The X-Axis – w/c 11 August 2025
ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #32. By Tim Seeley, Edoardo Audino, KJ Diaz & Clayton Cowles. This is the start of a new arc, and I’ll warn you now that I’m going to spoil the ending, because that’s the real hook for the arc. Up to then, we have a framing sequence of Sean telling the story to Black Tom (nothing wrong with bringing those two together, and this is the natural book for Tom to be used in), and the story itself involving the return of… the Changeling. That’s the Silver Age Changeling, the one who was in a handful of issues from the Factor Three storyline and then got retconned into having replaced Professor X when they wanted to bring him back from the dead at the dawn of the 1970s.
The Changeling is… not a character anyone has really been crying out to see again, which is why he didn’t even get used in the Krakoan era. But presumably he was resurrected off panel – he was an X-Man for one issue (retroactive), after all – and now he’s gone back to mutant radicalism. Tim Seeley does a good job of setting up why Sean would care about this character, reminding us that he debuted as a pawn of Factor Three back in the sixties – and Audino actually makes that wonky costume look pretty fun, giving the guy some presence, even though we really have to stretch to believe that the Tesco Value Mystique is going to get anywhere in a straight fight with Banshee. I mean, Banshee has range attacks that he doesn’t even need to aim with, right?
But the actual point of all this is to bring in Morph at the end – presumably the Exiles version, but who knows. And that does kind of intrigue me, because the Changeling is a character with the rather odd legacy of being the notional template for a much more popular character who bears almost no resemblance to him whatsoever. There’s got to be a story in that, right…?
X-MEN #20. (Annotations here.) We’re back to the single issue format, it seems, and that’s fine by me – it works better for Jed MacKay than longer storylines. With a bit of downtime conversation in the B-plots, this issue is built around a third confrontation between Scott and Agent Lundqvist, which ends up with them coming to blows and going to jail. It’s the first time that Lundqvist has come out more or less ahead – or at least that Scott has failed to bring him down a peg. MacKay has taken an odd approach in building up this character, presenting him as fundamentally outclassed from the word go; I suspect the whole idea is that we’re meant to be underestimating and misreading him to some extent. Diaz does a rather good job of making him smugly satisfied with finally getting a partial win over Scott. The reveal here, if you take it at face value (and Scott doesn’t), is Lundqvist arguing that he isn’t anti-mutant, he’s just anti the really powerful ones who think they’re above the law.
That actually is a plausible reading of his behaviour to date – with hindsight, it’s unfortunate we didn’t get more of him and Scott interacting over “X-Manhunt”, where they actually seem to have had some sort of off-panel understanding – and honestly, it’s probably a more interesting direction for O*N*E. After all, we have Corina Ellis doing the anti-mutant lunatic angle over in Uncanny, so this gives Lundqvist something more his own. And “where do the X-Men get off acting as if they’re above the law” is a completely reasonable motivation for a law enforcement character to have, with a post-Krakoa subtext that you could also tap into. It’s an issue I like more, the more I think about it.
LAURA KINNEY: WOLVERINE #9. (Annotations here.) This is… completely okay, I guess? I don’t really understand why Gabby was kept out of circulation in both this book and NYX for so long, especially if she and Laura are supposed to be in touch. Packing her off to hunt monsters with Xarus in the aftermath of Blood Hunt is at least a reasonable explanation for why she’s not been around and builds off the last story we saw her in, but it runs up against the problem that Xarus is not a very interesting character. Nor is Strega, the new villain, especially memorable. I kind of like Laura’s blatant inability to handle Gabby adventuring with a different partner, and it looks perfectly nice, but it’s all a bit surplus to requirements.
MAGIK #8. (Annotations here.) So this is an odd issue. Magik, Mirage and Liminal are packed off to Las Vegas, supposedly to recover a mystical artefact for the Society of the Eternal Dawn in order that it can be used to free Cal from Liminal’s possession, but in reality in order to deal with the Society’s dissidents on their behalf. So far, so normal. But the issue also features an extended hallucinatory fight scene (and I’m still not entirely sure why these Scarlet Eye dissident guys are dealing in hallucinogenics). It’s wonderfully odd, particularly as Matt Horak’s art normally strikes such a grounded tone even when dealing in magical dimensions; this is where he gets to go nuts. And there’s a subtler level of weirdness as Liminal gaslights his way through the issue blandly denying what other characters have literally just seen him do, and calmly insinuating himself into steering the story even though he’s meant to be Magik and Mirage’s prisoner. In isolation it’s all a little confusing, but the book’s earned the benefit of the doubt on this sort of thing.
GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #2. By Jackson Lanzing, Collin Kelly, Adam Kubert, Laura Martin & Clayton Cowles. Well, the House of M issue wasn’t bad, but on the whole I think we have to chalk this mini up as a misfire. I get that we’re trying to do stories about Kamala coming to mutant culture as an outsider, and in theory giving her a tour of X-Men history works with that, but in practice I’m increasingly convinced that this whole direction for the character is misconceived. She’s being dragged away from the neighbourhood hero role that was so central to her, yet she’s also too established a character to fit comfortably into this newcomer role. So none of this really leads up in a satisfying way to her coming out to her parents as a mutant – the strings are too visible.
As for the story itself, it’s basically just a fight between some of the major X-Men and Legion (or the abandoned personalities of Legion, who get packed off to the White Hot Room at the end). Kamala seems to have rounded up these characters… um, somewhere? It’s all terribly arbitrary, and it certainly wasn’t worth having Phoenix show up on Earth for this. There are other books where that would be a much more meaningful deal. Kubert’s art mostly delivers – the page of the two sides of Legion being reunited is genuinely lovely – but the issue as a whole is a bit of a mess.
The back-up strip is by Jed MacKay, Cafu & David Curiel, and basically consists of Mystique and Destiny trailing “Age of Revelation”. There isn’t much more to be said about it than that.
SPIDER-MAN & WOLVERINE #4. By Marc Guggenheim, Gerardo Sandoval, Victor Nava, Brian Reber & Travis Lanham. Because you demanded it: a book whose only selling point is the Kaare Andrews art, with a fill-in artist.
This is the first time I’m hearing of any fan backlash to Morrison’s take on Magneto. If anything, I remember the backlash being towards retconning him to be an imposter.
@Taibak: anecdotally, I remember people hating aspects of Morrison’s run. The Magneto story caused a stir at the LCBS, and I distinctly remember going to a con in the early ‘00s and hearing multiple people upset that Beast was gay now. I pointed out to one guy that the “coming out” was reversed right after, but he was mad that the Beast even said he was gay…
I don’t have the highest opinion of most other comic book nerds, for some reason.
@Taibak- TV Tropes explains why some people disliked Morrison’s Magneto:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/NewXMen
“Morrison’s take on Magneto is a radical departure from previous portrayals, essentially being a mentally unbalanced psychopath who’s driven even further off the deep end by abusing power-enhancing drugs. His downfall is ultimately caused by his own impulsiveness and lack of foresight, leading even his followers to turn against him when they recognize him as a deluded old crank. While Morrison wasn’t entirely responsible for Magneto becoming a villain again (that happened a few years earlier), previous versions of the character had always portrayed his charisma and intelligence as two of his biggest redeeming qualities—leading many fans to dislike Morrison’s version for lacking those traits.”
@Mike Loughlin – There was no reversal on Beast’s “coming out” because Beast wasn’t being serious in the first place when he said that. He was just fucking around with Trish who had dumped him purely because she allowed the ignorant crap other people had being saying about their relationship (using words like “beastiality”) get to her.
Magneto didn’t have much charm in the Silver Age, and infiltrating the x-mansion as Xorn was pretty intelligent.
@neutrino- I think the point is that Magneto seemed to lose all intelligence after the Reveal, to the point where you had to wonder how he managed to successfully hide among the X-Men in the first place.
@Michael- Magneto was high on Kick throughout Planet X.
@Moo: yes, absolutely, in my attempt to summarize I phrased my summary of what happened with Beast poorly.
Morrison’s Magneto was not only high on Kick, but being high on Kick also meant that Sublime was subtly influencing him.
That fits well with both Magneto managing to infiltrate the X-Men, something Sublime would want, and with Magneto acting irrationally and pushing things towards a human-mutant war once he reveals himself, which Sublime also wants.
There’s also a hint that “Xorn” is an aspect of Magneto’s better qualities, since the “Xorn” helmet talks to the Kick-addled Magneto partway through “Planet X” and chides him for his actions.
As to backlash, yah, a lot of longtime X-Men fans *hated* the last couple of arcs of Morrison’s run, since they were all in on the more sympathetic take on Magneto from the 1980s. There was also a lot of anger about the way Morrison cemented the Cyclops/Emma relationship in the final pages of his last issue.
I’ve also seen a number of persistent and vocal fans who insist that Morrison did not initially intend Xorn to be Magneto, and claim that Xorn’s early appearances don’t fit with the eventual reveal. They are unusually hostile to anyone presenting evidence for alternative interpretations.
@Omar- Morrison definitely intended Xorn to be Magneto from the start. That being said, there’s two issues people had with Xorn. The first is that it defies belief that Magneto could have fooled Wolverine’s senses for such a long time.
The second is that an Asian character turned out to be a white guy in yellowface.
The problem with the way that Morrison cemented the Scott/ Emma relationship, aside from the making out on Jean’s grave, is that Scott doesn’t make the “right” choice of his own free will- Jean has to mind control him to doing the right thing in the end. If it wasn’t for Jean’s telepathic push, Scott would have wandered off in self-pity while Sublime destroyed the world.
“The second is that an Asian character turned out to be a white guy in yellowface.”
Yeah, I’m sure that was a real widespread complaint back in 2003 when Marvel was still passing off Betsy Braddock as an Asian ninja (although she was dead at the time, but came back alive and still Asian shortly thereafter). In fact, I don’t recall seeing that complaint at all.
“The problem with the way that Morrison cemented the Scott/ Emma relationship…”
I’m going to cut it off at that point because what follows is irrelevant. Those fans were *always* going to complain about the
Scott/Emma relationship no matter how Morrison handled it. They were already complaining plenty about it before “Here Comes Tommorrow”. All that story did was give them additional ammunition. There was no way in hell Morrison was going to be able to write anything that would have swayed hardcore Scott/Jean loyalists into being open-minded to the idea.
I have to disagree. Making out on Jean’s grave is *very* soap opera, which makes it a perfect ending to Scott and Emma’s affair arc. And my reading of Jean’s actions was that she was releasing Scott to a new and better future, not controlling his mind.
Morrison’s whole thesis about Scott and Jean was that they were terrible for each other, another albatross around the neck of the franchise. She felt stifled by his conventional thinking. He felt guilty for holding her back. He had to stay in control to live up to his leadership duties. She had to stay in control to keep him happy and, you know, not eat any stars. They were locked in stasis as a couple.
Her final act in New X-Men was to free him to be a little bad, to follow his heart instead of his responsibilities. In short, to forgive him. And that ended up changing the entire timeline for the X-Men.
I think the difference is thinking about it as “Jean using her powers to alter Scott’s decisions” versus “Jean subtly letting Scott know it’s okay to let go.”
Furthermore, yellowface requires a non-Asian person to disguise themselves somehow (usually with makeup) to *appear to look Asian*.
Magneto did nothing of the sort. He simply asserted that he was an Asian guy underneath the helmet. That’s not yellowface. That’s just a guy lying.
Morrison intended Magneto’s bad, harmful ideas in “Planet X” as a refutation of the “he had some good points” reaction people had to the character, especially after Ian McKellan played him in the first X-Men movie. They also wanted to show that Magneto was more effective as a symbol, and that the man himself was a terrorist. Given that Morrison’s main theme for New X-Men was “out with the old, in with the new” (as much as I love the run, their success on that front was inconsistent), it made sense that they portrayed Magneto as a relic.
Even though then-recent X-comics showed Magneto acting as a villain, a lot of fans didn’t forget Claremont’s arc for the character (as stated by a commenter above), the villainous-but-sympathetic movie version, or the heroic Age of Apocalypse version. Morrison’s symbolism was no match for fan perceptions of the character, and there was much complaining. I liked “Planet X,” especially the scenes showing how the young characters rejected Magneto’s barbarism, but I had resigned myself to the fact that Marvel wouldn’t let Magneto be a multi-faceted character any more. As much as fan reactions can annoy me, I got why people didn’t like the character turn.
@Mike Loughlin- “Out with the old, in with the new” was definitely part of the problem. Neither of the main villains Morrison created (Sublime and Cassandra Nova) could really serve as a replacement for Magneto- Cassandra Nova was only used between Morrison’s run and X-Men Red in Whedon’s Astonishing arc and after the Weapon X series ended, Sublime only appeared in the female X-Men book until the Krakoan era. So even readers who liked Magneto as a villain felt like Morrison was trashing a good villain and not replacing him with anything comparable.
@Michael- I don’t recall Morrison expressing any intention to replace Magneto with anyone. He said things in his manifesto and in interviews that suggested he was going to steer clear of old villains, but we obviously know now that he wanted to preserve the surprise of the Xorn storyline.
@ Michael: Morrison’s Big 2 creations tend to be ignored by most other creators for whatever reason. They pop up occasionally, are used years after Morrison has left a title, and/or used by the rare creators who get Morrison’s intent. See: Crazy Jane, Danny the Street. The Great 10, Noh Varr, Zauriel, Aztek, the Brotherhood of Dada, the Seven Soldiers of Victory, Simon Hurt, Beak, Angel Salvadore, most of all of the special class, etc.
Granted, this happens to other writers and artists. I think it happens more often with Morrison. I don’t know if Sublime & CN were intended to be new archenemies in 1:1 correspondence way with Magneto & Apocalypse, I just think Morrison wanted to introduce new concepts and get rid of old ones.
“I just think Morrison wanted to introduce new concepts and get rid of old ones.”
I can agree with the first part of that statement, but not the second. Morrison killed off Magneto on his way out the door. I don’t think he particular cared enough to “get rid” of Magneto by that point. Perhaps if he intended to stay on the book for an indefinite period you could say that. But he was wrapping things up, and I doubt he had any illusions that his decapitation of Magneto would be the end of the character (although I imagine he was probably surprised at how quickly and ham-fistedly he was brought back).
I think it’s also worth remembering that Lobdell had already killed off Magneto just prior to Morrison’s arrival. Like, immediately before, lol. He had no idea Morrison was intending to use him.
To be fair, Morrison often doesn’t leave characters in places where they can easily be picked up again.
Want to use Crazy Jane? Well, her character arc has come to a definitive end, she no longer has any powers, and she’s not even on Earth. Good luck!
Want to use Magneto? Well, he’s demonstrably irrelevant and no longer has a head. Have fun!
Obviously, it’s comics, so anything can happen. I’m just saying Morrison leaves future writers a real challenge, so it might take a while to figure out even *if* some of their characters can be used again.
@Thom H- Also, it should be noted that Doom Patrol characters not named Gar often go unused for large periods of time. The original series ended with the original lineup plus Mallah and the Brain dying- only Gar, Mento and Madame Rouge survived. And Madame Rouge was forgotten about until New Teen Titans, where she was killed off. General Immortus, who hadn’t been used for awhile when the team died, was also mostly ignored after the series ended. Whenever the plot required an evil immortal at DC, the writers would use Ra’s al Gaul or Vandal Savage.
After Gar joined the New Teen Titans, Mento started appearing again and the Brain and Mallah were brought back from the dead.
The new lineup Paul Kupperberg introduced in the ’70s didn’t fare any better- most of them got killed or depowered.
@Thom H: Bobby Ewing showed up in the shower, Superboy punched reality and out popped the Red Hood, “Somehow, Palpatine returned”…
That Magneto who died? He was an impostor. The REAL Magneto was in hiding (or something, I never read that run of Excalibur).
Any character in serial fiction can be brought back at any time by any writer, even if the reasoning is really stupid. Which, unfortunately, it usually is.
Re Crazy Jane: yeah, she was given a definitive ending, that wasn’t my best example. Still, I think the overall point stands.
@Michael: The Doom Patrol definitely has a long history of not surviving its latest iteration. Until a writer comes along to resuscitate the characters they want on their new DP team (which feeds into Mike Loughlin’s comment). One of the smartest things I thought Morrison did in Doom Patrol was to leave so many previous characters dead instead of reviving literally everyone like Gerard Way did.
@Mike Loughlin: Yes, absolutely. I just wanted to point out that, more than most writers, Morrison doesn’t care about putting the toys back in the box at the end of a run. Which is probably the main reason Marvel had to do a hard reset on Xorn/Magneto, who Morrison pretty thoroughly discredited.
@Thom – And they botched that reset, and they knew it. Bendis revealed at a convention that Marvel was quite aware that their Xorn/Magneto retcon was a disaster. They were trying to salvage both characters (even though Xorn wasn’t meant to be a character) and made quite the mess of it.
They should have just let Morrison’s story stand as he intended it and then sewed Magneto’s head back on later or something.
@Moo- As I understand it part of the problem was that they wanted to do Xavier-and-Magneto-working-together stories but didn’t want to bring Jean back. So it would be difficult to have Xavier working with Magneto while Magneto killed Jean.
@Michael: not to mention putting a concentration camp in NYC and killing a bunch of humans. There’s no way Magneto could be anything but a full-on villain after that.
@Micheal- Well, that Genoshan-Excalibur series was another disaster. They shouldn’t have bothered with that either.
Here’s what they should have done: Let Morrison’s story stand, and leave Magneto dead for the moment. When it came time to do House of M, they could’ve had Wanda resurrect him. Then have Magneto realize that his behavior in NXM was the result of PTSD-induced madness as a result of having been present for, and surviving, yet another genocide (the Genosha attack).
@Mike Loughlin- To be perfectly honest, if Magneto were left in a state where he couldn’t be anything other than a villain, I’d be perfectly okay with that. I’m fine with characters who are traditionally depicted as henchmen turning over a new leaf (i.e. Thunderbolts) but when it comes to A-listers like Magneto, no thank you. Waste of a perfectly good villain. Then you end up with someone who used to give a whole superhero team a run for its money on that team, which means you’ve got to either nerf them, or power up the next villains to ridiculous levels.
@Moo- But the problem was that Morrison’s Magneto didn’t really work as an effective villain either- the entire story was about how he was an anachronism. Instead of an ideological threat to the X-Men, Magneto came across as a petty man who controlled one of the fundamental forces of the universe- and that niche in the Marvel Universe is already filled by Graviton.
@Moo: X-Men does have a villain problem, so making Magneto their antagonist again wouldn’t have been the worst move. Having him murder innocents and attempt genocide, however, makes him a villain I don’t want to read about. I thought Fall of X gave writers the perfect chance to make him an antagonist again. Other characters resurrected him when he said not to. After dealing with Orchis and co, he could have said, “I don’t trust you, and now I have to prevent more mutants from getting hurt while you all lick your wounds.” Lots of other characters follow him, and you have a new Brotherhood who actively recruit persecuted mutants.
@Michael- When I suggested how they could have brought him back, I wasn’t suggesting that just so they could have him go back to being Planet X Magneto. What would be the point then? I was suggesting it as a means to insane away his previous behavior and restore him to a more palatable state (but still as a villain, mind you).
@Mike Loughlin – Like I said, they’d established that he was insane at the time.
@Moo: yes, he was high on kick, but that’s not enough to make ever want to read about that version of the character again. I don’t like the ultimate resolution, but if they had to use Magneto again, I prefer him with less innocent blood on his hands.
@Mike Loughlin- No, no. I’m not talking about Kick. I think you skipped over my reply to Michael where I explained an alternative way they could’ve brought Magneto back.
@Moo: Oh, I think I conflated your above response with my reading of the story.
At any ratet, your idea of compounded trauma would be a good explanation of Magneto’s actions during “Planet X,” and could dovetail into how people who experience trauma can end up repeating it with others. If Marvel went in that direction, assuming it was handled with nuance and sensitivity, it would be workable. In fact, it would be better than the way Ben Percy reset Beast’s brain to a save point in order to excuse his despicable war crimes.
I, personally, would still think of Magneto as the guy who tried to (or did) recreate one of the most heinous, unforgivably evil events in history. The explanation (which I realize would not be an excuse) wouldn’t be enough to want me to read about that character again. I don’t like it when villains commit mass casualty events, no matter the justification. I think other readers would feel the same, no matter what the reason, although that’s just speculation on my part.
@Mike Loughlin- Fair enough, if that’s how you’d feel about it.
Though, I think you might be underestimating the average reader’s willingness to forget a storyline they want to forget. While the explanation might not satisfy them initially, I think the average reader would come to accept it and move on. But now that’s me speculating.
I still think it would’ve been worth the attempt, though. The way they actually did it may have gotten Magneto completely off the hook, but the next time we see him, he’s kicking back in a villa in Genosha seeming remarkably unphased for someone who recently endured a second genocide. And this was from Claremont. “Sorry the yard’s such a mess, Charles. There was a genocide here recently, and I still haven’t finished tidying up. Cappuccino?”
@Moo- It’s true that readers seem to be willing to forget a story they want to forget sometimes. Bishop killed many more people than Magento did in Morrison’s run and now he’s an X-Man in good standing. Nobody remembers that time Brother Voodoo raped his girlfriend, except to cite it as an example of how readers forget bad stories.
There are exceptions to that rule- Hank Pam being the most obvious.
@Michael – I think it comes down to relatability. Readers in general seem more willing to forgive a character for murder than for domestic violence, and I believe that’s probably because few readers can relate to the former, whereas the latter is a different story. That sort of thing is, sadly, very personal to too many.
@Michael – Along those same lines, this is the first I’ve heard of that Brother VooDoo thing, but I’d speculate that if the comic book audience were predominantly female, that’s not something readers would have forgotten.
Morrison, of course, did all sorts of bad things to Animal Man and then put everything back to normal when the series ended. But that also fit in with the book’s metatextual nature/
(Obligatory plug for my podcast with Grant from earlier thus year)
@Moo- in Brother Voodoo’s case. it was forgotten about because it was only mentioned in one issue and because Brother Voodoo was an obscure character at the time- everyone thought of him as the guy Fred Hembeck made fun of. When Voodoo later became more popular, the writers just decided not to mention it.
And there have been characters other than Hank Pym that hit their spouses and were forgiven- Peter Parker, for example. Brian Cronin discussed it here:
https://www.cbr.com/avengers-hank-pym-downfall-before-struck-wasp/
“First off, I guess we should address the somewhat controversial notion of, “Why do we even continue to bring up Hank Pym’s abuse of Wasp?” What I mean to say is, the history of superhero comic book fiction is a long one, with characters written by many different people over a period of many decades and as a result, there are going to be some stories where we would really prefer not to think about them when it comes to certain superheroes and yet, for the most part, when it comes to forgetting events like these, we just, you know, DO. For instance, Mister Fantastic never has anyone confront him over the fact that he created a clone of Thor that went rogue and murdered Goliath, a really close friend to Reed’s longtime partner, the Thing. Spider-Man never gets any grief over the time that he was in such a rage that when Mary Jane, who was pregnant with their child together at the time, tried to calm him down, he struck her and knocked her across the room. We’ve just collectively said, “Okay, that just totally ruins that character if we accept that story, so let’s just ignore it.””
“But for Hank Pym, his worst action is ALL ANYONE WANTS TO WRITE ABOUT. I’m not saying it is wrong, but it is certainly a bit unusual.”
@Michael- He definitely has a point. I mean, the wife-beater talk just seemed to come out of nowhere in the early 2000’s– from Chuck Austen, from Brian Bendis, and now it’s all anyone talks about with regards to Hank. And the issue it happened in was published back in 1981.
And “wife-beater”? That term is usually reserved for men who come home after a hard day at the factory and clock their wives for not having dinner ready. And it’s a regular occurrence.
Hank struck Jan in the middle of a nervous breakdown. He was in the middle of building a friggin’ robot to fight the Avengers. He clearly wasn’t in a sound state of mind.
And more than four decades later he’s still being punished for it.
If anything, more enlightened/left leaning writers should be taking up the talking point of Hank’s psychological issues going back to the Silver Age and write him in a more compassionate way.
Hank’s been to therapy, Hank now takes his meds, etc.
I have faith Ewing could have done that if Avengers Inc hadn’t been cut short, since he’s shown a fondness for the Hank/Jan corner of the MU.
@Mark Coale- There’s defniitely two trends in left leaning thought lately. The first is to say that mental illness, unemployment, etc. do not excuse violence against women,. The second is to say that men, especially minority men, who are caught up in the criminal justice system deserve compassion, even if they committed certain violent crimes. The problem is that these trends are contradictory. If society can demand of Bob that he not resort to violence against the women in his life, no matter what he is going through, then Bob can demand of others that they not mug him at gunpoint, no matter what they are going through.
@Michael: realizing the criminal justice system and carceral state are flawed and need serious reform DOES NOT MEAN that anyone is ok with violent crimes being committed with impunity. That’s pure nonsense. Also, saying men shouldn’t beat their wives even if their life is hard isn’t what I’d call a trend of left-leaning thought, it’s the default position of most people for decades, at least.
@Mark Coale: Hank has been written with compassion by Roger Stern in Avengers, Steve Englehart in WCA, Kurt Busiek in Avengers, and Dan Slott in Mighty Avengers. They tried to make him a viable hero again, warts and all. The problems are: 1) Hank was portrayed as creepy and unlikable prior to and after hitting Jan; 2) Hank was never very popular with readers, his solo feature didn’t last long; 3) unlike Spider-Man or Reed, Hank is disposable. Other characters became Ant-Man and Giant Man/Goliath, whereas the other 2 character; 4) Hank did it first? I’m not positive, but Hank might have been the first Marvel hero to hit his significant other in continuity. At any rate, readers rejected the character despite some writers’ best efforts and he’s unusable for the moment.
Yeah, one writer portrays Hank as stable and reformed, then the next writer destabilizes him again. The same’s been happening with Wanda for years.
Honestly, it’s a pretty realistic portrayal of mental illness, which often has up and down phases. And it’s handy to have characters on the margins who the heroes love but can’t quite trust. When those characters don’t age for decades, though, the repeated character arc becomes a little tedious.
My sense is that Wanda is doing well at the moment, mostly due to Steve Orlando, and Hank is not, despite Al Ewing’s best efforts.
Regarding Hank Pym, I think the other reason his worst moment has “stuck” is that it was immediately played as having significant, relatively realistic physical and emotional consequences. When Hank strikes Jan, the results are put front and center, from her black eye and initial shame and timidity to their divorce and Jan’s shift in outward demeanor as she struggles with what’s happened and finally finds herself.
In contrast, a lot of the other examples here were initially played out as contrived shock value with short-term, unrealistic, and melodramatic causes and outcomes, or even as no big deal. The stories in which they happened don’t even bother to make them “stick” or seem realistic in any meaningful sense.
So I think it’s the attempt at some psychological realism that really makes this all stick to Hank Pym. His domestic violence set up as part of a persistent inferiority complex, it’s paralleled to his effective betrayals of friends and allies, and it’s presented as having lasting emotional consequences for both him and others.
In comparison, Peter Parker hitting MJ because he’s freaking out and going paranoid about being deemed a clone comes from rather unreal circumstances, and everyone reacts to it in the story as a big melodramatic moment rather than as realistic physical abuse. And so it doesn’t really end up having the same narrative heft as Hank Pym’s steady emotional abuse of Jan over several issues culminating in physical abuse.
“At any rate, readers rejected the character despite some writers’ best efforts”
Well, that isn’t really true. It might be truer of this century, but I don’t recall any outright reader rejection of Hank throughout the ’80s and ’90s. I don’t recall seeing that sentiment expressed in the Avengers letter columns, nor from industry commentators in fanzines such as Comics Journal and Amazing Heroes.
Hank may never have been as popular as some of his Avengers buddies, and he does have the somewhat rare and embarrassing distinction of being a superhero who was surpassed in popularity by his own sidekick, but less popular doesn’t necessarily mean “rejection”.
Like I mentioned earlier, all of that wife-beater talk just seemed to spring out of nowhere in the early 2000s, by which point the Internet was in full swing and it gained traction.
And that’s actually not very surprising. If you don’t already have a hard-formed opinion of a character either way (and I don’t believe many readers did of Hank prior to 2000) but you’re exposed to a lot of online chatter that seems to be saying the same thing of that character, don’t be surprised to be find yourself adopting that opinion without even realizing you’ve been influenced. It’s very easy to wind up on a bandwagon that you don’t consciously remember boarding.
Anecdotally, “Hank Pym hit Jan” was known in my circles, and we didn’t even read Avengers. I remember an oversized painted special coming out (Tales to Astonish) after Marvels, in which the Hulk teamed up with Hank and Jan, and I thought “why would she go on vacation with a guy who hit her?” Maybe Wizard brought the subject up, or there was an interview with a writer who mentioned he was going to try to fix Hank? I don’t know, but I do know that I knew, you know?
Anyway, maybe reader reaction to Hank is more apathy than outright rejection, but he’s been replaced as Ant-Man by a slightly more popular version and been exiled into space or something after he merged with Ultron and very few people seem to care. If he’s come back, it’s been in a spin-off book that almost no one read. Maybe the Marvel Universe rejected Hank Pym.
@Mike – Yeah, I knew too. I was a regular Avengers before, during, and after Avengers 213. Roger Stern was the first to address the slap incident and he didn’t take the cheap route of trying to get Hank off the hook by asserting that he was mind-controlled (in fact, he wrote a sccene devoted to ruling that possibility out). Then he gave Hank and Jan some closure and a touching scene of him saying his goodbyes to the Avengers before heading off into retirement. I naively believed at the time to think that was the last we’d see of him, but it wasn’t long afterwards that Stern brought him back for a guest appearance. And it wasn’t long after that that Engelhart brought him into the WCA fold.
As far as Hank Pym apathy goes, I don’t attribute the slap to that. His inability to headline a successful ongoing predates that, and there were plenty of other heroes who couldn’t successfully sustain their own series for very long.
I think a big reason that Hank could never make it out of the B-leagues was because within the first seven years of his first appearance, he’d already blown through four different superhero identities. Consequently, it was difficult to associate him with any one superhero. Steve Rogers was Captain America. Tony Stark was Iron Man. But Hank Pym was Hank Pym and slap or no slap, that’s just not terribly exciting.
@Omar- But Peter had been losing his temper for a while after he found out his parents were imposters and Aunt May had a stroke. Dr. Kafka asked him to let her help him but he refused. So Peter’s violent outburst wasn’t unusual- it reads like someone who’s having anger issues but won’t get help. The reason why everyone forgot about was (1) it’s Spider-Man and (2) everyone understood that the only reason the “Peter’s having anger issues” plot started was to drive a wedge better Peter and the readers so that they’d accept Ben as Spider-Man.
@Moo- The complaints about Hank being a wife beater started a little earlier in 1998-1999. I remember Jeanne Burche put up a section on her website “Why Do You Think Hank Should Hit Jan” and that was the start of it. Up until then no one had a problem with Hank as a hero. I think you’re right that the internet was the main factor. (Although part of the problem was how badly Busiek wrote Jan in his first year of Avengers, before Avengers Forever.)
The funny part of it is that the Crossing retconned that Hank’s breakdowns were caused by Kang in 1995 and the fans hated it. They preferred Hank flawed but heroic. So Busiek and Breevort decided to undo that in Avengers Forever. But the complains about Hank being a wife beater started to gain steam just as Avengers Forever came out. So the retcon absolving Hank of blame was undone just as people started to complain more loudly about Hank hitting Jan.
@Moo- I think that you’re reversing cause and effect. The reason why Hank went through four different identities was because the fans were lukewarm toward him and the writers were trying to change him to make the fans like him more.
As for why the fans didn’t like him, it’s worth noting that Hank wasn’t supposed to be an ongoing character originally- his story was supposed to be a one-off story about a mad scientist who learned his lesson. So there wasn’t as much planning put into him as other Marvel characters.
One of the major problem was that Hank’s Tales to Astonish strip locked supporting characters besides the Wasp. And there was a lack of good villains. The only one which really became a major Marvel villain was the Human Top and he required some revamping to turn him into Whirlwind. The Black Knight, Porcupine and Egghead would all be killed off by later writers.
Then again, maybe the problem is that size-changing heroes have trouble finding an audience. The Atom’s series at DC lasted longer than Hank’s Tales to Astonish stint but it still failed. And there have been numerous attempts to try to change the Atom to make him more appealing- for example, his “Sword of the Atom” period.
Of course, the Atom’s villains were nothing to write home about, either. The only ones who made the big time were the Floronic Man and Chronos and both of them required a lot of revamping from their original appearances. Floronic Man was turned from a human who could control plants to an actual plant-man. Chronos is even weirder. He started out as a crook who used gimmicks based on watches, hourglasses, etc. And he gradually became this incredible scientific genius who can build devices that manipulate time itself.