X Deaths of Wolverine #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X DEATHS OF WOLVERINE #4
Writer: Benjamin Percy
Artist: Federico Vicentini
Colourist: Dijjo Lima
Letterer: Cory Petit
Editor: Mark Basso
COVER / PAGE 1: Omega Wolverine going through a Krakoan gate.
PAGES 2-4. Flashback: the fall of Krakoa in Omega Wolverine’s timeline.
Although the caption calls this the “near future”, the grey hairs on Forge suggest that we’re a good few years into the future. Wolverine is also shown with some grey hairs, though not as many. Despite the suggestion in X Lives that Wolverine is basically immortal, that’s not really true; we’ve seen in Old Man Logan that his natural lifespan is still something under 200 years.
Basically, Forge is implanting an organic-tech time travel device in Wolverine so that when he finally figures out what caused this timeline, he can go back in time and avert it. This is the back story of Omega Wolverine; we see him next in the flashback in the previous issue, where he was still hanging around in the far future trying to find the key information, and Moira seemingly killed him.
Krakoa is being destroyed by a bunch of fairly conventional-looking Sentinels, though Nimrod can be seen up in the top right. This is basically the destruction of mutants by artificial intelligence that Moira had always been warning about, and that Xavier and Magneto were keen to avert throughout the Hickman run. Evidently Moira wasn’t lying about that.
PAGE 5. Recap and credits. I have issues with the description of Laura, Gabby and Daken as Wolverine’s “closest allies” – they’re his closest relatives, but it’s not like he works with them all that often.
PAGES 6-8. Flashback: the origin of Omega Wolverine.
This continues directly from the flashback in the previous issue. Moira whines that she gave the mutants Krakoa, and that they responded by stripping her powers and exiling her. That’s Inferno #4, though really it was specifically an act of Emma, Mystique, Destiny and Cypher, not mutantkind as a whole. As we’ve said before, all of this is made a bit obscure by the failure to spell out in Inferno what exactly Moira’s secret plan was that led to her being driven out, but the implication was that Krakoa was meant to be a utopia to sideline mutants while preventing any more from being born in the outside world.
As mentioned last issue, the whole “Preserve” set-up echoes a timeline in Powers of X where Moira and Logan survived to the end of the human race, but this is a different timeline.
PAGE 9. Data page. This is all calling back to Powers of X and the potential ascent of humanity into post-humanity. More fundamentally, Moira’s death apparently resets the timeline; but if she were to live forever as part of the Phalanx collective consciousness, that could presumably be averted.
Digression: Quite how Moira’s timeline resets work, if indeed that is how they work, remains a little obscure. I think the simplest approach is to view it as just straightforward time travel where she goes back and alters the course of history. Or, if you prefer, it’s like Crisis on Infinite Earths, where the whole timeline exists from start to end, even though the event that leads to the destruction of everything happens to take place in the middle. What wouldn’t work is any suggestion that the future doesn’t exist beyond Moira’s death, since that would contradict all manner of time travel stories. Of course, precisely because time travel exists in the Marvel Universe, the whole timeline exists at once, even if its actual content is subject to change.
PAGES 10-15. Omega Wolverine, Scout, Daken and Wolverine (Laura) confront Arnab Chakladar.
Moira has already left, so they’re too late.
Why does Chakladar, a regular tech mogul, have a Cable-style gun lying around his lab?
According to Omega Wolverine, all of his children died in various ways in his timeline. Daken’s death might be a callback to Wolverine’s death in Days of Futures Past. Scout is apparently depowered by Nimrod, which I don’t think we’ve seen Nimrod having the power to do yet. Maybe he picks up the designs for Forge’s Neutraliser somewhere, but that suggests a possible future development. Wolverine / Laura (and Omega Wolverine is clear to assert her as the real Wolverine here) is tortured by the “Homo Novissima” – the far-future posthumans from Powers of X, who presumably also dominate the world in his far future.
PAGE 16. Data page.
Singing stone recordings. The singing stones are stone-based recording devices from X-Force. Bugs, basically.
Banshee. Moira asks Banshee to help her get back onto the Island. Banshee was, of course, her lover for many years in the Claremont run and beyond. Evidently he says no, given the next scene.
PAGE 17. Moira returns to the island, tricking Krakoa using Banshee’s skin.
Um. So apparently you can get through the gates by holding bits of a mutant corpse? Anyway, I really don’t like this; aside from being generally grotesque, it feels like it’s going out of its way to trash the Moira/Sean relationship, which may not exactly fit with the current direction of Moira’s character, but didn’t need to be actively destroyed. I suspect the intention was to convey Moira’s sense of desperation, but if so, it doesn’t read that way.
PAGE 18. Destiny in the Hatchery.
Destiny is waiting for Mystique to be resurrected after she was killed in the previous issue. As a member of the Quiet Council, Mystique will be fast tracked.
The panel of Logan and Xavier in the background is the cliffhanger of X Lives of Wolverine #4.
PAGES 19-24. Omega Wolverine stops Moira and succumbs to the Phalanx.
Moira’s initial plan is to get her powers back by using the Neutraliser twice, but that doesn’t work. Apparently Moira’s preferred option is still to reset time by suicide; this is effectively what she did in the Powers of X far future timeline, albeit that she let Wolverine actually kill her.
Professor X is bleeding from the shoulder because he was stabbed by a possessed present-day Wolverine in X Lives of Wolverine #4.
Moira shoots Forge with the Neutralizer. This is, in principle, reversible – Storm got her powers back in the end, and presumably Forge could be resurrected like many other depowered mutants who have gone through Crucible.
There’s some really, really clunky storytelling where Moira somehow gets into a suit of plant-tech armour that happens to be lying around. The art really struggles with that.
Moira uses the Neutralizer on Omega Wolverine, thus removing his healing factor and causing him to succumb entirely to the Phalanx.
PAGE 25. Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: TIME’S UP.
“Still, it was a 14-year old in a hot and heavy relationship with a 19-year old guy, and fans wish that the two of them were still together.”
Yeah, well I was like nine years old when Kitty joined the X-Men and about thirteen when Secret Wars rolled around. Their relationship read completely innocent and harmless to my young eyes. I just saw them as peers, which they were. I wasn’t even aware of what sex was at the time (and I’m still only vaguely aware). Not sure what I might have made of their relationship had Peter been a faculty member/teacher. I’d like to think that might have raised my eyebrows, but it’s hard to guess.
Re: Emma’s face turn: It was more gradual than people think. Yes, she killed Hellfire club goons and tortured Storm during the Dark Phoenix Saga. Next, she tried to steal Kitty from the X-Men and swapped bodies with Storm. Later, there were similar villainous plots in early New Mutants and the Firestar mini.
Then came New Mutants 38-40. The team was traumatized by dying at the hands of the Beyonder. Emma uses Empath to mess with Magneto (then-headmaster of Xavier’s school) and gets him to transfer the New Mutants to her Massachusetts Academy. She uses her powers to help them recover, but it’s not enough. Eventually, she asks Magneto for help and relinquishes her hold on them. While still a villain, Emma helped a group of teenagers without profiting (her thinking “they might join me later” doesn’t count).
Other than an appearance in New Warriors, Idon’t remember what happened between NM 40 and Uncanny X-Men 281. In the latter issue Emma seems out help from X-Men. While still an antagonist, she makes no attempt to fight or betray them. She ends up in a coma, and in Iceman’s body. After that, she reevaluates her life and seeks a new, less selfish purpose. The Phalanx Covenant and Generation X follow.
I’m not saying it’s perfect, but I think her storyline mostly works.
It seems that Emma Frost was another character Claremont intended to add to his list of “all mutants are potentially redeemable”.
There was also Emma siding with Magneto to vote Shaw out of the Hellfire Club Inner Circle. Shaw was solely devoted to his own private gain and didn’t care about the issue of mutants. When we next see Shaw during Claremont’s run, he has taken the government contract to begin production of the Nimrod Sentinels (at the behest of Omega Sentinel and to the shock of Moira, no doubt). Placing Shaw in the role of an irredeemable villain while placing Emma in a more positive light.
I’m not sure if Claremont used Emma much after New Mutants #40.
A lot of Claremont’s hetero romantic pairings are gross. Nightcrawler dates his sister. Cyclops marries a woman who looks exactly like his dead girlfriend. Prof. X goes off into space to be the consort of an alien bird lady. Storm falls for the guy who invented the device that stole her powers. Depowered Rogue hooks up with the much-older Magneto. And of course, young teen Kitty falls for the too-old-for-her Colossus. Bleach. I far prefer Claremont characters’ off-panel lesbian relationships. Too bad they couldn’t have been on-panel.
@Mike- it was fairly clear the only reason she helped the Mutants was to convince them that she was benevolent- she even says there’s no way Magneto will be able to convince the mutants that she was evil now.
After that, there’s New Mutants 73, where she tries to strike a deal with N’astirh not to interfere in his baby-sacrificing scheme if he’ll leave the Hellfire Club alone, New Mutants 75, where she tries to manipulate the Mutants into getting rid of Selene for her (which fails, hilariously, because the New Mutants forget about Emma’s hints Amara was in danger) and Marvel Comics Presents 82, where she reports Firestar to the government as an unregistered mutant, resulting in Freedom Force coming after Firestar.
I think the Rahne/Elixir story’s especially prone to being quietly ignored because it was part of a broader failed revamp of Rahne where she grew out her hair, losing her accent and was acting and dressing completely different, dropping the aspect that she’s emotionally repressed due to her upbringing. So it’s easy to ignore how out of character the Elixir subplot is since she’s massively out of character in that whole run and went back to normal once it was over.
It’s not a 100% correlation, but I do think massive character revamps partially hinge on the level of follow through. Claremont’s overhaul of Magneto is the best example, but Lobdell’s push to make Emma sympathetic but also sketchy was built upon by decades worth of subsequent stories. If Hama or Faerber or Morrison had turned her evil again, who knows what she’d be perceived as now.
Pym’s a bit of an outlier in that the defining moment was not only built upon by Stern and Englehart for years to redefine Hank, they also built a strong case that this was really grounded in how he’d been written all along, back to the 60s. It’s retroactive followthrough. The Pym/Wasp marriage is totally ridiculous in isolation (Circus of Crime putting a snake in the wedding cake!) but has actual bleak dramatic weight in retrospect. And it’s especially sticky since it’s also the moment that triggered Stern’s revamp of Wasp into being a properly three-dimensional character. Like Claremont’s Magneto, nobody wants a pre-Stern Wasp back.
“Prof. X goes off into space to be the consort of an alien bird lady.”
Oh, like you wouldn’t.
The issue with Wanda is that in each of the previous redemption stories nothing was done to reverse the decimation, so Childrens crusade and avx and her mini could make her a valid character but not remove the damage of the extinction era. Now with all the mutants back there is a road to forgiveness.
Hank had a huge redemption arc especially in WCA where he reached his nadir and worked his way back. Even his reconciliation with Jan took time and was sensitivitly managed. Then a hack like Johns comes along who insists on treating characters with only one single defining trait normally based on how the were in the 70s to make Clint a Jerk chasing Jan who was flighty pushing Hank on anger issues and just like that 20 years of story was thrown out the window. Then Millar wrote Ultimates and it was the most Millar Hank possible.
Ironman got forgiveness for civil war one because Osborne was worse and secondly he became RDJ.
Bishop was just handwaved away because no-one believed in bad bishop.
I think Moria will get past this as Sean can be back in the next issue, if death still mattered even in a comic sense this would be big thing but now it’s just a joke panel.
And of course post Excalibur Claremont retconned Kitty’s age so Wisdom moved from being a bit creepy to illegal.
Lila Cheney was having sex with Sam when he was still a New Mutant! If the genders were switched on that one…
I’m still lost on what Moira’s whole deal is supposed to be now. Maybe we’ll get some clarification in the next few weeks, but I don’t want to get my hopes up…
Moo: “‘Prof. X goes off into space to be the consort of an alien bird lady.’
Oh, like you wouldn’t.”
It’s all fun and games until molting season.
Re Emma: well, I didn’t read those comics, so your use of canon textual evidence won’t work on me! Bad Emma to Good Emma is a straight-ish line in my head, and no pointing out what happened is published comics will sway my semi-informed opinion!!!
(I remember there was a bad Firestar story in MCP during the Weapon X & Blood Hungry stories, but I gave up after maybe 2 chapters. I forgot Emma had anything to do with it.)
Anyway, I don’t think she *only* helped the New Mutants because she could use them later. The thought balloons at the end of the story say that, true, but I always found that incongruous with her actions. Helping the students heal was incredibly taxing, and she had to collaborate with her enemy Magneto. In my view, Emma Frost the businesswoman would see “maybe they’ll defect” as a bad return on investment. I saw her thought balloon as an attempt to justify her choice to herself. I’m not saying her heart grew three sizes that day, I just thought that she put the welfare of children above her own self-interests.
Alastair-The problem with Iron Man’s redemption is that we were supposed to feel sorry for Tony Stark when Osborne took power due to Osborne using the very machinery set up by Stark against him. It was never a fulfilling redemption arc, which is why a lot of fans refused to accept Marvel’s handwaving.
The message becomes actions are acceptable depending on who is wielding the power.
I would agree that the popularity of the movies played a big part in taking fans’ attention away from the fact that Stark had become a thouroghly unlikeable person.
I guess Warren Ellis’ story serving as a soft reboot for Iron Man also helped, to an extent.
What, Extremis? That was before Civil War. Tony still maintains the ‘Iron Man is my bodyguard’ lie in that book.
Oh geez. You’re right. Civil War was in 2006. I remembered the Ellis run as being done to increase attention on the comic as to create synergy with the movie. The first movie debuted in 2008. I thought it was earlier too.
Chris V. I think Iron Man essentially got a complete reset with after secret wars. The post axis Superior Ironman series stopped mid story and when the new series started all that was forgotten and he was very much the MCU Ironman with none of the baggage and no mention a of Civil War or Axis.
@Mike Loughlin- In fairness, there was a scene in New Mutants 71 when Emma does seem to be upset when humans are being attacked by demons. But then in issue 73. she’s described as “trading human lives like playing cards”. Maybe the reason she was upset in issue 71 was that she was actually reading the humans’ minds and sensing their pain and terror? Honestly, I’m not sure what the point of the Hellfire Club’s arc in Inferno was, since they don’t impact the story at all. I think maybe the idea was for the New Mutants to be so shocked by Magneto’s and Emma’s behavior with N’astirh that they never trust them again. But then, Harras changed his mind and agreed to put Emma in charge of teaching Generation X. so it had to be forgotten about.
@Michael – Harras didn’t change his mind on Emma. That story was years before they decided to reform Emma. Even a villainous mutant can be rattled by the sight of humans being attacked by demons.
There was an issue of Marvel Age from around that time where somebody involved with that Hellfire plot (I want to say Byrne but I can’t rightly recall) mentioned that the whole point of that was just to reinstate Magneto as a villain. Or at least send him off in that trajectory anyway.
It seems as if there was push and pull between Harras (with Simonson doing what she was told) and Claremont for the soul of Magneto. Harras wanted Magneto to revert to villainy, while Claremont would only agree to modifying Magneto to the role of anti-hero.
Around the time of Inferno they were laying the groundwork for a future crossover, Mutant Wars, with various mutant factions all fighting everyone else. That’s where the Magneto/Hellfire Club plot was headed. It wasn’t that the Hellfire Club was important to Inferno, it was just planting seeds for later. I think Mutant Wars fell off the rails when Claremont left.
That fits well with much of what is said in New Mutants #75 (by Shaw IIRC).
Re: Peter & Kitty,
In 10,000 years of human history, a per se rule against sexual relationships between 19-year-old males and 14-year-old females has existed for about 40, and even then only in a cultural milieu that covers perhaps 20% of the species. Of course, that meant there were (are) a lot of exploitative and abusive relationships; but it doesn’t mean that all of them are.
A blanket rule may be a better way to organize a society, than to attempt a case-by-case evaluation of each relationship. The risk of harmful exploitation is very high, and it is reasonable to conclude a flat ban is the safest and best way to address the issue. But it’s not a given that a precocious and self-aware 14-year-old girl couldn’t knowingly and voluntarily consent, or that a 19-year-old innocent boy must be exploiting or coercing that consent.
And that’s the story that was told for Kitty and Peter. In my view it’s not inherently gross or immoral; it’s simply not something we’re currently willing to allow because more often than not it involves a degree of exploitation or coercion. But the story we were shown in Uncanny was clearly written to show a relationship that was neither coercive nor exploitative, but entered fairly knowingly by both parties, and approached responsibly by the older partner.
Piotr even points out to Logan that if they were in the Soviet Union, he could be married to Katya by now.
I’m not disagreeing with that. My point was always that it is the intention of the storytelling which influences how fans perceive a situation.
Kitty and Piotr were shown in a positive light, so it’s accepted as an important and cherished part of each characters’ backstory.
Meanwhile, the Hank Pym striking Jan occurrence was treated as a major deal by writers on Avengers. People still remember Hank striking Jan and how it was treated in the comic.
If writers ignored the event and kept Hank and Jan happily married, it wouldn’t have become the default defining moment for Hank Pym. It would rarely get mentioned by fans.
The same is applicable with Piotr. If they had split up with a writer making a big deal about the age difference, having Kitty say she was too young for what Piotr wanted and it made her uncomfortable, then you can be sure that Piotr as a predator would still be being discussed as his main characterization to this day.
I think that’s why something like Rahne dating a student is ignored. It was a minor story and no writers made a point about it being a socially unacceptable situation in future plotting, so no one remembers or cares about it.
It’s impressive how much Chris V writes on every thread and how little he gets right.
Is there a reason for this or are you having personal problems?
“then KrakLock (WarKoa?) evolved in to a Titan and sent Omega Sentinel back in time to hasten the creation of Nimrod.”
Has that ever been confirmed?
Nu-D said: In 10,000 years of human history, a per se rule against sexual relationships between 19-year-old males and 14-year-old females has existed for about 40, and even then only in a cultural milieu that covers perhaps 20% of the species. Of course, that meant there were (are) a lot of exploitative and abusive relationships; but it doesn’t mean that all of them are.
Even in the 1980s, Jim Shooter used Secret Wars to break up Kitty and Piotr on the grounds that the age gap was creepy. But that plot point looks pretty bad from the standpoint of current American sexual mores because of additional cultural changes.
But yes, there’s been a significant cultural shift around this in Anglo-American societies around this in the last twenty or thirty years.
First, there’s been a much more public debate about consent, one that I’d say has narrowed things to “enthusiastic, informed consent” for a great many people and drawn attention to subtler power dynamics in relationships.
Second, there’s a much greater popular awareness of how late brain development finishes, which makes teenagers seem less like they meet that consent standard in general.
And third, a lot of stories of systemic sexual abuse and exploitation in various industries and institutions have been coming out in the last ten or so years. MeToo, Yewtree, and the Catholic Church’s decades of concealing sexual abuses all spring to mind here.
Consequently, there’s been a social shift towards assuming relationships that suggest those kinds of potentially abusive power dynamics are inherently suspect.
Watching old movies and TV shows, it’s striking how normalized the idea of sexualizing teenagers, especially teenage girls, was. There are lines of dialogue, plot points, and choices
of camera focus that are just…super creepy from a contemporary standpoint.
This is a matter of an underlying change from basing social norms on signs of physical sexual maturity — the ability to reproduce,, to put it clinically — to basing it on concepts of power dynamics loosely connected to a popular understanding of developmental psychology.
This is happening, in the U.S., at least, even in quite conservative areas: a number of states have been repealing parental-consent child marriage exceptions to age-of-consent laws have been repealing them, often amid horrifying testimony from women married off in their early teens to older men at their parents’ insistence.
The potential for systemic abuse — and the sense that the younger partner may not be able to consent or fully understand the relationship dynamics until damage has been done — seems like the dominant cultural more in the U.S. and U.K. at this point.
On a personal level, I tend to agree that there’s a proven potential for abuse, and that the apparent cost of avoiding it — some individuals won’t be able to pursue specific relationships — is pretty small compared to the very real damage and systemic problems that have been revealed.
The flip side of this is the legally abusive regime of overapplying sex offender registries and enhanced penalties, even in situations where there’s a very small age gap. I don’t know that Kitty and Piotr fit into that; froma
2022 standpoint, 14 does look horribly young to be dating a 19-year-old. It’d be the equivalent of a late middle-school or beginning high schooler in a relationship with a college student.
For similar reasons, the whole bit with early teenage Sue Storm getting a big crush on college-aged reed Richards was retconned out by Matt Fraction.
And the Wasp-Hank relationship looks extra bad in retrospect, since Jan enters that relationship as a traumatized and very young woman, and Hank connects with her because she reminds him of his dead wife and then immediately talks her into letting him genetically modify her.
Again, I don’t think we’re gonna miss those things too much. At a guess, we’ll likely see some kind of quiet retcon of the age range in the Kitty-Piotr relationship — probably by aging Piotr down, since Kitty’s neophyte status is too central to her character arc — or we’ll see the relationship itself quietly pushed into the hazy past of both characters.
Chris. V said: It seems as if there was push and pull between Harras (with Simonson doing what she was told) and Claremont for the soul of Magneto. Harras wanted Magneto to revert to villainy, while Claremont would only agree to modifying Magneto to the role of anti-hero.
And it wasn’t just Harras. Jim Lee, of course, famously wanted to jump back to the status quo of the early 1980s X-Men hat was formative for him. Re-villainizing Magneto was certainly part of that, and Lee’s tie on the franchise coincides pretty well with Magneto heading back to supervillainy.
Even before that, there were contemporaries of Claremont in the 1980s who saw Magneto’s reform as too easy. John Byrne has, in John Byrne fashion, always been quite vocal about seeing Magneto as an outright villain. He did a lot to push Magnet5o back in that direction in West Coast Avengers</I. and via the "Acts of Vengeance" crossover.
And Byrne's pal Roger Stern infamously had the X-Men Vs. Avengers editorially rewritten because his original ending pushed Magneto too far back into villainous behaviors. Stern’s take at the time was that Magneto was more of a regretful villain than a reformed one.
And then there’s Grant Morrison’s take, albeit with the “Sublime possession” escape hatch that has been pointed out. And, of course, there was the little two-page interlude during “Planet X” wherein “Xorn” talks to crazy Magneto and suggests that the “Xorn” persona was Magneto’s conscience rebelling against what turned out to be Sublime’s influence.
Echoing what’s been said already, I think a big part of what “rescued” Magneto from that kind of reversion was that, first and foremost, Silver Age Magneto is just less interesting and less fitting with the rest of the changes Claremont made to the X-books. He was really just a raving megalomaniac, a generic conqueror who pursued increasingly silly schemes and was being used to diminishing returns, popping up whenever say, the Inhumans or the Defenders needed someone to punch for a couple of issues.
Like the X-Men as a whole, Claremont’s revamp was arguably the first time Magneto had a sensible, compelling concept and a sense of direction in years.
Even the late-1980s/early-1990s efforts to turn him into a villain again had to acknowledge his Claremont-era character development, and part of why Morrison’s Magneto was so thoroughly overturned was that Morrison (on the surface) seemed as if they had flatly ignored all of that and not read the character’s appearances since circa 1967.
“There was an exchange of dialogue in some issue or another that implied that they wanted to have sex. Kitty: “God, I wish I was older.” Peter: “So do I.””
Except later in that same scene, Peter tells her “However, little one, you are not older”, and basically tells her this isn’t the time or the place for any sexcapades.
The irony is that Shooter has Kitty and Peter break up at the same time Claremont seemed to be trying to set up a triangle between Peter, Kitty, and Doug, which never really went anywhere.
“Then came New Mutants 38-40”
Yeah, that was the first time Claremont or anyone seemed to give some depth to Emma, and showed that she seemed to enjoy helping out her students.
“When we next see Shaw during Claremont’s run, he has taken the government contract to begin production of the Nimrod Sentinels (at the behest of Omega Sentinel and to the shock of Moira, no doubt)”
Um, no, not quite. Omega and Moira had nothing to do with that, unless it’s a new retcon of some sort. heck the Project Nimrod program gets forgotten about after that issue mentions it.
“New Mutants 75, where she tries to manipulate the Mutants into getting rid of Selene for her”
No, she and Magneto just speculate between themselves that is how things will play out in the future.
“It’s impressive how much Chris V writes on every thread and how little he gets right.”
Bwahahaha.
Nothing in Omar Karindu’s post convinces me that Kitty/Peter was creepy. I think you really have to WANT to see it that way. Same goes for all the relationships Like Loughlin mentioned. The only major issue with any of those is the way EVERYBODY just thought the Maddie thing was weird rather than enormously suspect.
wwk5d-That was a joke. In “Inferno”, it’s revealed that Omega Sentinel went back in time to hasten the creation of a Nimrod by founding Orchis.Towards the end of Claremont’s run, Shaw Industries gets a government contract to begin building Nimrod Sentinels. It’s simply pointing out the incongruity in the continuity.
Omar-Yes, Jim Shooter saw a problem with the relationship, but Shooter was also quick to shoot down any element in a Marvel comic which he felt could create controversy. It was his view on the relationship, which was not shared by Claremont or by a large portion of the fanbase who still perceive the relationship as positive and innocent.
@Chris V
Hard to tell sometimes what is a joke and what is opinion masked as cannon…
I don’t think it’s an incongruity as much as a dropped plot point. The issues of X-force vol. 1 that dealt with Nimrod are probably a better example of an incongruity when it comes to continuity.
Part of why the Piotr/Kitty relationship resonated with readers was that Piotr was not written as a mature, experienced 19-year-old. He was portrayed as somewhat naive, sheltered, and gentle. In many ways, he was written as the ideal of the “nice older boy.” The relationship reads as innocent because Piotr was written as an innocent.
Though there is that creepy Claremont bit with Wolverine encouraging a somewhat clueless Piotr to head off with Nereel in the Savage Land to “celebrate” a victory, which was then revisited in a story that made it clear Piotr has a kid he doesn’t know about.
And, again, it’s hard to imagine a writer today having a 19-year-old character date a 14-year-old and playing it as a sweetly romantic plot element.
This is why I think a quiet age-down or just being fuzzy about Piotr and Kitty’s ages is likely what we’ll see going forward. It’s one thing to have read the stories as they came out or not too long afterwards; it’s another to read on the Internet in 2022 that a 19-year-old character who’d already sired a kid then began dating a 14-year-old character in an old story.
And, yes, Shooter jumped on things he saw as “controversial,” particularly where sexuality was concerned. And at the same time, his idea of “mature readers” content led to stuff like a notoriously homophobic Rampaging Hulk sequence in which gay men were portrayed as sexual predators.
For that matter, Shooter’s “solution” to the Piotr-Kitty romance involved Piotr developing an obsessiuve sexual desire for an alien healer plot device character, Zsaji, and becoming irrationally jealous of Johnny Storm for hooking up with her.
“Fixing” a plot — if we want to call it that — doesn’t work that well when the “fix” is both contrived and ham-handed.
“And the Wasp-Hank relationship looks extra bad in retrospect, since Jan enters that relationship as a traumatized and very young woman, and Hank connects with her because she reminds him of his dead wife and then immediately talks her into letting him genetically modify her.”
^I don’t see any of that as worse than Janet finally recognizing Yellowjacket (in his debut appearance) as a schizophrenic Hank Pym and taking advantage of his condition to manipulate him into marriage rather than try to help him come back to his senses. She married Hank while he was seriously ill and she knew he was ill. Years later, that illness came back and smacked her in the face. Karma’s a bitch.
The Kitty/Peter stuff seems to have been pretty thoroughly fixed simply by allowing them to age. A 5-year age gap in your 20s is a lot smaller than the same span in your teens.
And them having sex in Astonishing seems to have been fairly cathartic for readers and writers alike. The characters have drifted apart in the last few years, as far as I can tell, without much fanfare.
As for the messed up relationship between Jan and Hank, it’s telling that all of those stories were written by men. Male writers’ ideas of what men and women do in relationships back then — not to mention their conception of mental illness — was pretty wild, especially filtered through the lens of superhero melodrama.
@Thom H. ‘The characters have drifted apart in the last few years, as far as I can tell, without much fanfare.’
Well. Kitty left Piotr at the altar. There was a special wedding issue leading up to it. It would be hard to muster more fanfare than that. 😀
It’s also the only good piece of character work in X-Men Gold and apparently it wasn’t even Guggenheim’s idea.
In this week’s X-Men Unlimited Infinity, there’s a feel good story where Banshee returns home after feeling sad about how out of things he is and how much life he’s missed. He has a happy turn, meets up with daughter and reconciles with Black Tom. Reads a little differently knowing what the “near future” holds for him. Maybe not the tone the X-Books editorial should be shooting for.
And after Kitty left Peter at the altar, Peter turned into a raging alcoholic for a while, didn’t he?
Person of Con: not having read the story, I’m picturing Moira in the Banshee skin-suit, and I (probably shouldn’t) find that hilarious.
As for Peter & Kitty: if my 15 yr old daughter introduced me to a 19 yr old boyfriend, I would not see their relationship as belonging to a historical tradition. I would kick the creep out.
I think Peter makes a good crush for Kitty, but I never bought them as being in a relationship. It doesn’t feel real until, ironically, it was over and Logan & Kurt let him get beat up by the Juggernaut. Their reunion in Astonishing X-Men worked better, one of the few things from that series I don’t actively dislike.
“Male writers’ ideas of what men and women do in relationships back then — not to mention their conception of mental illness — was pretty wild, especially filtered through the lens of superhero melodrama.”
Yep, the State of New York actually recognized and certified a marriage between one Ms. Janet Van Dyne and one Mr. “Yellowjacket”. Nobody except for Janet was aware throughout the proceedings that Yellowjacket was actually Hank Pym, not even Yellowjacket. The marriage shouldn’t even have been legal, but since it apparently was, that means that Janet got legally married to a psychosis.
Ha! Fanfare indeed. I must have missed that.
Weird to think that Peter and Batman have that in common. They should be drinking buddies. I feel like they would get along.
I had completely forgotten the Kitty/Piotr almost-marriage. Didn’t Marvel tease it like “There’s gonna be an X-Wedding!”, and then it turned out to be Rogue and Gambit instead?
Also, did Colossus date Domino before or after the wedding disaster? I know there were a few references to that relationship in Gail Simone’s Domino book, but I have no clue which X-book it took place in (I’m assuming some version of X-Force.)
The age of consent debate is hugely complicated and probably not suited to a comics chat. But nevertheless. Let us not forget that while the age of consent has historically been very low, as has the marriage age, this is because women were treated as property. This is the exact opposite of perceptions of their agency. The age of consent tends to rise with women’s rights in general. That said, it can be hard to quantify humans. Some mature mentally much faster than others. And Kitty Pryde was always portrayed as such. Legally we need to have hard and fast rules for the system to work, but socially maybe there’s situations that people can accept easier. I don’t know.
The real problem is we shouldn’t look at this in isolation. It’s been mentioned before that both Chris Claremont and John Byrne repeatedly returned to the well of sexual relations with minors, to the point where one has to ask whether it was a literary device or a kink (they are both known for various other kinks after all). Colossus and Shadowcat, Cypher and Psylocke, Cannonball and Lila, Mac and Heather Hudson, Mister Fantastic and Invisible Girl, the list no doubt goes on. It’s always the clueless boy/man and the strong-minded girl/woman who knows what she wants and will get it. Which is problematic on its own when it’s the girl who’s the young one, for various reasons.
As for Pym and Van Dyne, I think that’s a very different case. That was written in the silver age, when most characters and stories outside of Spider-Man comics were bare sketches in the air. Things had to move unnaturally fast, because you only had so many pages to tell a complete self-enclosed story. Yes in today’s lens it looks like Pym met a woman who had just seen her father murdered, took her to bed that afternoon, and sewed bug wings on her back before she could think about it with a clear mind. But through a silver age lens, it’s a classic tale of boy hero meets girl, so often-told that most of the details can be left out so there’s more room for the punching. Their later marriage was no doubt meant to be amusing, the same kind of hijinx you’d see on I Dream of Jeanie around the same time (roughly, I don’t know the respective dates). The Avengers comics still weren’t complicated enough to explore the theme beyond that. I mean, the team was almost exclusively made up of square-jawed blonde men, it was lucky she even knew which one was Hank. Complexity wasn’t on the menu.
@CalvinPitt I’m pretty sure that was in Cable & X-Force circa 2013 by Dennis Hopeless. That would’ve been a few years before Piotr and Kate’s non-marriage.
@CalvinPitt It was actually more specific than just an X-wedding. There was a six-part arc building to it, and it was promoted as being Kitty and Peter’s wedding, and the solicit for the wedding issue does say outright that they’ll walk down the aisle, which does happen before Kitty dumps him. The main indication that it would be a bait and switch is that Mr and Mrs X would spin out of the wedding issue, but they played coy about who’d star in it. And that promptly became a Rogue and Gambit series.
And Colossus and Domino got involved in Cable and X-Force #5 in 2012, so definitely pre-wedding.
“Chris Claremont and John Byrne repeatedly returned to the well of sexual relations with minors, to the point where one has to ask whether it was a literary device or a kink…”
Yup. Not good. Steve Englehart’s portrayal of Arisia in Green Lantern Corps was also highly problematic, and I don’t think anyone was a fan of Marv Wolfman’s pet couple Donna Troy & Terry Long. In Unity, Jim Shooter had a woman involved in a sexual relationship with a boy who was an alternate-reality version of her son. So did Terry Kavanaugh in X-Man.
The point is, many comic book writers of the Bronze Age were pretty terrible at depicting healthy relationships. Come to think of it, Stan Lee and Roy Thomas weren’t exactly stalwarts in that department, and Silver Age DC writers wrote most women as pests and shrews.
I will give Chris Claremont credit for not having Cypher & Psylocke become a relationship. I don’t know if Claremont had Lila & Sam consummate their relationship (before a recent story affirming that they did), and Peter & Kitty definitely didn’t. He at least showed some restraint. Still, I’d rather not have had so many glimpses into what writers are into.
Cypher and Psylocke was limited to a few comments and wistful looks from memory. Whether it was meant to be the start of a relationship that didn’t end up getting written, I don’t know. It was heavily implied that Lila and Sam hooked up pretty much immediately though. There’s a scene where she’s either in bed or just in a small space with him, and she’s in her underwear. That and the dialogue heavily suggests they weren’t there for a chat. I think he was 16 or 17 of course, so it’s far less problematic than many of the others. Still, cumulative effect and all that.
“It’s always the clueless boy/man and the strong-minded girl/woman who knows what she wants and will get it. Which is problematic on its own when it’s the girl who’s the young one, for various reasons.”
This is maybe the Bronze Age version of what Janet was doing to Hank. Instead of tricking men into marrying them, though, Bronze Age girls/women were insisting that they knew what was best. And that was marrying them. Slightly less creepy or even more creepy? Both, maybe?
“I mean, the team was almost exclusively made up of square-jawed blonde men, it was lucky she even knew which one was Hank.”
LOL
Now that you mention it, it’s a well-worn trope even today, but more so in the 50s and 60s, the freewheeling bachelor and the clever woman who hunts him down and cages him in marriage. Heck, that’s almost what happens with Enkidu and Shamhat in the Epic of Gilgamesh, circa 2100 BC, so it’s been with us a while.
@Mike Loughlin: regarding Unity, it is probably wise to remember that said woman was well established to be seriously unbalanced and nigh omnipotent. As a matter of fact, she was the villain of the whole crossover, and her son was just as clearly depicted as badly affected by the whole situation and rebelious against it.
More generally on this matter, I think that there is quite a challenge in depicting relationships in ways that can’t be criticized. Those things are generally kept private for a reason.
Claremont, as I have myself pointed out in these comments in months past, wrote the X-Men and its supporting cast as leading somewhat realistic, liberal and complicated sexual lives. Particularly for the editorial and Comics Code Authority policies of the time. Byrne’s writing tends to show a bit more sexual deviancy IMO, as well as body horror.
However, I stand unconvinced that more conservative writing features healthier relationships. There is a lot indeed of wish fulfillment and automatic submission in many of the more traditional comics relationships.
I don’t think that is any better than, say, acknowledging on panel that teens such as Doug happen to sometimes have crushes on older women (happened to a guy that I know well. Yes, it did. Seriously, it did) and between themselves (that too has been known to happen). Claremont actually showed a lot of restraint and nuance in depicting Kitty and Piotr’s infatuations towards each other and treated both characters with a lot of respect. Even the inability of Piotr in dealing with the realization that it was over was realistic and well handled.
As for Sam Guthrie and Lina Cheney, I guess I am not following. Sam was risking his life on a regular basis at the time. Whatever he and Lila had was clearly consensual and respectful enough towards each other.
Frankly, I have a lot more trouble with Claremont’s writing of Magik (come to think of it, has she ever actually had a relationship?) and Wolverine (whose plot protection apparently extends to questions about the morality of his relationships).
The issue, I think, with the Cypher-Psylocke thing is the though balloons suggesting that she reciprocates his romantic feelings to some extent.
I think the deeper issue is that late 1960s through early 1980s sexual “liberalism” often stayed stuck inside its own set of patriarchal ideas.
In place of women’s automatic submission in domesticity was, sometimes, the expectation of women’s sexual availability to and for men. It’s the old observation of forms of sexism in which “Men have sex; women are sex.”
Even these Bronze Age writers — Claremont, Engelhart, Byrne, etc. — tend to write female sexual assertiveness either as “puppy love” by adolescent girls who “grow up” to be lovers and wives of older men (Heather Hudson, Sue Storm, Arisia, arguably Kitty Pryde) or as inherently coming from a place of higher social power, either from the older woman towards the adolescent boy (Lila Cheney, Psylocke-thinking-about-Cypher) or from flat-out dominatrix stuff in which aggressive female sexuality is coded as “dark”(a ton of Claremont stuff, Sue Storm-as-Malice in BDSM gear, Englehart’s take on Star Sapphire as a woman driven by masculine aggression and therefore evil and domineering).
The Lila Cheney thing is especially instructive here. I can imagine a young guy from Appalachia dreaming of impressing an older, worldly woman rock star with a wild side who can take you places you only dreamed of going. It’s little harder to imagine a worldly, older female rock star fantasizing about a younger, earnest dude from Appalachia. Whose desires are reflected in that plotting?
Even in the more “liberal” plots, the sexually liberated women character is mostly the agent of realizing male desires. Teacher really will want a teenage boy back because they see his promise and precocity — Psylocke, Katma Tui. The glamorous, successful woman will love the earnest, stiff, and awkward younger guy for his ideals and his unsophisticated charm — Lila Cheney. That kid with the puppy-love crush on an adult man who’s going places will grow up to be conventionally attractive and still want that dude when he’s middle-aged, stodgy, and has foreclosed a lot of his opportunities for conventional success — Sue Storm, Heather Hudson, Arisia.
And the women whop come on too strong, or want to really, really be in charge, to control the man they desire? Well, they’re villains, in the end, and need to be defeated or exorcised or depowered.