Magnus Family appreciation 2021

[Zelena]

I feel Mental Illness is the clutch move for writers like it's a way to get a villain arc out of an established hero but also an easy way to bring them back to good, it's honestly boring I miss villains who are just evil because like it doesn't always have to be that deep ya know.

It depends on where lies your interest. If your focus is on the hero, it isn’t interesting to wonder why the baddie is bad. But the villains have become more and more trendy…

So, there’s indeed a mystery: why is he so bad?




Because wasn’t a satisfying answer to Claremont, so he made a background to Magneto…

[Noek]

Take away the Doom retcon and what was her culpability in the first place? She was clearly not in her right mind all the way back to Avengers Disassembled.



Quicksilver was fairly easily forgiven for his attempt to kill the Avengers on account of madness after all.

Are we just ignoring what the Australian government built?

[GenericUsername]

I feel Mental Illness is the clutch move for writers like it's a way to get a villain arc out of an established hero but also an easy way to bring them back to good, it's honestly boring I miss villains who are just evil because like it doesn't always have to be that deep ya know.

It has real world implications. People actually believe most mentally ill people are dangerous and have a compulsion to hurt others. When the truth is that self-harm is a lot more common. And they have to be an asshole on top of having the mental illness for there to be a correlation.

It'd be nice for fiction to give it a more accurate approach and humanize it a bit. If they want someone to be a villain, just make them an asshole.

[GenericUsername]

Are we just ignoring what the Australian government built?

Australia is very stealthy with it's entry into the nuclear race.

[juan678]

By April Wong.



Sisters by R. Owens



By Dagar

Thanks jmc247

[jmc247]

Thanks jmc247

The 60s outfits I have always found kind of cute.



By xmen.collection

The first Brotherhood was a fairly generic villain team with evilNeto and the twins as the misguided heroes being used by him. I mean the worst thing Wanda did back then was what cause Angel to trip?

By the time of Darker then Scarlet in 1990 Byrne decided to change up the formula and made Wanda the one dimensional crazy cackling villain and Magneto the reasonable antagonist.

Byrne seemed to have something more planned, but it came to not.

[GenericUsername]

The 60s outfits I have always found kind of cute.



By xmen.collection

The first Brotherhood was a fairly generic villain team with evilNeto and the twins as the misguided heroes being used by him. I mean the worst thing Wanda did back then was what cause Angel to trip?

By the time of Darker then Scarlet in 1990 Byrne decided to change up the formula and made Wanda the one dimensional crazy cackling villain and Magneto the reasonable antagonist.

Byrne seemed to have something more planned, but it came to not.

I think Byrne just had a fetish for good girl gone bad. He did feel like female characters needed to pay for having a lot of power. Which is weird. He did the same with Sue Storm that he did with Wanda and Jean. Sue's was just more brief. They'll revisit Malice from time to time but it's never really anything.

[Lucyinthesky]

This is my favorite part of this comic, he hardly get to see Magneto´s thoughts but this explains nicely what was his mentality during his reformation period and the change from his previous actions, as well as the responsibility he felt towards the new mutants.





The New Mutants #40 (vol. 1)

[Lucyinthesky]

WAY OF X #1 ARTWORK

[jmc247]

The art last page was actually a 3D printed sculpt with a version sans helmet.

[salarta]

Lorna's posing on the step at Magneto's feet and holding up his helmet is a strange choice. It typically implies a certain level of subservience, especially in contrast to the twins standing at his sides. Helmet isn't much of a thing on its own, but takes on different meaning in the context.

Obviously it's not a big deal here as this is just fan work. I'd be more critical if it was from Marvel. IMO it would've been better if Lorna was behind the throne or floating over it, though from a creator POV I can see that not being ideal. Or alternately, if Wanda and Pietro were next to each other and Lorna was on the other side of the throne.

[jmc247]

I view it as the helmet in the context of the picture represents the crown and the picture was signaling she is next in line for the iron throne.

Marvel's top 10 X-Women brought up an interesting question to me as in how I think the various core members of the Magnus family appear to be regarded by Marvel as a whole.



How Marvel seems to regard their list currently

Magneto top 10
Brotherhood
X-Men
Acolytes
Marvel antagonists

Quicksilver
Brotherhood
X-Factor

Scarlet Witch
Avengers
Brotherhood

Polaris
X-Factor

With Wanda I would say Marvel publishing has at times in the past 15 years demoted her off their top 10 of Avengers, but increased fan interest and the MCU has so far counterbalanced that. With Lorna I feel as though WATXM and The Gifted in at least its first season increased fan thinking of her as a character along the lines of Emma, Mystique, etc. as a bad ass potential X-Men ally and honorable antagonist.

Hickman might be onto an idea that could solve a number of problems for all once the Axis retcon comes down. The idea of the House of M not existing as simply an alternate universe family/idea. But the idea of them as a 616 unit that represents the honorable though more hardline view on mutant/human relations.

This follows onto the idea in Wolverine and the X-Men where the House of M was broadly speaking mutant aristocracy and a team of their own much like the family in the HoM universe.



Link

The Fox/Disney dispute and the turf war inside the x-line kept things from evolving this way last decade in the comics. But, when you think about it alot of problems would be solved if say Quicksilver when he had nowhere to go on the Avengers had an affiliation to fall back on. I am not under the illusion it will happen any time soon, but the core idea was and remains a good one.

[Cruelrain]

Wanda giving vampire vibes

[Zelena]

Wanda giving vampire vibes

None of them look very friendly…

[salarta]

Yeah, I had some words elsewhere about Lorna not being among the top 10 X-Women (though certainly not the same words as the few people/person on Twitter who complained about Storm being #1 and tried to use Lorna for their aims; those people can screw themselves).

It gets to the heart of what I've said about Lorna's history with the X-Men getting treated like it doesn't exist. This is a problem I've said multiple times for multiple occasions, especially these past few years. It's really damning that Marvel treats Genosha like something that never happened to Lorna. She was also excluded from the X-women variant cover a couple years ago, and same with the all-female X-Men team earlier in the 2010s.

That she's been relegated to X-Factor, not even leading it but as a supporting character team member, and that's all she's doing says a hell of a lot. Especially when you consider two things.

1) Rachel is getting to show up on other books like Marauders and Excalibur, and had a spotlight on her for the Entertainment Weekly article and clearly had a lot of thought put into her gala look (even if fans consider it a bad look).
2) Havok is never limited and reduced to X-Factor in the way Lorna is.

Since Havok led X-Factor in the 90s, Marvel has let him lead Starjammers. Co-lead Uncanny Avengers. Lead the Astonishing X-Men team. Lead a villain team on X-Men Blue.

Marvel isn't limiting Havok to X-Factor. They're not saying "Oh, he was extremely memorable for X-Factor in the 90s and he led that team for a long time there so we have to use him only there."

But they're limiting Lorna to X-Factor. And they aren't even letting her lead it. They use her as a "fill-in leader" when their stories put their chosen ones out of commission, like a good housewife stepping in for some tasks while the husband is away, and that's it. And the sole time she actually got to lead her own X-Factor team, issues #4-6 seemed to be trying to frame Gambit as the real leader while Lorna bumbles around, before ANXF #7 and later started doing right by her.

Which circles back around to that top 10 X-Women list. It's a list of what characters are considered the top 10 by people working at Marvel. I certainly wouldn't expect Lorna to come out above Storm or Jean, that's just absurd. But to not place in the top 10 at all? That tells you a lot about how little people at Marvel think of her, what her history means, and what she has to offer.

It also, importantly, speaks to the impact of past use and Marvel corporate culture. Past good, respectful usage for Storm and Jean is why they rank as highly as they do. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. They've earned it. Characters deserve such usage and respect.

But Lorna hasn't received that from Marvel. Historically, and right this second as I'm typing this post. Marvel's past treatment of Lorna across her whole 52 years of existence has mostly been bad and disrespectful, at times even horribly sexist. The difference is, Marvel has been willing to acknowledge (whether openly or privately) when other characters like Sue Storm have been treated poorly and do better. Give Sue more active powers and rename her from Invisible Girl to Invisible Woman. Stop calling Carol Danvers a girl and name her Captain Marvel. Let Jane step up from Thor's love interest to Thor herself. These are things Marvel is willing to do for their most notable characters.

But then you get down to Lorna, they don't do a single thing about it. They don't bother to assess where past poor usage has negatively influenced their perceptions of her and what she has to offer or how she should be written and depicted. If anything, they try to justify it. Try to spin all the times Lorna's been misused to put other characters on a pedestal because of their wish fulfillment fantasies or their fandoms for big strong men (and, I'm sure eventually, big strong women they have more respect for than Lorna).

That's the real reason Lorna's not considered among the Top 10 X-Women. When you get down to it, it has nothing to do at all with her viability, or interest, or how much she's been used with X-Factor, or anything else. It has to do with Marvel taking a look at how horribly she's been treated in the past, shrugging their shoulders, and going "Eh, I'm cool with it. I think she's worthless and I'm not going to bother questioning why I think that. Might even try to make sure other people think it too."

If Lorna actually got a fair shot out of Marvel, where they did real things with her with real support commensurate with her history, and she still didn't get into the Top 10? I'd be fine with that. It would be fair. "You tried your best, you just didn't make the cut." It's a whole different story when you're actively undermined by a culture that is unwilling to change its ways for characters that aren't prominently displayed by PR.