X-Men: The Trial of Magneto #5 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
X-MEN: THE TRIAL OF MAGNETO #5
“To Catch a Toad”
by Leah Williams, Lucas Werneck & Edgar Delgado
COVER / PAGE 1. Magneto and the Scarlet Witch dancing.
PAGE 2. The Scarlet Witch names her murderer.
This picks up directly from the end of the previous issue.
“No matter how your magic may or may not have affected Krakoa today…” Northstar is referring to the kaiju attack over the last couple of issues, triggered by Wanda’s traumatic identity crisis.
PAGE 3. Recap and credits.
PAGES 4-8. The Toad is summarily tried and exiled.
The Quiet Council here consists of Professor X, Magneto, Mr Sinister, Exodus, Mystique, Kate Pryde, Emma Frost, Sebastian Shaw, Nightcrawler and Storm. This is before Destiny and Colossus join the Quiet Council in Inferno (which is obvious from the timeline, as this story takes place in the days immediately following the Hellfire Gala).
The Toad is, at first sight, a wildly anticlimactic revelation as the killer. But there’s a twist, and we’ll get to that. We saw him before in issue #1, where he joined the other members of the original Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in a toast to Wanda, and then went on a rather dramatic rant about how her death wasn’t right or fair. Broadly, Toad always had a something of a crush on Wanda, but that storyline never went anywhere.
As we establish later, Wanda and Magneto actually had a plan to fake her murder so that the Krakoans would accept her rehabilitation (and also because she needed to die and be resurrected in order to carry out the magic). The implication seems to be that the Toad has been enlisted to take the fall, so his motivation for being involved in this scheme is mainly his devotion to Magneto – exactly as he says as he’s being taken away. Magneto and Wanda, on the other hand, are being entirely insincere in this scene.
“Wanda tore the Brotherhood apart!” Toad’s claim here – which he probably doesn’t mean anyway – is inaccurate. Wanda and Pietro left the Brotherhood after X-Men vol 1 #11, where the Stranger turned Mastermind to stone and abducted Magneto and the Toad. Basically, the team dissolved around them, and only then did they decide to swap sides and join the Avengers.
“That seems crueler than capital punishment.” It’s not clear what the Avengers have been told about “exile”, but they certainly seem to have the general thrust of it. Wasp and Vision brush it aside on the grounds that “We have no right to dictate Krakoans’ approach to morality”, but this is the sort of thing that conservatives say to parody liberal moral relativism, and could be used to justify all manner of horrific human rights abuses.
PAGE 9. Magneto cries alone.
You see, this whole scheme has been privately very stressful for him. It’s been… a trial. I think this would work better if it wasn’t so obviously bending over backwards to justify the series title.
PAGE 10. Flashback: Wanda and Magneto argue at the Hellfire Gala.
Wanda is pitching her scheme, as explained more fully later in the issue.
PAGE 11. “Data page.” The text explains that Doctor Strange once claimed that there’s no such thing as chaos magic, but he knows better now. This refers to a scene in Avengers #503 (from “Avengers Disassembled”) where Doctor Strange tells the Avengers that “chaos magic” doesn’t exist and that Wanda is just crazy. This page is trying to finally boot that into touch as part of its general attempt to close the door on everything that Brian Bendis did with Wanda. If this book has its way, we need never speak of it again.
PAGES 12-15. The children of Xavier, Magneto and Moira perform a ritual.
Wanda’s magic involves a ritual using the children of (apparently) the three most significant figures on Krakoa. She opts for Legion (the son of Professor X), Polaris (the biological daughter of Magneto) and Proteus (the son of Moira MacTaggert). As we find out later, the plan is to create back-ups of all mutants, even pre-Cerebro ones, on the astral plane, thus allowing all mutants to be resurrected, even those who died before Cerebro came online some time in the early Claremont years.
Proteus is understandably confused by the suggestion that his mother is somehow significant to Krakoa, since he doesn’t know anything about her involvement in the project, and he still thinks she’s dead. Wanda glosses over that – it’s not 100% clear whether she’s simply drawn to him by instinct, or whether she knows from Magneto about Moira’s involvement. Interestingly, she suggests that he has “access to the Astral Plane”, which may be another indication that his reality-warping powers are heavily involved in bringing back the actual souls of resurrected mutants.
The real point of this scene, though, is to establish Wanda as Magneto’s daughter by virtue of their past relationship, so that she becomes the proper participant to represent him in the ritual. It’s another attempt to, if not reverse a past story, at least bury it under a mound of earth and make it ignorable.
PAGES 16-18. Flashback: Wanda persuades Magneto to get on side with her plan.
This spells out the plot mechanics. Wanda wants to atone for M-Day by allowing all mutants from the past to be resurrected. She needed to be resurrected in order to be able to perform the spell at all. She needed Magneto’s help because nobody else would be willing to resurrect her (and indeed, he had to fight for it and eventually collude with Hope). And she needed to fake a murder so that people wouldn’t see it all as a scam. Magneto seems somewhat baffled and overwhelmed by the whole thing, and sort of dragged along in the wake by his love for Wanda. He then goes off and enlists the Toad to take the fall, which Wanda didn’t strictly ask him to do – but by the nature of her scheme, which called for him to arrange her resurrection, she surely can’t have intended him to have posed as the killer himself.
PAGE 19. Northstar learns that his adopted daughter will be resurrected.
Joanne Beaubier was an abandoned HIV-positive infant that Northstar found in a dumpster and informally adopted in Alpha Flight vol 1 #106. She died in the same issue, which was meant to be the catalyst for him coming out. Although her death postdates the start of Cerebro backups, Wanda’s spell also apparently allows the resurrection of mutants who died in the past before their powers emerged.
PAGES 20-21. Thunderbird is resurrected.
John, of course, died on his second mission with the X-Men, way back in X-Men vol 1 #95. He’s the iconic example of an X-Man who got killed, so this is a long-time traumatic event for the X-Men finally being reversed.
Meanwhile, Hope’s narration seems to be telling us that mutants who don’t want to go through the Crucible can now go through a literal portal to Wanda’s magical “Waiting Room” and simply join the resurrection queue that way. Presumably, if they do it this way, they don’t get to skip to the front.
The dragon flying around at the end of the scene is presumably Evangeline Whedon, a supporting character from X-Treme X-Men who had the unlikely power to turn into a dragon when exposed to blood.
PAGES 22-23. Wanda and Exodus tell their tale to the children.
Exodus is fully on board with the new line on Wanda, apparently, and so his regular fireside chats with the young mutants have U-turned to a pro-Wanda line.
PAGE 24. “Data page.” This is Wanda’s sigil and the logo from her 2016 solo series. At the centre of the sigil is a shape which doubles as an “M” and an outline of her headdress.
PAGE 25. Trailers. The Krakoan reads NEXT: INFERNO.
Not a particularly good miniseries, and certainly not up to the standard of Leah Williams’ work on X-Factor. We’ll see if this rehab job on Wanda sticks better than previous ones have. It probably helps that she’s become increasingly prominent in the MCU, so the comics will probably be using her more.
Between the sham conviction of Toad, the absurdly passive response to all this by the Avengers, the 180 reversal by Exodus to accept the newly authorized version of history, and what appears to be a magical suicide door, there are a lot of red flags casting doubt on this happy ending.
Of course, that’s been true all along in the Krakoa era but there’s been minimal progress on that thread. Maybe it’s something that will be followed up by Kieron Gillen in Immortal X-Men?
In order for Duggar’s X-Men #1 (in which Thunderbird is discussed in the past tense) to fit chronologically, there probably needs to be a time gap of at least a week between the main body of this story and the epilogue where Professor X learns about the new backups. But that seems to work fine.
Ah the good old “this spell requires an incredibly random factor that makes no sense, but happens to be part of the current setup, so that’s handy”.
I took the reversal on Exodus’ part to be an example on the real-world psychology of the authoritarian individual who internalizes official propaganda.
See: The USSR under Josef Stalin.
I found Wanda mentioning Moira being very odd. It seems like Magneto did share the secret with Wanda.
More and more characters are being revealed to know Xavier and Magneto’s secret.
As we near the end of “Inferno”, Moira being alive and a mutant seems to be one of those non-secret deep, dark secrets.
Speaking of Thunderbird’s return….check out Twitter’s response (or half of it anyway) to Marvel’s announcement of Giant-Size Thunderbird #1 written by a trans-Native American person named Nyla Rose.
I usually don’t follow such inanity, but I couldn’t help but notice and be amazed at the response.
Humanity never lets me down.
What a stinker this series was. I’m sure the ramifications of Wanda’s plan will be damaging to continuity and good storytelling somehow, but I can’t even get to that behind the hamfisted reveal of Toad, the greeting card self-help platitudes the Avengers uttered (“you are loved,” said Iron Man; “we had begun the grieving process,” said the Wasp), and the fact that half this series was the Avengers and the X-Men fighting poorly choreographed battles against giant monsters.
Can somebody tell me why we’re supposed to accept Toad being sent into the hole? Yes, they sent Nanny into the hole for the deaths of the park rangers when she asked. But the park rangers were killed by a mutant Nanny had trained to be a killer since childhood. Nanny was innocent in the narrow legal sense but in the larger moral sense she arguably bore considerable responsibility for the park rangers’ deaths. Toad has done some truly horrible things in his life but in this matter he was completely innocent. Why couldn’t Magneto and Wanda just wait until after the Avengers left and explain they did all this to resurrect Thunderbolt and Northstar’s daughter so Toad would be released from the pit? And we’re supposed to regard this as a redemption for Wanda?
Okay, for the last time, so Thunderbolt couldn’t be resurrected because he died before the backups were set up. So how were Changeling, Petra and Sway resurrected? They died before he did.
I’m still not sure what the advantage of the Waiting Room over the Crucible is. The only reason for the Crucible was ideological- it was developed by Apocalypse. If they just needed to be reborn, they could just take poison or something.
Xavier said that suicide will get a person put at the end of the queue.
That’s why Apocalypse came up with Crucible. It was decided if they rewarded suicide, then all the de powered mutants would immediately kill themselves, making the waiting time in the queue even longer.
To avoid that, Apocalypse said that de powered mutants would earn their right to gain back their X-gene one by one.
I’m thinking it was because Marvel is afraid of being accused of encouraged suicide.
If you notice, any comic that features anything related to suicide has to include the suicide prevention public service announcement.
Then, they would publish a popular comic where the mutant society encourages people to kill themselves to improve their lives.
Yeah, probably not PC.
Yeah this wasn’t good, and it jumped through a lot of hoops that don’t end up anywhere particularly interesting.
So we don’t need a Crucible anymore, every mutant ever can live forever, Onslaught was to blame for nebulous bad behavior, and Wanda isn’t used as a cultural boogie man.
The new post Hickman era brushed a lot of the nagging darkness aside so it can go on indefinitely.
Now we’re just left with an ethnic oligarchy run by villains.
Yaaaaaaaay.
I’m pretty sure Proteus has always had access to the astral plane, as his reality warping is stated to be psionic in nature, as opposed to Jamie Braddock using some form of quantum mechanics and Franklin Richards manipulating universal matter. Wasn’t Proteus’s plot in Astonishing X-Men that he was bringing the astral plane to Earth by making people’s wishes come true?
There was a dragon guy named Ned Ralston in Generation M who died after Wanda erased the X-gene, so I assumed the dragon was him.
And the next time the Avengers are beating up people in a foreign country, I hope they get hit with that “you can’t dictate the morality of a foreign culture” line. Hell, the Avengers have historically been fine dictating the morality of alien empires.
Nyla Rose is a wrestler and folks seem excited she’ll be writing the comic (apparently with Steve Orlando). Reaction seems pretty positive, am I missing something?
I’m curious how they handle Thunderbird’s transition from the double-digits of X-Men v1 to the present status quo – he’s spent less time engaged with mutant culture, such as it was, than probably anyone currently living on Krakoa. It seems like the answer is probably going to be that he’s totally fine with everything and there’s no adjustment period, but hopefully not.
I’ve seen the typical.
“Good for HIM.”
“Why would they hire Nyla Rose? Solely because of her sexuality.”
“Why would they hire Nyla Rose? Solely because of her ethnicity, not because she’s qualified to write a comic.”
“When are they going to publish Caucasian (sic) Voices?!”
“She’s not an authentic Native American anyway!”
@Michael
We’re supposed to accept Toad’s situation because it’s a sacrifice he chose to make for the good of mutantkind, I guess. And assuming Magneto and Wanda plan to get him out as soon as possible, it’s a temporary sacrifice at that.
In the case of Petra or Sway or anyone else who died before Cerebro came online, maybe the idea is the Cerebro coming online is when it got the ability to auto-scan the entire globe but that before that it could still manually scan someone close by. So the likes of Changeling were scanned in during their time working closely with the X-Men while Thunderbird never got the chance because he died on his second ever mission.
I left off this series after #2, when the muddled art, crowded amount of characters and general filler indicated it was going to be a bit of a mess.
I see the point A to point B they were trying to reach (pre Cerebro mutant backup; Wanda redemption). This would have played out much better in a longer term subplot in X-Factor as I understand it was originally planned, and worked to Williams strengths as a character writer.
I’m very dubious about the gain of bringing back original Thunderbird. Will he immediately sit in the background like Petra, Sway or several other characters who should be more prominent? I understand the symbolism but it feels like overload. Also, I note the preview has Thunderbird returning to his reserve to save it in some way. This kind of story? Surely we need a ‘man out of time’ kind of adjustment issue. But maybe we’ll see this run through further with James Proudstar in New Mutants.
The ‘who knows what about Moira’ is becoming increasingly leaky…
@Chris V- The complaint people had about the Crucible was that it was the council that decided that mutants that wanted to have their powers back had to fight in gladiatorial combat instead of just having Cecilia Reyes inject them with a drug that killed them painlessly or something. These were rules the Council made up- they weren’t traditions that have existed for centuries.
@Evilgus- I hope they remember that most of the inhabitants of his reservation were killed by Stryfe.
Michael-I understand it’s not a tradition. Krakoa has existed for all of two months in Marvel time. There are no actual traditions.
I still think that idea would be too controversial because it would feature Marvel seemingly promoting assisted suicide, which is still a divisive issue in most societies.
I believe Hickman came up with the Crucible as a way to work around editorial restrictions.
“Assisted suicide is too controversial? Well, how about a fight to the death with Apocalypse instead?”
Now, this series smoothed over that darker element on Krakoa with a more convoluted idea that also skirts the issue of assisted suicide.
You have to remember that Marvel tries to not feature divorce in their stories (Peter Parker made a deal with the Devil rather than take the simple route of getting a divorce when Marvel executives decided that a married Peter Parker seemed too old for the demographic they were hoping to appeal) and definitely avoids any references to abortions.
There are, of course, some counter-examples with divorce. They featured character-destroying traits like Hank Pym physically abusing Jan though.
These are controversial issues in the real-world that Marvel wants to avoid.
I don’t think they want to jump on a pro-assisted suicide bandwagon.
In modern life, does divorce really have the same controversy as abortion or suicide or [insert other topical issue]? I can understand, if not agree, with the notion heroes are role models, but given the divorce rates at least in Western culture, wouldnt having a divorced hero with kids kids having a good relationship with their former spouse, be something good for younger readers to see?
(If there actually are younger readers in 2022)
It seems like the issue with Peter Parker getting divorced isn’t the divorce, per se – it’s that it only worsens the problem of him feeling too old.
@ Chris V
Ah, well that’s predictable, I suppose. I can’t say I’m dying for a Thunderbird series, but it makes sense that Marvel would commission a one-shot from an indigenous creator. I’m not sure if she’s written comics before, but she’s far from the first professional wrestler Marvel’s hired, CM Punk etc etc. I never got into wrestling personally, but as Paul demonstrates, there seems to be a fair amount of crossover between fan bases, so it makes some amount of sense to me. There’s been a kind of broad Native American solidarity since at least the Indian Relocation Act of 1956 and especially the American Indian Movement of the late 60s/70s. Might they have hired an Apache author instead? I don’t know, but at least they’re trying.
As for this mini… it was mostly good fun, there are many good character moments, I thought the magical symbolism was integrated well. The art was pretty good. But obviously pretty unenever when looked at critically. I liked the idea of the Avengers coming to Krakoa, the kaiju stuff was fun but a little besides the point (aside from giving the two groups a common threat), and the resolution still leaves me scratching my head a bit. Not just the Toad, which felt very much out of the blue, but the idea of the Waiting Room period. At the very least, they’ve substantially rehabbed the Scarlet Witch, and drawn a line under some lingering questions regarding the mechanics of resurrection. I’ll be curious to see what book Williams is assigned to next, if we’ll get an X-Factor season two or what.
The explanation we’ve been given in the past for the presence of mutants like Petra or Sway on Krakoa is that they were recorded during Necrosha or Chaos War. The same can apply to Changeling, but since he’s only been shown in a single crowd shot, we can also chalk that up to an error.
But that absolutely does beg the question of why Thunderbird wasn’t recorded during those events, since he was around for both.
If we do get more X-Factor, it’ll be a different core cast. About half the team has already been farmed out to other books and the data pages in X-Men hint that Duggan will be bringing Northstar onto the team in the coming year. I would rather have Williams back, though.
I found this to be a messy miniseries – the action sequences are especially perfunctory, as they were in X-Factor. It is the rare example of a Wanda-centric major story where Wanda actually makes choices and does things of her own volition, whereas most Wanda-centric stories tend to boil down to “Wanda loses control!” Considering that the core premise here is that someone kills Wanda, that’s a nice reversal.
Paul,are you still rocking out on last.fm?
Also, thank you for slogging through this. As you said in the Wolverine 19 post, no one expected these Annotations posts to be so detailed or necessary. I quite like that the writers seem to be taking such an involved, continuity heavy approach. I just wish the stories repaid that investment – this turned out better than X Corp and Fallen Angels, but was a long way below the early X factor issues. The entire line has felt like filler since the Gala.
So it looks like Williams is trying to remove all shadiness from the resurrection protocols. They’re all the actual souls, not clones, no more Crucible, etc. But it raises more questions.
Who wants to wait in a line for 24-720 years? That was literally an aspect of Hell in the Supernatural tv show. If the souls are conscious, how do they feel about people cutting to the head of the queue?
What happened to “Magic has a price”?
Do mutants now have all memories up till death? If Wolverine (Laura) dies again, will she get her memories back of her time in the Vault?
What happens now if the resurrection protocols from a Cerebro backup are used while a mutant is still alive?
If a mutant dies multiple times in the future like Quentin Quire, is each self in the waiting room?
The objection to the Thunderbird one-shot is that it’s stuntcasting. Steve Orlando is going to be the writer, Nyla Rose is just an indigenous cover with no writing experience. As this guy says, he’s a huge wrestling fan and should be the raget for this, but he doesn’t want to have wrestlers write anymore than he wants to see Chris Claremont in the Royal Rumble.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlH7D-oAjWc
I wonder, historically, how often stunt casting a co-author helps with a book’s sales. We’ve had Raven and Punk write for Marvel in the past. I think Paul may have still been doing the charts with Raven did that story with Azzarello. Did the Ill-fated Lindelof Ultimate book sell well?
I presume the best example of this is Whedon, but that wasn’t a one-shot sales gimmick.
Chris V: there are studies that show an increase in suicides following media depictions of suicide. For example, there was a sharp increase in teen suicides following the release of the show 13 Reasons Why in April 2019. I can see why Marvel would shy away from characters killing themselves. Then again, such behavior was a plot point in Way of X, so who knows?
Trial of Magneto 5 was messy, and I don’t think it did enough to erase the damage done to Scarlet Witch’s character. I appreciate the attempt, but she’s now complicit in unjustly imprisoning Toad, bringing Magneto into a conspiracy, and endangering Krakoa. The first issue of this miniseries was great, but it went off the rails pretty quickly. I hope Leah Williams’ career and reputation aren’t damaged by the obvious and gratuitous editorial interference stuffed into this comic.
I don’t think wrestlers make a huge amount of difference to sales. As best as I can remember, CM Punk’s comics were fine, but they did no better or worse than you’d expect from the characters involved. He has a fanbase, but it’s not the sort that’s going to follow him to comics. I’d be pretty surprised if Nyla Rose is any different.
That’s why we have a market economy where a person can choose to buy a comic book or not buy a comic book.
I think it’s hilarious how people have a fit about someone co-writing or plotting a comic book, as if Marvel were going to show up at a person’s house with a gun and force them to read a comic book.
Also, I remember Drew Carey showing up in the Royal Rumble.
I don’t remember people turning off their televisions in disgust over the stunt.
Mark-Well, Whedon is a much more prominent name than CM Punk or Nyla Rose.
Whedon will surely attract readers who don’t normally read comic books to follow his writing, whereas I can’t see a professional wrestler increasing sales on a comic.
The exception would probably be The Rock, but that is probably more due to his becoming a major movie attraction rather than his prior wrestling career.
I was trying to think of “celebrity” guest writers over the years. The ones that came to mind that I didn’t mention were comedians like Patton Oswalt and John Cleese. IIRC, the cleese superman book with John Byrne got a decent amount of mainstream attention, but I doubt it amounted to a huge sales boost.
I’m sure there are others, especially in recent years, when I really stopped following modern popular culture the way I did even ten years ago.
The one wrestler who probably did okay sales wise was Mick Foley, with the kids books he did with Jill Thompson and then Jerry Lawler. But I guess those weren’t floppies, so may be a different animal.
Looking back, I can think of three instances of stunt-casting that got fans excited, other than the aforementioned Whedon:
In 1989, Batman scriptwriter Sam Hamm wrote a three issue story called “Blind Justice.” I don’t know what the reception was, but DC printed and sold a ton of copies.
Back in 1998, the idea that Kevin Smith, a movie writer/director, was going to write comics was mind-blowing. His Daredevil and Green Arrow comics sold very well, before people got sick of him (understandable after chronic lateness and bad comics like Batman: Widening Gyre).
In the early ‘00s, Stephen King collaborated with other writers and Jae Lee to do some Dark Tower prequels in comic book form. Initial sales were huge.
Other than that, assorted fantasy & YA novelists, screenwriters, wrestlers, actors, and musicians don’t seem to move the needle much. It probably would take someone like The Rock or, I don’t know, Beyoncé to get the interest of the wider world.
Is the Keanu Reeves book selling? And is anyone complaining about it?
“this spell requires an incredibly random factor that makes no sense, but happens to be part of the current setup, so that’s handy”.
It’s worse than that. She had to go through mutant resurrection (for…reasons?), but didn’t actually go through it since she resurrected herself. Absolute nonsense.
What was the point in this series adding major elements to the resurrections? Is it the writers wanting stuff that Hickman didn’t put in? Because right from the start of the Krakoan era they could’ve just said that Tempus’ part of The Five’s powers allowed them access to backups from the past.
We can now have ‘new’ mutants from the past, yet for the whole time since AvX completely ended the ‘No more mutants’ era there have been hardly any new mutant characters introduced, so again it’s utterly pointless.
Comedians like Oswalt, Cleese, (also Brian Posehn, Elliot Kalan, etc) are at least all writers, in addition to whatever else they do. Like Whedon, many of them have experience writing for television, and we’ve seen quite a number of TV writers writing for comics in the last decade plus. I suspect they’re able to negotiate better page rates and royalty deals than normal freelancers, but who knows. the comics industry has pretty terrible labor conditions compared with unionized film/TV work (just look at how royalties work in comics), so it’s also not too surprising that the Big Two have trouble holding onto writers coming from those areas (or even popular authors of YA fiction). CG types love to blame “SJWs” and all this nonsense, like the industry didn’t bankrupt itself in the 90s with the speculator boom and their own crap labor conditions. Especially given the value of comics IP for TV and film, it’s remarkable that they haven’t cleaned up their own shop yet. I’d love to see creators show a bit more solidary and finally get organized.
CM Punk didn’t get this kind of flack from the youtube crowd, they seem more upset that they hired a trans-woman to work on the book. This all reeks of CG nonsense to me. As far as we know at this point, Nyla Rose is only co-writing a one-shot. This youtube video (and comments) that Neutrino linked to are pretty sensational and totally incommensurate to the reality. So much of the YouTube media is just click bait, I can’t take this seriously. Old guys upset with current comics, just don’t buy them. ‘Nough said.
Speaking of celebrities, I noticed John Leguizamo has a comic being published by Image. It didn’t pique my interest, so I can’t speak to the quality, but it reminds me that a lot of Hollywood types 1) are comics fans and 2) tend to do projects like this because the overhead is so much lower than producing a film or tv series. It’s a way to get the IP circulating and hopefully option the rights for development. Not to say they’re cash grabs, but they make some amount of sense, when they’re creator owned. Working for the Big Two is something very different. When Aronowsky was having trouble getting The Fountain made (IMO an underrated film) he first commissioned a graphic novel, I think through Vertigo. That all makes some amount of sense.
@Allan M. That’s a great point, I like that reading alot.
Some people seem to be throwing a fit of their own. If during the speculator boom someone said that the multiple cover gimmick would eventually backfire, would that be a fit?
Drew Carey might have appeared at the Royal Rumble, but did he wrestle? Even if he did, it would be an actor in an acting job.
The Keanu Reeves book (Berzerker) is selling and some lefty creators complained about him taking away crowdfunding money from indie creators.
So, rather than a five issue story on X-Factor that would have everyone going “That’s a shame, the first ten issues were really good!” We have a five issue miniseries that has everyone going “That’s a shame, the ten issues of X-Factor were really good!” I still don’t understand the hows and whys of Wanda’s plan. The reveal of Toad reveals the problem with a lot of whodunnit stories, there is just no way to read back through the previous issues and see all the overlooked clues, especially when it’s written to deliberately miss those out because writers are worried that the readers will work out who did it. And while Toad has been written so inconsistently over the years (Remember the Kings of Pain annuals story?) he doesn’t seem to be enough of a toady to take the fall for Magneto. And the reaction of the Avengers was ridiculous, if they’d behaved like this during ‘Avengers Versus X-Men’ there wouldn’t have been a story.
Also, when will we see what Moira contributes to Krakoa that makes it important to have Proteus represent her in the spell? So far it seems to be moral support only while Charles and Erik do the work. It didn’t need to be as awkward as it was in order to allow Wanda to reclaim her role as Erik’s daughter again. It would have worked better if left unspoken, for the reader to notice.
It’s pretty insane to crowdfund a movie pitch comic by a guy who’s made more money than the vast majority of humans who’ve ever lived.
Kickstarter is bananas.
Michael says: Okay, for the last time, so Thunderbolt couldn’t be resurrected because he died before the backups were set up. So how were Changeling, Petra and Sway resurrected? They died before he did.
Hickman confirmed in his Jay and Miles episode that Sway and co being shown as alive was an error on his part and is the one thing that REALLY gets under his skin when he thinks about this time on X-Men
As for the Crucible not being needed, it never was, any former mutant being killed would get them put into the queue.
The Crucible was only ever a queue-jumping, presumably ego-boosting mechanism for those who didn’t, for whatever reason, want to commit suicide and hang around in the queue.
To bad for Hickman, as a writer, he should have done his homework better and White as the editor should have caught that mistake (of course that would actually require White to be semi competent), but since that made it to the comic then Hickman should have come up for a better explanation of why Thunderbird couldn’t be resurrected, but he didn’t so people are within their rights to point out the holes in his story. Of course, the more logical explanation would have been that Mr Sinister had used John’s genetic sample already to make himself a mutant, which was established by Hickman himself, so no convoluted explanation would be needed, but what do I now, I am not a writer nor an editor at Marvel.