Excalibur #2

[brerrabbit]

Comments

[cyberghostface]

I love how pissed Magneto is over Morrison’s Magneto.

[cainofdreaming]

And together they built the Mutant Orgy Island.

[trobadora]

Still love this.

[shakalooloo]

So Magneto believes in intelligent design over evolution?

[donnblake]

Superhero comics in general, and X-men in particular, have always had a weirdly teleological understanding of evolution.

[bruinsfan]

To be fair, in the Marvel setting the Celestials actually DID engineer proto-humanity to develop mutant/mutate powers. Human evolution didn't proceed naturally without intelligent direction from the point of the First Celestial Host's arrival onward. (And possibly since before that, as at least one story had the elder god Gaea choosing for mammals to supersede reptiles as the dominant life forms on the planet, for example.)

[donnblake]

There is that, but I think Apocalypse is the only one who regularly connects mutants with Celestials in terms of his worldview.

[bradygirl_12]

"You're dying to pop ask the question, aren't you?"

"Reading my mind, are you?"

"Reading your body."

[lbd_nytetrayn]

When did this take place? Always have a harder time parsing some of the older stuff that doesn't tie in to significant events, or have certain iconic flourishes (such as the style of cover/art used in the '80s-'90s).

I did really like this, though.

[cyberghostface]

2004. It started a few months after Morrison’s run and ended right before House of M.

[lbd_nytetrayn]

Ah, interesting! Thanks for the context. =)

[tcampbell1000]

"You let our ENTIRE COUNTRY BE DESTROYED after YOU LED US HERE!"
"...Well, I won't do it AGAIN."
"More importantly, old friend, it was only a rough draft of a nation anyway! It's like I always say, one year's holoCAUST can be the next year's holoBENEFIT!"

Comics are so weird.

Honestly, yes, I do see Magneto as capable of going full Final Solution. That's always been the threat of the character, spoken or unspoken, noble or ignoble: that he would end by repeating the sins he witnessed in childhood, like an abused boy who grows into an abusive parent, but on a much more terrifying scale.

But if he actually, you know, did it, then there'd be nowhere else for his character to go. For Morrison, that was the point; Magneto's was a failed, dated ideology, and keeping him around was like trying to address modern race issues by constantly resurrecting Simon LeGree. Unsurprisingly, Marvel saw it differently, especially with Sir Ian McKellen staring down moviegoers as the most compelling X-villain in theaters. Both views have some merit, but the way this story jolted from one to the other was pretty awkward even by superhero standards.

The strategy here seems to be to bring back the X-Men's best-known writer and let these two old guys be cute together for a while, and, hey, you could do a lot worse. It's just at the end of the sequence here, where we have to acknowledge there's a world beyond these two, that the seams really show.

[gnarll]

While there is merit to both views, I think only one of them allows further compelling stories. The other one kind of burns the character and all the work done with him to the ground.

[bruinsfan]

You'd think he would argue something along the lines of "was unable to prevent, not 'let'!"