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.
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.