Magneto: The master of magnetism Appreciation 2022

[Doom'nGloom]

This is one of my onetime favorite stories from the Utopia era as well, Skottie Young did a great job capturing his humor, threatening nature and mixed relationship with the Avengers but he managed to do it with this story.

I love how he was slightly teasing Tony at the start and only got aggressive once he was blatantly accused of the attack.

[jmc247]

Happy New Year to Magneto the once and future leader of mutants!

[Lucyinthesky]

I love how he was slightly teasing Tony at the start and only got aggressive once he was blatantly accused of the attack.

Me too, Erik always teases Tony a little bit because of his armor and while he respects the role he and the Avengers play in the world, Not a hero happens after HoM so I think he was being a little more teasing than usual because he didnt like the Avengers role in the whole mess given they were Wanda´s friends and yes he only got more agressive when he realized he was being framed. I also loved Steve being done with Scott´s explanation, while Erik and Scott were trying to appear "not exactly innocent but not guilty either" lol Scott and Erik wanted to give the impression he had Magneto under control and things got a little out of hand when Mags got angry. All of this is told with the words and the art and it´s great to see.

Happy New Year to Magneto the once and future leader of mutants!

Thank you JMC247 lest hope this year is great.

[Lucyinthesky]

Recent interview by Claremont, he talks about his take on the X-men, Charles and Magneto.

Not sure I agree with his take on Charles, he already was complicated since the first X-men issues but I agree with him the problem with Xavier is that writers only give him flaws in the character development so there´s some kind of advance with him but I personally think he can change in a positive way, especially now that writers managed to give him some questionable moments.

Now on Magneto, I think him being a hero or trying to be one but still be tempted by wanting to make bad choices for the right reasons is a very balanced view of the character and even more when he and Magik share this same journey of trying to keep themselves in check and how this situation made them relate back in the day when she was a New Mutant really interesting take in general.

How do you feel about Charles Xavier? Is he a man trying to do what's best? Or has he always been kind of a manipulative monster? Is Charles inherently good or bad or is he more neutral?

Chris Claremont: The simple answer is: yes. All of the above. That’s why I kept trying to kill him and replace him with Magneto. The challenge with Xavier is functionally he’s perfect. He’s a noble, committed, wonderful human being. All we can do in the book is diminish him, reveal he’s flawed or not as wonderful as we thought. And that doesn't seem fair to me. So I always kept trying to figure out, either I send him off with Lilandra and he has a happy ending and we never see him again, or we run him over with a backhoe. That's why, for me, Magneto was the overtly more intriguing character. We know he’s flawed. We know he’s done horrible things…but for the best reasons. Charles is trying to do the best for the best reasons, therefore he cannot get any better. With Magneto, he’s still climbing the ladder and dealing with athe mistakes he’s made. He’s trying to get better. That, for me, is a conflict with a sort of Shakespearean balance. That's why I love the idea of him being principal and headmaster of the school, because I can always find a moment for him where he is tempted, like “I have the perfect means of saving the world. All I have to do is this slightly evil thing. I’ll step over the line just a little bit…but save the world with it!”.

It’s like when we cured Jean, and erased the Phoenix Force from her body, and said she is good, and will last forever as a good person. My first reaction was: bullshit. She’ll be cured for as long as the writer or editor thinks it's worth it, and then someone will come up with something else because we need to up the sales and invent this really neat rationale for why she has to become Phoenix again. It’s for the best of reasons, but she'll become Phoenix again. And boom, once that happens, the point of #137 goes out the window…oh wait, that’s exactly what happened. Sorry.

The whole idea with comics is you never ever ever cross the threshold of “What if?” You go right up to the point of “I’m about to commit an unforgivable act” and you then find a way to save the day. With Magneto running the Mutants instead of Charlie, here we have Illyana, who is fundamentally an evil person trying hard to be good. And so she is depending on Magneto, who she knows has walked the same road she has. He's made the right choice, so he will save her. But here’s Magneto facing the same choice again, and he’s tempted—but we have the seven new Mutants who know that if he crosses the line, they're doomed. Because the next time it'll be easier for him to cross the line and easier and easier and easier, and then he’ll have forgotten where the line is. So their goal is to pull him back. To find a way to resolve the situation that will remove his temptation.

That to me is a far more ongoing, exciting, challenging edge-of-your-seat concept and reality.

As I said, all Charlie can do is destroy what we know. But Magneto is fighting for something. And again, it's the same thing with Jean. We see her as a person taking responsibility for her actions and doing something that cannot be reversed.

That has a meaning and that's why I brought in Rachel, who's trying to stand up for everything. Every point in the journey where Jean failed. And yet, she faces the same temptations, because she's a baby Phoenix and she's learning. That’s to me what storytelling is all about: challenges and resolutions…but the resolutions always throw out new challenges four or five steps down the line so that it hopefully gets even more exciting. If you’re not gonna do that, then why am I bothering to read your story?

When I was writing Nightcrawler, the whole point of the miniseries was it follows up from the fact that X-Men went up to heaven and rescued Nightcrawler and brought him back to Earth. Right off the bat, I knew exactly where I was with him. Nightcrawler is a true Catholic. He believes in the New Testament, that God gave his only son who died for humanity and went back to heaven. But Nightcrawler himself has now died and found himself in heaven. So for him it’s no longer faith. It’s reality. He knows what happens after life. And then of course the X-Men zoom up and rescue him and bring him back to Earth and now his best friend is a priest. When that man has a crisis of faith, Nightcrawler could just sit there and say, “don't worry about it, I've been there, I've done that, I've met angels, an email from God, everything's cool.” Except by telling the priest this, he destroys the concept of faith. The whole idea of faith is you're taking it on up on hope. You're dealing with this with your fingers crossed. You sing out in pursuit of an ideal.

So five issues into the series Wolverine dies and I got asked to do a memorial. I was sitting there and I had what I thought was really cool idea. So Kurt goes around the mansion and say come on guys we're going up on top of a hill, and we're gonna light a fire and tell Wolverine stories. What I was going to do was have three or four characters tell vignettes, these unknown stories about Wolverine. But the punchline would come at the end when Rachel would be talking to the team, and (hopefully) the readers would then realize, everybody who told a story has one significant thing in common: they’re all characters who have died and been resurrected: Colossus, Psylocke, Kitty. Rachel’s POV is we’ve been down this road. Who wants to bet on how long until Logan’s back? Five weeks? 10 weeks? 30 issues? And then you focus in on Nightcrawler, who's like "no no no no no, you don't want to go here, you really don't want to go here" and asks "where do you think he is?" And they all point up. And he goes "right, who’s up there with him?"

And they're all looking around going I don’t know, and then suddenly the penny drops. And it's like ohhhhh. And Nightcrawler goes, yeah which one of you idiots wants to go tell the redhead we're taking her boy toy away? He and Jean are together again for the first time, and you want to really break that up? I thought that would be fun, because then you figure out a way for Wolverine to come back. Either doesn't piss off Jean or brings her back as Dark Phoenix. Take your pick. But the editor didn't like the story.

To me, coming up with this reality is different from other realities. You find a way to deal with it, you find a way to play, you find a way to focus in. If Charles is the epitome of everything that is right, do you really want to destroy him? If you do, how then can you put him back together? I had this huge argument back at the turn of the century that once you take the X-Men public, you can’t put them back in the bottle.

And for me, the X-Men being clandestine was one of the few things, one of the primal things, that separated this concept from every other concept in Marvel. The Avengers are public, the Defenders are public. Everybody knows the X-Men are creepy. Even though they're heroes, they're creepy and no one knows who they are. Once you take that away, they're just like everybody else. They're not as interesting. Once you've diminished Charles as the ultimate father figure, where have you got left to go? How can you put him back on that pedestal? If you don't put him on the pedestal then why should anyone go to the school? What does he offer? It's like we'll follow Magneto…yeah, who cares? He just gets beaten all the time. You need you need a positive active icon to be the counterpoint to the negative icon, and even if you do, even if you introduce shades of gray, you’ve got to do it in a way that ideally forces who you want the character to be. For example, my vision of Mister Sinister is totally different from the vision that exists in print today, simply because I got fired the first time before I established any of this. So other writers came in and they took him at face value and screwed it up to my way. Preserving the balance, preserving the reality of who these people are is important. It matters. Reed Richards is the ultimate positive father figure at Marvel Comics. For me to do what I did when I was writing FF and tried to destroy that, only had solidity because I trapped him inside Victor von Doom’s armor and the armor was seducing him, and the plot was how the other three FF members bust him loose. And once they bust him loose, life returns to normal. That's the balance you have established, that's the way this has to go.

[Lucyinthesky]

[Lucyinthesky]

[Lucyinthesky]

New Mutants (1983) #52

[Lucyinthesky]

[Lucyinthesky]

[Wallcloud]

I truly wonder what will cause Erik to step away, cause yes while he's "trapped" in the Quiet Council he finally has allies who understand his cause for a mutant nation, and he's leaving the council, is he leaving Krakoa as well?

[Vishop]

I didn't like how the pieces have been put together in Inferno for the duo. It's ironic that was the opposite for what happened with HoX/PoX. Didn't explained why Mags left Quiet Council. But to be honest staying in the council would be any good for him seeing how things have turned out to be rather bad for Mags.

[Lucyinthesky]

I truly wonder what will cause Erik to step away, cause yes while he's "trapped" in the Quiet Council he finally has allies who understand his cause for a mutant nation, and he's leaving the council, is he leaving Krakoa as well?

Yes, he seems to be leaving Krakoa as well, I think we will see his real reason for leaving after X lives of Wolverine, the story was named as part of Inmortal X-men solicits and it acording to Percy Logan will do some timetravelling, to WWII so I suspect he may meet young magneto there and something may happen that makes Magneto leave for good the council, reveal the QC secrets and leave.

I didn't like how the pieces have been put together in Inferno for the duo. It's ironic that was the opposite for what happened with HoX/PoX. Didn't explained why Mags left Quiet Council. But to be honest staying in the council would be any good for him seeing how things have turned out to be rather bad for Mags.

I didn´t like the end either but I was expecting it, Hickman tends to use the characters and then let them fail and fall, like he did with Tony and Steve on Avengers or Reed on FF4. I just thought it was a little forced and they were supposed to tell the others at some point. I also think they made a lot of mistakes they usually would not have done.Like promising Raven something they were not willing to give but I guess Hickman had to force the story to get to this point.

I think this is a middle point story, we will see what else happens on Inmortal X-men, right now all of them hate each other, the council is highly unstable and they may stab each other over and over again, figuratively or literally like on Inferno on Inmortal X-men.

I believe Magneto will leave after X lives of Wovlerine will reveal some secret that makes him think that staying on the QC and Krakoa is not good enough, being on Krakoa has made them take a defensive position when it comes to Nimrod/Orchis and Erik already had been talking about leaving in ToM and Inferno, so if I add what´s going to be revealed on X lives of Wolverine, he may think it´s better to have more liberty to act outside of the council and Krakoa, I am just not sure what secrets he will reveal, he may think coming clean on all sides inside the council may be better than them just not knowing how the others are going to act. That´s my guess.

[Wallcloud]

i love you

[Lucyinthesky]

i love you

Yes I always loved that moment between them from X-men Tas ,you can look for the chapter on Disney plus, hopefully X-men 98 will follow on their relationship

[Saithor]

I’m still in favor of the idea that he leaves when they refuse to let him kick the Nazi off of the Quiet Council.