Magneto vol 2 – “Reversals”
One more volume, and then we can lay Axis to rest for now. (There’s still the All-New X-Factor tie-ins to come, as part of that book’s final collection.)
The first volume of Magneto was a strong start, setting a clear and distinctive tone. It backed off from the familiar locations of the Marvel Universe, it steered clear of familiar superhero tropes, and it generally set about being a bleak character study of a man who had taken on many of the techniques of those he claimed to hate, and who seemed completely isolated from those he claimed to represent.
Well, two thirds of volume 2 is Axis tie-ins, so you can imagine how well that holds up.
Before that, we have two further issues along the line of the first volume. Issue #7 sees Magneto investigate a gang in Hong Kong who are kidnapping mutants to sell them on to Mutant Growth Hormone dealers. Since the dealers don’t actually want live subjects, the captive mutants are first being chucked into an arena to make them fight Predator Xs, since you might as well get a bit more money out of the execution. I’m not altogether sure I’d have used Predator X in this series – it’s a big metal wolf, and a link back to the core X-books – but it’s a peripheral enough concept that I think the book gets away with it, not least because it treats the creature as a rather sad victim of breeding and circumstance.
In issue #8, Magneto tracks down the MGH gang, and also crosses paths with the SHIELD agents who have been tailing him. Again, this is pretty good; the book is at pains to stress that Magneto is now operating at a power level where a bunch of random bozos with temporary powers have a reasonable shot against him, and it does a nice job of getting across that the gang aren’t even particularly anti-mutant. In their own minds, they actually quite like mutants. That’s delusional, but they can fairly claim that they’re more indifferent to the fate of mutants than actively hateful; and that sort of casual disregard is, if anything, more effective than having them foam at the mouth.
And then the crossover hits for four straight issues.
Now, there are commercial considerations that result in marginal titles having to do multi-issue tie-ins to big crossovers. It boosts sales in the short term and keeps the titles alive a bit longer. This is all understandable. Creatively, though, it’s generally a bad idea, unless the crossover can be worked into the series without disrupting what people liked about it in the first place. This is not one of those cases.
Interestingly, despite the length of the crossover – and despite Magneto being one of the inverted characters – the tie-in focusses entirely on the battle against the Red Skull, with only a very brief nod to the inversion gimmick at the end. Perhaps the calculation was that an inverted Magneto dragged the book even further from its core concept, and that’s probably right. But four issues of Magneto versus the Red Skull, with a cast of guests from the rest of the Marvel Universe, is a problem too.
Issue #9, for example, tries to do parallels between the Red Skull’s concentration camp on Genosha, and the experiences of young Magneto as a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz. And yes, at first glance it looks as though this ought to work. Genosha is obviously evoking the Holocaust; this is a formative aspect of Magneto’s character. But just because the plots click together, it doesn’t mean that the tone does. Magneto’s flashbacks largely centre on a camp officer, Hitzig, and Magneto’s regret that he couldn’t summon up the courage to kill him at the time. This is paralleled with Magneto’s evident contempt for two mutants in the camp who are too scared to take up his offer of escape – plainly, Magneto projecting his own self-hatred onto them.
And then the Red Skull shows up. And this is a problem, because the Red Skull is a different kind of Nazi. He’s not a realist portrayal (however toned down) of the formative horrors of life in the camps. He’s an outrageously over the top one-dimensional lunatic whose roots are in the propaganda stories of the 1940s. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that sort of character, but he comes from a very different story, and the grinding of gears when Magneto is trying to do its character pieces with the Red Skull in play is awkward indeed.
Issue #10, which consists of Magneto using his own memories to hide from the Red Skull’s psychic attack, is a wild deviation from the book’s normal style, and not for the better. Much of it will make little sense to readers without a fairly thorough knowledge of continuity – hey, remember that time Magneto and Rogue fought Zaladane in 1989? – but the very fact that it’s such a detour into the byways of the Marvel Universe just feels hopelessly wrong for the book. By the time some Nazi dinosaurs show up near the end, we’ve gone horribly awry.
By issues #11-12, we’re on to re-telling scenes from Axis. The former issue chucks in a spliced-in sequence of Raleigh encouraging Magneto to go and round up the villains. (She is an interesting character, when we finally get to learn more about her in issue #13 – but that’s for next volume.) The latter has a flashback to that time Xavier and Magneto fought Baron Strucker in their (relative) youth, and an admittedly cute epilogue in which the echo of Xavier appears to Magneto and tries to tell him that he was right after all. Unfortunately, by this point Magneto has been inverted, and he misses the point entirely, earnestly dedicating himself to take up Xavier’s crusade. Of course, since he’s going to be back to normal by the next time we see him, it doesn’t really matter.
This is a lengthy detour that does the book no real favours and, by the end, is pretty much just an alternate take on material we already read in Axis itself. Hopefully the book can swiftly get back on track now that this is out of the way – and issue #13 does seem promising in that regard. I understand why arcs like this exist, but it doesn’t make them any better.
It must be quite a creative echo of Xavier.
Everyone remembers the Magneto/Rogue/Zaladane story in the Savage Land. I think at this point, a writer is safe in referencing and playing with any pre-1992 (maybe 1995?) continuity for the X-books. It’s all pretty well known to anyone bothering to read the X-books. I can’t imagine a scenario of a “new” reader coming along and not having gone back to read the classics era. Otherwise, what keeps them reading the absolute shit Marvel keeps churning out?
Errant — that was over 20 years ago! I wouldn’t count it among “the classics” like Phoenix Saga.
Paul — Nazi dinosaurs? Good grief. The only way I’ve marginally kept up with any of the xbooks is via reading the feed of HtA, and I wanted to explicitly say Thank You. You read the books so I don’t have to!
Errant may or may not be right, but he is not completely wrong. The Jim Shooter days when there was an effort at putting the newcomers up to speed are long, long gone. Even footnotes and editorial pages have become nearly extinct, to everyone’s loss.
@Luis – Amen. The little editorial notes in the corners of panels sold me a ridiculous number of Marvel comics when I got into the hobby.
I loved those editorial footnotes. It made my 10-year-old self feel like I was reading something intellectual and sophisticated.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a writer to reference the Jim Lee era on Uncanny. It’s currently in print, it was one of the best-selling runs of comics of all time, and most (not all) comic book readers came of age reading the books of the ’80’s and ’90’s. However, the reference needs to either be accessible to a new reader via explanatory dialogue or narration, or unimportant enough that it can be safely ignored.
How can I put this… I’ve been reading comics since about 1998. Who the hell is “Zaladane”?
Marvel’s recap pages make it fairly easy to jump into most recent books, I think. As long as you start at any given relaunch or new creative team, it’s reasonable to keep up.
Still, I’m with deworde on this one: who or what the hell is a Zaladane???
She was the boss fight at the end of the first level of the first X-Men game on the Sega Mega-Drive.
“I can’t imagine a scenario of a “new” reader coming along and not having gone back to read the classics era.”
Oh of course! Whenever I start reading a title that is new to me, I immediately go out and purchase 300 back issues to get myself up to speed.
/sarcasm
Zaladane is an old Ka-Zar villain from the 70s that tended to show up whenever Claremont had the X-Men visit the Savage Land.
Her main claim to fame is the very dubious assertion around Uncanny X-Men 250 that she’s Polaris’s sister (and she’s actually “Zala Dane”), which already felt like bullshit at the time and has been quietly ignored ever since.
She was also the token villain for the “famous” Rogue/Magneto team-up in Uncanny 275, which is what this story is referencing. (As well as most riffs on that pairing.)
While we are on the topic of Zaladane, I am crazy for thinking it was implied in Uncanny 275 that she was Magneto’s daughter? I seem to recall that being in there, but I haven’t read the issue in 10 years or so. As I recall, it wasn’t officially established that Polaris was his daughter until one of those god awful Chuck Austen issues.
Jamie is right. I will correct myself: there are no new readers.
Zaladane was inconsequential enough that she has stayed dead for 25 years after Magneto killed her.
She was always an odd fit for X-Men. I always wondered about her origins and her role in other stories, but as an X-Fan in the ’80’s, I wasn’t about to dig up issues of Ka-Zar from the 1970’s. Claremont imported all sorts of great ideas from the wider Marvel U into the X-Line, but this was not one of them.
“Jamie is right. I will correct myself: there are no new readers.”
If you read what I actually said, I mentioning reading a title that is new to me, which I do rather often. You’re just looking for reasons to bitch.
Zaladane and Polaris being sisters sounds like something Claremont would follow up on in X-Men Forever. Did he?
They have kept recap pages around since the early 00’s….
I thought Zaladane was a French footballer.
Hahaha Jamie accusing people of looking for reasons to bitch. Hahahaha.
“…but as an X-Fan in the ’80’s, I wasn’t about to dig up issues of Ka-Zar from the 1970’s.”
I still secretly wonder how many of the oddball characters from the Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe were actually secretly invented by Mark Gruenweld in 1986, illustrated by someone in the bullpen in-the-style-of as the handbook was in-process, and inserted into the zeitgeist just to mess with us all as an experiment in how we remember/don’t remember back issues in the pre-digital age…
And from the other end of the spectrum, I started reading X-men back in 1981 or so. I’m pretty sure I read #275, and I vaguely remember that there’s a character named Zaladane. But I’ve got no recall whatsoever of a Rogue / Magneto Savage Land story from that time period. Indeed, my main memory of that period has (new at the time) Gambit and co. out in space with the Starjammers and Shi’ar.
@Brian–I could be convinced that this was true. All it’d take is a column by Brian Cronin over at CSBG telling us how Gruenwald invented Zaladane, and I’d eat it up. (Of course, I know she was around before 1986 because I read the Petrified Man arc, but you get the point).
@Sol–I’d say you’re an outlier. That Rogue-Magneto team up was pretty central to Rogue’s story all through the ’90’s, and a lot of fans have nostalgia for it. She refers to it in X-Men v.2 #1-3; again during the Magneto War, and on several other occasions. In fact, it was her reason for taking in and nurturing Joseph.
@Jaime–still a dickhead, I see.
@Dasklein83–not quite.
Polaris was introduced way back circa XM #50 as Magneto’s daughter, but that was revealed to be a “lie.” Claremont then had Zaladane steal Polaris’ powers, and Moira McTaggart told Polaris that they would have to be sisters in order for that to work ~ #250-255. Then Magneto killed Zaladane in #275, and later Polaris was re-retconned (unretconned? deretconned?) into Magneto’s daughter.
Here’s a question…for people who aren’t Marvel history mavens (and perhaps even those who are, given the sheer depth of crap there is to know), how effective are the recap pages at making sure they understand what’s going on?
Do people really need to read back issues just to be caught up on a character’s back-story or find out what happened to a character 20+ years ago these days? I just google or wiki a character or storyline. Of course, if my interest is piqued, then I might search out those issues…
“There’s still the All-New X-Factor tie-ins to come, as part of that book’s final collection”
Ah well. This recent volume isn’t quite clicking for me the way the previous volume did, but I will miss it, and the characters.
I can’t comment too much on the efficacy of the recap pages, but I have noticed they sometimes seem to introduce plot points from a previous issue that never actually came through clearly…or never made it in at all.