Super-intelligence characters also suffer from the fact that most comic writers seem to have little to no background in science and just classify everything as SCIENCE! meaning a biologist can psychoanalyze another person while building a giant robot in their basement. Emma Frost built the device that let Mastermind put images directly into Phoenix’s mind and another device that let her switch bodies with Storm, but most people would put Tony Stark making more powerful guns as more intelligent than her. In fact, Marvel RPGs do this.
Hank is probably at his most stable when he has a non-costumed girlfriend, like Vera or Trish Tilby. They keep him from spiraling into unhealthy fixations. So, Louise Simonson wrote the most stable Hank, and the best Hank IMO.
I don’t pretend to know the actual correlation, but I do wonder how much “superhero geniuses going bad” in comics is related to growing anti-intellectualism and distrust of authority/expertise IRL, at least in the U.S.
That could make some sense of the “heroes fight to keep each other in check” trope mentioned above, too.
As for Hank McCoy in particular: if you’re a character that’s been in continuous publication since the ’60s, chances are you’re going to go bad at some point. It’s an effective way of giving an unsophisticated character a facelift and a little depth.
Not that I don’t like Beast — he’s great. But “smart guy with brutish body” isn’t the most profound idea. I mean, every member of the O5 has gone bad at this point, barring Bobby. And he’s openly gay now, so he’s had a facelift without having to turn evil.
@Sam: For whatever reason, characters who buld devices to extend their inherent super-powers never get much intellectual cred. Emma and Xavier have both been shown building fairly advanced psionic technology, and Magneto spent decades devising gadgets fueled by his magnetic abilities and engineering artificial mutates. Emma also doesn’t seem to build that kind of stuff anymore; perhaps her revised backstory would imply that it was really done by scientists at Shaw Industries. (Have any of the various continuity insert series ever fully reckoned with the inherent conflict between the retcon that Emma was a runaway rich girl turned burlesque dancer who was then elevated to the Inner Circle as Shaw’s subordinate and her initial status as the widely respected head of a posh, elite private school?)
But they aren’t usually written as genius super-scientists the way, say, Reed Richards or Tony Stark are. Thematically, their inventions are just appendages to their powers, and their powers are already quite versatile.
In my head canon, Emma and Charles used their telepathy to read the minds of other geniuses, then built their devices based on borrowed knowledge. Both characters are unscrupulous enough to do this, and maybe even erase the knowledge from the original inventors’ minds to prevent others from building similar devices.
“I mean, every member of the O5 has gone bad at this point, barring Bobby.”
Well, that’s understandable. Who could take an evil Bobby seriously? You can’t be evil with a name like Bobby. It doesn’t work. Robert, sure, but he rarely goes by Robert. He’s mostly Bobby, and Bobby’s don’t get to be evil. In the Dallas TV series you had the Ewing brothers. J.R. was the bad brother and Bobby was the good brother. See?
Let’s give the name the evil test:
“Everyone run! It’s… Bobby!”
Doesn’t work, does it? Bobby isn’t someone you run from. Bobby is someone you ask if they’ve finished their homework yet.
Maybe if Bobby went by his last name he could do a credible heel turn. He could become the archfoe of D-Man, Marvel’s equivalent of the Hobo with a Shotgun.
@Moo- The idea that the Chief was shady started when Paul Kupperberg was writing Doom Patrol. Kupperberg had the Chief do things like hide from the Doom Patrol that he was alive and manipulate them into fighting menaces. Kupperberg also introduced a woman called Celsius who claimed to be the Chief’s wife. And Kupperberg pointed out repeatedly that she had to have actually known the Chief somehow- too many things didn’t make sense if she was just delusional or lying.
When Morrison took over, he asked Kupperberg to get rid of some characters he didn’t want to use. So Kupperberg had the Chief claim that he never met Celsius and then killed her off. Later on, in Morrison’s run, we find out that the Chief seduced a young Celsius and convinced her to be a guinea pig in his immortality experiments, which turned out to have an eventual side effect of insanity.
Has Kupperberg ever explained where he was going with the Chief? He seemed to be hinting that the Chief was traumatized by Rita’s death but mostly well-intentioned. The idea that the Chief was a villain seems to have been Morrison’s idea.
Emma’s inventions seem to be a case of Early Installment Weirdness. She was mentioned as having invented the device Mastermind used in X-Men 134 and used the body-switching gun in X-Men 151-152. She’d only had 5 appearances by X-Men 152. What happened was that after that, writers tended to focus on her role as teacher. Even though she was described as the headmistress of the Massachusetts Academy in her early appearances, she first acts as a teacher with mutant students in the New Mutants 15-17, the first Hellions story. After that, she rarely built anything.
If I was going to have Iceman go evil, I’d lean into his accounting background and have him be this ruthless corporate raider who makes obscene profits based on accounting loopholes. His pitiless demeanor is why he’s known as “the Iceman of Wall Street”.
Though rather than make him evil, it’d be better to lean into Top Gun and have him constantly playing beach volleyball.
I also have to say that I really dislike the elevation of Tony Stark into the inventors of the Marvel Universe. Until the MCU started, Tony Stark was who you went to if you wanted a gun to shoot more powerful or if you want to miniaturize an engine. Reed Richards or Doctor Doom were the ones making portals to other dimensions or time machines.
I recall a page introducing Magneto’s Antarctic base as mentioning that it would do Tony Stark or Reed Richards proud, so I do think there’s more Magneto as super-scientist, but that went away as he joined the X-men. Meaning Wolverine’s secondary mutation is a super-intelligence suppression field.
“Iceman did go evil in Astonishing X-Men 62-65, when he was implanted with a Death Seed.”
Well, who *wouldn’t* go evil after being implanted with a Death Seed?
I don’t even know what a Death Seed is, but it sure doesn’t sound like a seed I’d want implanted in me. If I had to get a seed implanted, I’d browse through the catalog a bit longer to see if there was something like a Happy Fun Seed or a Makes Vegetables Taste Like Candy Seed or a Tax-Exempt Seed. Something actually desirable.
@Sam- Tony was able to ASSIST Dr. Doom in creating a Time Machine in Iron Man 150. And in West Coast Avengers 18, Tony was able to tell that a Time Machine was broken and only goes back in time.He was unable to fix it because they were stranded in the nineteenth century and needed transistors, though. Traditonally, Tony was one of the big three heroic geniuses of the Marvel Unviverse- the others being Reed Richards and Hank Pym.
On a side note, I think it’s hilarious that an X-Axis column with no reviews to speak of has racked up this many comments. Paul may as well have titled the column “Comments” and simply said “Go ahead”.
Magneto is so smart that he may be the only Marvel super scientist who created a sentient robot that hasn’t turned against him at some point. (As far as I know, that’s Ferris.)
The thing is, all of those early Emma Frost stories had the same author. Claremont made her the inventor, the posh headmistress, and the runaway socialite burlesque dancer.
@Oldie- It was Morrison who made her the runaway socialite burlesque dancer.
You’re right in that Claremont seemed to forget about any inventive talents Emma had after issue 152.
I thought he established her origin in a backup story to Classic X-Men, but I can’t find it so maybe I’m misremembering the New X-Men story as a CXM story.
Yeah, Morrison’s story sat uneasily with previous stories in Generation X where Emma’s parents locked her in a mental institution and she escaped and formed an alliance with the Dark Beast. This raised two questions:
1) Emma’s revised origin claimed that Emma’s BROTHER was the one who was sent to a mental institution. Were BOTH Emma and her brother sent to mental institutions?
2) Did Emma become a stripper AFTER she formed her alliance with the Dark Beast? That would be … unusual.
Emma’s backstory being a mess is a victim of the loose continuity of the Jemas/Quesada-era. Writers were free to ignore whatever details and write the characters how they saw fit, and editors basically let them. The Generation X and Emma Frost solo series backstories were not adhered to, and Morrison’s story didn’t line up.
I, for one, don’t care as long as I like the story I’m reading at the moment. There were some major duds in the Jemas/Quesada era (most of which were written or championed by Jemas), but there was a major uptick in quality during that time. It didn’t last too long, maybe 3 or 4 years, but Marvel was exciting again. Continuity snarls (and spider-totems and Xornetos) were minor glitches in the grand scheme.
@Michael- To be perfectly honest, I don’t think most readers would give a shit what the answers to those two questions are.
I think Mr. Loughlin’s remarks are probably more reflective of the general audience. “I don’t care, so long as the story’s good.”
Being a continuity stickler is rather pointless today. Forty years ago, you could more effectively stickle away. Stickle, stickle, stickle and the big two publishers might make an effort to explain away or correct continuity errors.
But those days are long gone. There’s just too much publishing history and research involved by this point for the publishers to care that some story published today conflicts with some backup story written in 1988 (or whatever).
I had a friend in college who considered Emma Frost rising to be a self-made millionaire (though I’m guessing now she’s a billionaire) to have missed the point. Sebastian Shaw was the self-made man, and Emma Frost was the heiress from the well to do family. It’s only if you’re trying to make her likeable would you change it so she’s been abused and rose above it all on her own.
Claremont’s Emma Frost was a fairly irredeemable character. Leaving aside the Firestar limited series which is DeFalco’s, she is very evil in her initial appearances and has an entire group of young mutants that she’s indoctrinating in the ways of the Hellfire Club.
Of course, after Claremont redeemed Magneto, then all of the X-men villains are considered redeemable, but Emma’s “nicest” thing under Claremont was helping the PTSD New Mutants…after having Empath manipulate Magneto to transfer them to her school. One teaspoon of good doesn’t undo the two cups of evil involved there!
As for Tony assisting Doom build a time machine, they were trapped in Dark Ages Marvel Camelot and their armors were the only source of technology that could make the time machine. If Doom’s armor was enough to do it alone, Tony’s sorry butt would have been begging for a spell, Kang, or anybody to get him back to the modern Marvel time. I don’t doubt that he might have had some suggestions on what to use, but making a substitution in the plans that Doom had already invented isn’t the same thing. Don’t get me wrong, it’s impressive, but following along that line would put Thunderball of the Wrecking Crew on the same level, as he created a more efficient Gamma Bomb in his debut story.
@Sam: I’ve always viewed New Mutants 38-40 as the start of Emma’s face turn. She didn’t absolve herself of her previous actions, true, but taking the time to use her powers to heal rather than hurt planted the seeds of thinking there’s a better way within her. It took the death of the Hellions and her “death” to get her to commit to a better path.
I love Grant Morrison’s hand wave, though: she claimed she was evil back in the day because she was on a truckload of drugs. True? Who knows, but it made me laugh.
@Mike Loughlin- Yes. but she monologues about how the only reason she helped the Mutants was to gain the New Mutants’ trust so she can corrupt them later.
@Michael: yes, and to me that’s Emma coming with the disassociation of being “evil” but doing good. She could have gone in their heads and wrecked havoc, or refused to help them and cut her losses. Instead, she spent considerable personal effort and worked with an enemy in order to help traumatized children. I read those issues when I was 13 or 14, years before Generation X, and even then I didn’t believe Emma’s monologue. I think she believed it, and she didn’t just turn good right away. When it was announced that she and Banshee would form a school for the next generation of mutants, I thought of NM 38-40 immediately.
Like I said: head canon. If it doesn’t work for you or anyone else, no worries.
Well, if people want to bring the Firestar limited series into it, then they should definitely bring Secret Wars II issue 7 into it, as Emma is part of the group that sells their souls to Mephisto in exchange for a powerup that will cause the destruction of the Beyonder.
Super villain redemption requires a lot of hand-waving. I remember when John Byrne turned Sandman back into a villain because an early issue of Spider-man established he was one of the FBI’s most wanted so therefore he was too violent and dangerous to turn into a hero.
Seemed a bit extreme on Byrne’s part. Comics are not a court of law. You really can shrug off old bits now and then.
@New kid- Byrne was wrong about the FBI’s most wanted list. In the 1950s, some people were on the FBI’s most wanted list for crimes like murder but others were on the list for crimes like armed robbery of a post office or a bank. That’s serious and I wouldn’t blame the victims for holding a grudge but it’s not exactly Moral Event Horizon territory.
@Mike Loughlin: That’s a smear perpetuated by Conor Goldsmith of Cerebrocast. Threnody went willingly with Sinister. Beast let her because Sinister was the only one who could her control her powers, which were killing people. Rogue and iceman agreed. After Threnody got control, she said Beast did the right thing, even staying with Sinister to keep an eye on him.
Another thing is the double standard between Beast and his leaders. Cyclops ordered him to weaponize the Legacy virus against the Skrulls, but he’s a badass leader while Beast is a war criminal. Emma Frost was the power behind New Tian who established the collaboration with fascists, but only Beast gets blamed.
Super-intelligence characters also suffer from the fact that most comic writers seem to have little to no background in science and just classify everything as SCIENCE! meaning a biologist can psychoanalyze another person while building a giant robot in their basement. Emma Frost built the device that let Mastermind put images directly into Phoenix’s mind and another device that let her switch bodies with Storm, but most people would put Tony Stark making more powerful guns as more intelligent than her. In fact, Marvel RPGs do this.
Hank is probably at his most stable when he has a non-costumed girlfriend, like Vera or Trish Tilby. They keep him from spiraling into unhealthy fixations. So, Louise Simonson wrote the most stable Hank, and the best Hank IMO.
I don’t pretend to know the actual correlation, but I do wonder how much “superhero geniuses going bad” in comics is related to growing anti-intellectualism and distrust of authority/expertise IRL, at least in the U.S.
That could make some sense of the “heroes fight to keep each other in check” trope mentioned above, too.
As for Hank McCoy in particular: if you’re a character that’s been in continuous publication since the ’60s, chances are you’re going to go bad at some point. It’s an effective way of giving an unsophisticated character a facelift and a little depth.
Not that I don’t like Beast — he’s great. But “smart guy with brutish body” isn’t the most profound idea. I mean, every member of the O5 has gone bad at this point, barring Bobby. And he’s openly gay now, so he’s had a facelift without having to turn evil.
@Sam: For whatever reason, characters who buld devices to extend their inherent super-powers never get much intellectual cred. Emma and Xavier have both been shown building fairly advanced psionic technology, and Magneto spent decades devising gadgets fueled by his magnetic abilities and engineering artificial mutates. Emma also doesn’t seem to build that kind of stuff anymore; perhaps her revised backstory would imply that it was really done by scientists at Shaw Industries. (Have any of the various continuity insert series ever fully reckoned with the inherent conflict between the retcon that Emma was a runaway rich girl turned burlesque dancer who was then elevated to the Inner Circle as Shaw’s subordinate and her initial status as the widely respected head of a posh, elite private school?)
But they aren’t usually written as genius super-scientists the way, say, Reed Richards or Tony Stark are. Thematically, their inventions are just appendages to their powers, and their powers are already quite versatile.
In my head canon, Emma and Charles used their telepathy to read the minds of other geniuses, then built their devices based on borrowed knowledge. Both characters are unscrupulous enough to do this, and maybe even erase the knowledge from the original inventors’ minds to prevent others from building similar devices.
“I mean, every member of the O5 has gone bad at this point, barring Bobby.”
Well, that’s understandable. Who could take an evil Bobby seriously? You can’t be evil with a name like Bobby. It doesn’t work. Robert, sure, but he rarely goes by Robert. He’s mostly Bobby, and Bobby’s don’t get to be evil. In the Dallas TV series you had the Ewing brothers. J.R. was the bad brother and Bobby was the good brother. See?
Let’s give the name the evil test:
“Everyone run! It’s… Bobby!”
Doesn’t work, does it? Bobby isn’t someone you run from. Bobby is someone you ask if they’ve finished their homework yet.
Maybe if Bobby went by his last name he could do a credible heel turn. He could become the archfoe of D-Man, Marvel’s equivalent of the Hobo with a Shotgun.
Wouldn’t work. If he went by Drake he’d just end up in a feud with Kendrick Lamar.
AoA Iceman went evil, does that count?
@Moo- The idea that the Chief was shady started when Paul Kupperberg was writing Doom Patrol. Kupperberg had the Chief do things like hide from the Doom Patrol that he was alive and manipulate them into fighting menaces. Kupperberg also introduced a woman called Celsius who claimed to be the Chief’s wife. And Kupperberg pointed out repeatedly that she had to have actually known the Chief somehow- too many things didn’t make sense if she was just delusional or lying.
When Morrison took over, he asked Kupperberg to get rid of some characters he didn’t want to use. So Kupperberg had the Chief claim that he never met Celsius and then killed her off. Later on, in Morrison’s run, we find out that the Chief seduced a young Celsius and convinced her to be a guinea pig in his immortality experiments, which turned out to have an eventual side effect of insanity.
Has Kupperberg ever explained where he was going with the Chief? He seemed to be hinting that the Chief was traumatized by Rita’s death but mostly well-intentioned. The idea that the Chief was a villain seems to have been Morrison’s idea.
Emma’s inventions seem to be a case of Early Installment Weirdness. She was mentioned as having invented the device Mastermind used in X-Men 134 and used the body-switching gun in X-Men 151-152. She’d only had 5 appearances by X-Men 152. What happened was that after that, writers tended to focus on her role as teacher. Even though she was described as the headmistress of the Massachusetts Academy in her early appearances, she first acts as a teacher with mutant students in the New Mutants 15-17, the first Hellions story. After that, she rarely built anything.
Iceman did go evil in Astonishing X-Men 62-65, when he was implanted with a Death Seed.
“Kupperberg had the Chief do things like hide from the Doom Patrol that he was alive”
How awful! Xavier would never… oh.
If I was going to have Iceman go evil, I’d lean into his accounting background and have him be this ruthless corporate raider who makes obscene profits based on accounting loopholes. His pitiless demeanor is why he’s known as “the Iceman of Wall Street”.
Though rather than make him evil, it’d be better to lean into Top Gun and have him constantly playing beach volleyball.
I also have to say that I really dislike the elevation of Tony Stark into the inventors of the Marvel Universe. Until the MCU started, Tony Stark was who you went to if you wanted a gun to shoot more powerful or if you want to miniaturize an engine. Reed Richards or Doctor Doom were the ones making portals to other dimensions or time machines.
I recall a page introducing Magneto’s Antarctic base as mentioning that it would do Tony Stark or Reed Richards proud, so I do think there’s more Magneto as super-scientist, but that went away as he joined the X-men. Meaning Wolverine’s secondary mutation is a super-intelligence suppression field.
“Iceman did go evil in Astonishing X-Men 62-65, when he was implanted with a Death Seed.”
Well, who *wouldn’t* go evil after being implanted with a Death Seed?
I don’t even know what a Death Seed is, but it sure doesn’t sound like a seed I’d want implanted in me. If I had to get a seed implanted, I’d browse through the catalog a bit longer to see if there was something like a Happy Fun Seed or a Makes Vegetables Taste Like Candy Seed or a Tax-Exempt Seed. Something actually desirable.
@Sam- Tony was able to ASSIST Dr. Doom in creating a Time Machine in Iron Man 150. And in West Coast Avengers 18, Tony was able to tell that a Time Machine was broken and only goes back in time.He was unable to fix it because they were stranded in the nineteenth century and needed transistors, though. Traditonally, Tony was one of the big three heroic geniuses of the Marvel Unviverse- the others being Reed Richards and Hank Pym.
On a side note, I think it’s hilarious that an X-Axis column with no reviews to speak of has racked up this many comments. Paul may as well have titled the column “Comments” and simply said “Go ahead”.
Magneto is so smart that he may be the only Marvel super scientist who created a sentient robot that hasn’t turned against him at some point. (As far as I know, that’s Ferris.)
@Michael
The thing is, all of those early Emma Frost stories had the same author. Claremont made her the inventor, the posh headmistress, and the runaway socialite burlesque dancer.
@Oldie- It was Morrison who made her the runaway socialite burlesque dancer.
You’re right in that Claremont seemed to forget about any inventive talents Emma had after issue 152.
I love how this community still finds segments of X-Men continuity to debate, even though no new X-titles were released.
Who needs them, anyway?
I thought he established her origin in a backup story to Classic X-Men, but I can’t find it so maybe I’m misremembering the New X-Men story as a CXM story.
It was when Jean found about Scott and Emma’s telepathic affair and Jean broke into Emma’s mind to take a look around.
Yeah, Morrison’s story sat uneasily with previous stories in Generation X where Emma’s parents locked her in a mental institution and she escaped and formed an alliance with the Dark Beast. This raised two questions:
1) Emma’s revised origin claimed that Emma’s BROTHER was the one who was sent to a mental institution. Were BOTH Emma and her brother sent to mental institutions?
2) Did Emma become a stripper AFTER she formed her alliance with the Dark Beast? That would be … unusual.
Emma’s backstory being a mess is a victim of the loose continuity of the Jemas/Quesada-era. Writers were free to ignore whatever details and write the characters how they saw fit, and editors basically let them. The Generation X and Emma Frost solo series backstories were not adhered to, and Morrison’s story didn’t line up.
I, for one, don’t care as long as I like the story I’m reading at the moment. There were some major duds in the Jemas/Quesada era (most of which were written or championed by Jemas), but there was a major uptick in quality during that time. It didn’t last too long, maybe 3 or 4 years, but Marvel was exciting again. Continuity snarls (and spider-totems and Xornetos) were minor glitches in the grand scheme.
@Michael- To be perfectly honest, I don’t think most readers would give a shit what the answers to those two questions are.
I think Mr. Loughlin’s remarks are probably more reflective of the general audience. “I don’t care, so long as the story’s good.”
Being a continuity stickler is rather pointless today. Forty years ago, you could more effectively stickle away. Stickle, stickle, stickle and the big two publishers might make an effort to explain away or correct continuity errors.
But those days are long gone. There’s just too much publishing history and research involved by this point for the publishers to care that some story published today conflicts with some backup story written in 1988 (or whatever).
Sounds like a hangover from the silver age when there was a little mad scientist in everybody.
I had a friend in college who considered Emma Frost rising to be a self-made millionaire (though I’m guessing now she’s a billionaire) to have missed the point. Sebastian Shaw was the self-made man, and Emma Frost was the heiress from the well to do family. It’s only if you’re trying to make her likeable would you change it so she’s been abused and rose above it all on her own.
Claremont’s Emma Frost was a fairly irredeemable character. Leaving aside the Firestar limited series which is DeFalco’s, she is very evil in her initial appearances and has an entire group of young mutants that she’s indoctrinating in the ways of the Hellfire Club.
Of course, after Claremont redeemed Magneto, then all of the X-men villains are considered redeemable, but Emma’s “nicest” thing under Claremont was helping the PTSD New Mutants…after having Empath manipulate Magneto to transfer them to her school. One teaspoon of good doesn’t undo the two cups of evil involved there!
As for Tony assisting Doom build a time machine, they were trapped in Dark Ages Marvel Camelot and their armors were the only source of technology that could make the time machine. If Doom’s armor was enough to do it alone, Tony’s sorry butt would have been begging for a spell, Kang, or anybody to get him back to the modern Marvel time. I don’t doubt that he might have had some suggestions on what to use, but making a substitution in the plans that Doom had already invented isn’t the same thing. Don’t get me wrong, it’s impressive, but following along that line would put Thunderball of the Wrecking Crew on the same level, as he created a more efficient Gamma Bomb in his debut story.
@Sam: I’ve always viewed New Mutants 38-40 as the start of Emma’s face turn. She didn’t absolve herself of her previous actions, true, but taking the time to use her powers to heal rather than hurt planted the seeds of thinking there’s a better way within her. It took the death of the Hellions and her “death” to get her to commit to a better path.
I love Grant Morrison’s hand wave, though: she claimed she was evil back in the day because she was on a truckload of drugs. True? Who knows, but it made me laugh.
@Mike Loughlin- Yes. but she monologues about how the only reason she helped the Mutants was to gain the New Mutants’ trust so she can corrupt them later.
Emma becomes a hero. Hank becomes a villain. I had coffee with breakfast.
@Michael: yes, and to me that’s Emma coming with the disassociation of being “evil” but doing good. She could have gone in their heads and wrecked havoc, or refused to help them and cut her losses. Instead, she spent considerable personal effort and worked with an enemy in order to help traumatized children. I read those issues when I was 13 or 14, years before Generation X, and even then I didn’t believe Emma’s monologue. I think she believed it, and she didn’t just turn good right away. When it was announced that she and Banshee would form a school for the next generation of mutants, I thought of NM 38-40 immediately.
Like I said: head canon. If it doesn’t work for you or anyone else, no worries.
I must have read if not all then most of the stories with Death Seeds and Life Seeds and I’ve never really understood what’s going on with them.
@Sam: Never discuss how evil early Emma is and leave aside the Firestar limited series! #JusticeForButterRum
Well, if people want to bring the Firestar limited series into it, then they should definitely bring Secret Wars II issue 7 into it, as Emma is part of the group that sells their souls to Mephisto in exchange for a powerup that will cause the destruction of the Beyonder.
Given how active Kupperberg is online, either he’s written about those DP stories or it would be easy to ask him about them if he hasn’t.
Super villain redemption requires a lot of hand-waving. I remember when John Byrne turned Sandman back into a villain because an early issue of Spider-man established he was one of the FBI’s most wanted so therefore he was too violent and dangerous to turn into a hero.
Seemed a bit extreme on Byrne’s part. Comics are not a court of law. You really can shrug off old bits now and then.
@New kid- Byrne was wrong about the FBI’s most wanted list. In the 1950s, some people were on the FBI’s most wanted list for crimes like murder but others were on the list for crimes like armed robbery of a post office or a bank. That’s serious and I wouldn’t blame the victims for holding a grudge but it’s not exactly Moral Event Horizon territory.
@Mike Loughlin: That’s a smear perpetuated by Conor Goldsmith of Cerebrocast. Threnody went willingly with Sinister. Beast let her because Sinister was the only one who could her control her powers, which were killing people. Rogue and iceman agreed. After Threnody got control, she said Beast did the right thing, even staying with Sinister to keep an eye on him.
Another thing is the double standard between Beast and his leaders. Cyclops ordered him to weaponize the Legacy virus against the Skrulls, but he’s a badass leader while Beast is a war criminal. Emma Frost was the power behind New Tian who established the collaboration with fascists, but only Beast gets blamed.