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Jan 9

X-Men: Grand Design #1-2

Posted on Tuesday, January 9, 2018 by Paul in x-axis

Grand Design is one of the stranger X-related ideas in quite some time.  Planned for six outsize issues, it’s Ed Piskor re-telling the first three hundred or so issues of (UncannyX-Men.  These first two issues cover the Silver Age.

Now, three hundred issues in around three hundred pages is going to be seriously compressed.  But Piskor’s best known work, Hip Hop Family Tree, is essentially documentarian, and there’s a similar vibe to this.  Yes, there’s a framing sequence to set up Uatu as the narrator, but that largely serves to explain why the focus remains on the big picture rather than the small details.  More to the point, though, roughly three hundred issues basically means the end of the Claremont run, and if there’s one thing that Claremont was very good at, it was creating a sense of a grand saga.

So the point of this exercise – beyond simple tribute – seems to be to shift the emphasis away from the details of individual stories and to tell the story of the big, dominant themes which run through that era.  Of course, Claremont didn’t actually come onto the book since 1975, when most of the cast was replaced, but it was still an era of superhero comics based on the notion of a grand continuing uber-story, and which treated its history in that way.  This didn’t die with Claremont – it persisted for most of the nineties – but it petered out by the time of the Grant Morrison run.  It’s not something that’s easily re-created now, given the stop-start nature of X-Men history over the last 15 years or so, and the sheer unwieldy bulk of a continuity stretching back to 1963 (and being spammed with new content month after month).

Part of the appeal here is the style, with aged-looking pages and a balance between an indie feel and a more conventional Marvel style.  There’s a great attention to detail in the panels, which helps to fill out what could otherwise have been very clipped and narrative-heavy scenes, and give more depth to the characters.  And there are some good little comedy beats in there as well.

But for someone who’s already pretty well immersed in X-Men continuity, what’s more interesting is the extent to which Piskor is not doing a straightforward summary of the series at all.  That’s not just because of the incorporation of a large number of continuity implants – the first issue doesn’t even reach X-Men #1 because it’s so busy incorporating a whole load of flashback material (including the late-sixties back-up strips about how the team was formed).  Rather, Piskor is changing a lot of the details, in a way which might not be altogether obvious to readers taking the catalogue of end notes at face value.

This is not to say that anything big has changed.  Quite the opposite – the point seems to be that nothing big has changed, but that a lot of the small details have been hammered into line so as to better serve precisely the same big picture, or just to get rid of stuff that was no good. In short, it’s a summary of the X-Men as it would have been if the creators had known where they were going all along, and had steered clear of some of their dodgier ideas.  But at the same time, little or nothing is truly new, simply revised.

At this point there’s a risk of degenerating into a catalogue of minutiae, but let’s take a few examples of how Piskor is, on the whole, tying things together rather more neatly than the original, with a few subtle changes.

In Lee and Kirby’s version, Xavier loses the use of his legs in battle with Lucifer, and the fact that nobody ever uses Lucifer despite his theoretical “arch-enemy” potential tells you all you need to know about what a mediocre bad guy he was.  Piskor – much more sensibly – just cuts that out entirely, and simply has Xavier injured in the same cave-in where Cain Marko becomes the Juggernaut.  That requires Xavier’s trip to Egypt to meet Amahl Farouk and a young Storm to take place before his military service (Claremont had it after), and means that Xavier is now in a wheelchair by the time he meets Gabrielle Haller (in the original, he wasn’t).  It’s an obviously better sequence.

The Phoenix Force storyline starts as soon as Jean Grey’s powers emerge, as the Phoenix instantly turns round to head for Earth and all the alien races take notice.  That allows it to become a developing subplot which slowly builds from the earliest possible moment.  It also provides an explanation for the Shi’ar reconnaissance vessel which kidnaps Scott’s parents – oh, and Katherine Summers is just killed instead of being captured and killed later, which simplifies matters and also gets rid of a slightly dodgy overtone of sexual violence.  And it provides a better reason for the alien Mutant-Master to take an interest in Earth during the Factor Three arc, instead of his original “nuke everything and rule the wasteland” plan.  And it explains why the Stranger wanted to come to Earth.  And… you get the idea.  If it involves aliens or anything vaguely cosmic, it’s now probably to do with people trying to find out what’s up with Phoenix.

The various anti-mutant villains – Cameron Hodge, the Trasks, Stephen Lang, Robert Kelly, Donald Pierce – are linked together by making them members of the Right.  This is one of the points where I wonder if it’s going a bit too far to tie everything together; thematically, isn’t it better if the anti-mutant sentiment is coming from multiple sources rather than one?  Still, there are some nice tweaks to Angel’s back story to take account of the retcon from 80s X-Factor that he had Cameron Hodge as a confidant during his first run as a superhero.

Magneto’s attack on Cape Citadel in X-Men #1 is conflated with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants’ attack on Santo Marco in X-Men #4.  This is a very good move because it goes some way towards answering the question of what Magneto was actually trying to achieve in issue #1; it neuters the question of why he didn’t bring the Brotherhood with him; and it makes it possible to have the Brotherhood being recruited alongside the X-Men, which works much better.

The X-Men’s random fight with Count Nefaria at the start of the Roy Thomas run now seems to be presented as Nefaria laying the groundwork for a plan involving NORAD – in other words, trying to give some big-picture context to the X-Men’s other random fight with Count Nefaria at the start of the Chris Claremont run, an inconsequential story which could easily have been glossed over if it hadn’t been used to kill off Thunderbird.

Ted Roberts, a short-run late-sixties supporting character who was a competing love interest for Jean Grey, is now Mastermind starting the Dark Phoenix saga ten years early.  This is a lovely way of acknowledging a dead end plot which went on for a year, and actually tying it to something bigger.

The whole team know that Xavier fakes his death, and not just Jean.  Of course, in the original, they just killed Xavier and then brought him back in a retcon, which made it impossible to claim that the whole team knew all along.  But that was stupid, and the only reason to do it that way was to try and square off earlier issues.  Piskor could have just cut the entire thing, but then he’d lose the bit where the team “graduate” by carrying on as heroes without their mentor around, and that wouldn’t be in the spirit of the series.

You get the idea.  Now, granted, once we get into the series proper, there is a bit of “and then they fought X, and then they fought Y”.  I guess that’s necessary if you want to make the point that, honest, there was other stuff in here too.  But what Piskor’s done here is a rather subtler exercise in editing the material than it might first appear, and the vast majority of his changes are clear improvements.  There are good reasons why the original comics weren’t done this way – principally, the original creators were neither perfect nor psychic – but it’s a streamlined re-telling that’s faithful to the big picture while still being built almost exclusively from the original elements.

What you lose, of course, is much of the character dynamics and soap opera which were typical of the X-Men’s heyday – though, to be fair, not so much in the Silver Age.  But then we’re bringing out one particular aspect of the X-Men’s history here.  The nagging question here is whether this all amounts to anything more than an interesting editorial parlour game with nice art.  Ultimately, that will turn on whether Piskor really can bring this chunk of X-Men history together as a truly satisfying whole.  That may be easier said and done, because the X-Men didn’t stop in 1991, and the Claremont era ends with him leaving mid-story and the reset button being whacked next month.  We won’t know for a while yet whether Piskor can find a resolution in his source material, but it’s the point that I’m most curious about.

Bring on the comments

  1. mchan says:

    So I guess Deadly Genesis, Vulcan, and that whole swath of X-Men in space in the 2000s is gone then. I mean on some level good riddance, but I have the feeling what Piskor is doing is paring away the contemporary history by removing some of the roots of it at the very beginning. How he deals with The Twelve, for example, might be really interesting.

    I guess the broader question is what the point of this entire exercise is. Is it just a project for Piskor to do for Marvel? To that end, it’s quite successful. Is the aim now for it to supplant the current chronology?

  2. Thom H. says:

    I love seeing those old stories in a new light, especially compared with Uncanny X-Men #138, for example, which was a similar exercise in nostalgia but without the through-lines.

    It’s so interesting to read the chronology this way — it ends up being like Game of Thrones with all kinds of warring factions with different agendas. Much more complex than the original stories, for sure.

    Not crazy that the Phoenix is trotted out again as the unifying force for a lot of this continuity. Going back to that well over and over cheapens the concept for me, but at least it makes sense this time.

    And there are just enough comedic asides to get me through the more detailed, less interesting bits of history.

  3. Moo says:

    Damn. After thirteen years or so, I might actually buy a comic again. This seems right up my alley, as it’s historical.

    And it seems to be retconning precisely what I would have retconned myself if it were up to me (Lucifer, Xavier’s faked death, Deadly Genesis– good riddance), Hopefully this will also be used to rescue Scott’s character from the wreckage of X-Factor #1. Scott being a catastrophe when it comes to dealing with personal issues is part of his character (and it’s what I like about him) but there’s no way he’d have walked out on his wife and son. Not for Jean or any reason. Even if he couldn’t come to grips with his dead girlfriend returning and eventually fell out of love with his wife, he’d have stayed with her in a loveless marriage purely out of a sense of obligation (or for Nate’s sake, of nothing else). Scott’s the kind of guy who would read the entirety of an iTunes agreement just to be certain not to violate anything. He’s not just going to brush aside his wedding vows.

    So, here’s hoping that gets addressed.

  4. Jerry Ray says:

    X-Men 138 was my first issue of the comic, and the issue that got me hooked on comics for good, so I’ve got a soft spot for this particular exercise (although I find the indie style and dry writing a little off-putting).

    It seems that 138 (or a reprint thereof) was a big influence on Piskor, as well, as evidenced by this conversation between Piskor and Claremont that I quite enjoyed reading:

    https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/12/chris-claremont-ed-piskor-reflect-on-the-grand-des.html

  5. Nu-D says:

    The Classic X-Men reprint of UXM #138 was also one of my earliest comics, and was essential for helping me become an X-Men fan. If such a history of the Avengers had been published around the same time, I might have gone that direction instead.

  6. Moo says:

    Man, I’m old. I read 138 when it came out. Amazing Adventures #1 (vol 3) was my intro to the X-Men. Reading it prompted me to buy the very next issue of the current series which happened to be #129 (Kitty and Emma’s first appearance). Great place to start! It was as if Kitty was created just for my benefit. A newcomer to the X-Men’s world.

  7. Matt C. says:

    If this goes through 300 issues then it won’t touch upon The Twelve.

    I am curious to see if Deadly Genesis will be touched upon (wasn’t the point that they were the first rescue team Xavier sent to Krakoa? So they could still show up in #3) but won’t be surprised if they’re ignored.

    The other big omission to me was Cassandra Nova, but I can see why if this only goes to Uncanny #300.

  8. Paul says:

    I don’t think anything in this series is intended to retcon official continuity. It’s just a re-telling of the story up to 1991 or so, revised to make it flow better. Some of his changes would screw up things that happen after 1991, although simply not mentioning Cassandra Nova isn’t really in that category – there’s just no point bringing her up, because she doesn’t play into anything else that’s going to happen during this period.

    A better example would be that by removing the (very weak) Lucifer story from Xavier’s back-story, you also delete his relationship with Amelia Voght, which screws up a storyline from Lobdell’s run. But that’s outside the time frame of this series too, so it doesn’t matter.

  9. Moo says:

    How did he approach Magneto’s age? Did he? Because this is something that’s going to have to be addressed sooner or later. The time gap between WWII and the day the X-Men first fought Magneto widens all the time. If that day was fifteen years ago, then it’s already problematic. He attacked Cape Citadel when he was how old? Seventy-five? It’d have to be in that ballpark. And then there’s the fact that he and Xavier are supposed to be contemporaries, so there’s that.

  10. Gregory Baker says:

    Moo,

    I have a fanon that Magneto, like Captain America, was placed in stasis for a period of time. I also have Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, and Spider-Woman placed into stasis by High Evolutionary as well (at least until the stupid “Magneto is not really our father!” crap).

    As for Piskor’s treatment, I love the “big picture” stuff with Phoenix, Mastermind, and especially Namor. However, the streamlining of the timeline seem more like Uatu glossing over things for this record rather than retconning, since it would is more than just changing something like X-Men vol. 1 #9, but echoes across things like Xavier’s relationship with Amelia Voght, etc.

  11. Moo says:

    I don’t really see why this shouldn’t be considered an official retcon of X-Men continuity unless Uatu is meant to be an unreliable narrator, but that doesn’t sound like it’s the case. If this isn’t official, then it’s inaccurate, and if it’s inaccurate, who cares? Sure, it makes for a more interesting and streamlined tale, and I guess that’s the point, but it’s still built on lies. It means (for example) that we’re just pretending Lucifer never existed even though he did. I prefer the idea that he actually didn’t exist. I love the idea of Ted Roberts being Mastermind all along. A lot of these changes seem to be for the better (though I agree that lumping all of the anti-mutant activists into one bunch isn’t a great idea) so why not adopt it as the official history?

  12. Jerry Ray says:

    Haven’t noticed any references to Magneto’s age. This book seems more focused on weaving a new narrative and not trying to resolve unresolvable meta issues like character aging.

    Personally, I wish writers and fans would just leave those kinds of “comic book time versus real time” issues alone – has any character really been improved by rewriting their history to address those kinds of issues?

  13. Moo says:

    Jerry Ray, Magneto being pissed off about the Holocaust and waiting until he’s pushing eighty-years old to finally do something significant doesn’t really work. I can see how it seemed like a good idea in 1981 when the gap was narrower, but not now. The Fantastic Four didn’t take that maiden voyage to “beat the commies to the moon” anymore either.

    They don’t have to retcon his Holocaust history out of existence. I wouldn’t go with suspended animation either. We already have that with Cap. Have him be rescued from Auschwitz by a fellow captive mutant. Someone who can open up time portals. Magneto finds himself “decades” in the future. Leave the length of time jump deliberately vague so it can be elastic along with Marvel’s timeline. He turns up in time to be the same age as Xavier, whom he eventually meets, and then you go from there. Problem solved.

  14. Moo says:

    I’ll also point out that one of the writers who the passage of time mattered to was Stan Lee. He’s the one who put Cap on ice to keep him young two decades after the war. And it wasn’t meant to “improve” anything. It was meant to explain something.

  15. Daibhid Ceannaideach says:

    “Ted Roberts, a short-run late-sixties supporting character who was a competing love interest for Jean Grey, is now Mastermind starting the Dark Phoenix saga ten years early.”

    So does he mind control Ralph the Boy Industrialist into thinking he has a brother, or have Ralph and his whole “Behold the awesome power of cobalt!” deal gone down the memory hole?

  16. Daibhid Ceannaideach says:

    Come to think of it, Ralph being mind controlled would explain a few things…

  17. Col_Fury says:

    Don’t forget, Grand Design claims that Manhattan was an uninhabited wasteland for over a decade (!) after the Human Torch/Sub-Mariner fight.

    To answer people’s age questions, Grand Design has Brian and Sharon Xavier cleaning up Manhattan in the ’50s after working on the Manhattan Project in the ’40s. Charles Xavier was born at some point before this. So yes, Magneto and Xavier are contemporaries (Magneto probably a little older), and the sliding timescale is ignored. The “current day” bits seem to be taking place in the ’60s, given character ages.

    I don’t think it’s intended to be canon. Fun comic, though!

  18. Si says:

    No need for headcanon to explain Magneto. Magneto was turned into a baby in a Defenders story, then later re-aged in X-Men by Erik the Red not to his actual age but to “in his prime”. So mid 20s maybe?

    It’s worth noting that this story was back in 1977, when it was still practical that he was a youth in the 1940s. So the plotline is much more useful now than when Claremont actually wrote it.

    So yeah at the moment he’s probably in his 30s physically, maybe early 40s, no older than Cyclops and Jean Grey. Assuming he even ages any more, who knows what the machine does to people?

    Xavier got a new cloned body from the Starjammers, and I imagine they would have given him a nice young body rather than one his actual age, otherwise they’re just dicks.

  19. Moo says:

    “No need for headcanon to explain Magneto. Magneto was turned into a baby in a Defenders story, then later re-aged in X-Men by Erik the Red not to his actual age but to “in his prime”. So mid 20s maybe?”

    How does de-aging Magneto anytime AFTER the Cape Citadel incident address the length of time that separates the Holocaust from the events of X-Men #1?

    We’re talking roughly six decades by now and the gap continues to widen as time marches on. Magneto had to be close to eighty years old when he attacked Cape Citadel, which is already pretty stupid. Eventually, we’ll arrive at the point where it would be impossible for him to be alive by the time Xavier gathers the original X-Men.

  20. Nathan Mahney says:

    Was Ted Roberts Mastermind? I thought he was another student, the one Jean went to the Ren Faire with?

    I spent most of this comic getting annoyed because “that’s not how it happened”. I did love the retcon of the Warlock issue (#30) into a Mastermind illusion though, especially the Winsor McCay tribute.

  21. Taibak says:

    In addition to what Moo said, the problem with hauling out an obscure Defenders story from 1977 is that very few people have read or even care about obscure Defenders stories from 1977.

    Not that it stops Tom Brevoort from citing it whenever he gets asked….

  22. Taibak says:

    Come to think of it, anyone want to give odds that Magneto will have his origin changed to the Balkan wars at some point?

  23. shandrakor says:

    Magneto actually had his clock reset at least twice. In addition to the Defenders story in ’77, there’s the much more recent story where the High Evolutionary used Celestial technology to restore Magneto’s powers, he claimed that the treatment left him fit and healthy as a young man. I don’t have the book right in front of me, but it’s UX 515, I think. Right after Utopia.

  24. shandrakor says:

    Ah, I found it. UX #516:

    “But when it was done, I was reborn, recharged, like a man of 20 again.”

    (picture Greg Land traced out of a bodybuilder magazine)

    Even if the treatment didn’t de-wrinkle him or anything, it’s certainly an excuse for him being in fighting trim for the next couple decades.

  25. wwk5d says:

    At least they haven’t pulled a Vector style retcon…yet.

  26. Chris V says:

    While they did change Tony Stark’s origin (saying he was in Afghanistan, not Vietnam), they have yet to change the fact that Frank Castle fought in Vietnam.
    It would be an easy enough change to just say that the Punisher fought in the most recent war in Iraq.
    Far easier than changing Magneto’s origin, but no one seems to care.

    They can just change the time-line for when World War II occurred in the Marvel Universe, and compress most of the 20th century in to a decade.
    It was a….really, really bad ten years. World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War….all within a ten year period.
    In the Marvel Universe, World War II took place sometime in the late-1960s.

  27. Psycho Andy says:

    The big benefit of this book, as far as I can see, will be for new readers. Yeah, some minutiae is changed for a better-flowing narrative.

    However.

    As a comic store employee, I get a weekly barrage of “I want to read X-Men from the beginning.” And, really, if anybody outside of folks like Paul or Jay & Miles did that, it would probably drive them insane. The Silver Age stories are just so hard to read by modern standards.

    When. The complete Grand Design collection is released, it will be a VERY useful tool to hand to someone, and say, “Start here. This covers the majority of everything from about 1963-1993.” One book, and if they want to know more about Dark Phoenix or X-Tinction Agenda or whatever, they can buy those TPBs or associated Epic Collections, too.

    This book isn’t for us, the folks that know all of the X-Men lore. It’s to get new readers into the most complex mainstream comic series.

  28. Paul says:

    Xavier and Magneto’s ages are a continuity quagmire which at some point is going to have to be addressed with a sweeping retcon.

    The basic problem is the sliding timeline, under which the Silver Age moves, but World War II doesn’t. That creates an ever-increasing gap which means that both characters are now very old by the time you even get to X-Men #1 – to the point where it’s difficult to imagine Xavier successfully pulling off a de-aging without the public asking some very awkward questions.

    Xavier’s personal back story isn’t too closely tied to World War II – Lee and Kirby showed his parents working at Alamagordo, which anyone at the time would have understood as a reference to the first atomic bomb test, but that was long since finessed into being a different project altogether.

    But Magneto is irrevocably tied to World War II because of his holocaust back story. And much of the Xavier / Magneto relationship is tied up with the idea that they’re roughly contemporaries.

    And if you rely solely on the de-aging of Xavier and Magneto, what about other characters who crop up in their back stories – how old is Moira MacTaggert, or Gabrielle Haller, or Legion?

    It’s a fix that works as long as you don’t look too closely and you don’t put two conflicting elements on the page at the same time. But it wouldn’t work for a project like Grand Design, which would wind up foregrounding all the internal contradictions.

  29. The original Matt says:

    Remember all that “time is broken” stuff from a few years back? I honestly thought that was gonna be the fix all for this stuff. Have Stark, Richards and McCoy basically announce “Yeah, we broke time and it’s affecting the 60s till now, so we all age weird. But we fixed it. Time works normal again until the writers need to fix a continuity blunder.”

    Now I’m trying to remember if that even went *anywhere*

  30. Si says:

    I don’t want to make this into a big thing, but the Magneto being turned into a baby bit isn’t just an obscure Defenders comic, it was a central plot point to the story in X-Men volume 2 #1, the best-selling comic book of all time. It’s not super relevant today, but then neither is his age, really. There’s no actual reason why these things need to make internal sense, any more than it needs to be explained how a character can speak a two paragraph passage in the time it takes for a single punch to land. Time in comics is only a B-list character.

  31. Moo says:

    Si, you’ve gone from “Here’s your explanation…” (which didn’t actually address the timeline problem) to “These things don’t need to make sense” in the span of two posts.

    Actually, they do. Sooner or later, someone’s going to have to sort this out. On the plus side, Magneto being an old geezer by the time he attacked Cape Citadel at least gives him an excuse for losing a fight to a pack of inexperienced teenagers. They wore the poor old guy down and he ran home to take a nap.

  32. Brian says:

    With all he recent research into refreshing aging blood, I imagine that it’s only a matter of time before Magneto’s age is explained away as his own (instinctive) power over the ferrous minerals in his blood dramatically slowing his aging while giving him features similar to someone with hemochromatosis (tan skin, gray hair with a widow’s peak) despite an otherwise youthful and healthy body. He’ll be one of those mutants who aged normal until his powers fully manifested (in the late 1940s, after emerging during WWII) and then seems to have basically stopped aging.

  33. Joshua says:

    What bothers me about this series is the slavish attention to continuity then the bizarre ignoring it, for seemingly no reason whatsoever. The bit that jumped out at me the most was the Namor getting over his amnesia. In the comics, it’s the Human Torch (Johnny Storm) that finds Namor as a derelict, then dumps him into the ocean, restoring his memory. Why would Piskor change that fairly huge detail, especially when the FF are in a following panel?

  34. Moo says:

    Well, it was a pretty stupid scene. Had Johnny been wrong (and he wasn’t 100% sure he had the right guy when he dropped him into the ocean) it would have meant having to explain to Reed that he assaulted a homeless man, first by burning away his facial hair and then by tossing him into the ocean all because he resembled someone from a comic book he was just reading. Then there’s the matter of how Johnny correctly guessed that the water would cure Namor’s amnesia as opposed to him remaining amnesiac and suddenly confused as to how he was breathing water.

    Logan should have gone to Johnny for help with his amnesia. “That accent… Western Canadian. I’ll fly him over Alberta and toss him into Banff National Park. That should restore his memory.”

  35. Adam Farrar says:

    Moo, Uatu doesn’t make this canon. It’s just an alternate reality Uatu. He and the other Watchers are not unique in the multiverse.

  36. Voord 99 says:

    I don’t think that Magneto’s age is a problem for the current version of X-Men continuity, in which the O5 are simultaneously from the early 1960s and from about 10-15 years ago. Magneto’s first conflict back in UXM #1 can exist in the same chronological indeterminacy. If you can accept the first, you can accept the second.

    But at some point that set-up will be dispensed with, and at that point it will probably be rethought. (That is, assuming that Disney doesn’t dispense with publishing new Marvel comics altogether before that point…)

    One alternative to freezing/time-travel/whatever is the X-Men: First Class version. Magneto spends as many decades as you need as a Nazi hunter and has his turn towards mutant radicalism after that phase of his life is over — as part of his friendship with Charles Xavier. There’s a time limit of about a decade or so on how long that version will work, before we get to a point where the Holocaust happened too long ago for any of the perpetrators possibly to have still been alive about 20ish years ago. But for the moment, it would justify Magneto’s Silver Age villainous turn as being when he was an old man.

  37. ASV says:

    The Franklin Richards Time-Shift Theorem explains all of this.

  38. Alex H says:

    Honestly at this point I’d find it neater if immortality or at least extended life span were just made part of Magneto’s powerset – the Holocaust background is too strong to drop, but it’s also generally presented that he didn’t descend into outright villainy until the X-men were around – perhaps just have some later, lesser trigger incident make him think that thing’s haven’t actually changed?

  39. Moo says:

    @Voord99 um, which version of the O5 is actually from the 1960s? I know there’s two versions of the O5 running around, but I thought the younger set were plucked from the sliding X-Men start date of approximately 10-15 years ago.

    @Alex the problem with Magneto living the life of an immortal Highlander is that there’s a lot of backstory space to fill between WWII and Cape Citadel and that space is only going to get larger as time goes on. That’s a lot of space where he’s not being Magneto and I can already think of all kinds of problems with that.

    I think suspended animation or a time-jump is what’s needed. Something that lands him in the sliding timescale alongside Xavier at approximately the same age.

  40. Daibhid Ceannaideach says:

    @Moo I thought the younger set were plucked from the sliding X-Men start date of approximately 10-15 years ago.

    Officially, yes. And then we get Hank thinking iPods are astounding new technology, and Scott complaining that there aren’t barbershops any more. They’re supposed to have come from the mid-2000s, but they’re written as if they came from the sixties, and nobody in-universe seems to notice the discrepancy.

  41. Moo says:

    @ Daibhid thanks for clarifying that.

    Magda is another problem. My understanding is that Wanda and Pietro are no longer Magneto’s children, but they were led to believe that they were. So, even if it was a lie, it had to seem plausible to everyone concerned (Magneto, Wanda, Pietro) that Magda could have given birth to Wanda and Pietro.

    But Magda and Magneto met before WWII. They were reunited in the camps and escaped together. If she were still alive today, she’d have to be in her eighties. Which means Wanda and Pietro would have to be fairly old themselves to believe that a woman born in the late1920s or early 1930s at the latest could have been their mother.

  42. Voord 99 says:

    I think that’s easier to retcon. It’s not important when Magneto met Magda in quite the same way that it is important that Magneto is a Holocaust survivor.

    I’d file that one alongside things like Sharon Carter being Peggy Carter’s younger sister to begin with, and now being her grand-niece.

    I’m pretty sure that Wanda and Pietro will be back to being Magneto’s children before too long, incidentally.

  43. Col_Fury says:

    Magda died during childbirth, if I remember right.

    Also, the Evolutionary War Annuals established that Pietro & Wanda were placed in suspended animation as infants, and eventually thawed out and given to the Maximoffs in the relatively recent past.

  44. Moo says:

    The twins came to believe Magda was their mother in a story published back in 1983. But on Marvel’s sliding timescale, that 1983 story rests somewhere in the 2000s. Meaning it was already plausible to Wanda and Pietro before that suspended animation stuff came to light that Magda, a woman born circa 1930, was their mother.

  45. Zoomy says:

    The Marvel Universe is full of people with links to the second world war, you can’t just fix it by extending Magneto’s lifetime. Even in Wanda and Pietro’s back story, there’s the same problem with the Whizzer and Miss America, not to mention Bova – she’s still hanging around out there somewhere, right? If they’re going to do the whole sliding timescale thing, eventually the war and everyone connected to it has to be ditched and the whole continuity rewritten.

  46. Voord 99 says:

    Well, but it’s not all equally important, I think. I think that one can draw a distinction between characters like Magneto and Steve Rogers, for whom the link to WWII is an absolutely essential part of what’s interesting about the character, and, well, characters like Bova, where you can simply kludge in a new origin and no-one is likely to care very much.

    This isn’t confined to WWII, either. Much of the Marvel universe is very strongly rooted in the Cold War. Yet no-one is really likely to be bothered by the fact that the Fantastic Four exist because They Couldn’t Let the Commies Win the Space Race, Dammit! It’s easy enough to say that FF #1 basically happened, minus that element.

    (Just as one can accept that the death of Gwen Stacy happened, but Peter Parker didn’t actually wear some of the outfits that he wore in the early 70’s.)

    On the other hand, there are characters where the Cold War matters and can’t be edited out without harming the character — that’s why we need the stuff about Natasha Romanoff being much older than she appears. It’s not always easy to tell the difference, though. In theory, especially if you look at the original ‘60s material, one might suppose that Iron Man was as strongly tied to the Cold War as the Black Widow. (There’s a reason why she originates as an Iron Man villain.) But he turned out to be able to leave all that behind without any difficulty at all.

    But there’s a somewhat different question here as well, which is how much it matters that, over time, World War II (or the Cold War) are going to fade in cultural salience and become as vague in popular memory as I think the First World War already is becoming. (Although there’s obviously been a certain resurgence of WWI in our consciousness recently, driven by the centenary.)

    Right now, the Second World War is still quite present to us, thanks at least in part to the wave of “Greatest Generation” interest in it that started to take hold in the ‘90s (related to the awareness that the people who lived at the time were dying off) and has therefore been around for about a generation at this point.

    But that is going to fade — I think arguably it’s done so to a significant extent already. It’s like Westerns: at one point it was unthinkable that the Old West would not be a dominant presence in American imaginations but now, if you get a Western, it’s something like Deadwood where it’s about exoticizing it as an alien world to us.

    And I think that Magneto or Captain America become somewhat different characters once they’re from a past that’s outside living memory entirely.

    But I don’t know that the Marvel universe will really last that long anyway. It came essentially into being in the ‘60s, in large part as a dialogue between the ‘60s and the ‘40s — like everything in human history, it comes with an expiration date as circumstances change.

  47. Nu-D says:

    This is why they need to let characters age out gracefully. Magneto should never have returned after Claremont/Lee killed him.

  48. Moo says:

    @Nu-D How does that fix anything? WWII remains in the same place in time. The Silver Age and everything afterwards keeps sliding forward in time, including the Claremont/Lee stories. Magneto’s age is tethered to both of these. Eventually, Magneto will be too old to still be alive for X-Men volume one let alone volume two.

  49. Moo says:

    I think they need to ditch the Holocaust background. It would be great to keep it, but it’s a continuity headache that’s just going to keep getting worse. And immortality doesn’t suit Magneto the way it does someone like Apocalypse. It eliminates the urgency to his actions. If he knows he’s going to live for several hundred years, or more, he’d be smarter to work quietly in the background, taking his time trying to manipulate things the way he wants them to go. His mad takeover plots only make a degree of sense when he knows he’s on a mortal deadline. Just give him a generic traumatic episode in his past (family murdered) that sets him on his path. Have him occasionally point to the Holocaust to back up his arguments. It won’t be as powerful as him having lived it, but it can still work.

    Same goes for Xavier being tied into the Korean War. Lose that. Put all of the Xavier/Magneto stuff as happening “years” before Cape Citadel, and away we go.

    Pietro and Wanda, whether they go being back to Magneto’s kids or not, need to lose that “possibly the children of the Whizzer” background too because that certainly doesn’t work anymore.

  50. Krzysiek Ceran says:

    Not a generic traumatic episode, but another racially motivated hate crime. Doesn’t need to be a genocide, but Magneto is a constant victim/perpetrator, and it would be better for the character if his victimization was anchored in real-world issues. Generic ‘my family was gunned down in a gang shootout’ wouldn’t work. Even ‘my family was murdered by an anti-mutant mob’ would strip him of some of his complexity.

    More broadly, though, I agree that he doesn’t need to be tied to Holocaust. He doesn’t need to have experienced the absolute worst evil that humans can inflict. In fact, a lesser evil, something that is perhaps often overlooked and forgotten, might be even more poignant.

    But this is all rather moot. Marvel doesn’t seem to be concerned about continuity issues these days. And by ‘these days’ I mean… uh… the 21st century so far?

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