Jimmy Olsen’s Blues

Hey, look, it’s a new post! Sorry we’ve been away for so long, but at least we’ve been Twittering, and that’s not nothin’, right?

sigh Sorry. We’ll try not to let it happen again.

We were brought out of semi-retirement by this “Scott and Jean” meme started by Alert Nerd which has been making the rounds the last couple of days. The point, for those of you might not have seen it or don’t feel like clicking the link, is that we comics readers each have those things which we feel so strongly about we can’t even rationally discuss the topic. I don’t think I’m so far gone about my choice that I can’t even talk about it like an adult, but I did feel passionately about the issue, even though I knew at the time that passion was going to prove fruitless. Anyways, here’s mine:

X-Men #3 (1991)

I firmly believe Magneto should have been capital-D permanently never-ever-comin’-back Dead at the end of Adjectiveless X-Men #3 (1991).

Chris Claremont brought Magneto through an absolutely fabulous character arc in the X-Men titles throughout the back half of the ’80s and the beginning of the ’90s. He added nobility to the character and a sense of depth rarely seen in comic-book bad guys before that point. Under Claremont’s direction, Mangeto went from regular full-on supervillain, to a man trying to fight his own nature and be a force for good, to a man crumbling under the weight of expectations he couldn’t bear and returning to what he knew — even as he knew he was disappointing those who had put their trust in him.

At the end of X-Men #3, Magneto died (in the sense that there’s any such thing as “death” within the ever-continuing genre of mainstream superhero comics, of course). He went out almost literally crushed beneath those expectations, and it was a perfect ending for the character — and for Claremont’s run on the X-Men, as that issue was the close of his almost-two-decade run on the title. Claremont was the one who added such dimension to the character, and I thought Marvel should have left the character dead.

Magneto by Jim Lee

I knew it wasn’t going to happen, of course. That’s just not the way comics work. They did leave Magneto alone for a couple of years, but he’s been back and re-killed and re-brought-back a couple of times over the eighteen years(!) since Claremont ended his story. Even if subsequent writers hadn’t had their own ideas for what to do with the character, the X-Men movies and Magneto’s prominent place in them would surely have convinced Marvel to bring him back then. Don’t mean I think it’s right, but I accept that that’s the way it is.

And funnily enough: now Marvel’s given Claremont his own book, X-Men Forever, which continues the story exactly from the end of this issue, letting Claremont explore what he might have done with the characters had he not gotten shitcanned from the books. I wonder how long it’ll take before Claremont brings Magneto back himself in that book?