Last night I was reading the third volume of Essential X-Men with the original run. Two things caught my attention a) I think by the time the new X-Men had developed in to a team by about issue 120 that Cyclops had early stage altzheimers because there is a scene in there that originally appears in here where he goes in to the Danger Room and Jean asks him in both cases "Don't you remember that fortified door leads to the Danger Room?" Okay, you can live in a place & forget where a room is MAYBE once but twice and both parties spouting the exact same dialogue?
This is the real question though. When Mesmero is tracked down by the Sentinels, we find out the Magneto he was working with was a robot. Did we ever find out just WHO created it and why?
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Conventional wisdom says that the robot you're talking about, from X-Men #50-52, was created by Starr Saxon, as apparently alluded to in Captain America #247-249.
Some fans complained that after Roy Thomas (or was it Gary Friedrich?) showed Magneto falling to his death, that Arnold Drake did not explain how he came back from the dead in his 4-part "City of Mutants" story in X-MEN #49-52. To be fair, this criticism was hurled at Arnold for a number of such stories, such as when Quasimodo turned up in an issue of CAPTAIN MARVEL. So when Roy Thomas got back on X-MEN, with Neal Adams, first they revealed that Mesmero's boss was not the real Magneto, but a robot. THEY never bothered to explain who built the robot. Some time later, when Angel (and the rest of the team) found themselves back in the Savage Land, Angel ran into a scientist who, we learned, was really Magneto (the first time anyone had ever seen him with his helmet off). From the back-story revealed, it was clear that Magneto had wound up in the Savage Land after the big X-MEN/AVENGERS crossover... which meant that, definitely, the guy in "City Of Mutants" had NEVER been Magneto. Now, had Mesmero known this, and been in some way responsible for creating the robot (perhaps as a way of coercing other mutants to follow his lead), that might have made sense. But that's not what Thomas & Adams did. And the thing is, they never explained it. EVER. Would they have gotten around to it, if X-MEN hadn't been cancelled when it was? No way to know. Either way, sloppy writing.
What's funny is, I know publication dates often mean nothing in some cases, but it seems to me Starr Saxon didn't get killed until AFTER "City of Mutants" came out (I may be wrong there, I just don't feel like looking it up right now).
About 9-10 years later, continuity-OBSESSED Roger Stern and John Byrne, in a SINGLE panel in CAP #247, showed that Machinesmith had apparently been responsible for creating a lot of previously-unidentified robots throughout the Marvel Universe. This included a (literally) 2-faced villain who'd shown up in a couple of Steve Gerber stories, and the "Baron Strucker" who'd been calling himself "The Hood" in those Gene Colan CAP stories with the fake Bucky Barnes. (Bucky was created by Dr. Doom, though... as if things weren't confusing enough.)
What bugs me, to this day, is, when I went back and read thru those Stern-Byrne issues, THEY never explained WHY Machinesmith (formerly Starr Saxon) had been building those particular robots. Their belated attempts to straighten out long-neglected continuity only wound up opening new questions, which in turn have NEVER been answered. Sheesh. (I suppose I've found this stuff fascinating because "Bucky Reborn" was the 1st issue of CAP I ever bought when it came out. I didn't read the 2nd half until about 7-8 years later, and the Stern-Byrne issues came out maybe 5 years after that.)
Come to think of it, I guess someone thought it made sense to tie in at least 2 different and previously-unrelated confusing Gene Colan storylines together...
Even more puzzling was those X-Men issues introduced Lorna Dane AKA Polaris who was briefly called "Magneto II" as the daughter of the Robot Magneto. I'm still not 100% sure of what the REAL origin of Polaris is!
Does anyone recall Walt Simonson's Fantastic Four run where it's strongly implied that ALL of Doctor Doom's appearances since FF #40 were robots? That would be a fascinating mixture of productivity and laziness!
And wouldn't a Magneto robot with real magnetic powers just curl itself into a ball? :-)
John Byrne had already started claiming that some (other writers'!!!) appearances of Dr. Doom weren't legit. Later, it seemed to me Walt Simonson was giving John Byrne the finger. I could half-accept what Byrne did (I bet Chris Claremont & Dave Cockrum weren't at all pleased), but the way Walt Simonson did it was a large part of why I totally dismissed his entire run of the FF. (Of course, I stopped buying the book entirely when he left. I figured, if I was fed up with the writing on that book by Roger Stern, AND Steve Englehart, AND Walt Simonson-- 3 otherwise good writers-- NO WAY I was gonna give Tom DeFalco even a minute of my time. Enough is enough.)
Around the same time (more or less, if memory serves) I recall John Byrne contradicting certain AVENGERS stories by both Roy Thomas and then Steve Englehart, while he was on AVENGERS WEST COAST. When Byrne left the book, in MID-story, Roy Thomas came in and proceeded to give Byrne's stories the same treatment.
It's not really polite, coming into a long-running series and going out of your way to brush off other writers' work that way.
It's one thing when it's EYKIW but when it's EYRIW (Everthing You've READ Is Wrong!), only to be changed again and in some cases again again, that's when readers tune out!
KLORDNY -- the long-time Amateur Press Alliance devoted to the LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES, lost more than half its longtime members when ZERO HOUR hit and wiped out 35 consecutive years of LEGION history. I suspect most of them were already fed up with all the tampering, post-CRISIS, first when Paul Levitz had to work around the "new" SUPERMAN who had "never" been a SUPERBOY, and worse, when Mike Carlin (who was not even the LEGION editor) shoved his way in and told Keith Giffen that from then on, Superboy was "never!!!" a member (even though Levitz had gone to such clever lengths to show that he had). Giffen pulled a hissy-fit, rebooted LEGION history twice in 2 months, then BLEW UP the Earth in his final issue 2-1/2 years later, as a way of "giving the finger" to all his fans!
So about a year-and-a-half later, when they decided to go finally go ahead and COMPLETELY reboot LEGION history from scratch (which had, up to then, never quite happened before), and start the series over completely from the beginning (just as DC had done with WONDER WOMAN, after the CRISIS), they alienated many longtime fans. Somehow I kept reading... I'm not sure how. Maybe it's that when they started over, it was simply so much better than the putrid rotting garbage Keith Giffen had spewed out for 3 straight years during his "Five Years Later" storyline. Everyone I know who's met Keith has said what a nice guy he is (that includes me), but I have often joked he may be the only creator in the biz who is simultaneously on some fans "most loved" and "most HATED" lists, at the SAME time.
Of course, 2 years into the reboot, the writing somehow went COMPLETELY to hell... a year or so later, the editor actually FIRED everyone on both LEGION books (even the artist who was doing GOOD work!). It took awhile, but the new team eventually began to impress me... before the artist was hired away by Marvel for more money (I always suspected it was nothing more than deliberate SABOTAGE). And then, out of nowhere, Mark Waid (who had been involved in rebooting history TWICE before) decided to create yet ANOTHER new continuity FROM SCRATCH... and 4 or 5 issues in, I was so turned off, and so bored, I quit.
LEGION was the single comic series I bought NEW as it came out for a longer stretch of time than any other comic I have ever bought (even though I got started "late"-- around 1978!). And yet they found a way to drive even me away. I have not bought or read the series since. (Even though I've heard wonderful things about it ever since Paul Levitz stepped down as publisher to get back to writing!)
I don't recall that specific point, where or if Walt Simonson posited that everything since FF #40 was a robot...but I will point out that Doom's appearance and motivation behind the FF Annual #3, which followed on the heels of FF #43, must have had the real Doom with injured hands from FF #40. So, not quite everything...
That also would mean that Doom's involvement with the Silver Surfer, stealing his power in #57-60 and his return to earth for DD #37-38 would have been a robot...and the events of FF #72 were motivated by a robot too.
Alright, some fans objected to Doc Doom on a surfboard at the time, but I believed it was him.
The couple of places where I felt he "jumped the shark" or "went off the rails" were in FF #84-88 "The Prisoner" story arc, particularly because he never does anything himself, but stays behind the scenes...plus, commits murder in front of the FF and they walk away... all because it was priceless art that would have been destroyed.
And then to see him return to LEAD the FF in about FF #114-116 was just TOO MUCH. I would NEVER have seen Doom do that, even if it was in his interests to defeat the Overmind. It would have pleased him too much to see Reed fail and be a victim.
Frankly, I don't mind if a skilled writer who is familiar with the continuity tries to invalidate or change an earlier writer's poor story or contradictory plot...after all, remember this is a comic book we're talking about.
For me, when a skilled writer like Stern or Byrne go into a story and start through flashback or testimony to suggest or state that an earlier tale was wrong, incorrect, or actually different from reality... I don't mind, cause I know and trust that they are going to make things make more sense when they are done. And, that it will be a hellofva good ride while we do it.
So, if people get upset with Bryne, tough.
He never fails to entertian me and I find the revisions that he puts in place MAKE SENSE and SOLVE conflicts, if that's important to you.
He used to do that a lot. The thing in CAP #247-249 seemed long overdue. I just thought he & Stern didn't go far enough with it.
On the other hand, I suspect most people to this day were and are deeply offended by what he did in AVENGERS WEST COAST. He just destroyed The Vision and the marriage, seemingly for no good purpose.
I guess it's the difference between stories that feel like they want to be written, and those that DON'T.
Of course, the whole Kevin Dooley-Gerard Jones GREEN LANTERN situation comes to mind... (According to Dooley, Hal Jordan had "always" been headed toward becoming a mass murderer. YEAH, RIGHT.)
The current Legion of Super-Heroes stars basically the original Earth-One Legion with most of their history intact. The same characters with the same relationships are now older and there are younger Legionnaires being introduced, which is good. The Legion should always evolve and expand; that's part of their appeal.
But the sense of abandonment, I understand. In the mid-80s, DC published Who's Who in the Legion of Super-Heroes, a seven-issue mini-series featuring the original Legion but following the initial Post-Crisis interpretation of Superboy including the Pocket Universe and his death. Dev-Em and Laurel Kent's backstories were changed. But not mention were: Lex Luthor, Mask Man (a future Mister Mxyzptlk), Pete Ross, Insect Queen (Lana Lang), Elastic Lad (Jimmy Olsen), the Legion of Super-Pets and, most importantly, our Supergirl! More infuriating was that a Post-Crisis Supergirl appeared fairly quickly, thus negating any sense that Kara mattered at all.
As for the Vision, IMHO, that both John Bryne and Brian Michael Bendis just didn't like the fact that the Scarlet Witch (a personal pin-up girl to them perhaps) had married an android, or as Bendis put it, a toaster! Bryne seemed to want Wanda with Wonder Man and Bendis just wanted her insane!
Writers want to line up characters in certain slots and if they don't fit, they make them fit!
Replies
Conventional wisdom says that the robot you're talking about, from X-Men #50-52, was created by Starr Saxon, as apparently alluded to in Captain America #247-249.
-- MSA
Some fans complained that after Roy Thomas (or was it Gary Friedrich?) showed Magneto falling to his death, that Arnold Drake did not explain how he came back from the dead in his 4-part "City of Mutants" story in X-MEN #49-52. To be fair, this criticism was hurled at Arnold for a number of such stories, such as when Quasimodo turned up in an issue of CAPTAIN MARVEL. So when Roy Thomas got back on X-MEN, with Neal Adams, first they revealed that Mesmero's boss was not the real Magneto, but a robot. THEY never bothered to explain who built the robot. Some time later, when Angel (and the rest of the team) found themselves back in the Savage Land, Angel ran into a scientist who, we learned, was really Magneto (the first time anyone had ever seen him with his helmet off). From the back-story revealed, it was clear that Magneto had wound up in the Savage Land after the big X-MEN/AVENGERS crossover... which meant that, definitely, the guy in "City Of Mutants" had NEVER been Magneto. Now, had Mesmero known this, and been in some way responsible for creating the robot (perhaps as a way of coercing other mutants to follow his lead), that might have made sense. But that's not what Thomas & Adams did. And the thing is, they never explained it. EVER. Would they have gotten around to it, if X-MEN hadn't been cancelled when it was? No way to know. Either way, sloppy writing.
What's funny is, I know publication dates often mean nothing in some cases, but it seems to me Starr Saxon didn't get killed until AFTER "City of Mutants" came out (I may be wrong there, I just don't feel like looking it up right now).
About 9-10 years later, continuity-OBSESSED Roger Stern and John Byrne, in a SINGLE panel in CAP #247, showed that Machinesmith had apparently been responsible for creating a lot of previously-unidentified robots throughout the Marvel Universe. This included a (literally) 2-faced villain who'd shown up in a couple of Steve Gerber stories, and the "Baron Strucker" who'd been calling himself "The Hood" in those Gene Colan CAP stories with the fake Bucky Barnes. (Bucky was created by Dr. Doom, though... as if things weren't confusing enough.)
What bugs me, to this day, is, when I went back and read thru those Stern-Byrne issues, THEY never explained WHY Machinesmith (formerly Starr Saxon) had been building those particular robots. Their belated attempts to straighten out long-neglected continuity only wound up opening new questions, which in turn have NEVER been answered. Sheesh. (I suppose I've found this stuff fascinating because "Bucky Reborn" was the 1st issue of CAP I ever bought when it came out. I didn't read the 2nd half until about 7-8 years later, and the Stern-Byrne issues came out maybe 5 years after that.)
Come to think of it, I guess someone thought it made sense to tie in at least 2 different and previously-unrelated confusing Gene Colan storylines together...
Even more puzzling was those X-Men issues introduced Lorna Dane AKA Polaris who was briefly called "Magneto II" as the daughter of the Robot Magneto. I'm still not 100% sure of what the REAL origin of Polaris is!
Does anyone recall Walt Simonson's Fantastic Four run where it's strongly implied that ALL of Doctor Doom's appearances since FF #40 were robots? That would be a fascinating mixture of productivity and laziness!
And wouldn't a Magneto robot with real magnetic powers just curl itself into a ball? :-)
John Byrne had already started claiming that some (other writers'!!!) appearances of Dr. Doom weren't legit. Later, it seemed to me Walt Simonson was giving John Byrne the finger. I could half-accept what Byrne did (I bet Chris Claremont & Dave Cockrum weren't at all pleased), but the way Walt Simonson did it was a large part of why I totally dismissed his entire run of the FF. (Of course, I stopped buying the book entirely when he left. I figured, if I was fed up with the writing on that book by Roger Stern, AND Steve Englehart, AND Walt Simonson-- 3 otherwise good writers-- NO WAY I was gonna give Tom DeFalco even a minute of my time. Enough is enough.)
Around the same time (more or less, if memory serves) I recall John Byrne contradicting certain AVENGERS stories by both Roy Thomas and then Steve Englehart, while he was on AVENGERS WEST COAST. When Byrne left the book, in MID-story, Roy Thomas came in and proceeded to give Byrne's stories the same treatment.
It's not really polite, coming into a long-running series and going out of your way to brush off other writers' work that way.
It's one thing when it's EYKIW but when it's EYRIW (Everthing You've READ Is Wrong!), only to be changed again and in some cases again again, that's when readers tune out!
KLORDNY -- the long-time Amateur Press Alliance devoted to the LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES, lost more than half its longtime members when ZERO HOUR hit and wiped out 35 consecutive years of LEGION history. I suspect most of them were already fed up with all the tampering, post-CRISIS, first when Paul Levitz had to work around the "new" SUPERMAN who had "never" been a SUPERBOY, and worse, when Mike Carlin (who was not even the LEGION editor) shoved his way in and told Keith Giffen that from then on, Superboy was "never!!!" a member (even though Levitz had gone to such clever lengths to show that he had). Giffen pulled a hissy-fit, rebooted LEGION history twice in 2 months, then BLEW UP the Earth in his final issue 2-1/2 years later, as a way of "giving the finger" to all his fans!
So about a year-and-a-half later, when they decided to go finally go ahead and COMPLETELY reboot LEGION history from scratch (which had, up to then, never quite happened before), and start the series over completely from the beginning (just as DC had done with WONDER WOMAN, after the CRISIS), they alienated many longtime fans. Somehow I kept reading... I'm not sure how. Maybe it's that when they started over, it was simply so much better than the putrid rotting garbage Keith Giffen had spewed out for 3 straight years during his "Five Years Later" storyline. Everyone I know who's met Keith has said what a nice guy he is (that includes me), but I have often joked he may be the only creator in the biz who is simultaneously on some fans "most loved" and "most HATED" lists, at the SAME time.
Of course, 2 years into the reboot, the writing somehow went COMPLETELY to hell... a year or so later, the editor actually FIRED everyone on both LEGION books (even the artist who was doing GOOD work!). It took awhile, but the new team eventually began to impress me... before the artist was hired away by Marvel for more money (I always suspected it was nothing more than deliberate SABOTAGE). And then, out of nowhere, Mark Waid (who had been involved in rebooting history TWICE before) decided to create yet ANOTHER new continuity FROM SCRATCH... and 4 or 5 issues in, I was so turned off, and so bored, I quit.
LEGION was the single comic series I bought NEW as it came out for a longer stretch of time than any other comic I have ever bought (even though I got started "late"-- around 1978!). And yet they found a way to drive even me away. I have not bought or read the series since. (Even though I've heard wonderful things about it ever since Paul Levitz stepped down as publisher to get back to writing!)
I don't recall that specific point, where or if Walt Simonson posited that everything since FF #40 was a robot...but I will point out that Doom's appearance and motivation behind the FF Annual #3, which followed on the heels of FF #43, must have had the real Doom with injured hands from FF #40. So, not quite everything...
That also would mean that Doom's involvement with the Silver Surfer, stealing his power in #57-60 and his return to earth for DD #37-38 would have been a robot...and the events of FF #72 were motivated by a robot too.
Alright, some fans objected to Doc Doom on a surfboard at the time, but I believed it was him.
The couple of places where I felt he "jumped the shark" or "went off the rails" were in FF #84-88 "The Prisoner" story arc, particularly because he never does anything himself, but stays behind the scenes...plus, commits murder in front of the FF and they walk away... all because it was priceless art that would have been destroyed.
And then to see him return to LEAD the FF in about FF #114-116 was just TOO MUCH. I would NEVER have seen Doom do that, even if it was in his interests to defeat the Overmind. It would have pleased him too much to see Reed fail and be a victim.
Frankly, I don't mind if a skilled writer who is familiar with the continuity tries to invalidate or change an earlier writer's poor story or contradictory plot...after all, remember this is a comic book we're talking about.
For me, when a skilled writer like Stern or Byrne go into a story and start through flashback or testimony to suggest or state that an earlier tale was wrong, incorrect, or actually different from reality... I don't mind, cause I know and trust that they are going to make things make more sense when they are done. And, that it will be a hellofva good ride while we do it.
So, if people get upset with Bryne, tough.
He never fails to entertian me and I find the revisions that he puts in place MAKE SENSE and SOLVE conflicts, if that's important to you.
He used to do that a lot. The thing in CAP #247-249 seemed long overdue. I just thought he & Stern didn't go far enough with it.
On the other hand, I suspect most people to this day were and are deeply offended by what he did in AVENGERS WEST COAST. He just destroyed The Vision and the marriage, seemingly for no good purpose.
I guess it's the difference between stories that feel like they want to be written, and those that DON'T.
Of course, the whole Kevin Dooley-Gerard Jones GREEN LANTERN situation comes to mind... (According to Dooley, Hal Jordan had "always" been headed toward becoming a mass murderer. YEAH, RIGHT.)
The current Legion of Super-Heroes stars basically the original Earth-One Legion with most of their history intact. The same characters with the same relationships are now older and there are younger Legionnaires being introduced, which is good. The Legion should always evolve and expand; that's part of their appeal.
But the sense of abandonment, I understand. In the mid-80s, DC published Who's Who in the Legion of Super-Heroes, a seven-issue mini-series featuring the original Legion but following the initial Post-Crisis interpretation of Superboy including the Pocket Universe and his death. Dev-Em and Laurel Kent's backstories were changed. But not mention were: Lex Luthor, Mask Man (a future Mister Mxyzptlk), Pete Ross, Insect Queen (Lana Lang), Elastic Lad (Jimmy Olsen), the Legion of Super-Pets and, most importantly, our Supergirl! More infuriating was that a Post-Crisis Supergirl appeared fairly quickly, thus negating any sense that Kara mattered at all.
As for the Vision, IMHO, that both John Bryne and Brian Michael Bendis just didn't like the fact that the Scarlet Witch (a personal pin-up girl to them perhaps) had married an android, or as Bendis put it, a toaster! Bryne seemed to want Wanda with Wonder Man and Bendis just wanted her insane!
Writers want to line up characters in certain slots and if they don't fit, they make them fit!
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