or with some form of mutant separatism. The clever bit about Claremont’s approach, and the reason why it’s been so influential for so long, is that while the stories implicitly invite us to accept that the X-Men’s way is right, they make sure that Magneto has plenty of logical support for his position; the humans really are out to get mutants, and if the future timelines shown in the comics are anything to go by, Magneto is just plain right about the way things are going. It would have been easy to show unequivocally that the bad futures are all due to the counterproductive efforts of mutant separatists, but the comics have wisely held back from that. Not only does this give Magneto a credible argument, it also makes sure that the X-Men’s worldview requires a leap of faith.
The point being, this take on Magneto – which has been the dominant one for decades – is interesting in large part because of the contrast with the X-Men themselves. Even Magneto’s recent stint as a member of the X-Men was done principally to make the point that Cyclops’ revised vision for the X-Men steered dangerously close to Magneto’s worldview, and to ask whether, by “uniting” almost all the remaining mutants on Utopia, Cyclops had achieved something wonderful, or merely compromised what the X-Men stood for. So all this leads to the question: is he actually less interesting if you take him away from the X-Men?
Second, until recently Magneto was vastly overpowered for a solo hero. In fact, he always has been – which is fine if you’re the sole arch-enemy for an entire team, but not so good if the audience has to root for you. Obviously, Magneto’s recent depowering as part of Brian Bendis’ Phoenix Five storyline solves this problem nicely.
So how does Cullen Bunn approach the task of a Magneto solo series? For a start, he plays up the depowering heavily, and moves as far away as possible from the traditional depiction of Magneto as an A-list super villain. This is Magneto in reduced circumstances, living in motels and investigating stories of violence against mutants. He does have his costume and does get to do set pieces with his powers, but we’re on the fringes of the Marvel Universe here, away from the big cities, and away from established characters for him to interact with – until issue #6, but by then the tone has been firmly set. Gabriel Hernandez Walta, drawing the first three issues, is a perfect fit for this take, since although we know he can do the grand gestures from his run on Astonishing X-Men, his basic style steers clear of superhero norms and points us to re-align our expectations accordingly. Javier Fernandez, who draws the next three, is a little more conventionally polished, but still fits happily into the tone set to start with.
This Magneto remains obsessed with protecting his people, with whatever limited resources he still has open to him. You can perhaps query why he would choose to go this way rather than staying with Scott, but the series never goes near the question of why he left the X-Men. More fundamentally, given his attitude to the people he’s fighting, even a vastly depowered Magneto is still pretty terrifying. The series wisely limits Magneto to doing things that are properly connected to magnetism, a limit that’s never really been strictly adhered to before – even in his debut, he was somehow able to create force fields. But so what if this Magneto is no longer up to throwing aeroplanes around? You wouldn’t want to be stuck in a room with him and a fork.
Still, a Magneto remorselessly hunting down the oppressors of mutants and torturing them in inventive ways is basically the Punisher with added superpowers. The Punisher likewise started life as an alternate model of (anti)heroism to be contrasted with the likes of Spider-Man and Daredevil. Once you put him in his own book, you don’t have a full-blown hero to act as a contrast, and the moral argument becomes far bleaker – about a protagonist who has lost something of his soul, and where the stories can illustrate that there’s something wrong with him, but without there being any real impression that he might learn from it or experience redemption.
This seems to be the model Bunn’s working on in these six issues. The stories keep confronting Magneto with moments that ought to be giving him pause. The Sentinels are being stockpiled for defence by crackpot human separatists who would have been happy just being left alone. Magneto’s interrogation techniques are directly lifted from his childhood experience of the Nazis. The Marauders simply don’t fit into his idea that he’s defending all mutants, which he can only preserve by arbitrarily deeming them not to be proper mutants (even though getting rid of “the wrong sort of mutant” is precisely the crime he loathes them for to start with). But while the moral problems here are obvious to us, they leave Magneto himself utterly unfazed. As with the Punisher, there’s an element of moral horror here that stems simply from the fact of his refusal to respond to plot points that ought to be making him question himself. He’s either oblivious to them or he’s rationalised them away already.
None of this, at this stage, wholly undercuts the idea that we’re supposed to be rooting for Magneto, who is, after all, facing actual anti-mutant bigots and the Marauders. But it feels like it’s setting up some sort of debate about his obsessiveness, to be unpacked further in future issues. There are no recurring characters for Magneto to interact with (until Rachel shows up in issue #5, and even she only recurs in an exposition flashback the next issue); for all that Magneto claims to be defending an entire race, he appears to exist in a world of one. Magneto’s self-image is pretty unambiguous; the book’s attitude to him is a little more so, and it feel like this book will be less about him undergoing any sort of growth, and more about us figuring out how we’re supposed to feel about him. Thus far, it seems like a viable direction.
This book has a lot going for it.
I would really like to know where it fits with Uncanny and No More Humans. Any ideas?
yea, I’m quite on board with this take on Magneto. I never quite bought him hiding in Scott’s shadow in Uncanny X-Men (although I didn’t mind it), but I never wanted him to go full on “enemy of the X-Men” again either. I think this is a nice in-between for him, and it certainly makes him more interesting than he’s been in a good 15 years, at least.
the art has been great, the new costume is awesome, and I LOVE the idea of him being in charge of the Marauders now.
I don’t get a sense from the review if these issues were any good or not. It sounds like they were well thought out in terms of the series direction, but were they enjoyable and satisfying in and of themselves?
This book is great. I do disagree with Paul, though. I think there is an implication that Magneto, unlike the Punisher, is acutely aware of how evil his actions are. I just don’t think he cares anymore.
It seems like they’ve done something Grant Morrison wasn’t able to do…find a new and interesting take on Magneto. Granted, it’s been evolving for quite some time now, but still.
Each issue tells a more or less self contained story, not unlike the current incarnation of Moon Knight. Some have been better than others, but on the whole I think this has beena really strong series.
I didn’t get the impression from Morrison that he was consciously attempting to deliver a new and interesting take on Magneto. His point seemed to be that Magneto was obsolete and that he (and Xavier too, to some degree) would do better to step aside and let the new generation carve out their future.
I suppose that may have qualified as a new way of viewing Magneto at the time, but it certainly wasn’t for the purpose of elevating or refreshing the character. It seemed to be more about putting the Xavier/Magneto conflict to bed once and for all and to pave the way for future writers to chart out new territory.
But then Marvel reversed gears and brought Magneto back before Morrison received his last paycheck.
I gather they’re going to spend some time with Magneto’s past, particularly during the Holocaust. I’m not necessarily opposed to that, bt I’d rather see some attention to his actions during the 1950’s, when he was working for the CIA and hunting down hidden Nazis.
You know, it’s actually probably best that they don’t spend too much time on his past since it just raises too many questions about Marvel’s sliding timeline and I can’t imagine there are all that many readers familiar with that de-aging story since that was 40 years ago.
Come to think of it, has anyone ever done a story where a mutant starts to lose his or her powers simply because they’re growing older?
Magneto’s a special case because, like the Punisher, his origin is pretty much irrevocably tied to a conflict that remains stuck in time. The one thing that fixes the problem is that Magneto has been de- and re-aged enough to guarantee that they can hand-wave these questions away. The problem will be when they get to the point where, even with the most generous sliding timescale it’s impossible for anyone who was alive during WWII to have begun fighting the X-Men 13 years ago, which is I believe the current dating for FANTASTIC FOUR #1 in Marvel Time. That time is already almost here, and as it is, if Magneto attacked Cape Citadel in 2001, he’d still have to have been at least in his late 70s by then.
There is a good workaround for this which would also explain the longevity of a number of other early mutants such as the Sub-Mariner. All mutants born before the beginning of the Atomic Age were extremely long-lived – Externals, basically. It fits if you realize that we already know that there are a bunch of very old immortal mutants still around. It adds a tiny wrinkle to a handful of characters, but it simplifies things in reference to Magneto and Namor.
TL,DR: the Celestials implanted mutancy into the human genome, so they can handwave anything away if they try hard enough.
@Taibak – I tend to agree but if they’re going to keep the Holocaust in Magneto’s history, they’re going to have to figure the timeline out eventually.
Even the de-aging bit doesn’t work anymore. Erik and Charles met years before Charles formed the X-Men and they’re meant to be close to the same age. That’s a problem unless you’re going to wave the de-aging wand at Xavier too.
Even if they were to retroactively assert that Magneto de-aged many years earlier, or stopped aging decades ago, or whatever, it still raises the question of just what the hell Magneto was doing all of those years. Seventy years between the end of WWII and the formation of the X-Men and it amounts to Magneto deciding to attack Cape Citadel? And he gets beaten by a pack of inexperienced teenagers?
Xavier is (or was) already in a cloned body. They could just say it was a younger one.
@errant – That cloned body came well after the X-Men had been formed. It could be used to explain his youthfulness in the present day, but again, he and Magneto met years before the X-Men came along and they’re meant to be of the same generation. If the X-Men came about 13 years ago (approximately) then Xavier had to be pushing 70 before starting his school. Ten years from now, he’d have to be pushing 80 (taking the sliding scale into consideration) at the time he starts the school. So this doesn’t really work either.
When it comes to Magneto and Professor X’s age, Marvel could just retcon in a suspended animation/time travel story. Put them together, either as opposing sides or as allies, to explain why they both had the same thing happen to them.
Yes, it is cliche and tacky, but it beats retconning Magneto into a victim of some more modern attempt at genocide.
Or Marvel could just not draw attention to it.
A brave writer would turn Magneto into a Bosnian Muslim.
Eh. He looked about 70.
Yeah suspended animation is the only viable workaround I can see. Just saying they aged slowly only means they spent decades pissing around before finally getting around to their X-Men vs Brotherhood business.
Here’s a possible solution…
After the end of the second world war, Magneto spent the next twenty years or so chasing down remnants of the Nazi regime– oblivious to the nature of his powers and the fact that there were others like him (so, similar to the First Class film). In 1968, he uncovers a Nazi thinktank that Hitler set up to research into longevity. The project continued even after Hitler’s death and made at least one breakthrough in that they were able to develop suspended animation technology. Magneto raids the facility, kills everyone inside, but in his rage, he causes a cave-in (it’s literally underground). In an effort to save himself, he leaps into what turns out to be a cryo-stasis container which then activates and he is placed in suspended animation buried under tons of rock.
At this point we jump from 1968 to “twenty years before the X-Men were formed.” We don’t specify the exact year or precisely how many years Magneto was frozen. Same as the Captain America deal. Magneto is freed (somehow) and discovers that although he hasn’t aged at all, he’d been buried for “many years.”
It’s after this point that he eventually meets Xavier who is physically the same age as him (thirty-something) although Xavier was born “many years” after Magneto was.
The sliding timescale thing is problematic, but I’m not convinced by some of these answers.
The Bosnian Muslim thing would be a good choice for an Ultimate universe style setup, but, would be too jarring a change for 616 where “Holocaust survivor” is one of his most core character points in modern versions of the character.
Similarly the suspended animation thing risks turning his early appearances into a “bottled evil” style thing, which is too usually a magic trope to quite fit the tone of the character.
I’d be more tempted to go with him slowly come to the realisation he stopped/slowed aging, but leave it ambiguous as to whether this is an aspect of his powers or the result of some Nazi experiment.
At this point, more problematic is that you begin stretching the Xavier-Magneto friendship if one is on a sliding timescale and the other isn’t. Although you can prolongue that by perhaps having it become a mentor-friendship thing (Magneto is the one to first get Xavier to explore his powers?) and that then opens some different dynamics.
Also, Namor doesn’t need his timescale explaining: he’s more interesting as a hybrid than a mutant and as long as no one ever states how long Atlanteans live thats all the explanation you need.
I wasn’t serious about the Bosnian thing. The Holocaust is too important to the character in too many ways. My serious answer is the “elastic bridge”. It’s 2014, and 13 years ago it was 1965. But five decades have still passed.
I kind of think we need to be a bit more generous with the sliding timescale than 13 years. You could pretty easily push it to at least 20 for most franchises (and just assume Franklin is some weird time nexus). Cyclops and Spider-man could easily be placed in their mid 30s now from debuting as teens. That then allows the New Mutants, Kitty and Jubilee to be mid 20s which is a bit neater.
I think Magneto could still work even if they retconned out the Holocaust from his backstory and just gave him a new origin where he had a mutant wife who was murdered by humans and that’s what sent him over the edge. Timeline problem solved.
Of course if Marvel were to do this they’d be barraged with accusations of antisemitism. Can’t win though. Take the Holocaust stuff out and it means you have a problem with Jews. Leave it in and you’re “marginalizing the Holocaust” by attaching it to a comic book supervillain which is what some critics said of the first X-Men film.
Marvel’s sliding timeline, like most things in superhero comics, falls apart if you think about it for longer than thirty seconds, and any attempt to address this will probably only make this worse. The underlying problem is that none of these characters were designed to last for this long. As much as we’d like to think otherwise, these are not timeless creations we’re talking about; there are not endless amounts of stories one can tell with these characters, which is why most Big Two stories are, at this point, simply either remixing old stories or playing at mashing action figures together.
As for Magneto in particular, I don’t think you can retcon the Holocaust out of his origin without breaking the character, and I don’t think there’s another way to do the time-jump without making even more of a mess of things. When you have a hole in your story, sometimes the only thing to do is gloss over it rather than call attention to it.
(And I know Tim likes the Celestials, but as much misplaced affection as I have for Earth X, I think the X-Men and the Celestials seriously need a divorce, because they both become massively more lame when mixed together.)
The sad thing is that the X-Men franchise is actually the one line where Marvel had the opportunity to let their characters age gracefully. Claremont was letting characters slowly grow up and move on with their lives, into retirement. If that model had been continued, this whole thing could have been avoided as far as the X-Men are concerned.
BTW, couldn’t Xavier have had slowed aging based on some effect of general relativity due to the time he spent in space with the Starjammers?
I’ve always loved the “elastic bridge” idea. (First time I’ve heard it called that, but I like it, too)
It’d make a great FF story and explain everything needing explaining in comics. And with the whole “timeline is broken” stuff they keep harping on about, we’re other building to that or a reboot of the timeline.
Magneto’s a special case because, like the Punisher, his origin is pretty much irrevocably tied to a conflict that remains stuck in time.
Starting with the Greg Rucka series a few years back, the “main” Marvel Punisher — as opposed to Garth Ennis’s grizzled MAX take — has had his origin updated to the recent Gulf War. The most recent issue of his current series has him refer to fighting in Fallujah.
“Claremont was letting characters slowly grow up and move on with their lives, into retirement.”
You know, I recall Claremont talking about doing this sort of thing in interviews but I don’t recall him actually doing it. Banshee was written out at Byrne’s suggestion because they already had a guy on the team a ranged attack (Cyclops). Jean “moved on” by being killed off by the EIC. Cyclops met and married a ringer for his dead girlfriend but he wasn’t written out. He remained in the book up until X-Factor came along (which wasn’t Claremont’s idea).
Years later, Scott Lobdell writes a convincing exit story for Kitty Pryde with her deciding to take a stab at a normal life. Who brings her back into the X-Men? Claremont. Only to have Whedon steal her away from him.
Cyclops WAS written out of the book. He leaves the team after his marriage (in #176) and only makes a few appearances with the team after that (in Secret Wars and the X-men/Alpha Flight/New Mutants Asgard story). He doesn’t have a significant appearance in Uncanny until # 199, then is written out again in # 201.
Alright, lets give him that one. That’s one.
Thunderbird I; died without being resurrected.
Jean Grey: died and resurrected only over CC’s objections.
Banshee: retired in collaboration with Byrne.
Cyclops: Took a hiatus, came back on an ad hoc basis, left to get married but got roped in a few times, left again to raise his child, and returned to action under another pen.
Xavier: Went off to space to retire.
Nightcrawler: Had a crisis of faith and left the team, came back, got hurt and was gone. Joined Excalibur.
Kitty: Same as nightcrawler.
Colossus: retired after the Siege Perilous.
Dazzler: retired after the Siege Perilous.
It’s my impression that CC would not have returned any of these characters on a full-time basis to the X-Men. He was interested in progressing the team. But there was editorial blowback from the “no team” era, and a push by Jim Lee and others to reunite X-Factor, X-Men and Excalibur.
I think that CC would have reunited the team after the “no team” era with just Storm, Logan, Gambit, Jubilee, Psylocke, Rogue, and a few new characters–essentially the team that we say in UXM #275, minus Banshee who would probably have been reserve. The others would have been occasional guest stars and/or retired but for the pressures of editorial and other creators.
To put it another way, who did Claremont bring back to the X-Men during his original run, prior to UXM #275, after that character had definitively left the X-Men? None. I think that team in #275 is probably the last team that Claremont had a relatively free hand in creating. I also don’t think that Forge and Banshee were going to stay on that team for very long. I do think he was bringing Xavier back, because we know he was planning a final Psi-War between Xavier and the Shadow King for #300.
I don’t think Excalibur counts as bringing a character back, since it really was an independent title, not an adjunct to the X-Men until after CC left.
Basically, CC got to a point where he felt there were no morse stories to be told about a particular character, retired him and brought in someone new.
Oh yeah, don’t forget Beast, Iceman and Angel.
On the flip side, he did bring Havok back to the X-Men after retirement, and was clearly working on bringing back Polaris towards the end there.
Not only that, he also was bring Xavier back for good to kill him off in #300. And Magneto would side with the X-men once and for all.
“I think that CC would have reunited the team after the “no team” era with just Storm, Logan, Gambit, Jubilee, Psylocke, Rogue, and a few new characters”
There’s some promo art from that era, interestingly enough, which features that line up more or less…and some with Strong Guy, too. Who knows what CC was planning…I do think he would have brought back people like Colossus and Dazzler, but not on a full time basis, more like Cyclops post Dark Phoenix Saga (in one interview, he did mention his plans for Colossus to rip off Wolverine’s claws)…
“Retiring” Beast, Angel and Iceman isn’t something that should be credited to Claremont. He didn’t come up with the “All-New, All-Different X-Men.” He inherited the gig after Wein bowed out and those characters were never meant to stick around because, well it was the All-New X-Men.
Thunderbird was killed off for the sole reason that Claremont and Cockrum couldn’t figure out what to do with him. And he was resurrected eventually. In the form of James Proudstar, a previously unmentioned brother who conveniently happened to have the same powers. For all intents and purposes, that’s the same thing as resurrecting the guy.
Claremont was hardly as progressive as he made himself out to be. By 1984, he was already paying homage to his greatest hits. Contemporary X-Men writers are frequently criticized for regurgitating and recycling the best of Claremont, but Claremont himself got that ball rolling. The fakeout with Madelyne (#175) The “Rogue Storm” story where he teased the same idea with Ororo. The Phoenix on the cover which turned out to be Kitty using some doohickey. And look at Rachel Summers. One part Phoenix, one part Days of Future Past. She’s popular, sure, but to me she’s just a reminder that Claremont should have stepped down a few years earlier.
moose n squirrel: You can’t take the Celestials out of the X-Men’s backstory any more than you can take the Celestials out of the Punisher’s backstory. They created humanity and put the genetic variance of mutancy in there.
Who knows whether or not they only wanted mutants to be rare and immortal, and it was nuclear energy that jump-started the proliferation of mutants in the 20th century? The idea that mutancy was exacerbated by the discovery of atomic power is not a new one. I recall that X-MEN forever had something about this as well.
The idea that mutancy was exacerbated by the discovery of atomic power is not a new one. I recall that X-MEN forever had something about this as well.
Heck, Stan and Jack implied this by revealing that Xavier’s father worked on the atomic bomb way back in the 1960s run. (This actually creates a slight timeline problem with Xavier also being a Korean War vet, but whatever…)
The Celestials are a neat idea – when contained within their own stories, as Kirby originally wrote them. Mixing them into the fundamental origins of every Marvel character wasn’t the point, and doing a bunch of X-Men stories about the Celestials just means making a bunch of really shitty X-Men stories that have little to do with the themes that have typically made X-Men stories work in the past.
To put it another way: in the Marvel universe, every single person, living or dead, is part of the cosmic being Eternity. Thus, there is a connection between the cosmic being Eternity and Spider-man. But if a bunch of Spider-man’s stories suddenly involved Spider-man hanging around with Eternity, you’d end up with a huge pile of shitty Spider-man stories, because the things that make good Spider-man stories have precious little to do with the things that make good stories about Eternity.
I’m not arguing that, no one really wants to see the X-Men having anything to do with the Celestials. (Although, you could argue that since the Phoenix is so closely tied to the X-Men, and the Phoenix is a cosmic counterpoint to the Celestials, that the basis for the connection is already there.) But my point was simply that if you needed a hand-wavey explanation regarding why certian things relating to genetics in the Marvel U don’t work right, that’s your go-to “get out of jail free” card.
“Space gods did it,” Hank said to Scott as he returned to his laboratory.
“The idea that mutancy was exacerbated by the discovery of atomic power is not a new one…
Heck, Stan and Jack implied this by revealing that Xavier’s father worked on the atomic bomb”
It’s also in the Beast’s origin story from the original Uncanny run – his father was exposed to radiation at a nuclear power plant.
Say, when did they take the “Children of the Atom” tag off the X-men books, anyway? I think it was still there in the early Claremont era.
“Heck, Stan and Jack implied this by revealing that Xavier’s father worked on the atomic bomb way back in the 1960s run. (This actually creates a slight timeline problem with Xavier also being a Korean War vet, but whatever…)”
Nah, Charles was 14 at the time. Xavier Senior just liked to take his work home with him.
“Dad do you have to enrich that plutonium in my bedroom?”
“It’s not your bedroom Charlie it’s the garage. You’re the one who refused to sleep at the foot of your mother’s bed any more.”
““Retiring” Beast, Angel and Iceman isn’t something that should be credited to Claremont.”
But he didn’t bring them back to the team. And while Bryne brought Angel back to the X-men, CC did write him off of the team again. They were pretty just brought back every once in a while, some of them more than others.
“For all intents and purposes, that’s the same thing as resurrecting the guy.”
Except it isn’t. It would have been had he brought him onto the X-men or New Mutants, but he didn’t. Which was a nice twist that he ended up with the Hellions.
“The fakeout with Madelyne (#175) The “Rogue Storm” story where he teased the same idea with Ororo. The Phoenix on the cover which turned out to be Kitty using some doohickey.”
A few teases here and there isn’t the same as out and out recycling. Big difference. So CC and the artists could never never never ever mention Phoenix again?
“And look at Rachel Summers. One part Phoenix, one part Days of Future Past.”
Which also isn’t the same as resurrecting a previous character. Rachel may have had the same powers as Jean, but they were 2 very different characters. And again, revisiting DOFP is recycling? This is a serial series, not a procedural/monster-of-the-week series. He’s allowed to revist past concepts and expand on them.
What was done with Angel, Iceman and Beast during the Claremont years is rather funny considering what “Uncanny Avengers” is trying to achieve. They were let loose into the broader superhero world, effectively retired as X-Men to just be superheroes. Champions (Iceman and Angel), Avengers (Beast), then all three together in New Defenders. And both Angel and Beast had a fling with the “public mutant” – Dazzler.
Then there was clearly an editorial decision to separate the X-Men off from everything else. Dazz joins the X-Men, Iceman, Beast and Angel get screwed over in X-Factor (overpowered, brain-damaged and Horsemanned respectively).
Clearly, at the time, rather than retiring them, they wanted to use (and abuse) the characters in different X-Men related ways. The problem for years after Claremont left was that they stopped doing anything interesting with them.
@halapeno — I think you’re missing the point. The point is not “why did they go,” but rather “did he keep bringing them back?” There’s a tendency in comics to feel like every so often the status quo needs to be restored. Claremont’s first run allowed the status quo to evolve and change, without hitting the reset button every two dozen issues. Not only did characters move on from the X-Men, but the X-Men moved on from their current settings, missions and so on. Over the course of fifteen years, they left the school, the mansion, New York, they even evaporated the team.
Towards the end of the run he was obviously moving closer to a reset because he had to restore the “team.” But it’s known that there was a lot of editorial influence and control was being handed over to the artists (esp. Jim Lee) who wanted to revisit old stories and reset the status quo. It’s not clear when CC’s influence really waned, but I’d say that by the time you hit #275 you’re clearly seeing the influence of editorial.
You know who else was doing that? Grant Morrison. He really tried to blow up the status quo and put a final end to so many of the tired X-Men tropes. No more secret school. No more Phoenix. No more Magneto. No more mutants are a tiny minority. No more Shi’ar. He was trying to push the franchise forward and force successor writers to do new and creative things. Instead, Brian Bendis, Chuck Austen and, yes, even Chris Claremont undid it all with Decimation, Xorn II and Excalibur.
@wwk5d – Replacing Beast, Iceman and Angel with new X-Men was something that was decided upon before Claremont even got the job. The job being “Write and further develop the All-New, All-Different X-Men.” If you want to credit him for his ability to understand his assignments and carry out instructions, okay. He did quite well with that, after all.
But if you want to support the argument that Claremont would, as a matter of practice, develop his characters towards natural retirement/moving on points, you might want to stick with decisions that were actually his surrounding characters he actually wrote on a regular basis (i.e. Cyclops, and Jean I suppose, had he not been forced to kill her). Removing old characters who were already slated for removal by the time he got on board and opting to leave them alone hardly qualifies.
As for James Proudstar, what difference does it make where he ended up? He was still just a way for Claremont to “resurrect” a character he regretted killing. Just because he didn’t join the X-Men it doesn’t count? Because Claremont found a different role for him that wouldn’t place him within a team where his powers were duplicated better by other characters? That’s largely why the original was killed in the first place. Of course Claremont was going to take a different tact with him the second time around.
Finally, I never claimed Rachel to be a resurrection of Jean. I just pointed her out as an example of Claremont being the first writer to trawl back through his greatest hits for more material. I usually don’t agree with much of what John Byrne has to say, but when he said “If you tell Chris that you liked something he did, his response will be to do that same thing over and over again.” Not that Byrne should talk, but still, he had a point.
To be fair, there was a logical and welcome progression up to issue 280. The whole post-Inferno dissolution of the team had been building to a reunion for over 2 years – from issue 251.
It was the new era with #281 and X-Men #1, post-Claremont, that lost it.
The X-Factor team merging back in made sense based on where that title had failed. Despite the joy of moving away from Louise Simonson’s angst-fest in #26 never really did anything after Inferno and had no real identity. The over-long Judgement War nonsense was a complete waste.
This is bringing back loads of memories! I remember, at the time, loving what Claremont was doing and being continually disappointed by X-Factor. With the X-Men gone, the potential for X-Factor, having dropped the X-Terminators cover, to be a public mutant superhero team (as it included an Avenger and two former Champions) was huge.
Instead, it was awful – not just the Judgement War rubbish (which the current Uncanny Avengers really reminds me of), but dire rubbish like the competition winner story with the trolls.
“If you want to credit him for his ability to understand his assignments and carry out instructions, okay. He did quite well with that, after all.”
I credit him for not bringing them back to begin with, when other writers (like Byrne) did want them back on the team.
As for James Proudstar, again, I don’t see it as a resurrection as all. A younger character who joins the rival team of the junior X-men? Not quite the same thing.
“Claremont being the first writer to trawl back through his greatest hits for more material.”
It isn’t trawling as much as revisiting a concept or idea that hadn’t been run into the ground by that point (ie, Cable, Bishop, etc). I don’t see revisiting old ideas as a bad thing since as i said, this is a serial nature where it is nice to see old concepts revisited. Forgetting everything that came before might have been a fun lark in the silver age, but give me the serial nature that CC was so good at during much of his uncanny work.
Ymmv, though.
Rachel, in particular, was a very interesting and successful idea. Bring back the Phoenix, but with someone who wasn’t turning Dark. Mash up her baggage (of the messed up future) with the team’s baggage (a constant reminder of Jean) and create new dramatic tension. It was brilliant.
Bringing in James Proudstar as a angry young man on the rival to the New Mutants was also an original idea. Yes, the power-set was unoriginal, but the dramatic motivation and characterisation was different. Stories are about much more than just the powers.
“A younger character who joins the rival team of the junior X-men? Not quite the same thing.”
You’re splitting hairs. It’s the same character. Just a few years younger. And didn’t I already point out that Claremont quite obviously was going to take a different approach with a resurrected T-Bird? What did you think he was going to do? Stick him on the X-Men with Wolverine and Colossus again so he could go, “Oh, yeah. Now I remember why I killed that guy!” Lol. No, he figured out a different role for him and then brought him back as his younger brother. It was something he’d been planning to do at least since Cockrum came back for his second tour (because Cockrum himself mentioned the possibility in an interview from that period). And with the New Mutants book, he eventually found an opportunity.
And I do not agree that “not bringing a character back that you never wrote on a regular basis in the first place” is fundamentally the same thing as “writing a character so that they grow and move on.” I don’t see how you draw a line between the two.
Again, that’s how you see it. I still don’t see Warpath as a “resurrection” since if CC wanted to, he could have just brought him back. Making him a younger different character is still not the same thing. Also, CC wasn’t the one who killed off T-bird, that was more Wein and Cockrum.
And if we’re going to by “plans the creators mentioned but never implemented” the original plan was for Scott and Jean to eventually get married and leave the team. Which CC did, except it was Scott and Maddie.
“And I do not agree that “not bringing a character back that you never wrote on a regular basis in the first place” is fundamentally the same thing as “writing a character so that they grow and move on.” I don’t see how you draw a line between the two.”
Easy. It is when he allows the characters to move on without feeling the need to bring them back full time (as opposed to Byrne bringing back Angel full time). So he wasn’t their regular writer. So what? He only brought them back for occasional appearances when he needed to.
Again, ymmv.