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Jan 12

The X-Axis – w/c 6 January 2025

Posted on Sunday, January 12, 2025 by Paul in x-axis

ASTONISHING X-MEN INFINITY COMIC #6. By Alex Paknadel, Phillip Sevy, Michael Bartolo & Clayton Cowles. This is the end of the “Back to Roots” arc, in which Banshee and Husk deal with anti-mutant thugs who’ve been getting budget cyborg upgrades. I’m not sure it really works. The good stuff in this arc was mostly the radicalisation angle, and I kind of like the idea of a cobbled-together middle ground between the real world and Kirbytech. But when you actually get to the climax, you’re basically left with a fight against henchman-level bad guys. In fairness, the story is trying to set up the villain behind the tech for future use. I’m not thrilled about this take on the X-Cutioner – whose original schtick wasn’t so much that he hated mutants as that he resented mutants who thought they were above the law – but I guess it was established in Marauders and we’re running with it. Still, the first half of this arc was the stronger part.

UNCANNY X-MEN #8. (Annotations here.) So the “Raid on Graymalkin” crossover was a weird thing, and not a particularly successful one. I generally like both X-Men and Uncanny in their current incarnations, but this story doesn’t play to either of their strengths – the best material in this crossover is the character stuff with Calico. The Graymalkin prison still doesn’t feel like it’s bringing anything we didn’t see (at grinding and inordinate length) with Orchis last year. I’m kind of interested in Scurvy, but I’m not seeing what distinguishes Corina Ellis from a thousand other anti-mutant types. And the whole hook of the two X-Men teams fighting just doesn’t work – if we’ve got past the first major conflict between the two groups and I still don’t really understand what the disagreement is meant to be, we’ve got a problem.

WOLVERINE #5. (Annotations here.) This is a refreshingly straightforward book, isn’t it? The Adamantine story is an odd idea – a sentient mythical metal thinks adamantium is an impostor – but if that’s the direction then it’s probably a smart move to put it a book which is otherwise playing the hits straight. Snowy wilderness! Fighting in trees! Leonard the Wendigo! And… one core idea which isn’t from the standard playbook. I still haven’t really figured out whether it’s a good idea or not, but it’s a nice looking comic that has the confidence to do something simple and seems to know what it’s doing.

NYX #7. (Annotations here.) The NYX community centre (or whatever it is) is finally opened, though we already saw it in an Infinity Comic a couple of weeks ago. A rather out-of-character Synch then shows up to pick a fight about the whole thing. I’m genuinely baffled about the choice of Synch for this role, which doesn’t seem to play off anything in his back story – in fact, Hickman’s insertion of centuries of time in the Vault into his back story feels like it makes him almost perfectly unsuited to a book about the mutants trying to find a place in the real world. I guess you could do something about his perspective being so far removed from everyone else, but that doesn’t really feel like it’s what they’re going for. Still, I like the caricature quality to Balám’s art, and Cousin Bilal trying to be a supervillain – and somewhat pulling it off – is a great visual.

MAGIK #1. (Annotations here.) So like I said in the annotations, my stance on Magik is that her story ended perfectly well in “Inferno” and nothing published since then has come anywhere close to changing my mind about that. It’s also a magic-driven book (well, of course it is), which is rarely an angle that does much for me in the X-books. So with the caveat that I am very much not the target audience for this book… it’s not bad, actually. Ashley Allen gets across her approach to Illyana and puts more emphasis on an actual character beneath the persona. Germán Peralta’s crow demon is lovely stuff, just because he seems so relaxed, in an understated kind of way. I really wish they’d get rid of that costume, which sort of worked in the Chris Bachalo period but feels out of place in what this book’s trying to do. But… yeah, perfectly solid.

SENTINELS #4. By Alex Paknadel, Justin Mason, Federico Blee & Travis Lanham. So it turns out that the dodgy technology that’s been implanted into the hapless Sentinels has actually been copied – badly – from the body of Juston Seyfert, who is not a character I was expecting to see reintroduced. In fact, there are a couple of odd twists here that feel a bit choppy in terms of the story, but they’re at least interesting calls. We’ll see if the book can pull it all together for an ending next issue, though. It feels a bit out of control here, but you never know.

Bring on the comments

  1. Michael says:

    The whole thing with the X-Cutioner in Marauders was weird. In Gambit’s series in 2000, he’d turned over a new leaf and stopped hunting mutants. Unfortunately, his armor is stolen by an alternate reality counterpart of Gambit. Gambit kills his counterpart and it looks like the X-Cutioner armor is lost for good. When a new X-Cutioner shows up later, it’s made clear it’s not the same X-Cutioner. And then in Marauders, the original X-Cutioner is (a) evil again and (b) somehow has his armor back. It made no sense and hopefully Paknadel will explain.
    I couldn’t figure out where Trask got the nanotech for his Sentinels from. I was assuming that he got it from something EVIL. It never occurred to me that he got it from Juston’s Sentinel, who was just trying to rescue Juston, and the transformed Sentinels aren’t evil.
    My guess is that next issue leads into X-Manhunt, since we see Xavier contact Patricia this issue. Probably, the Sentinels help Juston and Xavier escape.
    Wolverine 400 is coming out in April. Not only does it FINALLY bring the Adamantine story to a climax (which was probably dragged out until the anniversary issue) but an old enemy of Logan’s drives the Wendigo “to the brink”. Ogun, Sabretooth, Graydon Crred and Romulus are on the cover. My guess is it’s Ogun- he tried to corrupt Kitty, who like Leonard was one of Logan’s pupils.
    Breevort really offended Spider-Man fans this week. First, when Gail Simone asked a joking question about which superhero couple has sex the most, Breevort said MJ and Paul. Then he said that he thought that Ben Reily makes a good villain, in part because an enemy “whom readers at one point followed as a lead character” is a good idea. If Breevort thinks that turning heroes into villains is a good idea regardless of whether it’s consistent with their previous characterization, it’s no wonder that Darkstar and Phoebe Cuckoo suddenly became villains as soon as he became editor.

  2. ASV says:

    Sentinels has been enjoyable, but I can’t help but think it would work better as a b-plot in the main regular books.

  3. Mark Coale says:

    If you can have villains that get popular and then turned babyface, I don’t know why you can’t have a hero have a compelling heel turn. Not to Star in a book, but be a good foil for the hero on whom they turned.

  4. MasterMahan says:

    In theory a compelling heel turn is possible. In practice it mostly just upsets the character’s fans. Parallax was retconned away, Cassandra Cain fans hated her brief villain phase, and I think Jason Todd spent like 5 minutes as an antagonist before swapping to brooding bad boy anti-hero.

    There’s a couple exceptions. A character that starts out a villain is allowed to swap back and forth, and The Maker, who probably succeeded because his existence doesn’t remove a good Reed Richards from the board.

  5. The Other Michael says:

    I gotta say, seeing Juston Seyfort returned in this fashion made me utter some very rude things.

    Look, I rather liked the twerp in his solo series and in Avengers Academy. I really hated how he was brutally killed off and his Sentinel scrapped in Avengers Arena, but it was an ending for a dude who was, in the end, a normal person with a giant robot. He was always a bit out of his league and his death was a tragedy.

    So now… this. Nanotech resurrection and harvested for Sentinel parts. Either he returns as a full-on nanotech hybrid, or he dies again, and his few fans get stuck with an icky feeling.

    It’s weird to have not one but two vastly handwaved Avengers Arena casualty resurrections in such a short time. (And the whole Mettle/Emplate thing still raises awkward timeline questions since Emplate was on Krakoa and presumably didn’t have time for his usual shenanigans.)

  6. Alastair says:

    The Other Michael:

    I find a lot of Avenger Academy hard to fit in with anything else, Normie does not interact with the Venom books. The Mettle thing made no sense as Emplate was living on Krakoa. Tommy and Billy as ghost that were part of hot black heart and nothing to do with young avengers. it is just a mess of a book, whose only remit is make sure everyone is hot and gay. It is one the worst Infinites along with house of Harkness and the dull avengers book with is week after week of chatting. At least the funny animal books know what they are for. X-men and Spider-man both use the format quite well at the moment.

  7. Gary says:

    Magik’s story would have “ended perfectly well in Inferno” if she had the final fight with Belasco that Claremont had promised multiple times and that her entire story had been building up to. By replacing Belasco with N’Astirh they did the equivalent of replacing Voldemort in Deathly Hallows or Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi. She had to be brought back to get real closure and fix that mistake, and her return was the story her death was supposed to be and should have been because she finally got that confrontation with Belasco and his Elder Gods. Inferno was a terrible way to end her story and was in fact never meant to do so – Simonson has said multiple times she never intended Illyana to be deaged or to sacrifice herself for real. It’s just that Bob Harras hated the idea of having a character with supernatural characters associated with the X-Men so he wanted her gone at any cost. Her return was so successful specifically because her story was left dangling rather than truly completed and there was so much left to tell.

  8. Krzysiek Ceran says:

    Funny, for me Avengers Academy is one of the best Inifinity titles. Sure, it exists in its own bubble, but that’s not uncommon. And I guess I don’t care enough about the Venomverse to be bothered by Normie’s status. It’s funny, it has its heart on its sleeve in a way I appreciate, and it made me care about a bunch of characters I’ve never thought I’d care about.

    (Also time is weird in Emplate’s realm, and anyway, who’s to say he didn’t pop back for a nibble when he was on Krakoa, anyway? The security regarding former villains was incredibly lax there, after all).

    As for this week’s crop – we’ve already prosecuted Uncanny elsewhere, Astonishing was alright but fizzled out at the end (also, there’s no new issue today?), and Wolverine is… mostly unchanged from issue to issue.

    Though it is incredibly restrained for Ahmed – even with the narration it’s not overloaded with text, which was very much an issue for previous books of his that I’ve read. (Exiles – incredible art, incredibly obscured by all the ballons and captions fit to print and more).

    Moving on, I liked Sentinels a lot, I liked NYX even more, and I’m… rather baffled by Magik. Like Phoenix, it’s very much not an X-Men book, it seems to be a magic book with an X-character in the middle. But as a magic book, the setup is very basic.
    The crow cowboy demon (crowboy!) was fun, at least.

  9. Michael says:

    @MasterMahan- The Maker also worked because Marvel had been been trying to come up with an evil Reed Richards since the ’70s and the previous attempts (the Brute, the Dark Raider) never caught on with fans.
    @Kryzsiek- the problem is that it was a plot point during Dark X-Men that Azazel had Emplate under his control and was only allowing him to feed rarely.
    @Alastair- the biggest problem is the Marvel Voices Infinity comics issue that introduced Kid Juggernaut featured Xavier hanging out with the Original Five in Canada. How is that possible? It can’t have taken place a few hours after Enigma was defeated- Scott thought Xavier was a murderer, he wouldn’t be cordial with him. And then Xavier was in Graymalkin Prison.
    @Gary- part of the issue seems to be that Simonson thought Illyana killed Belasco. Simonson had Illyana say as much in the Spellbound miniseries. in reality, of course, she refused to kill him, he fought Ka-Zar, suffered a Disney Villain Death and later tried to object Crystal (over the objections of Ben Grimm, who complained that her name isn’t Crysanna.)
    Simnoson also intended for an adult illyana to be able to return one day but she got kicked off the book before doing anything. Simonson set up a lot of plots that she did nothing with for years- the Inferno Babies, the Hellfire Club’s plans for Amara.

  10. Drew says:

    “In theory a compelling heel turn is possible. In practice it mostly just upsets the character’s fans. Parallax was retconned away, Cassandra Cain fans hated her brief villain phase, and I think Jason Todd spent like 5 minutes as an antagonist before swapping to brooding bad boy anti-hero.”

    Yeah. I think DC almost immediately retconned away Wally West accidentally killing people in “Heroes in Crisis” too.

    I’m trying to think of examples of main hero characters turning evil and it sticking… as you said, the Maker is one. (But probably only because he’s the Ultimate universe version, they’d never let that stick with Reed Prime.) Phil Urich, I guess? Was briefly a heroic Green Goblin, but then Dan Slott turned him into the new Hobgoblin (then the Goblin Knight). Not sure what his status quo is now.

  11. Ronnie Gardocki says:

    Phil Urich is some sort of Goblin zombie now I guess.

  12. Gary says:

    @Michael. I’m actually aware of all of that, which is why I mentioned that Simonson never intended Inferno to end Illyana’s story. It’s also why after Simonson replaced Claremont Illyana suddenly needed to learn the dangers of killing again despite that being the main lesson she learned in her origin. And because of that mistake she made modern writers have the precedent to continue ignoring how important sparing Belasco was during her origin. I’m just explaining why Inferno was a failure as a “final story” for Magik and why she had to return to have the story Inferno denied her.

    I kind of hate Inferno for having Illyana regress to the point that she needed to relearn the central lesson of her origin for the first time as if it was a totally new concept just so Inferno could even happen and then turning the supposed culmination of he arc into a side story where she dies without ever getting closure against Belasco and the X-Men never even find out anything is going on with her. What a complete waste of a character who had so much potential under any editor other than Bob Harras. Quest for Magik was such a necessary story that absolutely needed to be told with how horrible Inferno was a “final Magik story.”

  13. The Other Michael says:

    I’m hard-pressed to think of many examples of heroes having permanent, plausible, effective heel turns. I can think of lots of lousy examples, but very few where the story actually benefitted from a hero going full villain and sticking to it long-term. Usually, it’s because the story winds up crapping all over the character and the fan base in the process.

  14. Michael says:

    Phil Urich was seemingly killed by Normie Osborn in the Red Goblin series but Dylan Brock questioned whether he was really dead.
    I think MasterMahan is right that it’s easier to have a former villain revert to evil than true a hero into a villain. Look at two heroic supporting characters- Madelyne Pryor and Madame Masque. Both were turned into villains. However. in Maddie’s case, many fans spent decades complaining and she eventually received a sort of redemption in Dark Web. In Madame Masque’s case, it seems like the only person who really wanted Madame Masque back as a hero was Kurt Busiek- he wrote a redemption story for her but no writer used the “redeemed” Masque and in her next appearance she reverted to villainy. Part of the reason is that Maddie’s turn into a villain was blatantly an attempt to excuse Scott’s misdeeds. But a large part of it was that Madame Masque was introduced threatening a man who owed the Maggia a gambling debt in order to coerce him to aid the Maggia in a crime. So it was easier for fans to believe that she went back to villainy.
    @Gary- speaking of Maddie, I think that the problem with Inferno was that turning Maddie into the Goblin Queen ensured that neither illyana’s nor Maddie’s storyline had a logical ending. The meeting between Maddie and Jean didn’t work because this WASN’t the Maddie we’d been following- it was her transformed by a spell into someone who didn’t talk, dress or act like her. But it also ensured that Illyana’s plot didn’t intersect with the X-Men’s. Plus, S’ym having the ability to magically transform people into evil sorcerers in their dreams seemed to come out of nowhere and raised more questions than answers. Did S’ym always have this power? If he did. why didn’t Illyana tell the X-Men about it?Why did Belasco insist on taking years corrupting and training Illyana if he could just have S’ym do it in her sleep?

  15. Mark Coale says:

    The longest running one i can remember was Sargon, but that has some asterisks.

    He was a golden age minor hero (said as an admitted mark) who was made into a bad guy in the Silver age for a number of years in The Flash. Then becomes a good guy and maybe dies in crisis.

    Then, sort of a bad guy again in the Miller/Hester Swamp Thing.

    But yeah, the extreme elements in modern Fandom, especially in the online era, would make a real heel turn diffciult. Who needs the grief from a vocal minority every day about you turning an obscure C list hero into a bad guy, because everyone is someone’s favorite.

  16. Michael says:

    Some news about One World Under Doom:
    Joe Kelly took to the internet to say that Weapon X-Men 1 really has nothing to do with One World Under Doom “outside of a single sequence that takes place in the forests of Latveria and a passing mention of the current state of the Marvel Universe”.Apparently Marvel slapped the One World Under Doom brand on Weapon X-Men 1 without telling Kelly.
    Maddie will be one of several supervillains who the heroes will form an alliance with against Doom, including MODOK, Dr. Octopus, Baron Mordo a/nd judging by the cover of issue 3, Mysterio. (Why Mysterio?)

  17. Gary says:

    @Michael I believe the implication was that while it was S’ym in the dream, the spell that allowed S’ym into Maddie’s dream was cast by N’Astirh, who was an actual sorcerer. In addition, the point was to awaken Maddie’s dormant Phoenix powers, so it wouldn’t work the same way on other people.

    You’re right about how bad it was for Inferno to have both the Maddie and Magik stories. At least the Maddie story had Claremont writing half of it. Simonson tried to write Maddie as being inherently evil from the start as if she didn’t just sacrifice her life to save the world in the previous story, while Claremont recognized that she was a good person beforehand and a victim herself. Inferno ended up being a combination of Harras’ vendetta against supernatural characters in the X-Men line and Claremont and Simonson’s attempt to fix the problems caused by how terrible Jean’s return was handled and how Cyclops’ character was ruined by him running out on his wife and baby. And they did it by demonizing the victim, literally.

    The difference between how Jean returned and how Illyana returned was night and day. Jean’s return ruined a classic story – the Dark Phoenix Saga – by saying the main character of that story was never Jean. Illyana’s return fixed a bad story by being the story her death was always supposed to be and giving her the closure she never had. Jean’s return undercut not only Maddie, who was perhaps not the best idea, but Rachel, who would never have a chance to establish herself as a true major character once Jean returned. That’s in addition to what was done to Cyclops and the regression of the entire 05 to make X-Factor happen. When Illyana returned, the only character who was undercut was Amanda, who had already failed as the 2nd Magik because she never made sense for the role and had the baggage of the ickiness of her lover being her foster brother. Illyana’s return fixed the terrible “the soul sword was never a part of her and she never created it” retcons and was the impetus for Marvel’s big push of Pixie in the late 2000s.

    Also, the way Illyana returned was set up in her origin. In issue 3 of Magik: Storm and Illyana, she states the reason she doesn’t let herself get killed is because she knows Belasco would just resurrect her, exactly as he ended up doing once Bob Harras was gone and creators who weren’t so closed-minded got the chance to complete her dangling original story.

  18. Diana says:

    @Gary: I’ve always assumed Claremont simply lost interest in Madelyne as a character once X-Factor was a done deal – sure, Simonson was the one applying every ugly stereotype of the Henpecking Wife, but there’s no real pushback against that in Uncanny, even before Inferno happened. He could’ve just as easily yeeted her through the Siege Perilous and given her some kind of happy ending; the Goblyn Queen of it all reads like he just gave up.

  19. Chris V says:

    I think it’s Marvel’s “no divorce unless the man is abusive” rule that messed up any alternative for Madelyne. The problem was that Scott and Madelyne were married with a kid, and Harras wanted Scott and Jean to be an item again. There is no happy ending unless Scott and Madelyne got a divorce, and Madelyne moved on to someone else, but Marvel doesn’t like their superheroes to get divorced. That has caused so many problems for these characters over the years…it was either “Inferno” or Scott making a deal with the Devil, I guess.

    Claremont was very angry when he heard that they were bringing back Jean. He said he would have quit, except he was informed on Friday night after the Marvel offices were closed. He had a weekend to calm down and decided he wasn’t going to quit working at Marvel. I think he worked a lot of his own anger at Marvel ruining his happy ending for Scott and Madelyne into the “Goblin Queen” story.

  20. Michael says:

    @Diana- It’s pretty much the opposite- Claremont used her more often than before after Scott left her. He portrayed her very sympathetically. In issue 223, he contextualized X-Factor 1 from her perspective- “He left home. No real explanation, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes. A secret, she knew, something bad. No word after that, no answer when she tried to reach him.”
    In fact, Claremont was planning on using her extensively in the Australian period. Marc Silvestri even came up with a costume for her:
    https://www.reddit.com/r/xmen/comments/pcwxkn/concept_art_for_madelyne_pryor_as_a_member_of_the/
    The Goblin Queen appears to have been Simonson’s and Harras’s idea.
    @Chris V- There were other alternatives to Inferno or Scott making a deal with the Devil- they could have had one of them turn out to be a Skrull or explained that Franklin Richards mind controlled them into getting married. 🙂
    The problem was more than just Harras wanting Scott and Jean to be an item again- it was also that a lot of fans hated Scott for his treatment of both Jean and Maddie. And Simonson deserves her share of the blame for this as well- after Hodge tricked Scott into thinking Jean was Phoenix, Simonson had Scott blast his eye beams at her with lethal force in an attempt to make her realize she was the Phoenix. So Harras decided to make Maddie the scapegoat for all of Scott’s sins.
    it’s funny- at the time, Inferno was compared poorly to the redemption of Hank Pym. it was felt that Hank’s story had resolved logically and readers were willing to accept him as a hero and Jan’s lover. But years later, readers took a more harsh view of Hank while Scott is still the X-Men’s leader. So I guess the answer is- don’t have your hero own up to his failings but demonize a woman to get them off the hook?

  21. Michael says:

    In One World Under Doom news, Karma and Sunfire will be appearing in the One World Under Doom tie-in series, Doom’s Division. Interestingly. Karma will be working for Doom. I wonder if she’s under the same mind control as the world leaders or if there’s another explanation:
    “Karma, why are you working for Doom?”
    “Leong and Nag disappeared again and I need Doom’s help to find them. Wolverine? Why are you banging your head against that wall?”

  22. Omar Karindu says:

    Hero-to-villain turns can work if the hero was already played as abrasive and smug, but even those tend to eventually be undone by redemption arcs, or at least “well, they’re *our* asshole” kinds of stories.

    For instance, Marvel made Moondragon a villain twice over in the 1980s, and while she’s again seen as a hero, her villainous actions still come up from time to time as a dark stain on the character’s history in-universe. She also started as the cartoonishly villainous Madame MacEvil, but that’s more in the “weird first draft” category and was effectively retconned away by Jim Starlin.

    Northstar and one iteration of the White Tiger — the Angela Del Toro version created by Brian Michael Bendis — also got “stuck” as villains for a little while when later writers had the Hand brainwash them in separate stories.

    Northstar bounced back fairly quickly, much as Aurora came back from her stint as a an exploited member of Frank Tieri’s Weapon X, but I don’t remember if Angela del Toro came back. A new White Tiger with a very similar backstory turned up later on, but was definitely a different character.

    Daredevil and Wolverine could fit here given their spates as magically corrupted Hand minions, but in both cases their status was treated as a temporary story arc thing, not as a seemingly long-term change as was initially suggested for Northstar, White Tiger, and Aurora were suggested.

  23. Mike Loughlin says:

    Beast’s heel turn should have been his new status quo. It made so much sense for the character, and I think he works as a well-intentioned but amoral extremist.

    Arguably, the most important super-hero to get an extensive heel turn was Hal Jordan. Parallax was central to at least one line-wide crossover, and could be a reasonable challenge for the most powerful DC heroes. It wasn’t a popular phase for the character, but it worked for a couple of years.

  24. Thom H. says:

    I will always be grateful to Mike Carey for resetting Northstar and Aurora in that X-Men arc. I wish they’d stayed on the team during his run.

  25. Omar Karindu says:

    @Michael: Madame Masque is an unusual case, since she went from a villain who’d become very sympathetic reformed by the end of the Silver Age to a total psycho. The first Michelinie Layton Iron Man run really rewrote her to make her an irredeemable baddie, but their take has been much more popular.

    @Gary (and Michael, and Fiana, and others): N’astirh and Belasco both always struck me as odd character choices for the X-books. Belasco started as a Ka-Zar villain, and one who worked from a weird ancient theme park version of Hell in the Savage Land, apparently built by the original, surface-dwelling Atlanteans. His name was drawn from a famous theatre producer, David Belasco, who was known for “special effects” on stage.

    Bruce Jones’s original Belasco has magic powers, but also uses robots and mutation tech from an ancient Hell “theme park.” This is probably a play on the Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle novel Inferno, in which a character initially perceives a modern journey through hell as a visit to a high-tech amusement park.

    But then Belasco’s origin in the Ka-Zar stories brings in Dante Aligheri and Beatrice in ways that are totally at odds with their real history. (The real Dante never married Beatrice, and met her just twice, the first time when she was 9 years old. And the real Beatrice not only married someone else entirely, but had several children.) So perhaps Bruce Jones was hinting that Belasco wasn’t entirely what he claimed to be.

    But then he turns up in the Magik series as the ruler of Limbo — a big step up for a guy who was initially portrayed as more of a servant of Elder Gods who could be frozen for centuries by a freon pipe. And after that, he’s a more generic evil sorcerer/pseudo-demon type. As far as I can tell, we’ve never gotten an explanation of his odd Living Monolith-like connection to Magik, where he loses power when she assumes her Darkchylde form. Nor have we ever learned how he lost an arm.

    N’astirh, on the other hand, always struck me as superfluous when S’ym was already around. The 1988 Inferno stories end up having to present N’astirh as a usurper of S’ym, one who also gets turned into techno-organics just as S’ym was. So why not just use S’ym in the first place? Maybe they just didn’t want top keep running with the Dave Sim parody for their big crossover villain?

  26. Sam says:

    I think maybe Nova (Frankie Raye) qualifies as a hero turned villain. She’s assisting the Fantastic Four with her Human Torch-esque powers and then becomes the Herald of Galactus of her own free will. She does the herald thing and gets him to eat the Skrull homeworld (among others), saying she doesn’t care about other planets so long as it’s not Earth.

    Otherwise, maybe the Sentry? I am not sure how that mess turned out.

  27. Michael says:

    @Omar- Angela del Toro stayed a villain for a few years but was freed from the brainwashing in Ewing’s New Avengers.
    Of course, Quicksilver and Doctor Druid both had their stints as villains. In Quicksilver’s case, it was not only because he was an arrogant jerk, but because his flaws- arrogance, bigotry- are Magneto’s flaws. so it’s easy for writers to portray him as Magneto,Jr. (Or was, before the retcon.)
    And then there’s Dr. Druid. He eventually got a redemption in Waid’s Dr. Strange. Although, in his latest appearance in iron Man, he somehow found himself the forced to work for Belasco but got freed by the end of the story.
    Sunspot is a weird case. It was constantly hinted under multiple writers that his destiny was to become a well-meaning supervillain. Especially since all three of his mentors- Professor X. ,Magneto and Cable- have a habit of making bad decisions. But every time a story to turn him evil got started (Reignfire, joining the Hellfire Club to save his girlfriend), it was quickly aborted and Sunspot wound up back as a hero. The modern take on him is that he’s effective because he’s learned from Professor X, Magneto and Cable but he’s also aware of their flaws and knows how to avoid repeating those mistakes.
    It can be weird how writers thing brainwashing/ magic/ memory loss is a good way to turn a character evil. The problem is that’s not actually a tragedy- it’s a writer waving their magic wand and turning the character evil. Like Ewing had Black Ant say- evil implies CHOICE. Relying on brainwashing has led to some pretty bad arcs. We eventually learned that Nature Girl’s turn to villainy was a result of Curse’s wish but weirdly that was used to lead into a redemption arc for CURSE and Nature Girl stayed evil. Then we had Dr. Druid’s first turn to evil where Nebula brainwashes him and has sex with him on the astral plane and it’s treated as demonstrating what a jerk Druid is, instead of Druid being raped.

  28. Chris V says:

    I’m surprised no one has mentioned Moira or Omega Sentinel yet. Both started out as having believable motivations for their actions, but were eventually ruined by poor writing.

    Yes, Omega Sentinel was possessed by a future version, but it was still the individual Omega Sentinel wound have become had Krakoa succeeded.

  29. Michael says:

    @Omar- the weird thing about Belasco is that Claremont built him up as a villain who Illyana will have to fight a final battle against- and then did nothing with him for the rest of his run after New Mutants 14, where S’ym switches his allegiance to Illyana. Belasco disappeared for years, and reappeared in an issue of the Fantastic Four that came out a few months before inferno, then disappeared again.
    It was the same issue with Deathbird. Claremont famously objected to her being defeated by Hawkeye because he had big plans for her and we saw what they were in the Brood Saga. But she disappears halfway through the Brood Saga, and she doesn’t reappear until a few months before the end of his run, although she does appear in a few stories written by other writers. So in one sense Deathbird held onto the Sh’iar Empire longer than Attuma ever held on to Atlantis. But Attuma actually fought against the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, Alpha Flight, Spider-Man and the Defenders dress during the various periods where he controlled Atlantis, so he actually was on panel fighting with major heroes.The problem with viewing Deathbird as a major villain was that she was absent from the stories- and that’s exactly the problem with Belasco.
    N’asitrh is weird. In Uncanny X-Men 234, S’ym is shown to be the one that corrupts Maddie. Then suddenly, in Uncanny X-Men 236, N’astirh is the one that takes over handling Maddie.
    It seems like S’ym was supposed to be the main villain of Inferno when issue 234 was written. There’s a couple of lines of dialogue that suggest that S’ym was merely carrying out N’astirh’s pan for Maddie. But why would N’astirh trust S’ym to do that? The entire plan required Maddie to be unaware that S’ym was a demon. If Colossus had mentioned S’ym to Maddie the whole scheme would have fallen apart. Dark Web tries to explain it by explaining that S’ym’s finger has the power to transform people.
    I guess that the reason why was that it was decided the New Mutants plot would be separated from the X-Factor/ X-Men plots. So they needed one demon in New Mutants and the other in X-Factor/X-Men. As it is, S’ym’s defeat in New Mutants is anticlimactic- illyana tosses her sword away and S’ym gets swept away by a wind.
    As a side note, why did the Enchantress never seek revenge against S’ym and Dessie? First, S’ym tortured her when Illyana trapped her in Limbo. Then, years later, his daughter Dessie was working with Emily Bright when Bright killed the Enchantress’s son Iric. The Enchantress isn’t the type to forgive and forget.

  30. Michael says:

    @Sam, Chris V- Nova, Moira and Omega Sentinel all ended their stories on the side of the angels- so again, it’s more evidence that heroes changing sides doesn’t last.

  31. Gary says:

    @Michael Belasco not appearing in New Mutants before Inferno isn’t much of a problem. For Illyana, he’s clearly the final boss and having him appear too much would actually cheapen him. Not having him be the villain of Inferno was a huge mistake that did ultimately ruin him as a villain. It’s no coincidence that Quest for Magik is the only truly good story in which Belasco was the villain since 1984. There was nothing to do with him without the hero he was most connected to, and pretty much every Belasco story from 1990-2006 was god awful.

    Likewise, it was a huge mistake for writers to bring Belasco back after Quest for Magik. That was the story he was being built towards, and there’s again nothing to do with him after it. They haven’t even bothered explaining how he came back, and since Illyana has arguably grown beyond him and she hasn’t had a problem with killing since Simonson forgot her origin, he doesn’t even work as a villain for her anymore.

    The one thing they could have done is have him discover how Illyana created the soul sword in order to create his own, which would have shown how cunning he is and restore him as a major threat. But they wasted that idea with one of the stupidest retcons in Marvel history, where they revealed that he created his own soul sword long before Illyana did and the Elder Gods just took it away from him. All this did was make Belasco into even more of a joke and undermine Illyana’s achievement since she no longer invented the spell that created the soul sword and it’s not even a unique weapon anymore. I pray to god Marvel pretends that terrible Mary Jane and Black Cat miniseries never happened like they now pretend the whole “there’s nothing of Illyana in the soul sword” retcon never happened. If they do that maybe they can have do a story where Belasco discovers how to make a real soul sword and thereby do one final story with Illyana to kill him off for good. Quest for Magik was that story before Marvel decided to be stupid again, but there is room to do it again now that Illyana has something to lose, unlike the last time when she was missing her entire soul.

  32. Taibak says:

    A bit late to the party on this one, but wasn’t Claremont setting up a heel turn for Kitty back when he was on Excalibur? Or was he always building towards the “Girls’ School From Heck” story?

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