X-Men #1

[history79]

12 pages of 37

Comments

[scorntx]

Do you remember a time when chocolate chip cookies came fresh from the oven?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Do you remember a time when everyone wore pouches, and women's hips couldn't un-sway?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Kind of surprising Logan actually managed to land a hit on Magneto.
Kind of surprising they brought Logan to a Magneto fight at all.
"Kind of", because they keep doing it.

Oh, and Fabien Cortez, with his auspicious debut.
Such a long lasting and iconic symbol of X-Men lore.
All true X-Men fans remember this as the grand moment when he overthrow the worn-out and uninteresting Magneto, rightly consigning him to the dustbin of history, beginning Cortez's meteoric rise to the upper echelons of the X-Villains.

(And a "focused totality of my psychic powers" from Psylocke. Wow.
You read about it, and then... when you actually see it...)

[starwolf_oakley]

In FATAL ATTRACTIONS, before the big Adamantium Removal, Magneto says "Logan, we dance the dance again, and you never learned the steps very well."

Also, when GIANT SIZED X-MEN #1 came out, Magneto was reduced to infancy by Alpha, the Ultimate Mutant (in THE DEFENDERS). That might explain why two members of the new X-Men (Colossus, Wolverine) had "metal" as the basis for their powers.

[sarahnewlin]

I get the art style and the whole Wolvie vs Mags thing being oddities but what do you mean by Psylocke statement? That its wordy?

[icon_uk]

"The focussed totality..." is a Claremont trope normally associated with Magik's soulsword, but now transferred to Psylocke who used the term on a monthly basis for YEARS.

So the fact that "The focused totality of my psychic powers" was a sparkly spike a couple of inches never really struck me as impressive.

There's also the fact that given she can fry someone's brain whilst standing on the other side of a room (She's literally killed someone by thinking at them), her insistence on turning it into something limited to her hand never seemed like remotely a worthwhile trade. Her power is psychic, why give it a physical limitation?

Hmmm. the people who primarily used the term were both females, who did so by manifesting a phallic symbol... (A sword and a knife), one has to wonder about that, or maybe not.

[flint_marko]

Who did she kill?

[icon_uk]

Evil alt-universe version of her brother, a nasty piece of work from a Nazi-like world who enjoyed visiting other worlds and raping (then killing) alt-Betsy's

Betsy sensed his attack in time and basically fried every synapse in his body before he could get near her.

No real loss to the multi-verse there.

[bruinsfan]

When the Hand tried to brainwash her after the Siege Perilous business, she was killing a bunch of their ninjas to correspond with them being gunned down in the hallucinatory mindscape her brainwashing was going on in. Invisible psychic attacks dropping them like flies across a big warehouse complex.

[balbanes]

The other thing that's dumb about her psychic knife? In most cases, stabbing someone in the brain with a regular knife would be more effective.

[mastermahan]

More likely he's pointing out how Chris Claremont tends to fall back on certain phrases. for Psylocke, it's the 'focused totality' line, whereas Cannonball is nigh-invulnerable in his blastin' field.

A listing of Psylocke's Focused Totality.

[astrakhan42]

Transformers fans are familiar with these as Furmanisms since Simon Furman loves using certain phrases in his stories. And now this post is over, finished! like a vast, predatory bird, even though it never ends.

[icon_uk]

See also; "I'm the best there is at what I do"

and a few others.

[zylly]

Because sending the guy who literally has metal bones against the Master of Magnetism is a good idea.

[freezer]

They must think so, because they never consider NOT doing it.

[tcampbell1000]

http://textsfromsuperheroes.com/post/129319385148/metal

[tcampbell1000]

YMMV on the scene after the fact, which seems to argue that Magneto just didn't expect Wolverine to strike him that quickly and viciously while he was just innocently gathering up some nukes, after all their history together (cue slashfic).

In any case, this story was supposed to be Chris Claremont's last hurrah (and in a way, it was), and there was absolutely no way he was going to do his final X-Men story and not include those two characters, so here we are.

I remember this comic, this specific #1 issue, as the one that taught me I would never be much of a comic artist. The cover presented here is one-quarter of an illustration that spanned multiple variant covers, and however it looks now (why was Magneto facing the reader and not the X-Men?), at the time it was considered a pinnacle of comic art, at least to Marvel's fevered fan base.

In high school, I spent two months off and on trying to replicate some of the look, feel, and design of the non-Magneto parts of that illustration, using my own childhood-favorite comics characters (Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew). As here, I arranged the characters in the super-team to all be charging forward together, united against an off-frame threat.

I showed this to a peer, who thought he was praising me when he observed how the character in the "Wolverine" position, rather than standing beside the character in the "Cyclops" position, looked like she was punching him in the groin.

Others have overcome worse. But I found I was getting more satisfaction by applying myself in other creative directions, and if I couldn't even enjoy the biggest self-indulgence I could possibly have made as a comic artist, then this probably was not the direction for me.

[q99]

-YMMV on the scene after the fact, which seems to argue that Magneto just didn't expect Wolverine to strike him that quickly and viciously while he was just innocently gathering up some nukes, after all their history together (cue slashfic).-

The first strike is fine, it's ever bit after that where one can expect the fight to be hilariously one-sided ^^

I forget, isn't this not long before Magneto rips all the metal off his bones?

[tcampbell1000]

You DO see Magneto using Wolverine as a pelota one page after that first strike, and he doesn't get another opportunity until the end, when Magneto's powers were so messed up he might as well have been an old guy holding up a couple of fridge magnets.

To your question: that happened in #25 of this same series, so "not long," relatively speaking.

[gnarll]

It had been building for a while. Logan always pushes the new members, but Magneto wasn't socially adept enough to see that Logan was "Ragging on the new guy". Storm saw it happening and worried about it, but didn't know how to step in.

Then "Rahne of Terra" happened, and that was what really turned Wolvies instincts on Magneto into "kill on sight". Magneto had no way of knowing that, and this was the first inkling he had of it. More than anything else, it was what drove him away from the X-me after years at Xaviers.

[flint_marko]

What did "Rahne of Terra" have to do with this?

[icon_uk]

In that story, Wolverine was brought to a medaevil analogue of the main MU, and was programmed by magic into becoming a killing machine to seek out and kill Magnus, that world's Magneto analogue

I've never seen it used to suggest a general change in Wolverine's default approach to Magento though, especially since the spell was broken since Wolverine DID manage to kill Magnus.

[gnarll]

That worlds Magneto-analogue captured and tortured Wolverine.

Wolverines enhanced senses did not differentiate between parallel-world doubles, and Wolverine relies heavily on them. That is why Proteus got to him so badly, back when. While he intellectually knew it was a different version of the man, his instincts did not differentiate. (and to be fair, I could see this happen with normal people and parallel world copies)

I seem to remember Logan shouting "KIll you Magneto!!" long after the man had explained he had no idea why he kept calling him that.

Bit strange because the artist made that worlds Magnus look quite different, but there you go.

[lbd_nytetrayn]

You know, Magneto/Rogue always seemed like such an odd pairing -- mostly for the age disparity -- but I can kind of see how one might reach that conclusion from their interaction here.

[q99]

Yea, while I don't ship 'em, having 'em as friends oddly works.

Also, EXiles had a cool Rogueneto kid in the first issue.

[astrakhan42]

It's interesting how the age thing works for both Xavier and Magneto. They've both been reborn in new bodies enough that they're technically in their physical late thirties/early forties despite canonically being alive in WWII.

Magneto got de-aged by Mutant Alpha (a key part of him being declared innocent of his Silver Age crimes); I just think his hair went grey/white early. Meanwhile, Xavier has been rebuilt by the Shi'ar, healed by the Morlocks' sewer wizard and who knows what else.

[balbanes]

The early white hair might be genetic. Look at Pietro... err, nevermind. :/

[astrakhan42]

Rick Remender did that so as far as I'm concerned it isn't canon.

[bruinsfan]

It helped that Rogue was another reformed X-Men villain (adopted by Magneto's successor as leader of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants) who joined the team. She had more common ground with him than anyone else.

[sarahnewlin]

Bets' s poor vagina....yikes. anyone else notice how the Asian characters tend to be a specific shade color?

[q99]

Not surprising, before computer coloring got as good I don't think they liked to experiment with skin tone as much because of the chance of something coming out looking really bad.

[q99]

Best selling comic issue of all time, I believe.

[informationgeek]

Yep! 1 million copies... and we'll probably never see a sale like that again.

[q99]

Not one million, *seven* million.

Star Wars 1 did hit 1mil two years ago, but without the combination of big splash and speculator market, yea.

[wizardru]

Star Wars also had the added bonus of being distributed with some collector box subscriptions, so some folks got copies who never actually bought the comic.

X-men #1 having four covers certainly drove sales (as did a rebooting of the most popular franchise in comics at the time)...but it was the herald of the madness to come and pre-saged the crash as things spiralled out of control with holograms, lenticulars and even stickers.

[locuatico]

which also ensured comics would NEVER reach those numbers again by essentially reducing the market to what we have today.
Like, it's not like it sold crazy well in the pre-oversaturation days, but it sure wasn't what we have today.

[bruinsfan]

Back in the 40s Superman regularly sold well over a million issues each month, and I believe some Captain Marvel issues may have cracked 2 million. Of course, kids didn't have TV or videogames back then.