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In which Asher Elbein joins us to discuss the complicated intersections between Magneto, big feelings, and international politics.
X-PLAINED:
- Some complicated intersections between Magneto, big feelings, and international politics.
Check out links to some of what we discuss in this episode on our blog.
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(sigh) That went pretty much the way I expected. Looking forward to hearing how Cassandra Nova’s actions are actually resistance and decolonization.
Re: Magneto confronting his old self, Si Spurrier actually wrote a phenomenal short in the Utopia era where he does a form of that shortly after he joins Cyclops on Utopia. It’s in Nation X #1 , “The Ghost of Asteroid M.” It’s one of my favorite Magneto stories to this day.
There is actually one other example of Magneto confronting his old self directly (sort of), and it’s one of my favorite Magneto stories ever.
It’s an eight page short by Si Spurrier, Nation X vol. 1 # 1, “The Ghost of Asteroid M.” Takes place very shortly after Magneto joins Utopia, before he’s really trusted or integrated, where he takes one of the kid groups (the ones from New Mutants vol. 2) deeper into Utopia to check on some ghost sounds they keep hearing.
“Nothing grows old quite so fast as the future” still lives rent-free in my head.
I totally missed this one! I’ll have to give it a read — I like Spurrier’s work and that sounds great.
Mutant power ideas:
-shoots clothes out of eyes
-shoots trees out of eyes
This episode actually reminded me of a question I have been wondering about. I recently read the Alpha story from Defenders for the first time. Everyone knows about Magneto getting turned into a baby and all the consequences that came from that, but it turns out Mastermind, Blob and Vanisher ALSO got turned into babies! Does anyone know their re-aging ever got addressed or mentioned?
Yeah, I believe in Champions. Basically, Erik the Red’s actions accidentally worked on them too remotely
Okay…that makes more sense and this only popped up now for me. Ah well.
Excellent, thanks!
Not to my knowledge, but my head canon has been:
A. Basically the de-aging was temporary (Alpha didn’t realize that, but hey, he was relatively new!).
B. Magneto already ages slowly due to Marvel’s Version of Magnetism
B1. In the most generous reading of X-Men, the team formed in the late 90s due to the sliding timeline
B2. That would mean the O5 were fighting a man in his late 60s
C. Magnetism caused him to be stuck at that age and not re-age like the rest.
There’s 0 canon proof for this, but it’s how I sleep at night and don’t get kept up by this.
The sliding timescale makes this tough to apply broadly, but “Magneto and Xavier age slowly as part of their secondary mutation” is just a generally useful thing to establish for both of those guys moving forward. That way we need never again bring up the baby (except we’ll keep doing so, because it’s funny.)
Amazing episode! I’m actually sending it to one of my favorite professors from undergrad who teaches/writes about Jewish representation in media (and definitely will appreciate a lot of the arguments made here)
I’ve been mulling this episode over and one thing I find interesting is how differently I relate to Magneto as a gay man vs. as a Jewish man. (In full disclosure, I have a magneto tattoo…so I freakin’ love the character – but I notably only call it my “queer rage tattoo” and never a Jewish-aligned one) I think I recoil more when looking at him through lens you discuss (i.e., Magneto is often wrong) whereas I am much more in Lucille Bluth “Good for her” mode when looking at him via a queer lens. Like, literally before listening to this episode this morning posted a response to Shia LeBeouf saying he’s afraid of gays and it was “yes, you should be afraid of us” and an image of Ian McKellen saying “we ar the future, not them.”
And none of this is to challenge your very thoughtful essay and interview, but almost wonder where this disconnect comes. Perhaps it’s from the fact that queer people haven’t ever created a nation state, nor is that possibility super likely. Likewise, we can’t really see real world implications of Magneto from a queer rage perspective the way we can from that of being a Jewish Holocaust survivor. Perhaps it’s the fact that there’s always a little bit more irony there and that it’s more harkening back to a cultural tradition of embracing immoral characters (e.g., Divine in Pink Flamingos saying “Kill everyone now. Condone first degree murder. Advocate cannibalism”; Brandon and Philip of Rope becoming reclaimed as gay icons; etc). Granted, I think this also speaks more to the long-talked-about tradition on the show of picking and choosing what a character means to you and who they are, so that also helps.
Thanks for this! I don’t know if this always comes through in the essay and the episode, but I actually really love Magneto as a character, even when I don’t always like him. I personally like that he’s messy, difficult, and often wrong: I don’t think that can be dismissed, because the impulses that drive him, both righteous and otherwise, are very human impulses. “F*** off and die” in response to past oppression is the most human imaginable impulse. What makes Magneto so compelling to me, is his ability to actually carry that impulse out, which forces a real question about what that power actually means. Claremont making the decision to tie Magneto to the Holocaust gave the character a lot of weight, and also meant you were never going to be able to escape those kinds of questions.
I think reading Magneto primarily through a queer lens absolutely does change the reading of the character in a lot of ways, and for a lot of the reasons you describe: the relationship of queerness to state power is just profoundly different, and the idea of Magneto as the thumb in the eye to that state has a lot of juice. When Magneto *becomes* the state, however, I think you have to ask somewhat harder questions about what it means to have a state built around Magneto’s stated beliefs, and a lot of Magneto stories are, openly or not, about probing what that means. So I think there are multiple layers to the character, and multiple threads you can pull. As a pretty straight Jewish guy, I will happily confess that I didn’t touch on the queer readings of Magneto as much just because, to me — even though I personally think of him as queer, because *come on* — it doesn’t resonate to me in the same way the Jewish connection does. But there’s a ton of value in being able to come at these characters from different directions, and it’s one reason I love hearing other people’s readings.
Having just finished a re-read of New X-Men, I’m glad to hear discussion of Morrison’s take on Magneto. Upon first read in the early 00’s it didn’t bother me – in fact I found it faintly amusing as “Magneto taken to the logical extreme” – but at the time I also had not read Claremont’s entire run and gotten the full view of the character up to this point. Having done that since (and even having read Eve of Destruction prior), I found “Planet X” to be a pretty horrific character assassination, so yeah I guess I’m willing to accept it as an “exorcism of Magneto” that we never have to deal with again.
(This does make me wonder, do the people of 616 Earth ALSO know that wasn’t the ‘real’ Magneto? I always feel like they should do a DAMAGE CONTROL: PUBLIC RELATIONS miniseries to answer this very important question.)
We’re a long way away, but it’s worth pointing out that “Planet X” can’t be character assassination if Magneto is explicitly, textually under someone else’s control…
Honestly, the fact that the entire population of Earth 616 isn’t in constant ongoing trauma therapy counselling probably explains a LOT about their reactions to mutants.
Between; the alien invasions (The Kree, the Skrulls, the Phalanx, the Klyntar); the global scale mind control (Emperor Doom); the “Half the universe died! WHOOPS they’re back!” scenarios (Infinity whatever); Manhattan turning into spider-folk (Spider-Island); demonic summonings (Inferno); whatever beef the Wakandans/Atlanteans have going on this week (Too many to list); the Inhumans just dicking around because it’s what they do for fun (Ditto) and the like, on TOP of the “usual” domestic and international issues, I’d never want to leave my apartment, never mind have to grapple with social dilemmas.
I didn’t understand the idea of violence being inherent to Magneto. Power is. For those of us who can walk about the world, occasional moments of inattention when we stub a toe, or bark our shins can allow us to notice the force with which we casually move though the world. It’s not at a level where we can destroy the world, or terraform a planet, but it would be assault if we inflicted that pain on another and we aren’t even trying. So is Magneto a special case, or is violence inherent in everyone?
Also, have we ever met the indigenous people of Genosha and seen something of their culture?