X-Men

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Thad
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Re: X-Men

Postby Thad » Sat Dec 18, 2021 12:20 am

Friday wrote:
It's more complicated than that, as X-Men continuity always is.

In the comics, the Sentinels showed up after Magneto. Magneto first appears in X-Men #1, the Sentinels in #14.


Wow, huh. My knowledge of X-Men comes -almost- entirely from the cartoon, so it's interesting to learn that Magneto wasn't originally what I think he is.


Yeah, the original Magneto was more of a straight-up supervillain. Pretty similar to Doctor Doom. And the Nazi imagery wasn't exactly subtle.

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Claremont made him a much more complex character, and added the Holocaust survivor backstory. I believe he explained away Magneto's earlier characterization as the result of some sort of mind-wipe or something.

Claremont's Magneto eventually became one of the good guys, and even led the X-Men for awhile, though he was evil again by X-Men #1 in 1990, which is kinda the main reference point for the '92 cartoon series.

Mongrel wrote:
Büge wrote:It seems remarkably quaint and naïve to think that a public debate would do anything but foment more anti-mutant sentiment.


I actually can't recall if that's exactly what happened in the original Kirby/Lee run or not. Thad?


More specifically, the Sentinel arc (X-Men #14-#16) was written and laid-out by Kirby and finished by Werner Roth (under the pen name Jay Gavin, which he used because he was also working for DC and didn't want them to know he was working for their competition), with dialogue by Stan Lee. Kirby had backed off doing the finishes and switched to just the layouts in #12 (penciled by Alex Toth and maybe my favorite issue); Toth just finished that one issue, after which Roth took over as the regular penciler with #13. Kirby's final issue was #17, and Lee's was #18; Roy Thomas took over as writer with #19.

At any rate, to answer your question about how the Sentinel arc plays out:

During the televised debate, Trask tries to demonstrate how safe and non-threatening the Sentinels are, whereupon they zap him, kidnap him, and take him back to Master Mold to show them the secret of how to make more Sentinels. They go all evil-robot and announce that they're going to conquer man and take over the world. The X-Men show up to save the day; Trask, witnessing their selfless heroism, realizes that he was wrong about mutants and he's made a terrible mistake. He turns against the Sentinels and sacrifices himself to help the X-Men defeat them.

Incidentally, in case anyone didn't notice, "Trask" is an anagram of "Stark"; I assume the idea there is that he's like an evil opposite tech genius/roboticist.

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Re: X-Men

Postby Thad » Sat Dec 18, 2021 12:43 am

Adding: a lot of Kirby villains were Hitler figures -- starting before the US even joined the war, of course; after all, he kicked off Captain America with that cover where he punches Hitler right in the jaw. But he didn't stop after the war was over; he kept on writing Hitler figures as villains for the rest of his career. I suspect it was cathartic for him, as both a Jew and a WWII vet, to get to draw people punching out Hitlers over and over.

I love this anecdote by Stan Sakai (creator of Usagi Yojimbo):

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Friday wrote:I love how goofy/awesome Sentinels are, while still representing the police.


I think some of Kirby's best work on X-Men came once he had one foot out the door.

Like I mentioned in the previous post, he quit doing full pencils in issue #12. That's the issue that introduces the Juggernaut and I fucking love it; it's this wonderfully constructed monster movie homage, with the X-Men setting up all these traps to keep Juggernaut from getting into the mansion and he just slowly fights his way through them, one by one. And in classic monster-movie tradition, you only see him in silhouette until he reveals himself in the last panel -- cliffhanger!

And then after the Juggernaut two-parter, Kirby's last full arc is a three-parter (which was a really long story arc back in those days, when the norm was still done-in-one stories) that introduces the Sentinels. And yeah, I love that they're goofy-ass '50s sci-fi robots, and their leader is a giant robot whose power is to birth smaller giant robots. I don't know if that's the most Jack Kirby thing ever, but it's in the running.

But it's also the strongest statement the series had yet made about its antiracist theme. The mutants-as-Jews metaphor had been part of the series' subtext from the beginning. It wasn't as overt to start with; as I mentioned upthread, I think that's because Lee didn't really get what Kirby was going for at first. By issue #4 you had the Scarlet Witch as the target of a literal witch hunt, but even that wasn't quite as overt as that newspaper sequence in #14. The whole "there's a secret cabal of people who look like us but aren't like us, and they want to take over the world and enslave us" metaphor ain't exactly subtle.

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Re: X-Men

Postby Thad » Sat Dec 18, 2021 1:06 am

Some more stray thoughts on Magneto's versatility and the many different ways he's been depicted over the years:

I quite liked how Grant Morrison used him in New X-Men.

In the beginning of the run, Genosha gets nuked; Magneto apparently dies.

After that, edgy kids start wearing "Magneto was right" T-shirts, in the style of the Che Guevara shirt.

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(art by Frank Quitely)

In death, he becomes a revolutionary symbol for mutant rights.

Of course it turns out he's not really dead. He comes back and tries to take over the world, but Grant Morrison's got a fetish for going back to early depictions of characters, so he treats Magneto more like the crazy supervillain he started out as than the complex, nuanced survivor-activist Claremont made him.

Morrison's Magneto is on drugs; he's taking something to enhance his powers, but it turns him into an addled lunatic. There's a scene where he's shouting proclamations from a rooftop and then he's like "Toad, why isn't anybody responding to me?" and Toad's like "uh sir you're on a rooftop, they can't hear you down there."

The point of all this is the irony that Magneto was more effective when he was dead. As a martyr, as a symbol, he grew in stature; people saw him through rose-tinted glasses. Once he comes back, they see him for the petty despot that he is.

That particular take made a lot of people very angry and I think it was like two months before some other writer retconned it away as "just kidding that wasn't really Magneto it was a crazy guy who thought he was Magneto." Personally I loved it, but I can see how people who are invested in Magneto as a complex and sympathetic character would have been pissed off about it.

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Re: X-Men

Postby Mongrel » Sat Dec 18, 2021 1:43 am

Thad wrote:
Mongrel wrote:
Büge wrote:It seems remarkably quaint and naïve to think that a public debate would do anything but foment more anti-mutant sentiment.


I actually can't recall if that's exactly what happened in the original Kirby/Lee run or not. Thad?


More specifically, the Sentinel arc (X-Men #14-#16) was written and laid-out by Kirby and finished by Werner Roth (under the pen name Jay Gavin, which he used because he was also working for DC and didn't want them to know he was working for their competition), with dialogue by Stan Lee. Kirby had backed off doing the finishes and switched to just the layouts in #12 (penciled by Alex Toth and maybe my favorite issue); Toth just finished that one issue, after which Roth took over as the regular penciler with #13. Kirby's final issue was #17, and Lee's was #18; Roy Thomas took over as writer with #19.

At any rate, to answer your question about how the Sentinel arc plays out:

During the televised debate, Trask tries to demonstrate how safe and non-threatening the Sentinels are, whereupon they zap him, kidnap him, and take him back to Master Mold to show them the secret of how to make more Sentinels. They go all evil-robot and announce that they're going to conquer man and take over the world. The X-Men show up to save the day; Trask, witnessing their selfless heroism, realizes that he was wrong about mutants and he's made a terrible mistake. He turns against the Sentinels and sacrifices himself to help the X-Men defeat them.

Incidentally, in case anyone didn't notice, "Trask" is an anagram of "Stark"; I assume the idea there is that he's like an evil opposite tech genius/roboticist.

Huh, that's the version of the story I know, but thought that was actually a later revision and not the way the original played out!
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Re: X-Men

Postby Büge » Sat Dec 18, 2021 8:51 am

Friday wrote:I love how goofy/awesome Sentinels are, while still representing the police.




My favourite moment is at 0:58.

Thad wrote:Yeah, the original Magneto was more of a straight-up supervillain. Pretty similar to Doctor Doom. And the Nazi imagery wasn't exactly subtle.


That puts this moment from Captain America #367 (Acts of Vengeance) in a new light. I presume Mark Gruenwald wrote this dialogue with an eye towards that characterization?

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Re: X-Men

Postby Niku » Sat Dec 18, 2021 12:08 pm

Friday wrote:I love how goofy/awesome Sentinels are, while still representing the police.


i wish police came out of a giant polices tummy
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Re: X-Men

Postby Thad » Mon Dec 20, 2021 4:50 pm

I watched the first couple episodes of Wolverine and the X-Men and it seems pretty good, if a little muddled (so wait, the Mutant Response Division is rounding up unregistered mutants, but also Senator Kelly is trying to get the Mutant Registration Act passed?).

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Re: X-Men

Postby IGNORE ME » Mon Dec 20, 2021 6:12 pm

You think it's unrealistic to start enforcing a law before it's actually passed?

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Re: X-Men

Postby Thad » Mon Dec 20, 2021 6:29 pm

For an existing law enforcement agency? No.

For a brand new federal bureaucracy to spring up to enforce a law that hasn't been passed to, presumably, establish and fund said organization? That raises a few questions, yeah. Giant robot scorpions ain't cheap.

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Re: X-Men

Postby Thad » Tue Dec 21, 2021 12:57 am

And wouldn't all mutants be unregistered if the Mutant Registration Act hasn't passed? Why would you specify "unregistered mutant" if there's no such thing as a registered mutant? I don't go around calling my earlobes "unregistered earlobes".

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Re: X-Men

Postby nosimpleway » Tue Dec 21, 2021 1:26 pm

I took a bunch of martial arts lessons and had to register my earlobes as deadly weapons

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Re: X-Men

Postby Thad » Wed Dec 22, 2021 5:17 pm

"A man with metal bones should have more sense than to break into my house."

Right? Right? Dammit X-Men, there are like 700 of you. And only like half of them have metal arms, legs, skeletons, or skin. If you're going to fight the guy with magnet powers again, send the other ones!

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Re: X-Men

Postby Büge » Wed Dec 22, 2021 9:03 pm

Thad wrote:Right? Right? Dammit X-Men, there are like 700 of you. And only like half of them have metal arms, legs, skeletons, or skin. If you're going to fight the guy with magnet powers again, send the other ones!


*Marrow shakes her head in disbelief*
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Re: X-Men

Postby Thad » Thu Dec 23, 2021 10:54 am

I'm joking, kind of. I stand by my "stop sending metal X-Men to fight Magneto" comment as a general rule, but in the episode in question it actually makes sense from a character perspective, because this is an episode where Wolverine fucks up. The title could be "the international stealth mission that could have been a phone call."

Wolverine finds out Xavier is in Genosha, immediately jumps to the conclusion that not only is Magneto holding him prisoner but he was also responsible for the explosion that destroyed the mansion when Xavier disappeared, even though Beast explains to him with copious technobabble that not only is there no evidence of that but it really doesn't make sense because something something whoever did it definitely didn't use magnetic powers.

So Wolverine launches a mission to Genosha that they are so ill-prepared for that Beast and Forge are actually fixing the X-Jet as it's flying across the ocean. He and the X-Men break into the presidential palace, Magneto catches them and beats seven shades of shit out of them, and then when they tell him they're looking for Xavier he goes all James Earl Jones in Sandlot and asks them why they didn't just ring the damn bell, he'd have gotten their cueball for them.

Wolverine is a terrible leader, is what I'm saying.

And I kind of love that? When I first heard about this show, right from the title, I was like "That's stupid." It's clearly a marketing-driven decision; Wolverine gets his name in the title because he's the most popular character in the franchise, but his being a leader makes no sense.

And all that's true, but the show's smart enough to acknowledge and lean into that. Wolverine is a loner, not a leader; he's emotional, he has poor impulse control, and he doesn't strategize. The show acknowledges all that. It gives us a Wolverine who's clearly not the ideal pick to lead the team, but who ends up in charge kinda by default.

Cyclops has had a breakdown; Wolverine finds him living in a seedy brownstone. This is a children's cartoon so they don't say outright that he's got a drinking problem, but look at this motherfucker:
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This is a man who buys Jack in bulk at Costco.

Beast's not fit to lead because he's too busy staring at test tubes all day. Warren is running his own game -- he's secretly using his trust fund money to support pro-mutant causes, but he knows if he ever openly supported mutant rights, his father would cut him off and he'd lose the ability to use his wealth to do good. Emma Frost was a supervillain until like five minutes ago. Kitty and Bobby are teenagers. Forge is Tom Green for some reason.
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Rogue has gone whatsitcalled. You know when someone's a member of an organization that's got rules but then stops obeying them? What's the word for that? "Go" something. Tip of my tongue.

Nightcrawler and Storm...actually, where the hell are Nightcrawler and Storm? They're in the logo
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so obviously they're going to rejoin the team eventually, but I'm three episodes in and they haven't shown up since the first five minutes of the first one. Why isn't one of them the leader? Either one would be way better at it than Wolverine. They've both led teams in the comics.

The show's been good enough up to this point that I expect there'll be a reason. One of the episode titles is "X-Calibre" so maybe Nightcrawler has been out there leading his own team.

Anyway, all that to say, the show's done a pretty good job acknowledging exactly what's wrong with its premise; it's about how Wolverine is definitely not the ideal choice for leadership but he's doing his best to step up because somebody has to. I'm interested in seeing how his arc shapes up over the course of the show's one season.

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Re: X-Men

Postby Thad » Thu Dec 23, 2021 4:44 pm

Yep, episode 4 does a satisfactory job of answering the question of why Storm isn't the leader; she comes down with a bad case of Possessed by the Shadow King and the X-Men narrowly prevent her from killing every single person in Africa. I can see how that'd throw somebody off her game.

Also, Cyclops and Wolverine fight a hailstorm and I love it so much.

I also like that every time you see Cyclops out of costume he's got 5 o'clock shadow but when he's in costume it's gone. I like the idea that he only bothers to clean himself up when he's about to suit up; there's something so very Cyclops about that.

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Re: X-Men

Postby Thad » Tue Dec 28, 2021 5:07 pm

In Gambit's first appearance on Wolverine and the X-Men, he steals a suppression collar and hands it to the bad guys.

Wolverine says "You sold out your kind for a little bit of money?"

Gambit responds, "Absolument non! I sold out my kind for a large amount of money."

I'm not sure it's the single most Gambit moment of all time, but only because he's not creeping on any women while he says it.

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Re: X-Men

Postby Friday » Tue Dec 28, 2021 8:00 pm

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Re: X-Men

Postby Thad » Thu Dec 30, 2021 6:27 pm

I'm about 10 issues deep into the Thomas/Roth run on the comics. It's kinda fascinating to me that the last thing Stan Lee does on the way out is introduce the Mimic, a character who has the power to copy mutants' powers, and then Roy Thomas takes over the next month. I wonder if that's a funny coincidence or a deliberate, sly comment on Roy himself -- because mimicry is very much the primary skill he shows when he takes over X-Men. He does an impeccable impression of Stan Lee; about the only tell that Lee isn't writing the book anymore is that Beast's Shakespeare quotes stop being wrong.

Marvel -- under Thomas as EiC -- would do some wildly creative and experimental work in the '70s, but in the mid-'60s they had a formula and by God they were going to stick to it. Thomas would be instrumental in changing things up in the decade that followed, but Goodman and Lee were extremely risk-averse when he first came on-board, and his remit seems to have very much been "don't rock the boat, make it sound exactly like Stan Lee."

I recently read a biography of Marie Severin, and there's an interview in there with Mark Evanier, where he's talking about how, as good as she was on books like Hulk and Kull, she really should have been on humor books -- but that just wasn't what Marvel did. He says something along the lines of "At Marvel in the '60s, Charles Addams could have walked in the door and asked for a job and they'd have said 'Sure, can you ink like Dick Ayers?'"

And that's kinda where Werner Roth is; he's one of many guys at Marvel at the time who was a good artist but just not suited to superhero books, which were the only damn thing Marvel would publish at the time. (Don Heck, I think, got the rawest deal on that score; he was a great artist on monster and romance books, but he got this totally undeserved reputation as a no-talent hack because they kept putting him on books like Iron Man and Avengers and telling him to draw like Kirby.)

The most notable thing in the Thomas/Roth run so far is that they didn't just bring the Mimic back a few issues later, they made him a central character. And I like him; he's a good, classic Marvel-style Hero with Problems, in that he's a selfish jerk who's in it for himself but he's got this spark of potential to be something better. That's a good hook.

The other big change is having Jean's parents withdraw her from the Xavier School and send her to college -- because, after all, the X-Men graduated a few issues earlier. I think there's a germ of a good idea in there, but the execution is kind of all over the place. On the one hand, it gives Jean more opportunities to grow as an individual character; on the other, it largely sidelines her as part of the team dynamic. (Except when it doesn't. Some issues she shows up just in time to be part of a mission, some issues she's just off at college and never suits up.) And ten issues or so in it seems pretty clear that Thomas doesn't really know where he's going with it.

It also raises another question: where the fuck are everyone else's parents? It makes sense that Jean's parents would send her off to college once she graduates. But, like...doesn't anybody else have parents? We know Warren does; we've seen them. Where are they, and why aren't they looking to put him into some fancy-pants Ivy League school? You know a dude with a name like "Warren Worthington III" is a legacy.

As for the rest of the team, I don't think anybody else's parents have even been mentioned yet? They haven't gotten to the "Scott's an orphan" stuff yet (and there was ample opportunity when the X-Men saved a bunch of kids from a burning orphanage a few issues back). Let alone the "actually Scott's father is alive but he's a space pirate" stuff; that's still a long way out. No word on Hank or Bobby's parents, either, as far as I can recall. You could maybe handwave that Hank and Scott are legal adults and can make their own decisions about where they're going to school; the series hasn't actually given them specific ages, just said that they're teenagers. But Bobby's definitely a minor (and I believe the only character who's been given a specific age; an earlier issue said he's 16). Where are his parents? Why's he still at Xavier's? Why is Jean the only character who has parents who think she should stop living at her high school now that she's graduated?

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Re: X-Men

Postby Thad » Tue Jan 04, 2022 1:16 pm

Thad wrote:okay, I know [season 4 finale "Beyond Good and Evil"] was intended to be the finale when it was written, but had the surprise season 5 pickup happened by the time it was completed? Because otherwise, ending it on Cable in his time ship announcing he's going home to see his son is fucking weird. Like, I'm no TV writer, but it seems like your final scene should include at least one of the main characters from the show.

Per Previously On X-Men, yes, they learned the show had been picked up for another season during the scripting phase and had to substantially rewrite the ending of "Beyond Good and Evil".

The original ending would have had Xavier and Jubilee leaving the team to start a new school (hinting at Generation X), Scott and Jean getting married and leaving to start a family, Storm either leaving or dying, and Archangel, Psylocke, Bishop, and Shard joining the team. (There was never any plan to continue the series with that new core cast; the idea was that the changing of the guard would be the end of the series.)

So while "Beyond Good and Evil" was originally intended as the series finale, and it ends with Cable in his timeship, Cable in his timeship was never intended to be the last scene in the series; the ending did indeed get rewritten once they found out they had another season coming.

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Re: X-Men

Postby Thad » Wed Jan 05, 2022 12:26 pm

Thad wrote:So that's it for now. Until 2023. Guess we'll see what they do with the status quo the series ended on -- is Magneto going to stick around and join the team? Is he going to go back to Genosha and become president of a nation of mutants? Both those storylines have happened at one time or another in the comics. I think Magneto as ruler of Genosha is a way more compelling story than Magneto as one of the X-Men (and one of my favorite Marvel storylines of all time involves international tensions between T'Challa, Namor, Doom, and Magneto as heads of their respective states), but we'll see what they decide to go with.

I think I'm changing my answer.

I still think Magneto as ruler of Genosha is a more compelling story than Magneto as leader of the X-Men, but Wolverine and the X-Men already did it. I'm sure the '92 team could find an interesting take on it, but I'd rather see them go in a direction we haven't seen an animated series do before. And that'd be Magneto as leader.

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