The X-Axis – 9 September 2012
It’s a podcast weekend, so if you haven’t checked out the episode yet, it’s just one post down from here. (Actually, it’s one post down from here whether you’ve checked it out or not.) This week, we review Steed & Mrs Peel, Peter Cannon: Thunderbolts, and Phantom Stranger – which really is just as bad as we say it is.
Back with the X-books, it’s a quiet week – but that does give me the opportunity to catch up on the last handful of books that came out while I was on holiday! Um, because the next issues are now out…
Age of Apocalypse #6-7 – I sat down to write this with a vague memory that I had not yet reviewed issue #6. Then I tried to remember what had actually happened in issue #6. And I couldn’t.
That rather suggests that this book still isn’t really connecting with me. Actually, it’s been improving as it’s gone along. The individual personalities are starting to become more distinct. And I’m starting to get the impression that the book’s problems stem in part from a tone clash between script and art. Faced with a series about a small group of freedom fighters in a world run by evil mutants, the art tends to go for grim and gritty. But David Lapham’s script doesn’t seem to be taking things quite that seriously; the actual events of the story are rather more over the top than the look of the book might suggest.
That said, I remain a bit confused by how this world is supposed to work – perhaps because of that tone clash. The art shows a world which looks like a complete wreck, yet the script seems to have society kind of functioning and people going to work. There’s a mobile phone network. There appear to be theatres. The elements don’t fit together properly.
Issue #6 introduces Monet St Croix into the story; she’s one of the dead characters who were being revived in earlier issues, but Prophet made sure that she didn’t get brainwashed. The result is that there’s now a very powerful mutant wandering around and setting herself up as some sort of political figure. Monet isn’t exactly fond of the ordinary humans, but she does regard the regime as way over the line. Her rather garbled philosophy is that the mutants are still living in a hellish world even after winning their war because they haven’t atoned properly for the blood on their hands. Supposedly, she’s going to show them the way to redemption and the better life they were promised.
This is a reasonably interesting idea – as is the idea that Wolverine sees her as a good thing because powerful mutants are precisely what he thinks the Celestials have charged him to breed – but it runs up against the problem that the series hasn’t really established any reason why the attitude of the general public matters, or even what they think about Wolverine’s regime to start with. For this story to work, the public have to be a factor, and I don’t feel I have much sense of whose side they’re on to start with. Still, it seems to be a long-term storyline; perhaps it’ll become clearer in time.
This issue also finally makes a series issue to distinguish Fiend from Deadeye. While all the X-Terminated human members are inversions of anti-mutant villains, most of them seem to be genuine inversions. Fiend is the one who really does hate mutants whether or not they’re in league with the authorities, and this is the issue that tries to establish that point. It does at least finally put some daylight between her and Deadeye, and explain why the book needs both characters, but I can’t say it really points in a particularly interesting direction.
Issue #7 starts a new story, which sees the group hunting for Reed Richards’ old notebooks, in the hope that they might contain something useful about the Celestials (and thus a way of depowering Wolverine). It’s a sensible enough macguffin, and it also gives the cast a reason to leave the USA and visit some parts of the world that aren’t so emphatically under the thumb of Wolverine’s regime. Britain, for example, doesn’t seem to be in such a horrific state – not compared to the ruined cities the artists have been rendering for America, at any rate.
This chapter is mainly setting up the mystery of what’s going on in Latveria (where the macguffin is), and reintroducing the AoA version of Dr Doom. It also gives a pretty substantial role to Emma Frost, which I’ll discuss further when we get to later issues. Suffice to say that Lapham understandably doesn’t see her as a natural hero, so much as somebody who picks sides depending on circumstances. It’s a decent enough intro chapter, but the supposedly moody colouring really is overplayed. The story has a prison camp being guarded by a dinosaur, for heaven’s sake. Is “bleak” really the tone to be hitting so emphatically in the visuals?
First X-Men #2 – Two issues down, and I remain mystified as to why somebody thought we needed a miniseries in which Wolverine and a catastrophically out of character Sabretooth assemble a team of mutants to protect mutants before the X-Men were founded. It doesn’t feel like hidden history, it just feels like a very awkward insert that will probably never be mentioned again. And while you can make a case that there must have been a period when Sabretooth was at least functional as a teammate, and that we haven’t seen much of him during that time, his role in this story still feels hopelessly forced.
This story continues a “gathering the team” format, as the group picks up a bloke called Yeti, and the guy who blew up in issue #1. Yeti seems to have a Native American version of Colossus’s original “gentle giant” role – lots of power, no real interest in learning to fight – and that’s a potentially workable role for a team book character. The other kid (Anthony) is more generic – he spouts explanations of the plot and occasionally says things designed to position him as the enthusiastic young one, but there doesn’t seem to be much going on beneath the surface.
We also get the group trying to recruit Magneto, who isn’t interested either. Mind you, Adams does at least give us a decently constructed action sequence with the guy. Perhaps you can only get away with this by going back to the early days of the character, but the book wisely avoids the “magnetism can do literally anything” approach that has applied for years, and confines itself strictly to Magneto making clever use of magnetism. This is something that ought to be elementary, but like so many characters, his powers have been allowed to drift wildly from a relatively well defined original concept. It’s nice to see a bit of focus on the actual gimmick, not to mention an action scene in which the moves and the use of props has been thought out in some way.
That aside, however, this remains a series that has not made a particularly compelling case for its own existence.
X-Factor #241-243 – These issues are billed as the first three chapters of “Breaking Point”, but they’re actually self-contained stories, each focussing on a different team member. The unifying theme is the group falling apart.
Issue #241 returns to the subplot of Guido having been brought back to life without a soul. Quite what that actually means in practice remains rather vague, but in this case, that appears to be deliberate; Peter David has set up the idea that there’s something seriously wrong with Guido, but that nobody’s entirely sure how, or quite what it means. The backdrop is a fight against the three villains that Madrox picked up on his reality-jumping story a few months back – and since their arrival in the mainstream universe appeared to be the main point of that story, it’s a bit disconcerting to see them brushed aside as quickly as this, as if David had decided that he didn’t really want to follow through on that storyline after all. (They’re not completely gone from the story, but it does seem like a change of direction from what the earlier issues had been setting up.)
The main point, though, is that when the bad guys try the usual trick of threatening an innocent bystander, Guido is completely unfazed. “Don’t know her, don’t care,” he says. It’s not that Guido is actively trying to harm anyone, or even that he won’t help do his job with the team, but this is the point where it becomes clear to everyone that he simply no longer cares about some of the things he really ought to. Monet’s reaction to that drives him out of the group – and David uses her well there, not just because of Guido’s established interest in her, but because Monet is normally so committed to her cynical persona that when she breaks the character and reacts emotionally, it means something. Still, one rather assumes that without an established role to perform, Guido’s only going to get worse.
Rahne’s storyline dominates issue #242, as she goes hunting for her missing mystical child. Meanwhile, Darwin is also after him, convinced that the kid is “the harbinger of the end” and has to die. By this point, Darwin seems to have little in common with the original Ed Brubaker creation, though that character was bland enough that his retooling is no loss. His role here as the implacable hunter who appears to have a screw loose positions him in similar territory to the most recent take on Bishop from the last Cable series, but it seems to work rather better – perhaps because other characters react to it more appropriately. The upshot here is that Rahne recovers the kid and leaves the team to be with him, though given the length of build this has had, I’m rather hoping that this is just a temporary move – if she’s actually being written out here, it’s terribly abrupt.
Finally, issue #243 digs into the murky and hitherto largely avoided waters of Polaris’s back story. For those who haven’t really followed this, Lorna was introduced back in the late 1960s as Magneto’s long lost daughter who had been adopted as a child. But the very same story promptly established that this was simply a hoax designed to get her on board with his plans, and that they had no connection whatsoever. Pretty much nothing more was done with Lorna’s back story for years (unless you count a swiftly dropped subplot from the 1980s which purported to establish her as the sister of an unrelated villain, Zaladane). And then, for some unfathomable reason, Chuck Austen decided to reassert that she was Magneto’s daughter after all. Despite nobody telling any stories that suggested that there was the slightest rationale to this change, it does appear to have stuck.
In this story, Lorna gets Longshot to use his powers to find out exactly what caused the plane crash that killed her “real” parents (or rather, the real mother and her husband). Apparently Lorna blames Magneto, though I don’t recall any prior mention of that. Regardless, after a couple of attempts by characters to hold back the truth, the upshot turns out to be that toddler Lorna herself destroyed the plane with her powers, and that Magneto’s only involvement was to try and wipe her memory of it.
I’m not entirely sold on this idea. One of the fake-outs is a deliberately melodramatic scene of Magneto confronting his ex-lover, but if we’re being honest, it’s not like the actual story is much less melodramatic – though it does lead to a quieter and more ambivalent ending. That said, Lorna is one of those characters who needs a serious jolt to make her interesting again; for some time now, she’s essentially been the nice one who stands next to Alex, and when a character falls into that kind of rut, sometimes a story like this can help to define them more sharply again. We’ll see how it goes.
I have some mixed feeling lately with X-factor. I do feel the cast is a bit too big at times. However, I really don’t want any of them to leave, since 1) I’m a sucker for good B and C list characters and 2) PAD writes them very well, in fact, for many of them, this is the best they’ve been written in ages, if not ever, all together.
As for Lorna…she was the least developed character during PAD’s original run, but then again, they needed a relatively sane and “normal” character to balance out all the wackiness. And hey, it beats Austen’s cukoo for coco puffs version of her.
Weren’t Magneto’s powers always “magnetism can do anything”? I have a vague recollection that Stan reckoned he could throw lightning bolts (because electricity and magnetism are related) and control minds (because brainwaves are part of the electromagnetic spectrum).
A nice touch in X-Factor was Havok at least aknowledging that the Magneto who told Polaris she was his daughter was an android, even if PAD seems to have no more idea how we got from their to Austen’s status quo than anyone else. And the idea that the messing with Lorna’s mind has slowly been driving her crazy feels like a bit of a justification for everything else wrong with Austen’s take on the character.
I like X-Factor – no, I love X-Factor because it often reminds me of the X-Men when I started reading them back when Jean and the X-Men were separated, each thinking the other was dead. Large cast, multiple sub-plots, relationships evolving.
That being said, this latest multi-part storyline almost feels like it’s being pushed on PAD. It may not be, but after building the cast up to this size, this just feels like a somewhat overnight clearing of the plate. We know Havok’s being removed to go to Uncanny Avengers – I wonder if any of the other characters are being forcibly removed to appear in other books? I think it’s odd that Havok and Polaris got ‘parked’ in X-Factor a few months ago and we’ve barely explored their roles and the changing team dynamics – or rather, we just got ‘there’ – and now the status quo is changing up again. But then again, that’s Marvel these days – status quo changes every 12 – 16 months (it’s just that, up to now, PAD has seemed relatively immune from it).
Seems like a pretty bleak week for comics. Or is Paul just depressed at being back at work?
I’m still waiting for Paul to tackle the Jeph Loeb Wolverine story. If reviews of the original arc are any indication, it shall be glorious.
Wasn’t it actually Morrison who reasserted Lorna’s parentage? I seem to recall the issue where they go back to Genosha for the first time since E for Extinction, Polaris is there and refers to Magnus as ‘dad’ a few times.
Didn’t the Polaris and Magneto thing come up in Magneto Rex or some other mini?
lorna in morrisons story was clearly out of her mind and traumatized by the genoshan genocide. when i first read it, i didnt interpret her ramblings as anything that should be taken literally.
xfactor 243 was a rather limp issue, no? even the art by the usually excellent leonard kirk fell flat for me.
but i appreciate what david is doing here. basically, at this point, lorna is ‘the nice one’… except when shes ‘the batshit crazy one’. only, her mental issues never felt like characterisations, but more like bad writing and continuity glitches. now we have an in-universe reason why she has those issues, and why she has them off and on. hopefully, the character can now move on.
Lorna was re-established as Magneto’s daughter by Austen in Uncanny 431. She went to Genosha to confront Magneto about her birth mother just before Nova’s Sentinels blew the place to high heaven. Morrison then took Austen’s assertion and ran with it.
Magneto and Polaris’s relationship was expanded after “The 12” and “Ages of Apocalypse” stories from the ’90s. Magneto was the north pole, Polaris the south pole capping out whatever the 12 were meant to be. She then went with Magneto when he was first taking over Genosha to learn more about her powers, placing her in Genosha for when Morrison came along.
Morrison returned Polaris to a child of Magneto, and then when Polaris was picked up in Chuck Austen’s run, he created another sub plot that gave a different reason for Lorna’s presence in Genosha, saying she had gone on a hunt to find out what had happened to her parents originally, the only evidence from the plane crash was that the metal was magnetized. She then had a blood test done that claimed she was really Magneto’s daughter, who then went to Genosha to talk to him about it, but before she could the citizens of Genosha started to worship her a child of Magneto, and literally five minutes after that the sentinels from Morrison’s run enter the picture.
During the 12 and Magneto Rex stories, they never alluded to any sort of relationship between them, except that Magneto’s powers were fading and proximity to Lorna was helping him with that. So he wanted her close, and offered to train her.
I can’t remember how Chuck Austen got her around to the DNA check, but I’m pretty sure the rest is close to how it happened.
I can’t remember Lorna ever being much of a character until Peter David’s first run with her. She really bloomed then, and it’s really that run I consider to be her iconic faze. Up until then she was always a sideline at best.
Just to be clear… Morrison’s story came before Austen’s story.
Yes, Zach it was New X-Men 132 in 2002 where Lorna was calling him her dad, obviously Austen didn’t have to continue with it as she was unstable at the time, but he continued with it.
Lorna and Alex’s problem was spending over a half decade in space which seperated them from everything going on in the x-books and really only got back to an ongoing until this year.
Lorna’s parentage hasn’t exactly been a problem for Lorna or Magneto other then it was under-developed in the 616 until reciently.
She was pretty heavily implied to be his daughter in Magneto: Dark Seduction. Their connection was referred to as an emblical cord. That’s pretty blatant. She was also his daughter in the Mutant X series. I don’t get why people take such issue with Polaris’ being the daughter of Magneto. That’s basically the concept of the character.
Anyway I’ve loved the last three issue of X-Factor and Age of Apocalypse is also another gem.
I’m a big X-Factor fan as well, and I’ve been a bit underwhelmed by this current arc. It was billed as the culmination of a variety of plot points, which actually did seem to be all building to… something. But Paul is right – what we’re actually getting feels more like a deck-clearing exercise to quickly get rid of story lines that were no longer of interest to PAD or editorial or someone.
Or, as an alternate theory, there are whispers in some corners that the end is nigh for X-Factor, and so perhaps is trying to take some kind of swipe at wrapping up his plot threads in preparation.
“I don’t get why people take such issue with Polaris’ being the daughter of Magneto.”
Because the idea that mutant offspring have the exact same powers as their parents is lazy.
Derek: There are two reasons for that. The story that introduced her explicitly said that she wasn’t Magneto’s daughter and because the main story that said she is was written by Chuck Austen – who wouldn’t know a strong concept for a character if it bit him and, even accounting for that, quite possibly did a worse job writing Lorna than any of his other characters.
FWIW, what if Lorna’s concept actually is that she’s the nice girl who stands next to people? I mean, when she was introduced, it was as a romantic interest for Iceman, then she moved onto Havok. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there really has never been a strong character there.
On an unrelated note, ever wonder just how many bastard children Magneto has? So far, we know of three children by two mothers. Given his messianic and megalomaniacal tendencies, you’d think he’d have seduced other women at some point.
“what if Lorna’s concept actually is that she’s the nice girl who stands next to people?”
That would make her an actual fridge magnet. Maybe pretty, it looks nice stuck on your fridge or filing cabinet, you can also hang more interesting things with it, but unless you’re adding it to an appliance (and it doesn’t actually make that appliance work better or anything) it’s pretty much pointless.
“That would make her an actual fridge magnet. Maybe pretty, it looks nice stuck on your fridge or filing cabinet, you can also hang more interesting things with it, but unless you’re adding it to an appliance (and it doesn’t actually make that appliance work better or anything) it’s pretty much pointless.”
Or it means she’d be killed off to give Alex something more to angst over. (Yes, puns. Sorry.)
Given the stories Lorna had appeared in prior to PAD using her (either as an appendage to whatever guy she was hooked up with, possessed by somebody, or non-starter storylines that went nowhere), it looks like “nice girl who just stands there” was the way to write her at the time.
“I don’t get why people take such issue with Polaris’ being the daughter of Magneto.”
making polaris the daughter of magneto pointlessly complicates the backstories of no less than four major characters: polaris, magneto, quicksilver, and the scarlet witch. characters dont get more interesting if their origins are more cluttered. i prefere characters with elegant, simple origins over impenetrable family-trees.
“On an unrelated note, ever wonder just how many bastard children Magneto has?”
maybe, at some point, all those magnetic bastards will gather on an island, drawn there by their genetic connection. then together, they will open a portal, so magneto can return to earth from… earth.
“Because the idea that mutant offspring have the exact same powers as their parents is lazy.”
Is it? Mutants powers are supposedly all about genetics. Surely having offspring with the same powers as their parents (especially if they’ve only got one mutant parent) is the point?
Er, since when? Isn’t mutation about . . . mutation?
Professor X/Legion
Mystique/Nightcrawler
Magneto/Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch
But if what you really want are more Wolverine/Daken knockoffs, be my guest.
Polaris being Magneto’s daughter doesn’t really complicate Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch at all. None of these children were raised by him and it’s not like we’re going to see some sudden development where Lorna becomes very close to her half-siblings. And if she did, so what? That’s not really a complication. They are already aware of and know each other to begin with.
As for the original story stating that she wasn’t… well. Iceman said she wasn’t. WTF does he know? And that was pretty clearly a last-minute reversal after several issues of building her up AS Magneto’s daughter. Someone changed their minds mid-stream. Or had it changed for them.
No reason why she NEEDS to be Magneto’s daugheter. But the claim/implication that she is or might be is also right there in that origin story. No harm in following through on it, really, since that was kind of the point of introducing her to begin with.
The only reason why anyone cares one way or the other now is because it took them 40 years for anyone to get around to caring. But that’s the way it goes with Polaris. It might actually give her a point to exist as a character, since she hasn’t really had any other one for 40 years other than to be Havok’s girlfriend and be possessed by various villains.
I mean, it’s Polaris. Nobody can really have a strong opinion of what’s done with her either way, can they? Say what you will about how Austen wrote her, but at least he gave her a plotline. Something to do. Something resembling a personality, even if it wasn’t a good one. That’s more than anyobody’s bothered to do with her since 1992.
I’d rather she had no personality than have experienced what Austen did to her. Then again, I like to pretend the Austen run never happened.
Yeah, “this is a bad direction, but at least it’s a direction!” doesn’t work for me. OTOH, I have no strong opinions about Polaris’s parenthood beyond a feeling that multiple-retcon-pileups are messy.
It used to be accepted that the children of mutants would not necessarily breed true – there was no reason they would have the same powers as their parents, or even that they would breed “true” – if you recall, Nate Summers was initially a normal human child. That has basically been thrown out the window because it’s so much easier to just assert that mutant children will get the same powers as their parents. (That’s one good thing – one – about Aaron’s “Wolverine kills his children” story – they weren’t obviously his children because they didn’t have claws and healing factors.)
If anyone remembers the old Marvel Role Playing game, it defined mutants specifically as being different, genetically, from their parents and that children wouldn’t inherent their mutant parent’s powers. Of course, this was from the early ’80s, I think… before a lot of this was an issue.
I’m guessing that was the first edition of the old FASERIP Marvel game (I’ve actually got the second edition lying around and it doesn’t say that, but I remember reading it somewhere too). That’s (an approximation of) the actual scientific definition of mutant, which is that they possess some genetic trait that wasn’t inherited from either parent. But it doesn’t mean that mutants’ children can’t inherit their parents’ powers, it just means that when that does happen, said child technically isn’t a mutant, it’s the second member of the species of which their mutant parent was the first member.
In other words, no one ever doubted that Siryn was Banshee’s daughter or suggested that she shouldn’t have his powers, but people often used to point out that she wasn’t technically a mutant in the scientific sense. She was the second member of Homo cassidy or whatever you want to call it the species that started with Banshee.
But Marvel’s long since abandonned any connection between actual evolutionary science and the way their mutants work.
(Oh, and in everything I just said, I think you should actually substitute “breed” or “race” or something for every time I said “species.” I’m pretty sure that the fact that they can interbreed with normal humans means that they’re not, technically, a seperate species – I’m not positive that’s an absolute rule, but that’s what I remember learning in school even if I forgot it when I wrote my last post.)
“On an unrelated note, ever wonder just how many bastard children Magneto has? So far, we know of three children by two mothers.”
Magneto’s 616 tally: four children and two mothers, three are alive and three are dead.
Did anyone ever (have the terrible idea to) bring back Magda and/or Anya?
I think Lorna being Magneto’s daughter makes her origin/status quo easier to describe to a newbie, rather than complicating things.
I recall that at some stage the thinking was that the child of a mutant with similar powers tended to have another mutation. Like Rachel Summers had her mother’s telepathy/telekinesis but her mutant power was the time-shifting. I can’t recall the source, but I recall Siryn being described as a mutant because unlike her father she could talk and fly at the same time. (It’s a bit of a stretch, PAD’s hypnosis-seduction-siren power would be a better difference.)
I’m sure someone once said that Lorna’s mutation was the green hair!
It doesn’t really matter if a child has the same mutation as their parent if the definition of being a mutant (or rather definition of homo superior) means having an active X-gene.
Polaris can be Joseph’s kid, just to make it even more confusing.
Quick question about X-Factor… does Longshot remember Havok from their time as X-Men?
“maybe, at some point, all those magnetic bastards will gather on an island, drawn there by their genetic connection. then together, they will open a portal, so magneto can return to earth from… earth.”
lol @ kingderella 🙂
“Quick question about X-Factor… does Longshot remember Havok from their time as X-Men?”
I don’t think that’s been brought up, and with Havok being moved, it might not again. That said I’m sure after long enough, PAD would mention it, however obliquely. I really like X-Factor: it takes a lot of relatively minor characters, makes them interesting, and reminds me of the X-Men of yore. I could tell you how everyone on that team interacts, despite a busy cast: more than can be said for any other main X-book. And PAD is able to juggle all the cast members too so they all get a bit of spotlight. What a concept!
Have to say though, Havok and Polaris have always been very thin characters, to my mind at least. I suspect that’s because they never got to develop the usual Claremont foibles and verbal tics that most of the main X-Men cast did.
Didn’t Longshot remember Dazzler? Well, he at least remembered he enjoyed having sex with her…not sure how that would apply to Havok but hey, if they could retcon Shatterstar and Rictor into being a couple, who knows? 😉
@ZZZ The classic notion of a species was defined by interbreeding. A variety of exceptions to that rule have been found, including the discovery of microorganisms that don’t reproduce sexually. It turns out we have yet to define species in a way that can be applied to all organisms, but the interbreeding notion is still fairly useful at a macro scale.
So, yes, by most definitions the “mutants” of the Marvel universe are not a separate species at all because they can have kids with regular humans.
Also, if we are going to say that having some genetic difference from their parents is what makes them a mutant, then everyone would be a mutant. DNA replication isn’t 100% perfect; everyone has some difference in their genome relative to their parents.
“CHUCK”
Bendis.
I remember when he knew how to write.
Hmm says:
September 11, 2012 at 3:10 PM
Polaris can be Joseph’s kid, just to make it even more confusing.
Fuck. Yes. Somebody write this now. Austen or Way. Loeb would also be a good choice.
Honestly, though, retcons are stupid most of the time, introduce a character, flesh them out and move on. If you suddenly have an idea for a character, make a new character and put them in a team book with established characters, instead of further cluttering the existing characters. Not everyone has to have three pages of small type in the official handbook. One or two characters per book like that can be good, but when it is everyone on the team? No. It surely can’t be that hard to work out?
I did a little digging on Wikipedia about the definition of “species” and quickly got totally confused. As far as I can tell, it’s something like “members of two species can’t produce viable offspring, except when they can.”
The “viable” bit is important; horses and donkeys can mate, but the offspring are infertile. Are there any cases where the children of human/mutant unions had children themselves? (Apart from Tommy and Billy, who don’t count because they’re magic.)
…Aand as soon as I hit “Send” I remembered Luna…
I don’t think mutants were explicitly called a separate species from humanity until X-Men: Endangered Species which paved way for Utopia and all that.
Based on the last FF, you were not the only person to forget about Luna.
@Andy Walsh
The sciencey definition of mutant (or at least a “good enough for high school biology class” simplification of it) is that the mutant has traits it didn’t inherit from EITHER parent. So no one’s genes are a 100% match to one of their parents’ genes (technically it’s not impossible for that to happen, but it’s astronomically unlikely) but normal people have 50% of their mom’s genes and 50% of their dad’s; a mutant is when your genes are (to simplify the numbers so I don’t have to type out outrageously long decimal trails to be completely accurate) 50% from your mom, 49% from your dad, and 1% all new, all different.
But, as Paul F says, in the Marvel Universe, the definition of “mutant” (at least when the X-Men and politicians and whatnot use it) is “having an active X-Gene.”
I think people are missing out on the most important thing: It’s just much more INTERESTING if the offspring of a mutant has different powers, and much more boring if they don’t, because then they just become a legacy character (and legacy characters don’t generally work well for Marvel).
Not to mention, it’s more interesting when only one child (out of many) is a mutant, or when the children have different powers (the two Guthries . . . forget Josh Guthrie, please).
Having mutant powers always be inherited could be boring, but having them never be inherited is just as bad, in my opinion. If poweres were already inherited, you could still tell stories about superhuman families with different powers: just don’t make them mutants. But if powers are never inherited, you can’t tell stories about families with the same powers, and anything that decreases the number of stories that can be told is a bad precedent (again, in my opinion). And while the average Marvel writer’s grasp of evolution is so far removed from Charles Darwin’s that if you represented them as points on a map, a tortoise wouldn’t live long enough to walk from one to the other, if they even want to pay lip service to the “next step in human evolution” concept there has to be some inheritability.
But, I think the way Marvel does it – sometimes powers are inherited, sometimes they’re not – actually works best (though I think they got there more by accident than design). There’s actually a rather elegant way to rationalize it that fits with the way Magneto acts in the most recent X-Factor well enough that I susped PAD might indend it:
Just suppose that the X-Gene is inherited from one parent, but the way the X-Gene expresses itself is inherited from the other. So when Magneto has kids, he can either pass on the “be a mutant” gene or the “if you get the mutant gene from your other parent, you’ll have magnetic powers” gene. And Lorna’s mom ALSO has the “if you have powers, they’ll be magnetic” gene – in fact, she may be doubled up on the particular trait, so every child she has will get that gene. That would not only explain why Magneto was so intent on having kids with her even though she didn’t seem to have powers herself (it’s his best bet for having kids that share his powers, instead of just having random powers) it would also explain how Zaladane could be Lorna’s sister and have magnetic powers without also being Magneto’s daughter (which, I believe, was the last known theory about her).
Zaladane wasn’t born with magnetic powers, she stole them from Lorna, circa Uncanny X-men #250.
Genetics in the Marvel Universe is not the same as real genetics. In real life, evolution doesn’t “step”, nor does it aim towards making more powerful species. In real life you couldn’t have babies with Atlanteans or probably even Inhumans, let alone freaky space bird people. So the best way to define “mutant” in the Marvel universe is “superhero who was born like that”.
My no-prize theory of why biology is so weird in the comics is that there are forces at play, sapient anthropomorphic representations such as Eternity that manipulate reality constantly, meaning there are no random occurrences. Everything happens along set paths. And then you have the Celestials going around messing with DNA. They probably have stock code that they just drop into every sequence, which must be easier than writing new code every time.
Oh and by the way, a lot of mules are in fact fertile. Two mules can go on to have a baby mule, which is itself fertile. They can also breed with zebras, horses, donkeys, or hinnies. Life cares not for the puny categorisation efforts of science nerds.