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Dec 2

X-Men: The Trial of Magneto #4 annotations

Posted on Thursday, December 2, 2021 by Paul in Annotations

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

X-MEN: THE TRIAL OF MAGNETO #4
“Verdigris”
by Leah Williams, Lucas Werneck, David Messina & Edgar Delgado

COVER / PAGE 1: Three intertwined Scarlet Witches – one in the centre, one upside down, and one apparently made of branches.

PAGE 2. “Data page”, though in the magical designs used in this series (note the parchment effect). The spiral text is a description of the sensation of being reborn, with the narrator finally recollecting that they brought this about themselves. Presumably, this is Wanda describing the events of the flashback that follows.

PAGE 3. Flashback: The Five resurrect Wanda.

This presumably happens between pages 4 and 13 of issue #2. Hope takes the initiative to resurrect Wanda (just as she quietly ignored resurrection protocols to bring back Scout in New Mutants #21. As Hope points out, the Five are essentially untouchable because they’re vital to resurrection; they haven’t done much to use that political power.

However, in the end Wanda is able to resurrect herself using Cerebro, evidently reaching out from the limbo dimension where we saw her in previous issues. There’s a precedent for this in Way of X #2, where Legion was similarly able to force his own resurrection once his previous body had died.

PAGES 4-5. Flashback: Wanda’s children talk to Prodigy.

As we established last issue, this Wanda’s memories have been reset to a much earlier point in her life, so she knows nothing about Wiccan or Speed.

Speed saw Wanda’s body in X-Factor #10.

Prodigy recaps the clues that X-Factor found in issue #1. Wiccan suggests that enchanted metal provides an explanation for Wanda’s death by strangulation that exonerates Magneto. Northstar decides to call Excalibur, though Magik would surely be the natural choice – she’s an actual magician, which is more than can be said for any of Excalibur besides the rookie Rictor.

It’s not spelt out, but this scene is a flashback which overlaps with Wanda being told about the details of her life by Jean and Rachel in the previous issue.

PAGE 6. Recap and credits.

PAGE 7. Speed and Wiccan take Wanda aside.

As Prodigy says, the kaiju attack began last issue and was prompted by Wanda getting her memories back (or, surely more likely being given an infodump about her life – the whole point of her lacking memories is that Cerebro doesn’t have a more recent memory backup).

PAGE 8. Data page, showing the multi-arrow symbol (from the data pages of issue #1) transmuting into an opening eye.

PAGES 9-10. The other two Wandas fight.

This picks up from the confrontation that was underway at the end of the previous issue. The future Wanda has apparently come back to tell Wanda that her guilt is producing the kaiju, and that she needs to let it go; but the fact that they’re reunited later suggests she’s actually a projection of one side of Wanda’s personality.

PAGES 11-22. The three Wandas defeat the kaiju and are reunited.

Krakoan refuses to accept that she did any of the things she was told about, and denies responsibility – more or less exactly what old Wanda seemed to be asking for. The kids tell her that’s not acceptable, and at the same time the older Wanda apparently says that she needs to forgive herself instead of punishing herself. Honestly, it’s all pretty contrived, and rather obviously an attempt to dig the character out of the dead end she’s been in ever since Brian Bendis.

But if people are going to keep using her, then something like this is unavoidable; the Bendis stories are one of those rare bad ideas that has proved so unignorable that it’s effectively ruined every attempt to use the character since he left. At some point you either stop using the character, or retcon the Bendis stuff away somehow, or do something very contrived like this and hope everyone accepts it as the Moving On Point. It’s not a particularly good story, but that’s because the brief is impossible. It’s just one of those rip-off-the-sticking-plaster storylines that needs to be done to clear the way for something else.

PAGES 23-24. Wanda addresses the mutants.

Magneto is happily reunited with his figurative daughter, as he’d wanted at the end of the Hellfire Gala.

Quite reasonably, some random mutant voices the objection that Wanda is getting a pat on the back for saving Krakoa from herself. I think it’s just a generic, although it looks like we’re maybe meant to recoognise her. We’re left with the X-Men and Avengers defending Wanda from the mob, which seems a more fitting result.

PAGE 25. Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: THE ACCUSED (with the T and H written separately, instead of using the Krakoan TH symbol).

Bring on the comments

  1. Rob says:

    My reading group thinks the random at the end is Magma, with her blond hair and glowing hands. Possibly?

  2. Krzysiek Ceran says:

    Not only is this contrived, it’s also Wanda’s second, third or even fourth exoneration/forgivness story. Children’s Crusade had her find out M-Day was Doom’s fault, somehow, more or less. Avengers vs X-Men ended with her working with Hope to restart the x-gene activations worldwide. Though that didn’t help the depowered mutants, it just allowed for new ones to appear. Even though Wanda herself did give Rictor his powers back (in Children’s Crusade). I’m certain there was another story or two working the redemption angle hard. Uncanny Avengers? Though that was mostly about the mutants on the team accepting Wanda.

    Anyway. The line has been drawn under Bendis’s Wanda multiple times. It just hasn’t stuck. I’m not sure this time will be different either.

  3. Joseph S. says:

    Contrived, maybe, but she is the Scarlet /Witch/ and the maiden mother crone trinity is an elegant way to work magic formally into the plot while still doing the requisite character work. Wanda has become a mother and a teacher in recent continuity, and so resurrecting the younger version underscores that development, despite the Bendis morass. And of course the character just co/headlined a well-received TV series in which she was a mother. It seems as though there are MCU plans for Young Avengers.

  4. Rareblight says:

    Could that girl in the end be Boom-Boom? Her personality also fits.

    Regarding her outdated Cerebro back-up, I hope they tie that up with her M-Day spell. Because otherwise, it just does not make any sense. Also, what about the other “pretenders”: Quicksilver and Powerhouse. I wonder if they still have back-up, too.

  5. Si says:

    It’s kind of interesting how some characters get stuck with a single story defining them forever more, like Scarlet Witch and Hank Pym, while others have their evil turns slide off them like water from a duck’s back, like Cyclops. Iron Man has done it at least twice, while Havok, who was turned evil at the same time, is still dealing with it. I suppose it’s some combination of how marketable the character is, and how interesting they are outside of that one thing.

  6. Mark Coale says:

    I’m annoyed I didn’t recognize the mother/maiden/crone thing until this issue.

  7. Evilgus says:

    The solution should have been to retire Wanda as a character for several years – or have her killed off in a way that makes us very sympathetic for her. Like Jean or Magneto, she may have been better as an emblem than on the page.

    Then we can move on as part of the inevitable resurrection. Instead you have a situation where is nearly impossible to reconcile the actions with the ongoing character. The success of the Avengers movies arguably hasnt helped to allow her to gracefully fade away before a return.

  8. Drew says:

    Magma would make sense, since as I recall, she was dating a guy who lost his powers on M-Day… while they were exploring an active volcano together. Yikes.

    Honestly, arguably the only way to “redeem” her as a viable character is to reset her to a pre-Disassembled self (as they’ve now done, it sounds like), retcon away the event itself (probably impossible at this point), or Skrull/clone/evil future self it away. Just ask the many, many, MANY writers who’ve written the definitive Hank Pym Redemption Story. It only lasts until the next writer comes along.

  9. Michael says:

    Why is Wiccan saying he’s been defending Wanda his entire life? Dissassembled only happened a few years ago Marvel time and Wiccan was an adolescent at the time. Did Wiccan spend his youth defending Wanda from people who said she was a useless Avenger?
    Williams seems to think it was Wanda who taught Wiccan magic. which isn’t the case.
    The twins seemed out of character- they’re usually more defensive of Wanda.
    @Si- In Wanda’ case, the problem was that she did damage to recurring characters and it stuck around for years. You can ignore Dr. Strange exploding a child during his turn to the dark side during Gillis’s run since the child was a nobody. But Wanda did damage to characters the readers loved and it lasted for YEARS. Jubilee didn’t get her original powers back until 2018.

  10. Chris V says:

    Yes, but Iron Man decided to attempt to ruin the lives of half the superheroes in the Marvel Universe, and it was all swept under the rug almost immediately after Civil War.
    We were expected to accept him as a superhero again, when he should have been portrayed as one of Marvel’s biggest villains moving forward.

    Wanda keeps getting redeemed and instead of moving forward, she acts in a questionable manner again and is set back, needing to be redeemed over again.
    The same with Hank Pym.
    Their characterization is built around them being flawed individuals constantly in need of redemption.

  11. Karl_H says:

    There’s some ropey plotting in between issues… I thought the scene where Northstar’s cooking in the apartment indicated a time jump to after the kaiju fight, because he and the twins were with Wanda when the monsters first showed up last issue. Spent way too much time trying to figure out the timing before realizing it was just ropey plotting.

  12. The Other Michael says:

    What we need is a miniseries called REDEMPTION starring Wanda, Pietro, Alex, Hank Pym, and any other characters who are stuck in that cycle, and the end goal is to rehabilitate them once and for all. And then we all agree to never ever ever ever ever bring up their fatal flaw storylines again. No more wife-beating, no more mind control, no more crazy…

    And then in a few years we do it all again.

  13. Will Cooling says:

    Stuff like this is why I really think Marvel should do every generation do a DC style reboot of their continunity. As brutal and awkward as those reboots are, they do mean DC can escape catstrophically bad decisions to salvage characters in a way that Marvel struggle with.

  14. Luke says:

    +1 for the random blonde female mutant as Magma – not sure when she got the short hair, but that’s how she looked in New Mutants in the Cosmar story.

    That mild bit of interest aside… this was terrible. This feels much different from what I expected based on the setup and solicitations, and far worse.
    This was quite Tini Howard-esque – exposition heavy that doesn’t seem to match the story we’ve actually seen on the page.

  15. Michael says:

    @Chris V- I think the difference is that Tony didn’t ACTUALLY do much damage to his teammates. The only one that really died was Bill Foster, and nobody likes Bill. (Sorry, Bill.) In contrast, Scott Lang was dead for YEARS as a result of Wanda.

  16. Thom H. says:

    Part of the problem of rehabilitating Wanda, I think, is that Bendis’ characterization was retroactive. Wanda didn’t just go crazy at the point of Disassembled, but had ostensibly been crazy since the twins disappeared and Vision went white — years before, even in Marvel time.

    You’d have to go back to the late ’80s to find a version of Wanda who wasn’t traumatized by those events. Which maybe this miniseries did? If so, it also wipes out all of the progress made by Busiek, Heinberg, and Robinson in the meantime, as mentioned above and in other threads on this blog.

    Like Hank Pym, Wanda is a character who didn’t stabilize for a while. Both of them had shifting power sets and problematic relationships. If you throw a memorably traumatic event into their timelines, then it’s easy to look back and say we saw it coming all along. And to have them “relapse” at any point in the future. Something similar is happening to the Beast right now, maybe.

  17. Chris V says:

    Michael-Did anybody really like Scott Lang at that time?
    I always thought of his the other, less-interfering Ant Man.
    It wasn’t until Matt Fraction’s FF and Nick Spencer’s defining run on the character that it seemed like people cared about Lang, which was after Lang had come back from the dead.

  18. NS says:

    They could easily “fix” Wanda by just dropping a huge retcon on her.

    She’s been losing it for years, acting out of fear/paranoia, and destroying people because of the Shadow King, Chthon, Mephisto, the High Evolutionary, The Adversary, or Kang. Hell, the Beyonder might even work. It should just be a villain who’s unexpected and able to believably work as a mastermind. The goal could simply be to keep the Avengers and X-Men separated physically and philosophically for reasons. Marvel can turn it into a giant crossover that reverses M-Day and explains away all of Wanda’s behavior over the decades.

    Something so big would truly serve as a line in the sand unlike Children’s Crusade which had a vague/underwritten plot with little to no impact because Marvel wouldn’t just do the smart thing and just reverse M-Day.

  19. Chris V says:

    I guess at this point, maybe that’s what is needed.

    The problem is that Wanda didn’t need to be “fixed” anymore.
    The James Robinson solo series was a superbly written, well-received title that opened the way forward for Wanda as a character.
    Marvel and later writers chose to completely ignore it and restart the cycle again.
    If writers would have just left Wanda alone, there would be no need for this ill-conceived series or a big event simply to make Marvel and certain writers stop using the John Byrne/Brian Bendis Scarlet Witch as her default setting.

    I get the feeling that Hickman used Wanda as the “great pretender” simply to show the propaganda on Krakoa, not because he (or the reader) should take Xavier’s words seriously.
    After all, the other rallying moment on Krakoa is Genosha, which Xavier blamed on all humans, while the actual events solely involved his parasitic twin-sister.
    Then, later writers in this finagling with the Krakoa set-up decided that Wanda’s actions were a serious matter that should be addressed.
    Rather than something Orwellian (as under Hickman), we were meant to see Xavier’s propaganda as a damning indictment of Wanda.

  20. Rareblight says:

    For the attacker, it would be really fun to have Alarak and Council of Chaos Godhead conspiring against Wanda, due to her actions in Empyre event.
    “I want my eye back, you crone!”

  21. Loz says:

    I will never defend ‘Disassembled’ but it was an attempt, a dumb, boneheaded attempt, to find something to do with a character who was at a dead end. But now Wanda seems stuck again, she’s become the Jonny Storm of the Avengers. Every time a new writer takes over Fantastic Four Jonny gets reset to the callow inexperienced literal hothead and, if we’re lucky, the writer makes him more than that, only for the next writer to ignore that. Remember when Jonny was the supreme ruler of the Negative Zone? The writers would prefer you don’t.

    This is my concern with Beast right now. Not that his story is about him turning dark (right after his storyline being about opposing Cyclops turning dark) but that in several years time we might all be saying “Ugh, another story about Beast having to be forgiven for what he did in the Krakoa era? We’ve done this five times already!”

  22. Uncanny X-Ben says:

    I’m a Williams fan but this has snowballed from kinda okay to outright bad this issue.

    I have no idea who thought chopping this up into a miniseries called Trial of Magneto was a good idea, but they need a timeout.

    And why we needed yet another fixing Wanda story. Just move on.

  23. Josie says:

    “DC can escape catstrophically bad decisions to salvage characters in a way that Marvel struggle with”

    Has DC really done this, though? They never seemed to require a continuity reboot to rejigger a character or bring them back.

  24. Michael says:

    @Loz- I’m not buying that Wanda was at a dead end when Bendis took over. She had just played a major role in Busiek’s Avengers a couple of years before.

  25. Thom H. says:

    Reboots at DC also frequently break characters who then have to be slowly pulled back to their former status quo. It’s happened to Superman (and his supporting cast) more than once. At first the changes seem fresh and full of possibility, and then everyone hates them and wants Brainiac to make sense again. Or Lois and Clark to be married again. Or the Legion to have their inspiration back. Etc.

    Why Superman continually needs to be “fixed” is beyond me, but he’s the best example of DC screwing up a character with reboots that I can think of.

  26. Krzysiek Ceran says:

    I kinda enjoy the current state of DC. They seem to have kind of… given up on continuity? Everything happened or not, characters have all their memories back or not… I’m a Renee Montoya fan. She’s currently the Gotham Police comissioner enforcing the no-vigilantes rule. Her previous starring role was in Rucka’s Lois Lane maxiseries. She was Question at the time. It was the first time she was the Question since the New 52, Convergence nonwithstanding.

    Comissioner Montoya pursues vigilantes and no mention has been made of her previous career that she didn’t have after the last reboot except for that one time she did.

    It’s beautiful.

    (I’m only a casual DC reader so I might have missed something…)

  27. Chris V says:

    I gave up reading any DC books.
    I was always more of a Marvel fan, but there have certainly been times that quite a few books in the DC-line have drawn me to them down the decades.
    The last DC books I was reading were anything that involved Grant Morrison. Now that Morrison is gone from DC, I’m not buying any of their titles.
    It’s really not based on anything reboot or continuity-related, but a general feeling of malaise about the creativity surrounding current-day DC.
    I look at their books and everything at DC feels so alien to me now.
    It’s not that I am opposed to reading a DC comic. If a top creative team I enjoy took over a book I felt strongly enough about to read, I would buy it.
    I just have no interest in DC and their creators right now.

    Marvel’s position on continuity seems to be as lax as the way DC is being described and has seemed that way for years now.
    I am very quickly losing interest in Marvel also.
    Hickman’s X-Men and Al Ewing’s Immortal Hulk we’re the last two books at Marvel I felt truly excited about.
    I am slowly beginning to feel about current-day Marvel the same as I have felt about DC for a few years.

    A Sabretooth series written by Victor LaValle has certainly piqued my interest.
    I can’t say that a lot of other books from Marvel that are going to be shipping during 2022 are of any interest to me.

    I don’t see myself ever quitting reading all comics anytime in my life, but after “Inferno” ends, I will be reading very few comics.
    Meanwhile, a few years back, I was reading nearly every book being published by Marvel.
    Oh well. I’ll be able to save a lot of money.

  28. Uncanny X-Ben says:

    Yeah I was never huge into DC supers stuff, but I certainly read some over the years.

    I really can’t after all the reboots, it just ruined it for me.

    I’ll stick to the totally out of continuity stuff, like the Batman’s Grave.

  29. Omar Karindu says:

    DC books are fun when they’re written by specific writers with strong visions, efforts at running themes, and distinctive tones. I did enjoy a lot of Scott Snyder’s Batman, for example, though it wasn’t up there with some of the greatest runs on the character.

    But yeah, DC reboots are less about “fixing” characters with messy continuity ior damaged core concepts than about trying for “fresh hip, relevant” re-visionings of characters that they feel have grown stale or old-fashioned. (Or, in the case of the New 52, appealing to aging fans of 1990s comics.)

    Ironically, this makes those reboots age very badly, since the character concepts tend to be heavy on current comics trends and light on the iconic qualities of the characters.

    Marvel is odd: they ave a mix of writers who do try to reference, reconcile, or connect things — Hickman and Ewing, as Chris V mentions, and also folks like Dan Slott and Nick Spencer. The quality of the efforts varies.

    And other Marvel writers like Jason Aaron and Kelly Thompson, while less devoted to minutiae, seem to know their Marvel history and like to put their spins on sometimes obscure or marginal characters. The same could be said of Charles Soule and Chip Zdarsky.

    But Marvel also has a lot of folks who like the Jemas-era approach, where the characters they use most are more like flexible IP and minor characters are either jokes or just don;’t count. These writers make lot of hasty retcons, sometimes unwitting ones, to make the next big story or reboot work, or to make it movie-audience- friendly. (Say, where are those folks drawn in by the movies?)

    And this has led to some real tangles and wild swings in characterization and character history across titles and runs.

    I’d say the big shift at both companies is that there’s no core editorial drive for continuity, even as there are (mostly Marvel) writers who work hard to keep up the idea of a consistent “shared universe.”

  30. Omar Karindu says:

    I’ll add that, for me, the bigger problem is the degree to which both companies just sort of find the big character IPs that are working, and then put that character concept everywhere or try whatever Big Wacky New Gimmick with them they can think of as the basis for new title launches or event storylines.

    Who hasn’t been an Avenger, a Justice Leaguer, or a Phoenix host at this point? How many different characters have called themselves Wolverine, Spider-Person, or Superman in the last ten years, often all teaming up in sprawling cross-title tales?

    When they’re bringing in alternate universe Gwen Stacies, giving Lex Luthor the S-shield or putting him in the Justice League until the next editorial shift comes along, and running series literally called Wolverines, it’s a telling indictment of the Big Two and a recipe for a confusing mess for anyone who reads more than couple of years in a row.

    And Marvel’s concept for the X-Men has been “virtually every extant mutant except Whirlwind is united with the rest all in one place at once because the storyline is about attempts to exterminate them all” since at least the Matt Fraction era.

    My sense is that editorial sees the major character costumes and names as the only sure launch strategy in a saturated and shrinking market, and creators can take providing a new character creation to corporate IP if the character was essentially subsumed by the trademark from day one.

  31. ASV says:

    During the pandemic I’ve been reading all sorts of old stuff, and one of the most odd things is the way characters in the 70s and 80s didn’t know each other yet and mostly didn’t interact. Like, Moon Knight spun out of an existing series but in his own book in the 80s he’s totally on his own. Chris Claremont bounces a few characters around the books he’s writing around the beginning of the decade (X-Men, Iron Fist, Spider-Woman), but that’s basically it for those. It reminded me that Spider-Man being a “reserve” Avenger was a minor plot point in one of the first arcs I ever read, and it was clear in the story that the Avengers were pretty much separate from everybody that had their own series (except for the 1963-era members). Now everyone knows everyone, knows everything *about* everyone, and they’re all good pals.

  32. Mark Coale says:

    As someone who started reading Marvel and DC in the 70s, I certainly prefer the classic approach than the modern one. And I never had any issues with continuity or such, the things editors would say when they felt the need to reboot stuff.
    I largely gave up on DC when new 52 started and since then, prefer to only read new stuff that is either mostly self-contained (fraction/lieber Jimmy Olsen, Rucka Kois) or stuff way off the grid, like Scooby-Doo Team Up, arguably DC’s best book in decades.

  33. Josie says:

    “Why Superman continually needs to be “fixed” is beyond me”

    Because his books don’t sell. If nobody is buying the books, the character isn’t “working.” What other measure is there?

  34. Josie says:

    “I kinda enjoy the current state of DC. They seem to have kind of… given up on continuity?”

    Honestly, I think this approach started with Snyder’s first Metal series. I was confused as to why all the ancient characters suddenly knew each other, who this version of Kendra Saunders and Dr. Fate were, why there was a baby Darkseid (that, at least, was explained in Geoff Johns’s Justice League, which I hadn’t caught up on at the time), what this version of the Challengers and Challenger Mountain was, etc.

    And that take has carried over into basically all DC properties.

    This isn’t necessarily a bad thing or invalid, but if a writer is going to use a very particular take on a known character, they need to put in a little effort to properly introduce those characters each time.

    What didn’t work for me with Metal is that the character guest stars were treated as surprising plot points in themselves, but just about all of them fell flat for me, because I didn’t know why I was supposed to care about these specific incarnations of these characters.

  35. Thom H. says:

    “Because his books don’t sell. If nobody is buying the books, the character isn’t “working.” What other measure is there?”

    That seems like a chicken-or-egg problem to me. If DC puts just a little effort into continuity-heavy Superman, then they sometimes end up with a perennial hit a la All-Star Superman. And if they turn him into “Batman with laser eyes” or constantly replace him with other characters, then his books don’t sell.

    It can’t be that difficult to find high-quality writers/artists who want to do something big and fun and wild with Superman. But DC editorial is stuck in an endless cycle of trying to reinvent him as something else because that worked once back in the ’80s.

  36. Josie says:

    I don’t know that DC has ever “reinvented” Superman. They’ve told stories with him, some of which altered the status quo . . . the same as every single other franchise superhero character.

    John Byrne didn’t “reinvent” Superman. It was the same character with a simpler backstory.

    The New 52 didn’t “reinvent” Superman. It was the same character with a dumb costume.

    I don’t know what it means to “put effort into” a fictional character. Does that mean more convoluted stories? More panels per page? More realistic art? More continuity references?

    Complain all you want with certain takes on the character, but pretending like creating “good stories” simply requires “putting in effort” is reductive nonsense.

  37. Mark Coale says:

    Arguably electric Suoerman altered his powers, but everyone knew it was a short term gimmick, more in like with his long hair or making him immune to Kryptonite.

  38. Thom H. says:

    Thank you, I will complain all I want. I appreciate the support. 🙂

    To clarify: I think it’s difficult to tell a good story about Superman and his long history without overly relying on that history. I imagine it takes more conscious thought and creativity than simply discarding large chunks of his continuity or personality. Or wholesale replacing him with someone else. That’s what I mean by “putting in effort.”

    And whether we can agree on the word that perfectly describes what John Byrne did or not, he definitely fundamentally changed the character of Superman when he took over. I don’t hold it against the man – that’s what he was hired to do, and he did it well. Superman was largely the same character in outline, but the very type of stories you could tell with him were different during that era.

  39. Josie says:

    “the very type of stories you could tell with him were different during that era.”

    Is it that they type of stories you COULD tell were different, or the types of stories they DID tell were different? Different from what? Couldn’t you say the same thing about Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow, which was told before the reboot?

    To be clear, I support complaining when a comic is crap. I support complaining when a company keeps misfiring on a particular property that they have gotten right briefly and recently. For example, I can’t understand why DC can’t maintain a Shazam comic when the movie presented a viable approach to the character.

    But I also don’t pretend to know how to successfully sell a Shazam comic to a wide audience.

  40. Josie says:

    To be fair, I am frequently shocked at the kinds of things that do sell well. I don’t know why anyone buys any Venom comics. I don’t know why a solo Wolverine comic does and has sold as well as it does and has.

    And conversely, while I wasn’t in love with Immortal Hulk, I could appreciate the things it did well and did differently, and was shocked that sales actually reflected this deliberate change in tone and approach. Given that the Hulk is almost never a big seller, and that horror comics are largely all failures, it seemed to be like a recipe for disaster.

  41. Luis Dantas says:

    DC and to a surprisingly lesser extent Marvel now treat their comics divisions as free range farms for marketable IPs. In DC’s case, there seems to be an active desire to give it as much attention, money and prestige as necessary to fulfill that role and not a cent more. The publisher has really suffered from a combination of too many layers of ownership and decision and lack of people with both authority and respect for the characters and continuity. The same can probably be said about Marvel, but not nearly to the same degree.

    To be sure, there is no way either company would fail to face major challenges in the transition from the 1980s to the current day. Add the increasing competition from digital media (including their own) to the cultural changes, the tension between commercial and creative interests and the mixed legacy of decades of continuity of ever unclear relevance and you will end up with comics divisions that have a significant difficulty deciding what goals to pursue. Dealing with the higher-ups in their companies, which have largely decided that the comics are something of an no longer relevant legacy product, can make things even more difficult.

    All things considered, Marvel has been managed very well recently. It is very market-oriented, but it has struck a respectable balance between conflicting interests. The movie continuity is the money-maker and will take elements from the comics without being restricted by those. Disney Plus and other non-comics products are a secondary but significant source of income and visibility. Comics currently have a soft, malleable approach towards continuity, character story and the shared universe. With few exceptions nearly every published story “happened” in some way, but details only matter for a limited time of about two to five years. All current Marvel comics are in effect expressions of successive “events”, which have become so necessary and constant that they usually are not labelled or even named anymore.

    Interestingly, the current approach to event spill-over is now much more cautious than it used to be in the 1990s. Back in late 1993 (#71) Excalibur was a bit directionless and therefore came back from the Fatal Attractions event explicitly redefining itself as a satellite X-Men book and remained so for some 54 issues more. Currently things are more fluid, a bit more contained, and marketed in a much more organic way. The current “Death of Doctor Strange” event has been impressed me on that regard. The tie-ins are in reality spotlights into the featured characters and teams, gentle invitations to follow their ongoings with hardly any relevance to the main plot or baggage from it. Meanwhile the main series tells its own story, requires no particular awareness of other stories, and is fairly well written and drawn while also acknowledging the wider Marvel Universe.

  42. Luis Dantas says:

    DC, by contrast, has been in deep trouble for nearly a decade now. A big part of it is lack of interest in its own characters. Giving the 300 guy creative control of what was supposed to be a series of movies starring Superman and Batman was a very serious mistake.

    Superman himself is essentially lost now. The character has no clear continuity to speak of, has been reinvented without care far too many times, and is now more notable for how difficult it is to know who he is supposed to be than for any remaining viability.

    Other characters do not fare all that much better, truth be told. Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, even Batman himself are now brands as opposed to characters. DC is reduced to making successive, very visible events to lampshade what should be expected of the editorial line for the next few years. It has, indeed, basically given up on continuity.

  43. Krzysiek Ceran says:

    On the other hand DC maintains a constant output of, let’s call it, prestige mini- or maxiseries – or at least they aim for them to be prestigious. Some of them are missess, but every now and then they have a critical hit (I have no idea how they fare commercially) – which is a field Marvel seems to have no interest in at all.

    The way I see it Marvel chanced onto Tom King’s ‘Vision’ and didn’t care about the splash it made. It just doesn’t publish similar books. Meanwhile DC churns them out constantly – they have Tom King writing them one after another now, and he’s not the only one.

    Obviously, Marvel publishes miniseries, but I mean specifically books with a clear authorial intent, basically self-contained stories or even clearly marketed as elseworlds. Tom King’s output, The Other History of the DC Universe, the just published Wonder Woman: Historia: The Amazons…

    Meanwhile from Marvel, the only thing that comes to mind that’s remotely similar (strong authorial style, though not as self-contained a story) is Daniel Warren Johnson’s Beta Ray Bill.

  44. Josie says:

    “On the other hand DC maintains a constant output of, let’s call it, prestige mini- or maxiseries – or at least they aim for them to be prestigious. Some of them are missess, but every now and then they have a critical hit (I have no idea how they fare commercially) – which is a field Marvel seems to have no interest in at all.”

    Yes! I remember when they announced the Black Label sometime around . . . I want to say 2018? In any case, it seems to be the one primary holdover from the Didio days. And while most of them don’t interest me, there is a deliberate effort to tell self-contained stories with interesting creative teams, which is a far cry from the ongoings, which seem determined to ship too often to maintain a stable singular creative team.

    And these 12-issue Tom King maxiseries? Sure! I don’t always love Tom King, but give him an obscure character outside of continuity with a clear beginning and end, and I’ll be there for the collection.

    The Vision series is a great example. It is seriously one of the only such examples at Marvel I can think of.

  45. Krzysiek Ceran says:

    Having thought about it, I guess X-Men: Grand Design and the Spider-Man/Fantastic Four: Life Story minis would count as well…

  46. Thom H. says:

    “Is it that they type of stories you COULD tell were different, or the types of stories they DID tell were different?”

    One leads to the other. When you change Superman’s history and powers, you change the types of adventures he can go on. For example:

    No more stories of “Superman as a boy” because he didn’t have his powers until he was an adult. No more traveling through time because he couldn’t fly fast enough to get through the time barrier. No more traveling to distant planets because he couldn’t hold his breath in space long enough. No more stories in Kandor because he was the only survivor of Krypton.

    The scope of the book radically shifted because Superman’s abilities were very different than what they had been before the reboot.

    “Different from what?”

    Different from the stories told about Superman previously. And, more importantly, different from the types of stories that were previously available *to tell* about Superman. For my money, removing time travel, space travel, etc., from the book strips it of a lot of the wonder that makes it special.

    “Couldn’t you say the same thing about Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow, which was told before the reboot?”

    If you mean that Moore’s story severely limited the kinds of stories you could tell about Superman once it was over, then yes. But it was specifically the last story told with that version of the character, so Moore could change whatever he wanted and it didn’t matter. The decision had already been made to reboot the series. It’s actually an amazing Superman story *because* it’s still set in a world where wacky stuff happens on a regular basis: Jimmy Olsen becoming Elastic Lad, the Legion of Super-villains arriving from the future because they saw something in the “historical records,” etc.

    “But I also don’t pretend to know how to successfully sell a Shazam comic to a wide audience.”

    My original point is this: every time DC strips away parts of Superman’s continuity, which they have done more than once through their use of line-wide reboots, they always eventually reverse their decision and put Superman and his supporting cast back the way they were (or some semblance of how they were).

    That suggests to me that there is fan and creator interest in a continuity-heavy version of Superman. So maybe DC should lean into that instead of trying to “fix” the character all the time and/or dropping him into plots that belong to other characters.

    I think telling stories about Superman that can only be told about Superman would really work for DC. It certainly seemed to work when they released All-Star Superman. Maybe that was just the “prestige mini-series” effect that was discussed above.

    But I certainly think injecting some wonder back into the character would attract some older readers (including me) back to the book. If that makes me a know-it-all, then send me to internet jail. I’m certainly not under the impression that anyone is taking my opinions so seriously that I’m going to change the course of publishing history. Unless someone from DC is reading this, in which case I’m happy to consult.

  47. Omar Karindu says:

    No more stories of “Superman as a boy” because he didn’t have his powers until he was an adult. No more traveling through time because he couldn’t fly fast enough to get through the time barrier. No more traveling to distant planets because he couldn’t hold his breath in space long enough. No more stories in Kandor because he was the only survivor of Krypton.

    And the biggest and most lasting of Byrne’s changes: “Superman” is an identity used by a good-hearted, basically human-in-perspective Clark Kent, rather than Clark Kent being a put-on by a not-quite-human-personality guy who called himself “Superman” in his thought balloons.

    Even as the Supergirls and Superdogs, the Silver Age-y Krytpon and Brainiac, and other elements have been brought back, the basic personality of Superman is now much more like, say, a non-nationlistic Steve Rogers: a very good-hearted, but ultimately “everyday” kind of person.

    Pre-Crisis (well, pre-1986) Superman had a very different personality, playing at extreme meekness and weakness as Clark Kent, and, as Superman, exhibiting a degree of pride in his abilities and intelligence.

    And he was usually portrayed as having a kind of comic-book super-intelligence, as well as a sometimes pitying, always paternalistic attitude towards his supporting cast, even including Lois Lane and Perry White. He wasn’t the cynical, humanity-mocking character that the villain of Kill Bill claims, but he definitely wasn’t the post-Byrne Clark Kent, genuinely humble, “doing-the-best-he-can, all-American nice guy, either.

    It’s hard to imagine any post-Byrne iteration of Superman behaving that way. I will note that Byrne did write Superman as quite “clever” and able to think through, say, the logic of some bit of super-science. Byrne’s Superman still tended to outwit his villains more often than outmuscling them.

    Pretty much every post-Byrne writer has played that element down, usually to let Luthor and other villains be master schemers, so that Superman reacts to rather than outwitting from the start in Silver and Bronze Age fashion. In team-up stories, this also creates a heightened contrast with Batman.

    I’d argue that the net effect is shifting the concept of Superman as “the greatest superhero” has shifted from Superman being the most impossibly competent and powerful hero to Superman being the most impossibly noble and altruistic hero.

  48. Mark coale says:

    And Batman is the opposite now.

    Used to be Bruce dressed as Batman. Now, Bruce wayne is a persona worn by grim and gritty driven Batman.

  49. Josie says:

    I don’t have a lot of familiarity with Silver Age DC, but I have been reading through 1940s Batman, and Bruce Wayne is almost a non-entity. There’s no mansion, no Wayne enterprises or any sort of productive use of his wealth or influence. He literally just shows up somewhere as Bruce Wayne, observes a crime or something shady, and changes into Batman.

    As for writers eventually referencing old continuity . . . I mean, this happens with literally every comic book property. This is nothing unique to Superman. Plus it’s such a flimsy argument. It’s like saying, they keep bringing Spider-man’s black costume back, so there must be something intrinsically worthwhile about it. Oh wait, but then they keep bringing back the classic threads, so there must be something costume back, so there must be something intrinsically worthwhile about THAT. And on and on and on ad nauseum. It’s just confirmation bias to see something you like being referenced again in a new story. It doesn’t say anything about the value of the thing being referenced.

  50. Thom H. says:

    Not sure why you’re so bothered by my opinions in particular, but I give up. I’ll save my flimsy, reductive nonsense for someone who wants to hear it. Happy holidays!

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