I'm really looking forward to Avengers Academy 9

They've put out a preview for this one, so I'm optimistic it will ship on time. It's the book this week I'm looking forward to the most, because it continues my favorite Avengers Academy subplot, Quicksilver and Finesse.

Finesse really is my favorite new female character. You know that Data stereotype, with the robot who wants to have feelings and understand humans? How super-played it is? Well, Finesse is the opposite of it, being a human being who can't seem to understand feelings. She can't even get her own behavior at times. It's really interesting to watch.

In addition to that, she is pretty much perfect at everything else and so tends to be a bit overconfident. I love that we have this hypercompetent woman who is a failure at the stereotypically feminine area of intuition and empathy. It makes her very unusual.

Her entire motivation is she wants to learn new things. At every turning point, Finesse's thought is "Can I learn something from this person? Can I learn something from this action?" If she can't better herself from the action or interaction, she doesn't see the point of it. She is not altruistic or sympathetic towards anyone, but she's also not vindictive or actively malicious.

She has a fixation on Magneto that will probably bite her in the ass later on.

Plus she may be a villain's kid (and this issue is what promises to confirm or kill that possibility), and they have her tangled up with my favorite teacher on the team. Hell, this has actually redeemed the horrible Lie storyline for with the blackmail angle. Finesse, not understanding or empathizing with anyone, is constantly trying to test things so she can manipulate others into behaving the way she wants. (So far there's no indication this is for control, but because everyone else can do it and she can get people to teach her new things) She tries a little schoolgirl gushing on Hank, for example, and is disappointed it doesn't work. So for Quicksilver, once she figures out he lied about being a Skrull she decides she's going to blackmail him into teaching her everything Magneto taught him.

This is insanely amusing to me for two big reasons:

1) In the last Finesse issue, #2, she observes an argument between Pietro and Hank over appropriate training methods. Hank doesn't feel it's right to use the methods Magneto used, even watered down and with the safety on. Hank wins, but Finesse wants to learn the Magneto lessons. So... she is blackmailing him to teach her things that he already wanted to teach her.

2) She is an amateur at manipulation, and really doesn't understand how to do it. Contrast that with Magneto, who has practiced manipulation as the leader of a terrorist cult, the leader of his own country, convincing one of his sworn enemies to become romantically involved with him, and in a multi-decade struggle against a TELEPATH for the most powerful followers in the mutant community. Magneto is a master at social relations. Since he was a teenager, Quicksilver has found himself playing delicate manipulation games with Magneto where they do things like try to convince each other they are on the same side and see who double-crosses the other first. And judging by how pissed off Magneto was over the last game, documented in House of M... Quicksilver won. (And yes, I am prepared to argue over this one.)

Even discounting that last one, the fact that Pietro can play at all on Magneto's field means Finesse is in for one hell of a lesson here.

Gage has said that one of the kids will definitely go bad, and maybe others. I hope Finesse stays good because she's a real departure from the typical hero. I guess a lot depends on what happens in this issue, how the Taskmaster reacts to her and how she reacts to him. Maybe it'll open her emotions. Maybe it won't, but she sees a logical reason to follow one path or another.

The setup here is she only has Quicksilver for framing, but that might be the best chance she has. Hank, Tigra, and Justice have been mentoring the other kids and they are very touchy-feely teachers. Finesse just can't comprehend that, she needs a much colder and harsher perspective. Quicksilver is one of the most emotional members of the team, but he protects his heart well. We know he's capable of a lot of caring and kindness if she does have an emotional awakening here and needs sympathy. And if she doesn't, Quicksilver can strip away any appeal to pure heroism and present a brutal picture of reality. He can take it down to her odds of survival and success on either side of the moral divide. Every other teacher will come down to "This is the RIGHT way to act," but Pietro's much more cynical. He's bickered over right and wrong with his father, he knows that villains think they're in the right usually. He can make a good case for "this is the best way to act" and not tie it to mushy goodness.

As long as I'm wishing for things...

I've realized recently that if Marvel were to write a comic just for me it would be an ongoing series starring Magneto and focusing on how he relates to his family. You could set stories where he's a good guy and a bad guy, because he certainly switches, is horrifying or sympathetic, and where he fights the X-men or helps them, but the main draw for me would be a promise of seeing the family ("the family" is to be referred to with Ron Howard's voice because I've watched too much Arrested Development). ALL of his children and grandchildren (even Luna now that she's got funky mind powers) qualify as super-heroes, and he is a Big Time super-villain. If you do not find that interesting, I don't understand you.

Right now in Children's Crusade, the main thing that keeps me picking it up (other than desperate hope that Wanda will do something) is watching Tommy, Pietro, and Magneto all try to out-smartass each other. (Billy and Wanda should join in once they've finished laying out the exposition.)



Marvel could easily pick this up after this series ends, and we'll have two sets of twins plus Grandpa. You already have some serious dramatic potential there, with the two sets of twins trying to become a full family again, and Magneto trying to be an X-man still. While he's trying to do the hero thing, he's also trying to rebuild those bridges now that he's got a couple of stepping stones put down again.

Bring Lorna back from space with the boyfriend, and you have another set of characters to enfold into the family. Polaris and Magneto is already a compelling interaction, Polaris plus the twins (and new twins) after House of M is so fascinating to me that I can't understand why Marvel wants to let this lie.

And while Magneto would be the central character, this would be an excuse to showcase how the family interacts with each other. We could get my Pietro-Lorna teamup here, Wanda and Lorna doing sister stuff (and fighting evil), Wanda and her children, Lorna and her niece and nephews...etc...

Along the way, natural storylines would bring in Crystal and Luna, Hulkling, the Kaplan family, the Shepherd family, Rogue and Professor X for an issue or a few arcs. Tommy could get a little robot girlfriend. Magneto could try to manipulate Pietro into dating a human or mutant woman. (I think he'd leave Wanda alone since even down to the basic "I make bad things happen" power she's not someone wise to mess with, and she's already had two mutant children.) Ideally they'd find excuses to bring back the old Vision (not the dumb emotionless one, or the admittedly nice baby one, but the Vision who married Wanda), Astra, Joseph, and--for me the Holy Grail of potential Magneto stories--Magda.

Marvel, I promise you that unless you put an absolutely DIRE creative team on it I would buy the hell out of this.

Team-up I'd Like to See

Polaris and Quicksilver

Right now, Mike Carey's hinting that there'll be Polaris and Magneto interaction this year and I do want to read that but I've seen those two together already. I really want to see her interacting with the twins, especially after House of M. That sort of story should completely change their dynamic.

Of course, the big character dynamic with the twins was set up in a lackluster way by Chuck Austen in Uncanny X-men. Prior to that, I don't remember her really dealing with Wanda (I'm trying to put together the issues of Exiles where AU Wanda and Lorna were together) but she's had a lot of contact with Pietro. They were on X-Factor together, and later they both worked in Genosha for Magneto. Sadly, I think he left before she found out they were related because Austen has her dropping the news on them after her initial post-Genosha breakdown, during the build-up to that dreadful Wedding storyline that I hope Wanda wipes from reality in Avengers: Children's Crusade #5. It bugs me a bit that we didn't see a significant team-up between Pietro and Lorna during that.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see the sisters together, but Pietro and Lorna were on a superhero team together before they found out they were related. They worked closely for a while, and I want to see how this discovery affected this. Not only that, Quicksilver is an extremely family-oriented character, and Polaris has a running plot about trying to discover her true self. These characters should want to have a relationship and talk about this revelation, how it's affected them, and just generally about the family.

Lorna is the innocent member of the family in the House of M family fight fall-out, but she was also pulled into the family substantially for the first time by the twins during this. Having been present at the climax in HoM#7 she should remember Wandaworld, her father's fit, and have some words for both the twins and Magneto. That's a mess of emotions on her end. There's huge dramatic potential here and honestly, the best time to do it is during this period between Secret Invasion and Children's Crusade while Pietro is sane but miserably alone and disconnected from his family. (When Wanda gets back, Pietro won't be nearly so starved for sisterly approval.)

Sadly, Brevoort's formspring answers suggest there is no interest in developing this in the Avengers books, and the X-books for years have focused on Magneto and Polaris over her relationship with either twin. I have my fingers crossed Peter David will do something in X-Factor, though.

Defending Quicksilver (Hang on, this is a long one)

I've been meaning to blog for a while on Quicksilver's mental breakdown, mainly to answer fans who think that there's no fixing House of M, Son of M, and Silent War without a Skrull or possession explanation. Really, there's a number of points in the storyline that a writer can seize on and use to exonerate him without pulling in a new mind-controlling villain into the mix or saying it was an imposter. I don't know if Bendis or Hine put them in there on purpose, but they're there and I think Peter David at least saw a couple.

In the first place, the already accepted explanation for his complete breakdown is a pretty fucking good one. In House of M he's portrayed as a good but extremely foolish man. Bendis is actually sympathetic to the twins. He makes Pietro play the villain not by setting things up to get everything he wants (like he could), but by setting up a place to hide his sister and sacrificing his own happiness. He gives his father the benefit of the doubt and convinces his sister that Magneto could be a good guy if he had nothing to be afraid of. He gives up his own independance and becomes the obediant, adoring son his father has always demanded. The end result? The old man crushes him to death, he gets resurrected by Wanda (which, judging by Hawkeye's odd behavior afterwards, probably has a temporary effect on the brain chemistry) and awakens the next day to discover that his sister has left him, taken his power, and taken the powers of 99% of his species.


Thing is, I have run into fans that don't think this is enough. That's okay, because there's quite a bit more going on here.

I actually like the first issue of Son of M, because they play this up really well. He's dejected, miserable, powerless, blames himself for M-Day, and when he finally looks past himself to realize just how much harm he did when he was trying to help he finds it so painful he throws himself off a building. Hine really manages to put forward just how depression he's in at the beginning, so when Spider-man's tirade puts him over the edge to self-harm it doesn't seem out of nowhere or a sudden attempt to get sympathy for the character. It seems like this is a person who is that depressed, albeit because of his own actions.


Hine paints a sympathetic portrait of a man becoming a monster, but he doesn't ever call back to the fact that Pietro's a good man. He just has the events unfold and gives us Pietro's view of himself and others during this time. That's actually what ends up ringing false. Pietro is believable in a sickening way when you've been reading him up to this point, but if Son of M #1 was your first exposure to the character you'd think he was always self-centered and short-sighted rather than suffering from an incapacitating bout of depression and that this was him finally getting the results his actions were going to lead to. Crystal's statements, and part of why I hate her so badly in this, suggest that he always had a selfish dark streak and that that was what dissolved the marriage and none of her actions or even her awful uncle screwing them both over. She's an ex-wife who's bad egg of a husband has returned looking for her, and she's strong to tell him off. We're supposed to empathize with her as the virtuous partner. Luna comes off as innocently not knowing how bad her father is. Because we've read Quicksilver, we know he was a real good guy and a good father and husband who tried his best but Hine never lets us see the man Pietro was before M-Day. /He doesn't explain how a good man like Quicksilver be responsible for House of M--leading us to conclude that Pietro was a bad man (or that he has been retconned to be a bad man all along)--or explain how a good man would be driven to stealing those crystals, leading us to conclude that Pietro's nature is supposed to be a selfish bad man being revealed for once because he's lost his power.

It's really skillfully done, the mood and the pacing and the voice all support the story and character, but there is absolutely nothing even acknowledging that he hasn't always been selfish and ruthless. We have to add that ourselves as readers. There are, however, a couple of things in House of M and Son of M together that hint that he's losing it for an external reason.


There's the mood in the first issue of Son of M. There is a great cover where the artist shows everyone as moving superfast while Pietro's standing still, but inside there's a different problem. Pietro's not upset everyone else is moving fast. He's upset that he is moving slow. We know from years of characterization that Quicksilver's powers aren't just running, that he actually perceives and thinks at a greater speed than anyone else. That's why he has a patience problem. He has time to get bored in between words. If he lost all of his powers, everyone else would seem faster like on the cover. He wouldn't be able to keep up with conversations or events, everything would confuse him because it would just be going at a much greater pace than he's used to. Instead, he understands everything that's going on around him, and he perceives himself as going at a snail's pace. He doesn't see other people as going faster, he even asks how they can stand being so slow!


Whether through a stroke of brilliance or a major mistake on Hine's part (*it seems natural to paint someone as being constantly aware of their lost power but really, if he is used to having 5 times as long to process everything, he shouldn't be able to hold a conversation or react at the just slightly too slow speed he's shown reacting at), Pietro's powers are only halfway gone. FYMaximoffs on Tumblr speculated that he hadn't really lost his powers in M-Day, and was just suppressing them out of guilt. Myself, I'd been thinking that Wanda really wanted to depower her brother (thinking it would help him because as much as he loves his powers he's had a lot of social difficulties from them) but messed it up and only got it partly right, fucking his head over even more. The idea he did it himself from the trauma makes more sense, and I prefer it a lot. Whatever caused it, his powers are partially there and causing him to lose his sanity. He's lost his family and he knows it's his fault. He has only one skill, being a superhero, and he can't perform that job anymore. Then Spider-man comes along and tells him (I am not exaggerating) he has no reason to live.

Once he gets to Attilan? Hine actually establishes that someone up there fucks with his mind. This story actually excuses him for his idea to steal the Mists. The Inhumans punish the bad guy and ignore that his brain was fucked with for the umpteenth time when talking about how horrible Pietro is (like they do whenever Maximus fucked with his head, I hate the Inhumans so much), of course, but the writer does put it in there.

And this wasn't Maximus. There is yet another psychic who thinks Pietro's mind is his to mess with so he can achieve his own goals--really, why have we not had a story where someone addresses that psychics (Professor X, Moondragon, Maximus, and now this Videmus dude) don't seem to care about Quicksilver's sanity or rights? Is it the high-speed brain, does it come off as a buzzing that annoys them and they have to stick their hands in there and stop it? Marvel needs an alternate universe where there are no telepaths and as a result all of Magneto's children (and a number of other characters) are in fine mental health. And Magneto needs to see it so he can stop taking his kids to Charles Xavier rather than real therapy.

*Ahem* Back to the original subject, Secret Invasion also establishes a Skrull presence in Attilan. As a result, I look at this and see even more people manipulating Quicksilver in addition to the rogue telepath he connected minds with, the brain moving too fast thing, the depression, the trauma of having been killed by his own father and been brought back to life by a woman with the power to make things go horribly wrong, and then the mental stress of either having a witch use him as a power familiar to focus a spell that changed reality/history and then one that changed the whole multiverse or having to help mentally guild an ultra-powerful reality warping emotionally unbalanced mutant in creating a coherent reality. (Oh, did I mention that I think the Scarlet Witch basically used him as her cat when she cast the House of M and M-Day spells? Well... more on that in the "Ways a clever writer could save Wanda" post I'll probably get to before the next issue of Children's Crusade.)

So that takes care of everything from M-Day to the to the Terrigen Mists. He was losing his sanity and getting desperate, so he tries what he can to get his powers back. What he can try is to expose himself to a dangerous chemical that warps his physical body, has undocumented effects on the human/mutant mind, does nothing to solve his problem of his brain moving faster than his body, and triggers a power that has an even greater detriment to his sanity: Time Travel. Pietro's very first use of time travel is to meet his horrible future self, a future self who tricks him into murdering someone and exposing himself to that drug more. From this point on, he takes it more and more and gets worse and worse until he gets thrown into detox for the Quick and the Dead, goes through withdrawal and his natural powers come back completely. It's pretty obvious that all of his actions from that point onwards were to be attributed to the Mists. I'd argue that the actions leading up to it can be excused as temporary insanity, too, because of the trauma in House of M #7 and the disconnect between his perceptions and his actions.

This brings us to House of M. Nothing can save the character from that, right? Well... Maybe Magneto can.


In House of M #1 Magneto finds Pietro at his sister's bedside and demands to know why he's there. That little question is glossed over but it is the oddest thing for Magneto to say. This is Quicksilver of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch here. Also known as Pietro "Is my sister going to be alright?" Maximoff. Now, I didn't read Excalibur but if Wanda is ill, why wouldn't he be there? We know as teenagers she used to get sick when she used her powers too much, and he used to take care of her during that. He's been playing nursemaid for her at least since they were 13. The thing to question here is that he hasn't been at her side constantly, rearranging the bedding, bringing her water and chicken soup, reading to her, doing anything that can possibly be done to care for a sick person. The only explanation for that question is that Magneto's already made it clear that he's not supposed to be there, probably to prevent Wanda from accidentally hurting him.

But Pietro's in the room in House of M #1, and this can't be the first time he's been there. And maybe... it's not the first time Pietro's tried to help Wanda control that power. I mean, it wouldn't be the first time he's applied his will to a mystical situation to try and help her (see "Nights of Wundagore", which is either magic or a result of Wanda's power by the Bendis retcon so it applies either way) and they probably couldn't have created a world so intense without having practiced first. Maybe whatever caused Wanda to lose her sanity got passed onto Pietro and amped up the stress level, leading to his own actions in that miniseries. If they go by that hateful idea that those powers cost Wanda her sanity, can you imagine what they did to the guy who's not built to have them? If it's just magic getting out of hand it makes even more sense that he was affected. And if she's being possessed or affected by some external source then that's probably been passed on to him by the opening of the miniseries too.

My point is, for a clever writer (or even just one with eyes) there's no reason to completely retcon out the past few years to save Quicksilver as a heroic character. His actions in Son of M were terrible, but there was major external interference causing it. Any combination of the items I mentioned above could be explored in a scene where someone questions Quicksilver's return to the Avengers and you can use him cleanly afterwards.

Crystal, on the other hand, would benefit greatly from all of us forgetting this miniseries ever happened.

The Airing of the Grievances

I was doing a meme of Caroline's called "My Year in Fannish Favorites" when I came across a question so big it deserved a post on its own: Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year? There were so many fuck-ups to choose from just involving Marvel and DC, and as it is Dec 23rd and I have been watching Seinfeld all day I thought I'd go ahead and give this one it's own post.

So this year Marvel and DC have disappointed me in the following ways:

First, there's Blackest Night. The 2009 lead-up to Blackest Night was fucking gold. Rage of the Red Lanterns, Sins of the Star Sapphire and the BRILLIANT Agent Orange storyline are still some of the best Green Lantern stuff I've ever read. I even like that fucking FCBD story with Barry and Hal at Bruce's grave. The crossover itself sucked shit. I stopped reading when I realized that the White Lanterns weren't going to be recognizably as horrible as the Black Lanterns, and Johns lost the potential moral of the story, but not after being horribly dismayed by:

Hal's prominence over Kyle in Blackest Night. After two crossovers that centered on Hal and Kyle, suddenly it's Hal and Sinestro. It's like a crossover trilogy bait-and-switch trick (and Marvel pulled this shit too).

Katma Tui wasn't actually coming back to life, she'd just be a Black Lantern for a couple issues.

Soranik bringing Kyle back to life by way of Miri's ability to manipulate love energy rather than her impressive medical skill.

The massive WHAT THE FUCK of Wonder Woman being the Star Sapphire while the Atom is an Indigo Lantern. No, Greg Rucka could not save that.

Then when we get to Brightest Day they kill off the better Atom, and bury him in a matchbox. So cheerful.

Beyond that, they put Judd Winick on Power Girl, which used to be one of my favorite reads.

Stephanie Brown is still Batgirl (yeah, I said it), Cassandra Cain is still not back.

I was horribly let down by the entire Flash series, which I am still picking up for Manapul's art.

And of course, Wonder Woman's relaunch which has been an incredible miss for far too many reasons to list here.

Over at Marvel, they lost one of Magneto's kids.

A lot of people have asked Tom Brevoort on Formspring about Lorna being Magneto's daughter, and he pretty consistently said he thought it was forced and unnatural. He also, early on, stated there were no plans to bring her into Children's Crusade but I can't find that link. It makes me a little sad that they're ignoring this rich mine of soap opera drama, and it makes me a little worried that someone's going to retcon it away again and Lorna will become the Power Girl of the Marvel Universe.

They squandered numerous opportunities to bring Jean Grey back to life.

Second Coming and Hope Summers didn't really do it for me.

They let Greg Land do the covers to their Women of Marvel issues.

They continue to hire Greg Land.

The Massive Fucking Lie told by Quicksilver wasn't resolved by the finale of the series he told it in, and instead they decided to carry it over to another series. All of this, of course, is giving me the impression that there is no plan to exonerate Quicksilver for Son of M in Children's Crusade, because I find it so hard to believe they're dragging such a thing out when someone has a clean mind control explanation up their sleeves.

The topper, though, was that Scarlet Witch wasn't the big reveal in Seige. Instead, for the final of a trilogy of company crossovers (and Marvel did admit that Disassembled and House of M led to Seige) where Wanda was the centerpiece in the first two they decide to give SENTRY the sendoff. And this is not just "Fuck the Sentry" (But seriously, fuck the Sentry).

They dropped a lot of hints about a big surprise world-threatening villain, and a heroic redemption and such so we were down to Wanda or Bob. I was really hoping that Marvel would use that crossover to fix the mess Bendis made of Wanda Maximoff but no, the actual cleaning up for this character is to occur in a maxiseries rather than a company crossover like they fucked her over in. Yes, Heinberg is going to write a much better story, but he's going to take 9 issues bimonthly to do it and it is a side-story that other books won't tie into. That is how Wanda will be returned to sanity.

The thing is, it took THE ENTIRE MARVEL LINE to turn her into a villain and code her as baby-crazy. Every book was hijacked by House of M, and every fan reading and every writer writing got Crazy Wanda into their brains, but a single writer and a book that ties into nothing is supposed to undo that? Fucking Marvel. All those fans who read those crossovers but aren't fans enough of Wanda to read Children's Crusade, how many of Marvel's next crop of writers will be coming from that group? How long before someone decides that Womb Crazy is the real characterization, because that's the characterization she had when THEY started reading? What the fuck, seriously? That's like writing obscene lies about someone in a phone booth right where someone's eyes are looking during a call, and then instead of blacking it out you write "Not really, she's a nice person" on the inside of the handset. It's not hidden, but you certainly expended more effort making sure someone would look at the lies.

Everyone knows why I'm reading Avengers Academy anyway.

Yesterday's Talking Comics With Tim was an interview with Avengers Academy writer Christos Gage. Of course I dove in hoping for information on one of my favorites, and I wasn't disappointed:

O’Shea: With Avengers Academy–while the students are the core of the series, it’s the instructors that offer almost as much interest for me. For example, I love your use of Quicksilver. Was it your idea to have him in the cast, or how did he get added? Are there certain eras of Quicksilver history that appeal to you and fuel your approach to the character?

Gage: I asked for Quicksilver because I thought he fit in perfectly with the theme of the instructors being Avengers who have flawed, checkered pasts. Avengers Academy is meant to be a place of redemption for student and teacher alike. Just as the best counselors for people trying to stay off drugs are recovered addicts, the Avengers Academy teachers are people who’ve been down some tough roads and come back. Quicksilver was a teen villain, then a teen hero. He was raised to be a terrorist and grew to be an Avenger. My favorite point in Quicksilver history is when he first joined the Avengers…he did this incredibly heroic thing in terms of breaking from Magneto, and putting himself out there in front of a world that hates and fears mutants…but the whole time he was constantly backseat driving and second-guessing Captain America, of all people! Now that’s what I call cojones. Quicksilver is so much fun to write because he gets to say all the snarky things I want to say to people who irritate me, but don’t want to get smacked in the mouth for.

Two things here, number one that yes, that point in history is absolutely one of the best things about Quicksilver. He'll give even Steve Rogers shit. The prototype for Horrible Boss in his life is none other than MAGNETO, a man he has worked for multiple times (a man who repeatedly showed a willingness to just leave him to die even after they found out they were related, a man who actually killed him once--long after they found out they were related), but that doesn't make him grateful just to be treated like a person. He'll let anyone no matter how good (or how bad, because he was always the guy standing up to Magneto in those Silver Age X-men) know when he thinks they're going in the wrong direction or just not acknowledging him enough. I believe it leads back to sincere trust issues, but even then it really takes some nerve, and I like to read people with some nerve.

The second is the one the part I think a lot of fangirls will take issue with:

Quicksilver was a teen villain, then a teen hero. He was raised to be a terrorist and grew to be an Avenger.

I remember a panel was being passed around on Tumblr a few months back where it states that he was trained by Magneto. Thing is, I absolutely love this idea because as I said yesterday about the children of supervillains, the harder it is to break free of the parent the more heroic it is. I actually like the idea he had a few years to indoctrinate the kids and the twins still sabotaged and then left him. It shows a great deal of strength to begin with that they left this incredibly terrifying person, but when you make it that they left him after several years of training because putting the stuff into practice was too horrible it seems like a feat of Herculean strength. Not only that, every time Pietro and Wanda stood up to him it wasn't because they were shocked by the new revelation of what sort of people they'd fallen in with, it was because they still managed to hold onto their values despite being trapped in the group and cut off from the support network that taught them those values.

I do get the feeling, though, that we're witnessing a slight retcon. I think they are slowly being retconned to join Magneto at a younger age than originally intended. I like this, again, because it emphasizes the character strength it took. I used to use they'd just simplify the Maximoff's origins and have them raised by Magneto all along, but I can't help but notice that losing their mother at birth and being passed from Bova to the Franks to the Maximoffs to the streets (or rather, hillsides) to the grip of Magneto finally to a decent life in the Avengers seems to fit their attitudes somehow. They kept getting bounced from place to place and only had each other. (I would like the Citadel of Science "stasis while waiting for a proper family to adopt" explanation traded for a retcon that their mother was a time-traveling mutant, which would nicely explain why neither twin has powers even approaching their father's and truly simplify their origins--but somehow I doubt Marvel will ever realize that there's a really easy way to explain those powers right under their fucking noses.)

I'm optimistic about Gage in a way I'm not about Heinberg. After how Maximoff twins have been handled since Disassembled I really appreciate that a writer thought about their history so he could concentrate on actually portraying the sort of person the character was originally created to be. I would a hundred times prefer that to an in-depth metastory that continues the cycle of weakness to explain how the cycle started. (You can do your explanations and excuses while you're portraying the character as actively heroic, thank you.) They've been pretty much destroyed from all sides in two consecutive crossovers, and ever since then the plots, flashbacks and expositionary dialogue has only served to underscore them as a woman who couldn't handle her powers or not having the family she wanted and a man who couldn't handle losing his powers or losing the family he had. Even now when the lie storyline presents Quicksilver as someone who couldn't own up to his own deeds and had to take the easy way out, Gage's emphasis on his past as a villain and how he broke free of that mitigates the impression and really makes me expect that his coming clean will be a major revelation that's used to advance the overall story arc in AA. And while I'm waiting for that, and for Wanda to finally get repaired, it's still a relief to see at least one of them handed to a writer who recognizes the strength of will that was present in the Silver Age over the plot-induced madness.

This is without even getting into how the Vision's presence could've averted the whole thing.

I was going through my LibraryThing where I came across something that got old irritations going:



Avengers West Coast Visionaries: John Byrne, Vol 2: Darker Than Scarlet (Prelude to House of M)

I normally adore long, unwieldy titles, but this did not bring me joy. No, it did not.

Prelude to House of M. Who do they think they're fooling?

I don't know if that was a fan or if Marvel retitled it (I've heard they did re-release it), but we all know no one planned this far in advance. We know that the whole shitty Darker Than Scarlet storyline was just to get rid of the husband and kids so they could use Wanda as a sexpot again. It was just a really stupid story that left a really stupid open end that Bendis thought he was oh so clever in catching, even though he missed the storyline afterwards where the whole crazy thing was settled and the children were too. Really it wouldn't piss me off so much that he'd used it as an excuse to break up the Avengers if he'd closed up the loophole at the end but no... He had to leave Wanda crazy so he could do House of M.

House of M wasn't a great story idea. It certainly didn't justify leaving the Scarlet Witch in that state. I don't COMPLETELY hate it (I think Pietro and Wanda are the most sympathetic characters in the mess, followed by Magneto and poor innocent Lorna) because it had nice art and issue 7 was heartfelt, but it was really just 5 issues of getting the band together framed by domestic violence and the X-men being hypocrites. This was never anything more substantial than a way to off the mutants and undo the really awesome stuff Grant Morrison did with mutant culture. It also provided a convenient excuse to completely divorce the X-men from the high ground by having them throw aside everything they've ever fought by suggesting they kill a mutant--who hasn't done anything to THEM--for being too powerful. Honestly, one of the reasons I fucking hate House of M is it has made most of the X-men entirely unreadable to me. (I still give Cyclops a pass for a lot of horrible shit because he was the only dude on that side to say "Wait.." but nobody listens to Cyclops when he doesn't want to murder people) They're a bunch of fucking hypocrites, and will be as long as no one points out that they pretty much caused M-Day by reacting to Wanda exactly as nonpowered humans react to them. There wasn't a single mutant at that fucking meeeting that hasn't lost complete control of their powers at some point in their careers. Professor Xavier ALSO took out the Avengers when he did, and no one--not even Pietro who was for having the government put him under guard--suggested he get executed.

I honestly can sympathize with the Avengers in that series. None of them except Wolverine pushed to kill her. They didn't want Magneto to take her away, they had to bargain to try and get her back. No one could really trust that Pietro wasn't going to freak out the second they tried to explain this, so of course they didn't tell him. I can get through House of M and still like the Avengers, and I even suspect this was on purpose. After all, didn't things end for the Avengers with getting Hawkeye back to life? They got a little reward it seems.

Of course, their actions, going along with the X-men to do a full assault on Magneto and distract him while Dr. Strange snuck in to see Wanda (because... this wouldn't make anyone tighten security around the most important person in the universe to the perpetrator/the only family member the deluded and ridiculously powerful party guests would believe couldn't defend herself?) were pretty stupid, but I think the Avengers overall handled it better. No one wanted to kill her and the Wasp wanted to ask Wanda for her input.

But oh god, the X-men. Every time I look at it I can't help but think they deserved to get slammed on for taking that position in the beginning. Before the beginning, even. Professor Xavier was entrusted to treat a woman who was said to be losing touch with reality. When confronted with memories of her giving birth--an event that even after Darker than Scarlet did happen was still something that happened OUTSIDE of her head--he decides to tell her that the children never existed and to forget that memory. Which is bullshit. The children did exist, they just were a trick from an external force. They weren't a delusion only Wanda saw. They weren't a delusion she caused everyone else to see by telepathy. They were a fucking trick by a fucking demon. All the events happened. The children weren't a result of her breakdown, her breakdown was a result of the children turning out to be a big trick. And as the trigger for her original breakdown was that Agatha Harkness fucked with her memory (and to Byrne's credit, the entire WCA team thought that was stupid and her father and brother knew nothing about it until after she freaked out), naturally the solution to a relapse is to fuck with her memory again. Professor Xavier can only have made her WORSE with his "therapy", but he gets none of the blame for House of M nor for supporting the option of killing her. ("I don't know what else to do, Scott" my ass.) He really should have been the one saying "Now, Emma" in the damned X-meetings, but instead he was breaking the idea gently to Magneto.

Hell, Emma actually prevented the peaceful resolution of House of M by stopping them from recruiting Captain America. Despite the fact that he's probably the only person in the group who could have talked down Wanda (and, after the reveal, Pietro), Emma vetoed him because he was too old. So in the big fight scene, when they find out who's idea this all is and they need someone with a clear head around to take control, Steve Rogers is not there. Instead we have a bunch of idiots who let the person who knows the least about any of the players--someone those jackasses really should have been looking after in case she might decide to get hurt or do something really stupid--decides to activate Magneto, the biggest most violent temper on the board. All change of a peaceful resolution disappears, and the mutants of the universe get fucked over because they didn't have Jean Grey at the meeting telling them they were a bunch of assholes for coming up with this.

That said, I did notice that Dr. Doom came out okay during the whole mess. So maybe they did mean to fix Wanda and blame Doom for both her breakdown and Pietro's really bad idea (Seriously, he was helping her focus her powers and unless he was under the same mindfuck I don't see how they'll explain how he let Reed Richards and Sue Storm are dead while Dr. Doom is still in power slip by), or maybe it was a really fucking big oversight and Heinberg caught it. It doesn't solve my problem with X-men, but it does make me optimistic for the Maximoff twins.

The Tragedy Here Was the Marriage, Not the Divorce

I'll level with you right away that my first exposure to Pietro as a romantic hero was Age of Apocalypse. He had a sweet romance with that universe's Storm, and it really got me on the side of the character. I sought him out in X-men, in Essentials reprints, and in his own series during the 90s. There was something absolutely engaging about this woobie fanfic mode Draco Malfoy living Luke Skywalker's life at superspeed, so I ended up devouring any appearance he made in anything. I ended up really fond of him, his sister and his little daughter before I ever read anything with his wife.

Then I finally met Crystal in X-Factor back issues. There's a story where Pietro tries to mend his marriage by going to a little log cabin. External forces take pictures of Crystal sleeping with another man, and Pietro's approached by a shadowy PI type who shows them to him. he gets mad at the guy, denies the thing, but goes back to the cabin in a foul mood. He doesn't tell her what's wrong, and Crystal ends up crying and leaving early. I remember thinking at the time the pictures were forged and Pietro would eventually see the truth and feel horrible, and that he was in the wrong.

Then I read more of Crystal. The whole reason for the marriage breaking up was her having an affair, and there's the implication she's actually a serial cheater (and you know what, I'm not interested enough in Crystal to track down all the instances of her romantic tension with characters who aren't Pietro and analyze them for whether or not she slept with the guy just to quibble it out with Crystalfans on the internet. I'll do that for Sue Storm and Reed Richards in an online argument, but Crystal met Pietro while she was linked to Johnny, and she's got at least one established affair during the marriage, and from that point on any plot with her and Pietro either revolved around Luna or that threat that she would have another affair.) This didn't make me HATE her, but it did make me think that this was pretty doomed marriage as she had already broken the trust and a major character trait for her husband was that he didn't trust easily.

Aside from that, she just didn't interest me. She was flat, sweet, smiling and had a temper for the purposes of the plot. She seemed to exist to fret over the baby, and give Pietro a reason to act like a dick. Crystal didn't even fit the wife role very well before the writers decided to break up the marriage, because she was never as entertaining in a scene with her husband as his own sister was. She was never as entertaining in a scene with her husband as his brother-in-law was. Crystal just didn't compliment Pietro like Vision complimented Wanda. Vision and Wanda had opposite temperaments, but similar values and histories (Ultron is a mechanical Magneto, after all). Vision and Wanda shared their troubles and triumphs, and smoothed out each other's weaknesses with their strengths (Vision's logic and self-control to Wanda's emotion was traditionalist, but they suited each other). Crystal's flaws only amplified Pietro's flaws, which amplified Crystal's flaws. Their backgrounds were too different. Crystal was a princess and Pietro lived much of his life as a poor outcast criminal; and Crystal was a alien woman, a modern creature of science from the moon while Pietro was a gypsy boy with a witch sister from a fairytale mountain. Opposites attracting is a fine story when we have a common thread in the wildly different settings, but Pietro and Crystal didn't share enough of the "human experience" within those settings to bond over like Vision and Wanda did with their respective fathers, origins, and treatment from the outside world.

The marriage seemed like an editorial directive to free up Johnny Storm and get Wanda's overprotective brother out of the picture while Vision wooed her. Pietro's reasoning seems to have been that she was the first woman he ever got close to. I think Crystal just liked the old-fashioned romance at first. Really, though, I didn't want her to die but I wanted that marriage over with for good so that Pietro could have a new love interest.

I only hated her after Son of M. There's a scene where he gets jealous because she gets a flower from someone else, and I think he even hits the guy. Now, if I didn't know the history to this marriage, I'd say that Pietro was insane dick that she should dump and no one should ever date here. And if it were any other marriage at Marvel, and we saw T'Challa getting told off by Storm, or Scott by Jean, or Reed by Sue... Yeah, I'd side with Storm, Jean, or Sue because while the latter two have tension with other guys, none of them have done anything to justify jealousy. Hell, I'd side with Crystal, even, if her reaction was "Can't you control yourself? You're overreacting! He didn't mean anything, and it was just one mistake and you can't ever seem to let it go!" instead of what it was, which basically amounted to "You're a backwards human who isn't as enlightened as us. Stop acting like you own me. That's why the marriage didn't work out." CRYSTAL who actually had an affair and gave Pietro plenty of reason to be jealous, calls him "primitive" and possessive and basically lays the blame for the marriage not working out at his feet when the cause of the tension is her not keeping her word to be monogamous. Basically, she regards him as a caveman and feels she's never done anything wrong in this whole fiasco when she's the one who is OATHBROKEN at that point. Like many fans, she puts herself up as blameless and enlightened, when SHE broke the marriage contract. It comes off as her REALIZING she can't hold to the marriage contract, but saying "fuck it, I can do what I want because I'm an enlightened being and he is an asshole if he expects me to hold to it." Hell, under Hine all of the Inhumans look down their noses at him, and treat him as an irrational lower life form.

To make matters worse, the way Son of M unfolds I'm supposed to sympathize more with her because she's in the right when it comes to Luna, but I'm too busy being pissed off at her condescending attitude towards her ex-husband after all her bullshit to care about her anxiety as a mother. It would be different if they'd well and truly ended the marriage before like they did in Silent War, because they were such a bad match but they kept trying over several freaking decades to fix it so it came off very badly.

Honestly, she's supposed to be the sympathetic party in Silent War too but all I could think was "He's incredibly sick and needs someone to just grab him and toss him in Detox, and you are the only family around who can DO that right now since the rest are depowered/having a breakdown herself" but she cuts him loose THEN of all times rather than ending it during the several years when they knew it wouldn't work but he's strong enough to handle it and move on. She just kicks him to the curb. And it's irrational, because she's in the right to annul the marriage and I've been wanting them to divorce the two for years but this just served to get me pissed at her. Really, they need to catch him and toss him into detox and she just makes it so he HAS no one. But oh, she tried to make the marriage work because she LOVED him so much back when he wasn't in real trouble. That's probably also the fault of Son of M because that's she went from merely uninteresting to awful to me.

I'll admit that Abnett and Lanning redeemed her quite a bit to me. I've read some of Realm of Kings, searching for Lorna and Pietro, and they've managed to upgrade her from hateful to irritating. I still don't like Crystal, I don't want to read about Crystal, and I sure as hell don't want to read about Pietro and Crystal married anymore. She's probably a better wife for Ronan, and he's probably a better husband for her than Pietro. (Pietro would be a better husband for a lot of women than Crystal.) I do feel bad for her when she finds out about the Lie, and I side with her if she socks him in the face when he tells her. He deserves it for the Lie. But if she pulls this "You are so primitive, and this avoiding responsibility and openness is what caused our marriage to fall apart" bullshit, she loses that. It's good to see with her calling Pietro on bullshit, but when the blame is laid entirely at his feet and he's labeled as a "bad husband" to a "good woman" when really it was just an unsuitable marriage, I've got issues with that.

Maybe I'd side if there were something in her character I could relate to. But she's always been just generic and sweet with a hint of temper. She's no doormat, true, but she doesn't have anything going for her as I see it.

Add to that that in multiple Alternate Universes, Pietro is paired with the infinitely more interesting/likable Storm and shows none of the negative traits that feed his marital tension with Crystal. On the contrary, with Storm he's a sweet and devoted romantic hero. There's major differences in personality there, and while Pietro is more grounded and controlled in Age of Apocalypse, for example, he's also with a partner who never broke his trust, and I believe that's the bigger difference.

I don't want Crystal dead. That would suck, because then someone would bring her back to life and Luna would be sad. But the marriage was simply a bad match. They don't truly suit each other like Vision and Wanda did, and the big part where they differ (fidelity) is a dealbreaker for Pietro. Pietro married the first woman ever interested in him, and Crystal married the guy who seemed more stable than the Human freaking Torch. She needs someone less temperamental who can deal with an open marriage. He needs someone monogamous and modern, but who isn't condescending to him over his being old-fashioned. He needs a woman with a logical, stable outlook who controls her emotions, a female version of the old Vision, really. Someone who won't break his trust, and if the storyline happens that he thinks she's cheated it'll be revealed as a villain hoax and he can beg for forgiveness and she can forgive his flaws. He needs someone who can be his rock, really, like Vision was Wanda's rock. And even with all her strengths highlighted, Crystal's too soft and flighty to be the rock in a relationship. The best thing to come out of Silent War (even though it made me mad at Crystal and was set up to put the blame for the end of the marriage entirely on Pietro even though Crystal's the one who dissolved the bond to begin with) was they finally got the divorce, and it just needs to stick.

Update: Oh, Crystal. This is pretty low.

Pietro Maximoff and the Soulsearingly Massive Lie

Yesterday I learned that Quicksilver is going to be a teacher in Avengers Academy. This makes me feel a lot better for really complicated reasons about the proper way to structure a redemption arc, and Slott's pacing on the Pietro subplot.

The Pietro subplot, which still gives me a nasty taste, is not a horrible idea for a redemption arc. It covers Pietro's major issues since at least House of M: he's lost trust in just about everyone, he's retreating into deception, and he is absolutely terrified of living without Wanda. He didn't trust the new Avengers to defend Wanda from the members of the X-men who wanted to kill her. (This may have been rooted in the fact that they were willing to discuss it, but Steve and Tony didn't have much choice in that Wanda was actually in Magneto and Prof. X's custody, and they couldn't just say "No, we can't kill her" and expect her to be given safely back.) He didn't trust his father to prevent Wanda's execution. (Okay, that may have been a reasonable one.) Wanda wouldn't let him just run away like he likes to, so he tried to hide her in a MASSIVE Lie. And to make the MASSIVE Lie work, they tried to make it as pleasant as possible so that everyone just got pissed off when they found out it was a lie. Magneto was so upset he killed Pietro. (But does he have the Furies hounding his ass to the edge of the world and back? No, he gets to have the moral high ground next meeting with Pietro, and then go be a "good guy" for a while after he spills his son's blood all over the place). Wanda brings him back to life, but is so upset by his death that she curses her father (but he gets his powers back, and no one calls the Furies on his ass), and the rest of the family (who eventually get their powers back), and all of the innocent mutants in the world who had nothing to do with this (They don't get their powers back. She gets all the blame for this, of course, even though she was kneeling in her twin brother's blood--the twin brother who'd been trying to prevent her death--and still suffering the effects of whatever actually caused her breakdown in Disassembled, and the effects of Professor Xavier's incompetence. I mean seriously, who the fuck treats being out of touch with reality by trying to convince someone parts of her life that happened, that she remembers happening, that other people remmeber happened, never happened? The demon babies were demon babies, but they were actually BORN, you arrogant jackass! What the fuck?). She runs off, but loses her depowered and thoroughly traumatized little brother somehow. He resurfaces in New York to offer us an unobstructed view of his heartwrenching descent into madness.

To be honest, Son of M is a compelling and disturbing story. I don't really want it wiped from continuity, even though it has my favorite character doing some really heinous things, because it strikes me as a genuine mental breakdown. This story is the result of being killed by his own father after becoming the submissive robotically loyal son the old man's always wanted. He's depowered, abandoned, suicidally depressed (Spider-man accidentally talks him into jumping off the roof), and seizes at the first chance to at least get his powers back. He's always put most of his self-worth in those powers and how useful they make him to the team, and how they allow him to protect his sister. He exposes himself to a dangerous chemical, and gets even further unbalanced by the substance and the powers he gains from it. Well, maybe not the powers so much as his manipulative evil future self. (Never trust any version of yourself you can look in the face without a mirror, kids.) The rest of plot in Son of M is really uncomfortable, because this is a father turning to drugs and then giving the addictive substance to his daughter while he's high. His last sane act is to send the little girl back to her mother before he just up and becomes the full villain. From there he descends to the lowest point, burns all the social bridges he can, and makes everyone who ever loved him regret having met him.

He plays around with X-Factor for a bit (I found myself rooting for him to kill Layla, actually, because she's a fucking manipulative asshole but now it's too late for that) before we get to David's shot at a redemption arc. I'm being generous when I say arc, because it's a one-shot (X-Factor: The Quick and the Dead) where Pietro spends a night in jail, hallucinating pep talks from loved ones who won't actually talk to him (the one offrom Magneto lets us know that even in his fantasies Pietro can't get a hug from his Dad). While he's being counseled by figments of his imagination that he's a person worthy of love and forgiveness, he's distracted when he sees someone else in trouble. When he focuses on getting help for that person, he suddenly just gets his original powers back (maybe that first hallucination really was Wanda popping in to check on him) and decides he wants to be a good guy from now on. We can only conclude from this that Pietro Maximoff's imagination is the best therapist in the Marvel Universe, and that Wanda would have been better served by her brother's hallucinations than by that fucking arrogant telepath.

All joking aside, there is an incredible display of conscience and determination in this issue. David actually took all the stories where Pietro was being used as a plot device to drive the mutants and the Inhumans into the worst settings possible and used them to support his point that Quicksilver is an inherently good person underneath all the manure.

Villainy in the superhero genre is normally the result of a spiral of misery that causes the villain to lash out at others. Many villains have misfortunes--often their own fault--that they blame on the hero or society. They might desire revenge. They try to get revenge and are thwarted, which they blame on the hero rather than their own actions, which leads to more revenge attempts, more failure, and more blaming external forces for problems that are really their own fault. Or they might feel they're shortchanged in life, and try to rectify this injustice. When that fails, they feel even more cheated and try to rectify the injustice again, making things worse, making themselves feel more cheated and so on and so on. A villain like that is trapped being a villain because he never takes responsibility for his own actions.

In House of M, Pietro blames his father for his sister's breakdown. He convinces her to fix herself and her own actions, and while she's at it to fix this and that and ooh, that other thing even though it's suspected that any use of her powers just worsens her mental state. He knows mind control is wrong. He knows lying is wrong. He knows his sister is not supposed to use her powers. But he rationalizes that this can save her life, and if they actually replace the old world with a better one it's not as wrong. In Son of M, Pietro still doesn't realize that the action wasn't justified, and has the further misery of not having his powers anymore. He thinks they could have done it better, but now he's lost his sister from the "imperfections". When he does get a brief glimpse of just how wrong his actions were, he attempts to kill himself. When Spider-man stops that, he goes back to blaming external forces for his problems. He sinks further into the cycle of villainy, destroys what little is left of his family (which I think was a blessing in disguise because he and Crystal were a colossally horrible marriage, Crystal is about as interesting as wet cardboard, and Luna has powers now so there's less chance of her being Lianed), and ends up deciding on Layla as the cause of his troubles.

But after he gets well and truly defeated by the good guys, this bad guy does something most villains don't. He drags himself out of the twisted wreckage of his life, looks around and sees that he's the one who destroyed everything, and rather than decide to continue blaming his father or Layla for his problems, he accepts that it was really his own idiocy and arrogance that caused it, and then concludes that he can move past that and be the sort of person who helps people again. That is a heroic feat. The lower he's sunk, the more enemies he's made, the more trapped in the villain mindset he seemed to be before this, the closer he is to the Point of Absolutely No Return Ever, the more difficult it is to make that sort of breakthrough. The more horrible the actions, the more dangerous it is for your own sanity to face the responsibility. And heroism is directly proportional to difficulty and danger. Really, I find this sort of turnaround so incredibly admirable that I'm glad they didn't wipe all of this experience away to make him turn out to be a Skrull.

I finished the X-Factor one-shot incredibly happy, and this lasted until I picked up Mighty Avengers and found out he'd been lying about being a Skrull. While it would be stupid to have Pietro completely fixed after one night of hallucinating, it still jarred me to see him lying. Pietro is a character with an honor debt in his origin. I was very worried that he was back in the cycle of villainy until they did the Unspoken storyline. Pietro's not externalizing the blame anymore. His thoughts during the battle with the Unspoken were that the entire mess was his fault because he caused that war, and he wanted to make it right. He doesn't blame Crystal for remarrying, and doesn't waste any thoughts on the new husband. He's not mad at Luna because she rejected him for lying. The primary thing on his mind is this Big Fucking Lie and how he can't get out of it. (And he contrasts Hank Pym here so neatly I get the impression one of Hank's tasks is to save Pietro.)

So he's stopped blaming Daddy for his problems. He still got three big issues, though. Trust, Truth and Wanda. He doesn't trust his friends to accept him after what he's done, he's still turning to deceit as a way to make his life easier, and he's still fixated on Wanda to the exclusion of everyone else's rights. (The Wanda fixation is just one of the reasons a proper Pietro redemption arc has to end before Wanda gets back, the others being that she's his reward and he's her reward. He needs to be redeemed before he deserves to be reunited with her. And when her redemption arc is finished? She's supposed to be rewarded by seeing the bundle of anxiety issues she loves and not the bundle of self-loathing we've had running around since she left.)

I was expecting that with Loki revealed in Mighty Avengers #34, Pietro would drop the deception but no, he kept with it and just rejected everyone else. It seemed like he was slipping back to blaming others so I got antsy for a while, especially as there were only two issues left to resolve the Lie. I was actually angry until I saw the last issue. All he gets is a half-page, but I believe it touches all of the issues I've noted. He even manages to blame others a bit (though after what Hank pulled I can't really call that bit of dialogue backsliding) as he wonders why the hell he acts the way he does.



We're down to one issue to resolve his plot, but he's the sort of character who will impulsively blurt out a confession in a public place. And the news that he'll be in Avengers Academy with Hank Pym of all people tells me he's not still upset at Hank, and they will at least make some progress on his trust issues and his fixation on Wanda.

I really want them to fix the Lie next issue, though. I want them to fix it three issues ago. Until they do, he can't properly bond with a team, he can't be reunited with his sister, and he can't claim the moral high ground with his father.

Mutants, Cowardice, and a Severe Misunderstanding of Quicksilver's Behavior

"We're trying to completely reimagine the concept of the super hero team book here," Mark Millar told Wizard. "I mean, wouldn't it be interesting to see some people chicken out and call in sick when there's somebody they know can kick the sh-- out of them?"

--Mark Millar during the runup to Ultimates

"It's a cynical corpse of a superhero universe"

--Kalinara, Miller vs. Millar: A Rant About Cynical Superhero Storytelling

I must confess that back in the 90s DC I had no aversion to a Mark Millar writing credit. I remember my sister pointing out--when he wrote DC books--that he had an irritating "twist" ending at the end of all of his stories that was predictable in itself, but I never really had a problem with him. It wasn't until they launched the Ultimate Universe over at Marvel that I realized that I hated Mark Millar's work.

I initially liked the line, Bendis's Ultimate Spider-man was quite good and the first storyline of Ultimate X-Men featured my favorite set of villains--Magneto and his two brats. But there was something about Ultimate X-Men that rang hollow, though at the time I couldn't quite quantify it. This had been meant to be a slick, streamlined relaunch but there was a sleazy layer of grime to it. Wolverine in particular seemed... lesser. As a fan of Wolverine's more relatable aspects (the cranky uncle of the Marvel Universe, the guy who finds it all the more irritating that he can't really hate the man married to that girl he loves, the brooder who stays above his animalistic nature but doesn't let on about it, the smartass old bastard on the team) I'm not impressed by making him a more brutal or successful fighter. I'm not impressed with crazy eyes or hostility from this character. (He's blunt, not hostile.) Millar seemed to have lost thehuman side of Wolverine. I'm quite attached to him as the guy who stands around the breakroom in his cowboy hat drinking beer and being kind of a dick to Cyclops, who puts up with it because he knows they can count on him in any situation. The inherent trustworthiness of Wolverine wasn't there. Maybe it was coming on to a teenager instead of a grown woman. Maybe it was not enough standing around the breakroom in his cowboy hat being good-naturedly dickish rather than just dickish. Whatever the problem, Ultimate Wolverine just didn't work for me.

Ultimate Magneto was another problem. The common complaint is that Magneto is more honorable, but that wasn't precisely my problem. My problem is that Magneto is more mature than he was in the Ultimate universe. Really, attacking the White House and throwing around cars just seemed puerile to me. It wasn't something the arrogant old fuck we all know and love to hate would do. It's too small and childish for the guy who reversed the polarity of the whole fucking planet in the regular universe. The worst bit was him begging Xavier for mercy. Our Magneto is a sneaky hypocrite, but he has too much pride for that. He's a dignified bad guy. That's why he's such a big-name bad guy.

Still, Ultimate X-Men featured a genuinely creepy Professor Xavier and Pietro turning on his father (the look of shock on Magneto's face was a good moment) so I didn't consider the first arc a huge disaster. It was enough to bring me over to Ultimates, which promised an appearance by my two favorite Avengers (who also happen to be two of my favorite X-Men villains). That is where I realized exactly what was wrong with this entire universe.

There weren't any heroes there.

Seriously. Marvel has always been famous for the fundamental flaws in its heroes, but there were always redemptive qualities that balanced these flaws out. Mark Millar's reimagining of the "superhero" concept deliberately stripped the characters of their redemptive qualities. In Ultimates, Bruce Banner doesn't attempt desperately to cure himself while running from a man who wants to turn him into a weapon. He is addicted to being the Hulk and knowingly activates it again. Tony Stark doesn't seem to feel any guilt about his inventions at all. He is purely in it for the rush of being a superhero, there's no nobility or responsibility balancing his hedonism as there is in the mainline and the movieverse. Thor (who to be fair was one of the better re-imaginings just because here everyone assumes he is insane) is content to gather a cult and withhold his help based on politics. (Yes, it was funny, but it wasn't exactly a heroic idea.) Giant-Man and the Wasp were in a deeply abusive relationship that robbed both of their best qualities (his genius and genuine desire to do good, her strength in actively obtaining powers and leaving the relationship once the first punch was thrown).

Captain America is without a doubt the absolute worst. His core concept is that he is the absolute ideal of every American history book, the complete best that the country could possibly have to offer, the moral pinacle of the American culture preserved perfectly in time from what is almost universally regarded as the most just position the USA has ever taken in wartime. Instead, he is the embodiment of the most shameful aspects of his generation, and an indictment of the worst aspects of the prevailing US political climate.

That didn't make me drop it, though. What ultimately made me drop it was when Millar's above quote came into effect and Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch sat out fighting the shapeshifting aliens because they were "sick."

When I first read Millar's quote on calling in sick, my traditionalist mind pictured one of the younger team members sitting by a toilet sick to his stomach with fear while Captain America talked some sense into him. Or, at best, the guy that calls in sick, then changes his mind and shows up at the climax. But that was the fault of my foolishly conventional mind, Mark Millar had other thoughts for a heroic story. Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, my two personal favorites, chickened the fuck out the first mission and sat it out. Because giving in is apparently more interesting than someone transcending their weaknesses.

Now, I have an idea why Millar might have picked those two. On their first mission as Avengers, Pietro establishes his especially bad habit of running ahead of the group. Not two panels pass before a terrified Pietro runs back to Captain America.



I find this actually quite adorable, and not just because Don Heck drew an adorable Quicksilver. This is a necessary component of heroic stories. Fear. It's something you need to overcome to face the monster, and seeing one of the heroes get out of sorts when coming face to face with the bad guy emphasizes the danger. Pietro's a young man (I believe at this point he's a teenager, but that's a long unsettled argument between Kalinara and I), and this is his first time out as a hero. It is natural that he's going to panic a little. That's not cowardice, because he doesn't run off from the battle or hide from the bad guy. He just has the character trait of being fearful. It emphasizes his heroism rather than detracts from it, because it's something he has to fight through. Cowardice is when the character is fearful, but doesn't fight through it.

The Ultimate Universe is the Marvel Universe reimagined without nuance or complexity. (I've long argued that it is Marvel's answer to the DC's Crime Syndicate, and I eagerly await when the two meet and Captain America kicks Captain Jingo's ass while scolding him for disrespecting our oldest allies.) When Millar recreated a character, he first distilled them to his or her basic character components. Then he carefully discarded the merits and magnified the flaws, occasionally adding completely different ones. All he had to do afterwards was add profanity. Pietro and Wanda go from being wide-eyed and fearful on their first mission to being full cowards. Rather than joining the Avengers to build a positive reputation and prove themselves better than Magneto, they join to hide from Magneto who scares them shitless.

To be fair, this is reasonable considering he seems to have raised them in the Ultimate Universe. I'm not sure exactly how early he got them, but I imagine he would have fucked them up even more royally if he'd known they were his kids right away. Magneto somehow manages to be an even worse father when he actually tries to be a father. (See Magneto Rex, House of M.)

Still, as much sense as this chain of events makes in how people behave, I don't read superhero books to root for cowards and glory-seekers who never learn that it's bad to be cowards and glory-seekers so I dropped the book to preserve both wallet and blood pressure.

I'm glad I dropped it when I did, because subsequent scans have revealed the Loeb ran with the incest angle on the Maximoffs. That really pissed me off.

See, Quicksilver has long been criticized by the arrested development set as having a "creepy" relationship with his sister. I can only conclude that these critics are either severely emotionally underdeveloped, or they have never sat down and thought through Quicksilver's personal history.

Pietro and Wanda were separated from their foster parents (whom they believe are their real parents) at a young enough age they don't have a clear memory of them. They're twins so no one really has seniority, but they've been raised in an old world mindset so Pietro has picked up some sexist attitudes about male responsibility. He's not so much a chauvinist as a chivalrist, but still, quite sexist in that he believes that as the boy he's the stronger and should be the more responsible.

Couple that with their natural personalities. Pietro is an anxious, very grounded in reality, and holds a serious outlook. He has physical (or at least, manifesting as physical) powers, and wonderful control over them. They're nothing but a boon to him, and these speed powers seem custom-made to make him an excellent protector and provider. Wanda is a distracted romantic, a dreamer. She has trouble from an early age distinguishing truth from fiction (in "Nights of Wundagore", a 70s story, they establish that her foster parents told her stories about WWII and she believed that they'd happened to her), is much slower perception and reaction-wise than he is, and her powers manifest as bad luck/clumsiness. It probably took until Magneto found them before they realized she was powerful instead of simply clumsy and unlucky. Not only that, when they DO realize she has powers, they realize she has almost no control over them. (This is actually part of the appeal of Wanda. She is incredibly awkward and clumsy early on, and grows into being a pretty badass superhero. That's also why that West Coast Avengers storyline, Disassembled and House of M were so fucking infuriating. They threw away the growth and returned her to poor Wanda with the crazy powers who needs her baby brother to protect her.)

So, in Pietro's mind, he's got a slow, clumsy, gullible and chronically unlucky sister. He loves her very much, but as he can see it he's got the advantage and it's his job to take care of things. And to make matters worse, she grows up to be HAWT. I believe it's safe to assume that even before they ran into Magneto, they ran into a lot of predatory types.

Now we have a set of orphaned and alone twins, a girl who is chronically unlucky and a boy who is very athletic. The chronically unlucky girl is in the wrong place at the wrong time, a fire starts, and she gets blamed for it. They are now fleeing an angry mob when OUT OF NOWHERE, a man appears and fends off the mob with his fantastical powers. There's probably a great deal of bloodshed, but we don't know for sure because you couldn't show that sort of thing in a code book during the Silver Age. The man collects the terrified twins, who are in awe of his fantastical powers and the violence he's willing to put them to.

They were probably fooled early on into thinking this man is a benevolent protector (unless, of course, he graphically killed the whole fucking town in front of their tender adolescent eyes like I think he did), but I imagine that misconception went away the second the recruitment drive started and they saw the unsavory sorts they were forced to room with. What we end up with is two traumatized teenagers in a room filled with terrorists.

So we have Pietro--with what he considers his slow, clumsy, gullible, chronically unlucky sister--in room full of terrorists with fucking amazing powers. The old man has unimaginable power, designs on world domination and is perfectly willing to maim, kill, mutilate innocents and even let his own men (specifically, Pietro) die if it'll get them towards that goal. One of them casts illusions and doesn't even hide that he wants to fuck his sister. The other likes to gross out his sister and will sell them both out to the old man if it'll get him a treat. Oh, and the old man is perfectly willing to present his sister as an incentive for more powerful men to join the group.

Is the protectiveness not starting to look less like incest and more like a Type A personality's natural reaction to a truly fucked-up situation?

And as this happened during their formative years, it's a habit you won't discard even in the safety of Avengers Mansion. He might not trust unfamiliar people right away, especially as Magneto had presented himself as a savior. He might worry that allowing them to disrespect her will lead to them taking even further liberties. (This isn't so far off, considering that every male in the Avengers seems to go through a point of crushing on Wanda, Wonder Man even going so far as to prevent her husband's restoration to get in her pants. Hell, Hawkeye was willing to sleep with her while she was an amnesiac, which is pretty creepy.) He might not fully trust the robot who was made by their worst enemy to take care of her. He might react very badly to finding out all these people that he learned to trust slowly over time (overcoming the anxieties formed by spending his adolescent years in the Brotherhood working Magneto) are willing to--after not killing Kang, not killing Loki, not killing Dr. Doom and so on--discuss executing his sister while she's ill.

And the incest idea really annoys me because it shows me that either the writer has not actually sat down and considered where Pietro's character comes from, or the writer's just an incredibly cynical person who sees a sexual motive in any closeness between two members of the opposite sex. (I'll give you, this is one place Bendis managed well in House of M. He got where those two were coming from and wrote a tragically devoted relationship without creepy overtones.)

This is without going into the underlying truth of the relationship, which is that for all Pietro's worry and protectiveness, Wanda is the one actually in control. Wanda, the idealist, is the one with the real core of strength here. She's from a traditionalist mindset when it comes to gender, but that doesn't mean she lets her brother push her around. She'll defer to him on some occasions, but more often than not she knows better than to put baby brother in the driver's seat. Pietro's anxiety weakens him, and he has an inherent softness to him. He's an emotional, family-oriented worrywort who tags along to make sure she's safe. Wanda is the one who makes decisions for her own life and happiness, and progresses as a person. He just orbits her. He has no worth in his own mind except for his powers and how he can use them to help his family. That's why after House of M he starts to lose his fucking mind, while she's content to make a a secluded life without him or power. (Yes, even regressed as she was by those two crossovers, she still comes off stronger than her brother.) Part of why he's so zealous to protect her physically is because he can't handle a life on his own. It's a very old world gender dynamic.

Why bring this one up? Because it carried over into the Ultimate Universe. Wanda was the controlling twin. She was the primary decisionmaker. She comforted and supported him emotionally. So, if incest was going to happen, it was actually more on Wanda's head as the stronger in the relationship than on her anxious, needy brother. So the incest angle really tears her to pieces, and reduces the primary relationship in her life to a sexual one. This is especially problematic as Wanda is one of very few female characters in comics who places such importance on a nonsexual relationship.

Of course, I haven't read the actual issue, and the incest may not be Wanda's fault. But that's even worse because then the balance in the relationship between the Maximoffs is thrown out of whack. Pietro (and a version of Pietro that is inherently weaker as a result of Magneto's influence than our beloved mainline basketcase) the physical protector and provider is now also the decisionmaker, and Wanda has no pull whatsoever. Some 21st Century updating of the Avengers.

Tales From the Chatroom: Dear Pietro..

Tonight in chat, Kalinara and I realized that even though Scott Summers and Pietro Maximoff have so much in common that writers swap them during Alternate Timelines and What-Ifs and they were effectively counterparts in the Silver Age, but they interact much more rarely than they should. Then it occurred to us that they must be penpals.

Dear Pietro,
How are you? I'm fine. The Professor just developed an evil split personality and tried to kill us. Or something. I admit, I don't quite follow. On the plus side, he mind wiped your dad, so you should get a few weeks of vacation out of the deal. I have to go, he's trying to kill us. See you soon.

Dear Scott.
I'm glad you're well. So am I. I am deeply impressed that you can tell the difference between an evil split personality of Professor Xavier's and his typical machiavellian plotting. Thank him for the memory wipe, as it allowed Wanda and I to finally have a quiet Thanksgiving.

~~~~~

Dear Pietro,
It's possible you will get a package from my former father-in-law. It is advised that you do not open it. Have a happy holiday.

Dear Scott,
Thank you for the warning. Enclosed is a magnetic bumper sticker backing that should provide some amusement next time you encounter my father. Happy New Year.

~~~~~

Dear Pietro,
How are you? I don't know if you've been watching the news lately, but we have a de-aged and amnesiac version of your father staying with us. He apparently is hitting it off with Rogue. Gambit is annoyed. It's vastly entertaining. Hope things are going well with you.

Dear Scott,
As always, I am pleased to learn that Father has lost his memory. Today I ventured across the Island of Dr. Moreau Players production of Camelot. There is talk of some sort of scientific Grail Quest. I'd forgotten how little sense life makes at home.

~~~~~

Dear Scott,
How are you? I have unfortunately been trapped into working for my father again. I have been successful in curtailing his plans for light genocide this week, but this fixation with robots troubles me. Send Jean my well-wishes.

Dear Pietro,
I'm fine, how are you? I've sent you a package of electrical engineering text books. Use as you see fit. Jean is dead again, but I'll transmit your wishes when she comes back.

Dear Scott,
I am doing much better since receiving your gift. Father is rather upset about it. My condolences on Jean. I would like to attend the funeral, but am too busy preventing my father from murdering too many members of his Cabinet. Please accept this wreath and apologize for my absence when she returns.

~~~~~

Dear Pietro,
If someone comes to your door saying it is me, do not open it. I have been possessed by Apocalypse. DEATH TO ALL UNWORTHY!!! I am going to take a vacation on a fishing vessel. TREMBLE BEFORE ME MORTAL. Please tell Wanda I said hi. DIE INFIDEL. Best wishes.

Dear Scott,
Have relayed your greeting to Wanda, as well as your warning. Good luck with the possession. I am told that the trick is not to isolate yourself but to surround yourself with people who care for you, but I don't know anyone with a heart who has actually tried this. I certainly wouldn't risk my sister in such a way.

DEAR PIETRO,
HOW ARE YOU? I HOPE THINGS ARE WELL FOR YOUR SISTER. HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT OF A NEW CAREER ON LIFE? I HAVE A JOB OPENING AND YOU WOULD MAKE A GOOD PESTILENCE.

Dear Apocalypse,
I move far too fast for pestilence. My father, on the other hand, is a plague upon the entire species. Contact him.

DEAR PIETRO,
HOW ARE YOU? YOUR FAMILY IS A SCOURGE AND A BLIGHT ON THE PLANET. ALSO YOUR SISTER WILL NOT RETURN MY CALLS.

Stay. Away. From. My. Sister.

Dear Pietro,
How are you? Sorry it's been a while since I last wrote, I was amnesiac on a fishing vessel and then had to get exorcised.

Dear Scott,
Quite well. How was the fishing?

~~~~~