Resurrection of Magneto #4 annotations
As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.
RESURRECTION OF MAGNETO #4
“Reawakening”
Writer: Al Ewing
Artist: Luciano Vecchio
Colour artists: David Curiel & Jesus Aburtov
Letterer: Joe Sabino
Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen
Editor: Jordan D White
COVER / PAGE 1. Magneto attacks Orchis footsoldiers. He’s in his black costume, rather than the red one worn in the issue.
PAGE 2. Obituary for Paul Neary.
PAGE 3. Magneto advances towards Orchis soldiers.
As in previous issues, this opening splash page is a tarot reference – it’s loosely based on the Rider-Waite version of the Hierophant. That card doesn’t show the Hierophant with three helmets, but it does show him in a purple cape between two pillar type structures, raising his right hand in the same position as Magneto here, and with two worshippers in the position of the two Orchis footsoldiers. It also has two crossed keys lying on the floor, replaced here by two Orchis cards.
“I don’t know which hat to wear.” Magneto means this both figuratively – in terms of which role he wants to play – and literally, since he’s actually carting around all three versions of his helmet. We saw them lying around him in the symbolic opening page of issue #1. Page 9 is quite explicit about the black helmet representing aggressive rage, the white helmet being saintliness (which he equates with Professor X), and the red helmet representing his own path. This is a little awkward, in that the “Magneto of old” is being equated with a helmet that doesn’t actually come from that period, but the black/white symbolism clearly takes priority. Magneto has clearly opted for his red costume (with a Krakoa-era X-Men logo on the chest).
More generally, we see him in the next scene vacillating about how aggressive he wants to be with the Orchis soldiers. He’s aware that everything he does has consequences, not all of them intended, and that attempting to withdraw from the world was no different. He’s unsure about how to use his power (and position) for the greatest good, and acting cautiously as a result.
PAGE 4. Recap and credits.
PAGES 5-6. Magneto advances past Orchis footsoldiers.
“And why can’t I face Charles?” An aside at this point, but see below regarding Magneto’s repurposing of his “good men” speech from X-Men Red #7.
“As the resistance mobilises…” In Fall of the House of X. Storm was still absent in this storyline as of Fall #3.
PAGES 7-11. Squad Zero try to defeat Magneto.
Squad Zero are new. They’re apparently the specialist anti-Magneto squad. Rather than equipping them with equipment that makes them immune to Magneto’s powers, Orchis’ approach is to boobytrap them so that they’ll flood the prison with nerve gas if Magneto uses his powers. It doesn’t work, because Magneto can crush them so quickly and thoroughly that no nerve gas is released.
But Magneto acknowledges nonetheless that “it was the perfect trap”, presumably because it has forced him into the position of taking their lives, something that he was working very hard to avoid in the earlier pages. It’s also determined how he’s perceived by the mutants that he’s rescuing. At any rate, he definitively opts for the red helmet at the end of the scene.
“First ten of you die! Then a hundred! Then a thousand!” This seems to be echoing Orchis’ threat to kill humans in X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023. (“The first time a returned mutant is found on Earth, we will kill a human. The second time, the cost will be ten humans. Then a hundred. I suppose you’re smart enough to know about the powers of ten?”)
“Of course, now he [Charles] know how Orchis keep their end of such bargains.” Magneto assumes that Professor X would back down in the face of Squad Zero’s threat, by analogy with his surrender at X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023.
Magneto implies that Orchis didn’t honour their side of the bargain they made with Xavier. Technically, that’s debatable, since Dr Stasis’ offer was “We will kill no more humans, if you all leave.” Quite a few of the X-Men didn’t leave, so arguably Stasis’ promise was never engaged in the first place. That said, it’s fairly clear that Orchis were always planning to kill the human guests at the Hellfire Gala, as they did at the end of the issue, which is probably sufficient for Magneto’s point. More fundamentally, Magneto may also be under the impression that Stasis lied about the destination of the gates – in fact, Stasis really did believe that they were directed to Mars.
“I’ll have to remember their names.” As in the memorial wall seen in issue #2.
“To save one life is to save the world.” This is a paraphrase of the Talmud (Sahedrin 4:5, to be precise).
“To me, my friends.” Echoing the “To me, my X-Men” catchphrase used by Professor X, but with more emphasis on the wider community.
“We must be so wary of good men. For what will we not do?” Magneto’s narration repeats his line from X-Men Red #7, where he was warning Storm to keep an eye on Professor X. Here, he reapplies it to the need to keep watch on himself.
PAGES 12-13. Storm, Magneto and Blue Marvel destroy the Orchis base.
Magneto tacitly acknowledges to Storm that he killed some of the Orchis prisoners. It’s odd that he says that Storm and Blue Marvel “took more Orchis prisoners”, since there were only five people in Squad Zero – did they really make that much difference to the numbers? Or did he go on and kill some more people between pages 11 and 12? (Or, because he was being so cautious at the start of the issue, did he let more of them escape?)
“What will I not do? I fear the answer is change.” Well, this is comics, and this is Al Ewing’s final issue.
PAGES 14-21. Storm, Magneto and Blue Marvel defeat the Stark Sentinel.
Magneto continues to have a very broad idea of the deaths that he’s responsible for. Here, he blames himself for the Stark Sentinels, because they were built using technology that Iron Man developed as a counter-measure for Magneto. As Magneto points out, having deliberately set himself up as a figure of fear, he can hardly complain that people reacted accordingly; but even so, the causal link between that and the Stark Sentinels is quite remote.
“Dr Brashear has a long-standing distrust of the Avengers.” I think that’s a point from Ewing’s Ultimates run.
Neutronium is another recurring feature from Al Ewing’s stories, introduced in Mighty Avengers vol 2 #9 (where its effect on Blue Marvel was established).
“The bark of an oak is built to withstand a piece of straw but a hurricane wind will blow the straw through the bark and deep into the wood.” Mythbusters would disagree.
“I’m not afraid of a life that ends.” A recurring motif from X-Men Red, relating to the people of Arakko rejecting Krakoan resurrection. Magneto (and Storm) both aligned themselves with that, which is why Magneto was dead at the start of this series in the first place.
“To me. We’re going to make a human / mutant circuit.” Again, Magneto echoes “To me, my X-Men” – and then proposes doing the Krakoan-era “mutant circuit” standard with a non-mutant hero for the first time. He goes on to talk about the importance of not “forsaking common humanity”. The suggestion here seems to be that Magneto is acknowledging the need to place greater weight on what mutants have in common with humans, which happens to fit quite nicely with the end of the (separatist) Krakoan era.
“Ororo calls the fundamental force of lightning – and, as she did in the Shadow Kingdom and on Arakko, uses it to boost my [Magneto’s] power.” The Shadow Kingdom was last issue. Arakko was X-Men Red #6.
“When the world I helped to build was no longer to my liking …. I chose to … walk away.” When he left Earth for Arakko in Immortal X-Men #1 and X-Men Red #1.
PAGES 22-23. Magneto is sent to rescue Iron Man.
Magneto does indeed show up to help Iron Man at the end of this week’s Invincible Iron Man #17.
The final page is based on another tarot card – the World, representing wisdom and an unequivocally positive card. The original card shows a naked female figure, but Magneto’s cape is arranged to evoke her hair. Like her, he’s carrying two sticks and surrounded by an oval shape (on the card, it’s a wreath). The four heads in the corner of the original card are the four “living creatures” of Jewish mythology: a man (Emma), an eagle (Iron Man), an ox (Storm) and a lion (Blue Marvel).
PAGE 24. Trailer. This is the final issue, so the Krakoan reads RISE OF THE POWERS OF X.
““When the world I helped to build was no longer to my liking …. I chose to … walk away.” When he left Earth for Arakko in Immortal X-Men #1 and X-Men Red #1.”
I think Magneto means that by refusing to return to life, he was shirking his responsibilities.
Well… that was a perfect encapsulation of FoX-era Ewing: repetitive, navel-gazing, trying desperately to sound profound without actually having anything new or substantial to say. And all this just for a glorified guest spot in Iron Man and, presumably, some small role to play in the remainder of FotHoX. What a waste.
It’s a small detail, but I’d say the annotation is correct. Magneto first shirks his responsibilities by leaving Xavier. The world he helped create was the Earth with Krakoa. He then realizes that “mutant heaven” cannot mean as much to him as he thought it would while he fought for it because Anya, his daughter, was not a mutant and would not be resurrected. Plus, he got tired of the in-fighting and backstabbing of the Quiet Council, as Magneto expected mutants would be beyond that. The world he helped create wasn’t as he wanted it to be so he simply left Krakoa for something else.
@Diana- they had to bring Magneto back SOMEHOW if they were going to use in McKay’s X-Men.
@Michael: According to Ewing, this was always the plan, it has nothing to do with the relaunch.
Well, I like gazing at Magneto’s navel. Or is that Al Ewing’s navel? I like when he gazes at it.
That being said, this issue feels a bit off. The white/black/red symbolism – sure, Ewing goes for ‘white is good, black is bad, we all know it’, but it doesn’t work, it can’t work when the magenta Magneto is a classic design and the weight it carries – what it symbolises – can’t win over generic ‘white is good, black is bad’ with an audience reading an X-Men book.
Especially when the red-clad Magneto was used as a symbol of everything Max/Erik was when he was a Silver Age madman in this very book, two issues ago.
There was a way to make Magneto going back to old colours without reverting to villainy work, but Ewing went about it in a convoluted and simply wrong way.
I did like the navel gazing and the inner monologue, but the colour stuff was off.
Draft me into Team Navel Gazing too. I don’t know of any previous interpretation of Magneto that directly acknowledged the value of human life *or* demonstrated a willingness to work with them, so, on the contrary, I find this both new and substantial development. Apart from the heady and symbolic first issue, I thoroughly enjoyed this mini and am looking forward to Gillen’s wrap-up over in Forever and RoPoX.
This was fine, but not quite the final chapter we’d have wanted from Al Ewing. (Then again, who knows, we may not be done yet.) That said, as a Magneto character study, it’s been nice to see Resurreccion follow up on some of the themes of Cullen Bunn’s Magneto series, in addition to tying together many of the themes Ewing has toyed with throughout his various X series.
Combined with issue 3, but this issue in particular, it seemed to me Ewing was responding to the casual murder of Duggan’s post FoHoX X-Men. Magneto ultimately does kill Squad Zero, but only after very blatantly sparing the kinds of henchmen we’ve watched Kate, Piotr, and even Kurt gleefully murder in Duggan’s books recently.
Anybody watching X-Men ’97? Holy #$@!
It’s only navel gazing when it’s done badly. When it’s done well, it’s “introspective,” “reflective,” and “character-focused.” For me, this fair squarely in the second camp.
I’m not up on every Magneto appearance, especially in the 15 or so years before HoX/PoX, but Magneto working with a human and then going to save a human who has fought with him in the past is an unexpected development. This isn’t “I think Lee Forester is hot,” this is a person with well-established anti-human tendencies making a conscious choice to work with humans. The last page threw me a bit, because Magneto’s actions show he has changed (at least for now).
@Jeff: episode 5 was BANANAS! I can’t believe they went as far as they did.
Well, they did plop Cable right in the middle of it for one scene, so they probably went as far as they did because they’ll walk back some if not all of it.
But they certainly went places.
Mike-Claremont’s reformed Magneto had to agree to cooperate with mutants and tried to change his attitude and perspective on humans to make himself worthy of living up to Xavier’s standards.
There was Blair from the Cullen Bunn Magneto run, who was a point-of-view character for the reader, working alongside someone like Magneto, yet still sympathizing with his cause.
This is supposed to position Magneto in a different light, from the perspective of his realization that Anya (his daughter) was not a mutant. The Krakoa-era Magneto had been positioned as a mutant supremacist who was seen as almost a god by the inhabitants of Krakoa. Krakoa (especially after Gillen distanced Xavier from the nation’s ideology) was a culmination of Magneto’s dream, far more than Moira’s selling it as a compromise between warring mutant ideologies. It is interesting to see Magneto achieve what he had been fighting towards for so long only to realize that “mutant heaven” isn’t “to his liking”. Not only due to his realization about Anya but also the noble ideals he considered inherent to mutants (as opposed to humans) was found by him to be a delusion.
*Claremont’s Magneto had to agree to cooperate with humans, not “mutants”
@Chris V: true, Magneto worked with humans during Claremont. What I remember is Magneto submitting himself to a trial because of his own guilt and uncertainty, his following Xavier’s path as best he could (not great), his interacting with Tom & Sharon, Stevie Hunter getting mad at him for interfering in her class, his dealing with school authorities and parents uncomfortably, an alliance of convenience with SHIELD and Ka-Zar, and him saying “screw it” and leaving Earth. He was pretty darn anti-human after that…
I think his actions in RofM 4 are Magneto forging his own path toward allying with humans, probably for the reasons you cite as well as his experiences in the afterlife. I’m interested in seeing how long this change lasts.
Wasn’t aware of Blair, thanks for the info.
@Joseph S.- According to Steve Foxe, Ewing is writing a short story in X-Men 35 that helps set up Heir of Apocalypse. Preview images for Fall of the House of X 4 came out today, and they show Apocalypse arguing that the supposed leaders of mutantkind abandoned Krakoa to hid in mansions (Emma) or hide in sewers (Kate). So presumably Ewing’s story is going to be about the break between Apocalypse and the X-Men.
Instead of a booby-trapped Squad Zero, why didn’t Orchis just use the power nullifier they had in Inferno #4?
I noticed that when Hickman was writing Orchis, they didn’t use the word “mutie”, but they do often during FoX.
Magneto. In a sense, what most surprises me about his continued use is that it happens at all. He is up there with Wolverine and Storm in the short list of most incoherently written mutants.
Or rather, it is the reactions of people around him that I find most incoherent. Were he a DC character, I would posit that he may have an uncontrollable power to switch places with alternate continuities’ versions of himself.
There are many issues afflicted on X-characters due to their continued use in a wide array of arrangements though decades, making them quite unconvincing from a psychological perspective. They have lived through much and, out of pragmatical necessity, effectively forgotten most of it. Magneto and the people who interact with him show that trait particularly clearly.
This current form is apparently presented to us as an idealist of some kind. That puts him very much at odds with who he was back in Uncanny #150 (1981) and before, but I guess no one else cares and neither should I.
[…] OF MAGNETO #4. (Annotations here.) At first glance, it seems like an odd choice to do three rather abstract issues venturing into the […]
Marvel has explained his inconsistency by giving him mental instability due to his powers.
From Claremont onwards, Magneto is quite a bit like Namor, another character who ranges all over the moral and psychological spectrum.
Both of them have had pretty long runs where they were somewhere between sympathetic antagonists and sympathetic would-be heroes struggling with their worst tendencies.
Each of them got an explanation of their wild personality swings based in part on physiological issues related to their powers.
But in more recent decades, the arrogance and willingness to cross moral lines is what’s been played up in both of them. But writers tend to go back and forth on the degree to which they’re willing to cross those lines.
Depending ont he writer, you get different answers to the bug characterization questions:
Do Magneto and Namor feel remorse for past actions and collateral damage?
How willing are they to admit this to themselves?
Do they care about anyone besides their people?
What alliances are they willing to say no to?
How much of their arrogance is actual narcissism, how much is bitterness, and how much is a facade they believe they must keep up to help their people?
On the one hand, this reflects complex characterization, at least potentially. On the other, the need for spectacle and shocking moments can make them very inconsistent characters.
And it can mean writers must downplay or justify some pretty indefensible stuff from past stories in order to play up their more sympathetic traits.
I had not considered the comparison to Magneto, oddly enough (since they have considerable story together).
There are IMO two very significant differences between the two, however. They make me feel that Namor’s treatment is warranted while Magneto’s is not.
One: Namor has been like that from the very start. Magneto switches between issues of the 1980s Secret Wars series – and even then it isn’t even him, but rather Xavier and the X-Men who out of the blue decide that he is not such a bad chap after all (for no clear reason).
Two: Namor is royalty. Magneto sometimes seems to have decided unilaterally that he is or ought to be.
It all comes down to Magneto having an odd attitude since he decided that he likes to occasionally be perceived as a decent chap instead of a slobbering would-be despot and for some unclear reason having the X-Men’s play along (no, “God Loves, Man Kills did not convince me at all, nor did Uncanny #150).
Magneto did not change all that much. Xavier and the X-Men’s reactions towards him did change quite suddenly and unexplainably.
@Omar- to be fair, this isn’t just a problem with Namor and Magneto but with a lot of reformed villains. There’s Poison Ivy, who as we’ve discussed before change drastically since her villain days. But even from the mid-90s onward her characterization has changed drastically and writers often try to justify or ignore her horrible acts. In fact, some writers try to portray Harley and Ivy as DC’s premier lesbian couple, and that requires ignoring not only Ivy’s past but Harley’s as well. Even ingnoring that horribly out-of-character issue where she places bombs in toys, Harley has done horrible things like help the Joker abduct kids and try to kill Jimmy Olsen just for lying to her about being in love with Talia. But writers often try to downplay that aspect of her.
There’s similar issues with Mystique and Destiny. Writers seem inconsistent about how to handle Mystique over the years. Spurrier for example had Legion cheer her on and even managed to make Mystique killing a man whom she’d been pretending to romance while robbing him blind a noble act of standing up to homophobia. Gillen on the other hand pointed out how Destiny downplaying the chances of people dying in her plan made Mystique LESS likely to agree.
(Although Destiny has arguably become LESS sympathetic in the Krakoan Era than ever before, even though Nicieza and Casey revealed that she had been party to Sinister’s experiments on children.)
And then there’s Frenzy, who murdered Sharon Friedlander but weirdly when it’s mentioned at all, like in Resurrection of Magneto, Magneto seems to get the blame even though he was dead at the time.
And then there’s the Krakoan Era’s weird take on Apocalypse. On the one hand, we seem to be supposed to accept him as a tragic figure who just wanted his wife and children back. But at the same time. Hickman had him proudly boast of destroying Middle Eastern civilization in the Bronze Age and other characters view him sympathetically even as he does things like order Excalibur to kill the Warwolves, dissect Morgan Le Fey and use the life forces of his fellow immortals to create a mystic portal.
(Arguably the problem with some writers’ takes on Apocalypse and Ra’s al Gaul and to a lesser extent Vandal Savage is that some writers want to view them as tragic anachronisms. They were born into less civilized and more violent times, they DID What They Had to Do and don’t realize such methods are not appropriate in the modern era. But at the end of the day, they’ve all destroyed entire civilizations when it suited their needs ,and there’s no way to justify that.)
Apocalypse is another interesting character to compare and contrast to Magneto – and, lately, also Sinister and Exodus.
During the Golden and Silver Ages villains and the ways heroes related to them were rarely complex or nuanced. Villains were bad, heroes had to stop them. There were very few exceptions: Catwoman, Golden Age’s Harlequin (Green Lantern’s foe/love interest), arguably the first Black Widow (Claire Voyant).
Early X-Men were no different. They just had an additional layer of dealing with a social acceptance challenge. But things have changed. Now when the X-Men find a traditional foe odds are that they have to decide whether they want to argue with him, stop him, or just ask what they are up to. It can no longer be assumed that the X-Men will want to stop the schemes of their foes when given the opportunity.
That happened during the first Claremont run for a few characters – the White Queen, Magneto, Sebastian Shaw. Callisto and the Morlocks were perhaps the first deliberately ambiguous case; Uncanny #169-170 established them from the get-go as dangerous yet in a detente of sorts, with a wide variety of stances and levels of trust and sympathy: Masque was something of a sociopath, Annalee was well-meaning if sometimes misguided, Callisto herself was power-hungry and proud but saw herself as honorable and could be worked with if you conformed to her expectations.
Interestingly, it was during that two-parter and the concurrent original Wolverine mini that we first clearly saw the flip side: the X-Men themselves became increasingly ethically compromised, starting with Logan and Ororo.
I can see how Claremont may have appreciated the opportunity for engaging in more varied and innovative plots, but I don’t particularly care for the end result that came from that setup coupled with the editorial desire to keep using the character for decades since.
The X-Men have not only become more tribal and uninterested in larger society (the Morrison and Krakoa eras have only intensified that trait, I am afraid), but they have also become selectively forgetful according to the needs of the editorial interests of any given time. Perhaps not coincidentally, Marvel has also lost interest in long volume runs. We are no longer expected to follow a character or team since their first appearances, but instead just during the runs that we have reason to expect to like, due to the attached creators or events.
This last development was probably unavoidable. I am starting to think that we should consider each volume on its own terms, with its own continuity which only vaguely inherits bits and pieces of previous or concurrent ones from other runs and other series. Because if we do not, characterization becomes unworkable.
Luis Dantas points out how IRON MAN became repetitive
@Michael: Someone said they liked redemption, but shouldn’t there at least be a redemption arc for characters like Apocalypse?
@luisdantas , are you suggesting … HyperTime ?! Not even the Distinguished Competition could successfully make Kt work, even now in 2024 despite their timeline being absolutely a mess. Such is Heresy to the Marvel Multiverse , Mark Gruenwald is spinning in his grave right now LOL which is why Quesada’s & Jemas’ personal preferenced for “consistency” over “continuity” never got taken too seriously by writers like, say, Busiek and Ewing .
Actually 616-En Sabah Nur has been on one long redemption arc beginning with Blood of Apocalypse and continuing through XMen Disassembled , Age of XMan : The X-Tracts , HOX/POX , Excalibur Volume 4 , X of Swords , X-Men Red Volume 2 , Heralds of Apocalypse , and now FOX and soon the Heir of Apocalypse
@JDSM24: Hypertime may not have been even planned by DC, which in any case has shown a clear lack of ability and/or interest in caring for its own continuity – coupled with a lot of interest in selling successive series that address it, of course.
First I hear of Blood of Apocalypse, but I was intrigued by how Age of X-Man went out of its way to present Apocalypse under a favorable light.
I don’t know that it is possible nor desirable to be consistent while also writing exciting stories about characters with thirty to sixty years of real time publishing behind them. In practice, it is not attempted. Sales matter far more than consistency.
But I do feel that it should be possible to do better than writing most characters as if they only had very fuzzy recollections of most events beyond what, to them, is around the last three years of their lives.
If you are going to use characters who consider themselves royalty or leaders of whole country-like communities, at some point they must live under the weight of their own reputations and find themselves unable to do anything about that.
Xavier has mostly been treated that way (although there are exceptions). Storm and Magneto have not. Nor has Logan, who has its own smaller but much more dynamic brand of inner incoherence.
@Chris: Iron Man has always been repetitive, because it is a Silver Age character who for the longest time was defined by his love life, his role as a tech and business wizard and his health troubles.
Which apparently either plays to Gerry Duggan’s strengths or just meshes with his own inclination towards incredibly high stakes, heavy noises, unbelievably fast and spectacular resolutions and hardly any follow-up, consequence or even memory.
“Rise from the ashes” plots are part and parcel for Iron Man since at least the late 1970s and I would be lying if I claimed to be expecting something else this time. But it would be nice to have Tony be allowed to eventually grow and move on as a character. He seems to be at pretty much the same place now as he was back in the early days of the first Micheline run.
Yeah , Blood of Apocalypse was Peter Milligan’s last XMen story , and the most distinctive one in what was otherwise a disappointingly underwhelming run , in relative comparison to his arguably modern classic X-Force/X-Statix . Personally , it was extremely shocking to me as it actually had the audacity to resurrect Apocalypse , after half a decade dead since his very spirit itself was dissipated by Cable in The Search for Cyclops , and whats more , resurrected him as a Magneto-style X-gene mutant messiah who actually cared compassioanately about his fellow X-gene mutants , who had just been Decimated , which was the exact opposite of his personality during The Twelve storyline and the Ages of Apocalypse when he was a sheer selfish sociopath. Arguably , this story is where Krakoa’s heroic [A] directly and expressly originated.
@JDSM24- in Blood of Apocalypse, he was trying to kill 90 percent of the planet’s population and has no problem brainwashing some of his fellow mutants to do it. That’s not very sympathetic.
No, not to baseline humans , but to his fellow powered X-gene mutants still surviving in Earth-616 , the “198” (actually 300 as per Henry Gyrich’s revelations in Avengers: The Initiative) , he was the Second Coming of Magneto LOL which was echoed a decade and a half later by the “reformed” Cassandra Nova in Marauders Volume 2
“And it can mean writers must downplay or justify some pretty indefensible stuff from past stories in order to play up their more sympathetic traits.”
Oh man, insert Villain Name Here. I often have this reaction to the various attempts to rehabilitate and humanize Dr. Doom in particular. Y’all, he is a democracy-quashing dictator, who cares if he has mommy issues? It always sits uncomfortably for me.
But at the same time, finding the humanity in these characters must be more of a both/and exercise than it often is with more straightforward protagonists – we have compassion for Doom’s/Magneto’s/Namor’s childhoods or whatever and also correct judgement for some of their modern day actions – and when done deftly, this helps us as readers reconcile with our own darker halves too.
One of the more interesting things about the Krakoan era for me has been the writers who understand this tension and are playing with it. Ewing has Magneto directly acknowledging and working with this inner duality, so even though he isn’t “redeemed,” he might become at least reconciled to himself. Whereas Gillen’s Xavier believes himself to be shadow-free, Just a Good Guy, and therefore never does contend with his own worst impulses – and thus is actually more dangerous when they inevitably come forth. Storm is a bit in the middle of those two extremes in that she never considered herself quite as messianic as Xavier did, despite being treated as such by others, but also never fully accepted or explored her darker half either. And so, she and Magneto come to an understanding by virtue of what they of themselves in the other: Magneto learns he is not so bad as he thought even while still no saint, and Storm learns she is not so good as others hoped and therein lies her true potential for greatness.
I think the [A] storyline had a LOT of potential to be better explored and fit in with all of these themes. Hickman talked about seeing Apocalypse, Magneto, and Xavier as the bit three that were necessary for telling the Krakoan story and I think that’s because Xavier and Apocalypse are “opposite” ends of the spectrum and Magneto is in the middle in the ways described in this thread.
How does a nation contend with the breadth of its own humanity? How can even one individual do this for themself? You can see how Apocalypse’s extreme nature would be a necessary aspect to fully explore that theme.
But ultimately a lot of his part of the story was handled in Excalibur where it was bungled and obscured, and then ultimately sidelined in X-Men Red where Ewing was more interested in Magneto and Storm.
The heroes aren’t heroes and the villains aren’t villains. Everyone is equal on Krakoa – equal in their humanity, for good and for ill.