How do I not own this?

I just found out this trade existed:



So it has the Magneto War, which is the storyline where Joseph kicks it, as well as my personal Magneto Rex which is just this crazy Magneto, Rogue and Quicksilver story and a must-have for any connoisseur of 90s superhero soap or Rogue awesomeness. It is sadly discontinued, but fortunately just about everything in it is available online if you're up for dealing with Marvel's confusing digital strategy. I'm just amazed it's out there and I never saw it. Those storylines are two of my favorite rereads in X-men comics.

This new knowledge of my own fallibility brings another question to mind: Have they ever collected Dark Seduction, the Magneto in Genosha-focused storyline that involves Polaris and Quicksilver, in trade paperback? That one isn't up in digital comics, and unlike Magneto War and Magneto Rex I wasn't able to read it when it first came out.

As long as I'm wishing for things...

I've realized recently that if Marvel were to write a comic just for me it would be an ongoing series starring Magneto and focusing on how he relates to his family. You could set stories where he's a good guy and a bad guy, because he certainly switches, is horrifying or sympathetic, and where he fights the X-men or helps them, but the main draw for me would be a promise of seeing the family ("the family" is to be referred to with Ron Howard's voice because I've watched too much Arrested Development). ALL of his children and grandchildren (even Luna now that she's got funky mind powers) qualify as super-heroes, and he is a Big Time super-villain. If you do not find that interesting, I don't understand you.

Right now in Children's Crusade, the main thing that keeps me picking it up (other than desperate hope that Wanda will do something) is watching Tommy, Pietro, and Magneto all try to out-smartass each other. (Billy and Wanda should join in once they've finished laying out the exposition.)



Marvel could easily pick this up after this series ends, and we'll have two sets of twins plus Grandpa. You already have some serious dramatic potential there, with the two sets of twins trying to become a full family again, and Magneto trying to be an X-man still. While he's trying to do the hero thing, he's also trying to rebuild those bridges now that he's got a couple of stepping stones put down again.

Bring Lorna back from space with the boyfriend, and you have another set of characters to enfold into the family. Polaris and Magneto is already a compelling interaction, Polaris plus the twins (and new twins) after House of M is so fascinating to me that I can't understand why Marvel wants to let this lie.

And while Magneto would be the central character, this would be an excuse to showcase how the family interacts with each other. We could get my Pietro-Lorna teamup here, Wanda and Lorna doing sister stuff (and fighting evil), Wanda and her children, Lorna and her niece and nephews...etc...

Along the way, natural storylines would bring in Crystal and Luna, Hulkling, the Kaplan family, the Shepherd family, Rogue and Professor X for an issue or a few arcs. Tommy could get a little robot girlfriend. Magneto could try to manipulate Pietro into dating a human or mutant woman. (I think he'd leave Wanda alone since even down to the basic "I make bad things happen" power she's not someone wise to mess with, and she's already had two mutant children.) Ideally they'd find excuses to bring back the old Vision (not the dumb emotionless one, or the admittedly nice baby one, but the Vision who married Wanda), Astra, Joseph, and--for me the Holy Grail of potential Magneto stories--Magda.

Marvel, I promise you that unless you put an absolutely DIRE creative team on it I would buy the hell out of this.

He has no right to look this good.

I'd briefly considered ordering the Age of X: Alpha book this week simply because the Magneto costume design is so beautiful looking, and I am a sucker for Magneto. Still, the initial marketing campaign was very off-putting so instead O decided to slot that money towards a Chaykin-written Magneto one-shot. It is currently in the mail, but in the meantime @#$% Yeah Magneto has started posted some of the artwork and already I'm feeling good about my purchase. Check out this splash:



That is Magneto rocking the suit and trenchcoat look after he clears customs with a stolen identity. I'm told this is set when he first gets to the US, after the falling out with Xavier. Now, if I remember my X-men timing properly means that right now Xavier is scoping out Scott so it's within the past fifteen years. Magneto was a teenager in WWII, so he's coming up on 90 right now. That gorgeous man in that picture is around 75 years old.

Not only that, there's panels of him on a date with a much younger woman. I like this, because I'm particularly enamored of Magneto in a romantic setting. My reasons for this are complicated, though.

You know those terrible romance novels where there's an infamous bad guy who is a perfect gentleman to the heroine, so she falls for him? Not really the bodice rippers, mind you, but one of those where the guy treats her like fine porcelain but engages in violent behavior against every other character. It's this weird safe fantasy in love stories where the heroine is special enough that she is immune to the man's violent tendencies or he's somehow redeemed because sexism/chivalry keeps him from acting violently towards a woman.

Magneto romance stories use that setup, but his history acknowledges how completely removed from reality this feeling of safety is. Yeah, there's people like Rogue that he ended it with a bittersweet parting (I remember one where he told his life story in pillow talk to some girl he picked up on the beach and far as I know he just left, betcha this girl in this one-shot ends up okay too) but this guy has had some very bad breakups. Magda wisely realized that someone with that much power who is prone to paranoia and fits of rage is bound to lose it and hurt a loved one (like, y'know, their son) so she left. She leaves the children because she expects him to be so mad he'll kill her and take them. It's heavily implied that Lorna's mother was killed in a plane crash caused by Magneto. He attacks Astra on sight. Hell, even that bromance he had with Xavier ended on a really sour note.

And because they've done this, they've established that he is a bad guy who does bad things even to people he loves, they have a lot of flexibility when it comes to Magneto stories. They can explore his soft side and humanize him without erasing or trivializing his violent side because Magneto is such a huge, established and well-known villain that there's no point in trying to explain away his past or sweep it under the rug. It's there, and the writer has to accept that this is Magneto and he's been a pretty awful person. In the meantime, he's had enough softening and humanizing stories by this point that they don't come off as weird or insincere. Sure Vision and the Scarlet Witch #4 was probably weird when it first came out, but by now we all know just how complex this guy is. He can be the grand world-threatening villain without losing our sympathy, and he can be the melancholy, remorseful father without losing his threatening presence.

Ultimately, this what makes him such a compelling villain. His origin and subsequent actions, all of the alternate universes where he's a good guy, all the side-switching, his love life and his attitude towards his children all mean he has our sympathy. Not only that, we can relate to him. We can see ourselves in the shoes of this guy who just randomly has all of this power and ability but has given into his rage and pessimism to end up being exactly the kind of person who caused all of his pain. We can see him as a cautionary tale, someone to pity, someone to root for and someone to fear.

And we can look at a splash page like that, of him full of hope and cheer having stolen his friend's identity and illegally entered the country, and know that he's going to become a major supervillain but still smile at how happy and roguish he is, and how great he looks in the suit.

Defending Quicksilver (Hang on, this is a long one)

I've been meaning to blog for a while on Quicksilver's mental breakdown, mainly to answer fans who think that there's no fixing House of M, Son of M, and Silent War without a Skrull or possession explanation. Really, there's a number of points in the storyline that a writer can seize on and use to exonerate him without pulling in a new mind-controlling villain into the mix or saying it was an imposter. I don't know if Bendis or Hine put them in there on purpose, but they're there and I think Peter David at least saw a couple.

In the first place, the already accepted explanation for his complete breakdown is a pretty fucking good one. In House of M he's portrayed as a good but extremely foolish man. Bendis is actually sympathetic to the twins. He makes Pietro play the villain not by setting things up to get everything he wants (like he could), but by setting up a place to hide his sister and sacrificing his own happiness. He gives his father the benefit of the doubt and convinces his sister that Magneto could be a good guy if he had nothing to be afraid of. He gives up his own independance and becomes the obediant, adoring son his father has always demanded. The end result? The old man crushes him to death, he gets resurrected by Wanda (which, judging by Hawkeye's odd behavior afterwards, probably has a temporary effect on the brain chemistry) and awakens the next day to discover that his sister has left him, taken his power, and taken the powers of 99% of his species.


Thing is, I have run into fans that don't think this is enough. That's okay, because there's quite a bit more going on here.

I actually like the first issue of Son of M, because they play this up really well. He's dejected, miserable, powerless, blames himself for M-Day, and when he finally looks past himself to realize just how much harm he did when he was trying to help he finds it so painful he throws himself off a building. Hine really manages to put forward just how depression he's in at the beginning, so when Spider-man's tirade puts him over the edge to self-harm it doesn't seem out of nowhere or a sudden attempt to get sympathy for the character. It seems like this is a person who is that depressed, albeit because of his own actions.


Hine paints a sympathetic portrait of a man becoming a monster, but he doesn't ever call back to the fact that Pietro's a good man. He just has the events unfold and gives us Pietro's view of himself and others during this time. That's actually what ends up ringing false. Pietro is believable in a sickening way when you've been reading him up to this point, but if Son of M #1 was your first exposure to the character you'd think he was always self-centered and short-sighted rather than suffering from an incapacitating bout of depression and that this was him finally getting the results his actions were going to lead to. Crystal's statements, and part of why I hate her so badly in this, suggest that he always had a selfish dark streak and that that was what dissolved the marriage and none of her actions or even her awful uncle screwing them both over. She's an ex-wife who's bad egg of a husband has returned looking for her, and she's strong to tell him off. We're supposed to empathize with her as the virtuous partner. Luna comes off as innocently not knowing how bad her father is. Because we've read Quicksilver, we know he was a real good guy and a good father and husband who tried his best but Hine never lets us see the man Pietro was before M-Day. /He doesn't explain how a good man like Quicksilver be responsible for House of M--leading us to conclude that Pietro was a bad man (or that he has been retconned to be a bad man all along)--or explain how a good man would be driven to stealing those crystals, leading us to conclude that Pietro's nature is supposed to be a selfish bad man being revealed for once because he's lost his power.

It's really skillfully done, the mood and the pacing and the voice all support the story and character, but there is absolutely nothing even acknowledging that he hasn't always been selfish and ruthless. We have to add that ourselves as readers. There are, however, a couple of things in House of M and Son of M together that hint that he's losing it for an external reason.


There's the mood in the first issue of Son of M. There is a great cover where the artist shows everyone as moving superfast while Pietro's standing still, but inside there's a different problem. Pietro's not upset everyone else is moving fast. He's upset that he is moving slow. We know from years of characterization that Quicksilver's powers aren't just running, that he actually perceives and thinks at a greater speed than anyone else. That's why he has a patience problem. He has time to get bored in between words. If he lost all of his powers, everyone else would seem faster like on the cover. He wouldn't be able to keep up with conversations or events, everything would confuse him because it would just be going at a much greater pace than he's used to. Instead, he understands everything that's going on around him, and he perceives himself as going at a snail's pace. He doesn't see other people as going faster, he even asks how they can stand being so slow!


Whether through a stroke of brilliance or a major mistake on Hine's part (*it seems natural to paint someone as being constantly aware of their lost power but really, if he is used to having 5 times as long to process everything, he shouldn't be able to hold a conversation or react at the just slightly too slow speed he's shown reacting at), Pietro's powers are only halfway gone. FYMaximoffs on Tumblr speculated that he hadn't really lost his powers in M-Day, and was just suppressing them out of guilt. Myself, I'd been thinking that Wanda really wanted to depower her brother (thinking it would help him because as much as he loves his powers he's had a lot of social difficulties from them) but messed it up and only got it partly right, fucking his head over even more. The idea he did it himself from the trauma makes more sense, and I prefer it a lot. Whatever caused it, his powers are partially there and causing him to lose his sanity. He's lost his family and he knows it's his fault. He has only one skill, being a superhero, and he can't perform that job anymore. Then Spider-man comes along and tells him (I am not exaggerating) he has no reason to live.

Once he gets to Attilan? Hine actually establishes that someone up there fucks with his mind. This story actually excuses him for his idea to steal the Mists. The Inhumans punish the bad guy and ignore that his brain was fucked with for the umpteenth time when talking about how horrible Pietro is (like they do whenever Maximus fucked with his head, I hate the Inhumans so much), of course, but the writer does put it in there.

And this wasn't Maximus. There is yet another psychic who thinks Pietro's mind is his to mess with so he can achieve his own goals--really, why have we not had a story where someone addresses that psychics (Professor X, Moondragon, Maximus, and now this Videmus dude) don't seem to care about Quicksilver's sanity or rights? Is it the high-speed brain, does it come off as a buzzing that annoys them and they have to stick their hands in there and stop it? Marvel needs an alternate universe where there are no telepaths and as a result all of Magneto's children (and a number of other characters) are in fine mental health. And Magneto needs to see it so he can stop taking his kids to Charles Xavier rather than real therapy.

*Ahem* Back to the original subject, Secret Invasion also establishes a Skrull presence in Attilan. As a result, I look at this and see even more people manipulating Quicksilver in addition to the rogue telepath he connected minds with, the brain moving too fast thing, the depression, the trauma of having been killed by his own father and been brought back to life by a woman with the power to make things go horribly wrong, and then the mental stress of either having a witch use him as a power familiar to focus a spell that changed reality/history and then one that changed the whole multiverse or having to help mentally guild an ultra-powerful reality warping emotionally unbalanced mutant in creating a coherent reality. (Oh, did I mention that I think the Scarlet Witch basically used him as her cat when she cast the House of M and M-Day spells? Well... more on that in the "Ways a clever writer could save Wanda" post I'll probably get to before the next issue of Children's Crusade.)

So that takes care of everything from M-Day to the to the Terrigen Mists. He was losing his sanity and getting desperate, so he tries what he can to get his powers back. What he can try is to expose himself to a dangerous chemical that warps his physical body, has undocumented effects on the human/mutant mind, does nothing to solve his problem of his brain moving faster than his body, and triggers a power that has an even greater detriment to his sanity: Time Travel. Pietro's very first use of time travel is to meet his horrible future self, a future self who tricks him into murdering someone and exposing himself to that drug more. From this point on, he takes it more and more and gets worse and worse until he gets thrown into detox for the Quick and the Dead, goes through withdrawal and his natural powers come back completely. It's pretty obvious that all of his actions from that point onwards were to be attributed to the Mists. I'd argue that the actions leading up to it can be excused as temporary insanity, too, because of the trauma in House of M #7 and the disconnect between his perceptions and his actions.

This brings us to House of M. Nothing can save the character from that, right? Well... Maybe Magneto can.


In House of M #1 Magneto finds Pietro at his sister's bedside and demands to know why he's there. That little question is glossed over but it is the oddest thing for Magneto to say. This is Quicksilver of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch here. Also known as Pietro "Is my sister going to be alright?" Maximoff. Now, I didn't read Excalibur but if Wanda is ill, why wouldn't he be there? We know as teenagers she used to get sick when she used her powers too much, and he used to take care of her during that. He's been playing nursemaid for her at least since they were 13. The thing to question here is that he hasn't been at her side constantly, rearranging the bedding, bringing her water and chicken soup, reading to her, doing anything that can possibly be done to care for a sick person. The only explanation for that question is that Magneto's already made it clear that he's not supposed to be there, probably to prevent Wanda from accidentally hurting him.

But Pietro's in the room in House of M #1, and this can't be the first time he's been there. And maybe... it's not the first time Pietro's tried to help Wanda control that power. I mean, it wouldn't be the first time he's applied his will to a mystical situation to try and help her (see "Nights of Wundagore", which is either magic or a result of Wanda's power by the Bendis retcon so it applies either way) and they probably couldn't have created a world so intense without having practiced first. Maybe whatever caused Wanda to lose her sanity got passed onto Pietro and amped up the stress level, leading to his own actions in that miniseries. If they go by that hateful idea that those powers cost Wanda her sanity, can you imagine what they did to the guy who's not built to have them? If it's just magic getting out of hand it makes even more sense that he was affected. And if she's being possessed or affected by some external source then that's probably been passed on to him by the opening of the miniseries too.

My point is, for a clever writer (or even just one with eyes) there's no reason to completely retcon out the past few years to save Quicksilver as a heroic character. His actions in Son of M were terrible, but there was major external interference causing it. Any combination of the items I mentioned above could be explored in a scene where someone questions Quicksilver's return to the Avengers and you can use him cleanly afterwards.

Crystal, on the other hand, would benefit greatly from all of us forgetting this miniseries ever happened.

I don't understand Marvel sometimes.

Remember 90s X-men? Remember this guy?



Joseph. He showed after Magneto was "killed" in the whole Onslaught mess, and everyone assumed it was the old man de-aged with bonus amnesia. And for a while he was on the X-men as they milked the whole distrust the stranger who strongly resembles our worst enemy for all it was worth. During this, he got romantically entangled with Rogue, and it worked nicely because it had the positives of the romance with Magneto, where a guy actually treated Rogue like a worthwhile person (fuck you and your bullshit macho entitlement attitude Gambit) without the negatives of him really being a hateful old man and the main villain of the franchise. (Though again, directed at Gambit, when your biggest romantic rival is the main villain of the franchise and that guy actually treats her BETTER than you do, you suck.)



As time went on, Joseph proved he was a genuinely noble soul and real hero in his own right, and the people who thought he was Magneto began to think Magneto could have been a good guy if only the psychic airline had lost his baggage. Then two things happened (and as 90s X-men went I'm not certain which came first): 1) Magneto came back, and 2) We met Mommy.



See, Joseph was just a clone of Magneto, created by his mad scientist ex-girlfriend in order to kill him.

Yes, that's right, Magneto has a good-guy clone-son and an evil mad scientist ex-girlfriend who wants to kill him... and Marvel is not using either of them.



It's weird, too. Astra is a really, really horrible person, but I really like her. She was apparently in the Brotherhood pre-Uncanny X-men #4, but left for ideological reasons or because Magneto wasn't screwing her or because Magneto dumped her or all three. The falling out was apparently over greed, Magneto wants to rule the world and establish his demographic as the one in power, she wants to rule the world and get rich. It was amplified by the sexual tension they had. She is incredibly fixated on how she felt about Magneto and how attractive he still is and how he either turned her down or dumped her, to the point that her preferred method of killing him is to clone him and tell the clone to call her Mommy. Because despite the fact that she knows he's a jackass and she wants to kill him, she still thinks he's one hell of a man.

For his part, he thinks she's a greedy soulless monster who cares nothing for her own people and is sworn to kill her on sight. He has called her deluded, so she may be a stalker-bad-guy rather than an ex, but I don't trust Magneto not to have taken a lover from his early cult when a woman was so readily up for the position. I mean... he was kinda creepy around Wanda sometimes (though not as bad as Xavier with Jean) and she was underage, his daughter, and completely repulsed by him. Astra's good-looking, older, and--even now that she hates his guts--really freaking hot for him. Also, he certainly seems to hate her a lot more passionately than he hates anyone else who's left the Brotherhood.

Also, I love the way they talk. Magneto is very lofty and formal, Astra is disrespectful, flippant, rude, and colloquial. She calls Joseph "Joey", and continually makes comments about how attractive Magneto is, comes on to Nightcrawler, reduces everything to it base level and constantly mutters about the shoddy alien tech that she's stolen and is using to attack him. Oh, and when she doesn't get to kill Magneto or take over the world by taking advantage of human gratitude, she says this:



I can't believe no one wants to use this character. I mean, how many supervillains, crazed parents, or psychotic ex-girlfriend/stalker characters have this much fun playing just one of those roles? She's having the time of her life being all three, and even stops to shake her fists at the heroes at the end!

But sadly, no one seems interested in her or her poor kid. Joseph dissipated after throwing all his power into the magnetic field of the earth to fix damage his old man did, and Astra was apparently "taken care of" off-panel by Apocalypse sometime. Really, they should bring both back, Rogue deserves a better love interest and Magneto certainly deserves more enemies.



That's probably the main reason I like her. There's an ex-wife/ex-girlfriend stereotype that writers love to play with, where the hurt woman dogs the poor innocent guy all over the place. Usually, this woman is very unbalanced and the wrong was completely out of proportion with result. Basically, it's always Carrie Fisher chasing the Blues Brothers all over Chicago so she can kill both because Jake left her at the altar. He's a jerk, but she's going way overboard.

With Magneto? He's responsible for how much horrible misery? Beyond the whole genocidal maniac thing, just look at his personal life. His first wife left him because he killed a whole bunch of people in front of her. He lost his temper and crushed his own son to death once. He is the worst possible scenario of that smooth guy who gets you on his side and then reveals that underneath he is--to quote his daughter--just this horrible person. You can completely side with any woman who says "He treated me like shit and he needs to die" even if she's as objectively awful as Astra.

Maybe that's it. They don't really want that stereotype to be someone that you even slightly side with, and if the guy in question is Magneto you know he did something horrible to her. Personally, I want Marvel to make a thing of this. I want this to be a Magneto problem on multiple fronts. Because not only do we have Astra in limbo, we also have his good-natured selfless wife Magda.

Now, Magda is not established as being anything more than a baseline human, but her two children have radically different powers than their father and it wouldn't be too much for suspension of disbelief if an old lady speedster showed up some day. (Wanda's powers are established as having been fucked with by Cthon, so I'm figuring Pietro's the one displaying the natural X-gene.) Also, no stretch of the imagination to find reasons Magda might think her husband needs to be stopped or even killed for the good of planet, or at least her poor kids.

Beyond that, we have Rogue, who ends up fighting the old man a lot as part of her job description. She generally thinks nicely of him as a lover, even when she knows he's a bastard politically, but her major romantic interest talks like she's a piece of trash he found on the curb so it might be a comparison thing.

Dig even deeper to find Lorna's mother, who is human and dead but that's never stopped anyone in comics. She can show up like Carrie Fisher and launch rockets at him and it shouldn't cause too much confusion. People might not even wonder about the details until it's revealed she's Lorna's mom.



And don't get me wrong, I love Magneto, he is my favorite villain specifically because he can be portrayed so sympathetically, has moments with genuinely good intentions and will organically cross to the good side from time to time. It's just that given the qualities he has displayed as a friend, an ally, a leader, an enemy, and a father, I wouldn't be surprised if every woman he ever slept with ended up trying to kill him or at least severely inconvenience him. At the very least my Dream X-book is that three of these four women team up to attack Magneto.

With Bova as their Jarvis.

Stuck on a moment

Girls Read Comics Too is putting together a Women of Marvel Memorable Moments poll (which is still accepting nominations until Sunday), and the list is pretty good. I want to make that clear before we go on. I like this list, I like this idea, I think you shoudl all go nominate stuff and vote.

But as with all fanlists, there's a couple in there that some fans loved but that make other fans cringe because everyone has different tastes. I'm pretty sure you all know which one I'm talking about:

NO MORE MUTANTS. Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch changed the lives of every person on the planet in House of M

What really got me was the sheer number of people suggesting it in the first post. I'm sure there's a number of Wanda-fans looking at that list and going "Oh HELL no, what's WRONG with people?"

See, House of M and Avengers: Disassembled are two of the absolute worst things to ever come out of Marvel for those of us who like Wanda. It's like Emerald Twilight and Zero Hour for Hal Jordan fans, two books that are fucking based around taking a hero we love and making her fucking crazy for no reason other than someone wants to change the franchise. Wanda Maximoff is the Parallax of the last decade (a comparison I've been on about in chat that I really must elaborate on in the future), and this is basically nominating Scarlet Twilight (No, we won't be going with Crimson or Ruby Twilight, it is going to be Scarlet Twilight) for an award while Scarlet Witch: Rebirth is experiencing shipping delays.

There is something distasteful just about seeing the storyline mentioned and driving home the point that everyone read her losing her mind, every book in the entire Marvel universe was affected, and every fan and writer has had "Womb Crazy Wanda" and the results shoved down their throats for the past six years.

And of course, the first defense of nominating this storyline is, like Zatanna in Identity Crisis (another nomination I complained endless about on Twitter) it was a major decision made by a woman that changed the world. It also underscored the sheer power the character contained, and the weight of their decisions. And in this case, perhaps because I favor the Scarlet Witch over Zatanna as a character, that might actually turn me a bit.

It is also the moment most fresh in fan minds about Wanda, being her last notable appearance prior to Children's Crusade (as an amnesiac guest star she is just a shadow of her true self, and flashback/AU appearances were far under the radar), so that has an effect.

But I don't think any of that is the real reason this sticks in our minds, the real reason it won't go away even after Children's Crusade brings her back and M-Day is undone. I think the real reason is the "I've had just about as much of this shit as I can stand" effect.

In the set of stories that would fall under the umbrella of "Scarlet Twilight" (West Coast Avengers: Darker than Scarlet, Avengers: Disassembled, House of M) Wanda has been fucked over severely from all sides. Her kids have been erased from existence, and she's been told by a demon, her fellow Avengers, and now her father and her "therapist" (Yeah, I'm sure Xavier has a degree but the bastard probably mind controlled his teachers into passing him) that not only were they not what they appeared, but they didn't exist. Her trusted Mentor Agatha Harkness has meddled with her memory. The Marvel Authority on Magic, Dr. Strange, contradicted all of his prior statements about Wanda and stated that she has no magic and it's been her freaky powers all along. The Avengers take him at his word, and do nothing to investigate whether or not her behavior was caused by an external force (such as that demon that took away her children). Captain America turns her over to a father who has a history of manipulating and using his children. Her father turns her over to the world's worst therapist. She's removed from her friends (Magneto's reaction to finding Pietro at her side implies he wasn't even allowed to visit), imprisoned, drugged and subjected to invasive telepathic therapy. The X-men, a team created to protect mutants from a society that feels they are too dangerous to live because of their powers, says that she is too dangerous to live because of her powers. Her friends in the Avengers have chosen to discuss this with them. Her father tells her brother that nothing can be done to stop it. (She was watching that.) And to top it off her sense of reality, her memory, and her powers--her very genes--are rebelling against her, tearing her in different directions and have caused her to kill several teammates--including her close friend Clint and her own husband.

Through all this, all she has left is her brother--who cannot obtain an ally to help save her life--who sacrifices his own independence (as well as his relationship to his wife and daughter--both of whom where absent in M-World) to hide her in a world. For this, for giving everything that their father could possibly want to him and finding a way to do this without destroying all their friends, her brother--bringing to life a nightmare she's had since they first met Magneto--becomes a victim of her father's violent temper.

I hate House of M and the effect it had, but I honestly can't make a case that it was Bendis hating on Wanda. She is the most sympathetic character in the story, the most put-upon woman in the universe. She has gone from having a full SUPERHERO family and friends to just having one person left in the universe who is willing to fight to save her life and sanity, and when she almost loses him... she loses it.

"No More Mutants" was a horrible moment. It was sheer rage and misery. It nearly destroyed the Marvel Universe. But unlike the previous two stories (the first of which was just cruel and the second of which made NO sense and totally ignored the resolution of the first), it was a logical continuation of her story. It was born of grief, anger, pain, abandonment, disillusionment horribly out-of-character actions by the rest of the cast, and kneeling in the blood of her twin brother after her father had beaten the life out of him.

It was not a heroic moment, though you could argue that after her experience with her own powers she honestly thought everyone would be better off. It was more of a "Fuck you, I'm leaving" to her father, to the hypocritical X-men, to the New Avengers, to the world, and to whatever cruel deity had given her those awful powers. It was Wanda, after being jerked around by EVERYONE for two crossovers, finally putting her foot down.

It was not a heroic moment. It was not a positive moment. It was, however, a powerful moment.

And while we're all betting on the Phoenix as the final winner, I have to wonder what it means if it wins. Because this moment is the one that classifies the Scarlet Witch as her father's daughter. It is a very Magneto thing to react to being hurt and betrayed by taking it out on an entire species. It is a very Magneto thing to think you are doing good when you act that way. It is a very Magneto action, the sort of action that allows him to be a compelling villain that can be allied with heroes from time to time. But... it is not an action that you can attributed to someone and classify them as a hero. It's defining moment of villainy and in order to use the Scarlet Witch as a hero it will need to be undone somehow. The effects will need to be reversed, and it will likely be attributed to lingering mind control (though sadly not hair-graying mind control because that would have looked pretty cool).

At least, I sincerely hope it will be undone. I liked the X-books better with the expansive attitude of the Morrison era, and the optimism of the 90s or the Silver Age. I don't like this dying race angle. I don't like it all being Wanda's fault. I don't like Wanda as a villain, or in limbo. And honestly? I hope next time we do a poll like this it doesn't even pass the agency rule.

Disappointed before the first issue ships

CBR has a feature up teasing Age of X by showing the files of Henry Gyrich in the alternate universe, profiling several of our heroes. What really strikes me are the relations listings, and how many characters which are not being used by the X-office and haven't been used by the X-office for years are also missing and dead in this X-men alternate universe. (And I'm going to mention specifics soon, so consider this your spoiler warning.)

And it takes me back to how when Janet Van Dyne was taken off the board in the 616 universe, the Ultimate version of the Wasp was killed in Ultimatum. How when Wanda went crazy in Disassembled it was closely followed by Wanda getting killed in Ultimates.

It's very weird to me, because an alternate timeline storyline is a great opportunity to play with characters you don't normally get to play with, to have dead people alive and inactive people active, and make villains into good guys and bystanders into heroes. It's a really cool playground, but time and time again Marvel seems to decide that when something happens in the 616 universe it is reverberated across the multiverse! Hell, in "Ghost Box" Beast outright states that this is the case with M-Day, meaning that we aren't going to get to see an alternate timeline where mutants are the majority except for House of M flashbacks.

I know there's writers who get it, and we had a lot of variety in Hickman's Fantastic Four excursions and that Exiles is all over the fucking place, but it seems to me like ongoing things like the Ultimate Universe and large scale events like Age of X are squandering huge opportunities by having the same cast in a different setting. Don't get me wrong, Magneto, Rogue and Cyclops are awesome but we can read them together ALL THE TIME right now. We can't really read Cyclops and Havok at the moment because Havok is lost in space. We can only read Magneto and the twins in a single bimonthly series now, otherwise we haven't seen them since House of M. We can't read Rogue and Destiny now, ever, because they killed her off so damned long ago and she's just not a character who gets resurrected.

And these are things that would be fresh and unusual because we haven't seen them in the regular universe for so long. I still maintain that one of the greatest X-crossovers in history is Age of Apocalypse, partially because the only character who absolutely had to be absent was Xavier. With that rule in place, we got a lot of odd relationship stuff that we simply could never see the way 616 was set up. We had Nightcrawler and Mystique as a bickering mother-and-son team. We had Magneto as a loving husband and father, with a supportive relationship with his son (I am a bit irked they killed off Wanda in this crossover). We had Rogue as a mother and stepmother. We had Quicksilver and Storm in a romance. We had Cyclops and Havok raised together by Sinister. We had one-off death Blink alive and active, which actually led to the creation of the freaking Marvel Multiverse by being so popular she launched a series based on traveling through alternate universes!

It was a dystopian setting, but it was expansive and varied. Age of X so far strikes me as based on the same scarcity mentality that is driving the mutant plotlines in the regular universe. There was a "Decimination" and now the vast majority of mutants are dead rather than depowered, so it's a worse place where all the same characters are active. I like Mike Carey, but... it seems so small.

First Rant of the Year (That didn't take long)

So this stuff was up on Tumblr...



Yeah, Marvel... We need to have a talk. This thing with Wanda, I know I've complained before but you are seriously out of your heads with this. Right now you are selling a maxiseries to her fans based on the idea of her CHILDREN finding her and getting her back to regular operation but everywhere but INSIDE THAT MAXISERIES you continue to push the idea that she hallucinated her children and lost her sanity. With zero textual clues to suggest that the characters are wrong in this assumption.

Don't get me wrong. I understand that you have to establish certain things in the regular universe in order to set up the premise, which is that everyone but Wanda, Magneto, and Billy think that the kids were just a manifestation of her mental illnessand out of control powers. I understand that this sets up drama.

The problem is that you're dragging this shit out so long, and fixing it completely underground. Disassembled interrupted half of your line and REBOOTED entire franchises. House of M took over the ENTIRE Marvel line and rebooted the OTHER half of your line! And since then, for at least SIX years every MENTION of Wanda has come with a nod to her being tragically insane and everything short of ominous music. You have spent SIX years and your two highest profile crossovers pounding ALL of your readers over the head with the idea that Wanda is BABY CRAZY.

Then, you offer us an option to fix her in Avengers: Children's Crusade.... A special that is entirely self-contained and not reflected in any of the other books published right now. A narrative thread that we have to go out of our way to find (again, there are NO textual clues outside of Children's Crusade and it's single sad prelude that the Avengers are wrong to assume Wanda's irredeemably insane), is being shipped ever OTHER month, and will last 9 issues that will total up to an 18 month storyline. The book itself is oddly out of time, and does not reflect any of the other developments in recent years despite using characters like Steve Rogers--who appears in half the books you publish--without reflecting their current in-story status, and PROMINENTLY featuring characters like Quicksilver and Magneto who are right now appearing in other books with no nod to the emotional build-up to this story (Magneto's heavy concerns involving his children, Pietro's conclusions that these are his nephews) or the fallout from its conclusion.

This, I believe, would be okay if you had made it as high profile an event as the TWO events in which you destroyed Wanda's image as hero, or did not insist on decompressing the living fuck out of this maxiseries along with dragging it out over 18 months WHILE you continued to use those 18 months to push the narrative of Baby Crazy Wanda.

Y'know, your distinguished competition had this problem with a Silver Age character once. They made Hal Jordan crazy evil and stuck to it for ten years and do you know what happened when they changed their minds? They built up to it. We saw Hal EVERYWHERE and we had foreshadowing all over the fucking place that he was coming back and that it wasn't his fault. After the build up they made him good again in a high profile miniseries... that had a compact six-issue storyline, shipped monthly, and led to the reboot of a franchise. And after that mini? We saw Hal everywhere again rebuilding all those bridges his time under mind control had burnt.

See, after you've dedicated so much time and energy to forcing a heroic character into the role of villain, and have enthusiastically sold the character that way to the readers for an extended period of time... You get a lot of readers and future writers who think that character is a villain. If you want to FIX that, you need to make their redemption a Big Fucking Deal, and make it easily seen by all those readers who gave been eating the shit you've been selling for the last six or ten years rather than just the die-hard holdouts who have been waiting for this since you made her nuts. Otherwise, you'll have a lot of confusion and you risk the right dumbass writer connecting with the right dumbass editor a year or two down the road and having this exchange:

"Hey, wasn't she a bad guy?"
"She's been good since that.. Damn, I forget the name if the mini but it was mind control I think."
"I only know how to write her bad. Let's soft retcon it and use her as a villain."

Or:

"Hey, as a kid I read this cool story where she went nuts. Anyone ever resolve it?"
"... I don't remember, I think she jyst came back to the team."
"Okay I got this idea... We'll call it AVENGERS: DISASSEMBLED..."

And even if that seems too farfetched or just like something that happens anyway, you still have characterization creep. Your writers, editors and artists have been not only pushing this shit but they've been consuming it themselves. Future writers, editors and artists are consuming it. Even if they are ASSIGNED Wanda as a hero, they still have the impression of a weak-willed passive woman who cannot tell reality from fantasy. These traits will overtake her as they write, because you have been pushing them endlessly and this is the image they have of her now. This is just like Hal Jordan's inability to feel fear, Quicksilver's mental instability, and Crystal's wandering eye... All flaws never in their original concepts that now serve to completely define those characters to the point of pushing away their relatability unless the writer works their ass off at researching and restoring the original personality. With every reference to Wanda's insanity you are CONTINUING to destroy your second female mutant character and your second female Avenger--one of your few female characters with a solid profeminist Silver Age foundation. This is not only irritating, it is MIND-BOGGLING to me that you'd do this.

There's really only one way you can save her. When Wanda gets back, she needs to be directly involved in rebuilding everything she destroyed (Bringing Hawkeye back was a good idea, but you are really going to need to overturn M-Day through HER actions) and she's going to need to make those Hal Jordan style pop-ins where she teams up with everyone in the Marvel Universe and defends herself against their grievances. If you leave M-Day in effect, if you just have people drop the grumbling without actually interacting with Wanda, all this shit is going to remain and Scarlet Twilight II is just around the horizon.

Also, that quote of hers bugs me on two levels. Continuity-wise that's a Lee quote, long before they ever found Bova and got the story of their birth. That story's set up so that Wanda has to be the older one, that's why Cthon would infuse her with power. (Unless you're planning something odd with Pietro and Oshtur.) Personality-wise, unless she's drugged out of her gourd like in House of M she knows better than to defer to anything Pietro says. That is hardly a quote indicative of her personality, and I'm a bit annoyed at your Polaris one too. It's awfully generic.

That said, the Quicksilver profile is very compassionate look at his actions and leaves open the option that Steve doubts Pietro's Skrull story. A previous one suggested Steve couldn't tell there was lying involved, this one may well have been after Pietro came clean and the "skrull interference" would be the Skrull that was in Attilan during Son of M. That one made me wince, because a) Captain America should be able to tell when someone as neurotic as Quicksilver is lying to him, b) Steve should know Pietro well enough to tell, and c) I was a little worried someone would have Steve on the less likely to forgive side of this one. It gives me some hope we'll see a little interaction between those two characters again, at least.

Pietro Maximoff and the Soulsearingly Massive Lie

Yesterday I learned that Quicksilver is going to be a teacher in Avengers Academy. This makes me feel a lot better for really complicated reasons about the proper way to structure a redemption arc, and Slott's pacing on the Pietro subplot.

The Pietro subplot, which still gives me a nasty taste, is not a horrible idea for a redemption arc. It covers Pietro's major issues since at least House of M: he's lost trust in just about everyone, he's retreating into deception, and he is absolutely terrified of living without Wanda. He didn't trust the new Avengers to defend Wanda from the members of the X-men who wanted to kill her. (This may have been rooted in the fact that they were willing to discuss it, but Steve and Tony didn't have much choice in that Wanda was actually in Magneto and Prof. X's custody, and they couldn't just say "No, we can't kill her" and expect her to be given safely back.) He didn't trust his father to prevent Wanda's execution. (Okay, that may have been a reasonable one.) Wanda wouldn't let him just run away like he likes to, so he tried to hide her in a MASSIVE Lie. And to make the MASSIVE Lie work, they tried to make it as pleasant as possible so that everyone just got pissed off when they found out it was a lie. Magneto was so upset he killed Pietro. (But does he have the Furies hounding his ass to the edge of the world and back? No, he gets to have the moral high ground next meeting with Pietro, and then go be a "good guy" for a while after he spills his son's blood all over the place). Wanda brings him back to life, but is so upset by his death that she curses her father (but he gets his powers back, and no one calls the Furies on his ass), and the rest of the family (who eventually get their powers back), and all of the innocent mutants in the world who had nothing to do with this (They don't get their powers back. She gets all the blame for this, of course, even though she was kneeling in her twin brother's blood--the twin brother who'd been trying to prevent her death--and still suffering the effects of whatever actually caused her breakdown in Disassembled, and the effects of Professor Xavier's incompetence. I mean seriously, who the fuck treats being out of touch with reality by trying to convince someone parts of her life that happened, that she remembers happening, that other people remmeber happened, never happened? The demon babies were demon babies, but they were actually BORN, you arrogant jackass! What the fuck?). She runs off, but loses her depowered and thoroughly traumatized little brother somehow. He resurfaces in New York to offer us an unobstructed view of his heartwrenching descent into madness.

To be honest, Son of M is a compelling and disturbing story. I don't really want it wiped from continuity, even though it has my favorite character doing some really heinous things, because it strikes me as a genuine mental breakdown. This story is the result of being killed by his own father after becoming the submissive robotically loyal son the old man's always wanted. He's depowered, abandoned, suicidally depressed (Spider-man accidentally talks him into jumping off the roof), and seizes at the first chance to at least get his powers back. He's always put most of his self-worth in those powers and how useful they make him to the team, and how they allow him to protect his sister. He exposes himself to a dangerous chemical, and gets even further unbalanced by the substance and the powers he gains from it. Well, maybe not the powers so much as his manipulative evil future self. (Never trust any version of yourself you can look in the face without a mirror, kids.) The rest of plot in Son of M is really uncomfortable, because this is a father turning to drugs and then giving the addictive substance to his daughter while he's high. His last sane act is to send the little girl back to her mother before he just up and becomes the full villain. From there he descends to the lowest point, burns all the social bridges he can, and makes everyone who ever loved him regret having met him.

He plays around with X-Factor for a bit (I found myself rooting for him to kill Layla, actually, because she's a fucking manipulative asshole but now it's too late for that) before we get to David's shot at a redemption arc. I'm being generous when I say arc, because it's a one-shot (X-Factor: The Quick and the Dead) where Pietro spends a night in jail, hallucinating pep talks from loved ones who won't actually talk to him (the one offrom Magneto lets us know that even in his fantasies Pietro can't get a hug from his Dad). While he's being counseled by figments of his imagination that he's a person worthy of love and forgiveness, he's distracted when he sees someone else in trouble. When he focuses on getting help for that person, he suddenly just gets his original powers back (maybe that first hallucination really was Wanda popping in to check on him) and decides he wants to be a good guy from now on. We can only conclude from this that Pietro Maximoff's imagination is the best therapist in the Marvel Universe, and that Wanda would have been better served by her brother's hallucinations than by that fucking arrogant telepath.

All joking aside, there is an incredible display of conscience and determination in this issue. David actually took all the stories where Pietro was being used as a plot device to drive the mutants and the Inhumans into the worst settings possible and used them to support his point that Quicksilver is an inherently good person underneath all the manure.

Villainy in the superhero genre is normally the result of a spiral of misery that causes the villain to lash out at others. Many villains have misfortunes--often their own fault--that they blame on the hero or society. They might desire revenge. They try to get revenge and are thwarted, which they blame on the hero rather than their own actions, which leads to more revenge attempts, more failure, and more blaming external forces for problems that are really their own fault. Or they might feel they're shortchanged in life, and try to rectify this injustice. When that fails, they feel even more cheated and try to rectify the injustice again, making things worse, making themselves feel more cheated and so on and so on. A villain like that is trapped being a villain because he never takes responsibility for his own actions.

In House of M, Pietro blames his father for his sister's breakdown. He convinces her to fix herself and her own actions, and while she's at it to fix this and that and ooh, that other thing even though it's suspected that any use of her powers just worsens her mental state. He knows mind control is wrong. He knows lying is wrong. He knows his sister is not supposed to use her powers. But he rationalizes that this can save her life, and if they actually replace the old world with a better one it's not as wrong. In Son of M, Pietro still doesn't realize that the action wasn't justified, and has the further misery of not having his powers anymore. He thinks they could have done it better, but now he's lost his sister from the "imperfections". When he does get a brief glimpse of just how wrong his actions were, he attempts to kill himself. When Spider-man stops that, he goes back to blaming external forces for his problems. He sinks further into the cycle of villainy, destroys what little is left of his family (which I think was a blessing in disguise because he and Crystal were a colossally horrible marriage, Crystal is about as interesting as wet cardboard, and Luna has powers now so there's less chance of her being Lianed), and ends up deciding on Layla as the cause of his troubles.

But after he gets well and truly defeated by the good guys, this bad guy does something most villains don't. He drags himself out of the twisted wreckage of his life, looks around and sees that he's the one who destroyed everything, and rather than decide to continue blaming his father or Layla for his problems, he accepts that it was really his own idiocy and arrogance that caused it, and then concludes that he can move past that and be the sort of person who helps people again. That is a heroic feat. The lower he's sunk, the more enemies he's made, the more trapped in the villain mindset he seemed to be before this, the closer he is to the Point of Absolutely No Return Ever, the more difficult it is to make that sort of breakthrough. The more horrible the actions, the more dangerous it is for your own sanity to face the responsibility. And heroism is directly proportional to difficulty and danger. Really, I find this sort of turnaround so incredibly admirable that I'm glad they didn't wipe all of this experience away to make him turn out to be a Skrull.

I finished the X-Factor one-shot incredibly happy, and this lasted until I picked up Mighty Avengers and found out he'd been lying about being a Skrull. While it would be stupid to have Pietro completely fixed after one night of hallucinating, it still jarred me to see him lying. Pietro is a character with an honor debt in his origin. I was very worried that he was back in the cycle of villainy until they did the Unspoken storyline. Pietro's not externalizing the blame anymore. His thoughts during the battle with the Unspoken were that the entire mess was his fault because he caused that war, and he wanted to make it right. He doesn't blame Crystal for remarrying, and doesn't waste any thoughts on the new husband. He's not mad at Luna because she rejected him for lying. The primary thing on his mind is this Big Fucking Lie and how he can't get out of it. (And he contrasts Hank Pym here so neatly I get the impression one of Hank's tasks is to save Pietro.)

So he's stopped blaming Daddy for his problems. He still got three big issues, though. Trust, Truth and Wanda. He doesn't trust his friends to accept him after what he's done, he's still turning to deceit as a way to make his life easier, and he's still fixated on Wanda to the exclusion of everyone else's rights. (The Wanda fixation is just one of the reasons a proper Pietro redemption arc has to end before Wanda gets back, the others being that she's his reward and he's her reward. He needs to be redeemed before he deserves to be reunited with her. And when her redemption arc is finished? She's supposed to be rewarded by seeing the bundle of anxiety issues she loves and not the bundle of self-loathing we've had running around since she left.)

I was expecting that with Loki revealed in Mighty Avengers #34, Pietro would drop the deception but no, he kept with it and just rejected everyone else. It seemed like he was slipping back to blaming others so I got antsy for a while, especially as there were only two issues left to resolve the Lie. I was actually angry until I saw the last issue. All he gets is a half-page, but I believe it touches all of the issues I've noted. He even manages to blame others a bit (though after what Hank pulled I can't really call that bit of dialogue backsliding) as he wonders why the hell he acts the way he does.



We're down to one issue to resolve his plot, but he's the sort of character who will impulsively blurt out a confession in a public place. And the news that he'll be in Avengers Academy with Hank Pym of all people tells me he's not still upset at Hank, and they will at least make some progress on his trust issues and his fixation on Wanda.

I really want them to fix the Lie next issue, though. I want them to fix it three issues ago. Until they do, he can't properly bond with a team, he can't be reunited with his sister, and he can't claim the moral high ground with his father.

Mutants, Cowardice, and a Severe Misunderstanding of Quicksilver's Behavior

"We're trying to completely reimagine the concept of the super hero team book here," Mark Millar told Wizard. "I mean, wouldn't it be interesting to see some people chicken out and call in sick when there's somebody they know can kick the sh-- out of them?"

--Mark Millar during the runup to Ultimates

"It's a cynical corpse of a superhero universe"

--Kalinara, Miller vs. Millar: A Rant About Cynical Superhero Storytelling

I must confess that back in the 90s DC I had no aversion to a Mark Millar writing credit. I remember my sister pointing out--when he wrote DC books--that he had an irritating "twist" ending at the end of all of his stories that was predictable in itself, but I never really had a problem with him. It wasn't until they launched the Ultimate Universe over at Marvel that I realized that I hated Mark Millar's work.

I initially liked the line, Bendis's Ultimate Spider-man was quite good and the first storyline of Ultimate X-Men featured my favorite set of villains--Magneto and his two brats. But there was something about Ultimate X-Men that rang hollow, though at the time I couldn't quite quantify it. This had been meant to be a slick, streamlined relaunch but there was a sleazy layer of grime to it. Wolverine in particular seemed... lesser. As a fan of Wolverine's more relatable aspects (the cranky uncle of the Marvel Universe, the guy who finds it all the more irritating that he can't really hate the man married to that girl he loves, the brooder who stays above his animalistic nature but doesn't let on about it, the smartass old bastard on the team) I'm not impressed by making him a more brutal or successful fighter. I'm not impressed with crazy eyes or hostility from this character. (He's blunt, not hostile.) Millar seemed to have lost thehuman side of Wolverine. I'm quite attached to him as the guy who stands around the breakroom in his cowboy hat drinking beer and being kind of a dick to Cyclops, who puts up with it because he knows they can count on him in any situation. The inherent trustworthiness of Wolverine wasn't there. Maybe it was coming on to a teenager instead of a grown woman. Maybe it was not enough standing around the breakroom in his cowboy hat being good-naturedly dickish rather than just dickish. Whatever the problem, Ultimate Wolverine just didn't work for me.

Ultimate Magneto was another problem. The common complaint is that Magneto is more honorable, but that wasn't precisely my problem. My problem is that Magneto is more mature than he was in the Ultimate universe. Really, attacking the White House and throwing around cars just seemed puerile to me. It wasn't something the arrogant old fuck we all know and love to hate would do. It's too small and childish for the guy who reversed the polarity of the whole fucking planet in the regular universe. The worst bit was him begging Xavier for mercy. Our Magneto is a sneaky hypocrite, but he has too much pride for that. He's a dignified bad guy. That's why he's such a big-name bad guy.

Still, Ultimate X-Men featured a genuinely creepy Professor Xavier and Pietro turning on his father (the look of shock on Magneto's face was a good moment) so I didn't consider the first arc a huge disaster. It was enough to bring me over to Ultimates, which promised an appearance by my two favorite Avengers (who also happen to be two of my favorite X-Men villains). That is where I realized exactly what was wrong with this entire universe.

There weren't any heroes there.

Seriously. Marvel has always been famous for the fundamental flaws in its heroes, but there were always redemptive qualities that balanced these flaws out. Mark Millar's reimagining of the "superhero" concept deliberately stripped the characters of their redemptive qualities. In Ultimates, Bruce Banner doesn't attempt desperately to cure himself while running from a man who wants to turn him into a weapon. He is addicted to being the Hulk and knowingly activates it again. Tony Stark doesn't seem to feel any guilt about his inventions at all. He is purely in it for the rush of being a superhero, there's no nobility or responsibility balancing his hedonism as there is in the mainline and the movieverse. Thor (who to be fair was one of the better re-imaginings just because here everyone assumes he is insane) is content to gather a cult and withhold his help based on politics. (Yes, it was funny, but it wasn't exactly a heroic idea.) Giant-Man and the Wasp were in a deeply abusive relationship that robbed both of their best qualities (his genius and genuine desire to do good, her strength in actively obtaining powers and leaving the relationship once the first punch was thrown).

Captain America is without a doubt the absolute worst. His core concept is that he is the absolute ideal of every American history book, the complete best that the country could possibly have to offer, the moral pinacle of the American culture preserved perfectly in time from what is almost universally regarded as the most just position the USA has ever taken in wartime. Instead, he is the embodiment of the most shameful aspects of his generation, and an indictment of the worst aspects of the prevailing US political climate.

That didn't make me drop it, though. What ultimately made me drop it was when Millar's above quote came into effect and Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch sat out fighting the shapeshifting aliens because they were "sick."

When I first read Millar's quote on calling in sick, my traditionalist mind pictured one of the younger team members sitting by a toilet sick to his stomach with fear while Captain America talked some sense into him. Or, at best, the guy that calls in sick, then changes his mind and shows up at the climax. But that was the fault of my foolishly conventional mind, Mark Millar had other thoughts for a heroic story. Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, my two personal favorites, chickened the fuck out the first mission and sat it out. Because giving in is apparently more interesting than someone transcending their weaknesses.

Now, I have an idea why Millar might have picked those two. On their first mission as Avengers, Pietro establishes his especially bad habit of running ahead of the group. Not two panels pass before a terrified Pietro runs back to Captain America.



I find this actually quite adorable, and not just because Don Heck drew an adorable Quicksilver. This is a necessary component of heroic stories. Fear. It's something you need to overcome to face the monster, and seeing one of the heroes get out of sorts when coming face to face with the bad guy emphasizes the danger. Pietro's a young man (I believe at this point he's a teenager, but that's a long unsettled argument between Kalinara and I), and this is his first time out as a hero. It is natural that he's going to panic a little. That's not cowardice, because he doesn't run off from the battle or hide from the bad guy. He just has the character trait of being fearful. It emphasizes his heroism rather than detracts from it, because it's something he has to fight through. Cowardice is when the character is fearful, but doesn't fight through it.

The Ultimate Universe is the Marvel Universe reimagined without nuance or complexity. (I've long argued that it is Marvel's answer to the DC's Crime Syndicate, and I eagerly await when the two meet and Captain America kicks Captain Jingo's ass while scolding him for disrespecting our oldest allies.) When Millar recreated a character, he first distilled them to his or her basic character components. Then he carefully discarded the merits and magnified the flaws, occasionally adding completely different ones. All he had to do afterwards was add profanity. Pietro and Wanda go from being wide-eyed and fearful on their first mission to being full cowards. Rather than joining the Avengers to build a positive reputation and prove themselves better than Magneto, they join to hide from Magneto who scares them shitless.

To be fair, this is reasonable considering he seems to have raised them in the Ultimate Universe. I'm not sure exactly how early he got them, but I imagine he would have fucked them up even more royally if he'd known they were his kids right away. Magneto somehow manages to be an even worse father when he actually tries to be a father. (See Magneto Rex, House of M.)

Still, as much sense as this chain of events makes in how people behave, I don't read superhero books to root for cowards and glory-seekers who never learn that it's bad to be cowards and glory-seekers so I dropped the book to preserve both wallet and blood pressure.

I'm glad I dropped it when I did, because subsequent scans have revealed the Loeb ran with the incest angle on the Maximoffs. That really pissed me off.

See, Quicksilver has long been criticized by the arrested development set as having a "creepy" relationship with his sister. I can only conclude that these critics are either severely emotionally underdeveloped, or they have never sat down and thought through Quicksilver's personal history.

Pietro and Wanda were separated from their foster parents (whom they believe are their real parents) at a young enough age they don't have a clear memory of them. They're twins so no one really has seniority, but they've been raised in an old world mindset so Pietro has picked up some sexist attitudes about male responsibility. He's not so much a chauvinist as a chivalrist, but still, quite sexist in that he believes that as the boy he's the stronger and should be the more responsible.

Couple that with their natural personalities. Pietro is an anxious, very grounded in reality, and holds a serious outlook. He has physical (or at least, manifesting as physical) powers, and wonderful control over them. They're nothing but a boon to him, and these speed powers seem custom-made to make him an excellent protector and provider. Wanda is a distracted romantic, a dreamer. She has trouble from an early age distinguishing truth from fiction (in "Nights of Wundagore", a 70s story, they establish that her foster parents told her stories about WWII and she believed that they'd happened to her), is much slower perception and reaction-wise than he is, and her powers manifest as bad luck/clumsiness. It probably took until Magneto found them before they realized she was powerful instead of simply clumsy and unlucky. Not only that, when they DO realize she has powers, they realize she has almost no control over them. (This is actually part of the appeal of Wanda. She is incredibly awkward and clumsy early on, and grows into being a pretty badass superhero. That's also why that West Coast Avengers storyline, Disassembled and House of M were so fucking infuriating. They threw away the growth and returned her to poor Wanda with the crazy powers who needs her baby brother to protect her.)

So, in Pietro's mind, he's got a slow, clumsy, gullible and chronically unlucky sister. He loves her very much, but as he can see it he's got the advantage and it's his job to take care of things. And to make matters worse, she grows up to be HAWT. I believe it's safe to assume that even before they ran into Magneto, they ran into a lot of predatory types.

Now we have a set of orphaned and alone twins, a girl who is chronically unlucky and a boy who is very athletic. The chronically unlucky girl is in the wrong place at the wrong time, a fire starts, and she gets blamed for it. They are now fleeing an angry mob when OUT OF NOWHERE, a man appears and fends off the mob with his fantastical powers. There's probably a great deal of bloodshed, but we don't know for sure because you couldn't show that sort of thing in a code book during the Silver Age. The man collects the terrified twins, who are in awe of his fantastical powers and the violence he's willing to put them to.

They were probably fooled early on into thinking this man is a benevolent protector (unless, of course, he graphically killed the whole fucking town in front of their tender adolescent eyes like I think he did), but I imagine that misconception went away the second the recruitment drive started and they saw the unsavory sorts they were forced to room with. What we end up with is two traumatized teenagers in a room filled with terrorists.

So we have Pietro--with what he considers his slow, clumsy, gullible, chronically unlucky sister--in room full of terrorists with fucking amazing powers. The old man has unimaginable power, designs on world domination and is perfectly willing to maim, kill, mutilate innocents and even let his own men (specifically, Pietro) die if it'll get them towards that goal. One of them casts illusions and doesn't even hide that he wants to fuck his sister. The other likes to gross out his sister and will sell them both out to the old man if it'll get him a treat. Oh, and the old man is perfectly willing to present his sister as an incentive for more powerful men to join the group.

Is the protectiveness not starting to look less like incest and more like a Type A personality's natural reaction to a truly fucked-up situation?

And as this happened during their formative years, it's a habit you won't discard even in the safety of Avengers Mansion. He might not trust unfamiliar people right away, especially as Magneto had presented himself as a savior. He might worry that allowing them to disrespect her will lead to them taking even further liberties. (This isn't so far off, considering that every male in the Avengers seems to go through a point of crushing on Wanda, Wonder Man even going so far as to prevent her husband's restoration to get in her pants. Hell, Hawkeye was willing to sleep with her while she was an amnesiac, which is pretty creepy.) He might not fully trust the robot who was made by their worst enemy to take care of her. He might react very badly to finding out all these people that he learned to trust slowly over time (overcoming the anxieties formed by spending his adolescent years in the Brotherhood working Magneto) are willing to--after not killing Kang, not killing Loki, not killing Dr. Doom and so on--discuss executing his sister while she's ill.

And the incest idea really annoys me because it shows me that either the writer has not actually sat down and considered where Pietro's character comes from, or the writer's just an incredibly cynical person who sees a sexual motive in any closeness between two members of the opposite sex. (I'll give you, this is one place Bendis managed well in House of M. He got where those two were coming from and wrote a tragically devoted relationship without creepy overtones.)

This is without going into the underlying truth of the relationship, which is that for all Pietro's worry and protectiveness, Wanda is the one actually in control. Wanda, the idealist, is the one with the real core of strength here. She's from a traditionalist mindset when it comes to gender, but that doesn't mean she lets her brother push her around. She'll defer to him on some occasions, but more often than not she knows better than to put baby brother in the driver's seat. Pietro's anxiety weakens him, and he has an inherent softness to him. He's an emotional, family-oriented worrywort who tags along to make sure she's safe. Wanda is the one who makes decisions for her own life and happiness, and progresses as a person. He just orbits her. He has no worth in his own mind except for his powers and how he can use them to help his family. That's why after House of M he starts to lose his fucking mind, while she's content to make a a secluded life without him or power. (Yes, even regressed as she was by those two crossovers, she still comes off stronger than her brother.) Part of why he's so zealous to protect her physically is because he can't handle a life on his own. It's a very old world gender dynamic.

Why bring this one up? Because it carried over into the Ultimate Universe. Wanda was the controlling twin. She was the primary decisionmaker. She comforted and supported him emotionally. So, if incest was going to happen, it was actually more on Wanda's head as the stronger in the relationship than on her anxious, needy brother. So the incest angle really tears her to pieces, and reduces the primary relationship in her life to a sexual one. This is especially problematic as Wanda is one of very few female characters in comics who places such importance on a nonsexual relationship.

Of course, I haven't read the actual issue, and the incest may not be Wanda's fault. But that's even worse because then the balance in the relationship between the Maximoffs is thrown out of whack. Pietro (and a version of Pietro that is inherently weaker as a result of Magneto's influence than our beloved mainline basketcase) the physical protector and provider is now also the decisionmaker, and Wanda has no pull whatsoever. Some 21st Century updating of the Avengers.