Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS
In which we remain frustrated with Morrison’s Magneto; Esme Cuckoo’s hat game is lacking; and the status quo dies with Jean Grey.
X-PLAINED:
- Dubious X-relationships
- Some excellent songs from an excellent show
- New X-Men #149-150
- Various atrocities and catastrophes
- The resistance, such as it is
- Magneto’s limits
- A rebirth
- Neutron warheads
- The cavalry
- Yet another death of Magneto
- Yet another death of Jean Grey
- A peculiar epilogue
- A legacy of retcons
- A miasma of bleakness and futility
- The Xorn retcon
- Disability in “Planet X”
- Miracles of Magnetism
NEXT EPISODE: The future!
Check out the visual companion to this episode on our blog.
Find us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify!
Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men is 100% ad-free and listener supported. If you want to help support the podcast–and unlock more cool stuff–you can do that right here!
Buy rad swag at our Dashery shop!
I never took Morrison’s comments about Magneto being a “terrorist twat” at face value, for the simple reason that they literally give the character an out in the next arc. We don’t look at Sublime-Beast in “Here Comes Tomorrow” as if it’s some kind of author’s statement on Hank McCoy, so I don’t understand why we don’t extend that same grace to Sublime-Magneto. (Well, that’s not entirely true – I suspect I know why, but no need to get into that.)
This.
This!
THIS!!!
Thats why I think the voice taunting Magneto was his own voice, from a deep inside still not Sublime influenced part of his mind
(I have suspicions too) (But I also suspect people can’t connect what we see in this arc with the stuff we learn in the next. Why? I have theories, but my theories aren’t very nice)
SO I have a theory as to why folks remember Magneto/Esme differently: Deathstroke/Terra (which DEFINITELY feels like Deathstroke did sleep with her to manipulate/groom her) is ghosting on that relationship. Esme’s haircut is even more Terra and she is doing a lot of similar Terra things in terms of “I’m a cool, sexy adult villain now.” Whether that was intentional or not (I’d be shocked though if Jiminez hadn’t read the story and most of the cues are in the art), the parallels are there. AND THEN that compounds with the fact that The Judas Contract also got its first publication in years in 2003 as well. So again, for comic readers at the time, many of them would have been reading the two at the same time (I cannot undersell to younger readers how hard it could be to get old, iconic stories for YEARS if they were out of print and you didn’t have tons of money to drop on eBay).
Anyway, like Jay, I also only think of CXG with Shitshow. Granted, with New X-Men 150, I can only think of Floating Hands, “And then we beat you up and Wolverine lopped off your head. Oh, and you killed Jean.”
Is there anywhere that has Morrison’s original X-Men plan? Because, from what that article you posted said, it seems that their original plan didn’t really happen (and I think I’ve heard in conversation that the run was truncated). I can only seem to find references to it not being the original plan but can’t find what it was.
Undersell might be the wrong word for litotes here, but that’s what I get for a 7 AM comment…
Underscore.
Undersell might be the wrong word for litotes here, but that’s what I get for a 7 AM comment…
The mention of the Phoenix egg at the end of this story reminded me that Jonathan Hickman gave Cyclops a Phoenix egg in the lead up to his Secret Wars story many years after this run. As far as I know there’s no explanation as to where he got this or how he was able to use it to transform himself back into Phoenix.
Any canonical or non-canonical explanations for this? I’ve got a no-prize for anyone who can tell me!
Zero explanation. In the run up to Secret Wars Hickman wrote a few scenes with Scott and his X-Men and they had no relation to what Bendis was doing in Uncanny X-Men at all.
It may be uncomfortable, but I believe that beyond the geopolitical interpretation within the context of the publication period (2000 terrorism), it’s possible to draw parallels with what is happening in Israel now. It’s not about applying a speculative theory to facts that certainly don’t perfectly reflect the theory, but about parallels that make us think about the mechanisms of genocide.
The Genosha genocide, Magneto surviving that genocide, Magneto being a genocidal maniac. I think that, in pop culture, it’s reasonable to think about the continuity of comics in terms of the faithful evolution of the characters; however, when we make a social commentary on a work of art (yes, comics are art, sometimes of magnificent quality) within the historical period we are in, it’s possible to use the artwork to understand what is happening to us today.
I speak from a country scarred by civil war (Colombia), in which leaders frequently fuel the rhetoric of war and are accused, by free-thinking intellectuals, of being perpetrators of state terrorism.
Why are people asking you guys specifically, if disabilitys were handled well in this?
Is it just to be assumed you guys are experts on EVERYTHING? 🤷🏼♂️
I mean, Jay’s a disability advocate who has talked about it on his social media for years and also routinely brings up disability politics in his analysis of X-Men.
True
The Phoenix retcon parallel is the most obvious. The biggest difference is that story found a way to give Phoenix Jean’s memories and, later gave Jean Phoenix’s memories. That way, they could have Jean be Phoenix and Phoenix Jean while keeping Jean technically innocent of the Phoenix’s actions. I wish there had been a way to have their cake and eat it too. I know Magneto said he bore some responsibility because Xorn wore his face, but that was it.
I think my view on the use of Magneto in this story is that it works, if one assumes that this was going to be the last EVER Magneto story.
The fact that Magneto is now living in a world where, as they note, his post-mortem legend is proving more transformative and inspirational on a society-wide scale than anything he has ever managed whilst alive, and his Sublime warped mind not being able to take it.
Plus he’s dealing with a more jaded MU than ever before. Which is something that is valid, given that half the planets population died and then got better a few years ago because of Thanos, literal gods are walking the earth, and Earth became a the prison based dumpster fire of several different alien races a couple of years back. Magneto on a standard rampage probably wouldn’t even make the 9 o’clock news any more.
So he’s repeating old patterns and, since he knows they won’t work then he’s amping them trying to make them relevant by making them grander and more horrific because THAT will definitely give him relevance., right?
It was wildly optimistic of Morrison to assume that this would be the last story to feature him, but I admire them for trying.
I think it’s a great point about Magneto lacking bombast and his own conviction, more than it being impossible for him to do these actions. The tone, the vibe, is wrong. Or was that the episode prior to this?
Anyhow, one of my favorite bits of Magneto in Al Ewing’s X-Men Red and such, is that Magneto basically says “Grant Morrison was Made Some Valid Points.” Specifically in X-Men Red 4, Magneto addressing the Great Ring: “I’ve seen what comes in with the cold of centuries. What can hid, through life after life… even from yourself… What would I become, with endless time? I fear it, Isca. I fear it. I do not fear a life that ends.”
I view this as such: years later, Magneto looks back at not just his actions over his entire publication history (his rule in original Genosha was pretty bad, too) but also at Planet X, and thinks that given enough time and drugs, it’s something he could do and would eventually do. That he has within himself the capacity to this kind of extermination, and he is afraid of it.
While I think Marvel could not let Morrison’s Magneto persist, and was probably right to retcon it, I feel late Krakoa Magneto reintegrates some of it, at least metaphorically, into the character, and I appreciate that. Claremont always loved to make Magneto grow as a person. Editorial frequently had him revert to Silver-Age villainy. The end result is a character with a lot of contradictions, and Grant Morrison’s run is too influential to ignore. Incorporating it, if not as literal canon, but metaphorically? I think that’s appropriate. Particularly for Morrison, since so many of their characters are highly metaphorical.